Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 09:27, 5 January 2010

Reminders
Topical Archives:
Deletion reform, Speedies, Notability , IPC, Fiction, Bilateral relations. WP:Academic things & people, Journals, Sourcing, BLP
General Archives:
2006: Sept-Dec
2007: Jan-Feb, Mar-Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec 
2008: Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec
2009:: Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec
2010: Jan10, Feb10, Mar10, Apr10 , May10 , Jun10 Jul10, Aug10, Sep10, Oct10, Nov10, Dec10

Please post messages at the bottom of the page - I will reply on this page, unless you ask otherwise

Just so you know why it ended

Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Bocconi School of Law Student-Edited Papers --Grasshopper6 (talk) 11:35, 4 January 2010 (UTC)

If your article is in danger of deletion, possibly some of the following messages may be of help to you:

• If you can fix the article, I'd advise you to do so very quickly, before it gets nominated for regular deletion
• We're an encyclopedia, not a social networking site. You have to become famous first, then someone will write an article about you. In the meantime, there's lots of things to do here
• An article must have 3rd party independent reliable published sources, print or online (but not blogs or press releases)
• To use material from your web site, you must release the content under our licenses, which permit reuse & modification of the material by anyone for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, and is not revokable.
• For articles about an organization, see our Organizations FAQ (a wonderful page written by Durova, from whom I learned my approach to people writing articles with COI.

User:DGG/LG

In December I gave a presentation to librarians in Pittsburgh area. Would you like me to send you my presentation slides? --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 19:01, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

After a day of fighting with my email and then Wikimedia, I finally gave up and uploaded a file to rapidshare. At least it works :) Download. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 06:09, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

magazines...and speedy

...and creative works in general cannot be deleted under speedy A7, per WP:CSD In any case, I think Railfan and Railroad might be one of the two leading magazines in its subject. did you check that? Please do not use speedy when not strictly within the specifications.'

Magazines are businesses, not creative works, and therefore fall squarely under {{db-corp}} guidelines -- which also explicitly refer to articles which make no assertion of notability, which this article doesn't. Your vague recollection doesn't qualify either as an assertion of notability nor a reliable source. Please do not wikilawyer about obvious failures of speedy standards and specifications. --Calton | Talk 16:10, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

I agree it will quite possibly be deleted at afd, unless I or someone finds more material. Relative rank is capable of objective determination via Ulrich's. But as for speedy, WP:CSD: "A7 applies only to articles about web content or articles on people and organizations themselves, not articles on their books, albums, software and so on. " if you want to change the rules, discuss it there. I think you will find the consensus is clear about magazines. A book publisher is a company. A book is not. A record distributor is a company. A recording is not. A series of recordings is not. A boxed set of recordings is not. A magazine publisher is a company. A magazine is not. Speedy is not stretchable. What you call wikilawering I call following the rules. " There is no consensus to speedily delete articles of types not specifically listed in A7 under that criterion." DGG (talk) 16:24, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

Noticeboards, noticeboards, noticeboards!

I think I remember you chiming in when the No Original Research noticeboard was created as it being just an extra page to watch. We've now got the Fringe Theories, Fiction, NOR, and NPOV. I'm wondering if we're not spreading ourselves too thin over too many boards. Any ideas? MBisanz 03:06, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

We also have COI, and BLP, and RS, and the duplicative pair (ANB and AN/I), and BONB, and a number of similarly functioning pages, such as WT:SPAM, CP and its family, the various VPs and RfCs, WQA if it survives, the widely ignored RM and PM, and those I dont even know about). And the XfDs, the Ref Desks and the Help Desks, and AIV, 3RR and their relatives. And the talk pages for every policy and guideline prominent and obscure. And user talk pages where interesting stuff tends to be found. I organize what I do with bookmarks: I've got a group I call WPck (wikipedia check), and how far I get down the list of 30 or so 51, now that I've actually counted-- each day is variable--but I've never gotten to the bottom. Some in my opinion in practice tend to serve for POV pushing, such as BLP and FRINGE. (At some I agree more with the trend--like RS, so I don't call it POV pushing)

I forgot the talklists and IRC. I prefer to forget about IRC, and I wish I could really forget about the talklists.

But look at it in a positive way--it's forum shopping which keeps there from being any one WP:LOC.DGG (talk) 04:43, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

Def going on my best of list. MBisanz 17:58, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

Re: User:Jbmurray/Madness

(Copied over from my talk page:) DGG, many thanks for your comment. I'm glad that my text may be useful for the NYC meet. I'd be pleased to have any feedback or reactions that come out of that. And I do now indeed intend to publish a version of the essay somewhere. --jbmurray (talk|contribs) 00:28, 21 March 2008 (UTC)

Category:Flagged articles

Hello again ...

Would you please take a look at User talk:Matthewedwards#Category:Flagged articles, and then add your comments on the cats I have created to compliment the templates?

Happy Editing! — 151.200.237.53 (talk · contribs) _{07:58, 3 June 2008 (UTC)}

Category:Flagged editors

Hello again ... {{Flag-editor}} now has an optional assist parameter that makes a friendly offer to help, for those thus inclined, instead of defaulting with making the offer. :-) — 151.200.237.53 (talk) 15:36, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

getting there! I'll check the details later. Next goal, perhaps: making it shorter while still making it friendly. and maybe copyvio should be different --if it's clear it should be db-copyvio, if not, suspected copyvio already has the template "copypaste". DGG (talk) 17:26, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

I realized that, but the point is, "I don't have time to check right now, but it's suspicious, so I'll flag it with this generic tag" ... maybe Some Other Editor will check it out in the mean time, and decide that it's {{Db-copyvio}}-able. :-) — 151.200.237.53 (talk) 04:06, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

For example, Liliam Cuenca González (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) was part of a WP:COI/N and WP:COPYVIO that led to a site being blocked and removed by a bot as WP:LINKSPAM ... it's all the sins in one (unfortunately repeated) case, but it certainly can be improved if editors are aware of the situation ... hence Category:Flagged articles. — 151.200.237.53 (talk) 04:14, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

)

Current project

Your third suggestion: I like. :) --Moonriddengirl 00:42, 2 June 2008 (UTC) P.S. As this is out of the blue, I am referring to the section on your userpage. "A good faith request by any established editor is sufficient for any administrator, whether or not the deleting administrator, to undelete an article deleted under speedy, except for BLP and copyvio. This should be automatic, and need not involve Deletion Review. it is polite to ask the original administrator first, but not necessary, and, even if s/he refuses, any administrator can undelete it without it being considered wheel warring. The article would normally be immediately sent for AfD. By definition, if an established editor disagrees, it is not uncontroversial and needs community involvement. "

Yes, that's the one. I think it would actually save a lot of drama and free up some wasted time for creators, onlookers & DRV contributors. It might increase the load at AfD, but I'm inclined to think not that much. --Moonriddengirl 02:09, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

Fringe

In Misplaced Pages:Requests for comment/Arbitration Committee, you wrote but situations of a single person with a completely far fringe view are dealt with fairly well already. There are cases where a real-world minority- or fringe-view is overrepresented on Misplaced Pages. There are also cases where a majority- or wikipedia-majority-view silences a minority view or reduces their weight well below their real-world due weight. This can happen by one side outmaneuvering the other into a behavior violation or by simply driving them away from the project in frustration. I don't think there is a good solution, other than to have affected articles watched by people who are informed about the article's subject matter but with no emotional stake in the article. This tends to happen more on articles on political or social topics, where way too many editors have a personal agenda, and on articles about people, places, or groups, where fanboys may succeed in turning the article into a virtual press release. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail) 02:07, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

as I said there, I think that dueling by taunting each other into unacceptable actions is not a really rational approach. . Perhaps it survives because the people who have been here a while tend to know just how far they can safely go & some of them have gotten quite good at it. But perhaps also it works because the people who are for good or less good reasons committed to an agenda with a zeal and devotion and purpose which transcend rational argument tend to be rather easy to lose proportion and descend into unacceptable actions. There is nothing wrong with zealotry when one is right, but it has to be pursued elsewhere--those who care more about their cause than objective editing encyclopedia are a danger to the encyclopedia.

Unfortunately, the attempt to deal with it otherwise tend to amount to an appeal to authority, which does not do much better--one can find authorities for almost anything. And so one argues about the relative merits of the authorities. People both in the right and wrong of it (as if w could tell) are equally likely to what to prevent their opponents from making a fair case. What is necessary is a way to determine what objective editing is, and enforce it. My current thoughts are mandatory mediation with enforceable remedies--not by subject experts necessarily, but by people with common sense and proven impartiality.DGG (talk) 03:28, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

Consistency

BIO has become very nebulous, especially because one can interpret "significant coverage" and NOT NEWS to produce any result whatsoever for many of the articles you have in mind. We need to make up our mind abut what depth of local figures we intend to cover. We need to make up our mind about whether to cover the central figures of human interest stories. And then stick to it, whatever the decision is. You and I would probably disagree on one or both of these in general, I at least would much rather accept almost any stable compromise rather than fight each of them from over-general principles. DGG (talk) 16:09, 8 August 2008 (UTC)

We'd probably be closer together than you might think. Yes, the community as a whole does need to thrash out local notability-- something that a narrow constructionist can rely on but which would allow some flexibility. Any standard, even one I loathe, would be better than none. As you say, any result is possible the way things are. A dice roll would be less stressful and do as well. This is why I avoid AFD. Cheers, Dlohcierekim 14:09, 9 August 2008 (UTC)

Stress

as with any democratic type of process, it works better if the good people stay in. The way I avoid stress is by commenting once or twice, and then not looking back--either my arguments is accepted, or not,and then on to the next. I generally do not look back to see what the result is, or I would get too often angry, or at least disappointed. Not that it's a game for me, but that I can be effective only by keeping detached. DGG (talk) 16:36, 9 August 2008 (UTC)

PSTS Policy & Guidelines Proposal

Since you have been actively involved in past discussion, please review, contribute, or comment on this proposed PSTS Policy & Guidelines--SaraNoon (talk) 19:40, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

archiving

I no longer remember how it was done but if someone knows or wants to talk to the bot operator, look at what's done for the museums project. In archiving it creates an index which includes topic and which archive it's in. I don't know if it can be done retroactively. TravellingCari 12:11, 12 September 2008 (UTC)

Looking at documentation, though I can change the names of the archives, the indexing is done as it makes the archive. I would have to remerge everything. What happened of course, is that a/I never imagined at the first they would get so large b/I started with topical archives, and this takes more maintenance than Ive actually done, and , of course 3/ there have been some very long postings here, not all by me,some interesting enough that I want to keep visible. Expect slow improvement. till and maybe a new normal system in January 09 DGG (talk) 14:51, 12 September 2008 (UTC)

1. Indexes, what indexes?
2. At User:MiszaBot/Archive HowTo there is a pointer to User:HBC Archive Indexerbot. I think this is the bot alluded to above by Travellingcari, currently used by WP:MUSEUM. EdJohnston (talk) 17:39, 12 September 2008 (UTC)

prod

"unreferenced" is not a reason for deletion. Unreferenced and unnotable, maybe."tried but could not find any sources for notability" much more convincing--when you say something like that, I'd probably accept your view. But of the 2 you marked unreferenced, one seems to have had a ref . tho not a good one Blaqstarr--I didnt check further, and the other Esa Maldita Costilla, is probably notable given the performers involved. DGG (talk) 07:56, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

I guess our standards differ. Stifle (talk) 08:18, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Your instincts were right on this one, DGG. I know this is kind of necro-bumping, but better late than never... Chubbles (talk) 21:40, 3 February 2009 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages:Deletion review/Log/2008 October 19#Comparison_of_web_based_file_managers

You raise an excellent point there. I seem to be averaging a DRV on one of my closures every second day (although the majority are being endorsed). The recent phenomenon of DRVs when one isn't satisfied with the result, but dressed up as "certain arguments weren't addressed, so the admin should have closed it my way" is worrisome, not least because a DRV would have been even more certain if the debate had been closed the other way. This is liable to put good admins off closing AFDs because of a perceived stigma in having your decision posted at DRV, especially when users decline to discuss matters with the closer first as the DRV instructions twice require (a matter about which we have repeatedly butted heads). Where can we go from here? Stifle (talk) 13:43, 20 October 2008 (UTC)

I've moved this down, in case you missed it. Stifle (talk) 08:12, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

still working on an adequate response.DGG (talk) 12:48, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

Refining AfD outcomes

Hi. I read your comments at the AfD and DRV of List of Who Framed Roger Rabbit characters. In particular, I noticed your suggestion to alter AfD/DPR. I started a discussion WT:AFD#Merge outcome, based in part on my interpretation of your comments and concerns. Flatscan (talk) 23:59, 15 November 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for responding at the discussion. Flatscan (talk) 04:48, 24 November 2008 (UTC)

54]] (T C) 12:00, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

User:TTN

Since you have had repeated experience with this user's AFDs like, I thought I'd contact you. This user's AFD behavior is appaling especially how he refuses to bundle nominations in the same universe for which he uses identical reasonings. He also continually fails to consider the option to merge or redirect without intervention of deletion and makes no evident efforts to look for sources himself (there's a difference between unverified and unverifiable), instead preferring to force the issue by nominating for AFD (which causes a 5-day deadline for improvement) and which is specifically considered to be improper.

The articles in question might well require care, merging or even deletion, but the way he goes about it is unneccesarily terse and bitey.

I think it's time to launch an RFC. Would you consider helping gather evidence and supporting it? - Mgm| 15:27, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

Before you start, you might consider seeing how the RfC/U on Gavin.collins goes first, since different facets of the same issue are involved.DGG (talk) 17:37, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

An offer of help, other inclusionists, and suggestions

Your name came up prominently at Talk:Deletionism_and_inclusionism_in_Wikipedia#Prominent inclusionists? I was wondering:

1. How I can help?
2. If there are other inclusionists you can suggest I talk to, or if there are any groups you belong too.
3. Any suggestions about how I can help form policy to be more inclusive.

Thank you, Inclusionist (talk) 00:31, 15 December 2008 (UTC)

the best way of helping attain a better and more inclusive encyclopedia is by finding sources for worthy articles that do not have them, especially those immediately under attack. I see you are already a member of the WP:Article Rescue Squadron. You can also look for articles in areas of interest to you that might be challenged in Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Unreferenced Article Cleanup or at Misplaced Pages:Unreferenced articles. This can be done most effectively after learning carefully the rules for proper sourcing given at WP:Reliable sources and the talk page and noticeboard associated with it. We already have a considerable amount of discussion, and it is practical work that is needed more. It is easier to talk about why articles should be kept, than to do the work to keep them. And when you do participate in Afds, never do so without a good argument that the majority of people will accept; weak arguments are counterproductive. Remember that by any rational standard most of the articles there should indeed be deleted. I find a good way to keep perspective is to a do a little WP:New page patrol, and to see and identify all the junk that really must be kept out of the encyclopedia. If you want to help policy become more inclusive, first think carefully about just what you want to have included and why it would enhance rather than diminish the encyclopedia. DGG (talk) 01:59, 15 December 2008 (UTC)

Speedy keep

Hi DGG. You may be surprised to see me championing anything regarding "keep" !votes, but you might find this discussion about this AfD discussion interesting. My conclusion is that WP:Speedy keep might do well to have at least one non-bad faith / non-nominator-generated reason, such as WP:SNOW. Thoughts? Bongomatic 18:43, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

I have elsewhere commented just now that the reason for speedy keep should be a "clearly mistaken nomination": or something of the sort, without implying anything about good faith. Except in extreme circumstances, we can't really judge people's motivations, and they are not necessarily relevant. for example, I readily admit that the motivation of one of my principal opponents in some recent discussions is their good faith and honest and forthright desire to reduce the Misplaced Pages coverage of fiction, which they in all honesty think excessive. That they are totally wrong and will destroy one of the key positive features of Misplaced Pages does not affect their good faith.

SNOW is a different matter, and I think we use it altogether too rapidly, because we should give a chance for people to say things that we might not have thought of at first. I think it would be a good idea if almost all afds ran a full 5 days =120 hours.

As for engadget, it closed before I had a chance to comment. I think the nomination was about was wrong as a nomination can be, and showed some inability to understand either the article, or a temporary lapse in understanding our guidelines. I think the nominator sometimes does interpret our guidelins in a way that i would not, but that at most is a persistent error, or non-standard viewpoint. Bad faith in a deletion nomination would be if someone wanted to delete the article of a competitor, or about an organisation that espoused a different ideology, or an article written by an opponent here or in the RW, or to make a POINT irrelevant to the merits of the article, or to do deliberate harm to the encyclopedia, or out of purely reckless vandalism. None of these were present here that i know of. DGG (talk) 20:36, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

I'm trying to reach a consensus (or at least spark further discussion) at Misplaced Pages talk:Guide to deletion#Summary up to now. Feel like weighing in? Bongomatic 02:15, 20 December 2008 (UTC)

useful general remark

::if anyone wishes to fight with me, this page is the place; if anyone wishes to fight with someone else, please do it elsewhere. DGG (talk) 19:25, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

The notability problem in a nutshell

Though it remains in the policy, there are now many exceptions to: If no reliable, third-party sources can be found for an article topic, Misplaced Pages should not have an article on it. - quoted from WP:V (There are a number of areas where this is true, but primary among the one that concerns us here is fiction.) There are several ambiguities: the first is the meaning of the plural of sources, for it is accepted and elswhere stated that ones sufficiently reliable third party source is sufficient. Second, there are many cases where it is clear that first party sources such as official documents from government sources are sufficient to show the notability of the agencies concerned. Third, we routinely accept the probability that there will be such sources. Fourth, the sources for writing an article are not in the least limited to third party sources, for the primary source of the work itself is accepted as sufficient and in fact usually the best source for content. Fifth, and crucial here, is the distinction between "topic" and "article"-- a key argument above is whether a spin offarticle on a character is to be judged as a separate article. The sixth is the lack of a requirement that the third party source be substantial. DGG (talk)

and we see how notability is used as an excuse to delete secrets that are merely hard to source like DCEETA. we have the spectacle of people saying that the NYTimes is not reliable, and it's just synthesis. thanks for the kind comments Dogue (talk) 20:32, 29 January 2009 (UTC)

there seems to be a recent trend to be as perverse in nominating as possible. See today's nominations for the chairman of AOL, and.a major dam. I think they may be intended as a POINTy demonstration that common sense is an unreliable criterion, or a proof by example that WPedians can be shown to be lacking in that mental quality. DGG (talk) 23:38, 29 January 2009 (UTC)

What else? Thanks, Aymatth2 (talk) 03:48, 31 January 2009 (UTC)

You are me

Sorry David, but you are apparently me. --David Shankbone 05:01, 8 February 2009 (UTC)

all David's are actually clones; we use disguises to conceal the fact, but they don't work 100%. DGG (talk) 09:13, 8 February 2009 (UTC)

I think Shankbone is the cabal. --KP Botany (talk) 09:32, 8 February 2009 (UTC)

the person who does the photos can control the world. DGG (talk) 09:34, 8 February 2009 (UTC)

You're awesome by me! I originally thought the page was about me, but apparently it is about you. Jeez, if you're going to have haters hating on you, at least get your name right! I'm guessing they put as much thought and research into their self-promotion as they did into that Facebook group. --David Shankbone 14:08, 9 February 2009 (UTC)

Prods

You have lost me when you say that "unresolved issues is not a good enough reason to delete". Taking Manhunt (urban game) for example, the issues raised are as follows:

It does not cite any references or sources.

t needs sources or references that appear in third-party publications.
It may contain original research or unverifiable claims.
Its factual accuracy is disputed.
It may need copy editing for grammar, style, cohesion, tone or spelling.
It may require general cleanup to meet Misplaced Pages's quality standards.

Its lead section requires expansion.

In other words, it is an extremely poor article that is almost certainly providing misinformation to the readers. So why keep it? Are you perhaps being pedantic and trying to insist that I duplicate all of the above as the prod reason instead of merely referring to the loud and clear issues that appear immediately below the prod box?

We are supposed to be providing the readers with a credible encyclopaedia, not preserving patent rubbish. --Orrelly Man (talk) 19:43, 9 February 2009 (UTC)

• In the case of the above article the prod wasn't correct as the article had previously had a prod removed, AfD therefore is the only way to go. RMHED. 19:57, 9 February 2009 (UTC)

As for your question though,since it applies equally to Prod and AfD:
You should not nominate an article for deletion if it can be rescued: see WP:BEFORE and WP:Deletion Policy. It is an excellent idea to remove rubbish, but only if it cannot be improved. The mere failure to have improved an article is not a reason for deletion by itself, no matter how long it has been unimproved. Let's look at those reasons:

1. We do not remove articles for being unsourced. We remove them for being unsourceable. You need to do a proper search. For games of this sort, I think this should include printed books on children's games. Atthe very least before nominating, you should check Google Books.
2. The second reason is just like the one above; it does need them, & the thing to do is to look for them. It's not a reason for deletion unless there are none to be found. (t
3. If the factual accuracy is disputed, then it should be edited, not deleted. The disputes about accuracy should be discussed on the talk page and resolved. It would only be a reason for deletion if you were prepared to show it did not exist at all, or that there was so much dispute that it was impossible to write even a brief article.
4. If copy editing is needed, then it should be done. The need for this is never a reason for deletion.
5. Ditto for general cleanup. If it needs it, do it. This too is never a reason for deletion.
6. If the lead section needs expansion, expand it. This again is never a reason for deletion.

Thus, none of the unresolved issues were a good enough reason for deletion, just as I said. I hope this explanation helps, more than my edit summary did. As a general rule, what we do with poor articles is improve them. What we do with misinformation is correct it, if we can show it incorrect. If you know enough about the game to make these statements, you know enough to help the article. Articles of this sort do tend to attract dubious material, and need proper attention. Then Misplaced Pages will be a more credible encyclopedia and not provide patent rubbish. I see you are interested in these games, so I look forward to seeing your improvements in this set of articles. DGG (talk) 20:34, 9 February 2009 (UTC)

I can see you mean well but you are being very unrealistic. If the original editor will not make the effort to provide proper sources, why should anyone else? You have to remember that other editors don't have the time to do "proper searches" or expand the lead or edit factual inaccuracies and original research. Quite often, when you find a bad article, it has been created by some redlink userid who has made no other "contributions". Best thing to do is get rid of it or you end up wasting valuable time. If the creator is a genuine editor, he can always come back and recreate it. --Orrelly Man (talk) 21:58, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

why? because of our Deletion policy, as clearest expressed at WP:BEFORE, our need to encourage new contributors, and WP:BITE. It is you who unrealistically expect perfection at the first edit. It is every bit as valuable and necessary to fix articles as contribute new ones. DGG (talk) 22:02, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

New York Public Library classes

Hi David, I've started something at Misplaced Pages:Misplaced Pages at the Library‎. Hopefully this can be a space for us to work out our ideas, and I look forward to your contributions.--Pharos (talk) 16:13, 22 February 2009 (UTC)

NAS

I believe I used this utility to convert a CSV list into a wiki table. — BRIAN0918 • 2009-02-26 17:50Z

Were you able...

...to read the article? --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 06:01, 5 March 2009 (UTC)

thanks for asking, still not yet. I'd appreciate a copy directly.DGG (talk) 09:12, 5 March 2009 (UTC)

Libraries & the Cultural Record

I thought this new article might interest you. Cheers. Thanks for all your help. ChildofMidnight (talk) 06:08, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

Clickety click

DGG, I thought you might have something worthwhile to say about this AfD and also a relevant part of "WP:CREATIVE" (on which see also my comment). -- Hoary (talk) 00:27, 17 March 2009 (UTC)

Heh heh, I'm enjoying this: DGG (ever the inclusionist) tending toward deletion of what's unenthusiastically backed by Hoary (ever the deletionist). Your comment on the meaninglessness of those particular library holdings is spot on: this says less about Powell than it does about the inadequacy of critical thinking behind "WP:CREATIVE". Um, anyway, could you revisit your comment in the AfD? As of a few seconds ago, it needed formatting and other attention. -- Hoary (talk)

I think I've said delete more often than keep today & the last few days. I think that's because fewer articles have been nominated for deletion the last week or so- by and large only the worst stuff is still being nominated, the passable stuff isn't. As for WP:Creative, where it does seem to work is that visual artists in conventional media who have works in the permanent collection of two or more museums does seem to indicate notability. It's easy to delineate things that certainly do indicate certain notability. It's easy to find careers that don't. The question is whether there's a concept of "notable, but not very notable," & what to do with such. DGG (talk) 03:12, 17 March 2009 (UTC)

mediawikiblacklist

I ask you because you're active there--am I correct that any enWP admin can deal with things also? DGG (talk) 05:35, 18 March 2009 (UTC)

Yes, although you need at least some knowledge of regular expressions. Stifle (talk) 09:02, 18 March 2009 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages Students' Guide

I noticed your involvement with Misplaced Pages:Misplaced Pages at the Library. I've got a draft of what is called the Misplaced Pages Student's Guide, which isn't a perfect fit for those getting instruction at the library, but might be useful. In any case, if you have any suggestions, they would be welcomed. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 21:40, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

Extinct editors

this must be one of the funniest AfD comments I ever came across! Owen× ☎ 16:35, 11 April 2009 (UTC)

thanks!DGG (talk) 19:33, 11 April 2009 (UTC)

Edwin Osgood Grover

If you have a moment and feel like it, would you mind a look here? I *think* the subject is probably notable but given when he lived, finding sources is a challenge. Some of the scholar results seem to fit, but others seem entirely unrelated. There are also a number of news hits, but they're behind pay gates. Know that they're not required to be publicly accessible to use, I just can't judge content to establish notability from what I can't see -- but thinking that quantity here might get past WP:PROF more so than quality. Thoughts? StarM 00:43, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

There's enough to tell. The NYT isnt substantial, 51 words, butt he very fact they gave it an article at all is significant. That he then published a long essay in the NYT Bk review is significant. The LA Times article is a signif ref. also. But the most useful general approach is something fairly new: WorldCat identities; best technique is to find a book by him in the regular WorldCat, then click on the author's name.: . Significant author & lecturer. Meets WP:BIO. DGG (talk) 01:49, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, didn't know about WC IDentities, will have a look at it when I have a few moments. I had a feeling he was probably notable. ThanksStarM 03:16, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

It's new, technically still experimental. I love it--the info was always there, but this saves a great deal of work compiling it from the individual book entries. DGG (talk) 03:22, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

from a recent deletion review: how to close XfDs

judging consensus is trying to evaluate what the other responsible people there think should be done. One can evaluate arguments, but only to see which ones are not in conformity with policy. I completely disagree one can choose which policy of competing ones applies, or how to interpret policy: both are for the community to decide (or whatever small fraction is paying attention). I do not argue to convince the closer in particular of the merits of my argument, but to convince others who may come and look at the discussion and give an opinion. The closer should follow whatever policy-based argument a clear majority agrees with, unless it's totally irrational. DGG (talk) 02:06, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

Sources about journalists

Hi DGG

Calling on you in your capacity as librarian, not admin. Do you know any good places to find information about journalists, rather than articles by them? I have just started a stub article on Michael Theodoulou who is an extremely prolific and I think well-regarded journalist. Any thoughts on how to find citations relevant to an article on him?

Thank you, Bongomatic 06:06, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

this has always been a problem. It would be much easier --as in almost all professions--to find non-directory information about historical than current figures. There are two fairly comprehensive specialized indexes: Communication and Mass Media Complete from Ebsco and "Communication Abstracts" from Sage, if you can find them. Lacking them, the best is probably the type of general database one finds in a library: (multiple exact titles of each, with different degrees of coverage): Proquest (ABI Inform, Periodical Abstracts) ) or Ebsco (Academic Search, Business Search) or Thompson Gale (Academic ASAP) , or Wilson (Business Periodicals Index , OmniFile). All public libraries have at least a truncated version of one or another, usually available outside the library to residents with a library card. All college libraries have a relatively full version of at least one. Key magazines covering the field include: "American Journalism Review" and "Columbia Journalism Review" There are also a large number of regional newsletter type publications, but almost always everything in them will be of the nature of press releases. General newspaper indexes sometimes work, if you can sort out the articles they themselves have written. DGG (talk) 15:43, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. Managed to get some access but wasn't able to find anything other than by the journalist. Maybe something will turn up eventually. Bongomatic 16:13, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

if you let me know by email what your library facilities are I can make some more precise suggestions. DGG (talk) 16:14, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

from an afd

"It was asked above what the inclusion criteria should be for material like this. the answer, is they can be whatever we want them to be. We make the rules, and we can make whatever exceptions are indicated. It's not as if we were working on someone else's project." DGG (talk)

Notability guideline for News Organizations/Publications

Hi, DGG, could you comment here about the proposal of a new notability guideline for news organizations and publications by OlYeller21? Thanks, Cunard (talk) 22:00, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

Thank you

Thank you Once again, thanks for your insightful words DGG. I have to admit that I had to read what you wrote twice to fully grasp what you were saying, because your posting tend to be a little bit deeper and more thoughtful than the average editor.

I admit, I was a little flustered today with your first typically neautral posting on ARS. But then I thought about what you said, and I realized this is exactly what I had been saying all along, that anyone should be welcome to post on any wikiproject (as long as they are not disruptive), you just said it in a more neutral, diplomatic way. Ikip (talk) 01:59, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

Historical notability

". Fifth century people are notable per se just by having their names remembered fourteen centuries later. Even if their actual record is scanty, and you can sum up all that's knowable about them in a single paragraph, print encyclopedias brim with stubs of exactly this type. - " . good comment by Smerdis of Tlön, for reuse as needed. DGG (talk) 04:03, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

merge/move

why not then do as you suggested, restore it and change the title, and then improve it to better NPOV. I'll look here for a reply. DGG (talk) 16:18, 10 May 2009 (UTC)

I thought it would be better if the two different histories were merged first, so they could be refactored. That might change the length of the History section which would affect the need for a separate article, especially if the rest of "Open access (publishing)" were cleaned up. But I don't really have time for a major rewrite at the moment. -- Beland (talk) 18:18, 10 May 2009 (UTC)

if I do it, I;'d have to do it from the separate articles. DGG (talk) 19:34, 10 May 2009 (UTC)

Some of the posts over at the AfD for Johnston are rather scary. It seems that people don't understand notability, or even read the one links that they provide. The one event says that if its a really big event, even minor figures can be notable from it. Then someone put forth an idea that the rest of his life isn't notable so it shouldn't be mentioned. Bah, do they not realize that encyclopedias don't have only "notable" information, or most pages would be empty? The fact that so many people have heard about him and there being over 8 months of coverage, scandal, interviews and the rest makes it all rather mind boggling. Ottava Rima (talk) 00:35, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

By the way, I managed to get Nicolo Giraud up to GA, and I think the current state of the page validates quite a few of your arguments over the years. :) Ottava Rima (talk) 00:36, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

people will say anything if they don't like an article In this case, there's the added factor of the reasons why some people of various political persuasions don't want the article--as they cannot admit it, they are forced to use other reasons. DGG (talk) 00:46, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

as for Giraud, magnificent work you did there. People who don't know research sometimes do not realize that for any historical figure connected in any substantial way with a famous person or event, there's a web of connections, and there will always be sources. The art of a librarian is not to do research, but to know (by a skill that is not explicitly teachable) where there is, and is not, likely to be material. But at least people here should understand about knowledge networks. The reason Misplaced Pages is such a good place to work is that we can build our net on top of the pre-existing ones. DGG (talk) 02:47, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

Shameless theft

Hi I have quoted you on my user page. It is attributed, but please remove it if you'd rather it were not there. pablo_hablo. 15:31, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

thanks for noticing it ! DGG (talk) 17:14, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

It's been there a while, I've only just got round to confessing! It just seemed to succinctly sum up a way forward away from all the

"You have no standards"
   "Well you would say that because you want to delete everything"
"Inclusionist!"
   "Deletonist!"

rubbish that forms so much of too many talk pages. Mind you, I won't be arguing in favour of articles about 10lb hammer's toes, left, right or hammer any time soon. pablo_hablo. 19:34, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

Kudos, comment & question

Dear David, I salute you for the various ideas expressed, and your sense of integrity. Your experiences from Princeton & Berkeley were also significant credentials to bring to bear. I have a comment about your working group for science and academia. Someone in the group lamented on how to distinguish "men from boys". At least in the science world it's quite easy. Below the obvious Nobel level, the next 2 are well known -- Academicians and Fellows. If WP can include all people on these 2 levels, it'd be quite a complete collection. Of course I'm only speaking about the US situation. I suspect that they have similar pecking order in other countries. Now a question unrelated to the above. When you have a chance, take a look at the discussion page for Deep Ng, and see my proposal to delete. Please advise if it's reasonable, and if so, the next step. Much obliged. --EJohn59 (talk) 18:24, 23 May 2009 (UTC)EJohn59

commented there based on general considerations. You do realise it's not the least my subject.DGG (talk) 23:21, 23 May 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. Your comments are reasonable & helpful--EJohn59 (talk) 04:40, 24 May 2009 (UTC)EJohn59

List of digital library projects

This is just a quick note that the a page you've commented on before List of digital library projects is undergoing discussion over a rewrite at Talk:List_of_digital_library_projects. The rewrite is at Stuartyeates (talk) 20:05, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

I am not sure how much it is going to help. I am not even sure that this should not be an exception to not being to some extent a web directory. DGG (talk) 20:38, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

Rescued

I have added a "rescued" tag to show where in AFD debates the rescue effort has begun, previously we have been adding a tag that shows when ARS was notified, but I don't think that is useful since nothing has changed at that point.Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Bahamas–Russia relations See here for an example that contrasts the difference in placement. --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) (talk) 20:17, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

I would suggest modifying it to include major changes by people not in the squadron. We there have no monopoly of the good editors, & it's just as important whoever does it. Additionally, I think it over-advertises the ARS. I urge you to change that template right away or we will be back at TfD.DGG (talk) 22:39, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

your comments on bilateral AfDs

with regard to your comment, are you seriously suggesting we need 20,000 of these, including the most non notable of non notables like Nauru-Monaco, Tuvalu-Ivory Coast, Bahamas-Liechtenstein? Some of the less notable have been nicely merged. the central test is

Your comment at Wikipedia_talk:Notability_(fiction) - well said

Just saw your comment on 08:51, 29 May 2009 - excellent! Thanks for taking out precious time to deal with this depressing situation, that a number of editors are so keen on purging fiction articles from Misplaced Pages. I can sure understand and fully respect if they find the fiction articles to be of such minor importance that they opt not read the articles themselves; but why they so persistently insist on deletion, hindering other people in reading the articles, is a mystery. A sincere appreciation of your work. Power.corrupts (talk) 14:36, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

-- Marcel Douwe Dekker (talk) 21:36, 21 June 2009 (UTC)

my comment is at the Wikiproject. DGG (talk) 18:49, 22 June 2009 (UTC)

Yes, thanks you. I have refraised my response, putting this rather black and white, in an attempt to get to the bottum of things. I hope you can take an other look... Thank you. -- Marcel Douwe Dekker (talk) 22:19, 22 June 2009 (UTC)

I wanted to draw your attention...

... to WP:SJ, a rather old essay of mine that I decided was ready to move to mainspace.—S Marshall /_Cont 20:39, 26 June 2009 (UTC)

WP space, you mean. I suggest you add some references to the discussions at the Misplaced Pages talk:WikiProject Academic Journals the relevant parts of WP:RS, & the great many discussions at WT:RS and the RS and FRINGE noticeboards. . I assume you've seen the key problem areas at pseudoscience, controversies over psychiatric & psychiatric medicines, and ethnic controversies. Do you intend this as a revision of guidelines, or an explanation of them? I'll take a further look in a day or two. DGG (talk) 20:55, 26 June 2009 (UTC)

Indeed, WP space.

With contributions only from me and Drmies, it's not ready to be a revision of guidelines. All it can be at this stage is a counterpoint.—S Marshall /_Cont 21:05, 26 June 2009 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages:Misplaced Pages at the Library

Hi David, you can check your email for some recent developments on this. Thanks!--Pharos (talk) 18:56, 27 June 2009 (UTC)

Too long, but you read it anyway

Thank you for your very courteous comment of support at WP:RFC/PAID#Statement by TheGrappler. It's extremely reassuring to find that somebody actually spent the time to read through the "tldr" section, cogitated upon it, and found it worthy of comment (and indeed praise, though for the time I invested in writing it, I would have been pleased even to receive a criticism!). Rather like you, I'm a reasonable person with a studiously considered (but hopefully open-minded) approach to Misplaced Pages; unfortunately I'm not so good at expressing that approach concisely! I've long admired your tactful and intelligent contributions, so your words were especially appreciated. Regards, TheGrappler (talk) 00:13, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

Journals

Hi David, I'm wondering if there are particular notability criteria that apply to journals, and think you might know the answer, (or at least have a view). I'm concerned about a brewing edit-squabble at Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith.  pablo_hablo. 19:28, 3 July 2009 (UTC)

Rescue

		The Article Rescue Barnstar
		For tirelessly rescuing articles from deletion discussions. Also, for giving me a new outlook on how to view inclusions/deletions. Paranormal Skeptic (talk) 16:04, 9 July 2009 (UTC)

Thanks

I want to thank you. In the past week, several people had an opportunity to show the true content of their character. Your conduct was an inspiration. When several others were loosing their heads, you conducted yourself with the highest standard of integrity and dignity.Dave (talk) 03:25, 11 July 2009 (UTC) P.S. I'm well aware that among the chaos were some legitimate issues. Rest assured I will do my best to fix them.

Arguing against redirects?

Any idea why all the sudden several editors are taking the unusual stance of insisting fictional characters can't even get redirects? I mean, I am sure it is probably coincidence, but it is rather annoying having to waste my time arguing for redirects. Surely there is strong consensus that these type of redirects are complete appropriate and they cost almost nothing. --ThaddeusB (talk) 14:40, 13 July 2009 (UTC)

Yes, I think I do know why:

1. They are afraid the articles will be re-created using the existing information
2. They are even afraid that if the article is deleted (to remove the history) and then the redirect created, that something like that will be restored anyway.
3. They no longer even ask for merges, because with a merge it is not permitted to remove the history: there is no such thing as merge, delete history , & redirect, because it violates the terms of the license
4. In a few instances, they may simply want to remove as much information about fiction as possible. I checked the 18th c Éncyclopedie yesterday on this very point, and their article about novels simply mentions the names of a dozen French authors and a few works, without talking about any of them elsewhere. That's the sort of encyclopedia some people want.

Now, I myself would be extremely happy if some genres of fiction had never been devised in the first place, but, astoundingly, in many cases the people wanting to remove material are fans of the series or the work. They apparently feel that they are wasting time with things that aren't worth talking about in general company. DGG (talk) 17:19, 13 July 2009 (UTC)

I just made a question along these lines at Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Gavilan ElessedilDGG (talk) 17:45, 13 July 2009 (UTC)

Points 1 and 2 are good ones. It is unfair (and a waste of time, ThaddeusB) to rely on people checking their watchlists to find reversions of redirects, which occur all too regularly. There should be a mechanism to prevent this without a new consensus.

Otherwise I give a lengthy explanation of my rational in Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Lokar which I would like your opinion on, either there or (preferably) here. I like to think that if I am in the wrong, I, like DGG, can see my position evolve. Abductive (talk) 23:31, 13 July 2009 (UTC)

I understand what you are saying on Lokar, but I still thing a "redirect" through disambiguation is better than nothing. In any case, Lokar is the exception - normally these character names only have one possible target. In general, a redirect is better than deletion for several reasons:

• Obviously someone was looking for the material or the page would have never been created
• Pointing new editors directly to a place where the content exists encourages them to edit there and/or spend their time on something else rather than recreating material that exists somewhere
  • Yes, redirecting makes it easier for experienced editors to undo the redirect, but experienced editors are far less likely to do so against consensus than a new editor is to recreate against consensus
  • Additionally, have one's first page deleted is probably the #1 way to scare someone off. Better that they not create the worthless page rather than be crushed when it is immediately deleted/nominated for deletion.
• Adding a page to your watch list costs essentially nothing in terms of time or effort. Additionally, if you wanted to insure the page wasn't recreated the blank page after deletion you'd have to watch list the non-existent page or otherwise keep an eye on it.
  • I have merged and/or redirected more than 100 articles in the last couple months and only 2 or 3 were undone by anyone (and none went through AfD prior to my redirect). If people aren't undoing my BOLD redirect, I really don't think people undoing consensus redirects is a serious problem.
• If a particular redirect is becoming a problem, it can always be protected just like any other page
• Redirects cancan't be hit by "Random article" so there is no risk of someone being pointed to one by accident.

• • • That generally makes sense. Three things; I do find that monitoring my watchlist takes time, a few minutes each time, and over many times it adds up. A reversion rate of 1 or 2 percent per month is 12 to 24 percent per year. And, are you sure that redirects are found by Random article? Abductive (talk) 00:46, 14 July 2009 (UTC)

Sorry, I should have been more clear. Of course monitoring a watch list takes time, but (at least for me) almost none of that time comes from changes to slow moving articles (or redirects). I have ~1000 articles on my list and probably 90% of the changes come from noticeboards and swine flu articles, as all the rest of my list is slow moving articles - in many cases I am probably the only active editor watching.

My results are perhaps not typical but take at Patrick Star. Even this very prominent redirect has only been undone less than once a month on average. If the page was repeatedly deleted (and not protected) rather redirected, I can quite confidently say it would be recreated more than once a month.

Finally, I meant "can't" that was an unfortunate typo. --ThaddeusB (talk) 01:07, 14 July 2009 (UTC)

Now is the end of the world if some fictional character doesn't have a redirect? Of course not, but neither should it bother you or anyone else that a redirect exists. It is just sitting there doing no one any harm and if it is helpful to a few people a year, then that is enough to keep it. --ThaddeusB (talk) 00:26, 14 July 2009 (UTC)

What do would you guys think if a new popular work of fiction along the lines of Twilight came out, and a user created all the redirects prophylactically? Abductive (talk) 00:46, 14 July 2009 (UTC)

I personally would be fine with that as long as the characters are mentioned by name in the target article. The redirect could always be overwritten if needed. --ThaddeusB (talk) 01:34, 15 July 2009 (UTC)

You are probably correct. I think this sort of attitude is a real shame. While I personally care very little about fiction, I do think that for a large percentage of our readers fictional topics are of great interest. It would be a great disservice to remove fictional topics altogether and would surely be a net negative for Misplaced Pages. I know you are a strong advocate for merging fictional topics in the "characters of"/"places of"/etc type article and I am on the same page entirely. If the information can be covered in one article there is no need for 5, 10, or even 20 stubs with little more than a basic character description. At the same time, there is no reason to delete information that is of interest to our readers just because it doesn't need its own article.

I think the majority (or at least plurality) of editors agree that merging is usually best, but there are far too many (on both sides) that simply refuse to compromise and I don't really understand why. --ThaddeusB (talk) 23:30, 13 July 2009 (UTC)

and of course in our system such people can prevent consensus indefinitely. The basic problem which affects every topic lies in our not having a mechanism to get reasonably consistent and stable decisions on content. (There are techniques though for handling very large watchlists, by looking for related changes. What is lacking is some way of filtering so only changes above a certain size are listed. ) But I see many changes in the other direction also--stable agreements to keep content, destroyed by someone going in and changing everything to redirects, or removing large amounts of content from a combination article. The main reason I still support keeping many articles intact even if perhaps better combined is to discourage that. We each think the other side is doing the worse, and it doesn't matter, because both are wrong. A first step would be a rule that BRD cannot be used for redirects and merges--that non-obvious ones MUST be discussed first, with full notice, and consensus. I suppose in equity that should apply to splits also.

Thaddus, the reason why people reject compromise is very simple. Rather than get a situation that consistently gives a result they can accept but do not really like, they prefer a situation where they will get what they want some of the time, even if they will lose others. They prefer chaos to a decision that does not satisfy them. I've heard people say as much in AfD in other topics entirely--their reason for deciding case by case instead of precedent , is that they can at least keep a certain percentage of the articles like X in--or out--even if its a random selection. This general way of thinking is characteristic of young children before they learn how to interact in groups in kindergarten. There's a large number of editors here who never learned. DGG (talk) 00:28, 14 July 2009 (UTC)

I would be curious as to what kind of articles tend to suffer was this later deletion of merged material. I personally do a lot of merges, but they are mostly all from 6+ day old PRODs where article being merged is either pretty unlikely to be notable or has very little content (2 sentences or less). I figure it is better to PRESERVE what I can than just let it disappear. --ThaddeusB (talk) 01:34, 15 July 2009 (UTC)

I hope I'm not like that. Abductive (talk) 00:46, 14 July 2009 (UTC)

You might want to check your current argument in Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Gavilan Elessedil, DGG (talk) 01:00, 14 July 2009 (UTC)

Since nobody looks at the article, and there are only 42 Google hits, and the search bar and the user's brain will take tham to the article on the novel, I would still prefer outright deletion. What if somebody created an article on a village that the characters visited, but it was not important to the plot or an encyclopedic discussion of the work? How about a stew with a unique name that the characters ate once in the novel? Should Misplaced Pages have an article, disambig or redirect on every named thing in every fictional work? Abductive (talk) 01:52, 14 July 2009 (UTC)

It is very hard to define the concept of "important" to the plot. In literature worth the attention, every place named there, even in passing, is included and discussed in works on the subject. There is always a reason for authors writing what they wrote; in good literature it is worth tracing the reasons--it adds depth to the story--the reader, or at least the careful reader, is much intended to make the associations. There has for example, been very extensive work done with Austen's names for people, places, and houses; similarly with Faulkner, or Joyce, or Hardy. Nothing is too trivial for a good writer. I remind you of the extraordinary care that Tolkien gave to this--he constructed a complete legendary history behind ever single name, and discussed it either in the works themselves, or his notebooks. Or the considerable less complicated but still meaningful names in Rowling.

As a librarian, I have learned to assume nothing about users' brains in searching; if they used them the entire profession would be much less necessary. The goal is to set it up so the users will find directly exactly what they no matter how stupidly they go about it. DGG (talk) 02:55, 15 July 2009 (UTC)

I agree with you, but point out that the metric from importance is mention in secondary sources. I've read Tolkien, Rawlings and Brooks, and recall thinking that Brooks was a pale imitation. The paucity of secondary sources on him and his works suggests that his treatment on Misplaced Pages needs to be scaled back; it seems especially unfair given that minor characters in the Harry Potter series are playing by the rules on their page. Abductive (talk) 03:35, 15 July 2009 (UTC)

Optional request for opinion

After dipping my toe in again, I noticed some unfortunate things about what seems to be casual application of the rescue tag, and on clicking through today's AfD discussions I see a pattern which I don't understand: This, this, this, this, and this page subject each appear to be created as autobiographical or self-promotional, and of the group I'd only keep the library as notable. Does the AfD process commonly ignore self-promotion as a factor in keep or delete closes? In only one case of the five was the self-promotional aspect mentioned in the nom. How should this weigh in the closing admin's decision? BusterD (talk) 14:10, 14 July 2009 (UTC)

nothing common in the article history, and 4 promotional articles in one day is under the usual quota--there are many thousands of equally bad ones here. (That's why I regret the effort in fighting over whether to merge character articles and similar obvious things--there is real work that needs doing). The library page is a copyvio,by the way--pages that read like that usually are. They will all 4 probably go, unless the motorcycle art is actually notable. The problem is the use of the rescue tag by different editors as a matter of course when the articles come up for deletion. It should not really be used for lost causes, but it's hard to tell what's a lost cause until we look for references--some amazing rescues have been pulled off, typically where a very bad article is written about something where there are actually references for notability--sometimes excellent references for major notability. Ideally, each article on AfD should get attention, and receive a careful look for the possibility of doing something with it. Ideally every new article should get a careful look for the very likely need of improving it and making a strong article out of it. In fact, all the old articles too should individually get the kind of concentrated attention a potential FA gets, to update and strengthen it. We are approaching 3 million articles. Another 100,000 active careful skilled editors are what we most need. If they each revised one a week, we could reedit the encyclopedia properly in 7 months. Or 5,000 people as active as the best people here, who could devote considerable time to it and do one a day. DGG (talk) 16:08, 14 July 2009 (UTC)

All this gives me more respect for those of you admins who take on "drinking from the firehose" directly. I feel I just help with splatters. There's only so much one can see without doing RC patrol a bunch. Thanks again for offering your view. I may come back around to this again. BusterD (talk) 03:07, 15 July 2009 (UTC)

we in turn rely on you and all the other sharp-eyed editor to spot these problems. Do not be reluctant to follow up. Never hesitate about letting someone know if you have doubts about something. DGG (talk) 03:13, 15 July 2009 (UTC)

If you're not already reading this, I'd appreciate eyes (but please hold your comments). I've been reading some of the previous discussions on this subject, and sampling actual tagged processes, and it's not pretty. I'm going to perform a more formal examination as soon as I figure exactly how I'm going to set it up. BusterD (talk) 03:25, 15 July 2009 (UTC)

Members of the project things in different ways--I'm a member myself. What would be an interesting analysis is the % of time the tagging got the article kept by consensus. If it is very low, taggers are not being selective, or not improving it sufficiently, or there is a prejudice against them. If it is very high, then either they are very successful, or there is a prejudice for articles they work on. I expect something in the range of 30% to 70%, which I think is an acceptable range. What I think the ideal range should be is 60%-80%. Let's see how the evidence matches my guess. DGG (talk) 03:31, 15 July 2009 (UTC)

Would you care to suggest a sample size? BusterD (talk) 03:47, 15 July 2009 (UTC)

Turns out to be easy, using Misplaced Pages:Article Rescue Squadron/Current articles subpage, which I should have known about but had not recalled, in June out of 416 articles, 279 were saved in some form or other, and 137 were not saved. This is 67%. More than I thought, but at about the minimum level I would consider acceptable. Next question: also can be done by counting, how does this compare with the ones not tagged, or the % before the ARS started? One would expect a higher % of the total afd's articles saved than those not tagged, or there would be no need for the tagging--though there will be articles so obviously a keep that there's no need to tag them. I hope there would be a higher % saved now than there was before the ARS started--but that's hard to differentiate from changing views towards deletion. Harder questions: how many should have been saved, but were closed wrong, how many should not have been kept, but were closed wrong. Obviously everyone will disagree here. However, all these numbers as not as meaningful as they look, because many of the saved were saved by a merge or a redirect: I do not consider a redirect with loss of all content a save, though it is technically. Key question? of the ones not saved, how many should not have been nominated? maybe 10 or 15; if 15 out of 416 were tagged in error, or at least wildly overenthusiastically, that's 3.6% of the total tagged. No wikiprocess really operates with errors much less than 5%. They're doing fine, though more articles are being lost than should have been. Evidence of a few really foolish ARS taggings are the sort of anecdotal evidence that should not say anything about the general process. The main reason I think they should be tagging more carefully that if they did, they might save some more articles overall by concentrating on them. I found at least 10 in there that should be appealed or reintroduced after improvements. DGG (talk) 15:25, 16 July 2009 (UTC)

AfD

Hi. I know you had some minor concerns about my AfD work, so could you review my recent closures and let me know if I've addressed the issues you noticed? Cheers. –Juliancolton |  22:29, 21 July 2009 (UTC)

Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith

Hi, the discussion on the talk page of this article is getting unpleasant. Some useful info on the journal was actually added to a section from another article and it is now proposed to merge this article there. I think that the current article, plus the info in American Scientific Affiliation#Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation would make for a rather nice journal article. I do however see a problem in showing the notability of this journal, as all sources currently (especially those in the ASA article) are from the journal itself or rather weak otherwise. All we have at this point is the library coverage data that you provided. Your input will be appreciated. Thanks. --Crusio (talk) 19:39, 22 July 2009 (UTC)

commented there--it's the indexing that does it. But I would not think it a major error if it gets merged. DGG (talk) 04:38, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

your comments

your comments on my nominated AfDs rarely provide examples of actual sources establishing notability yet you continue to deride me for making incorrect nominations. that is not assuming good faith. are you going to say my searches were also faulty for Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Hungary – New Zealand relations,Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Greek-Malaysian relations and Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Congolese–Turkish relations and the "closely located" Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Bulgaria–Malta relations? your continuing attitude towards an experienced editor like me is noted for future reference. PS you should archive, even when I pressed the end key, my broadband connection still takes a while to load up your talk page. LibStar (talk) 03:59, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

The onus of a deletion in on the person who wants to delete the article. By the time I comment, other people have generally already added enough material. I appreciate you are trying to fulfill WP:BEFORE, but you are not using common sense in doing it. G and GN are very useful when they succeed, but meaningless when they fail. I think you sometimes do very good work building up these bilateral relations articles, but you don't look far enough. I don't expect you to agree with my view that almost all such relations are notable, but you are persistently ignoring the historical aspects even when they;'re as obvious as Turkey-Malta. In those few cases where there's really never going to be enough for an article and there's no reason why there might be, I have agreed with your nominations & I've not said keep, as for those 3. I don't want to say delete unless I personally check, but it did seem very unlikely in those cases). I have no grudge against you, so I do not see why you should have one against me. Coming here & saying right out that you have one seems unusual, but i won't hold it against you. DGG (talk) 04:21, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

thanks for your comments, I must say at times I'm unsure of the intent of your comments. google news is usually the primarily means of getting a feel of third party coverage. google search just yields too much trivial stuff. can you suggest any other ways to verify significant third party coverage to meet WP:GNG? whilst I don't agree with your view on the notability of these, !voting keep for the sake of it and not providing actual evidence of third party non trivial coverage is not very weighty in my opinion. whilst I often don't agree with Richard Norton, at least he makes a genuine effort to demonstrate some third party coverage. LibStar (talk) 04:25, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

I am pleased to agree than RAN is working on these harder than I am. It's not actually my main interest, since I can only work on a few articles a day, I pick articles to try to source where I have some special technique, or access, or background to find sources. I never say a bald keep. I always give a reason. I try to have it based on policy. If people don't agree with my reason, they won;t vote in accordance with it. If I were personally deciding as a one-person committee what to keep and delete, and was doing it without looking for sources, you'd have a valid complaint. But this is a cooperative effort, and if RAN is there, I know I can depend on him. DGG (talk) 04:36, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

well your point about me being careless is not appreciated, AfDs are for discussion, if consensus shows something is notable, I accept that. if nominations are "faulty" then it will come out in consensus. what I think is more careless is the 1000s of bilateral articles that were created as stubs (not just the banned user) and no effort being made to improve them...so they are left as stubs for 1 or 2 years. rather lazy in my opinion. LibStar (talk) 01:02, 24 July 2009 (UTC)

I agree with you that we need some way of discussing what should be done with less-than-satisfactory articles in contexts other than threatening deletion. But AfDs are for when deletion is proposed as the solution, and if nomination s are faulty it wastes everyone's time and energy. I agree with you also that many people who write articles are lazy (or even ignorant) about references, but the secondary responsibility for trying to remedy that is everyone's.DGG (talk) 03:26, 24 July 2009 (UTC)

AfDs are a proposed solution when I nominate because I fail to find adequate sources, I can tell you in most instances I don't nominate bilateral articles because there is evidence of coverage. In some instances, I put a {{notability}} tag on some bilateral articles, in the cases I think are borderline, yet I have never seen any editor attempt to improve an article after adding this tag. you can draw 2 conclusions from this, people can't be bothered improving it or it needs to go to AfD. the problem with these bilaterals is that anyone can make an X and Y article and just leave it there and not risk speedy deletion. LibStar (talk) 05:09, 24 July 2009 (UTC)

List of actors who have played animated characters

Thank you for pointing out that "Usefulness is a relevant criterion for navigational devices such as lists", I could really use a cite of it, if possible.

The AfD was closed 'no consensus' here, challenged by Powers here, reopened here and closed Delete here. King of Hearts looks to me to be letting him/erself be pushed around by Powers. The argument that the AfD should be reopened to allow an editor to insert a last comment is unworkable and unsound. AfD closed, X requests the right to comment, AfD reopened, X adds a final comment, AfD closed, Y requests... When the second closure is considered, it's also having it both ways. Either one believes that it should have been opened to allow comments from Powers, and it shouldn't have been closed before replies to Powers could be addressed, or one believes as I do that it shouldn't have been re-opened for a user to get the last word in the first place.

My comments on User talk: King of Hearts for more on this. (middle paragraph and last sentence also sent to Michael Q) Anarchangel (talk) 03:45, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

I see it was reopened. I will comment there. DGG (talk) 20:39, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

WikiProject TRANSWIKI

Hi. In light of recent events and community concerns about the way in which content is transferred I have proposed a new wikiproject which would attempt to address any of the concerns and done in an environment where a major group of editors work together to transfer articles from other wikipedias in the most effective way possible without BLP or referencing problems. Please offer your thoughts at the proposal and whether or not you support or oppose the idea of a wikiproject dedicated to organizing a more efficient process of getting articles in different languages translated into English. Dr. Blofeld 13:00, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

DSB project

Hi DGG! Thanks so much for everything this past weekend -- I got home intact, if a couple hours delayed from the storms.

Here's my subpage on my DSB project -- the citations are formatted to link to the Dictionary of Scientific Biography, so if you check the "what links here" from that article you can see the ones I or others have done already. The redlinks on my page are bios that weren't already written that are in the DSB; the bluelinks are bios that have been written since I started the project. There's also a dump of bios in the print version that Ruud Koot did. I haven't been writing down my progress, but I'm somewhere in the middle of the print "B" volume at the moment, so anything starting later than that would be helpful -- we could start keeping track of how many bios we've covered. Best, -- phoebe / (talk to me) 02:18, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

Pity the picnic never actually happened.

--the links seem to go to the print version only, not the online also. Additionally, at least some show the part in the main vol, not the added parts for those who have them in the supplementary New Dictionary of Scientific Biography I think it might be better to add the online links & complete the ones for the supplement first, before continuing alphabetically, so we know that at least some part is complete. (I recall you said the online version wasn't available to you at the beginning of the project). That the New Dictionary did not include a complete list of scientists with main entries in the entire work is one of the principal defects in that reference work--and one of the defects in our reference work is that the listing in "what links here" is not sorted alphabetically. DGG (talk) 03:57, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

Our online version is through a (subscription) Gale interface, so there aren't easy links to the articles (I get something like this), and even if there were it wouldn't be helpful to nonsubscribers. But what they are providing seems to be an HTML version, but additionally a straight pdf scan of the original print -- so actually providing the print page #s & reference is still helpful no matter what version it came from. The new DSB volumes are just tacked onto the end of the original set, from what I can tell (they start over with the alphabetization) and the "complete dsb" is just a scan of the whole thing. -- phoebe / (talk to me) 22:37, 31 July 2009 (UTC)

So-called apamming by learned societies etc

Thanks for your thoughtful comments on this issue. Ultimately, of course, we non-admins just have to do as we are told (whether we agree or not) as it's you guys who have the power to delete us and block us. So I guess there's not much point arguing about it.

It would certainly help though if the "tone" and "approach" were to be a bit less overbearing and autocratic when pointing out "spam" to editors. Of course, I understand the point about the dangers of attracting purely promotional activity but it's often perfectly well intentioned and stems from a desire to provide the fullest information possible. I also find this idea of COI in wikipedia bizarre. If you work for an organization, you are likely to have a fair bit of expertise on how it works and therefore pretty well qualified to edit on it. That's not a COI, surely? PointOfPresence (talk) 08:50, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

You are right, but the problems are not easy to fix.

1. There is an inherent conflict between writing about what you know and not writing about what you are involved in. This does not affect people who write about hobbies--it does not affect me when I work on English history, or about things we're only generally connected with, as when I do the bio of some geologist or chemist. In theory, you are supposed to wait until such an incidentally interested person happens to come along. In practice, we often do more than that. The bio of my graduate advisor was missing. He was clearly qualified as a member of the NAS; as nobody did it, I eventually did & in fact won one of our internal awards for filling the gap. It helps to have an established reputation when one starts. or to go slowly and check with people who are well known here.
   1. But there are problem. for example, I could have written that bio to omit the fact that his best known book is so well-known because it made a prediction about the future of biological science that turned out to be as totally wrong as a prediction can be. If you write about your organization, you might implicitly pretend it accomplishes all of its goals. You might assume all of its publications are equally well-received. You can place excessive links for our customary practice, and be annoyed when they are removed. You might exaggerate the importance of some of its features or events.
2. It's inevitable that any human organizations--especially a very large one--even that tries to be egalitarian-- develops at least informal power structures. If you want a guide to our ethos, I recommend the free online version of How Misplaced Pages Works by Phoebe Ayers, Charles Matthews, and Ben Yates (also available in print).
3. Our impoliteness to beginners is a well-known disgrace--see WP:BITE for an essay on this. Many admins try to ameliorate this, but the prevailing tone is that of a convention of 19-year old science fiction fans, with some irascible elders of the previous two generations mixed in. We even have a rule that says, in effect, if you want to change something, don't be reluctant to start a fight about it, WP:BOLD
4. This is a unique medium. There are no real precedents for something this size without top down control that actually produces a widely useful product. Even to people who have been here many years, things can seem peculiar, and often are. The only practical thing to do is to learn to work the way it works, and gradually try to affect things as you learn how . DGG (talk) 16:38, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

Coatrack

Just a reminder: On Misplaced Pages talk:Coatrack, you wrote "to be continued" in February. — Sebastian 15:31, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

too many things keep happening here for one human being--or at least for me. I will try to get back to it. DGG (talk) 16:26, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages:CiterSquad

There is a lot of stuff at the bottom of Misplaced Pages:CiterSquad#Volunteers, which seems to me should be in on the talk page, would you take a look and let me know if I am mistaken in my apprasial, if it should be moved, please do so. If I move it, there would be conflicts. Thanks Jeepday (talk) 17:59, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

Yep. Some of us want any newcomers to this non-citing project to know that there is significant dissent. (It's not a project to add cites; it's a project to add "unreferenced" tags.) Some of my objection departs if the Orwellian name goes away. DGG, apologies for butting in on your talk page. Antandrus (talk) 19:20, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith again

• Things seem to be getting out of hand there, with two users redirecting the article against a clear majority of opposed votes on the talk page. The bullying behavior goes as far as putting a 3RR warning on my talk page, although I reverted just 2 times, as much as the person warning me. Your input might be helpful. --Crusio (talk) 12:20, 5 August 2009 (UTC)

Schools notability

Please see Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Schools#Request_for_comments:_Notability_of_high_schools. TerriersFan (talk) 18:22, 5 August 2009 (UTC)

Name dropped in an off-wiki article

DGG here is a little sun to help brighten your day. LA @ 05:11, 6 August 2009 (UTC)
Ribbon 1 • Ribbon 2

Dear DGG...I was reading Where oh where has my trivia section gone? which lead me to "Should Misplaced Pages include trivia?" which lead me to "The Charms of Misplaced Pages" where Nicholson Baker dropped your user name in the final section of that article. I just thought you might like to know. Have a nice day! LA @ 20:12, 5 August 2009 (UTC)

I am much less patient now. Some of the above messages about failed compromises at fiction and the challenged compromise high schools may give some idea of why. DGG (talk) 23:54, 5 August 2009 (UTC)

Keep up the good work. Bearian (talk) 23:55, 5 August 2009 (UTC)

Well, it seems the high schools compromise still holds. DGG (talk) 06:06, 6 August 2009 (UTC)

There seems to be a problem with just your talk page as far as I can tell. I can't access it directly from clicking on my user contributions page nor from your user page. I get a weird message "Override this function." Do you know what that means? LA @ 06:33, 6 August 2009 (UTC)

And now it seems to have gone away, but it could be back. LA If you reply here, please leave me a {{Talkback}} message on my talk page. @ 06:36, 6 August 2009 (UTC)

It's happening erratically all over the site; happened to me also.. Saw it mentioned at AN/I. Bug reported earlier today Cause presently unknown, except apparently related to a software update.DGG (talk) 07:25, 6 August 2009 (UTC)

Great userpage

		The Excellent User Page Award
		I just want to say that I greatly enjoyed reading your userpage - probably because so much of it is both true and in need of saying. Thanks, Ben Aveling 08:45, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

Scientist bios

Over the past several years, I have seen you remark several times that WP lacks good coverage of scientist bios. I had not given this subject any special thoughts, until Firefly posted a bio of myself. FF complimented me on my modesty in taking that bio to AfD, but that is not really correct: I am as vain as any researcher ;-) Having created several bios for others, I feel a bit hypocritical in proposing my own one for AfD. However, I edit WP under my own name and as WP life goes, that means that you're free game whenever there is a conflict on some other article. (It is obvious to me that had I been editing under a pseudonym, FF would not have created this bio and Hrafn wouldn't have slammed it). Any scientist can do without a WP bio slammed with notability tags and unflattering angry discussion on its talk page (the tags can be removed, but not the talk-page discussion). Anyway, I am digressing. One problem that I see with scientist bios is WPs (justifiedly) frowning on COI editing. We have all seen way too many fluff pieces written by their subjects. However, COI editing can work out well and I think that the article on Genes, Brain and Behavior, edited by myself (with a clear COI) but checked by other editors (yourself and Headbomb), is a good example of this. My idea is that it could perhaps be encouraged for scientists to write an autobio article in their userspace, which could then be checked by appropriate other editors who might (after correcting any POV) eventually decide to move it into article space. Checking an article would be much less work than writing it from scratch (even if done seriously meaning checking sources and searching for possible unfavorable material that has been omitted) and this way we could perhaps get an increase in this type of articles. In addition, if instructed properly, these autobios would most probably include more details on the research done by these individuals than nowadays mostly is the case, making not only for more but also for better bios. An additional advantage would be that the vetting before it is moved into article space would greatly reduce the probability of an article being slammed with tags and would spare good faith but non-notable persons the humiliating experience of having their bio go through AfD (wouldn't help with the vanity bios, but I don't mind the feelings of those persons too much...). What do you think of this idea, is it realistic? --Crusio (talk) 10:00, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

About half the bios of this sort are done by people with some degree of COI, & I agree this does not disqualify. What is needed is guidance. When scientists write their own bios they tend to fall into one of two errors: they give a minimal single paragraph as in a faculty list, or the give a full multi-page CV. You'd think people would know to look for a similar article and do likewise, but it would help to have standard templates--preferably as fill in the box types. I'd like to do it for many other types of articles also.

I'm not sure prevetting would help, certainly not as a requirement. I see an increasing people in all fields doing them by choice. We could perhaps have a way of suggesting it as a possibility--but I am concerned that it would just add complexity--the system is intimidating enough. You are right, thought, that it would avoid the embarrassment of having to tell someone they're not notable enough. Perhaps what we need there is some other word than notable and notability. Perhaps we need a simple arbitrary inclusion rule anyone can understand. (What we really need is tact and discretion, but let's be practical.) But we can conceal talk p. discussions, by archiving, or even as "courtesy deletions". At the very least, we can be sure to make them NOFOLLOW. Ideally, we should do everyone likely to be notable by bot in advance as a stub--I think I could write a conceptual algorithm to use on a faculty list, or a list of holders of a chair. DGG (talk) 08:13, 9 August 2009 (UTC)

Notability for academic journals

Actually, I could do with your input, I've just realised. Is there any agreement on thresholds of notability for academic journals? There's a discussion happening at Modern Theology about whether or not it is notable. I suspect so, and the other user suspects not, but I don't think either of us is sure.  :-) Cheers, Ben Aveling 09:57, 9 August 2009 (UTC)

We generally go by number of libraries and coverage in the standard indexes for the subject. In general, a journal by a major publisher is notable. And there is an project to make an article in Misplaced Pages for every journal cited here. DGG (talk) 15:45, 9 August 2009 (UTC)

incidentally, my comment from a current discussion elsewhere in Misplaced Pages, in response to a claim that WoS is the standard for journal significance:

I completely disagree with this as a general statement, and I doubt many information scientists or research librarians or scholars in the humanities would agree either. WoS includes only a very select list of current journals in the humanities, and similarly Scopus--exactly because of the many possible journals--so many not because they are insignificant but because they are most of them very small in contrast to science journals. Even in the social sciences coverage varies, and education gets very minor coverage in WoS, and only a little better in Scopus. Indeed, that's true even the the sciences: it is perfectly true that in molecular biology and physics a journal not in ISI is unlikely to be important, this is not the least true in descriptive biology. As a recent paper, by a well known information scientist, Howard White et al, in Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, the best journal in my subject, "Libcitation: A measure for comparative assessment of book publications in the humanities and social sciences" doi 10.1002/asi.21045 (v. 60, no.6,pp.1083-1096, 2009) says in its introduction

Thomson's Arts and Humanities Citation Index and Social Science Citation Index fail to cover many journals in book-oriented fields. Particularly likely not to be covered , because of economic constraints on Thomson or any similar publisher, are journals from the smaller anglophone countries of in languages other than English. ...Scopus is of no help to people in the humanities.

The purpose of the authors is to propose counting the no. of books in libraries as an alternative measure--something I have long advocated here and for which am glad to have such authoritative support. I'll be discussing the article further, as I think it's of general relevance to how we evaluate in these fields.DGG (talk) 00:41, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

== afd procedure ==

Hi, I'm wondering if it is allowed/discouraged, for users to remove all incoming links to an article that is at AfD, if the outcome is uncertain? I thought I'd seen that action mentioned in the guidelines, but can't find it.

Specifically, a user is removing (eg) all links leading to -logy, which he nominated at afd. Is that acceptable? -- Quiddity (talk) 18:03, 13 August 2009 (UTC)

the basic guideline is at Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion#How to discuss an AfD, but it does not specifically address what is likely to be contentious:

the question is whether or not it improves the article. Some people interpret that, as improving its chances of passing AfD, which is usually but not always the same thing. But I have seen people change an article at AfD to make it worse, in order to get it deleted. Most of the times, this is done just before nomination, where it's less visible to the high proportion of commentators who don't check the history. (I was wondering about WP:BEANS here, but the people who do the dirty tricks tend to be regulars who already know about them.). As a example of doing this well, if the article contains a linkfarm, and this is one of the reasons for deletion, it's good to remove it, but if the links add to the value of the article, then it is not. If the article has borderline references, it's good to remove them and substitute better ones; but to remove borderline ones and leave it unreferenced is not helpful. When it's done just before deletion I consider it evidence of bad faith, just as much so as stubbifying an article and then saying it covers the subject inadequately.

Where something one is on the scale, it is something I'd rather comment on at the AfD. DGG ( talk ) 18:17, 13 August 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, dirty tricks like Canvasing? Hey, how bad is this guy being in the review? I'm not going to ask you to vote against it, but did you know about it?- (User) Wolfkeeper (Talk) 02:04, 14 August 2009 (UTC)

Yes, I knew about it. I'm a little behind in checking AfDs, and hadnt gotten to it. I try to pick out the ones where I have something to say, and if I miss something likely to be interesting to me, I like to be told. About half the time, what I say is not what the person asking me may hope for. People looking for unqualified support from someone know enough not to ask for it here. You nominated another prefix or suffix or two, where I did not bother to comment because the deletion is correct, and will happen just as well without me. DGG ( talk ) 02:16, 14 August 2009 (UTC)

I wasn't intending to canvass. I was asking an experienced admin whether preemptively delinking an article was actually prohibited somewhere, or if it was just really poor etiquette. -- Quiddity (talk) 18:54, 18 August 2009 (UTC)

Now that the afd has been closed as keep, who is responsible for reinstating any of the useful links that were preemptively removed? (I won't have time to get to it till at least next week). (You can copy/move this thread to Talk:-logy or elsewhere, if that'd be more appropriate). -- Quiddity (talk) 18:54, 18 August 2009 (UTC)

All the links referred to foreign words and were linked inappropriately and are now linked appropriately. Nobody looking at those links would have had much idea where they led; I removed no visible links to -logy. If you want to go through and add links to -logy, go right ahead. So far as I can tell, none of the words I changed were derived from -logy, they were all derived directly from the greek or latin. The suffix -logy seems to be essentially a backronym. Or, if you're declaring an edit war, and intend to go through and simply undo all my edits, then I'd appreciate DGG giving you a suspension now, which should save time.- (User) Wolfkeeper (Talk) 19:16, 18 August 2009 (UTC)

It is not edit warring to revert your removal of links if a good faith user disagrees with your action in removing them. The edit war starts when you revert back without discussing and if you do that we will know where the blame for the edit war lays won't we.... You seem to take a very combative approach to discussing deletion. You know, you catch more flies with honey and your behaviour on the -logy AFD was certainly unhelpfuly muddying the discussion that I closed. Spartaz 19:24, 18 August 2009 (UTC)

It will surprise no one that I agree with Spartaz about this. DGG ( talk ) 19:39, 18 August 2009 (UTC)

Tonxxx (talk) 01:31, 14 August 2009 (UTC)Regards, Anthony |]] at 01:54, 14 August 2009 (UTC)

Kudos

I just wanted to compliment you on your tact. Good form! — Ched :  ?  02:09, 14 August 2009 (UTC)

Okay, and glad it is already resolved. Best, --A Nobody 05:51, 14 August 2009 (UTC)

Team conflict

User:Colonel Warden already deprodded it before you prodded it. So have a WP:TROUT. It'll probably die horribly at AfD, but it'll be a valiant fight. Fences&Windows 00:42, 15 August 2009 (UTC)

Col. & I agree completely about two-thirds of the time and completely opposite the other third. What makes it odd is because I think we both take the same general approach. I generalize from that there's at least a 25 % percent variability between what we any of us individually would consider notable even if we all agreed completely on the guidelines, which makes arguing over individual articles a little pointless. Proposed rule for AfD: keep anything any two experienced Wikipedians will speak for if they promise to maintain it (two not one, to eliminate idiosyncrasy). A lot of decisions will be wrong, but that's true anyway. DGG ( talk ) 04:20, 15 August 2009 (UTC)

As far as I'm concerned WP:GNG is the best guide, and I interpret it to mean that if you can find several independent, secondary reliable sources directly covering a topic and we can write a decent article based on them, we should have an article on that topic. I never bother looking at all these notability guidelines for people, music, books etc. Of course some topics are bloody stupid, like Michelle Obama's arms, so there are exceptions.

As for "team conflict", I don't think we have another article on the general topic of conflict at work, which would seem to be a notable topic, although we do have Work-life balance, Hostile work environment, Sexual harrassment, and Organisation climate. Seems to me that we need a general article on Work environment and another on Conflict at work. Fences&Windows 16:38, 15 August 2009 (UTC)

What follows is my own view, not current consensus: I do not accept GNG as a guide except when we have no other rational criterion for notability, or as a first rough screen. IUt works better for some types of articles than others; it very often works with people, or businesses. It almost always fails with abstract concepts I additionally think that its usefulness is ending, for with the great ongoing increase in coverage of GBooks and GNews -- which were not imagined in their present form when the rule was formulated, it is much too inclusive. Once we have all local newspapers there from a country--which will happen much earlier in the US than the UK, the rule will become much too inclusive. it will easily be possible to find references for almost anyone & anything. (They were in existence before, but they were too hard to find, and only a few dedicated people did the work, & in a very few instances). We are thus increasingly forced to find increasingly narrow definitions of what counts as significant coverage or reliable sources, and adopt special rules, such as ONEEVENT, which take many people and things out of the sphere of the GNG entirely. It is no accident that this have become needed where the Googles are strongest. Has nobody else noticed that ONEEVENT and GNG are in basic principle of how to decide contradictory? One goes by sources, the other by content. I make a prediction: we will not have WP:N in anything like its present form in another 3 years.

We can and should have a great many more general articles than we do. The main problem is that is much harder to write them adequately. We could have an article on the topics you mention, and on dozens of other related topics also.--even on team conflict, both in the meaning of conflict within a small workgroup or among teams. The question here for an existing article is whether it provides a useful basis for anything. This is especially true when it is a matter of repurposing an article intended to be indirectly promotional, as when someone uses an article on a book to write what should be an article on the subject of the book, but from a narrow perspective, or on a particular company's implementation of a business process for the process. When I see these, I'd very much like for us to take the opportunity to rewrite, but this takes what almost all actual Misplaced Pages people are most reluctant to do, which is actual research using a range of sources. DGG ( talk ) 18:00, 15 August 2009 (UTC)

Concepts can be defined using the GNG too, e.g. One dollar salary is notable because multiple reliable sources cover it in detail. I still feel we need to always refer to what reliable sources say; the tendency for editors to try to define in absolute terms what is notable and what is not is problematic and often distracts from actually looking at the sources.

There's already a bias against local news coverage that I think is sometimes reasonable and sometimes unfair. To make it policy would be tricky. Local newspapers do often have stories about trivial local matters, but how we define local and trivial is problematic. An adaptation to GNG could say that topics must have received some national coverage and in more than one publication, but this would make things that happen in tiny countries more notable than things that happen in large US states!

Of course GNG and ONEEVENT clash; it's pretty clear that ONEEVENT is designed as an exception to avoid having lots of articles about people that focus simply on a single incident. I largely agree with ONEEVENT, but it does mean that we delete articles about people who receive large amounts of national or international news coverage. John Yettaw was kept at AfD, for instance, despite ONEEVENT.

"this takes what almost all actual Misplaced Pages people are most reluctant to do, which is actual research using a range of sources." Haha, too true! It's so much easier to slap a delete tag on. I've rewritten a few articles from scratch rather than see them deleted, and UncleG did an amazing turnaround with Hell, Arizona, turning a hoax stub into a useful article. Generally there's too few people stepping back and looking at where we need to build the encyclopedia - although some of the WikiProjects do a fine job - and too many treating Misplaced Pages like a game of who can delete the most articles. I'm not looking at the big picture much either as I'm mostly either WikiSlothing around or firefighting to save notable topics at prod or AfD. Fences&Windows 16:18, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

We disagree about the fundamental basis upon which articles should be included in this or any other encyclopedia. (to avoid misunderstanding, I agree that your view is much closer to the current consensus, as I said earlier) My general view is that one part of what people want in a reference book is consistency: they will accept it if we cover all AAA baseball players, or if we cover none of them, but not if we cover some and not others because of the erraticness of what sources we can find easily among the ones that are published. They'd accept any other rational standard also, such as AAA players who have been on an AAA team for a full season--I take an example of current interest that I don't care about in the slightest. With a reference book, one wants to know ahead of time if it is likely to be useful. I see you understand the problems of interpreting "local" -- there's another one, the NYT/Washington Post are local newspapers for NYC/Washington as well as being national, though the NYC no longer covers minor purely local events. My example of what can happen is that most local newspapers give the lineups and scores of HS football games, with occasional stories about the principal local players. The scores may not be significant coverage, but the features are. "National" is asking much too much anywhere--I once suggested regional coverage as a more appropriate standard, but with the ongoing consolidation of newspapers & rise of internet news sources our standards are becoming less useful altogether. I do not completely rule out publication-based standards--a valid standard for a book or film is whether it had gotten reviews; we could and probably do include all restaurants included in Michelin. ASs for one event, the current exception is "If the event is significant, and if the individual's role within it is substantial, a separate article for the person may be appropriate" I consider that a very broad exception, not taken account of sufficiently. Obviously any event worth an article would be significant, and therefore every person with a substantial role in a significant event should have an article. if their role can be verified. DGG ( talk ) 17:19, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

SOD/CAT

I wondered if you might review the deletion of SOD/CAT. I'm concerned about the speed at which the article was deleted after being relisted for review. I am also concerned that the main catalyst--Dr Vickers--behind the deletion effort has made a large number of edits to a competing technology, Protandim which may indicate a COI. I do not know what the next step to appeal for an undelete would be. I appreciate your insights. RGK (talk) 21:48, 15 August 2009 (UTC)

It was listed for the regular 7 days, and then an additional 8th day--I suspect the only reason it was even kept open was that I had previously declined a speedy deletion on the article; at that point two additional good editors commented to delete, and it was appropriately closed. In all 6 editors, 5 of them excellent editors with considerable experience, said to delete, and only you , who apparently have a commercial interest in the product, said to keep. The admin who evaluated and closed the discussion is also experienced and competent; no adminwould have decided otherwise. Earlier, as reviewing admin when it was nominated for speedy, I declined the speedy deletion , saying " I think this shows at least some minimal importance, so not appropriate for speedy deletion." This does not mean I thought it should be kept; rather, that it said enough to require a community discussion before deleting it, and that is exactly what it has had. I did not participate at the AfD, as I did not think it necessary, but I too would certainly have said to delete. It seems clear from a scan of the references for the article that they are all or almost all general, and that there are no published studies about this particular product, but Superoxide Dismutase in general--except for an uncited Russian one of which a translation is posted on the company's web site. The other purported publications were in unreliable non-peer reviewed sources.

Tim vickers I have long known as a very experienced Misplaced Pages editor of the highest integrity. He edits articles on many subjects in his area. He, like myself, has a doctorate in the biochemistry/molecular biology. In fact, the reason I do not participate very much in this subject area is because the people there--of which he is perhaps the most active--do it extremely well, & I therefore work on other areas where help is more needed. He and I --and everyone here -- have a strong conviction that the quality of Misplaced Pages depends (among other things) upon keeping out advertisements for commercial products. Unbiased articles giving information on notable commercial products are another matter, if there are adequate references to show their notability. I advised you how to improve it, but although you fixed up many details nicely, it was not improved in the basic problems--from which I conclude that there was not enough appropriate specific material to support an article. I agree 100% with the deletion. You have the right to ask for restoration at WP:Deletion Review. I would advise against it. Even though Deletion Review is unpredictable, the chance for this one is approximately zero & all you will get there is further explanations of why this material is not suitable content for an encyclopedia--both because it is advertising and because the product is not notable. As for attacking the reliability and objectivity of T.V., I cannot think of anything which would harm you more. DGG ( talk ) 22:41, 15 August 2009 (UTC)

Thank you for your response DGG. I accept your judgement and acknowledge your support for T.V.'s independence. I will not be pursue an appeal of the SOD/CAT article. RGK (talk) 00:44, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

You may be interested to know that a form of the article has been moved from Robert Kavanaugh/Sandbox2 back to main space by MuZemike. I don't know why. _matic 01:11, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

I assume he did not realize, and I speedy deleted it as a re-creation. I do not see that any of the objections were met. RK, did you mean to re-create the article or abandon it? DGG ( talk ) 01:21, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

Abandon for now as per above. I'd saved a copy in what I thought was a personal sandbox. Apparently, its not personal, and someone I've no relationship with moved back to SOD/CAT. Thank you for fixing. Over and out. RGK (talk) 01:40, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

The confusion was probably caused because it was in mainspace - Robert Kavanaugh/Sandbox2 - instead of User space - User:Robert Kavanaugh/Sandbox2. I noticed this because I just now userified Robert Kavanaugh/Sandbox1. --ThaddeusB (talk) 03:40, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

I don't see the usefulness of keeping it there either, as it is extremely unlikely sources will be found. DGG ( talk ) 03:52, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

I made no attempt to judge its merits. Looks like some chunk of a larger article (perhaps of the deleted one for all I know). --ThaddeusB (talk) 04:27, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

Postmortum: DGG please see the breaking news re: . I thank you for your original support for my article and also included the forgoing url reference as an FYI. Much will be revealed in the coming months about Sirtuin 1 activation, soy isoflavones, antioxidant enzyme induction, etc. I am grateful to you for seeing the potential in the information and article. Too bad I failed to garner additional support, because the information in the article was very much on point as you can see.

the actual paper that refers to is "Can soyabean isoflavones mimic the effects of energy restriction on healthy ageing?" by L. Ions, L. Wakeling and D. Ford in Nutrition bulletin Volume 34 Issue 3, Pages 303 - 308 (which is a peer-reviewed Wiley journal). I notice this was done in vitro. I will be glad to see peer-reviewed in vivo results in humans, but I suspect it will be more than a few months. DGG ( talk ) 03:14, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

I've seen twenty+ years of in vivo (anecdotal) proof, so I was appreciative of the in vitro work as a proof of concept. Still, I don't believe diadzein is the magic isoflavone. My money is on diadzein's metabolite S-Equol. The actual work which was performed by Rasbach and Schnellmann and published in 2008 as Isoflavones Promote Mitochondrial Biogenesis appears to support my hypothesis, but I've insufficient experience as a amateur biochemist to be confident that I'm right. I'm not sure why the Brit's article got all the press, probably better PR people. :) I'm now in touch with Dr. Ion's via email, and based on our discussion, she intends to examine S-Equol as a Sirtuin 1 activator. Her follow up work will be an in vitro experiment too. So, I guess we'll get to see. I compared the structure of from wikipedia to Rasbach and Schnellmann 2008 work in which they noted that a free hydroxyl group is necessary to promote SIRT1 deacetylase activity. They state:

“The presence of the 5-hydroxyl group in genistein and biochanin A blocks the ability of these compounds to promote SIRT1 deacetylase activity, whereas the absence of the 5-hydroxyl group in daidzein and formonenetin promoted SIRT1 deaceylation activity, substitution of a methoxy group for a hydroxyl group at the 7-position, as seen in 7,4' D and 5,7,5'-T, blocked SIRT1 activation, suggesting that a free hydroxyl group is necessary at the 7-position to promote SIRT1 deacetylase activity. It is interesting to note that the flavone apigenin (5,7,4'-trihydroxyflavone) does increase SIRT1 activity, although it has a hydroxyl group in the 5-position (Howitz et al., 2003). Thus, shifting the phenyl group from the 3-position of isoflavones to the 2-position of flavones decreases the importance of the 5-position, and it allows the activation of SIRT1 in the presence of a hydroxyl group at position 5. Removing the phenyl ring at position 3 while maintaining the hydroxyl group at position 7, compound 7-C, is sufficient to activate SIRT enzymatic activity. ... 7-C is the basic isoflavone pharmacophore necessary to promote the activation of SIRT1 deacetylase activity.”

If this subject has captured your curiosity sufficiently, it would be great if you'd look at the structure of equol (as per wikipedia) and compare it to Rasbach and Schnellmann's work as repeated above. Did I get this right? Doesn't equol appear on paper to be an ideal SIRT1 activator based on their finding on other isoflavones? If it's asking too much for you to consider this question, then forgive me for asking it of you and thank you anyway. I must say I really appreciate your thoughtful mentoring as I struggled to publish my first wikipedia article. After my initial experience, I'm still a bit too timid to contribute to an existing generic subject like phytoestrogens, but perhaps it's best to watch from the sidelines for awhile before jumping in the game. . .

I unfortunately do not really have time to investigate the subject, especially as I am not familiar with this class of compounds. As for learning Misplaced Pages. start by making small additions or corrections to articles in your general field of interest, and then making small related articles--none of which should be related to anything with a conflict of interest. For suggestions, see our page about various ways to get started here. And see chapter 6 in particular of the free online version of Misplaced Pages: The Missing Manual by John Broughton (also available in print) DGG ( talk ) 21:27, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Anil Aggrawal

• Although this AfD seems to be mostly on the scientist, there is also a journal involved (Anil Aggrawal's Internet Journal of Forensic Medicine and Toxicology). Despite the seemingly "vanity" title of the journal, this is a less clear cut case than it might seem at first sight. --Crusio (talk) 11:15, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

Anhel GmbH

restored. Icewedge (talk) 02:49, 17 August 2009 (UTC)

Re:International Theatre Vienna

Hi DGG. It's absolutely fine with me! If any articles subject to deletion can be salvaged, I would be happy to support the effort. I have restored the page. Cheers, FASTILY 03:36, 17 August 2009 (UTC)

Knew you would. thanks. DGG ( talk ) 03:41, 17 August 2009 (UTC)

Ditto for A.D.A.M., Inc.- see my response on my talk page. ~ mazca 07:00, 17 August 2009 (UTC)

I have proposed ADAM for deletion - a search on Google revealed lots of hits, but mainly the information on websites seems to be based on the company's own press releases. I have left a more detailed reason on Talk:A.D.A.M., Inc.. (By the way, the talkback below is about another article, so please read it!) -- PhantomSteve (Contact Me, My Contribs) 09:23, 17 August 2009 (UTC)

As you admit their principal product to be notable, proposing the company for deletion seems a strange choice. did you even try to check the implied references there to Fortune and Forbes? DGG ( talk ) 14:05, 17 August 2009 (UTC)

I checked the Forbes and Fortune websites, as well as newspaper articles (looking for any mention which did not basically say ADAM said that they have been selected to be on the Fortune list. I could not find any verifiable references. The WP:Notability (organizations and companies) guidelines say that An organization is generally considered notable if it has been the subject of significant coverage in reliable, independent secondary sources - since all the hits I checked used the company's own press releases, then they would not be counted as independent. Other references I found are covered by this (from the same guidelines): Neither do the publication of routine communiqués announcing such matters as the hiring or departure of personnel, routine mergers or sales of part of the business, the addition or dropping of product lines, or facility openings or closings, unless these events themselves are the subject of sustained, independent interest

I may not have been clear: being selected for those lists is notability. One way for things to be notable is for good secondary sources to consider it notable. But no point discussing it further here. DGG ( talk ) 18:00, 17 August 2009 (UTC)

as you recognize there, the material will need to be found with other approaches than Google. I consider it less than ideally productive to nominate for deletion articles whose check will require resources you do not have available, but which will very obviously be found in printed sources. What you are essentially doing is forcing others to work on the subjects you challenge them to--and least, forcing them to do so if they care about information in the encyclopedia for material older than 2000. If you do not have a good print library available, you would help the encyclopedia more if you worked on subjects that did not need one. DGG ( talk ) 13:53, 17 August 2009 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Janet Allison

Hi DGG, the outcome of the above debate surprised me, due to the RS. As I respect your judgement, I would like to hear your opinion on that matter. thanks Power.corrupts (talk) 06:37, 18 August 2009 (UTC)

I commented at the closer's talk page. It is almost always wrong to cut off an AfD in this manner before a range of people have a chance to contribute. If he does not revert his close, & I doubt he will , the only possible course under our policy is to take it to deletion review, and you should think carefully. BLP policy is essentially OWNed by those who use it as an excuse for overly deletionist interpretations of NOT NEWS. They can sometimes be combatted if it is only NOT NEWS, but when BLP is involved , they usually win, because people stop thinking clearly when they hear that phrase. This is in my opinion not BLLP1E one event, because it is a continuing major international story, with implications on public policy. BLP is based on do not harm, and this article does no harm. I would take a look for additional international stories, as the most likely approach, or for its inclusion in a book--even if it takes a while, before going to del rev. DGG ( talk ) 07:30, 18 August 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. I simply dont get the BLP argument, which relates to contentious info not sourced in RS. IMO, being a victim of sex offender registration legislation is not contentious; and even if perceived as such, when referenced in a leader in the The Economist, this exceptional RS would trumph it all. I likewise fail to see BLP1E when The Economist consider the case relevant for national policy in many countries. The RS span at least two years, this is not NEWS. Being nominated for speedy and PROD within a few days I was not exactly taken aback by the AfD nom. But the pile-on of delete votes by editors who I respect, and the repeated rapid snow closures was a real so-called qualitative surprise to me, and I think it reflects group think. As this has flabbergasted me, I would like to ask for your opinion, if my reasoning is flawed. I dont have the time this week to dig into what human rights organization have written about the case. But could you line up some reasons, why a DRV could possibly fail. Power.corrupts (talk) 08:46, 18 August 2009 (UTC)

FYI. I have jotted down some refs that might aid your assessment of DRV chances , even though I really should spend my time otherwise. User:Power.corrupts/Sandbox/Allison sources. Power.corrupts (talk) 10:58, 18 August 2009 (UTC)

Just adding my $0.02 here. DGG is right in that AfDs should generally be kept open for the full seven days, but BLP violations (which this article was IMO) need to be dealt with differently. Therefore I endorse Tiptoety's early closure, and if I had to guess, I'd say consensus at DRV would likely say the same. –Juliancolton |  15:32, 18 August 2009 (UTC)

(I asked Julian to comment, btw). In practice, I agree it will be an uphill fight and I consequently continue to advise waiting for more material--additional material is the most frequent reason for permitting re-creation of an article. I share Power.corrupts' surprise at the rejection of his arguments without any attempt to refute them,, and am further astounded at refusal to permit normal discussion by good faith editors. "It is a BLP-violation because we say it is" strikes me as the sort of non-argument that must be based on something other than reason, but I can only speculate about what it might be based on. I am unfortunately too involved with some other things here to take the lead in dealing with this, much though i would like to. DGG ( talk ) 03:25, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

reguarding redirects

I wrote on another editors page the possibility of a RFC. I know you were embrolled in all of this. I don't want to have hundreds of newly created WP:BATTLEs over redirects now.

The redirecting was supposed to stop these battles.

As I mentioned to LibStar, I always wondered what he would do when he was unable to delete anymore articles. I saw a preview earlier: put the articles up for deletion a second time, and now today, put the redirects up for deletion.

Please advise if you think a RFC would be a good idea, either highlighting the editor, or over the entire series of articles. Ikip (talk) 00:46, 20 August 2009 (UTC)

It's been seen many times. Many many times. In many subjects. The various XfD processes other than AfD are small closed shops where newcomers are badly needed, but generally not very welcome, at least until they learn the particular style of argument that works. And even then, it's one newcomer at a time, so they can expect to hand in there for a very long time until there are enough new people to have much of an effect. My proposal is the deletion of a redirect after an AfD should go to AfD, where it will be visible.

With respect to changing articles into redirects, as you have proposed elsewhere, this is now a multi-directional conflict between

a./changing to redirects with the intention of then doing a merge, because of thinking the material is best put in the larger or more accepted articles

b./ changing to redirects in order to preserve the content in the history for future expansion gradually

c./ changing to redirects in order to do gradually try to delete the redirects, in the hope that RfD is relatively poorly watched as compared to AfD

d./ keeping as small articles in the hope of improving them quickly

e./ keeping as small articles in the hope of defending them at AfD

f./ keeping as small articles in the hope of merging then into larger or more accepted articles

I favor f as a second choice to d. As you are now seeing, using redirects especially when the material is not clearly represented in the article redirected to is a poor and unstable compromise--& should be done as an act of desperation only. It's technically called "keep", but it is not. It's a delete as far as the article is concerned, which is no longer visible to users. The only difference is that the history stays there read to restore. But history can always be retrieved for those wanting to work on articles. I look forward to restoring improved versions of essentially all these articles over the next year or two. My working guide is Big with anything: article; Medium with Medium:article; Medium with Small: article if on same continent or otherwise related or if there are special circumstances, otherwise merge; Small with Small: article only if they are close neighbors or there are special circumstances; otherwise merge. No redirects. No deletions. I can understand people going one step less inclusive, and I'll accept Big with Small or Medium with Medium if merged. I will not accept any redirect or deletion, but how hard I will fight them depends on the circumstances. Usually I won't fight a redirect very hard--but that will change immediately if people start trying devices like deleting redirects that were originally articles. A person who !votes for a redirect with the intention of later deleting it is in my opinion not acting in good faith, and is violating NOT BUREAUCRACY, as with other procedural tricks.

The odds of anything good happening at a conduct RfC are never very great unless the person is cooperative and in good faith-- and if they are then an RfC should not be necessary. The visibility. What Misplaced Pages needs is ways to encourage more people to participate in RfD and similar processes, and do what the judgment tells them on all sorts of articles. Not to get decisions I would prefer on this topic--which might not be the result, but to get better decisions generally, which is much more important. And more people in any process here protect against error, prejudice, and trickery. Unfortunately, too much rescue work in these processes takes time from improving articles and few people can keep it up for long. DGG ( talk ) 02:11, 20 August 2009 (UTC)

thanks DGG for your comments. whilst we don't always agree, the best way is to get more people involved in discussion to gain better consensus of issues. I'd rather spend my time improving notable articles than arguing over policy interpretations. LibStar (talk) 02:15, 20 August 2009 (UTC)

I appreciate your long, thoughtful response DGG. I find it ironic that only you can get away with such long answers. Several other editors have been critized for such long answers. You probably are excempt because you are a much better writer than those other editors.

It appears like LibStar was only targeting a small, select group of redirects, it felt like peeling onions to get to the real answer from him.

I wish he would have contacted me first before putting these redirects up for deletion, I would have simply renamed these redirects correctly.

I have more questions than answers at this point. The opaque way wikipedia works, I may never have all the answers to what happened today and why. Ikip (talk) 03:05, 20 August 2009 (UTC)

You're right. You never will. And it is not worth trying. The thing to do is acknowledge everyones good faith all around, and get on with things. Lib Star, if you nominated them in good faith please do not read any implications into what I said above & if it sounds otherwise I apologize. I was discussing a general problem. DGG ( talk ) 03:11, 20 August 2009 (UTC)

no problems DGG. LibStar (talk) 03:13, 20 August 2009 (UTC)

You participated in the recent Avatar (Ultima) AFD. You may be interested in the merge discussion.

I'm contacting all those who participated in the AFD for Avatar (Ultima) about a merge discussion affecting that article Talk:List_of_Ultima_characters Dream Focus 03:31, 20 August 2009 (UTC)

DGG, I am wondering, has there ever been a comprimise suggested that we sacrifice all character pages for episodes? i.e. episodes are permitted, but charcters cannot get a seperate page and must be in a list?

If this is a good idea, a eureka idea, (which it probably isn't) erase this edit and push it as your own, because many editors would scoff simply because I suggest it.

I would suggest suggesting it on ARS, and see what my collegues think of it. Ikip (talk) 03:36, 20 August 2009 (UTC)

Personally, I would strongly prefer it the other way round. Even at the most restrictive view, some characters are in fact very clearly notable. On the other hand, it should always be possible to easily write an article for a series of episodes. And in any case, don't think list", think "combination article". The solution is to routinely rely on such articles except in special cases, and the locus of debate should be 1/ where to draw the line and , even more important 2/ How much information to include. I would gladly exchange separate articles for substantial coverage in merged articles. At this point, I think most people would accept that, rather than debate the question further. Ikip (talk)

As for for ARS, I have always thought they should concentrate on the best, and exceptional neglected articles on things that surprisingly turn out to be notable, and aim for a very high success rate for those they do work on. Articles are not like swimmers--we do not have to rescue every one. DGG ( talk ) 04:14, 20 August 2009 (UTC)

I have gotten some suprisingly postive views on this suggestion. But I know there is little chance of it happening, especially if I said it. 04:21, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

What do you think of this?

What exactly is this: Professor of Modern History, Glasgow? Abductive (reasoning) 07:03, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

Ah, I see you have seen it before. Well, what do you think of making them into navboxes? Abductive (reasoning) 07:08, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

Personally, I think navboxes are overused, when a simple list would do as well--as it does here. Graphics of this sort should be an exception when needed, not routine. (Admitted, I tend to be verbally oriented--even so, this is a topic likely to be of interest to people who are equally verbally, not graphically oriented). In particular I don't see the point of navboxes for people unless there is some value to the sequence, not just the individual people. Fine for successive Mayors, or anything where it really is of interest who came before or after. But I don't see this here; it matters who all of them are, not who came after whom. This serves at present a checklist function : red links that should be filled in. Such links serve as a guide to systematic work, per WP:RED--especially in a case where somebody who could do one of them is likely to be able to do the others. Additionally, there could and should be added some information about the professorship in general- there's usually some information about the foundation or the endowment. DGG ( talk ) 19:56, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

Coverage of academics is so very uneven…. Abductive (reasoning) 21:11, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

You may find this a useful argument in some deletion discussions

Responding to several comments over at the NOT talk page, based on the idea of "unencyclopedic" content, I put up a new section, Misplaced Pages talk:What Misplaced Pages is not#The reason why the "unencyclopedic" argument just doesn't fly on that talk page. Much of the "unencyclopedic" argument is a pet peeve of mine. It's a bit of a tangent to the main discussion, but I'd be interested in your thoughts on it. Basically, when people say "unencyclopedic", they may be under the impression that Misplaced Pages policy is a lot more restrictive than it really is. Thanks, Noroton (talk) 19:06, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

"unencyclopedic" just as well as "encyclopedic" is a word that can mean whatever one wants, and any book, can be called an encyclopedia. Therefore either terms can be used to support any argument whatsoever. I tend to interpret "unencyclopedic" as meaning "inappropriate for this encyclopedia." I've commented there. It's interesting seeing all the perfectly reasonable arguments being used to destroy the weird and inconsistent assortment of criteria we use in Misplaced Pages to decide what to include as articles or as content. Nonetheless some things do belong and some do not, and we have to find some way of agreeing on what. Find a rule, almost any rule, and with enough ingenuity one can use that rule to support either keeping or not keeping any particular article. DGG ( talk ) 20:29, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

grey literature subjects

• Grey Literature International Steering Committee (GLISC)
• European Association for Grey Literature Exploitation (EAGLE)
• Grey Literature Network Service (GreyNet)
• OpenSIGLE
• System for Information on Grey Literature in Europe (SIGLE)

All of these are currently listed, and are close to expiring, at Proposed Deletion. Please review for copyright violations and to see whether multiple non-trivial published works exist. All that I've done is cleanup, to make the articles legible. Uncle G (talk) 13:56, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

• I was sort of hiding from this. merges suggested, but I am not sure which ones to merge into which. Possibly SIGLE into System, and GLISC and Eagle into GreyNet. Some do have refs already I may rewrite & condense enough so that copyvio won't be a problem, but I've asked the author to try first. DGG ( talk ) 16:21, 25 August 2009 (UTC)
  • You can't hide from us. ☺ Anything that you can do to solve the now-identified copyright violation problem is a good thing and would be most welcome. Uncle G (talk) 23:53, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

Notability in regards to ghost towns

It is my understanding that any town that ever officially existed is notable by de facto consensus. Is that correct? (question from ThaddeusB)

• Yes, in practice that seems to be what now happens at AfD. It might not necessarily apply to a proposed site that was never inhabited. DGG ( talk ) 21:52, 25 August 2009 (UTC)
  • We did once have a ghost town deleted at AFD. I don't recall the name offhand. The issue, as I recall, was the existence of any sources at all documenting the subject in any way. Uncle G (talk) 23:55, 25 August 2009 (UTC)
    • FYI, The town in question - Queen City, Iowa - was sent to AfD shortly after I posted this question. It seems the interested parties didn't believe me when I told them about this de facto consensus instead insisting "no policy says all towns are notable." --ThaddeusB (talk) 00:07, 26 August 2009 (UTC)
      • I saw this one earlier. I'll comment. Try to find a source for the archeology. DGG ( talk ) 01:17, 26 August 2009 (UTC)
      • That's probably a good thing. "If article X then article Y.", which is what such an argument from precedent amounts to, is never a good argument. A good argument would be that the subject is notable, because it satisfies the PNC. All that prior outcomes tell us is that this is highly likely, because of the nature of the subject, not that it is inevitable. Notability is not a blanket. In this particular case, I came across that article doing Proposed Deletion patrol, as DGG no doubt also did. I searched and couldn't find a source documenting any such thing, although I have no access to the one source that was cited. Uncle G (talk) 01:31, 26 August 2009 (UTC)
        • The author of the page evidently used a historical marker as their source. I undeleted their pic of said marker, which they seem to have intended to release in public domain, but was deleted because they never actually tagged it as such. I added a link at the AfD. (For clarity, I am not certain the pic can stay but it should at least be useful for verifing the contest which can be sourced to the actual marker.) --ThaddeusB (talk) 01:38, 26 August 2009 (UTC)
          • Precedent is a good argument, because the hallmark of a reputable reference work is some degree of consistency. (At least that's one major factor when librarians judge it and how they advise students to judge-- it should say what it covers, and what it covers, it should cover completely.) A person should be able to come here and know what they are likely to find and what not. This is especially important in those areas where we do approach completeness. WP:V is important, but this now meets WP:V. The sources Thaddeus found are fully sufficient. A listing in USGIS is unquestionable V. I should have been able to find it, and I don't know how I missed it; and Thaddeus checked the article history, which i neglected to do--I was wondering where the data came from. This shows, , as does Ottava Rima's work on the article he talks about below, what can be done by basic checking and careful research. As for your essay, Uncle, I disagree with both the general approach and much of the detailed arguments. You set up the straw man that not all places are notable because the plot of grassland to the west of your house is not notable. Right as far as it goes, but nobody is asserting all places, we're asserting all inhabited settlements. All we need is to verify that it existed and was inhabited, which we have done--there have been a number of names on maps proposed as articles which proved not to be inhabited settlements but individual houses, and those do and should get deleted. DGG ( talk ) 01:51, 26 August 2009 (UTC)
            • Precedent is a good argument — No, see above. This is not a court or a parliament. It's an encyclopaedia, and the bounudaries of human knowledge don't follow AFD precedents. the hallmark of a reputable reference work is some degree of consistency — That doesn't mean making human knowledge uniform when it actually isn't. That's the hallmark of a poor reference work, not a good one.

              You set up the straw man that not all places are notable because the plot of grassland to the west of your house is not notable. — No. The argument isn't a straw man. It's the wording that was used for months if not years. It took several AFD discussions to see that the principle was wrong, and ill-conceived. It keeps coming back in other "All X are notable." forms, and time after time it falls down. It's long past time for us to learn from this that human knowledge is inconsistent, lumpy, and unfair, and that we are in the business of documenting it as it is, not as we want to be.

              nobody is asserting all places — Wrong, as already stated. we're asserting all inhabited settlements — and your assertion is wrong. As I mentioned, there has already been at least one ghost town for which no-one could find any documentation at all anywhere. I repeat: Human knowledge is inconsistent, lumpy, and unfair, and "All X are notable." is looking for blankets. We shouldn't be looking for blankets. We should be looking for where human knowledge is properly documented, in depth, in multiple independent published works by authors with good reputations for fact checking and accuracy. Uncle G (talk) 02:50, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

side issues: which ghost town that we couldn't document have you in mind? And where were the arguments that all meadows are notable ? If we used that straw man argument for months and years, we should be glad we outgrew it. DGG ( talk ) 03:24, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

as I said, we disagree very fundamentally & we will probably continue to. What goes in this (or any) encyclopedia depends on 3 factors: can we write an article, is it worth writing about, and is it the sort of thing that ought to be in an encyclopedia (rather, than , say, a collection of original poetry or a game guide). We're not a court (which in anglo-american countries is bound to follow precedent unless it decides not to), or a parliament (which in the same countries is bound to follow a written or unwritten set of fundamental laws, but other does not need to follow precedent unless it chooses & is even expected to do novel things as a primary function). Still, we need a stable method of decision, just as does any publication. The editors in chief of EB can do as they please, but they are still bound to do what their readers expect of EB. We're a community controlled organization, so we are bound to do as the members want, though we expect them to follow certain basic principles about what is compatible with membership, including agreement on at least the general nature of the encyclopedia we're producing. The very fact that we have a meta-rule saying we need not follow the rules if they do not help, implies we are bound to follow the rules in most cases. It also implies that we can have whatever rules we please. We could choose to follow precedent always unless there were a reason otherwise, or to ignore it always and decide everything from scratch. But we have found if we do that we repeat the same arguments over and over, just as Arbcom thinks it has to start every decision repeating the same basic rules. Arb com can do that because it makes only a few dozen decisions a year. But there are 40,000 afds a year. Thus we generally do as we have done before in similar cases, and it is only realistic to say so. There are tens of millions of settlements. There are millions of schools, ditto. There are several million animal and plant species. We cannot argue each one of them, at least if we do anything else--and I am beginning to get to that point personally because of the need to repeat all this many times even after its been settled. So we do some preliminary rough divisions: all animal and plant species are notable. all settled communities are. High schools and colleges are. Olympic athletes are (even if nothing except their record at a single Olympic is known). Songs that chart are. Elementary schools are not. and similarly for other classes also. We even have a rule to keep the obvious non-notables out of AfD, by disposing the ones with no possible claim of importance at speedy. For each possible class, we divide it up. As for the GNG, we make it fit our ideas of what ought to be included by manipulating the definitions of "substantial coverage" and "reliable sources".

I ask you, what will we do when we do have all local newspapers in Google, and there are substantial reliable information about every local fire station and high school athlete. (we will extend what we do now, and say that significance has to be beyond the local community--this is actually abandoning the GNG in favor of a categorical guideline) I don't dislike GNG because its too deletionist. i dislike it because it's haphazard. We only need enough information for V, if the subject is worth covering and otherwise appropriate.

Now, if the GNG is the only rule, I can live with it. I remember when I came here, it was pretty much accepted, and I got rather good at hair-splitting analysis of the nature of sources, I may even have saved the same proportion of worthy articles as i do now. But I wanted to stop pretending that the exact nature of a publication mattered to notability. I'll argue however I need to, using, as I am sure you do also, my own internal guideline for what is worth trying to argue for. DGG ( talk ) 03:21, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

Nicolo Giraud

A year and 11 days ago, Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Nicolò Giraud resulted in a keep. Today, it is a featured article. You were the first to see value in the page. Ottava Rima (talk) 23:41, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

yes, working here successfully requires a long time scale. We need a few dozen skilled people with interest in other periods and countries. DGG ( talk ) 01:20, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

Scientific journal notavility standards

• I have created a first draft of a notability guideline for academic journals, so that we may have a better chance in future to avoid things like this. Please feel free to comment/correct/complete, etc. I would appreciate your comments either on the draft's talk page or here. Thanks. --Crusio (talk) 13:06, 27 August 2009 (UTC)

basically OK, if it's accepted. I'll look at details later. DGG ( talk ) 19:09, 27 August 2009 (UTC)

• Dear David, your talk page is so busy, that I am taking it off my watchlist, so when you find a moment to respond, please do so on the talk page of the draft guidelines. Thanks! Wim --Crusio (talk) 15:47, 30 August 2009 (UTC)

List of German rocket scientists in the United States

Hi DGG Thanks for adding those references. I don't think there are a lot of editors watching/working on that page, so good work adding in some substance. That said, having been reminded of the topic I took a look at the Operation Paperclip article and frankly it seems to me that we have two rather mediocre articles instead of one better article. Since 90% + of the scientists who came to the US did so under OC, I wonder if we could merge the two together and include a brief post-scripta about the legacy of the German rocketry technology in the US after the OC auspices officially ended (affecting the last few figures in the list article). This would involve redirecting the GRSUS page to the OC page and then replacing the list section in the latter with the substantive material in the former. It seems to me from the point of view of offering encyclopaedic information about the topic, reuniting the two is of greater service to the a reader. Anyway, I am interested in your thoughts and, if you would be agreeable, to check te results of such a merge which I think could be achieved rather quickly. I don't want to do a merge though without your support, though. Eusebeus (talk) 18:51, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

I found it checking PRODs. There are a number of other pages involved also, and the topic is capable of substantial growth. I 'm not sure it's reducible to a single page--I could see instead an increased number, considering we are talking about a/the recruitment of German scientists b/their specific contributions on the rocket program--some of them worked elsewhere c/ the coverup of Nazi affiliations respecting many of them d/the coverup of Nazi affiliations among German academics in general by the US and e/closely analogous situations with the Soviet Union. The current paperclip page is dominated too much by the qy of the coverup of Nazi affiliations, although this was equally for German academics who remained in Germany--as you probably know, there's a good amount of current interest and publication-- primarily in Germany, at long last--with special concern over jurists and physicians. (I intend to add some material on Nazi human geneticists) In any case, that 10% is going to be a problem. But the main reason I want to keep it separate is because seen just as a list, there should be a high priority in getting articles on the unlinked--separate lists seem to work as a psychological incentive. I have not checked yet to see what's on the deWP. DGG ( talk ) 19:55, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

Radio Tales

Yes indeed.... the series (or at least those nominated) survived as a speedy keep in September 2008. At that time, Themfromspace must not have been a happy camper. A renomination 5 months later by User:Laurent1979 in February 2009 (Misplaced Pages:Articles_for_deletion/The_German_Student_(radio)) of the entire slew of them resulted in a sadly and overwhelming deletion... the ignored problem with the disruption caused by mass nominations... when babies get tossed with the bathwater... and so much must be done at once that little gets done at all... and what is done is ignored. I argued as diligently as I could, but it seems that in the rather acrimonious AfD, the deletion was preordained. The speedy keep of 5 months previous made absolutely no difference in the discussions. The 2009 AfD discussion is enlightening. Draw your own conclusions. I asked for all of them to be userfied to me. As they sat in my userspace, other editors worked diligently to merge the content as best they could into the Radio Tales article... gratitudes to User:Kainaw, User:American Eagle, and User:Deor in moving the list and as much content from the stubs as was reasonable. 3 months later, when I saw that others had done the merging, I requested deletion of the pages . However.... here is my special contributions page from the timeframe they were userfied... showing the names they were placed under when moved. Surprisingly enough, the userfied talk pages still exist... and so this page may allow undeletion of the articles and subsequent userfication to someone else's userspace. A sad day and a sadder commentary. MichaelQSchmidt (talk) 01:51, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

And of course.... 'merge' and 'move' are not the proper terms, as the histories of 63 different articles were not included with the transfer of information. MichaelQSchmidt (talk) 01:57, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

I see that at the AfD I myself joined in suggesting the merge, based on what seemed to me the excessive detail of the individual articles. (I didn't recall that this was the same group of articles just now) Looking back at them, I continue to think there was excessive detail and repetition for them viewed as episodes. There seems to have been the very peculiar argument used later in the discussion that we were not removing information, since the plots were available in the articles for the original works. Obviously there were always be differences in any dramatization or even reading from the original. The discussion of these differences is just what belongs in an encyclopedia. This shows again that we have no good way of controlling what happens in a merge--and that is what makes all the difference between constructive building of good encyclopedia articles and destruction of them. I am open to suggestions.

1 We might need to require all contested merges, or merges following AfD to be discussed at Misplaced Pages:Proposed mergers, turning it from a mere list of where discussions take place to a page the equivalent of WP:AFD. The talk pages of individual articles will not get proper attention. I have not proposed it because I think that doing this along with AfD would be too much work for people to follow. I find that I am stretched to the limits to try to look at each of the 1000 afds--rather to each of the 500 among them that I might be able to intelligently consider.

2 We might require the AfD discussion to actually specify what should be merged, and give the closing admin the responsibility to see that it is done right. This would require people to only close if they were prepared to do this: knew enough of the topic to supervise intelligently, were willing to take the time, and did not have any preconceived bias on how they should be done. I am not aware of anyone who really meets all 3 requirements. Everyone who considers the fiction problem sufficiently to understand it has a bias about how the situation should be handled. This is true also of other complicated topics.

3 Committees. A great deal can be accomplished with a designated pair of one person from each position acceptable to the other side. there would have to be an appeal. This would be adding considerable structure Misplaced Pages, which in general is not a good thing to do. The virtue would be that it would save enough time from repetitive general argument to balance that.

4 Dividing the overall encyclopedia into subject portions, somewhat in the manner of Citizendium, so people need to concentrate only on one or two of them. This will have the same problem as it does at Citizendium--that a group will become autonomous and make editorial decisions that the community as a whole would not support. This has already happening at Misplaced Pages, where the WikiProject films has a content guideline which prohibits character sections in articles, dividing it up among a very brief plot summary and a list of the cast. They seem to forget that a film is a story, and the technology and business of making it --however fascinating--is secondary to the story--and that for almost all films the aspect of the story of concern to users is the characters--perhaps even more so than other fiction.

5 Accepted compromise guidelines for what to do so we don't have to fight about the general acceptability of articles and structure. I prefer short articles, which I think better suit the average Wikipedian writing skills. But I'd accept long ones, too, with multiple subdivisions. The problem is agreeing how detailed they should be, and i do not see people willing to compromise here. Assuming they did, we have no mechanism for a stable compromise. The strongest we have of informal compromises, schools, still gets challenged once or twice a week & takes careful watching to prevent an aberrant decision that would be used as a precedent. We need an attitude against ownership of policy, where we each accept that some things will be done always altogether wrong, but we leave them alone. I do not immediately see how to develop such an attitude. DGG ( talk ) 04:02, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

In the meanwhile , as a practical matter, it would be nice having some help undeleting & userifying them all for further work, however it works out. Perhaps the best solution would be for Shoessss to become an admin. DGG ( talk ) 04:14, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

• Comment - Thanks David for your help. I have been thinking about picking-up the lance and tilting at that preverbal Windmill one more time. ShoesssS

The individual episodes are still not notable as per our standards, they are much less notable than individual TV episodes, for example. I really don't think they will survive an AfD, especially with Soundout's promotional bent, and I advise against trying to revive them. ThemFromSpace 03:32, 14 September 2009 (UTC)

We have no agreed standards in this area. There is no consensus that the GNG is relevant, there is no consensus on the wording of the relevant section of WP:NOT. Every possible position has been argued, and disputed. Nobody can predict what will happen at AfD, nor is there any consistency there: unworthy articles have been kept, and worthy ones deleted. But in any case the N criterion does not apply to article content, such as sections of combination articles. The best compromise in most cases will be extensive sections of such articles. We could settle this here and now by agreeing that detailed content is appropriate for episodes of major series , but usually not in separate articles. One side accepts the content is fuller than they would like, the other side that there will not be the individual articles they want. The question then becomes, do we want to fight or to compromise? I think the fiction inclusions are willing to compromise--not because their position is weak, but because they want to be free of fighting in order to improve the content of the episode (and character) material, most of which are in very bad shape, and either too brief & uninformative, or too long and over-detailed. I do not know what the others want, as the current situation seems that they are not willing to compromise on anything that will provide more than the most minimal coverage of plot and character and setting. DGG ( talk ) 04:30, 14 September 2009 (UTC)

evaluate shirechurch?

Bunzyfunzy (talk · contribs) is requesting unprotection of Shirelive. The new version of the article appears to be improved, though it at least resembles the old version. Can you take an objective look at it? I know you were involved in the DR. tedder (talk) 13:27, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

they are possibly notable, however, they do not have the references to prove it, and the article remains somewhat promotional. The information present shows 3rd party coverage, but of very borderline significance. The most significant verifiable story is a negative one, used as a ref in the article for the an item of data , but with the negative information not included in the actual article. Assuming it were added, there might be a case. But what really bothers me is that I cannot even verify the basic facts about membership. The Church's website is remarkably uninformative about even minimal specifics. (What is probably the key website, Some of the other articles linked to in List of the largest churches in Australia are in similar shape, almost equally unverifiable, and the membership data in that article are equally unverified for the most part. The basic website for them, http://megachurchwatch.org/ does not seem to be working, at least not today, though it does have many links in google. I would need to see this site to know what to do about the article in terms of our present rules--it may link to actual data..

Our present rules, though, for churches in general are extremely unsympathetic to articles about them. Other language Wikipedias seem to accept that they will be significant in their communities--we do not. It's our general problem on deciding about local coverage, where our rules rely on the more or less random presence of findable web sources. I sometimes think we need a peripheral Misplaced Pages layer for items meeting V, but N being based on general assumptions. DGG ( talk ) 17:43, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, DGG. The solid explanation you've given is very helpful, and it matches what tan said on the RFPP. tedder (talk) 20:14, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

The last statement by DGG here is intriguing - a "semi-meta" level for verifiable articles that don't meet current notability standards. I don't think this particular article meets that (the V is too weak), and there would be inherent problems in keeping advert articles off, but interesting nonetheless. Only poked my head in here because Tedder commented on the RFUP thread that you had made a comment. Tan | 39 01:48, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

Yes, the spam would be a problem , but there are two ways: first, V will require that all vague praise be sourced, so we can still deal with promotional language; we could have a rule on content--do we or do we not include schedules, phone no.s, how many named people etc.-- and some general rough standards for N that don't have to be argued article by article, simply say OK all asst professors, any college team membership, all local chapters of Notable organizations, all business streets, all bus stops, all and maybe some of the things we now do accept in Misplaced Pages-- I could see moving most high schools there, and subway stations; and topics we quarrel about such as baronets, & characters in games --It could raise, not lower, the standard of notability in the main Misplaced Pages!-It would at least be a good directory. There's not really anything out there that does it adequately, and people need that sort of information also. It could be a separate project, Wikidirectory--just as we moved out dicdefs, and quotations, and so on, except that the WMF really doesn't want any more splits, as there are already too many projects to keep track of. Could we do it within Misplaced Pages, perhaps as a namespace? DGG ( talk ) 03:48, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

"Wikidirectory" was my first thought, but upon further thought it seems a bit nightmarish to moderate. Would it command the interest level that is required for the legions of vandal fighters, admins, etc that this project has? Probably not. Combined that a split is discouraged by WMF, this probably isn't the best route. A namespace strata, on the other hand, seems to work in my mind. I'm not quite sure how one would set it up... Tan | 39 17:08, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages:Article Incubator

You commented at: WP:AFD:ARSify I thought you maybe interested in this: Misplaced Pages:Article_Incubator which will go live soon. Your comments are very welcome. Ikip (talk) 20:41, 13 September 2009 (UTC)

it will be an heroic accomplishment if it succeeds, and i will leave to you the problem of handling the details and getting it integrated into our procedures. DGG ( talk ) 05:57, 14 September 2009 (UTC)

how to delete

if we have only 5% of articles that snuck in by negligence at NPP, that's still 150,000 articles, which ,as you say, will be quite a job. Especially since we have to separate them from the considerably greater number that look equally bad, but are fixable. The only practical way to do this by subject area, where people can concentrate of a group of related articles of similar merit. This has been going fairly well for athletes and porn performers. Not group nominations, which almost always include the good with the bad, but carefully considered individual ones in reasonable groups of 4 or 5, and starting with the worst. And, of course, following WP:BEFORE, and fixing at least the easily fixable ones. I would actually like to do more of this myself, if I didn't need to deal with emergencies when people try to delete without using BEFORE DGG ( talk ) 13:53, 29 September 2009 (UTC)

Removal of PROD from 16th World Economic Forum on Africa

Hello DGG, this is an automated message from SDPatrolBot to inform you the PROD template you added to 16th World Economic Forum on Africa has been removed. It was removed by Gallador with the following edit summary '(Enhanced English, updated a bit, removed prod)'. Please consider discussing your concerns with Gallador before pursuing deletion further yourself. If you still think the article should be deleted after communicating with the 'dePRODer,' you may want to send the article to AfD for community discussion. Thank you, SDPatrolBot (talk) 20:56, 29 September 2009 (UTC) (Learn how to opt out of these messages) 20:56, 29 September 2009 (UTC)

Talkback

since I'm not sure if you're watching there. Poke me if you respond - I'm not around much these days. StarM 03:26, 1 October 2009 (UTC)

me again 18:04, 3 October 2009 (UTC)

Re: Debate over Oral Torah

Dear DGG,

I thank-you for helpful sugesstions, I have made some needed adjustments for the article. Presently, I do not know how to access the deletion review.

I hope you could please keep in mind, the article is not the same as the old document "criticism of the Talmud." They are unrelated. I worked hard on this article. I am not trying to pick sides here. I am sincerely trying to be fair a wide range of belief. I mentioned the Orthodox party, because if I spoke only of the more critical groups it only be a narrow one-sided debate which would be unfair to Orthodox group. I did so out of respect.

As I hope you noticed, the article barely menetions the Talmud. Which is hard to do, since that where the oral traditions are recorded. I adjusted, and re-adjusted the article based of many of your suggestions. I hope you will please consider once again kindly reviewing it. Please remember, that one must mention the rabbinic party. I not attempting to make an article to fault-find the rabbinic party rather show the wide-range here of different belief regarding the subject. Thank-you!--Standforder (talk) 20:37, 3 October 2009 (UTC)

Perspective

The explanatory comments at Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Joshua Greenberg were useful for me.

Pondering the array of views in this thread helped me to step back only slightly; but even small movements do evoke a changed perspective, a new appreciation of our focal point. --Tenmei (talk) 16:23, 6 October 2009 (UTC)

In my opinion, the AfD thread resulted in an improved article. Let me take this opportunity to acknowledge your contributions specifically. Your pointed comments helped me to develop a broader perspective. My imperfect understanding of what WP:Notability and WP:PROF require may need further tweaking in future; but this was a constructive step towards something better. Thank you. --Tenmei (talk) 18:36, 10 October 2009 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Felicia Tang (2nd nomination)

An AFD where you recommend deleting and I recommend keeping? Is that a first? (: Stifle (talk) 08:14, 5 October 2009 (UTC)

actually, it's not just an chance event on this one--there's a principle there, for me: I think the GNG applies only when there is real notability in something for it to apply to. Once the other hand, it there is something actually significant, then I think we should be flexible about the nature of the sources. I explained this in the question just above: the GNG is a kludge, valuable perhaps 5 years ago, but the current information environment has destroyed its usefulness. (I argued the other way, for my first few months here, until I realized how artificial it was : I remember saying, why do we have the GNG if we're not going to use it? I now know why we have it--it's impossible to get enough consensus on anything else, because everyone has their own ideas of what ought to be in the encyclopedia. So we use it only when we want to, and use generalities like NOT NEWS instead when it gives a better result. This gives us a set of rules that can justify almost anything, positive or negative. And when no rule gives a result local consensus likes, we ignore the rules.

as an admin, I will not decide against the current practices, and therefore close afds only when it's obvious, just as I said i would in my RfA. But in discussion, I will say what I think we ought to do. My hope is, that I can help newcomers see the guidelines for the facade they are. The way to persuade people to change is to use selected individual instances to show what's wrong. I choose those where there is either some chance of convincing people, or where in a particularly absurd result a protest may be useful later on to show that there is an alternate view. DGG ( talk ) 13:56, 5 October 2009 (UTC)

"Perspectives", again

• This edit ahcllenges the inclusion of indexing info for a scientific journal based on WP:NOTDIRECTORY... --Crusio (talk) 14:37, 5 October 2009 (UTC)

Where a journal is indexed is in fact not only relevant content, but one of the key factors in its notability, to show that others consider it notable enough to include in authoritative indexes. We're usually a little selective about what we include, and include only major indexes -- as was done there--the one listed is the major index in its field. DGG ( talk ) 14:44, 5 October 2009 (UTC)

Just a hello...

...since there's a 2007 hello from you on my user page ;-) I'm teaching wikipedia this semester using Lih's book and Phoebe Ayers as a guest speaker. Could not remember how to find you until I saw your 2007 post :-/ Students adding to WP as part of their coursework. regards DGG! Katewill (talk) 02:23, 6 October 2009 (UTC)

Coombabah State Primary School

Please have a look at User talk:Orderinchaos#Coombabah State Primary School. This action looks so contrary to policy that, as I said, I am staggered. TerriersFan (talk) 00:14, 9 October 2009 (UTC)

Thank you for the sanity check. TerriersFan (talk) 00:46, 9 October 2009 (UTC)

I have left two extensive notes there. DGG ( talk ) 04:23, 9 October 2009 (UTC)

May I ask...

What you mean by this comment....Keep For better or worse, this is in practice the sort of topic that people expect Misplaced Pages to cover. We've managed to eliminate some articles on similar topics by using BLP, but it won't work for a fictional character. It meets the technical GNG guidelines, which , for those who would prefer to have us be more selective, might be taken to show their increasing uselessness...Hell In A Bucket (talk) 03:31, 15 October 2009 (UTC)

Do you mean you do not understand, or that you strongly disagree? I'll restate it: "it meets the guidelines. I don't necessarily like the guidelines. But it meets them. Like the article or not, it's within our scope." Personally, I dislike the GNG both for what it excludes and what it includes. I think as the ability to find sources for minor topics increases with the Googles, the deletionists are in for a re-evaluation of its usefulness. DGG ( talk ) 03:37, 15 October 2009 (UTC)

I didn't understand and potentially disliked. I thought you possibly were mocking my comment "I am toward the deletionist side of the spectrum. I have a firm belief if everyone is here for Misplaced Pages benefit we need to be selective on what is accepted to help gain respectability for our efforts." on my userpage. It could've read that I had outlived my usefulness here and I really would hate for that to happen. Amazingly I find great pleasure volunteering here. Well as I was wrong and you clearly clarified that I appreciate your thoughts on the matter. Hell In A Bucket (talk) 03:40, 15 October 2009 (UTC)

To be frank, I must apologize, for I have never actually read your user page, though I've looked at your talk page from time to time. There are a large number of people here who want to continue to rely primarily on the GNG, and I had nobody primarily in mind. I wish every one of them would adopt my personal view on the GNG, but that does not mean i want them to leave if they don't. DGG ( talk ) 03:48, 15 October 2009 (UTC)

No worries. I could use an admins attention at a SPI for a moment if you could. Seems to be a duck case but it's fun...] Hell In A Bucket (talk) 03:54, 15 October 2009 (UTC)

alas, that's one of the things I never really learned. DGG ( talk ) 04:02, 15 October 2009 (UTC)

Please don't call people who think that encyclopedias should cover topics that are encyclopedic in nature "deletionists". Deletionism is used to refer to a wide range of editors, with the history being (according to the page on the matter at Meta) of editors wishing to delete articles that are simply bad or unsourced, rather than articles about non-notable topics. You may not be referring to editors such as myself, but with respect to the increasing availability of fluff online that can squeak by GNG definitions, your comment about the limited utility of Google describes my views well. I believe that notability ought to be a requirement for inclusion here (and I agree that the GNG is both over- and under-inclusive), but if you look at the articles that I have in fact created, you will find that many are on topics that a classical deletionist would wish to see excluded. _matic 04:43, 15 October 2009 (UTC)

Errr read above he was actually agreeing with us....Hell In A Bucket (talk) 04:45, 15 October 2009 (UTC)

I know, and I have proof that he doesn't consider me an "opponent". Just a point about using the word "deletionist". _matic 04:49, 15 October 2009 (UTC)

Take a look at the root cause of it all? I've been seeing socks right and left so I'm getting paranoid here....someone else look and see what ehy think. Hell In A Bucket (talk) 04:50, 15 October 2009 (UTC)

I don't know who "us " might be. I doubt there are any two people who who have exactly the same ideas on content. I am more restrictive in content than in some subjects than others, for various factors--and so is everybody else. Of course, the subjects differ. I've learned in 3 years here to use the GNG when it helps reach a common-sense conclusion and to use other criteria when they reach a common-sense conclusion--not that any two people will agree on what is a common sense conclusion. Party names are only a very rough discrimination. As I said at WT:N earlier tonight, I am perfectly willing to be very restrictive on what gets separate articles--provided we are not too restrictive on what gets full content. You can put all the episodes of a soap together if you like, as long as each gets the proper coverage: not short like a teaser, not too long like a transcript. I want coverage on every subway station and bus route, but I don;t mind how we arrange them. You could put all the bus routes in NYC in one article, if giving the necessary information would fit practical limits--But still we have to give enough information--I would compromise at streets turns and bus stops, but not detailed schedules. The area I'm most restrictive in--local figures is because o the danger of advertising. Advertising new restaurants is in the danger to Misplaced Pages, not too many unimportant game characters. Perhaps if we stared from first principals,with each us not taking into consideration how it might affect our interests , we could get some where. --all major compromises have failed over the question "but what will it mean to me." and then every slinks away quietly,. The only way to get a compromise is to expect to lose half the time. DGG ( talk ) 05:06, 15 October 2009 (UTC) I'm strong enough for that--how about you. DGG ( talk ) 05:06, 15 October 2009 (UTC)

MYself I think I can see why small town figures wouldn't be all that notable except to their respective communities. We know of mayors in New York Bloomberg etc but has anyone heard of Ray Aguilera?] he's in our city council we have no mayor like Bloomberg. Would he be notable, probably enough to get by with the guidelines but in reality not so much yet. I really like Ray too, I've known him since before he was city council and he cares alot about the youth in the community. I do however squeal by on diminished notability for state parks and small historical places so I cheat I guess. Hell In A Bucket (talk) 05:15, 15 October 2009 (UTC)

Shame on me, readiong through his accolades he is actually the reciepant of a few awards and appts from not so non notable people. Like our governer and El Pomar foundation. I will now have to write the article. Damn I am serious too. insert foot into mouth....Hell In A Bucket (talk) 05:19, 15 October 2009 (UTC)

I expect to lose more than half the time. Does that make me stronger or weaker? _matic 05:53, 15 October 2009 (UTC)

Short sweet and poorly written. I'm going to wikify tag it then hope someone helps but I think I established notbaility. What do you think? Ray AguileraHell In A Bucket (talk) 05:56, 15 October 2009 (UTC)

I have my doubts. I think in general city council positions are not likely to be notable except in a larger city. I'm not clear on where the cutoff is, but it's considerably over 104,000. Usually he Governor appoints all state officials--that isn't notability unless what he is appointed to is, and its a minor commission. In most fields of endeavor, we look for state level awards--we might accept some city-level awards in a city like London, but not Phoenix. These are all city-level except the El Pomar Foundation Thayer Tutt Award, which is a Colorado state level foundation, but among their 37 annual rewards, & he is only 1 of 3 in his category that year . Ref.1 is an article about a group of politicians, in which he is barely mentioned. Ref 2 is his cv, usable for the details of his life, but not establishing notability; Ref 3. is OK--an article about him in the city newspaper--though it reads to me like a routine promotional tribute for work not even in the whole city, but just his neighborhood. Ref.4 is a minimal notice of his appointment to a commission. Ref 5 is an essay by him, not about him, for which the newspaper explicitly takes no responsibility. Ref 6 is his CV again. By standards of general importance he's not notable, By standards of awards he's minimal. By standards of GNG-level sourcing, he's minimal. I nominate one or two AfDs a day, and I may nominate this one. Where this should go is in a second layer, which we might call something like WikipediaLocal. (if we did that local inclusionist and deletionists would be happy, because we could add articles like this, and also remove things like bus routes from article space). DGG ( talk ) 14:44, 15 October 2009 (UTC)

I can understand what you are saying here. If you nom it I will not begrudge but I'll also improve the sources furthur during that time as well. The actual reason he would be notable is that our town doesn't have a mayor it's ran by our council. We're trying to change that but until then as a local luminary fairly important Hell In A Bucket (talk) 14:49, 15 October 2009 (UTC)

that last pojnt about the form of government can be relevant. The special role of the city council in some cities has been accepted as a good argument. Shows why people shouldnt judge an unfinished article. DGG ( talk ) 15:18, 15 October 2009 (UTC)

It helps me understand why people are a little flustered after a quick deletion. I had to scramble to add more sources to try and establish notability enough to keep time enough to improve after work. Hmmmmm some food for thought. Hell In A Bucket (talk) 15:34, 15 October 2009 (UTC)

Librarian's assistance requested

Hi DGG

I have come across a ton of advertisements written for Informa publications. However, as far as I know, they're all journals that should be covered here. I've taken out some of the obvious advertising and not further tagged them. Can you please review a smattering of them (to be found at links to Informa plc and links to Informa) and see if this is the right approach? If you could look at some of my edits to these articles to see if that looks sufficient for a first-pass at despamification, that would be great.

Thank you, _matic 05:24, 16 October 2009 (UTC)

thanks for letting me know. This is going to take a while, but I;ve seen even worse. Unfortunately, it was back in June, but I will try to get in touch with them also, as I have with other companies. Take a look at the message I left them at User talk:Lexicater] with what I usually tell people about what we want and do not want in a journal article. The main thing that needs removal from many of them at this point is the repetitive description of the company. I did a cleanup of Critical Reviews in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and Drug Metabolism Reviews as examples, but there's lots that need to be added. If you could clean up the others & check that the thumbnails have a correct fair use rationale, it would be very helpful. I'll check the main article on the company. There's a secondary benefit of getting these articles--it gives us a start on articles for the editors in chief, who are almost always notable. DGG ( talk ) 20:28, 16 October 2009 (UTC)

In my numerous edits to these articles, I removed some information about the availability and manner of such of archives, thinking it was too product-description-y—would like your thoughts. I've just tweaked two of your edits to handle them differently than I had in mine of yesterday. Your thoughts on appropriate level of detail would be welcome. _matic 06:02, 17 October 2009 (UTC)

The availability of electronic archives is I think important information, though it can be expressed very briefly, without details. It's as important as the number of issues published a year, though not as important as the year publication began. The key factor is the year from which they are available; a secondary one is whether they are at the publishers site (the usual case) or elsewhere. The details of how one has to pay or subscribe to get them usually are not--except that for some major journals (not these ones), there has in fact been considerable published or reliably posted controversy about it, as when previously freely available information is withdrawn--when there is, the information can usually be given best in the article for the publisher. The way you did it for Drug Metabolism Reviews was just right, better than my rough pass at it. Ditto for Critical Reviews in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology -- except that since it is a long established journal, I would put the editor in a separate section unless he is the only editor, because we also need to include earlier ones, with the dates. That particular title has a somewhat complex publication history, and needs to have it expanded to show earlier publishers and titles. That articles are continuously published online rather than as convention issues is I think important, and also if they are available in some manner before formal publication. Interestingly, every biomedical journal that accepts work published by the NIH & some other agencies is now at least partially a deferred open access journal, because the manuscript versions at least of those articles need to be made available open access 6 or 12 months after publication. I'm not sure we should state it every time--It's very important but is universally applicable. DGG ( talk ) 06:27, 17 October 2009 (UTC)

Notifying of prods

I apologise for ignoring this message. I have now formulated my policy - see this exchange.

Incidentally, I was most amused by this edit! — ] (talk · contribs) 02:07, 17 October 2009 (UTC)

David, notification of deletion notifications is one of the issues that gets my attention. So I took the liberty of popping over to User talk:RHaworth#Notifying of CSD noms, and leaving some comments of my own. I listed four strong reasons I consider it essential for good faith contributors to be advised every single time someone deletes material they contributed. And I added that I thought lapses in advising promising newcomers why their material had been deleted was a contributing factor in triggering some promising newcomers into the kind of vandal behavior that gets them permanently blocked.

Anyhow, I thought I would let you know. I'd welcome any comments that occured to you on my comments.

Cheers! Geo Swan (talk) 17:15, 24 October 2009 (UTC)

Recent prods

You said -

"It might help your deletion rationales if you modified the sentence"Non-notable, non-consumer niche market software." non-notable is one thing, and a good reason for deletion. But being non-consumer or even niche is not a valid reason. Everything is notable (or not) in it's own field."

I've already written a fairly long essay on the subject; I don't link it all that often any more, but it explains my approach to these things at greater length.

Generally, I don't think that businesses should get encyclopedia articles unless the "average Joe" would be surprised at their omission - i.e. they're at the IBM / McDonalds / Bernard Madoff level. Being "non-consumer" and "niche market" do impact notability, at least in my opinion. Being sold only to businesses rather than the general public means that the customer base is limited. "Niche market" means the same thing. It also suggests that any coverage will only be in trade publications; those publications seem to depend a lot on press releases and are often comparable to local newspapers in their audience, and we don't count local newspapers very highly to establish notability.

Being a web-based encyclopedia, we get more IT people than dentists. It's easier to learn about software than about brands of dental drills on the Internet. But individual dental drill makers probably are never going to be notable enough to rate encyclopedia articles. The makers of non-consumer, niche market software shouldn't get a pass just because they're easier to research online. - Smerdis of Tlön (talk) 17:15, 22 October 2009 (UTC)

That view is simply wrong. I would normally word it that I don't think it is completely correct, but what you are saying is antithetical to the basic concept of a comprehensive encyclopedia. This is a general encyclopedia, not a consumer encyclopedia. I do not see why a limited computer base implies non-notability . Notability is after all not popularity, and the notability of something is in its field. Physicians are judged by the notability other physicians afford them, and elementary schools by their importance as elementary schools, and the various types of creative media likewise. Classical music has unfortunately a relatively small share of the music audience, but we judge it as classical music, not by the general public importance relative to rock music. Businesses are part of the world too, and trade publications can be extremely reputable, and in many cases much more responsible about product reviews in their field than general publications. To see really bad reviews of software, try general news sources. (of course there is PR in trade publications also, but it affects all sources. A local newspaper can be 95% PR.). Nothing should get a pass, but sources for things are found where they are found, and nothing should get a rejection because of the type of publication. I think your chosen example is a very good illustration of what we ought to be writing about, and if I had the interest and the time, I would take you up on the challenge for dental machinery--I may do so anyway, though I'd have to do some orientation work first. DGG ( talk ) 17:52, 22 October 2009 (UTC)

Again, we would appear to disagree, but I tend to think that my position is closer to the consensus interpretation of policy than yours is. While Misplaced Pages is not simply a "consumer encyclopedia", it is neither a grand compendium of all that can be confirmed to exist, either.

Suspicion of the motives for inserting these articles is part of it, too. When I see articles newly created and fully formed, complete with the software infobox, I gather they've been prepared by publicity people offline. You may recall how a month or so ago an offline website came to light with rules about how to insert articles about minor computing research projects into Misplaced Pages, and helpfully supplying a template for them. I do get the impression that this is the tip of an iceberg.

My real concern is not so much with notability as with nonsense. You see these articles tossing around buzzwords, jargon, and catchphrases, trying desperately to look like they're riding the crest of trendiness, and creating vague, meaningless texts as a result. If it does something important, it can be described in English; and if it is important, its importance can be explained in English in the article. But when you see an article that consists of a few sentences of lede saying that a software package falls within a product category, and the bulk of the article that follows is devoted to a features list, that's a sales brochure, not an encyclopedia article. I just don't feel that by acting against those non-articles, I'm doing anything other than depriving their promoters from a free venue to publish advertising. - Smerdis of Tlön (talk) 20:33, 22 October 2009 (UTC)

Actually, if I may jump in here, I think the general consensus is that most of these types of things should be covered in some way. The main disagreement is about how they should be covered. Some say individual articles, others say as part of one large article. In that regard, both approaches have their own strengths.

On a personal opinion level, I don't think "advertising" about products "no one had heard of" are really a big deal. I'm not saying adverts disguised as article shouldn't be dealt with - they certainly should. I just don't think we need to worry about promoting something by letting it have an article. If "no one" has ever heard of it, "no one" will see the article either. Whatever the creators goal, the end result won't be an uptick in business for them on our account. --ThaddeusB (talk) 00:44, 23 October 2009 (UTC)

In fact, Smerdis, I do not think we would disagree on that many specific cases--I think almost all of your work in this direction to be excellent. That off-WP page you pointed to is a very troubling case, and some of its progeny can politely be described as lamentable. I am following up the articles it points to, & intend to do my best to see that they are justified by WP:N or deleted. You might see my comments on them. (I admit that I took in good faith some of the framework articles I first encountered, and I was insufficiently stringent about them--I've learned there. ) I devote about half my time here to getting rid of spam, most of it by companies--you can see what I am at work on presently from my user contributions. I have no tolerance with promotional editing--but I have a certain limited amount of patience in dealing with it, for I think it can be often rescued. (And even COI editors can sometimes be taught to contribute good articles--I know I've taught some of them, though certainly not the majority that I've dealt with. You would probably agree with my view that I think the use of Misplaced Pages for promotion is a much greater current threat than the inclusion of some questionably notable articles. Everyone will understand that in any project of our sort there will be a grey area about what is or is not worth including as far as importance goes. But being used for promotion affects our reliability. We are now a seriously used information resource, like it or not, and since the world has given us a striking degree of responsibility, we must live up to it. We need to improve our quality to what is expected of us in many respects, including this. DGG ( talk ) 00:57, 23 October 2009 (UTC)

ask for a favor

Hello David. You know the only time I stop by here is to ask for a favor. I am currently scheduled to be out of the country for a week or two, with very limited internet access. In that I am presently involved with an article Jews and Hollywood in which you commented on at the AFD here. I’m asking if you could review the current discussions, at both locations, and monitor both pieces and employ your calming advice to both sides of the discussion. As always, appreciate your help and advice. Take care, and again, thanks in advance. ShoesssS 19:40, 22 October 2009 (UTC)

I will watch & comment, though you probably will not really agree with what I say. If you do want someone to represent your position, please ask someone else. The subsequent course of the discussion has made me a little less moderate. DGG ( talk ) 02:49, 23 October 2009 (UTC)

I do not think we are that far apart in our opinions, it is more on how we approach the outcome. Do I believe that Misplaced Pages has a place for an article that addresses these concerns, yes. But believe balance from both sides need to be forwarded. Regarding asking your advice on this particular piece was not to get a strict representation of my point of view. But rather I have always found your advice balanced and fair. Even if we disagree from time to time. In my opinion no two editors ever should walk locked-step with one another. That is just the beginning of a cabal. In the mean time, I am off, will not think about Misplaced Pages for a couple of weeks. But will check on the job you did when I get back:-) And again, thanks for you insights. ShoesssS 10:18, 23 October 2009 (UTC)

I think that success in the job i do will in this instance not be achieving a compromise for the article, but in re-awakening a fundamental commitment among some Misplaced Pages editors to the principle of NPOV writing, and lack of political censorship. What happens to an individual article or two is minor in the scheme of things here, and in any case I am not sure about how good the initial approach to the article may have been, & I am not at all satisfied by my attempts to establish a dialog with the initial author of it. The claims at the AfDs that Jews did not take a leadership position in the development of the movie industry are either ignorant or hypocritical, as is the denial that some Black leaders as well as some professional bigots, took exception to their role. This is racialism disguised as resisting racialism. More critically for Misplaced Pages, a refusal to use the works of anti-semites, bigots, and other unpleasant people as sources for their positions is fundamentally opposed to NPOV writing--that applies to not expressing our POV about what we despise--not even about what every individual person here unanimously despises. To use an example I've used before, we do not need to say that Stalin was a tyrant; we just report his actions, and everyone capable of reading and thinking will understand. ` DGG ( talk ) 02:12, 25 October 2009 (UTC)

flict is to restore good relations, and considerations of which party was more in the wrong can be irrelevant--either with response to the particular exchange or the fundamental issue. As predicted, this has escalated, though I have not yet commented myself at the Request for Arbitration. DGG ( talk ) 01:28, 25 October 2009 (UTC)

Hello David, sorry to say, not the outcome I was hoping for, though not through the fault of your arguments. As an editor once said to me "the voters have spoken, and now the voters must be punished." ShoesssS 22:06, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

Incredible result, actually. Some further challenges to articles about Judaism, e.g. [[Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Marriageable age in Judaism

]] show similar lack of objectivity. I've commented there. I would simply rewrite from scratch, but not my field 7 too much else is happening. DGG ( talk ) 03:20, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

Jews and Hollywood comment

Just wanted to say I agree with the comment you just posted. I'm baffled by this whole situation. I figured Misplaced Pages was the last place where I'd see over-sensitivity to such a subject. You've stated pretty much what I would have liked to say long ago, and would have, if I thought I could make it come out as well as you just did. Equazcion (talk) 23:58, 22 October 2009 (UTC)

In checking how frequent this is , I noticed that Jewish exceptionalism & Israeli exceptionalism are both red-links. DGG ( talk ) 02:46, 23 October 2009 (UTC)

Outline infobox and header template for deletion

Thanks for your comments on Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Outline of Louisiana history. In your first comment you write "... and Karnac's templates help considerably". Actually, Karanacs has nominated it for deletion as soon as he noticed it! Your input on Misplaced Pages:Templates for discussion/Log/2009 October 21#Template:Infobox outlines would be very welcome. Thanks, Cacycle (talk) 01:14, 23 October 2009 (UTC)

Similar things happen frequently: Someone will see an article they dislike, try to fix it, decide it cannot be fixed , and nominate it for deletion. Sometimes they're making a serious try hoping to succeed, sometimes they're trying to demonstrate it's unfixable, and sometimes they're trying to take over the article to destroy it before trying to delete it. It is often in good faith. DGG ( talk ) 01:24, 23 October 2009 (UTC)

Yes. In this case it looks like the 20 or so outlines were nominated as a test run and that the same nominator (Karanacs) also nominated the template that addresses several of the main concerns of the outline opponents on some spurious grounds. It would be great if you could have a look at Misplaced Pages:Templates for discussion/Log/2009 October 21#Template:Infobox outlines. (BTW, Karanacs was not involved in the creation of any of these pages, only in their proposed deletion.) Thanks in advance, Cacycle (talk) 16:19, 25 October 2009 (UTC)

It seems the dissatisfaction with one particular outline triggered an over-reaction (in the manner of, i don't think the tone of this article on xxx; let's remove all articles on that whole class of subjects, or I think article Y has a NPOV against a particular ethnic group; let's remove all articles that might possibly have a NPOV about this group.) Personally, I sometimes think we might do better if we concentrated our efforts on fewer systems of organization. As a librarian, I think systems of organization are necessary for browsing, not searching--excellent evidence from 100s of studies has shown that in all information systems, keyword searching does as well as anything more elaborate for finding specific known topics. (There's an exception--the typical term paper search: I need a biography of someone--anyone-- who _____.) How people browse is almost by definition idiosyncratic, or it wouldn't be called browsing. Our systems amount to partial solutions to the general problem of predicting what someone would like to read next: e.g.. Having read about one President, I may well be interested in the succeeding one, or events during the period of his administration. But I may also want to read about some other people who came from the same state, or went to the same college, or have the same ancestry, or died the same year, or are famous for the same type of thing (such as, the famous speeches of other presidents besides Lincoln). I consider this an example of the problem, which we here are unlike to immediately solve. DGG ( talk ) 20:09, 25 October 2009 (UTC)

Noleander reply

DGG: Thanks for offering your email address. I may take you up on it in the future, but at this moment, I am swamped with work, home-repair, and a math team I'm coaching. Misplaced Pages takes way too much time :-) I'm not sure how typing just 100 words can take 30 minutes (I guess its all the other stuff I have to read :-) Anyway: Thanks for participating in the ANI discussions, and I'll just let those play out. I dont have enough time to even participate in the ANI discussions properly. --Noleander (talk) 02:13, 24 October 2009 (UTC)

I would feel enormously more confident defending the work you do if we were in direct communication. I'm not going to let those articles go in any case, & I intend to talk about the problem that people see in them here at the NYC meetup in November. DGG ( talk ) 03:27, 24 October 2009 (UTC)

(Cutting in) Why? Can't you determine for yourself David the difference between substance and a lack thereof without privatizing your relationships with other editors? -Stevertigo (w | t | e) 23:03, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

I am unimportant, so there is no need to defend my articles. What is important is the encyclopedia, and ensuring it provides accurate, uncensored information to users around the world - especially to those that need it most. That needs defending, and censorship needs to be confronted. --Noleander (talk) 03:45, 24 October 2009 (UTC)

As you will notice, I said said defending the work you do, not defending you. In terms of defending you, I'll defend people unfairly attacked not necessarily for their own sake, but to persuade the attackers not to do such things to others. In this case there is, as you say a principle involved, one I think a tremendously important principle, both in the RW and in Misplaced Pages: anything can be discussed if it is done properly & the more outrageous the subject the more the need to discuss it. Not everyone feels this way--a great many people in Europe seem to think that things may not be discussed if they are too upsetting to people's sensibilities (not libel, but sensitivities as one of a group). The model case is of course the laws against spreading Holocaust denial. Now, I think the people who espouse that theory are either doing it to be peculiar, or to be obnoxious, or stupid, or have a genuine prejudice against the Jews, or the desire to do them as much harm as possible. That does not affect whether they should be permitted to publish, and us to report on it. I recognize no exceptions. The making of genuine child pornography is a crime, because of the harm to the children in it, but I consider laws against simulated child pornography indefensible. We prevent speech that poses a direct harm to people, and nothing else. (I follow JS Mill in this line of argument--I suppose I would be best described as a left libertarian. Many of the people who share my politics do not agree with me, and would ban material supporting things or groups that they and I equally despise--the result of this is my inability to participate in the politics I would like to. Even if I were to accept them, they would not accept me. Misplaced Pages, like the American academic world, is a place of freedom from this, and I have consequently spent most of my career in one, and am finishing it in the other.

I am aware of using used some examples that might provoke strong reactions. I do not propose to discuss them here, unless they arise in practice with respect to Misplaced Pages articles.

otherwise I can only say that by concealing yourself you give rise to the view that you might fit into one of the 5 unsavory classes a few sentences up. Personally I don't care with respect to what you write, but there are people in some of those groups whom I will not defend; I am not naïve about possible motivations. As far as my talk p. is concerned, this topic is closed. DGG ( talk ) 05:12, 24 October 2009 (UTC)

(edit conflict) You may not be important, Noleander, but this has little to do with you. It doesn't even have that much to do with this particular article. It's people's reactions to them that have me worried, and this is (or could be) representative of a larger issue. One way of dealing with the encyclopedia is dealing with these issues when they occur. The next time I want to write something about anti-semitism or anti-christianity or anti-cancer-research or anti-anything-else-that's-considered-sympathetic, I would like to not be encumbered by concerns that if I don't do it just the right way, I'll be labeled "anti-" myself.

I have to admit the POV fork argument has me rethinking my position on whether or not the article(s) should exist, as that's an actual policy argument.

Nevertheless, I've only seen that argument from one or two people, and only once 4 days of arguing has passed, when I invited it myself with my "little essay" that spelled out a thought process the intelligent people in this discussion probably would've had a long time ago, had this issue not involved religion. The overall response has been so very disheartening. Many people, in fact it seems like a majority of those involved, seem so on-the-lookout for religious persecution that they lose objectivity when matters of religion arise. Notions of proof and policy go out the door, to be replaced by "demanding proof ... is a blatant sign of bad faith", and "I suggest we all let our conscience do our talking" (actual quotes -- from admins).

Hopefully this is an addressable issue. Freedom of information should also be free of political encumbrances, in my opinion; but maybe that's just a pipe dream. Equazcion (talk) 05:20, 24 October 2009 (UTC)

I didn't notice your "topic closed" prior to my posting this, DGG. If you want to remove my comments here you may. Equazcion (talk) 05:59, 24 October 2009 (UTC)

no problem--just an edit conflict. But I think the matter involved is ethnic persecution, not religious persecution. The Jews are are a people, what Misplaced Pages calls an ethnoreligious group. At present in Misplaced Pages the ethnic aspect of conflicts seems the greater problem. DGG ( talk ) 12:56, 24 October 2009 (UTC)

Closing rationales

Would it be a good idea to add this proposal to Template:Cent? Fences&Windows 16:45, 24 October 2009 (UTC)

yes. DGG ( talk ) 16:47, 24 October 2009 (UTC)

Equazcion has suggested that I close the RfC, admitting that consensus is not going to be gained for compulsory rationales, and instead gain consensus for a new wording that requires a rationale in the case of substantial disagreement. I'm thinking this is a good idea. Whaddya think? See User talk:Fences and windows#Deletion RFC. Fences&Windows 02:24, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

might as well. The sensible thing to do is to get what can be gotten now, and continue if still needed in 6 months or so. Just as it takes a good while for children to reach the age of reason, it takes a while for new and chaotic organizations who originally try to do everything ad hoc to develop systematically fair ways of proceeding. DGG ( talk ) 02:28, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

You probably know about it

But in case you don't: last "briefly" mention here: Misplaced Pages:Misplaced Pages Signpost/2009-10-26/In the news. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 16:23, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

MTV Generation: Misplaced Pages has no fixed definition - it happens!

Hi, I recognise that you stated that you had no interest in working on the MTV Generation article, but I've written (rather a long) comment on it in response to Peregrine981's request for comments on the discussion page. I won't ask you to read it, but it struck me that there is also little agreement on what constitutes a pair of shorts (e.g compared to trousers, kneebreeches, knickerbockers etc) , but little controversy in having a decent page about them. If you have time, could you please add any further comments you might have on the MTV Gen issue to the page? I found your previous comment quite helpful. Any response meant for me on my talk page, thanks. Centrepull (talk) 21:54, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

Journal categories

Hi DGG, you may be interested in this discussion. --Crusio (talk) 00:39, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

Well done

Well stated (and reasoned). //Blaxthos ( t / c ) 00:44, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

OCLC outside linkage to worldcat website

A discussion about whether of not the infobox books template should include outside linkage from the OCLC number is posted here. You are being notified because you posted in a discussion at infobox books about this template functionality. Please stop be and include your input into the issue at the link. Thanks. --69.226.106.109 (talk) 06:51, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

Notice how this was AFD was closed?

Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Comparison between U.S. states and countries nominal GDP

"Quite a few of the usual "it's notable" non-votes which are ignored as usual"

It appears as if this admin is once again using his philosophy to close AfDs against overwhelming consensus.

Suggestions? Ikip (talk) 21:45, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

commented on his talk page. But I would suggest NOT carrying it to deletion review; the practical result isn't worth the trouble in this case. DGG ( talk ) 00:14, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

• Yes, I ignored three Keep votes. DreamFocus' was a bare keep per WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS, Colonel Warden's was WP:ITSNOTABLE, and Boxsockrox88's was WP:INTERESTING. All these are listed in "arguments to avoid", and I will always discard such !votes, such as I would any of the Delete arguments listed there as well. Discarding those three, we have two Keep votes and two Delete (including the nominator). Hence "no consensus". At what point will people realise that "AfD is not a vote" is actually true, regardless of how many administrators keep closing AfDs badly by counting votes? Black Kite 10:47, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

• • On happening to come across this on DGG's talk page (which I don't usually stalk unless he and I are talking about something else), I'm concerned about the issues raised here. I certainly do not have an issue with that close, but I am concerned about the general issue of WP:ATA being considered in a closure. WP:ATA is an essay, and users may disregard essays if they wish. But there is no point in having a distinction between an essay and a policy if closers will treat essays as policy in a close.

    Further, WP:ATA is a crap essay. It's a list of arguments that other people think shouldn't count, and in a number of places, its reasoning is distinctly shaky. It needs to be disregarded in closing. But I want to be clear that I can very much understand discarding !votes that do not bring any useful new factors into the debate.

    But what really concerns me is that this looks like the beginning of yet another skirmish between elements of the Article Rescue Squadron and elements of the Article Extermination Squadron. There is a recognisable group of editors who show up en masse to !vote "keep" in certain discussions, but there is also a recognisable group of editors who show up en masse to !vote "delete" using arguments that are not perceptibly better, and on examining Black Kite's closes and occasional sharp phrases when he runs out of patience, I can't help wondering whether Black Kite perceives this clearly. It seems possible that Black Kite thinks the problems are all one-sided.

    It's hard to discuss this in detail without naming certain problematic users, and I certainly do not intend to pollute DGG's talk page by naming names here, but I do think this is less simple than it looks and there's a genuine issue.—S Marshall /_Cont 12:40, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

• • • The problems are certainly not on one side. Yes, WP:ATA is pretty crap, but the three examples I gave above are perfect examples of !votes without rationales that should be disregarded, in exactly the same way as if the same votes were "Delete: other stuff has been deleted", "Delete: not notable", or "Delete: not very interesting". However, I think the community as a whole is rapidly running out of patience with the block-voting, wikilawyering, and process avoidance of certain members of the Article Rescue Squadron. The "rescue" tag does seem to be used as a canvassing tag these days. I have to admit that I do not see as much block voting from so-called "deletionists" in XfDs, though I am willing to be presuaded otherwise if you can give examples. If there are groups of users that show up en-masse to vote in pre-determined ways on AfDs, then the solution is simple - topic-ban them all - on both sides - from XfD. Black Kite 14:33, 31 October 2009 (UTC)
      • Can I email you to name names, Black Kite? Shouldn't be airing them here.—S Marshall /_Cont 14:42, 31 October 2009 (UTC)
        • Yes, that's fine. Black Kite 16:19, 31 October 2009 (UTC)
      • PS: Topic bans are too simple. Last thing Misplaced Pages needs is another incentive to sockpuppetry, and I'm already having enough trouble keeping track of who's really who without that.—S Marshall /_Cont 14:56, 31 October 2009 (UTC)
        • Which is why I think admins should be recognising such patterns and, unless such !votes have reasonable rationales - just ignoring them. Black Kite 16:19, 31 October 2009 (UTC)
      • Since we are on this subject, I've got some material that I should probably send your way as well. --Tothwolf (talk) 01:10, 1 November 2009 (UTC)

to the extent the rescue tag is used as a canvassing tag it won't work well--it's not really canvassing because anyone with deletionist tendencies can look there also. It will only be effective if people use it on rescuable articles--and i do not think anyone can object to it being used for those. I don;t actually know how it's being used, because I don;t check there--I simply look at every AfD, to the extent possible, and comment where I think my comments would be appropriate and helpful. Appropriate = where I have something sensible & pertinent to say, helpful = where it might make a difference, or --sometimes--register a protest that might be useful in the future. some people have used it wrongly in the past, but then people have done wrongly here everything that it is possible to do wrongly--I think by and large the ARS overenthusiasts have learned by now. If we come down to topic bans, I see a number of people saying delete as a reflect immediately after nomination, without even checking the links to references that are given. And how about denials, after references are presented? What some people do not seem yet to have learned is the inadvisability of proposals to eject one's opponents, instead of out-arguing them--and I have other things in mind here than What some people do not seem yet to have learned is the inadvisability of proposals to eject one's opponents, instead of out-arguing them--and I have other things in mind here than that. , such as many of the cases at arbcom.. In general, it seems an argument used by those who know they cannot outargue the opposition. DGG ( talk ) 15:35, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

Hmm. I'm talking here about stopping block voting from both sides. I completely agree that there is an issue on both sides. On one side, you have people !voting "Delete" without looking for ways of improving the article, or sourcing. On the other side, there are people !voting "Keep" with spurious reasons, and adding reams of irrelevant trivia and sources into articles and then claiming this makes them "notable". Clearly, there is no problem with a deletion nomination being "outargued" if it is argued reasonably and in line with policy. What is a problem is swathes of !votes with little rationale which can sway closing admins into closing AfDs incorrectly. Black Kite 16:24, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

(I want to clarify that this is a discussion between us, not a debate--BK and I may personally have very different positions, yet as editors, AfD !voters, and admins, we would probably agree about 80% of the time on particular cases, It's with the relatively few not quite so clear ones where the conflict lies, and we should not over-estimate their frequency). If BK and I did not consider each other's arguments worth serious consideration we would not be discussing them in this detail.) DGG ( talk )

BK, I think you misunderstand the position of admins. We're not here to decide issues. We're here to do the necessary operations to carry out express or implied community decisions. We're not to even guide the community, except by arguing like any other editor on the strength of our own positions. People in clerk-like positions like ours' can manage to have a great deal of effective authority, but here it's a temptation that must be resisted. There is a group here who decide certain types of issues-- arb com, and proposals to have a similar group for content have been soundly rejected. I may consider myself competent to be editor in chief of an encyclopedia, but I did not come here to try to maneuver into such a position; in appropriate other places, I am very willing to make judgments--such as my book reviews for CHOICE. DGG ( talk ) 17:09, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

No, I realise that, but we are charged with judging the level of valid contributions when assessing consensus at XfD. It is noticeable that when admins do this rather than counting votes, the inevitable resulting DRV usually backs their position up. However, too many admins seem to regard being taken to DRV as something terrible (or maybe they're so lazy that they can't be bothered to do anything except count votes), and so many AfDs are closed, IMO, wrongly. Now much of the time this is functionally irrelevant (i.e. the difference between No Consensus and Keep) but in a non-trivial number of cases, it isn't. Black Kite 18:12, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

If you are saying that more questionable AfD closings should be taken to Deletion Review, I certainly agree. I think we would all also like to see more participation there by ordinary WPedians--at present, unless something exceptional is involved, it tends to fall to a few of us who specialize in it. DGG ( talk ) 20:46, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

Yes, I have to admit I'm as guilty as many others there; I rarely participate at DRV unless it's one of my closings (which happens less often than I expect, considering that I often close the "late" AfDs that others have shied off from). DRV is certainly underused and often misused, and too often turns into AFD2, however many times people point out that it isn't. Black Kite 21:08, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

DRV will inherently partake of the nature of AfD2: A close must be reasonable. An incorrect decision on which arguments have no support in policy is an incorrect & unreasonable close. This often involves examining the arguments in light of the article. An incorrect decision on which policy rules, and whether it is sufficiently clear to overturn consensus is a mistake, and an unreasonable close. This too requires evaluating the arguments in light of the article. Since IAR is a fundamental policy, it is always relevant, and this essentially opens all issues to review. DGG ( talk ) 21:25, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

• Black Kite does not seem to have read my contribution to that debate with sufficient care. I did not simply assert that the matter was notable but provided a link to a source and an association between the example and the list. As it seems that brevity is not understood or appreciated in such cases, I shall perhaps have to be more wordy to avoid my contributions being discounted in future. This seems a poor outcome but so it goes. Colonel Warden (talk) 17:55, 31 October 2009 (UTC)
  • Oh, I read it. You found a single source with a mild relevance to the article and synthesised that the subject must be notable. This is arguing from a false premise for the same reason that someone saying "I couldn't find any sources on the Internet, so it must be non-notable" is doing. Black Kite 18:14, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

• No, I have seen numerous comparisons of this sort in the past and so already had a good understanding of the matter. If I'd just given my own experience and knowledge then that would have been WP:IKNOWIT and so I did more - I made a brief search to cite a third-party example. This is everything one would expect from an argument at AFD - knowledge of the topic, cogent argument and evidence. The closing admin's job is not to second-guess such contributions and discount them if he doesn't agree with them. Your failure to recognise that multiple experienced editors found your close to be unsatisfactory seems to show that you are unable to properly assess consensus in cases of this sort. Colonel Warden (talk) 21:28, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

• In my view, BK, what you have done is the situation often is is that the closer has reached a desired conclusion by evaluating the arguments in view of the conclusion you want to reach. This is acceptable in a debate-- most of the time, most of us holistically decide whether we want to keep or delete an article and look around for reasons to support our position. This is not acceptable in a closing. The closer has to close in accordance with consensus, after removing irrelevant arguments and arguments contrary to policy , spa's and sockpuppets-- or if the closer departs from it, to show why the consensus is clearly opposed by unambiguous policy. I do not think a closer is able to do this in debates where he has a personal opinion. In such a case, he should contribute to the argument and let someone else close. BK, you say you've been selecting difficult closings, which makes it all the more necessary to pay due regard to this . DGG ( talk ) 21:39, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

• Well, I'd disagree with the first point - since the difference here is between Keep and No Consensus, which are functionally the same (i.e. the article is kept), even if I'd perceived a "desired conclusion" it would've been pointless to stretch the bounds of closing to reach it. If the difference had been between No Consensus and Delete, then there may be a case to be made that the closer is letting their own biases affect the result. As for the second point, you're actually backing my point up - "after removing irrelevant arguments and arguments contrary to policy". I admit that now I have heard Colonel Warden's explanation that I have slightly more regard for his point of view, but he could have made it far clearer. I stand by my discarding of the other two !votes, however. Black Kite 22:04, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

You know, I actually forgot that, as I'm so used to arguing against a delete-- and because we have really been discussing generally, more than about this article--so I have changed the wording. As for the second point, the question is of course when to call something irrelevant. Looking again at this article, the arguments you rejected seem in general relevant enough not to be unrelated to policy--or, like mine, simply said keep, without seeing the need to argue in any detail in an AfD where nobody had supported the nominator. So I therefore do not understand what you did, which is how the discussion got started in the first place. There are a few admins here, where instead I would have answered much more cynically: "You wanted it deleted, but knew that close could not possibly be supported, so you said non-consensus, to allow for a rapid renomination" DGG ( talk ) 00:33, 1 November 2009 (UTC)

I didn't think then, and I don't think now, that a rapid renomination would achieve anything. I don't think that's really the idea of "No Consensus", to be honest. However, I do think that some sort of merge of these disparate articles would be more encyclopedic - though that's not why I closed as I did. Black Kite 11:42, 1 November 2009 (UTC)

If you look back, you'll find that discussing a merge was what i suggested also. As I said, we don't disagree quite as much as it looks at first. I think at this point you might have made a call out of annoyance at the level of arguments. I think much of the time when we admins do something wrong, we realize it to some extent. I've been impatient also; I recall once when I tried what i knew to be a shortcut, but one I thought would be accepted --that was the one time a close of mine reached Deletion Review (and was overturned). DGG ( talk ) 15:26, 1 November 2009 (UTC)

• From my experience at DRV, I've come to the view that there's a sort of hierarchy of arguments in closing AfD. I mean, it's perfectly possible to give a single reply that wins the argument outright. With a "keep", you do it by finding some sources, citing them by direct link or by ISBN and page number, and subjecting them to critical analysis that shows they're reliable. One person doing this at any stage in the debate is worth a hundred "delete: not notable" !votes, because all the delete !votes are explicitly refuted and hence null and void. (See Uncle G's AfD contributions for examples.)

  The equivalent "complete win !vote" for a delete is linking the copyrighted source it's been copy/pasted from. But assuming it's not copypasta, the best "delete" is still a critical analysis of the sources. ("I found this, but it's a blog, and that, but it's a press release. Couldn't find anything else.")

  In an AfD where you have !votes that give you a critical analysis of the sources, the closer can safely ignore everyone who doesn't give such an analysis, and DRV will still support them. Except in the annoying case where someone uses the currently-fashionable three letter acronym "BLP", in which case everyone starts to run around like headless chickens screaming "delete, delete!", apparently because of Daniel Brandt. But if Misplaced Pages made sense, BLP policy would be about removing unsourced material, which comes back to the same thing I was saying before.—S Marshall /_Cont 23:42, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

Connel Fullenkamp

Hi DGG. I nominated Connel Fullenkamp for deletion. You deprodded the article in June 2009, so I thought that your input might be valuable for the discussion. CronopioFlotante (talk) 21:33, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for a Job Well Done

DGG, Thank you for participating in Chzz's RfA. Many of us suspected that Chzz was a problem user, but it was work by people like you, who saved the day. Rogue Admins. and Bureaucrats pose a real risk to Misplaced Pages. Thanks Again - Ret.Prof (talk) 18:28, 1 November 2009 (UTC) It was necessary, but I take no pleasure in this, any more than in similar cases; I hoped he would have eventually been a credit to us, and I regret he chose otherwise--and I am sure you feel similarly. DGG ( talk ) 18:35, 1 November 2009 (UTC) I do! - Ret.Prof (talk) 18:56, 1 November 2009 (UTC)

Fictional planet deletions

You questioned why I closed these as delete, instead of redirecting as was your suggestion. Firstly, I have no opinion at all on whether these should be articles, redirects or whatever. That said, at the debates I closed, there was a clear consensus to delete in my opinion. The consensus was clear enough that I felt any extra explanation was not necessary. I noted that several apparently similar articles were redirected, however these garnered more debate, and had a consensus to redirect rather than delete. Kevin (talk) 22:32, 1 November 2009 (UTC)

As an example at Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Hivehom I see: 1/ the nom's argument, which has no basis in policy: "non-notable planet" does not indicate why, "No source given" is not a reason for deletion. 2/My redirect, referring to a related debate where I said "merge or redirect as appropriate, as with the others. Somehow, this process does not seem a good way to sort these out." 3/A comment, saying "(redirect, merge or delete, whatever " 4/ Delete per nom, (which gave no acceptable reason), and per the prev. ed. who said whatever. 5. A delete that said it had no coverage; true, he gave no evidence of looking--but having no coverage is indeed a reason. Counting, 3 people said redirect was acceptable, 3 not counting the nom. said delete was acceptable. Perhaps for consistency you would change them to redirects. Given a number of articles in the essentially identical situation, it shouldn't depend on how many people have energy to join the debate for all of them. I am reluctant to take the time to carry something intrinsically this minor to deletion review. But as it's not protected, I could just enter the redirects--that would lose the history, but there was nothing much in them. Someone who doesn't like it could try G4, whereupon I would say "not the same as the deleted article", or RfD. DGG ( talk ) 01:13, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

I didn't notice that there at all. They really should've done all related things together. Of course last time they did that, it ended with keep or no consensus I think. Anyway, was there more than one line in that article? List of Humanx Commonwealth planets and Humanx Commonwealth both have the same one sentence for that planet. If additional information exist, it'd be best to copy it on over. Is there a way to see the total number of people that have ever searched for Hivehom in the search bar? If its a lot, you need a redirect. Otherwise, they'll find it listed in one of the other articles easily enough. Dream Focus 01:20, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

I consider the history of searches irrelevant. We need a redirect for material on the basis that it is something for which people might reasonably look. As for doing things separately or together, the problem is to ensure that the matters brought up together are really equivalent. I do not know the fiction well enough to know whether these planets are, or whether some might be background and others central. But a redirect from settings in a major fiction to some combination article seems a reasonable general approach to avoid this sort of fine-tuned decision. DGG ( talk ) 01:36, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

• I see a lot of articles in the series have been deleted already. I believe all administrators can look at the deleted content. I'd prefer if you could just restore their history and place a redirect, but if not, could you copy the information from those places, from whenever the history says its at its longest, to the proper article? I started List of Humanx Commonwealth characters and List of Humanx Commonwealth races and copied over what I could already. List of Humanx Commonwealth planets has been around for years, and appears at a glance to be the exact same information filling the main article to overflowing. With that many books in the series, a lot of them notable enough to have their own articles, no reason it shouldn't have its own character list. Dream Focus 02:29, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

I do not intend without some consensus to revert the actions of other admins in this field by restoring deleted articles intact into main space. What I can do is furnish you with the text, to use as information and a guide in adding modest amounts to combination articles. The necessary manipulations for merging the edits with proper attribution is rather complicated, and so is userifying them and then restoring them when you have finished and I do not have time to do it properly, so it would be better if I simply emailed them to you, and you rewrote what you used for the combination articles. You can then make the necessary redirects yourself. Please email me from this page to give me the email address you would like me to use, and tell me exactly which articles you need. DGG ( talk ) 02:57, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

You can't just click an option, and put them on my user page, in a side page, history and all? Would this userifying thing only gives me the newest version, correct? Sometimes people mass delete large chunks of an article before sending it to AFD, so there is less to save, and people thus less likely to argue against their attempt at deletion. Haven't seen that happening with any of these articles in this series so far though. Anyway, I'm emailing you now. Dream Focus 16:10, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

I might well be willing to do so in other subjects, but in this one I am as always making sure to use admin functions only in incontestable ways. I';ve tried to indicate that above, but I see i have to be explicit. If you want them userified, ask a non-involved admin. DGG ( talk ) 16:54, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

Re A7 Speedy Delete

Hey DGG, was hoping you could help me out with this as you seem to be both interested and in the know. I use the A7 CSD category in AfD discussions a lot, because (a) it's one of the most stringest deletion tests on Misplaced Pages and (b) if it's broken policy it needs attention called to it and discussion. It seems to my view to specifically set a higher bar for an article to exist than WP:N - that is, that not only must sources exist, but that those sources must attest to a claim of notability, not merely existence. That's a position I support, and it's in line with the essay WP:MILL but it doesn't really seem to be in line with any of the other notability policies. Are you able to educate me at all on the reasoning and history behind this controversial CSD category? - DustFormsWords (talk) 05:12, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

Excuse me for butting in, but I don't agree with that interpretation of A7. A7 states that the article, not the sources, must make some claim that would, if true, give rise to a reasonable inference of notability per any notability guideline. So it's a low, not high, bar. _matic 05:46, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

Sorry, that was indeed synthesis. A7 only refers to the article, but the inference to be drawn from it is that when considering the higher bar of WP:N, no amount of sources can save an article (of the A7 classes: organisation, etc) that does not itself assert notability, and in that sense acts as a precursor condition that significantly raises the level of sourcing required to satisfy WP:N. - DustFormsWords (talk) 05:52, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

Bongo, you're right, and I am in the middle of writing a full explanation why. DGG ( talk ) 05:49, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

it merely has to indicate on its face that there might be some realistic reason to think it's significant or important. This is much less than notability, and requires no sourcing at all. The criteria as given are very specific about that, as are multiple discussions on the talk pages. Even three years ago when I started and things were much more erratic that was the case. In fact, it avoids using the term notability to avoid confusion with WP:N. Now, anything that does meet WP:N will do so because it indicates the importance and has sources for it, and will never fall within A7. But a lot else will pass A7--if there is any plausible chance that someone acquainted with out general practice might think it notable , it passes. That may seem absurdly low, but, as you clearly suspect, there is a reason for putting it so low. The reason is that this is enough to get rid of the impossible junk, without cutting out anything where there is a chance of an article. Let's look at current New Pages:

1. Clarendon Plantation House -- this is actually N because all places on the historical register are as one of the Common outcomes, & it has a source for that. It also passes A7 because asserting a building is of historic interest is an assertion of importance if it is at all reasonable, and this is.
2. Sunil Reddy is in my opinion an A7. Because it will have been deleted, here's the contents: "Sunil Reddy, born 1974 is an Indian business consultant. He is the publisher of The People's Economics, an online Economics & Political magazine published semi-regularly. He is also a Technology Consultant for Internet, Telecommunication, Software and Alternative Power Generation Systems." Publisher of a journal would normally be enough of an assertion to pass, but not if it is an online magazine published only semi-regularly--this is not a plausible assertion of notability as I see it. This is a little borderline--some admins might think it does pass.
3. Abhijit PG Pandya asserts he has written a book. If so, and the book is at all important, he might conceivably be notable. Chairman of the Birkenhead society might be notable also, but I know nothing about it. It passes A7. Whether it will pass AfD will depend on what is found in looking for references. I've tagged it according. It will need checking. There are no present sources, but if what is asserted is true, there will be.

You are confusing N and V , which is easy to do--attempts to combine them have however never gotten consensus. Even if something would appear to be N, if there are no sources whatsoever, there is no way of writing an article, and it will be deleted. This can happen. But it is never a question for speedy deletion. We can not delete until we have looked for sources, and failed to find them. The condition is unsourceable, not unsourced. If the article is plausible, this is something which requires community input and some time to look. According to WP:BEFORE, we really should look before we put any kind of deletion tag on; if it goes to AfD , people will look--if it goes to prod, the few of us who patrol prod will at least try to look. But if you can find the source yourself, you should, before putting on the tag, or you will be embarrassed at AfD if you have guessed wrong. We don't delete on guesses. The sourcing has no relevance to the A7--except that if something is unclear, we should at least attempt to see if it might be ore important than the author realized, or knew to say. The key word here is asserts, which means indicates, not demonstrates. Think about this, look at that last example, try to source it, and come back tomorrow if you have questions. for now, I'm going to sleep. DGG ( talk ) 06:02, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

• Thanks for the reply DGG. My questions (when you're awake and online again) are: was this intended to be a separate rather than lower test than WP:N? It seems to act that way. A local restaurant, for example, may be able to source three separate significant reviews in independent, reliable local papers, which would prima facie put it over the bar for WP:N. However that same restaurant, barring some other factor, would be unable to make a claim asserting its notability rising higher than "The restaurant has been reviewed in three newspapers." It's a case of an article that would (theoretically) pass WP:N being struck out by A7 speedy delete. I can't read it as other than that asserting notability is a condition that needs to be addressed before WP:N can be explored, rather than a lower standard of the existing WP:N test. My second question is: why don't we require every Misplaced Pages article to assert notability? The threshold test of requiring an assertion would focus editing and provide a clear delineation of keepable articles from non-keepables. And the third question, being a compansion to that, is: why is A7 limited only to the classes of articles mention in that criterion? What's magical about organisations that doesn't apply to software, for example? Thanks. It's just that I so often see A7 described as "commonly misunderstood" without any accompanying reference to policy or discussion that would help it be "properly" understood. - DustFormsWords (talk) 06:17, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

Yes, it was intended to be a separate and lower test. When there was first a formal deletion process, it was called VfD, votes for Deletion -- after a while when the volume got too large, it was split: the hopeless articles were permitted to be deleted immediately without any vote, just by listing them and then a single admin would decide. A very narrow set of criteria were used, and gradually additional ones were introduced--the most recent being A9. Proposed deletion was added, for articles that it was thought might be un controversial deletions, but were not in those restricted classes--for PROD, any reason good under Deletion Policy applies. So it is intended to be a rough screen only. The conditions are for those where the deletion will be uncontroversial to anyone acting in good faith, had a reasonably unambiguous criterion, would not give a significant number of false positives, and would occur frequently enough to be worth the trouble of setting a criterion. It is accepted that there will be many false negatives, but these are handled by prod and AfD. It works very well as a screen--about 1/4 of the newly submitted articles are deleted under it as impossible, and another 1/4 get deleted by prod or AfD. Notice, btw, the effectiveness of tagging--when the author of the Abhijit PG Pandya article saw the tags, he withdrew the article, realizing that it was unlikely to stay. This is much friendlier than if we had deleted it--and easier, because we did not have to make the decision and be concerned about whether we were right.

"The restaurant has been reviewed by three newspapers" is handled by WP:LOCAL -- it needs to be known outside its immediate area. in my neighborhood there are two good local papers, and they review every restaurant in downtown Brooklyn. This does not establish notability. If any one of the New York or the New Yorker or the NY Times reviews it also, then it is notable, for they have a very wide circulation beyond Brooklyn and are considered to have very high standards for what they choose to review. If any of the other NY papers reviews it, then it would depend--their reviews are not considered as reliable. If we did not have WP:LOCAL, we would still reject local papers, because in general their reviews are not discriminating, and too much influenced by PR, and thus not reliable for notability. They would be reliable for details about a restaurant otherwise notable. This is how we deal with things that would pass a naïve application of the GNG--by specifying in some more detail what sources count. Now for A7. An article with the statement of being reviewed by three newspapers if it specifies the newspapers and if they appear credible RSs, would pass A7. Saying that a place has been so reviewd is a statement of possible importance, which might or might not be considered credible. If it did not specify the newspapers, most of us would not consider it a reasonable statement of importance, and it would not pass. where the problem comes is if it did not specify the newspapers -- but they happened to be important, the article being written by a very unskilled beginner here. A careful admin in a case like that is supposed to actually check the sources in a preliminary way to see. There will be false positives--how many depends on the carefulness of the admins. My estimate of false positive A7s is about 10%, which is too high--it should be 5%--better than that is unlikely to be accomplished . Some other criteria have a higher error rate, like G11. Some have a lower. A9 if properly used, should have a very low error rate--this was empirically checked before the criterion was accepted. (Restaurants can be a problem--check the full history of Mzoli's, where the original article, written by Jimbo, did not assert notability & was deleted)

Some types of articles are even more problematic with respect to assertions of notability--software for example, or books. Experience shows that articles on notable software or books often fail to assert notability--this is particularly true for children's books--a good example is Brown Girl, Brownstones which is actually famous == but the person who wrote the article said nothing to indicate it--it was rescued from Prod when I recognized the title. thus products and creative works are not included in A7--quite deliberately. The argument is that this is the sort of subject where many people should have the chance to see it, and try to add more, and this is proven by experience. As for organizations, this is a problem. I am not altogether happy with their inclusion in A7, and so I try to use G11 in addition when possible--or G12, copyvio when that's the case, as it often is. The reason it stays in is that there are a considerable number of obvious cases.

Think of patrolling this way: I patrol speedy (or recent changes) not just to delete hopeless articles, nor to save ones that can possibly be saved, but to sort the two. Many people submit inadequate first articles, but if treated in a friendly way, go on to write better ones. Deleting their first article does not encourage them to try again; showing them how to rescue it does. DGG ( talk ) 17:25, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

Thank you for taking the time to provide insight into this process DGG! Your experience and expertise are much appreciated, and I think I have a better understanding of the philosophy behind the CSD now. - DustFormsWords (talk) 22:55, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

CSD A7 and schools

In removing the {{db-org}} tag I had added to The Baan Dek Montessori, you asserted that "schools are not eligible for speedy A7." Why is that? I see no indication of that at WP:CSD#A7. Are schools somehow not organizations? Furthermore, looking back at the page's logs, I see that it has in fact been deleted before under criteria A7 (and twice prior to that under G11). Am I somehow missing some change in the interpretation of CSD criteria? John Darrow (talk) 05:01, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

(talk page stalker)Quoting directly from WP:CSD A7, emphasis added:

Tim Song (talk) 05:03, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

Interesting; I missed that among all the bold text around it. Given that A7 has been applied to the exact same article before, could anyone provide a link to when the school exception was added to the A7 criteria, and any discussion involved in it being made so? John Darrow (talk) 05:16, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

It was added initially because school deletions for lack of notability were always contested in good faith by established editors -- and are thus never uncontroversial. It has subsequently been generally accepted that in practice notability is almost never a valid reason for deleting a school via any method. High schools are now always treated as notable, because 95% of them are if one looks hard enough, & it isn't worth the debates to weed out the others, lower level schools are almost always not notable enough for articles, but are treated by merging into the school district, town, diocese, or the like. Every time in the last 2 years this balance has been challenged at AfD, it has been decisively upheld, even though our way for formally adopting guidelines have enabled the small minority of opponents to block formalizing it. The few genuine AfD debates are whether an institution is a school or merely a tutoring establishment, or whether it has a real existence. School articles are occasionally listed for speedy deletion as promotional, but this is almost never valid, for they can almost always be stubbified to remove the promotion. Same goes for copyvios: a noncopyvio stub can be easily substituted. Even in most cases of vandalism, there's an unvandalised core to revert to.

Personally I wish we applied similar principles to determining notability of other classes of things.

As a personal guide also, there is more than enough true junk to get rid of, and ewe should concentrate on it. Borderline notable articles do not harm Misplaced Pages. Promotional ones do, and likewise copyvio. And of the acceptable articles, probably most of them need better sourcing or updating or removing soapboxing --and these are almost equally harmful. There's too many important things to do to bother about borderline notability. DGG ( talk ) 05:46, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

AfD nomination of Denialism

An article that you have been involved in editing, Denialism, has been listed for deletion. If you are interested in the deletion discussion, please participate by adding your comments at Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Denialism (2nd nomination). Thank you.

Please contact me if you're unsure why you received this message. Unomi (talk) 06:24, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

Commented . I said weak keep before, but the established usage has now become clearer. DGG ( talk ) 14:32, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for your comment, I do hope that you will reflect on my response to your rationale. All the sources that I have seen so far demand cherry-picking as they employ the word loosely and arbitrarily, they are only useful for supporting a preconceived notion of the word, and only then by willfully ignoring the uses which go against ones desired conclusion. Of the many sources listed on the article a great deal of them do not even contain the word denialism. Unomi (talk) 15:47, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

Your user page

Hi DGG. It looks as if you may have been in the middle of adding content to your user page, but were interrupted before you could finish. You appear to have had this on the page for the last several days. All the best, Xymmax _{So let it be done} 20:44, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

yes, things have been too busy here. I find it difficult to get the necessary oppotunity to do more than fire-fighting. I'm glad somebody noticed! DGG ( talk ) 00:52, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Bibliography page guideline proposal

Hi DGG,

As you have been involved in the previous discussions about bibliography pages, I thought you should be notified about a formal proposal here. Any constructive contributions would be welcome.

Happy editing,

Neelix (talk) 20:02, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages:Jewish Labour Bund Task Force

I thought you might find this interesting, considering possible outreach to Yiddishist groups. It's a surprisingly active project.--Pharos (talk) 04:17, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

Psychology of AFD

//Blaxthos ( t / c ) 19:15, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanks

I just happened to come across this -- in light of recent events, thanks for keeping that article alive.--Epeefleche (talk) 15:07, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Scraeing

As I mentioned at the new user CSD, I could start scraping this information. Which class A7, A5, etc. would you consider examining first?Ikip (talk) 00:34, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

When I did it, I went directly from the deletion logs. The problem is, first, removing the irrelevancies, most of what is in the log is article talk pages, or files, or user space etc. & of the articles, most are expired prods, or AfDs , or for moves, or copyvios. Out of 100, there are about 10 worth examining for all other speedy reasons put together. I am not sure how a scrape of deleted articles would help analyze them. since I can see them easily enough. I thought about scraping the log to sort, but I'd lose the links. Any ideas? DGG ( talk ) 04:48, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

When you scrape a page, you can retain the links.

What I was thinking is having a self contained scapper program (meaning that you would not need any extra programs to use it, simply download and click).

For example, it could run every minute, scrapping G1. Patent nonsense, http://en.wikipedia.org/Category:Nonsense_pages_for_speedy_deletion.

Any page in that category, would have the whole article scraped, and the page history scraped. or any combination that we wish. The information could either be downloaded to a file (any format, including excel), or loaded to another wiki, created as a new page.

I could write some of it myself, but my friend User:TodWulff is a master in using autohotkey. Ikip (talk) 04:57, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

I see. But this is to audit the one nom'd for deletion. I just want to see those actually deleted. I'm interested in the admins not the taggers--taggers, who are usually relative beginners, can be expected to make many mistakes. That would be about half. I can see how to use it, though, once I get the links in Excel. We could try A7--the errors are easier to understand & less ambiguous. What would really help me do it the way I've been doing, is a program to go from the deletion log to a spreadsheet that I could run, since it would have to run with admin privileges open. I can manipulate links from there. FWIW, I use Mac 10.5. DGG ( talk ) 05:28, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

I couldn't test or refine a scraper with admin priveleges.

"program to go from the deletion log to a spreadsheet that I could run" do you have a PC emulator?

so you would want to scrape the deletion log, this would not require admin rights correct?

Here is the deletion log: http://en.wikipedia.org/search/?title=Special%3ALog&type=delete&user=&page=&year=&month=-1&tagfilter=&hide_patrol_log=1

Each entry could be put on a spread sheet like this:

Date	Name	Comments
2009 11 19 22:40	Secret	deleted "Developement Centre of East-Iceland" ‎ (A7: No indication that the article may meet guidelines for inclusion)
2009 11 19 22:40	Dlohcierekim	Deleted "JoeBob Mcgee" ‎ (A1: Not enough context to identify article's subject: although tere are ghits for person with this name, thic content insfficinet. same article deleted earlier. wold need rewrite from scratch)

What kind of spreadsheet? Excel? That is the only one I have, so to test and refine and debug, it would have to be excel.

Better yet, I could simply scrape the deletion log data then post it on a wikipedia page, as a sortable table. Say User:DGG/CSD 2009 11 19 or User:Ikip/CSD 2009 11 19, one for each day (or even one page for each week).

That way everyone that is interested, could work on this together. Anyone who wanted to copy and paste this info into a spread sheet could.

It appears like autohotkey doesn't run on mac. Ikip (talk) 22:43, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

OK, I did some experimenting. The simplest thing is to take the deletions for a day and sort it by deletion reason . Any spreadsheet, or in Misplaced Pages, if a wikitable that large would work . DGG ( talk ) 01:17, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

actually, I probably could do it with word, using find and replace wildcards, without even bother Tod. You can search by 5000 edits at a time, simply by adding &limit=5000 to any page history.

http://en.wikipedia.org/search/?title=Special%3ALog&type=delete&user=&page=&year=&month=-1&tagfilter=&hide_patrol_log=1&limit=5000

Wow, am I reading this right?

From 02:17, 20 November 2009 to 01:32, 18 November 2009. Two Days, FIVE THOUSAND pages were deleted.Ikip (talk) 02:20, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

not quite. For example, a good number of these are a./ deletions of talk pages associated with deleted articles, or redirects to deleted articles. b./ deletion requested by sole editor, or userspace pages requested by user c./ files. Misplaced Pages gets even more files per day submitted than articles. Many of them have copyvio problems. d./ technical deletions, including deletions to permit a move over a redirect. The actual number of article deletions is about 1000 a day. About half of all submitted articles get deleted, almost all of them very rightly. But now do you see the extent of the problem? DGG ( talk ) 04:09, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

"But now do you see the extent of the problem?" Problem? How many problem articles we have? Yes, I knew about the massive amount of bad submissions we get. I saw this problem patrolling AFDs and monitoring the deletion log. Big problem. Is that what you are talking about?

Or the problem of investigating the articles? Ikip (talk) 07:57, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

Nearer the second--the problem of making sure we catch them all, check them properly, and deal appropriately not just with each of the articles but with each of the users. I mainly patrol speedy & prod, & delete or untag 10 to 20 articles a day. To follow up each one properly and give the necessary personalized warnings and advice, & correct the erroneous taggings, warnings, and advice by some of the less careful or less experienced, and explain things to them also, would take about 20 -30 min each, considering followups and disagreements. I do maybe 3 or 4 as fully as I think should be done, & comment on 1 or 2 mistaggings, & I know no admin who is able to give full attention to much more than that. If I actually rewrote the ones that could be helped by it, it would be at least twice as long. I do maybe 1 a day at best; again, many people do similarly, but nobody has time for much more, unless they did nothing else. DGG ( talk ) 20:03, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

Okay, so every article deleted A7, for example, will have A7 in the subject line?

It looks like, for example:

20:28, 21 November 2009 Kinu (talk | contribs) deleted "Panohar" ‎ (A7: No indication that the article may meet guidelines for inclusion: A1: Not enough context to identify article's subject)

Many do have A& in subject line. To scrape effectively you need something that differentiates one passage from another.Ikip (talk) 20:38, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

That's technically the edit summary, not the subject line.As in the example you gave, essentially every article deleted via A7 will say either A7 in that summary or the phrase that follows. Articles deleted under multiple grounds will cite multiple reason & be picked up twice, which is fine. Deletions where the reason given is incorrectly specified or not of those listed or not given will not be picked up, unless we sorted and checked everything. Sometimes an edit will tag as A7, and the deleting admin will see copyvio or nonsense and simply change the reason to that--this does not pick up such cases either. But if you only look at the original tagging, it won't pick up the changed ones. This is just a first sample. DGG ( talk ) 23:56, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

Barnstar

		The Original Barnstar
		For being consistently active in all sorts of deletion discussions, and keeping an entire segment of Misplaced Pages running smoothly, even if we don't always agree. Keep it up! –Juliancolton |  05:10, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Double voting on DRV

Matthew Watson

Dear DGG I notice you contributed to the debate about Matthew Watson and his deletion. I think you made some factual errors in your contribution which have since been requoted on the deletion review for the article. Misplaced Pages:Deletion review/Log/2009 November 21#Matthew Watson

Would you consider clarifying or reviewing you position?

With articles on academics, if DGG can't find a reason to keep the article, then in my experience, there's none to be found.—S Marshall Talk/Cont 20:28, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

You argued with respect to Matthew Watson "Delete: Two articles and a book is not notability."

I think this is substantially wrong - Watson has Two single authored books published by leading publishers, around 30 articles - some in key journals.

You also state "Few Assistant professors are notable"

This is not appropriate as Watson is now a full professor.

User: Abductive suggested I should contact you to see if your concerns had been met.

I have worked more on the article on a page in my user space User:Msrasnw/Matthew Watson but would like it restored but I have been unable to gain any support for this due to what I think has been miss-information. Best wishes anyway (Msrasnw (talk) 00:32, 22 November 2009 (UTC))

Many thanks for you help and advice! (Msrasnw (talk) 01:05, 22 November 2009 (UTC))

I'm always willing to reconsider, and to fix errors I make. As for your draft, try making it less promotional and I'll look again. First step is to cut back, way back, on section one. This is not the place to argue his theories. . "This approach Watson and Higgot argue is increasing in its practioners." is not acceptable in a Misplaced Pages article. If you're going to use Krugman etc. as references, make sure they say something specific about Watson, and give the page numbers Then, it might help to eliminate your section 3.1 and 3.2 as neither of them is significant. An additional suggestion is removing the adjectives of praise. DGG ( talk ) 04:52, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

Might ..

you be able to fix the name of the Faraday article to the full name (if you agree that is appropriate)? Beyond my skill set, I'm afraid.--Epeefleche (talk) 03:43, 25 November 2009 (UTC)

will do, once it gets kept. DGG ( talk ) 03:46, 25 November 2009 (UTC)

tx.--Epeefleche (talk) 04:17, 25 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanks

I created resource room, and appreciate your help in making sure it wasn't deleted my a newbie who seems to be trigger happy (a self-described "deletionist"). Also, I did read your note on the fact that it needs to be expanded, but I am new to this, and want to make sure it is done right. Just when I lose my faith in this site, a person like you comes and makes sure good articles stay!

Jim Steele (talk) 19:18, 25 November 2009 (UTC)

It is messages like your's that help me keep my own faith that my work here is worth the effort it takes. DGG ( talk ) 20:15, 25 November 2009 (UTC)

Academic sources for short stories

Perhaps I can recruit your expertise for my help, if you have the time that is. I am currently editing a page on one of J.D. Salinger's most famous short stories, A Perfect Day for Bananafish. Not only do I have a decent amount of verfiable resources at my disposal, let's just say I have a personal investment in this subject. I'm doing my best to edit this article but another person is deleting my comments (of which there is no reason for, at least for which I can find via WP labyrinthine policies). Can you help? I don't know what to do here and don't want an edit war. There seems to be enough of those already around here... Jim Steele (talk) 01:50, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

I gave a starting hint for you on the talk p. there. It helps in these discussions not to refer to whether the other person understands or not, just to what is supported by the reference; it should be possible to do this without saying anything negative. Fortunately, there is enough criticism on salinger that you should be able to document--don't just use the handbooks, use the actual academic literature also. The key policy is that content is decided by consensus, which is not quite the same thing as argument, but if not resolved, you ask for another opinion. See WP:DR. You've asked me, I'll keep track. Unlike some topics people try to ask me about, I do know the story. DGG ( talk ) 05:07, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the help. I think the article is getting better, I'm glad I've got an analysis section started and some good references. For some reason there's someone, an angry poster, who is just reverting every post. The problem with posts regarding literary criticism is that if the reader doesn't understand the story in the first place (and I don't think this reverter does) it's hard to reason with him. I mean, he's asking me to cite how Bessie plays an important role in Franny and Zooey, and the dialogue between her and Zooey IS the story Zooey.

Jim Steele (talk) 21:15, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

Something you may be able to shed light on

Misplaced Pages:Reliable sources/Noticeboard#BYU Studies. _matic 00:25, 28 November 2009 (UTC)

disney

Because there is like the exact same list at List_of_Disney_theatrical_animated_features, therefore, that whole page of Walt Disney Animated Classics is simply not needed. IAmTheCoinMan (talk) 20:04, 28 November 2009 (UTC)

You are correct in your judgment of what was wrong, but we deal with that situation not by deletion but by redirecting the less complete page to the more complete page, and there can then if necessary be a discussion to find consensus for what the title should be. Looking at them. List_of_Disney_theatrical_animated_features, is indeed a little more complete in terms of explanation, so I did the redirect--since it is after all pretty obvious. DGG ( talk ) 20:10, 28 November 2009 (UTC)

Will you have another look at the talkpage of R1a?

See latest results: , .--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 07:06, 30 November 2009 (UTC)

Please read the replies to your latest posts. Please do not go yet.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 19:32, 30 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for taking the time to look again. Wondering what you think of this proposal: --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 12:31, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

User:Kurtd71

Dave, you might want to keep an eye on this user. He or she has been very combative in comments on my talk page regarding spam articles that have been speedied. Thanks. Hope you're doing well. - Realkyhick (Talk to me) 08:09, 30 November 2009 (UTC)

commented there; if further help is needed, let me know. DGG ( talk ) 19:43, 30 November 2009 (UTC)

Adam Lyons

Hey DGG, I responded about your concerns about Adam Lyons on the AfD page. My question is on a slightly different topic- basically about 5 users that voted delete have been blocked now for being sockpuppets and I was wondering if there was any procedure like removing their votes or adding a tag to their votes so an admin who doesn't know they have all been blocked can take that into consideration. I have mentioned it in my lengthy comment, but I don't know if there is anything else that should be done. DRosin (talk) 10:52, 30 November 2009 (UTC)

I normally handle it by striking the vote with <s></s> and adding a <small>comment saying the user was blocked for sock puppetry. --ThaddeusB (talk) 22:01, 30 November 2009 (UTC)

Re: donations

Dear David, You have always been such a wise sage on Wiki matters. Perhaps you can enlighten me on this topic. I have been a loyal supporter of Wiki, with previous donations. But the jump from $6M in 2008 to $7.5M this year puzzled me. In the current recessive financial climate, a 25% increase reminds people of those insensitive fat cats on Wall St. I went to the donation page and clicked "discussion" to voice my opinion, but there seems to be no place to add text. They only publish the glowing praises and eagerness to donate. What do you think? EJ --EJohn59 (talk) 18:05, 30 November 2009 (UTC)

There are several measure of efficiency that might give an idea: (all this is purely unofficial; anyone who wants to correct it should simply do so)

A year ago we were usually 8th in Alex; now we are 6th

There are about 14 million articles in all the Wikipedias combined, and probably an equal number of pictures. That's about $0.25 per article or picture per year. In terms of items added, we add worldwide about 2 million items a year -- about $4 an item to both add it, deal with all future updates, and make it permanently available. The cost per article in an open access scientific journal like PLOS is about $3000.

In 2006, apparently the market value of the operation if it were to run advertisements was about $580 million ,. It is probably at least 2 or 3 times that today.

I work about 20-40 hours a week on Misplaced Pages. By my guess, about 100 people at the English Misplaced Pages do so also, and an equal number at the others. That's 150 full time equivalents. There's probably about twice the work form people who work about half as much. and at least twice that additional from the other regular contributors. Counting only these groups, that's about $40 million worth of contributed labor.

The WMF has 27 employees. The total budget is spent 1/3 on wages, 1/3 on computer costs, and 1/3 on general operations. The computer costs would be higher except for donated services here also.

The additional cost in computer needs is a measure of our importance. The additional cost otherwise is a measure of our growing professionalism and increasing standards. My estimate is that for current scale of operation, and style of working, the proper budget should be about double; it would take us a few years to adsorb that grown.

If you want to comment, give them $1 and add your comment; they are all recorded and available. DGG ( talk ) 20:14, 30 November 2009 (UTC)

Thank you David. I donated $20 and voiced my concern, which is basically one of timely sensitivity. EJ--EJohn59 (talk) 01:51, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

Auto-Archiving (again)

The ANI thread that I set-up fell off again. I'm hesitant to restore it for a third time, thoughts? GainLine ♠ _♥ 22:38, 30 November 2009 (UTC)

Talkback

Gthanson (talk) 22:52, 30 November 2009 (UTC)

Talkback

ContinueWithCaution (talk) 23:47, 30 November 2009 (UTC)

The Legend of the Emerald Lady

Was there really a consensus reached that every Nancy Drew book is notable? I'm kind of amazed--can you point me to where this was decided, if it's not too much trouble?Prezbo (talk) 03:12, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

all such series seem to be. The problem is basically that they are all notable enough to warrant a section of an article, and there are so many of them, that it would be a very long article. Misplaced Pages seems to deal with most such things by making a separate article for each. It is quite possibly the case that there might actually be reviews for every single one of them, & you should check on that with a good children's librarian & not rule it out until you have actually searched. There are a great many more such articles. The last attempt to open discussion on this is at , and did not get a response. In any case they would not warrant deletion, for the very least that would be appropriate is redirect to a list of them, by WP:BEFORE and WP:Deletion policy. . Probably it is better to start a general discussion somewhere, and try to get a consensus to merge these until somebody actually wants to work on an individual title. Let me know when it starts. DGG ( talk ) 03:27, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

Adamantius (journal)

Dear DGG,

I have just, belatedly, managed to locate the deletion review for this article. Your comments are excellent. It is beyond my expertise to evaluate Excellence for Research in Australia or their methods, but I do trust yours on such matters. I'd love to know just a little more about the clues that have shaped your opinion if ever you have a few minutes.

Some quote from you that get my hearty "aye aye":

• "consensus of reasonable opinion" -- that's the standard! :)
• "Whether something is technically peer-reviewed is not always the determining factor" -- so true! There's psuedo-review and great professional editing, just as you say.

Personally, I'm not entirely sure about an article on the journal myself, all I've been concerned about is the way a speedy got rid of it because I wasn't around, then a hopelessly inadequate discussion was closed as though it were adequate. That's lip-service to what is not an unreasonable procedure in theory. It's a serious matter if people, with good intentions no doubt, still undermine a procedure by making it too easy. No big deal regarding Adamatius, but it can be done regarding more serious articles also. That's an issue we should all care about.

My thoughts on Adamantius:

• I'm working on the Song of Songs. The earliest Christian commentary (a huge one) on SoS is due to Origen. So I find myself in need of secondary sources on Origen. Adamantius came to my attention very quickly as a published forum for Origen research. For me it is an index, and a review journal, and so it is for other academics. That need not make it so for Wiki. Wiki can only accept what can be pretty easily defended against all comers on grounds that need to be fairly intuitive.
• I'm afraid the only major theological index I have access to is ATLA (impecunious old me). Their three criteria for incorporation of serials (rather like your own) are broad enough to accept "strong professional editing". Can't remember where I read it now, but Adamantius accepts only papers by it members (all professional academics, all published in the journal). I believe they do accept some outside papers, but only from equivalently qualified experts. One prominent academic, at least, lists his contribution to Adamantius on his CV. I noticed an Adamantius review quoted at Amazon or on the fly-leaf of a book somewhere.
• The thing is, baby researchers like me are hungry for bibliographies, we can spend ages groping around to find out basics concerning a journal and its affiliations; or, if we're lucky, we find a kind academic whose listed such stuff on her staff bio page, or, better still we find a Wiki page with a bunch of links (including other Wiki users interested in the subject area): bingo!

Ultimately, I don't particularly care too much about Adamantius, but I do care very much about regular editors expanding their understanding of what Wiki can achieve and why processes were originally set up the way they were. Second generationism is a real phenomenon.

Anyway, that'll do for now. Very, very best regards to you. I've seen your excellent work all over Wiki. Please, please, please keep it up! We all have so much to learn from you. Cheerio, Alastair Haines (talk) 14:43, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

It's not the Adamantius may not be an excellent thing. (I read one of the article myself while I was examining it, as I too find the field of some avocational interest.) But it really partakes a little too much of an informal professional newsletter. Many newsletters do serve the purposes of current awareness for new articles in specialized fields I'm perfectly willing to reconsider how we deal with them--I know of a number in various fields that might justify Misplaced Pages articles if we worked at establishing it. I've used a few of them myself--online and even print-- at various times--in at least one case the only reason I stopped was that it ceased. This sort of publication is obviously going to be even more common in the web than it was previously. It is also going to be even easier to have totally unimportant ones, as with any web publication. But even in print there are an amazing number of them, not just from academic groups, formal and informal, but essentially every organization in the world, from block associations on up. they have the same function for current awareness and news. They have been a very difficult type of publication for libraries to deal with in print--librarians tended to be very reluctant to treat them seriously because of the work entailed. I went to considerable trouble to try to maintain files of some specialized ones in ornithology, a specialty of my department. So I do understand.

the problem is NOT DIRECTORY. The AfD came at a rather bad time, where we are trying hard & over some objections to establish the notability of at least all the journals that are in major indexes). I am going to admit that strategic considerations were a part of it: I thought it advisable to very clearly show that i thought some journals non-notable. I know we really shouldn't use such strategic factors in AfD, but in practice we do, both pro and con. I do have a solution to the Directory problem-- a part of Misplaced Pages called something like WIKIPEDIA TWO for such borderline items in all subjects: it would hold the sort of local and special-interest material that we currently do not accept in Misplaced Pages, and thus satisfy the inclusionists, and also take the borderline material of the same sort that we do include, satisfying the deletionists. It would differ from Wikia in holding to WP:V, and being free from advertisements and promotionalism. the world does need a good Directory and perhaps the sport of people who work here are well situated to make one as a natural by-product of the work on the encyclopedia. DGG ( talk ) 20:08, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

If you want to know about deletion, follow David around. Whenever I come across his opinions, and they differ from mine, It still annoys me a little, and makes me wonder if I'm not really the one who is wrong. (usualy, I still stand by my opinion, but his judgement and experience strongly influenced me as a devoloping editor). Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 15:29, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

Please be aware of the discussion at Misplaced Pages:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents#User:Alastair Haines attempting to circumvent deletion process. As usual, your contributions would be valuable. --Orange Mike | Talk 18:58, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

Sorry DGG, I've been very slow to return and digest your thought-provoking reply.

Strategy is my concern here too, I will admit also. My strategy concerns people overestimating the reliability (and hence finality) of various processes, like deletion, but not just that one. But, like you, it's not just strategy here for me either.

I'm very committed to the WP:Academic journals project (at least in my heart), I create stubs regularly, and they seem to last. 90% of what people can regularly use regarding a journal can go into the info box, but producing that is only 5% of the work. If I knew that dumping Adamantius would directly lead to accepting 50 other journals, I might consider some other course of action, but I'm not sure that's how things would actually work.

For your enjoyment, if you've not read this already, I was somewhat relieved to find the Australian Research Council methodology was layed out clearly and not so very bad as I feared. In fact, there are a number of things I like about it. Here's their report on the journal ranking process.

Unless I'm mistaken, there are four tiers of review: the ARC expert staff, professional academies, select professional research experts (and I doubt that means a mere handful of easily available or not-too-busy academics), and--in some ways most impressively to my thinking--they had a public review phase also.

Contrast: ARC methodology gives Adamantius top 15% (after a year-long process) v. Wiki methodology gives SALT (in less than 24 hours).

Conclusion: I'm not sure best strategy is appeasement, instead of peace in our time, we might lose Poland. ;)

PS I had a little something published in the Review of Biblical Literature, which I note the ARC system rated at C (Journal of Biblical Literature is A*). If I had something published in Adamantius, that would help my chances of government support: it would be a step up.

Something seems right about that. Those Italians are somebodies, I'm nobody. Cheers friend. Alastair Haines (talk) 15:21, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

Nobody thinks deletion is really reliable. I estimate that about 5-10% of the keeps are for articles that probably should not be kept, and about 10-20% of the deletions for articles that could be kept or merged. Those much less willing to preserve content than I might put it at 10% in both directions: I do not think anyone would claim better than a 10% error rate. It should be under 5%, which is typically the best one can get for open processes like this. When people ask me if an article will survive deletion I will usually say at most, "this article will almost certainly pass AfD, but AfD is to some extent unpredictable and a matter of chance about who appears for the discussion and who closes it." There have been various suggestions for improving it, and I think the most effective approach is increasing the number of people without strong feelings on a particular article or topic who appear. We've done one modest improvement I & others have advocated for years: increasing the time from 5 to 7 days. And there's a few others: the increased frequency of relists, the frequent arguments for WP:BEFORE.

I am aware of the details of the Australian ranking system, and in fact know some of the people involved in it. I consider it highly susceptible to a strong feeling from any one prominent academic, regardless of the amount of bureaucracy that surrounds it. As you say, the purpose, identical to that of most such schemes, is to decide on the allotment of government funds to universities by seeing whether the journals in which they publish are good or not. This gives a conceivable motive for doing that, which I think makes it invalid for even that purpose, let alone other use. I know nothing in the literature--even the unpublished report literature on bibliometrics found at SIGMETRICS--to support its validity.

The reason it was salted was because of the altogether improper way you tried to re-introduce it under variant names. Doing this made dealing with the fundamental merits impossible. I have however found data that would support inclusion--In addition to WorldCat, I looked at Zeitschriftendatenbank (ZDB) , and found 16 libraries in Germany-- Germany is noted for good library coverage of theology. Suggestion: wait a bit, rewrite emphasizing all the library holdings using not this but the other libraries, such as the a similar number in Italy and France. The place to start is the marvelous federated search engine at Karlsruhe Virtual Catalogue, . Hints for using it: select libraries by small groups--it times out otherwise without doing them all; select the longest timeout available--your time zone shouldn't be a period of overload there; do not use the All Fields search box--some of the catalogs included here do not support it. Do it in user space & let me know--in January. DGG ( talk ) 18:35, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

The Tomorrow Code

I was surprised that you declined the above Speedy Deletion nomination.

The book is by an author who has no article, and although it may be in over 700 libraries Worldwide, about 600 of them are in the U.S.

Before putting this up for SD, I looked into it, and found:

• 3 Google Scholar hits - all from publishers of the book
• 1 hit on Google Books - stating that this is the author's debut book - and Kirkus Reviews (who published the review) publish their reviews 2-4 months prior to publication - and it was only published a year ago from what I can see (originally 28 Oct 2008, reprinted 28 Jul 2009)
• 0 Google News hits
• 0 Google News Archive hits

Looking at Google Web Search, a lot of the hits (I'll be honest, I only looked at the first couple of hundred or so) were mainly publisher sites, shop sites, etc.

Reading though WP:N and WP:NB, I can't see any mention that a sign of notability is the book being in more than 700 libraries in the world!

I am just curious to know your reasoning behind declining the SD - not that I'm saying that it is incorrect, but I do not feel that the stated reason is sufficient.

Regards, -- PhantomSteve/talk|contribs\ 19:40, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

It was proposed deletion, not speedy.-- it wouldn't have been eligible for speedy. I'm glad you found the review in Kirkus. Kirkus is a selective book reviewing service, intended mainly for libraries. Like most book reviews of consumer-market books, they are prepared from proof copy so that libraries that decide whether they want to buy the book can have it on the shelf as soon as published. (The NYT does just the same). Apparently 700 of them decided to. I'm not a children's librarian, so that indicates a rather high demand. given that the author is from New Zealand, and that the book is set there, I'd say that the 600 or so from the US (or Canada) indicates an internationally known book, much more than if mainly NZ libraries had bought it. Kirkus is wrong, though, that it's his only book. It's his only one published in the U (by Random house, a major publisher). WorldCat shows 4 earlier ones, but they have less than 100 holdings, almost entirely in NZ--and so they are not notable. I very definitely do not think all children's books notable. Most are not. DGG ( talk ) 23:20, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

Thank you for explaining your reasoning (and incidently, I noticed after I left my message that it was a PROD not SD, but forgot to change my comment here!). Although I am not 100% sure that this book should be included in Misplaced Pages, your reasoning also means that I am not 100% sure that it should not be - so I am inclined to leave it here! However, I will be keeping an eye on the article and if it's not been expanded (and if I can't find suitable sources to do such expanding myself) in a few weeks, I will consider taking it to AfD. -- PhantomSteve/talk|contribs\ 08:17, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

Scama school

Hi regarding my nomination of deletion of this advert..Skema it is you say notable but needs a lot of work, would you please point me in the right direction.. this is from the talkpage there...posted by the creator of the article ..."Hi, I'm sorry. I have created the web page for my school... just because it didn't exist. By lack of time, I used official texts indeed produced by the school." I see an advert, fro a paid school, is the level of notability in paid schools very low? I don't want to waste my time, nominating, how low is the guideline, the corner shop down my lane with a utube link and a twitter...I see you are at least making a couple of edits there...so lets see how it grows, regards Off2riorob (talk) 22:08, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

I did the first round of cleanup-- look at the way I edited this--my "couple of edits" removed the 3/4 of the article that was advertising. It is a university level business school, awarding graduate degrees--at least one of its two components certainly did--and all such are invariably notable. By paid, you probably mean "for profit", but For profit and not for profit schools are handled the same way; in any case this claims to be a nonprofit one. E The exception to presumed notability is trade schools that are not at university level and do not award degrees. If the shop in the corner is of this size, it might well be notable, so by all means try to look for references. But first you might try helping out this article by looking yourself for references, per WP:BEFORE. They should have been put in byu the first editor, of course, and he has been reminded of this & it's on my list to follow up. I take a very strong course in deleting or trimming promotional articles. I've deleted a few today already,and I'm just getting started. DGG ( talk ) 22:18, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

G11, thanks, perhaps I should become a bit more inclusionist, I see something like that and its not that I want to delete it, but I want to see the money. I had a look at the search and added a template, there are a few independent citations, thanks for the advice. Off2riorob (talk) 22:23, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

A note

Hi David. I haven't had many occasions to interact with you of late, but I wanted to express my appreciation for your good work on the encyclopedia. Take care and enjoy your holidays. ChildofMidnight (talk) 21:52, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

RE: good idea

Thanks, I'm glad you like it. Feel free to use it as much as you like, just so long as you change the link from my talk page to yours (heh, heh) . Kind regards, Spitfire 19:29, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

yes that was a temptation; it would shorten my talk page considerably, especially if I did it with all my similar messages as well, DGG ( talk ) 19:34, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

Question from Grsz

Hey David, thanks for commenting on my RfA, which I have just withdrawn. I was wondering if you could clarify what you meant in your comment; I am unsure how my response to Question 7 is off-base with regards to policy. Thanks, Grsz 01:25, 6 December 2009 (UTC)

I need to apologize about this, for I was really responding not just to that question, but the general approach to BLP/AFD. And this too was influenced by the weird coincidence of the same problems with several closely timed RfAs. For that particular article (David Shankbone), even the admin who closed the DRV & sustained the AfD close, said the closer at the AfD should not have closed it. I'm not going to repeat my strong opposition to both closes, and my view that both were outrageous misstatements of policy. (the only reason the matter was not taken further was the realization that it was embarrassing DS, but I don't think either admin would pass an RfA if they had to run again). Had I been asked about that particular AfD in a situation like yours', i would have replied "please pick another example--that one was too much involved with wikipolitics". So, yes, my response was unfair and too brief. However, the other issues raised were equally my concern, and no doubt i would have gone back and expanded my comment if there had been time, even had you not asked--I usually do realize when I've said something unfair, & return to modify or explain. If I thought it would have made any difference to the RfA I would now ask you to un-withdraw, or ask a bureaucrat to do so--if, for example, others had followed my lead. But as you see the general feeling was pretty clear, that you needs some more experience in wording things both in terms of accuracy and tone. DGG ( talk ) 03:19, 6 December 2009 (UTC)

Thanks a lot for the response. I do understand that that was not the best example to use. Do you feel I was on the right line with the weight given to arguments, or is there an more appopriate way to break a wiki-tie, in your opinion? I mean, if I gauge your opinion correctly (and forgive me if I'm wrong) but you feel that all "no consenus"es default as a keep, but is there leeway for a closing admin to consider the weight of each side? Grsz 03:39, 6 December 2009 (UTC)

the basic principle of consensus is to continue discussing until there is a resolution. When there is no clear consensus , it often helps to close as no consensus and try again in a month, especially with something that becomes emotional or gets involved with side issues. People often do better the next time around. For an example of discussions which do continue until consensus is reached, look at AN/I. (It has some other problems, but it does generally reach a consensus, be it right or wrong).

I disagree with admins making decisions on content issues. Our only role is to execute what the community wants us to do. We just need to determine what it is that they want. (When we decide by speedy, we're essentially assuming that we are sure what the community would say, and the CSD criteria are limited to those where we reasonably can do that.) At AfD, we do two things only: we remove the views of those who are not really in the community, such as sockpuppets and SPAs, and we discount arguments clearly not based on policy, such as ILIKEIT, under the assumption that the community wants those not counted. Most of the time, it's pretty clear. What we should not do is weigh one argument against another, or decide which of two conflicting policies that have been cited should rule. If the people there disagree on things like that, then they disagree. I know many admins do these things, and I will always vote to overturn at deletion review when that is the basis for a decision--even if I personally like the decision.

It is not "my opinion" that no consensus defaults to a keep for all articles, it's policy. Attempts to change it have repeatedly failed. Asserting otherwise is the sort of non-policy based argument that should be discarded, as an instance of IDIDN'THEARTHAT. There's a minority of people who think it should be policy, and that question can be re-discussed every year or so, out of the context of an individual case. I see their basic argument as not trusting the community to have a clear consensus when something should be deleted, & I think that incompatible with the basic way Misplaced Pages works. But they have the right to argue otherwise. Some of these people , though, seem to think the way to get it adopted is to boldly assert it at all opportunities, hoping we will get used to the idea through hearing it a lot. That's a propaganda technique, based on the assumption that the rest of us are fools. When I give a !vote on the basis that something ought to be policy, I say so, because the policies can be changed, and one of the ways of doing so is through repeated consistent decisions on individual cases. But for me as an admin to close that way, would be unequivocally wrong. If it were that clear, the community would have said so. If those at the AfD cannot decide what to do, we are not to decide for them. There's a very good reason for that: there are over 700 active admins, each with their own individual idea of what ought to be policy.

There is a role for admin discretion in deletion debates, which is why admins need to be sensible people as much as to have experience at Misplaced Pages: we use discretion in deciding if some opinion has no basis in policy,; we use discretion in deciding whether consensus is clear enough; we use discretion in saying whether a decision is so wrong it must be reversed; we use discretion in deciding whether to salt. And there is an occasional AfD once every few months where we must use discretion to say that IAR is necessary for the protection of the encyclopedia or for avoiding insoluble conflicts or to reach an obviously desirable end. DGG ( talk ) 04:39, 6 December 2009 (UTC)

AN

Courtesy notification. You were involved here and is now being discussed here http://en.wikipedia.org/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard#Defying_an_AFD_decision Suomi Finland 2009 (talk) 00:59, 8 December 2009 (UTC)

over something other than Fiction. last thing I would have expected. DGG ( talk ) 01:04, 8 December 2009 (UTC)

The policy question is unresolved (what is the correct process). However, we've swept all conflict away as now I'll just notify people. Whether they want to re-create the article now that merge is off the table is up to them . Suomi Finland 2009 (talk) 01:32, 8 December 2009 (UTC)

There is indeed a larger issue, though ANB is not the place to discuss it. . We have 2 contradictory practices: that merges and redirects are matters for normal editing, and not questions of deletion, but on the other hand they are among the possible closes for an AfD, discussed during afds, and very often resorted to as compromises. We try to accommodate this with the basic current rule is that a AfD decision can give a very strong but not binding recommendation of a merge or redirect. The key reason why that rule does make some sense is that a merge or redirect can be reverted by any editor, and an admin has no special prerogative for it. However, it not infrequently happens that someone pursues the obviously unfair tactic of trying to remove material when they know they could not get consensus for deletion by first merging, and then removing the material. Trying to do this is not editing in good faith, and if we have no specific rule against it, then IAR is certainly applicable. However, for one person to try to delete, and another to edit out the material not in the context of the original AfD can be in perfectly good faith as it was here. We still need to deal with the basic problem--not that I have any idea except to centralizing all contested merge and redirect discussions, which would essentially double the AfD-type work and is not at all an ideal solution DGG ( talk ) 01:47, 8 December 2009 (UTC)

Thank you for your insight. I have no problem with West Baltimore but am satisfied that you see that there is a potential manipulation problem, possibly more in fiction. As long as we act nicely and fairly, Misplaced Pages is for the better. If a few of us are aware that manipulation can exist, then Misplaced Pages is also for the better. Suomi Finland 2009 (talk) 02:13, 8 December 2009 (UTC)

		The Discussion Barnstar
		Awarded to DGG for calm discussion to try to resolve a policy and practical matter and bringing up astute observations to help others have a deeper understanding of Misplaced Pages Suomi Finland 2009 (talk) 02:15, 8 December 2009 (UTC)

collaborative work systems vs collaborative working systems

Thanks for adding the proper tag. The content of the article is based on the notion of a Collaborative Work Systems which is described in the literature as such. I have no objection to changing the name to Collaborative working system if that is within the Google scholar literature review however I did made two searches one for each proposed designation and indeed I notice the term "collaborative work" is much more consistent accross the literature so I propose to stick to the original name "collaborative work systems". As for the proposed merge with "Collaborative Working Environments" that is precisely the reason I have wrote this article in the first place: both notions are different. A "collaborative working environment" is a concept that emereges from a different research point of view, centered in the individual work of professionals that become e-professionals because they perform their work (e-work) within a networked environment, using not only collaborative software, but also videoconferencing systems which are not necessarily software-based. The concept of a collaborative work system on the other hand, is related to the organizational context of the work that occurs whenever two or more individuals collaborate for a given purpose. So the focus is not on the type of computer support to that work, but instead to the non-computer variables that affect that quality of work. It is important that one reads Beyond Teams, to see the difference on perspectives. Also, one needs to admit that a whole series of books dedicated to "Collaborative Work Systems" is sufficiently worth of having such a concept explained in wikipedia, independently of other related notions. Nunesdea (talk) 22:11, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

A key reason to not use "work" is because of the name of a company that was mentioned in the original article, Collaborative Work Systems. The article was marked for attention as an advertisement for the company, which is how I happened to see it, and indeed many spam articles are written in exactly that fashion--using the title does give such impression, even when another company is mentioned as well. (In any case Misplaced Pages always uses the singular as a mater of style: system, not systems; environment, not environments. As another matter of style, Misplaced Pages removes capitals in phrases that are not proper names--that too gives an impression of being promotional.--if not for a company, at least for the concept--just went through the CWS article & did this--I didn't have time yesterday.) As for the merge of the two articles, the explanation you give here seems a little clearer than you give in the articles. I have looked at the articles listed in the see also, and I see the same attempt to make many articles out of what are overlapping contexts. I would very strongly advise you to concentrate on fewer but stronger articles of substantial length, rather than one of each possible subdivision of the concept. We're an encyclopedia, not a dictionary. Myself, every setting I have ever been in, from kindergarden on, seems to meet the definition of a collaborative work system--they all of them were consciously designed to facilitate the functioning through group interaction, and I think this applies to anyone not a hermit. I admit I am not an expert, tho. To an nonexpert, both articles read like jargon. And I do not see how " "System" has a self explanatory power " -- "system" is such an extremely general word that the application of it will usually suggest jargon, not explanation, unless there is some specific meaning which will not be obvious. DGG ( talk ) 01:05, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

I want to establish a mutual purpose among us, as I also want to preserve Misplaced Pages from being devalued. However for that reason we should stick primarily to scientific arguments as valid reason to nominate an article. There are a lot of literature published within the field of "collaborative work systems", too bad it is also the name of a small company. On the other hand the concept of a "system" always subsumes an "environment" so I would have "environment" as an element of a "system" and would include the notion of collaborative working environments within the notion of "collaborative work system" this being the main article. Also concerning the CSCW (computer-supported cooperative work) definition (which is nowdays abriged as computer supported collaboration) the notion of a "collaborative work system" (CWS) can be a useful concept as it explains the non-computer based part of collaboration.Nunesdea (talk) 02:27, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

. In ordinary language, envirnment and system can sometimes be synonyms: the rule set, formal and informal, of Misplaced Pages forms a system, and also defines the working environment in which we edit. To me, so far as there is a distinction, they're inherently pair, aspects of each other. A system is meaningless in the total abstract and an environment is not worth talking about until there is something in it. Environments and systems exist inside one another, and any of the levels can be regarded as either. As a hierarchy, the parts of a computer form a system, and exist within the real or virtual office environment which requires certain functions of it; this environment is itself a system, which exists within the larger environment of a business organization, which itself is a system that exists within the environment of the whole economy, which.... In terms more natural to me, the early earth existed before there were living beings, and formed the environment in which living systems arose, but the biogeochemical systems the organisms established created new environments, in which further systems evolved, eventually getting us where we are. What you say makes sense to you, but not to me, although I can understand it, by thinking in what I consider an artificial context. But it does not matter how you or I look at it, but how the literature does--and since this is a general and not a scholarly encyclopedia, it's how both the popular and the scientific literature look at it--and you need sources not supporting only your view, but a search to find those that support opposing views also or that reject this formulation. that's call NPOV. We write to=not to advocate a theory, but to explain it.

The academic students of management may have their own vocabulary for all this, and use words in special meanings. But a vocabulary of this sort is not natural language, and is apt to sound like impenetrable and unnecessary jargon to those outside it. If you're going to use it, you have to define the universe within which it is applicable, and you're going to have to prove, not assert, that it is well established and how it differs from the general use of the English language. In the Misplaced Pages environment -- or system-- articles that are not clear to ordinary readers tend to be nominated for deletion, and science has very little to do with it. Some fields' jargon is accepted by people here more easily than others, and as a fact of life here, however much you or I may deplore it, it's only fair that I advise you that there tends to be very limited patience with the applied social sciences DGG ( talk ) 03:40, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

Death of a source

Did you see the latest on Kirkus Reviews? A pity. _matic 22:58, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

Nikolai Bezroukov

Nikolai Bezroukov Hi Dgg, did you see this I added the search template and there was some primary stuff but little or no third party reliable sources. Off2riorob (talk) 23:31, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

I hadn't seen the noticeboard; when you have done a search & found nothing, say what you;ve checked in the prod or AfD nomination, so others know where to start looking (& give you credit for how well you work). I now know to check the academic databases. If I cant find something either, I'll send it to AfD. In general, for open source figures, AfD is preferable because someone is likely to notice & there are always debates about what counts as a RS in this subject. (As it happens, I already found a prominent person's extremely negative response to one of his papers, --it's weird in a way that criticism like that might make one notable, but .... . I'll keep checking. ). DGG ( talk ) 01:32, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

Ta,for the advice as to search and tag so to speak. Perhaps he is borderline notable, I noticed this in the article.... Right now Bezroukov is more interested in eCommerce security, Perl and so-called "Orthodox File Managers" (Midnight Commander, etc.), a term he coined. ..a claim that it was him that coined the expression midnight commander..but if you go to the midnight commander article he is not mentioned. Off2riorob (talk) 12:25, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

that last criterion, of whether he is in a Misplaced Pages article, is unreliable in both directions. first, when someone does write a spammy COI article about themselves, it is quite usual for them to add themselves to some or all possibly relevant subject articles also. Second, our writing of subject articles is normally pretty sketchy and does usually not include all possibly notable contributors. For a n example, many more people are notable for having worked on DNA than those few famous people mentioned in the DNA article. His field is very tricky, and the decisions on who does and does not get kept have a tendency to seem less than straightforward to those not involved in the subject. I'm only very slightly involved, I think but am not sure I've seen him mentioned, and the only way is to do what one can and then, if not satisfied, take it to AfD. DGG ( talk ) 15:44, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

No worries, wel give him some time to develop, regards. Off2riorob (talk) 16:52, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

Paul H. Lewis

I don't think this professor passes WP:notability (academics). Being a full professor doesn't guarantee notability, unless he is a distinguished professor of has a named chair. He looks like an "average professor" to me. Maybe he is notable as an author per Misplaced Pages:Notability_(people)#Creative_professionals. Nonetheless, I added a notability tag to the article for now. Regards, PDCook (talk) 20:56, 13 December 2009 (UTC)

1/an "average professor" is an associate professor. Being a full professor does not guarantee notability, but there has not been a single full professor at a major research university that was deleted at AfD for three years now. Toulane is a research university, but it may not be of the very highest standard,so there is some question. It will depend who published his books, and whether they got substantial reviews and have substantial library holdings. Neither you nor I can tell from the very skimpy article, which is why I marked it for expansion. (In fact he might hold a distinguished professorship--the article is not adequate to about any aspect of his career. We should not assume inadequate articles = inadequate notability . I see quickly in Amazon eight book doing it properly g in worldCat, I see 12 plus his thesis, & 2 or 3 of the 12 have been translated into Spanish. The publishers are good ones in the subject including Prager and UNC Press. Some are all are pretty certain to have gotten significant reviews. This shows him as an expert, and meets both WP:PROF and WP:CREATIVE as an author. are essentially certain to get reviews. If nobody else adds them to the article, I will. But since you really should have checked before nominating, perhaps you will. Of course it was the authors;' responsibility in the first place, but we can;'t assume Misplaced Pages contributors are perfect; we need to help them and their articles. DGG ( talk ) 01:18, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

Joseph Schlessinger page (Again)

TrutherTruther seems to be back to editing the Schlessinger page once again - now as 'ScienceAndTruth'. The edits are the same - trying to push the horribly defamatory 'wikileaks' link once again. I have edited to remove the defamatory connections (hope that was appropriate), but am concerned that this will move in the same direction as before TrutherTruther was blocked from editing. Any advice?Hillhealth (talk) 07:51, 14 December 2009 (UTC) I just noticed that 'ScienceAndTruth' is actually also responsible for much of the defamatory material associated with the wikileaks link regarding Schlessinger (and other pretty outrageous postings on other sitesHillhealth (talk) 08:00, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

fixed. Next time notify me, please do not ever try to fix it yourself. DGG ( talk ) 18:40, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

OK - thanks. I shall not try to fix again.Hillhealth (talk) 23:38, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

Of librarians and Eguor admins

Hope you'll indulge a casual drive-by question. (Saw you comment on a matter at ANI, and followed the link here.)

If I begin with random praise about librarians, it may surely sound like sucking up, but I have little notches in my brain linking the concepts of librarian and "important acts for freedom." (e.g., Not that I'm a huge fan of Michael Moore's, but I always remember the librarians who made sure "Stupid White Men" was published at that time.)

Anyway, my question is do you think there is a (natural?) correlation between the values/temperament of librarians and Equor administrators?

(Feel free to ignore, tis the holiday season and surely you've much else to do, and perhaps you may already answered this somewhere, if so, a link would a blessing.) In any case, happy holidays and many blessings in the coming year. -- Proofreader77 (talk) 19:03, 15 December 2009 (UTC)

As a preliminary matter, yes, intellectual freedom and librarianship, at least in the US, are linked traditions. (It has been different elsewhere, such as the USSR.) But other people care equally--notably, most of the people who built up the web and free culture generally.

However, I wouldn't identify Misplaced Pages:Eguor admins with intellectual freedom specifically. Admins and other Wikipedians of all dispositions generally are almost all of us here because of our commitment to intellectual freedom in multiple ways--it's even one of our basic principles, as NOT CENSORED. The concept of Equor ( basically, anti-rogue ) is a little different--to use admin powers in a way that as careful and discreet, rather than heavy-handed and authoritarian. I do not actually agree with everything on that page--in one sense, adminship should indeed be regarded as a big deal, for the potential power of admins to harm Misplaced Pages is very great. But the point I have been trying to remind people of in recent weeks is that we do not exercise admin powers to express our view of what Misplaced Pages should be, but to enforce the consensus view of what Misplaced Pages should be. We don;t have to agree with it, but we cannot use the tools in opposition to it or regardless of it. I asked for the tools for two reasons originally: to check whether deleted articles could be rescued --with the community given another chance to decide if they were in fact rescuable, and to carry out the implied will of the community in removing ones that they obviously they would never support. Anything else I've done I've done incidentally--i will not pass over vandalism or disruption if I see it, but that's not what I go looking for (many others do, and they certainly should--we don't have to all emphasize the same things.) Unfortunately, all too many admins who work in all areas seem to regard themselves as infallible. They forget that we're not chosen for our great skill in policy--just the general knowledge of policy every active Wikipedian should have, but are needed primarily for having sound judgment and care in expressing it. DGG ( talk ) 03:42, 16 December 2009 (UTC)

Smiling. Beautiful. (Don't mean to be gushing.) My eyes water sometimes when I read things that make good sense—in an environment where it's clear that you know such "reasonable" perspective sometimes appears to be nonexistent. I care very much about "saying things well." In the holiday gift you have taken your time to give me, I have found beautiful fragments to savor. And wish the whole of your remarks was more representative of the rank of the bit than, sadly, it can ever be. My sincere thanks. (And see previous closing:-) Proofreader77 (talk) 03:57, 16 December 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, well said. The other key issue is (if one is entrusted with admin tools) is calming rather than inflaming heated debates, such as dealing to aggrieved editors who have blown a gasket. This is a key headache which needs looking at from time to time. Casliber (talk · contribs) 04:11, 16 December 2009 (UTC)

Well, I was completely satisfied with that beautiful exchange of gift and thanks, but then Casliber's comment "dragged me back in." :)

I guess my reaction in a nutshell is that most admins (present company excepted, by all means, if you wish exception) often seem to be the wrong animal to calm the waters — many believing there is only one species, and it's their kind. :-)

But I can only say that nut's worth after having written the below, which you can skim if you like, or just gaze across the waters. Cheers.
-- Proofreader77 (talk) 06:00, 16 December 2009 (UTC)

Nova Science

Dear Dr. Goodman!

I ask you to fix the Nova article; I tried my best today to bring it into a more objective and better shape.

Misplaced Pages is not the place for the gymnastics of publisher downgrading, if people have a grudge concerning a publisher, they should sort it directly with them in a civilised way.

Franz Weber —Preceding unsigned comment added by Franz weber (talk • contribs) 18:12, 16 December 2009 (UTC)

review bio please

DGG - would you review the bio at . I think everything is referenced and the verbiage has really been cut to the bone. I would welcome your further edits, if you would be so kind._{СДжП,ДС} 16:54, 17 December 2009 (UTC)

the difference between a CV and a Misplaced Pages biographical article, is that the CV includes everything possible, and an encyclopedia article focuses of the part that actually constitutes the notability. There'sstill a way to go. DGG ( talk ) 19:39, 17 December 2009 (UTC)

Is there any possibility that you could actually just fix this for me? This is the crux of the reason people shouldn't do their own bios. I acknowledge that. I need help, and someone to move it to prime time when done.

Also, I need an admin for a user called Platinumphotographer so I can get a photo uploaded to a page with his bio. I can't load the photo, and the system won't let him do it until he's a confirmed user. Can you confirm him so he can upload? He's done the ten edits. _{СДжП,ДС} 18:14, 18 December 2009 (UTC)

I will deal with the article; as for the photo, I cannot find the user account, either as one word, or as Platinum photographer. DGG ( talk ) 19:13, 18 December 2009 (UTC)

Thats ok, another admin did find it, and we were abel to get the photo up. Remember at CU, I asked you if the Founders and Senior Officers of Notable International Agencies are per se notable and you affirmed that they were? Please look at the discussion at ] (bios). They have really re-written my bio to take out most of what I ruly thought gave it notability, and then refused to move it a page. See my arguments re the FICS Medal, WP:ANYBIO, criterion 1, and also 2, these guys disagree. Can you help ?_{СДжП,ДС} 23:14, 22 December 2009 (UTC)

sorry for the delay. What I can say definitely is that the chief executives of major international organizations are always held to be notable. There is no formal policy to this effect, but if the organization is important enough they are always held to be Whether this extends to every agency with an article in Misplaced Pages is disputable, because some will be barely notable. I think one criterion for "major" would be the principal organization in a substantial area. I do not think there is really consensus for it being a general rule in every case. In general I think it might be best if they were assumed to be, but I doubt everybody agrees--there are always some people who say no such notability can be assumed. As for "Senior officers", this does not hold, and I certainly hope I didn't say it did--there is considerable difficulty in getting articles for anyone who is not the head of the organization, for anything much less important than , say , UNESCO. (for anyone who does not know, CU=the Nov. NYC meetup, at Columbia University). I've now revised the article, and asked some questions on its talk p. If you want to do the last two steps I mentioned there and put it in mainspace, go ahead, but do not be surprised if it will need defense at AfD. The community decides, not me. . DGG ( talk ) 01:22, 23 December 2009 (UTC)

POV tag

DGG, Cirt and I are agreed that the NPOV tag at Christian Apologetics and Research Ministry could be removed now. However, as you were the one who placed it, I did not want to remove it without your consent. Could you have a look whether the changes Cirt and I have made have addressed your original concerns? --JN466 21:12, 19 December 2009 (UTC)

Kabiru Ibrahim Gaya

I am slightly disturbed about a recent edit to this article, which is technically acceptable but seems unconstructive. You may want to comment at Misplaced Pages talk:WikiProject Nigeria#Update needed. Not important... Aymatth2 (talk) 02:50, 20 December 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for your input. I added some clarification of my concerns. I have been churning out a lot of these thumbnail bios lately, and would prefer not to see them all decorated in the same way. But it is not important - I will leave it and move on. Aymatth2 (talk) 16:25, 20 December 2009 (UTC)

Merging at AfD

Hello DGG. I've replied to your comment at User talk:EdJohnston#merging at afd. EdJohnston (talk) 03:39, 20 December 2009 (UTC)

I think the real issue, the broader issue, is the relationship of AfD to merging, about which there is no agreement (There are certainly n a number of proposals, at a number of different places, (for example, whether deletion review can revert a merge carried out as a consequence of an AfD closing), but I am not sure that any of them really represents agreement--and not just because there are different views about the desirability of particular issues it might affect, but because we simply don;t know how to handle this. I think I am going to propose a rather radical solution, which is to call AfD Articles for Discussion, and accept any solution there as within scope (more or less like the other XfDs)--in other words that AfD should have jurisdiction over contested merges. I'm not sure it will get the result I want for all the articles that I care about, but I think it's the most workable solution, that will cause the least work, confusion, duplication, and --especially-- the least opportunity for wikilawyering.

this particular part of the issue, how much changes can be made during an AfD, is a problem, because I can see the advantages of saying to never do it, to avoid confusion , and the advantages of taking any steps that will improve articles whenever we can do so. Different people have argued different ways, depending on what they want in a particular AfD. or type of afds--I am not sure how consistent anyone has been.

Enough background. specifically, I agree with your view of the matter, that most people support keeping the present state of discouraging it, to a similar extent or perhaps more so Where I disagree is that the change accomplishes it. ; I doubt whether it might not do the reverse. WHat I would like to do is to try to write something that accomplishes the goal you and i seem to agree on. Tomorrow, I hope. DGG ( talk ) 05:04, 20 December 2009 (UTC)

DGG, may I ask why you did not comment sooner? EdJohnston worked on the close for two weeks, including nearly a week rewriting the relevant paragraph. It appears that you reverted before preparing a justification. I see the broader WP:AfD and mergers topic as mostly irrelevant to this specific issue.

Regarding Articles for discussion, you may be interested in WT:Articles for deletion#Consolidation. Flatscan (talk) 06:37, 20 December 2009 (UTC)

I did comment early on--frankly, I regarded the need for change as so unlikely as not to need further attention. and so i lost sight of it. I appreciate your view that I have the ability to keep track of everything here. I do try , perhaps more than my actual capacity, and so I get to some things late, which is better than not at all. I think you are correct in your friendly reminder that I should pay more attention to policy disputes, even though it means less to individual articles. DGG ( talk ) 20:49, 20 December 2009 (UTC)

Skema school., business

Hi DGG, remember this? Skema Business School . The article is becoming a primary sourced advert edited by a single editor (a former student they state) I mentioned it to them on their talkpage User talk:Julien Schmidwhat do you think is the way forward? Off2riorob (talk) 18:01, 20 December 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for commenting and helping out DGG, also...Happy Xmas to you and yours. Off2riorob (talk) 20:42, 20 December 2009 (UTC)

A-Prime Handling

Hi DGG,

First and foremost - happy holiday. Second please advise me on what I may do to make my stub article worthy of publishing within Misplaced Pages. I have read several of the resources and even followed the content of similar stubs such as the 'Clark Material Handling' stub and the currently posted 'Yale' one. My interest in posting the information stems out of wanting to explain the history of A-Prime and how it became to be what it is today from a different name. Additionally, I am interested in listing a few of the products that fall under the 'Material Handling' company and further explaining them. My original post is below, please offer your guidance:

A-Prime Handling, Inc Located in the Industrial Park of Avon, MA A-Prime Handling, Inc. (more commonly known as "A-Prime") is a national facility service, sales and installation company for material handling products. It's core business consists of selling, coordinating, delivering, servicing and installing the material handling products that it provides as well as those already owned by its clients. Essentially moving a retailer's products from their mode of delivery to their final destination.
History

Founded in 1977, with just two employees, A-Prime Handling, Inc. started as a pallet rack and mezzanine installation company known as Master Installers. It's founder and current company president, Michael Zelman started the company after working in the material handling industry for several years. However, the actual A-Prime Handling, Inc. enterprise did not exist until January 1990 as a result of Michael Zelman's desire to start selling material handling products in addition to simply installing them. Then, because of A-Prime Handling, Inc.'s success and increased recognition within the material handling industry, Michael Zelman decided to consolidate the businesses leaving Master Installers to fade away in 2004 and operate under the A-Prime Handling, Inc. name.

Today, A-Prime Handling, Inc. is a national material handling facility service and product provider, hired by leading retailers within the US, Canada and Puerto Rico.

Material Handling Products

• Balers
• Overhead Doors
• Dock Equipment
• Conveyors
• Vertical Lifts
• Scissor Docks
• Pallet Racks
• Mezzanines
• Handicap & Wheelchair Lifts

References

1. Professional Retail Store Maintenance Association

External links

A-Prime Handling, Inc. 

--

Kindest regards ZFrost (talk) 18:17, 21 December 2009 (UTC)

Trust the process

I note that you deprodded Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth. I don't think this journal passes the GNG and I don't think it even passes your proposed WP:Notability (academic journals). According to Ulrich's Periodicals Directory, there are 300,000 journals active today. What proportion of them are indexed by services other than Ulrich's? I'd say most of them. I put it to you that Misplaced Pages cannot be a wiki version of these indexing services. For example, at Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/E-Century Publishing Corporation, why would a new single purpose account come in to vote for the company? Because these guys are just as desperate as any spammer to promote their product.

Now, I've been combing through the articles on journals and found that only a tiny percentage of them are deletion-worthy. Why is that? Because the system works. First, people only create articles on Misplaced Pages for three reasons; they feel that the topic is important, they are trying to win the WikiCup, or they are spammers. Then editors work on the articles, or work on getting them deleted, following the GNG. The ideal end result is a set of articles that are on important topics. Any topic that is too obscure to have secondary sources is also too obscure to have the average Misplaced Pages user looking it up. Think about it; why would anybody be looking up a scientific journal by name if they hadn't already gotten the name from somewhere?

So I think that you should trust the GNG and the process by which we winnow out the wheat from the chaff. Abductive (reasoning) 06:27, 22 December 2009 (UTC)

response

We are not far apart in practical matters, though we may be in respect to the principles for notability in general.

1. What you merely call chaff, I call junk. Of the about 75 to 100,000 peer-reviewed journals in Ulrich's, most of them are junk. This is getting even more true because of the extreme ease of started a new online only open access journal; free off-the-shelf software is available, and if the journal is small enough, there is no direct cost at all, and the indirect costs are small and not very noticeable. We did not really consider the problem of these minor internet journals when we developed the guideline, & we need to think further. Nobody has ever suggested having articles on everything in Ulrichs. (or in DOAJ).
2. The primary criterion I use for a new journal is the publisher, and perhaps that should have gone in the guideline, and will when we try again. Misplaced Pages covers new projects, sometimes even before they have been released, if the responsible party is sufficiently important. Just as we'd cover a new book by Rowling, or a new Disney film, we should cover a new journal from a publisher if essentially everything the publish is notable. This is the case for some, not all, of the major society and university publishers. It is not the case for even the best commercial publishers. It is certainly not the case for any online publisher I know of, unless one considers PLOS an online publisher.
   1. As for Johns Hopkins UP, the publisher of the journal you mention, as in that category-- it is one of the really first rate American University Presses for academic journals in the humanities. It is also perhaps the most widely known, because of MUSE.
   2. A secondary consideration is the editor in chief--I am very skeptical about editorial boards.
   3. Another secondary consideration is the nature of its first few articles. A new journal tries to have at least a few strong articles by prominent people to start out with. They 've been publishing almost 2 years, and they do.
3. I have never said I consider all indexes as automatically showing notability, though the presence in the major ones in the field is a major factor. I was the one who insisted on not claiming this for Medline. In science, I'd certainly say that the consensus of academic opinion is that presence in Web of Science is however a sufficient factor by itself. I am no longer as sure about Scopus as I used to be--they distinguish themselves from Web of Science by having more journals, which necessarily will cause some doubt.
   1. For this journal, the presence in the two major historical indexes is a factor towards notability , but does not determine it; I would regard its absence as an indication of lack of notability
4. As for notability in general, our approaches differ: the longer I work with the GNG, the less I trust it, in either the positive or the negative direction. It lets in so much clearly non-encyclopedic material that we have to qualify it very strongly by the details of what we consider a RS for notability, and by the provisions of NOT. Most contested notability afds are the debates of those two broad and imprecise groups of factors. It also excludes too much in some areas: the web, open source software, publishers, professors, journals, newspapers. In practice if we confine ourselves to the accepted sources, it would yield a criterion of either famous, or infamous. When I came here, I accepted it as a clever device, but I've learned better--and it is getting even less dependable with the increasing availability of minor sources in Google News. Its role is a fall-back when we can't come up with something logical for the subject. I know consensus is not with me yet for my statement here in general, but in practice, we don't actually judge afds by meeting the GNG, but by additional criteria particularly NOT. (weird that we say we will include everything in human knowledge, except...., when the exceptions include most of human knowledge) Formal guidelines here usually lag behind actual practice. fortunately, in most cases your approach and mine lead to the same conclusions. When they do not, the community decides, and what it decides seems to vary in a not very predictable fashion.
5. As for why people create articles, most articles are created because someone is interested in the particular topic.--and this includes journals, which have normally been added one at a time. Some are added by publishers, who of course have a tendency to include everything they publish. If they do so, or if they include what amounts to advertising, I stop them. I have even gone off-wiki to stop them. if they can be convinced to add factual matter at a reasonable rate starting with their most important journals and watching carefully the reaction, they can make useful contributions. Some of what has been added recently is in this class, but a good deal has not been, and will be quickly removed. What will take longer to remove is the promotional material in many articles on even existing journals. Most of it is not due to publishers--other people simply quote or paraphrase what is on the web site.

I too trust the process--the process of consensus, and the ways in which it develops. (Actually, what else can I do but accept it?) But I certainly try to affect its application and development to the extent I can convince people, or people realize themselves that my view might meet the situation.) For this particular title, I think you;ve misjudged the situation. For most of what you want to delete, I think you judged very well. DGG ( talk ) 21:53, 22 December 2009 (UTC)

replies

I am pleased that you think that most of what I want to delete I judge well. What do you think of Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Doon Theological Journal?

There is an underlying reason why the GNG and more specific guidelines are generally congruent; the efforts of conscientious editors like you and me who are trying to build an encyclopedia. I think Misplaced Pages has too many authors and not enough editors at present.

You go offline to remonstrate with publishers? That's really great.

If Ulrich's lists 300,000 journals, and about 1/3 are peer-reviewed, what proportion of those are listed in selective indexing services? I notice that many of the indexing services lack articles on Misplaced Pages; I would be willing to create articles on them. Have you not done so because you think they are sub-par? Abductive (reasoning) 03:03, 23 December 2009 (UTC)

Gene Therapy and Regulation (Journal)

Could you please look at Gene Therapy and Regulation (Journal)? I don't know whether the article ought to be kept. At this point, nobody has tagged it for notability. - Eastmain (talk) 02:14, 23 December 2009 (UTC)

I made some necessary additions to the page that will indicate what I think of it. DGG ( talk ) 05:43, 23 December 2009 (UTC)

Journal Info

Hi! I would like to ask, how do you search for information regarding a journal? for example, on it's citations? cheers Nkf31 (talk) 00:50, 24 December 2009 (UTC)

The easiest way, available to anybody , is with Google Scholar

1. Go to Advanced Search, put in the full journal name and then a year or year range. The articles will display in approximate inverse order by citations to them.
2. The total number of articles included will be at the top, but there is no easy way of getting a simple total of citations.
3. it gives zero results if you get the wrong abbreviation--full name works better even though it looks like it does not fit in the search box.
4. This is fairly complete for most English language journals, at least for recent years, & in some cases back to the beginning,
5. It will generally include some citations from books; the count is likely to be higher than with the more exact indexes.
6. coverage of G Scholar is changeable and can not be determined except by experiment.
7. There are numerous inconsistencies, especially for earlier years
8. I never know how far to trust it

For accuracy, you need to have access to Scopus or Web of Science or JCR, and the journal has to be one of those included there.

1. For total figures for major journals, the ones that are in JCR, use it. it doesn't go article by article, but it gives the overall sum very easily, with other useful statistics. For details, the tutorial is at ; anyone can see it, you do not need access to the database itself
2. For totals for the less important but probably notable journals, the ones not in JCR but in Scopus, use Scopus Journal Analyzer-- description available at . The information is less detailed than JCR, but very useful. It gives totals, not by individual articles.
3. To analyze article by article, as when I look to see how many citations the most cited article in a journal has, I find Scopus the easier & more reliable. Select Sources, search by by ISSN not title. The various years will display. You select each in turn, the articles display, you sort them by no. of times cited. A similar method works in Web of Science. If you want totals, you can add them up manually..
4. In some cases, the same things can be done within individual subject fields using an indexes for the subject field-- if that index support a citation search, as a few do.
5. Remember that in all cases the citing journals in the count are only the ones included in the indexes--citations from other journals are not included. DGG ( talk ) 03:43, 24 December 2009 (UTC)

Follow-up

Since the controversy section in Alina Cala article has been restored now, I would like to ask some follow up questions - when you said that Alina Cala's interview is usable did you mean that the interview itself is a notable event and merits its own section in biographical article, or did you mean that article is usable to establish Alina Cala's opinion on certain historical events, or did you mean something entire different? Thank you. M0RD00R (talk) 18:59, 24 December 2009 (UTC)

The Irish Filmography & Kevin Rockett

Sadly, the author seems to have left the project for the last few days. Hoping he'll return, I meanwhile found enough to create an article on the book's author in order to remove a redlink at the above. The man is apparently one of, if not THE, expert on Irish film and Irish film history. I also believe that at least three other of his tomes also may merit articles. Please look in at Kevin Rockett and advise. Best wishes, Schmidt, 19:55, 24 December 2009 (UTC)

Good news: He's back!. Hope he's been enjoying the holidays. But please look in at Kevin Rockett yourself if you have the time. I do not believe I made any major BLP blunders, but always appreciate another set of eyes. Best, Schmidt, 21:15, 24 December 2009 (UTC)

I normally do not support making articles for ordinarily notable non-fiction books; According to our current policy, we would be able to justify one for any book with a few substantial reviews, but I think that we should generally not do that. We should think of our inclusion policy here and elsewhere not as getting as many separate articles as we possibly can justify, but getting the necessary articles to appropriately cover a topic. The goal is including the information, in reasonable arrangement. The difficulty here is that our "notability" guideline is interpreted by the outside world as implying notability in the ordinary sense of the word. Therefore whether or not someone or something gets an individual article is a measure of its significance or importance. This is what makes it difficult to decide rationally on content. DGG ( talk ) 18:41, 25 December 2009 (UTC)

Really? In an ideal world, what would you do with the two articles here? Merge The Irish Filmography to Kevin Rockett? Abductive (reasoning) 19:07, 25 December 2009 (UTC)

Tricky one this, the book in question is more of a big almanacky-type thing..and the person is the eidtor not the owner. But still, maybe merging to the person (?) if not a stand-alone. The analogy I am thinking of is Leonard Maltin sort of..actually his books don't have an article...Casliber (talk · contribs) 20:02, 25 December 2009 (UTC)

RFC/CENT

2/0 makes a good point:

Support - could some kind soul notify me if I seem to have missed it when this is announced as a centralized discussion?

Care to make the AFD suggestion a cent/RFC? Seems like support for this proposal is very strong initially. Ikip 00:00, 25 December 2009 (UTC) RE: Wikipedia_talk:Articles_for_deletion#Move_a_disputed_merge_to_AfD.2C_retitled_Articles_for_Discussion

You probably already noticed: Ikip 00:45, 25 December 2009 (UTC)

Sebastian already did it, and it is at Misplaced Pages talk:Articles for deletion/Proposal 1. Myself, I;d have waited till after the holiday. DGG ( talk ) 01:08, 25 December 2009 (UTC)

Un-protection request

Hello, I am asking that the Rodney Glassman Misplaced Pages page be taken off protection. There is a newly written article that I believe meets the standards for Misplaced Pages and includes more sources then the original article in question. If you would like to review it that can also be arranged. I would like to post the article with all the requirements so that this does not occur again.

Mbellovin (talk) 00:03, 25 December 2009 (UTC) Mbellovin 12/24/09

After Jan 4, please. DGG ( talk ) 00:12, 25 December 2009 (UTC)

Cite sourcing and personal attack

Having a minor issue in the Jediism article. An editor is considering simply naming a book and making a WL to it as properly sourcing it. Along with that, he attacked the editor that made the previous edit. I reverted and explained that it wasn't a proper citation.. He then went in and reverted it. I did a second revert, explaining that he needed to show which version of the book, what page etc. He reverted again. Then he decided to vandalize my user page . Perhaps a word from you would be of assistance. Niteshift36 (talk) 03:06, 25 December 2009 (UTC)

More important, considering it's a novel show could it possibly say it say what any of the RL believers actually believe? The user seems a little over-attached to that article. DGG ( talk ) 16:04, 25 December 2009 (UTC)

Ban discussion prematurely closed

I was hoping that opening a new thread would help leave some of the histrionics of the earlier discussion behind, but the thread has already been closed without a chance for people to weigh in. I think this is a no-brainer, but if the thread gets archived this quickly that is moot. I know the timing is poor, but are you willing to open a new discussion? I think you see the problem and perhaps if I'm not personally involved it will go better. Delicious carbuncle (talk) 04:28, 25 December 2009 (UTC)

I too would like to continue it, but I gave up on it last night. My advice is to watch for future behavior from NJROTC--I do not think he understands in the least what he did wrong, if it were up to me I'd block him for harassment. I do not think this particular issue is worth it. And , as you say, given the timing.... DGG ( talk ) 15:56, 25 December 2009 (UTC)

For what it's worth, I have opened a new discussion here and already been inexplicably blocked for my trouble. I have added information from PCHS-NJROTC's contributions -- the bolded quotes -- that is relevant to the off-site activities we discussed earlier. I expect this one to end similarly to the last one, with the possible additional result of me getting a topic ban. :) Delicious carbuncle (talk) 20:45, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

Hello DGG

I'm referring to the following article you have deleted previously: 19:48, 1 March 2009 DGG (talk | contribs) deleted "Astronomical Society (ASDRC)" ‎ (A7: Article about a group or club, which does not indicate the importance or significance of the subject) Astronomical Society of Dharmaraja College is one of the very few active astronomical societies in Sri Lanka. The number of acievements it has got in local and international arena in last two or three years are immense. For example, 7 out of the 15 students selected to the International Olympiad on Astronomy and Astrophysics in last 3 years are ASDRC students. Moreover, it has conducted a substantial number of projects to popularize Astronomy in Sri Lanka. Therefoe I think that ASDRC undoubtedly reserves a space in Misplaced Pages. I've created a new article on ASDRC in my removing the alleged student names and undue weight which would've violated the wiki policies. I'll be extremely thankful if you take necessary steps to relocate the article in Misplaced Pages. Astronomyinertia (talk) 09:20, 25 December 2009 (UTC)

Do you have references providing substantial coverage from 3rd party independent published reliable sources, print or online, but not blogs or press releases, or material derived from press releases? DGG ( talk ) 15:58, 25 December 2009 (UTC)

The society currently does not possess an official website. But you may have seen that Astronomical Society of Dharmaraja College is appeared on the College website. It seem that all other apperances are directly or indirectly related to the achievements of the member students of the society. Does that count? There are published articles in print, on local and provincial newspapers. But again it's only the achievements are appeared online. Can you please tell how to resolve this problem? Astronomyinertia (talk) 06:25, 26 December 2009 (UTC)

List of academic journals

Hi DGG, List of academic journals has been prodded, and the prod warning went to Piotrus (talk · contribs) because he created the redirect. A few years ago, IF would have been seen as a reasonably neutral inclusion criteria, but now it would be viewed as a POV. I'm not sure what the solution is, but I worry that there are many similar lists. John Vandenberg 12:54, 26 December 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, it was me who prodded it. Sorry, I did not realize that this was created as a redirect and later converted to an article. I just went to the earliest item in the history log and left a notification at the talk page of the user who made that first edit. About the list itself, in its current form, as it has existed since 2006, the list has no identifiable inclusion criteria specified in it. While it would be useful to have a list of "top ten" journals in each discipline, I really do not see how a reasonable set of inclusion criteria can be devised. The IF changes from year to year and in any event, it is not a particularly accurate indicator of a journal's standing in a given discipline. This is certainly true in my own area of research, mathematics. Vitali Milman has a good article about shortcomings of the IF (from 2006 AMS Notices) where some of the problems with IF are explained. There is no systematic literature covering academic journals as such, which is why Misplaced Pages:Notability (academic journals) has been created (and also why it is proving difficult to promote to an actual guideline). Perhaps the list could be userfied for a while, so that people could experiment with it and try to come up with some viable ideas for what inclusion criteria might be. But as it is, the list has been sitting in mainspace since 2006 essentially as pure WP:OR, and that isn't right. Nsk92 (talk) 13:38, 26 December 2009 (UTC)

I appreciate your note and what you did--I have been aware that this list has always been unsatisfactory, and I always meant to get back to it. It takes BOLD action sometimes to get results around here (partly because there's so much that needs improvement , so much that it sometimes gets so discouraging that we do nothing at all) But I think objective criteria can be found, & I intend to do it in the next few weeks, because it will take a while to deal with all the work: For the subjects covered by JCR, for each of the 80 or so JCR subject categories, I intend to include those in the top 5 or 10 as judged by any of 3 criteria: impact factor (the classic 2-year impact factor), 5=year impact factor (Now available for the first time after people have been asking ISI to do it for over 20 or 30 years now--they have the well-earned reputation of being a slow moving organization), and number of citable article published. Of course it will change from year to year, but so does everything else. (the ISI fields because that's the only consistent source for the disivisions) We don't not list the Academy Awards because there will be a new set next year. It will be an interesting choice whether to do a new list each year, or update the old one (actually we can have both because if we do update each year, the old ones will still be in the history. I know the objections to the use of IF as a primary measure, and I consider them either misunderstandings or attempts to use it beyond its limitations. It was never meant for comparing across subjects; it was never meant for comparing primary and review journals; the 2-yr IF is not as appropriate as longer periods in many subjects where the cited half life is particularly long, and mathematics is among them (the principal argument in the article you cite is that 5 years is better for math-- which nobody has ever disagreed with) , there is a small effect from time of year published, there is a possible effect from self-citation, and from multiple other causes (Garfield discusses all these himself in detail in his published papers, available on the web at --& the ISIS help discusses them also, which does not prevent people from using them wrongly.) Personal opinion. FWIW: I am perhaps influenced in liking the conventional IF for its almost exact correspondence with actual use in my own subject of molecular biology--which is not surprising as IFs--& SCI-- were primarily developed for this subject. But in my personal experience, the people who complain most about the use of Impact factor are the people who very unfairly suffer from the improper use of the value to compare across journals in different fields, as in early unsophisticated RAEs--but current RAEs have gotten a little better at this, even if they tend now to rely on unsupported opinion of academics, which correlates nicely with the journals that were important when they were a graduate student. (There are also complaints from those who publish or edit the lower ranking journals, but that is another matter from the incorrect I recognize you think differently, & we can discuss it on the talk p. after I work on the article--but it will take a while. I'd appreciate patience with it.

And more generally, the intention of that page was also to show the variety of journals; this was not a great idea, probably this is much better done in text, where it can part of an explanation. DGG ( talk ) 01:26, 29 December 2009 (UTC)

OK, thanks. Maybe this discussion should be taken to Misplaced Pages talk:WikiProject Academic Journals to get extra input. It is good news about a 5-year IF, that was sorely needed in my own field, math, where it usually takes more than 2 years from submission of a paper to its publication and where the useful shelf-life of a paper is often about 15-25 years if not longer. My personal opinion is that List of academic journals is still going to be quite problematic and I am more sympathetic to things like List of scientific journals which are somewhat more narrowly focused. For the former the choice of "one and only one key journal each" subject is really quite problematic. E.g. for math it currently lists Journal of the American Mathematical Society. This is a super journal, but I don't believe it is no. 1 in the field in terms of prestige (again, based on my own subjective opinion as a research mathematician). Annals of Mathematics, Acta Mathematica and probably Publications Mathématiques de l'IHÉS and Inventiones Mathematicae are more prestigious, IMO. I think deciding which journal from a given discipline is really no. 1 is going to be problematic, given the absence of systematic literature about academic journals by field. Looking at the mathematics section of List of scientific journals, I also find it quite problematic, although there the problems are probably caused by the inadequacies of the 2-year IF for math journals. E.g. the list now includes Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics, Journal of Algebra and Topology. IMO, none of them belong on a "top ten" list. Bulletin of AMS only publishes surveys and expository papers (but no new research as such); these kinds of papers usually are well-cited but the journal is not considered to be particularly prestigious. Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics is a bit of a mystery to me regarding why its IF is so high; most likely it is because the journal publishes a lot of applied math and math physics papers that tend to be cited not in pure math journals but in experimental sciences and applied math journals. The publication cycle (from submission to publication) in those fields is much shorter than in pure math, which probably accounts for driving the IF higher. But, as far as I know, Communications on Pure and Applied math is not considered to be an especially prestigious journal in pure math. I have no idea how Journal of Algebra got on the list -it is at best in the top 50 in terms of IF and probably around that level in prestige as well. Topology used to be highly regarded (before the revolt of its editorial board who quit on masse a few years ago), but even in its heyday it was not as prestigious as, say, Journal of Differential Geometry or Crelle's journal. So figuring out a good set of inclusion criteria for "top ten" lists is going to be tricky. Nsk92 (talk) 02:35, 29 December 2009 (UTC)

In practice everyone likely to be interested will see it here also, but I'll link to it. Anyhow, the only real way to express this is going to be to do it, or at least part of it. Those two lists say the same "the most influential, currently publishing journals in each field," limited in each case to 10. But the intention was to use academic for the best of the best, which you are saying think might not be a great idea, & I agree is going to be the harder part. There are two basic sorts which need different criteria --the ones in the sciences + hard social sciences, where journals are the primary information source, and where citations are relatively rapid; and the humanities, where books are, and journals are both secondary and cited very slowly. JCR has persistently & in my opinion correctly refuses to cover the humanities. The advantage of using JCR subfields is it deliberately tries to put journals of similar citation patterns together; JCR separates math & applied math. I agree there is no point in giving "number one"--for one thing, it's almost always a review journal, which really need to be separated. I think I'll deal with this by not saying top, but simply the highest of the criteria used, in sortable tables--that at least is an objective measure & a valid statistic. As I said it will take some work. I know math is distinctive. If you can think of a suitable additional measure, we can use it.

The reason why there are some unlikely journals is due to either spam, or a deliberate decision to cover all the subfields. I think I stopped trying to keep the spam out about a year ago--I should have persisted.

I cannot employ my usual methods with the humanities--especially in fields where there are journals of record, and journals where the action is. There also tends to be more of a national division:. As I understand it, Yale French Studies is the leading English language journal in its subject. but well might not be in France. In this area, we may have to go by reputation. DGG ( talk ) 05:24, 29 December 2009 (UTC)

Writers Exchange E-Publishing

Hi. You de-prodded this article because of a claim that the publisher had won a national award, indicating possible notability. I checked and in fact the award went to an author, not their publisher. IMHO that's on the wrong side of borderline as far as notability goes. Any objections if I restore the prod? andy (talk) 16:57, 28 December 2009 (UTC)

In the past , we are in general fairly inclusive of self-publishers and the like, because of the need to have information about them when judging other articles. My error, but publishing a prize winning author might be enough to make the company notable. Please first check a/c WP:BEFORE that there are no better or additional references, and if you cannot find any, AfD is the place. DGG ( talk ) 17:02, 28 December 2009 (UTC)

eCPC

Dear DGG, Thank you, once again for your kind help on my recent article contributions...Although feel bit of disappointed to see the e-Century Publishing Corporation has been deleted, I'll respect the decision based on the consensus. To be honest, still I do not think the "consensus" on this deletion is well-informed since some of us may not have time to do the research on what this “company” is doing. As I mentioned in the original discussion of AfD for this article, we cannot judge the notability of e-Century Publishing with the criteria that we are using for a music band, a local Pisa restaurant, etc, and we should not judge it as "un-notable" because of it is too young (2 years old)either. e-CPC is actually publishing five free real professional medical journals, with four of them indexed in the ultimate database, as you know for the medical science---Pubmed and Pubmed Central, the achievements which may take decades to reach for a new publisher like this. In addition, it is indeed well accepted by the medical communities as you can see from the journals published by this publisher. Since I am new to Misplaced Pages in terms of article contribution, and surely have lots to learn, do you think that it would be appropriate to recreate this article, or take this case to "deletion review" which may take us too much time since most of us are the full time researchers? Your advice will be highly appreciated....Happy New Year!OpenAccessforScience (talk) 19:07, 28 December 2009 (UTC)

I think this was not a great decision, because the article could have been used for information about the journals,. which are almost certainly not yet notable. I do not think Deletion Review is the best course at the moment, because the notability of new scientific journals is being seriously questioned here, and an adverse decision there will not be helpful. It should be possible to write the article in such a way that it contains not just a list of journals, but information on them--this makes it a combination article, and as such , it can quite possibly be defended. You are almost certainly not the best person to do it because of conflict of interest. I will try it myself, or perhaps Crusio will, once things on the journal front get a little clearer. It would naturally help immensely if there were some sources about the company itself written by 3rd parties. If you should see any, let me know here or by email. But keep in mind that essentially all the the people here working on this topic have made a clear decision, that I support, at least for now, that inclusion in PubMed by itself (or, for that matter, its open access repository, PubMed Central) is not sufficient for notability. In future years, as they get included in Web of Science, and have a sufficient publication record, then, and only then, write the articles. I with that you would finally understand the basic principle, one that has my full and even enthusiastic support, that we do not exist to give publicity to new but worthy journals, but to include article about them once they are already notable--just as for all topics here DGG ( talk ) 19:45, 28 December 2009 (UTC)

The admin is moving the article into my user space to work on, & I will do so, but not for at least a few days. DGG ( talk ) 03:25, 29 December 2009 (UTC)

Thank you for your help. Yes, I do support eCPC just like that I have been supporting Misplaced Pages, although in different ways since I am a srtong believer that the knowledge should be open to every learning head...if I see something supportive, I will surely let you know. A scholar search result can be seen here: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=e-century+publishing+corporation&hl=en&as_sdt=2001&as_sdtp=on. A quick count of the citations indicated that IJCEP has about the "Impact Factor" of 2-3, while IJCEM has an IF of 1-2. Given Google Scholar can only has access to very limited journlas, the actual impactor factor should be higher. Hope this info halpes. Best regards.OpenAccessforScience (talk) 04:16, 29 December 2009 (UTC)

American Health Lawyers Association

I tried to cut out the violating material. If it's still a copyvio, then tag it again. Bearian (talk) 06:34, 30 December 2009 (UTC)

The Holocaust

DGG, just to let you know there is a discussion ongoing here. Do you care to weigh in with an opinion? Bus stop (talk) 22:16, 30 December 2009 (UTC)

OpenBiblio (software)

I deprodded this based on the number of google scholar hits. If you know something about it, perhaps you could help improve the article. I'm getting kinda burned out being one of the few adding references to AfD'd/prodded software. Pcap ping 14:58, 31 December 2009 (UTC)

GS hits in this are deceptive, most of them are including it on a list, where the focus in on another system. There seem to be only 11 live installations, all small.. The number of people working on it in any sense is probably about twice that. The two widely used opensource library systems are Kona and Evergreen, and they are the only two I would consider actually notable. But for Linux software there is an ongoing argument about how complete to be, on the grounds that in this particular field we are the major reference site. Most recent accessible ref to state of the art on OS library systems is a high-quality student paper . There are of course other and more formal refs, & I will add them. The question is how much work to do on an article i do not think important. I gather you have the same problem. DGG ( talk ) 18:06, 31 December 2009 (UTC)

Okay, I've taken this to AfD. Pcap ping 09:18, 2 January 2010 (UTC)

Biography

Do you have an opinion at Talk:Mary Dimmick Harrison about whether the lede should be separated from the start of the article by a header? --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) (talk) 23:20, 31 December 2009 (UTC)

I gave the opinion that it makes more sense to add content to the article, rather than argue about formatting. DGG ( talk ) 02:13, 1 January 2010 (UTC)

Need your experience

I recently recieved a question regarding my decision to remove some links to a video game's GOG.com entry. Just to clarify, GOG facilitates the distribution of old, currently discontinued games. I would very much appreciate it if you weighed with your perspective on my talk page. Eik Corell (talk) 01:20, 1 January 2010 (UTC)

commented there--mader a suggestion to deal with it more definitively. DGG ( talk ) 04:47, 1 January 2010 (UTC)

Template:Oldcsd

Another editor has created Template:Oldcsd, which can be added to the talk page of an article by an administrator who has declined a speedy delete. You may find this a convenient way to discourage repeated csd taggings of the same article for identical reasons. - Eastmain (talk) 22:17, 1 January 2010 (UTC)

Article on Ava Gardner in Esquire

Hi. I am working on the article on Tom Wolfe's anthology The New Journalism, and I'm trying to find out whether the article Ava: Life in the Afternoon by Rex Reed was published in the may 1967 issue of Esquire . Do you have access to the Esquire's archive, or something like the Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature. Your help would be much appreciated.The Ministry (talk) 23:58, 1 January 2010 (UTC)

G books has several sources saying so, including a reliable bibliography --is it contradicted anywhere? DGG ( talk ) 00:09, 2 January 2010 (UTC)

Thank you very much. (As far as I know, it is not contradicted anywhere, but I just wanted to be sure.) The Ministry (talk) 00:29, 2 January 2010 (UTC)

Some more Questions

Do you think you could also help me find when the article Gear by Richard Goldstein was published in the Village Voice, the article Timing and a Diversion: The Cocoa Game by George Goodman (under the pen name "Adam Smith") was published in New York World Journal Tribune, and when Beth Ann and Macrobioticism by Robert Christgau was published in New York Herald Tribune? The Ministry (talk) 01:13, 2 January 2010 (UTC)

Can you restore SUPER (software) to my userspace?

The adming that closed the AfD is on a "long wikibreak", and some sources like (The Inquirer) were ignored during the discussion. Further, during the AfD for MediaCoder, I found a book that discusses it too. Pcap ping 09:15, 2 January 2010 (UTC)

Also, this very long shoot-out article in Chip.de. Pcap ping 14:50, 2 January 2010 (UTC)

I happened to see this request. I've restored the article to User:Pohta ce-am pohtit/SUPER (software). EdJohnston (talk) 16:21, 2 January 2010 (UTC)

Bessie (lake monster)

Greetings. You "Added {{article issues}} with parameters notability, npov, original research, refimprove and tone tag to article". It would be helpful if you would explain on the article's talk page where you feel each applies, so that I can have a go at resolving them. Many thanks, -Arb. (talk) 15:26, 2 January 2010 (UTC)

replied on article talk p. DGG ( talk ) 03:53, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

Unreferenced BLPs

Hello DGG! Thank you for your contributions. I am a bot alerting you that 1 of the articles that you created is an Unreferenced Biography of a Living Person. Please note that all biographies of living persons must be sourced. If you were to add reliable, secondary sources to this article, it would greatly help us with the current 14 article backlog. Once the article is adequately referenced, please remove the {{unreferencedBLP}} tag. Here is the article:

1. Harold Robles - Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL

Thanks!--DASHBot (talk) 15:57, 2 January 2010 (UTC)

Delta Chi Chapter of Delta Kappa Epsilon at Cornell University

To: Misplaced Pages Editors slakr, DGG, C.Fred & Ronhjones

Gentlemen:

By way of introduction I am H. William Fogle, Jr. (Hwf1870, Bill Fogle, bill.fogle@cox.net), the Alumni Historian of the Delta Chi Association (the alumni arm of the Delta Chi Chapter of Delta Kappa Epsilon at Cornell University). I am also the sole author of the thirty historical papers about this Chapter that you will find on the

Cornell University eCommons@Cornell site. See http://ecommons.cornell.edu/handle/1813/7626.

All of these papers bear the notation Copyright: ©2006 -Delta Chi Association, Ithaca NY. As Alumni Historian and member of the Board of the Delta Chi

Association I am authorized to provide permissions for the use of this material and am also required to obtain permissions as required for copyrighted material that I

have used in these documents. There are only one or two cases of the latter.

I am also the author of Cornell Deke House A History of the 1893 Lodge. Ithaca NY: The Delta Chi Association, 1993. Copies are located in the Cornell University Library (+LJ75/.315/ 1993Z), the DeWitt Historical Society of Tompkins County (728.4 7655, accession #1994.9.1)

401 East State Street, Ithaca 14850) and the Library of Congress (Washington DC).

I noted that there were at lease three existing Misplaced Pages articles that connected to Delta Chi Chapter of Delta Kappa Epsilon at Cornell University:

“Deke House (Ithaca, New York)” http://en.wikipedia.org/Deke_House_(Ithaca,_New_York)

“John De Witt Warner” http://en.wikipedia.org/John_De_Witt_Warner

“Mario García Menocal” http://en.wikipedia.org/Mario_Garc%C3%ADa_Menocal

I edited “Deke House (Ithaca, New York)” on 29 December 2009 to correct the spelling of my name in the references. I edited “John De Witt Warner” on 29 December 2009 to correct the link to the reference Fogle, Jr., Homer William (3 Jul 2006). "DX of DKE Special Study #09: I edited “Mario García Menocal” on 30 December 2009 to add the two references that described the 1920 DKE Convention: Minot, John Clair (February 1921).

"The Convention in Havana," Delta Kappa Epsilon Quarterly, XXXIX, 1, p. 1-25; and Fogle, Homer William Jr. (25 Nov 2005). The Deke House at Cornell: a

concise history of the Delta Chi Chapter of Delta Kappa Epsilon, 1870-1930.Cf. pp. 27, 57, 60, 64, 66-69.

My next steps were to create two brief articles, "Delta Chi Association" and "Delta Chi Chapter of Delta Kappa Epsilon." The information for these articles consisted

of abridgements from http://hdl.handle.net/1813/3931 (Title: "Chapter and Alumni Operations Handbook, 2006" Author: Fogle, Homer William Jr.)

I completed the first article, "Delta Chi Association" on 30 December and that seemed to be accepted by the system. However, on the following day the text for the

second article, "Delta Chi Chapter of Delta Kappa Epsilon." triggered your plagiarism monitor and, I think, perhaps another on significance.

I would like to complete these two articles and see them registered in Misplaced Pages.

This chapter of DKE is one of the most historically significant college societies in the United States. It has direct connections to a host of important historical figures

including two Presidents of the United States. The lodge is on the National Registor of Historic Places and the Ithaca Landmark list. You will find much of the

historical data in http://ecommons.cornell.edu/handle/1813/3223.

Please advise if I may proceed with these two articles.

Respectfully,

H. William Fogle, Jr. (Hwf1870) Hwf1870 (talk) 20:39, 2 January 2010 (UTC) Alumni Historian, Delta Chi Association bill.fogle@cox.net

• FYI, Mr. Fogle posted the same message to User talk:Slakr and to my talk page; I have replied on his talk page (User talk:Hwf1870#Notability of Delta Chi Chapter of Delta Kappa Epsilon). —C.Fred (talk) 21:04, 2 January 2010 (UTC)

I'll add a comment there. DGG ( talk ) 21:28, 2 January 2010 (UTC)

JSTORE

Hi, I saw at Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Resource Exchange/Shared Resources that you have access to JSTORE. I am working on the article The New Journalism, a would like the access this article The Review of Politics, Vol. 36, No. 2 (Apr., 1974), pp. 306-309. Can you help me? My email is what.is.the.1404gmail.com. Thanks in advance :) The Ministry (talk) 21:39, 2 January 2010 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages:Articles_for_deletion/Peter_Hudecki_(2nd_nomination)

You commented in the last Article for deletion discussion. This article is up for deletion again.

You are welcome to comment about the discussion for deletion. Ikip 04:09, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

Articles for discussion, encouraging compromise

Hi. Could you expand on how your proposal at WT:Articles for deletion#Move a disputed merge to AfD, retitled Articles for Discussion "encourages compromise"? It's the last point (#8) in your list of reasons, but it seems somewhat redundant to "keeping all options open" (#7). Thanks. Flatscan (talk) 07:31, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

Keeping all options open is a rather general statement that merging the processes will establish the disputed proposition that a merge or redirect close is enforceable, and tlet any discussion end in the appropriate way for the situation--even letting a disputed merge end up as a delete, i that's really what consensus thinks is needed. Encouraging compromise means that merging the processes will immediately present the solution every time of a merge or redirect--will not leave it open to the possibility that someone will say so, and bring it more often to mind. It's the difference between the present: should we keep or delete this, and of course we might decide to recommend a merge. and saying what shall we do with this: keep/merge/redirect/delete. Instead of encouraging people to say, as I often do, "keep, but as an alternative merge". I would say "Perhaps we can agree on a merge, though I would rather keep it separate." It would induce the nom to say, if they did want a delete, not just why it should not be kept, but not merged & not redirected.

Any comprehensive argument generally has parts that overlap--one tries to say it in a way that will address the way different people see the problem. DGG ( talk ) 17:23, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for your response. I see the distinction now. I think that "encourages" is an exaggeration over "allows". Flatscan (talk) 06:25, 4 January 2010 (UTC)

A10

Let me know any new developments about A10 speedy deletion. I just found out about this. I can't believe this draconian policy was enacted, but I shouldn't be surprised.

The two groups had been vying for control from early on in the site's life, but the numbers suggest that the deletionists may have won. The increasing difficulty of making a successful edit; the exclusion of casual users; slower growth – all are hallmarks of the deletionist approach...

Ikip 17:48, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

The actual results have not been anywhere near as harmful as I had thought they would be. Just judging by the ones i've seen in patrolling, without doing an audit, most of the ones tagged A10 have indeed been hopeless naïve or inadequate articles on topics we have well covered, and I have deleted them accordingly. Some have had what seems to me possibly useful content, and I have declined them, with a suggestion to merge. None have been really inappropriate. But what I would not have seen, is any single-handed ones.

As for the deletionists winning, I see from many of their comments that they think the inclusionists are winning. What this means, is that neither is winning as much as they think the ought to. Both are unfortunately concentrating on what is really matters of arrangement and emphasis, rather than dealing with the true spam, poor documentation, obsolete sources, and important topics lacking articles. DGG ( talk ) 22:23, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

Talk:Juan Manuel Rodriguez (writer)#Requested move

Hi DGG. Because you participated in Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Juan Manuel Rodriguez (writer), you may be interested in the rename discussion at Talk:Juan Manuel Rodriguez (writer)#Requested move. Thanks, Cunard (talk) 18:28, 4 January 2010 (UTC)

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year David. I've been reminded of your outstanding contributions to the encyclopedia building effort over the last few days in coming across several of your insightful comments. Thank you very much for your good works. I hope you have a very healthy and happy 2010 ...and beyond. If you're able to go easy on the doughnuts and bacon, (and stay out of the political tussles) I'm sure you'll be fine! :) ChildofMidnight (talk) 18:30, 4 January 2010 (UTC)

And Happy New Year to you!!!

I left a message at Misplaced Pages:Articles_for_deletion/Edwin_E._Jacques. I hope you will reconsider. Even though I trust your experience as a librarian, I will dare mention that there are many people in Misplaced Pages (let's say soccer players who play in the 6th category of Ruanda), that are less worthy of being in wikipedia than Jacques.sulmues (talk) --Sulmues 22:47, 4 January 2010 (UTC)

it's futile to compare notability in one field with notability in another. There are probably several million people who unquestionably deserve to be in Misplaced Pages in terms of our clearest unambiguous standards, and who are lacking articles. In my field, every present & past holder of every named chair in a research university; in other fields, every member of any state or provincial legislature, or mayor of a medium size city--worldwide, and going back to the beginnings of records. Besides people, there is every Supreme Court case, every high school, every state park, every book that won a significant prize --all of them, for all countries, going back. Even just in the English speaking world, we have the potential for at least doubling our size; for the proper international coverage, perhaps five times that again.

In this particular case, my role as administrator is not to decide personally on notability, but to enforce the community policies and community decisions. The article was rightly or wrong deleted at AfD ; the new one is essentially the same and does not answer the objections. Whatever my personal views are, it may not be reinserted until it does. If the article were substantially better, with one or two additional really good references, then you could put it in, and I explained to you the way to do that without arousing immediate objections, by writing it in your user space first. Even if I though the deletion totally mistaken, I would still have to do the same and offer the same advice. DGG ( talk ) 23:32, 4 January 2010 (UTC)

Aynesworth-Wright House

Could you explain why you believe that the article Aynesworth-Wright House is not a blatant copyright violation? All the material in the article is lifted directly from here . Regards, ClovisPt (talk) 00:25, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

you are perfectly right. But , since any property in the NR is notable, and the infobox provides the basic data, I simply stubbified it, which is what I should have done in the first place DGG ( talk ) 00:35, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

That urge to prod

Happy newish year, DGG, from your evil deletionist nemesis, mwahaha. Though actually I've been feeling less deletionist of late, and have been compensating for this with extra evil. I've just come across this. It's in no way blatantly promotional and my guess is that its content is all true. Yeah yeah, not truth but verifiable fact is what matters hereabouts; yet as this is a (sort of) published item, arguably (hmmm) it provides its own verification. Now, I'm all in favor of more and better articles on photography magazines -- Japan has had dozens of demonstrable, verifiable significance -- yet I feel queasy when I see an article on a manufacturer's freebie. As User:Wageless seems to have departed, you'll have to stand in for him as benign inclusionist in the Big Question: Shall we prod? -- Hoary (talk) 01:12, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

the magazine is not in WorldCat or in Ulrich's, so probably the best course would be to merge it into the manufacturer, since it is a leading company. I feel just the same about such publications as you; as with self-published books, the presumption is against them. DGG ( talk ) 01:21, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

Well said. Here we go. -- Hoary (talk) 03:54, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

Just an Observation

Hello, DGG. I was reading the Printing press article and observed that you have made some work against the vandalism on that page. I just wanted to let you know that there is a phrase at the end of the introduction that is clearly vandalism. I tried to make an edit, but was unable. The text that appeared in the article was not on the edit page. I thought I'd pass the word along to someone who has worked on the article before. Let me know if I can help.

Thank you,

Anpetu-We (talk) 03:34, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

Chabad on Misplaced Pages arbitration request

Since you have been kind enough to comment at the unresolved WP:COI case at Misplaced Pages:Conflict of interest/Noticeboard/User:Yehoishophot Oliver, you may wish to know that it has now been nominated for arbitration. Feel free to review at Misplaced Pages:Requests for arbitration#Chabad on Misplaced Pages and, if you wish to do so, enter your statement and any other material you wish to submit to the Arbitration Committee. Additionally, the following resources may be of use—

• Misplaced Pages:Requests for arbitration#Requesting Arbitration;
• Misplaced Pages:Arbitration guide.

Thank you for your input and patience, IZAK (talk) 09:27, 5 January 2010 (UTC)