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== Hinting At A Block For Me For "Disruption"? ==

SMcCandlish, reverting your arbitrary, one-man consensus rewrite of an essay that's been here for years is not "disruptive". I can direct you again to ] or ], but that would be pointless, would it not? We are not going to ignore the rules in favor of a ridiculous thing such as this. Your content does not have consensus, and adding it in repeatedly against consensus is edit-warring. ] ] 03:02, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

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Old stuff to resolve eventually

Cueless billiards

Unresolved – Can't get at the stuff at Ancestry; try using addl. cards.
Extended content

Categories are not my thing but do you think there are enough articles now or will be ever to make this necessary? Other than Finger billiards and possibly Carrom, what else is there?--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 11:12, 18 January 2010 (UTC)

Crud fits for sure. And if the variant in it is sourceable, I'm sure some military editor will fork it into a separate article eventually. I think at least some variants of bar billiards are played with hands and some bagatelle split-offs probably were, too (Shamos goes into loads of them, but I get them all mixed up, mostly because they have foreign names). And there's bocce billiards, article I've not written yet. Very fun game. Kept my sister and I busy for 3 hours once. Her husband (Air Force doctor) actually plays crud on a regular basis; maybe there's a connection. She beat me several times, so it must be from crud-playing. Hand pool might be its own article eventually. Anyway, I guess it depends upon your "categorization politics". Mine are pretty liberal - I like to put stuff into a logical category as long as there are multiple items for it (there'll be two as soon as you're done with f.b., since we have crud), and especially if there are multiple parent categories (that will be the case here), and especially especially if the split parallels the category structure of another related category branch (I can't think of a parallel here, so this criterion of mine is not a check mark in this case), and so on. A bunch of factors really. I kind of wallow in that stuff. Not sure why I dig the category space so much. Less psychodrama, I guess. >;-) In my entire time here, I can only think of maybe one categorization decision I've made that got nuked at CfD. And I'm a pretty aggressive categorizer, too; I totally overhauled Category:Pinball just for the heck of it and will probably do the same to Category:Darts soon.
PS: I'm not wedded to the "cueless billiards" name idea; it just seemed more concise than "cueless developments from cue sports" or whatever.— SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(ل)ˀ Contribs. 11:44, 18 January 2010 (UTC)
I have no "categorization politics". It's not an area that I think about a lot or has ever interested me so it's good there are people like you. If there is to be a category on this, "cueless billiards" seems fine to me. By the way, just posted Yank Adams as an adjunct to the finger billiards article I started.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 11:57, 18 January 2010 (UTC)
Cool; I'd never even heard of him. This one looks like a good DYK; just the fact that there was Finger Billiards World Championship contention is funky enough, probably. You still citing that old version of Shamos? You really oughta get the 1999 version; it can be had from Amazon for cheap and has a bunch of updates. I actually put my old version in the recycle bin as not worth saving. Heh. PS: You seen Stein & Rubino 3rd ed.? I got one for the xmas before the one that just passed, from what was then a really good girlfriend. >;-) It's a-verra, verra nahce. Over 100 new pages, I think (mostly illustrations). — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(ل)ˀ Contribs. 13:41, 18 January 2010 (UTC)
If I happen to come across it in a used book store I might pick it up. There's nothing wrong with citing the older edition (as I've said to you before). I had not heard of Adams before yesterday either. Yank is apparently not his real name, though I'm not sure what it is yet. Not sure there will be enough on him to make a DYK (though don't count it out). Of course, since I didn't userspace it, I have 4½ days to see. Unfortunately, I don't have access to ancestry.com and have never found any free database nearly as useful for finding newspaper articles (and census, birth certificates, and reams of primary source material). I tried to sign up for a free trial again which worked once before, but they got smart and are logging those who signed up previously. I just looked; the new Stein and Rubino is about $280. I'll work from the 2nd edition:-)--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 14:16, 18 January 2010 (UTC)
Hmm... I haven't tried Ancestry in a while. They're probably logging IP addresses. That would definitely affect me, since mine doesn't change except once every few years. I guess that's what libraries and stuff are for. S&R: Should be available cheaper. Mine came with the Blue Book of Pool Cues too for under $200 total. Here it is for $160, plus I think the shipping was $25. Stein gives his e-mail address as that page. If you ask him he might give you the 2-book deal too, or direct you to where ever that is. Shamos: Not saying its an unreliable source (although the newer version actually corrected some entries), it's just cool because it has more stuff in it. :-) DYK: Hey, you could speedily delete your own article, sandbox it and come back. Heh. Seriously, I'll see if I can get into Ancestry again and look for stuff on him. I want to look for William Hoskins stuff anyway so I can finish that half of the Spinks/Hoskins story, which has sat in draft form for over a year. I get sidetracked... — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(ل)ˀ Contribs. 14:29, 18 January 2010 (UTC)
It's not IPs they're logging, it's your credit card. You have to give them one in order to get the trial so that they can automatically charge you if you miss the cancellation deadline. Regarding the Blue Book, of all these books, that's the one that get's stale, that is, if you use it for actual quotes, which I do all the time, both for answer to questions and for selling, buying, etc. Yeah I start procrastinating too. I did all that work on Mingaud and now I can't get myself to go back. I also did reams of research on Hurricane Tony Ellin (thugh I found so little; I really felt bad when he died; I met him a few times, seemed like a really great guy), Masako Katsura and others but still haven't moved on them.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 18:31, 18 January 2010 (UTC)
Ah, the credit card. I'll have to see if the PayPal plugin has been updated to work with the new Firefox. If so, that's our solution - it generates a new valid card number every time you use it (they always feed from your single PayPal account). — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(ل)ˀ Contribs. 18:37, 18 January 2010 (UTC)
PayPal Plugin ist kaput. Some banks now issue credit card accounts that make use of virtual card numbers, but mine's not one of them. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(ل)ˀ Contribs. 19:49, 8 February 2010 (UTC)
Thanks for trying. It was worth a shot. I signed up for a newspaperarchive.com three month trial. As far as newspaper results go it seems quite good so far, and the search interface is many orders of magnitude better than ancestry's, but it has none of the genealogical records that ancestry provides. With ancestry I could probably find census info on Yank as well as death information (as well as for Masako Katsura, which I've been working on it for a few days; she could actually be alive, though she'd be 96).--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 04:52, 9 February 2010 (UTC)

Sad...

How well forgotten some very well known people are. The more I read about Yank Adams, the more I realize he was world famous. Yet, he's almost completely unknown today and barely mentioned even in modern billiard texts.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 13:47, 21 January 2010 (UTC)

Reading stuff from that era, it's also amazing how important billiards (in the three-ball sense) was back then, with sometimes multiple-page stories in newspapers about each turn in a long match, and so on. It's like snooker is today in the UK. PS: I saw that you found evidence of a billiards stage comedy there. I'd never heard of it! — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(ل)ˀ Contribs. 15:17, 21 January 2010 (UTC)
Jackpot. Portrait, diagrams, sample shot descriptions and more (that will also lend itself to the finger billiards article).--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 01:34, 22 January 2010 (UTC)
Nice find! — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(ل)ˀ Contribs. 06:07, 27 January 2010 (UTC)


Look at the main page

Unresolved – Katsura News added (with new TFA section) to WP:CUE; need to see if I can add anything useful to Mingaud article.
Extended content

Look at the main page --Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 03:37, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

Since you don't appear to have seen this near to the time I left it, it might be a little cryptic without explanation. Masako Katsura was today's featured article on January 31, 2011.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 20:26, 1 February 2011 (UTC)
Supah-dupah! That kicks. WP:CUE's (and your?) first TFA, yes?! And yeah I have been away a lot lately. Long story. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(ل)ˀ Contribs. 01:22, 18 February 2011 (UTC)
Indeed, my first, though I have another in the works (not billiards related). I think François Mingaud could be a candidate in the near future. I really wanted to work it up to near FA level before posting it but another user created it recently, not realizing my draft existed, and once they did realize, copied some of my content without proper copyright attribution and posted to DYK. I have done a history merge though the newer, far less developed content is what's seen in the article now. I'm going to merge the old with the new soon. Glad to see your back.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 16:15, 20 February 2011 (UTC)
My front and sides are visible too. ;-) Anyway, glad you beat me to Mingaud. I'd been thinking of doing that one myself, but it seemed a bit daunting. I may have some tidbits for it. Lemme know when your merged version goes up, and I'll see what I have that might not already be in there. Probably not earthshaking, just a few things I found in 1800s-1910s books. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(ل)ˀ Contribs. 16:21, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Some more notes on Crystalate

Unresolved – New sources/material worked into article, but unanswered questions remain.
Extended content

Some more notes: they bought Royal Worcester in 1983 and sold it the next year, keeping some of the electronics part.; info about making records:; the chair in 1989 was Lord Jenkin of Roding:; "In 1880, crystalate balls made of nitrocellulose, camphor, and alcohol began to appear. In 1926, they were made obligatory by the Billiards Association and Control Council, the London-based governing body." Amazing Facts: The Indispensable Collection of True Life Facts and Feats. Richard B. Manchester - 1991; a website about crystalate and other materials used for billiard balls:. Fences&Windows 23:37, 12 July 2011 (UTC)

Thanks! I'll have to have a look at this stuff in more detail. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(ل)ˀ Contribs. 15:54, 16 July 2011 (UTC)
I've worked most of it in. Fences&Windows 16:01, 17 July 2011 (UTC)
Cool! From what I can tell, entirely different parties held the trademark in different markets. I can't find a link between Crystalate Mfg. Co. Ltd. (mostly records, though billiard balls early on) and the main billiard ball mfr. in the UK, who later came up with "Super Crystalate". I'm not sure the term was even used in the U.S. at all, despite the formulation having been originally patented there. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(ل)ˀ Contribs. 21:04, 17 July 2011 (UTC)

WP:SAL

Unresolved – Not done yet, last I looked.
Extended content

No one has actually objected to the idea that it's really pointless for WP:SAL to contain any style information at all, other than in summary form and citing MOS:LIST, which is where all of WP:SAL's style advice should go, and SAL page should move back to WP:Stand-alone lists with a content guideline tag. Everyone who's commented for 7 months or so has been in favor of it. I'd say we have consensus to start doing it. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ   Contrib. 13:13, 2 March 2012 (UTC)

I'll take a look at the page shortly. Thanks for the nudge. SilkTork 23:19, 2 March 2012 (UTC)


Your free 1-year HighBeam Research account is ready

Unresolved – Needs to be renewed, if I come back.
Extended content

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Unresolved – Needs to be renewed, if I come back.
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Thanks for helping make Misplaced Pages better. Enjoy your research! Cheers, Ocaasi 17:22, 22 August 2012 (UTC)

Yay! — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ   Contrib. 10:50, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Circa

Unresolved – Need to file the RfC.
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This edit explains how to write "ca.", which is still discouraged at ], WP:YEAR, WP:SMOS#Abbreviations, and maybe MOS:DOB, and after you must have read my complaint and ordeal at WT:Manual of Style/Abbreviations#Circa. Either allow "ca." or don't allow "ca.", I don't care which, but do it consistently. Art LaPella (talk) 15:41, 28 December 2012 (UTC)

Sounds like a good WP:RFC. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ   Contrib. 17:52, 28 December 2012 (UTC)
It's been hard to get opinions on circa in the past. Anyway, can I undo that edit, until when and if someone wants to edit the other guidelines to match? If we leave it there indefinitely, nobody will notice except me. Art LaPella (talk) 20:17, 28 December 2012 (UTC)
I don't care; this will have to be dealt with in an RfC anyway. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ   Contrib. 20:44, 28 December 2012 (UTC)
Done (now I don't need to wonder if the RfC will ever be acted on :) ) Art LaPella (talk) 21:08, 28 December 2012 (UTC)

You post at Misplaced Pages talk:FAQ/Copyright

Unresolved – Need to fix William A. Spinks, etc., with proper balkline stats, now that we know how to interpret them.
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That page looks like a hinterland (you go back two users in the history and you're in August). Are you familiar with WP:MCQ? By the way, did you see my response on the balkline averages?--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 15:54, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

Yeah, I did a bunch of archiving yesterday. This page was HUGE. It'll get there again. I'd forgotten MCQ existed. Can you please add it to the DAB hatnote at top of and "See also" at bottom of WP:COPYRIGHT? Its conspicuous absence is precisely why I ened up at Misplaced Pages talk:FAQ/Copyright! Haven't seen your balkline response yet; will go look. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖכþ Contrib. 21:34, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

Hee Haw

Unresolved – Still need to propose some standards on animal breed article naming and disambiguation.
Extended content

Yeah, we did get along on Donkeys. And probably will get along on some other stuff again later. Best way to handle WP is to take it issue by issue and then let bygones be bygones. I'm finding some interesting debates over things like the line between a subspecies, a landrace and a breed. Just almost saw someone else's GA derailed over a "breed versus species" debate that was completely bogus, we just removed the word "adapt" and life would have been fine. I'd actually be interested in seeing actual scholarly articles that discuss these differences, particularly the landrace/breed issue in general, but in livestock in particular, and particularly as applied to truly feral/landrace populations (if, in livestock, there is such a thing, people inevitably will do a bit of culling, sorting and other interference these days). I'm willing to stick to my guns on the WPEQ naming issue, but AGF in all respects. Truce? Montanabw 22:40, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

Truce, certainly. I'm not here to pick fights, just improve the consistency for readers and editors. I don't think there will be any scholarly articles on differences between landrace and breed, because there's nothing really to write about. Landrace has clear definitions in zoology and botany, and breed not only doesn't qualify, it is only established as true in any given case by reliable sources. Basically, no one anywhere is claiming "This is the Foobabaz horse, and it is a new landrace!" That wouldn't make sense. What is happening is people naming and declaring new alleged breeds on an entirely self-interested, profit-motive basis, with no evidence anyone other than the proponent and a few other experimental breeders consider it a breed. WP is full of should-be-AfD'd articles of this sort, like the cat one I successfully prod'ed last week. Asking for a reliable source that something is a landrace rather than a breed is backwards; landrace status is the default, not a special condition. It's a bit like asking for a scholarly piece on whether pig Latin is a real language or not; no one's going to write a journal paper about that because "language" (and related terms like "dialect", "language family", "creole" in the linguistic sense, etc.) have clear definitions in linguistics, while pig Latin, an entirely artificial, arbitrary, intentionally-managed form of communication (like an entirely artificial, arbitrary, intentionally managed form of domesticated animal) does not qualify. :-) The "what is a breed" question, which is also not about horses any more than cats or cavies or ferrets, is going to be a separate issue to resolve from the naming issue. Looking over what we collaboratively did with donkeys – and the naming form that took, i.e. Poitou donkey not Poitou (donkey), I think I'm going to end up on your side of that one. It needs to be discussed more broadly in an RFC, because most projects use the parenthetical form, because this is what WT:AT is most readily interpretable as requiring. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖכþ Contrib. 00:12, 7 January 2013 (UTC)
I hate the drama of an RfC, particularly when we can just look at how much can be naturally disambiguated, but if you think it's an actual issue, I guess ping me when it goes up. As for landcraces, it may be true ("clear definitions") but you would be doing God's (or someone's) own good work if you were to improve landrace which has few references, fewer good ones, and is generally not a lot of help to those of us trying to sort out WTF a "landrace" is... (smiles). As for breed, that is were we disagree: At what point do we really have a "breed" as opposed to a "landrace?" Fixed traits, human-selected? At what degree, at which point? How many generations? I don't even know if there IS such a thing as a universal definition of what a "breed" is: seriously: or breed or . I think you and I agree that the Palomino horse can never be a "breed" because it is impossible for the color to breed true (per an earlier discussion) so we have one limit. But while I happen agree to a significant extent with your underlying premise that when Randy from Boise breeds two animals and says he has created a new breed and this is a problem, (I think it's a BIG problem in the worst cases) but if we want to get really fussy, I suppose that the aficionados of the Arabian horse who claim the breed is pure from the dawn of time are actually arguing it is a landrace, wouldn't you say? And what DO we do with the multi-generational stuff that's in limbo land? Montanabw 00:41, 7 January 2013 (UTC)
I'm not really certain what the answers are to any of those questions, another reason (besides your "STOP!" demands :-) that I backed away rapidly from moving any more horse articles around. But it's something that is going to have to be looked into. I agree that the Landrace article here is poor. For one thing, it needs to split Natural breed out into its own article (a natural breed is a selectively-bred formal breed the purpose of which is to refine and "lock-in" the most definitive qualities of a local landrace). This in turn isn't actually the same thing as a traditional breed, though the concepts are related. Basically, three breeding concepts are squished into one article. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖכþ Contrib. 00:52, 7 January 2013 (UTC)
Side comment: I tend to support one good overview article over three poor content forks, just thinking aloud... Montanabw 23:01, 7 January 2013 (UTC)
Sure; the point is that the concepts have to be separately, clearly treated, because they are not synonymous at all. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖכþ Contrib. 02:07, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
Given that the article isn't well-sourced yet, I think that you might want to add something about that to landrace now, just to give whomever does article improvement on it later (maybe you, I think this is up your alley!) has the "ping" to do so. Montanabw 21:55, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
Aye, it's on my to-do list. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖכþ Contrib. 22:25, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
Although I have been an evolutionary biologist for decades, I only noticed the term "landrace" within the past year or two (in reference to corn), because I work with wildland plants. But I immediately knew what it was, from context. I'm much less certain about breeds, beyond that I am emphatic that they are human constructs. Montanabw and I have discussed my horse off-wiki, and from what I can tell, breeders are selecting for specific attributes (many people claim to have seen a horse "just like him"), but afaik there is no breed "Idaho stock horse". Artificially-selected lineages can exist without anyone calling them "breeds"; I'm not sure they would even be "natural breeds", and such things are common even within established breeds (Montanabw could probably explain to us the difference between Polish and Egyptian Arabians).
The good thing about breeds wrt Misplaced Pages is that we can use WP:RS and WP:NOTABLE to decide what to cover. Landraces are a different issue: if no one has ever called a specific, distinctive, isolated mustang herd a landrace, is it OR for Misplaced Pages to do so?--Curtis Clark (talk) 16:21, 7 January 2013 (UTC)
I have been reluctant to use landrace much out of a concern that the concept is a bit OR, as I hadn't heard of it before wikipedia either (but I'm more a historian than an evolutionary biologist, so what do I know?): Curtis, any idea where this did come from? It's a useful concept, but I am kind of wondering where the lines are between selective breeding and a "natural" breed -- of anything. And speaking of isolated Mustang herds, we have things like Kiger Mustang, which is kind of interesting. I think that at least some of SMc's passion comes from the nuttiness seen in a lot of the dog and cat breeders these days, am I right? I mean, Chiweenies? Montanabw 23:01, 7 January 2013 (UTC)
The first use of the word that I saw referred to different landraces of corn growing in different elevations and exposures in indigenous Maya areas of modern Mexico. I haven't tracked down the references for the use of the word, but the concept seems extremely useful. My sense is that landraces form as much through natural selective processes of cultivation or captivity as through human selection, so that if the "garbage wolf" hypothesis for dog domestication is true, garbage wolves would have been a landrace (or more likely several, in different areas). One could even push the definition and say that MRSA is a landrace. But I don't have enough knowledge of the reliable sources to know how all this would fit into Misplaced Pages.--Curtis Clark (talk) 01:01, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
Landraces form, primarily and quickly, through mostly natural selection, long after domestication. E.g. the St Johns water dog and Maine Coon cat are both North American landraces that postdate European arrival on the continent. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖכþ Contrib. 20:16, 9 January 2013 (UTC)
I see some potential for some great research on this and a real improvement to the articles in question. Montanabw 21:55, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
Yep. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖכþ Contrib. 20:16, 9 January 2013 (UTC)

One of the reasons gardens are walled

Unresolved – 'We really need an "intro to Misplaced Pages for academic and professional experts" guide.... Still do! Good potential project!
Extended content
Looking at Montanabw's reaction, I think sometimes you fail to look through the eyes of the editors in a narrow field, and end up with enemies instead of friends. I actually left off editing horse articles years ago because of the controversies, and the hammering out of consensus in that project has been decidedly non-trivial. It's important to remember that a local optimum is always optimal, locally, and that getting to a global optimum can involve considerable work, work that many editors thought they had already done. To me, the best way to start out is always "Here are some more general issues I perceive; I see that you do things differently. How can I help you deal with your problems in a way that will meet my goals?" In the case of the bird folks, this probably wouldn't have worked, but I think It's always a good place to start.--Curtis Clark (talk) 18:13, 3 January 2013 (UTC)
I agree in the abstract, but I've never been good at that sort of politics. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖכþ Contrib. 10:25, 4 January 2013 (UTC)
PS: This may sound like a "my logic is bigger than your logic" nit-pick, but I consider it a serious issue: A major and worsening problem on WP, especially as the generalist editorship continues to decline in numbers and activity levels, is that wikiprojects are becoming increasingly balkanized into stand-offish blocs. Despite several ARBCOM decisions against projects bucking consensus and making up their own conflicting rules, and despite a comparatively recent but clear policy against it, at WP:LOCALCONSENSUS, they continue to do it anyway, with increased feelings of righteousness. Per WP:OWN, no topic or field on WP is a walled garden, but some projects do not appear to believe this. I don't know what the solution is, but I have serious misgivings about what WP is going to be like 5 years from now in this regard if something doesn't change. One idea I've had, inspired a bit by the undoing of WP:Esperanza and a CfD several years ago that move all the wikiproject "members" categories to read "participants", is to propose that we abandon the term "wikiproject" entirely, and use something more verbal, that doesn't sound like a club, or worse yet a militia, one can join. Maybe "wikiwork" or something like that: WikiWork Botany, WikiWork Cats, etc. PS: My Granny's garden wasn't walled, but sprawled all the way to the mailbox at the sidewalk. :-) — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖכþ Contrib. 11:22, 4 January 2013 (UTC)
Some are more interested in methods, others in results.
Certainly, WP:OWN is a problem; otherwise it wouldn't have a shortcut. Randy in Boise is also a problem, and editors' reactions to that often appear from the outside to be WP:OWN. And over time they can turn into WP:OWN, when an editor starts to believe that's the only way to counter the Randys.
One approach is to wade in with policies, guidelines, and sanctions, whip up support from editors who have an abstract interest, and make life so miserable for the Randys and the "owners" that they leave Misplaced Pages. In my experience, the most knowledgeable editors are the first to leave (I almost wrote "best editors", but one solution to expert retention is to not care, and only retain compliant editors).
It seems that a lot of the pushback you are going to get at WP:EQUINE is over WP:COMMONNAME issues. You only meant to sweep the floor, but you knocked over a chess game. The word that immediately comes to mind is "inefficient".
My most memorable walled garden was the atrium in the house of Maurice K. Temerlin in Norman, Oklahoma, filled with lush greenery. My first thought was that it provided a safe place for Lucy, but as far as I could tell, they only let her into it under supervision.--Curtis Clark (talk) 16:31, 4 January 2013 (UTC)
You're right that my cleanup efforts have not been efficient when it comes to horses. (They have been in other areas, including donkeys, with direct cooperation from Montanabw, curiously enough, and in domestic cats, among others.) It is difficult to predict what projects will find article naming and categorization cleanup controversial, and on what points.

I understand the WP:RANDY problem, but I'm not part of it; WP:Manual of Style/organisms could not have been written by a Randy. One problem to me is that too many alleged experts treat everyone who disagrees with them about anything as a Randy, often very insultingly so. And by no means is every editor who claims expertise actually an expert; many, especially in biology projects, are simply fanciers, and others may have studied zoology or botany as an undergraduate, but that's it. I have a degree in cultural anthropology, but would never call myself an expert in that field. Large numbers of, e.g., WP:BIRDS editors don't even have that level of qualification, but will fight to the death to get their way on capitalization (and on a faulty basis – they continually claim that the fact that bird field guides capitalize common names means that the mainstream publishing world is honoring the IOU's convention, when in reality all field guides on everything have always capitalized this way, as ease-of-rapid-scanning emphasis, since at least the 1800s, long before IOU even existed; it's a coincidence, and they know this but pretend this fact was never raised.

Another related issue is that WP:Competence is required – not just competence in a particular field, but online community competence to work collaboratively toward consensus. Not all academics have this, and many are extremely competitive and debatory. Sometimes the only thing to do is not care if this sort leave the project (or even be happy that they've gone). The vast majority of expert editors are a boon to the project, but being such an expert is not a "Get Out of Jail Free" card in Wiki-opoly. As one example, several years ago, one alleged (and probable) expert on albinism was extremely disruptive at the page that is now Albinism in humans. He considered himself to be a reliable source, and basically refused to do the leg-work to provide source citations for the material he wanted to add, nor to show that material he wanted to remove was obsolete or otherwise wrong. I bent over backwards to try to get him to understand WP:V, WP:RS and WP:NOR, but he just would not listen. Myself and others kept having to prevent him from making the well-source if imperfect article a mostly unsourced mess, and he eventually left the project is "disgust" at other editors' "stupidity", much to a lot of people's relief. The article today is very well sourced and stable (aside from frequent "ALBINOESES LOOK STOOPID" vandalism). The disruptive expert's absence was a boon. I feel the same way about WP:DIVA expert editors who threaten wiki-retirement, WP boycotts, editing strikes, mass editorial walkouts and other WP:POINTy nonsense. We all know that in reality academics have zero problem adapting to in-house style guides of whatever venue they're writing for. Pretending that doing it on WP is onerous is a abuse of WP as massively-multiplayer online debate game.

We really need an "intro to Misplaced Pages for academic and professional experts" guide, to help prevent incoming specialists from falling into such pitfall patterns (not to mention the one identified at WP:SSF). — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖכþ Contrib. 20:45, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

Just wanted to let you know that I did read this, started an unproductive reply, and then decided I needed to think about it a while.--Curtis Clark (talk) 02:40, 7 January 2013 (UTC)
@Curtis Clark: It's a been a while, but I thought I'd get back to you about this. If I resume editing, I may in fact try to draft an "intro to Misplaced Pages for academic and professional experts" guide. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖכþ Contrib. 20:54, 21 March 2014 (UTC)
Actually, Misplaced Pages:Ten Simple Rules for Editing Misplaced Pages might be good enough. Didn't know that existed. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖכþ Contrib. 21:59, 21 March 2014 (UTC)



Kinda old stuff to sort through

Tlg module

Unresolved – The affected templates are still using the old code.

I've recreated (some of) {{tlg}} in Lua w/ a shorthand here -- it works 86% percent of the time! Anyway, this way should be easier to maintain, and we'll still have a shorter syntax if the tl-whatever tpls get deleted. If you like the idea, then maybe we can pitch it at tlg's talk page or wherever. If not, then oh well. — lfdder 00:32, 29 April 2014 (UTC)

@Lfdder: Cool beans!  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  07:08, 29 April 2014 (UTC)
@Lfdder:: The temples were kept, marginally, but I agree that the Lua route you were working on is ultimately a better way.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  09:50, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

Redundant sentence?

Unresolved – Work to integrate NCFLORA and NCFAUNA stuff into MOS:ORGANISMS]] not completed yet.

The sentence at MOS:LIFE "General names for groups or types of organisms are not capitalized except where they contain a proper name (oak, Bryde's whales, rove beetle, Van cat)" is a bit odd, since the capitalization would (now) be exactly the same if they were the names of individual species. Can it simply be removed?

There is an issue, covered at Misplaced Pages:PLANTS#The use of botanical names as common names for plants, which may or may not be worth putting in the main MOS, namely cases where the same word is used as the scientific genus name and as the English name, when it should be de-capitalized. I think this is rare for animals, but more common for plants and fungi (although I have seen "tyrannosauruses" and similar uses of dinosaur names). Peter coxhead (talk) 09:17, 3 May 2014 (UTC)

  1. I would leave it a alone for now; let people get used to the changes. I think it's reasonable to include the "general names" thing, because it's a catch-all that includes several different kinds of examples, that various largely different groups of people are apt to capitalize. Various know-nothings want to capitalize things like "the Cats", the "Great Apes", etc., because they think "it's a Bigger Group and I like to Capitalize Big Important Stuff". There are millions more people who just like to capitalize nouns and stuff. "Orange's, $1 a Pound". Next we have people who insist on capitalizing general "types" and landraces of domestic animals ("Mountain Dogs", "Van Cat") because they're used to formal breed names being capitalized (whether to do that with breeds here is an open question, but it should not be done with types/classes of domestics, nor with landraces. Maybe the examples can be sculpted better: "the roses", "herpesviruses", "great apes", "Bryde's whale", "mountain dogs", "Van cat", "passerine birds". I'm not sure that "rove beetle" and "oak" are good examples of anything. Anyway, it's more that the species no-capitalization is a special case of the more general rule, not that the general rule is a redundant or vague version of the former. If they're merged, it should keep the general examples, and maybe specifically spell out and illustrate that it also means species and subspecies, landraces and domestic "types", as well as larger and more general groupings.
  2. I had noticed that point and was going to add it, along with some other points from both NCFLORA and NCFAUNA, soon to MOS:ORGANISMS, which I feel is nearing "go live" completion. Does that issue come up often enough to make it a MOS mainpage point? I wouldn't really object to it, and it could be had by adding an "(even if it coincides with a capitalized Genus name)" parenthetical to the "general names" bit. The pattern is just common enough in animals to have been problematic if it were liable to be problematic, as it were. I.e., I don't see a history of squabbling about it at Lynx or its talk page, and remember looking into this earlier with some other mammal, about two weeks ago, and not seeing evidence of confusion or editwarring. The WP:BIRDS people were actually studiously avoiding that problem; I remember seeing a talk page discussion at the project that agreed that such usage shouldn't be capitalized ever. PS: With Lynx, I had to go back to 2006, in the thick of the "Mad Capitalization Epidemic" to find capitalization there, and it wasn't even consistent, just in the lead.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  11:11, 3 May 2014 (UTC)
  1. Well, certainly "rove beetle" and "oak" are poor examples here, so I would support changing to some of the others you suggested above.
  2. I think the main problem we found with plants was it being unclear as to whether inexperienced editors meant the scientific name or the English name. So you would see a sentence with e.g. "Canna" in the middle and not know whether this should be corrected to "Canna" or to "canna". The plural is clear; "cannas" is always lower-case non-italicized. The singular is potentially ambiguous. Whether it's worth putting this point in the main MOS I just don't know since I don't much edit animal articles and never breed articles, which is why I asked you. Peter coxhead (talk) 21:55, 3 May 2014 (UTC)
  1. Will take a look at that later, if someone else doesn't beat me to it.
  2. Beats me. Doesn't seem too frequent an issue, but lot of MOS stuff isn't. Definitely should be in MOS:ORGANISMS, regardless.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  00:46, 4 May 2014 (UTC)
Worked on both of those a bit at MOS. We'll see if it sticks.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  01:18, 5 May 2014 (UTC)

code vs. tt

Unresolved – Did not yet do the code work I said I would: I have it open in some window somewhere...

I could say that insisting on the use of <code> rather than <tt> is an example of an un-necessary, if not fallacious, specialist style. :-) I ought to be guilty of it, since I used to teach HTML! I confess that I use "tt" because it saves typing... Peter coxhead (talk) 09:31, 4 May 2014 (UTC)

Heehaw! I'm a stickler for HTML semantic purity whenever possible (which reminds me I need to fork {{bq}} into a div-based block indenter for non-quotations). I try not to make edits like that unless I'm making other ones at the same time and throw them in as an afterthought, on the same basis that just futzing with things like ] -> ] is considered objectionable by some.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  09:56, 4 May 2014 (UTC)
Update: <tt> no longer exists in HTML5.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  19:32, 29 July 2015 (UTC)

Sally Binford

Unresolved – Should make a stub, at least.

I'm in an intro to archaeological theory class, and a friend pointed out that there's no article on Sally Binford. I don't have the sources to write anything more than a one-line stub... would you have anything? Ed  19:01, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

Not right at hand. Have archaeology text books in a box somewhere. I wonder if anyone's written a biography book about her?  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  19:17, 1 October 2014 (UTC)
Not that I can find. Information on her seems to be extremely sparse. There's all of one mention of her in the Oxford Companion to Archaeology. Ed  21:28, 1 October 2014 (UTC)
So that would establish notability at least? Curiously, before I looked at that link closely, I did a similar search of gbooks but without the quotation marks that turns up her date of death as 1993 by suicide (and hmm, "an explicit movie about elderly sexuality in 1974 titled 'A ripple in time'".) In addition, the 2012 edition of the aforementioned Oxford Companion yields "in addition to his academic publications, a key role in the formation of New Archaeology group identity was the symposium organized in 1965 by Lewis and Sally Binford at the American Anthropological Association in Denver (Binford and Binford 1968...). (Also he had six marriages, which is at least 3 or 4 too many, but I don't suppose you can put that in.) And from the 1996 edition "Lewis Binford and Sally Binford also conducted an analysis of variability in Mousterian chipped-stone artifacts; their work touched off heated debates that rage to this day. Although further research has undermined the findings of some ..." . Buckets of notability. And three sentences at least. —Neotarf (talk) 01:14, 2 October 2014 (UTC)
Yeah, that's enough probably to establish notability. I find plenty of other stuff with Google "Sally+Binford"&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8, like a Northwest Archaeology article, an interview, etc., just on first page of results. She's co-notable for all the notable work she's credited as doing with Lewis. He's the more famous of the two, but they're often referred to as a pair, like Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, or Marie & Pierre Curie. I don't know loads and loads about her, but I'd be surprised if she's not individually credited on various papers and such.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  04:43, 2 October 2014 (UTC)
My professor today, although I don't know his sources, says that she was far more influential than it appears, but a combination of old-fashioned sexism and the popularity of Lewis combined to keep her from many history books. Ed  04:48, 2 October 2014 (UTC)
World Cat —Neotarf (talk) 05:44, 2 October 2014 (UTC) Actually, this is better, an advanced WorldCat search by author, with all 55 publications listed. —Neotarf (talk) 05:49, 2 October 2014 (UTC)



Saw your note on Women in Red. She looks fascinating. I had never heard of her. This blog, though probably not useable as a source gives a pretty detailed account of her life and the fact that Binford was only a small part of it. The whole controversy over François Bordes which later erupted gets a whole new light, when you realize Sally had a pre-existing working relationship with him. There are also tons of people and places mentioned here that would help in locating sources about her. She definitely should have an article. SusunW (talk) 14:29, 1 August 2015 (UTC) Just realized I didn't give you the blog link, sorry Susie Bright's blog SusunW (talk) 14:34, 1 August 2015 (UTC)

Current threads

<Throws up hands>-Current_threads-2015-07-27T02:40:00.000Z">

In all seriousness, I'm at a loss to know what to do . Is he being intentionally clueless? Since he doesn't seem to understand at all what's happened or what the plan is, I hesitate to resume work for fear he'll start another round of reverting anything not previously discussed. EEng (talk) 02:40, 27 July 2015 (UTC)"> ">

I wouldn't worry about it. I think it's just a case of WP:LASTWORD (which you seem prone to yourself; I am as well, so I'd recognize it). This appears conciliatory, and can be taken as a promise to not be obstructionist: 'Anyway, I look forward to your new proposal on the the edits that most of us already agreed (Discussion of individual edits (2)).' I really think there's not a lot of re-re-re-debate. Of the 12-point list that was pored over, I think we all know what is good to go with.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  02:58, 27 July 2015 (UTC)
I didn't make myself clear. You may not be aware that, after JS simply went silent for several days during discussion of the famous "12", I (foolishly) assumed he'd wandered off elsewhere, and so continued what I was doing with another 60 or so edits (listed here ). Now, I want to be clear: when I've installed the modified set of 12, as so endlessly discussed, is it your opinion I'm supposed to enumerate and justify the next 60 things I propose doing? I feel foolish even asking that, because we both know the answer is No, but I fear he's just gonna repeat his past behavior of reverting and demanding explanations of why each change is "necessary". EEng (talk) 04:19, 27 July 2015 (UTC)
Well, multiple editors thought many of your changes were good and that mass-reverting them wasn't helpful. I expect he's learned from that. But I also expect you've learned from the experience too: None of your edits in that batch were unanimously supported, and some were supported by no one. I'm skeptical that that page needs another 60 edits any time soon, and beyond skeptical that more than some under-50 percentage of them would meet with consensus. I'm a huge fan of WP:BOLD even when it comes to policypages, but they're not articles, and sweeping changes to them tends to be viewed as disruptive. It's better to take a few at a time and let people adjust to and refine (and sometimes reject) them.

If I could simply "get away with" rewriting MOS my way, it would change in way more than 60 places. But MOS's function isn't to reflect what I want it to say, but what the community needs it to say. Some "rules" in it that I really hate, as a writing style, are better for WP's needs than what I'd prefer. Some are just accepted for better or worse, and changing them won't have a positive effect that outweighs the negative of a zillion pages having to change to comply with them. Some advice I see as missing doesn't need to be added (in a few rare cases it does). I've mostly learned to make a spate of copyedits that do not in any way change the meaning only the facility of the wording, and let those sit a while. Then make a substantive change (usually an addition) by itself, and let people chew on it, for a week or longer even, then do some pure copyedits. When you mix in substantive changes in a series of copyedits (as J-S did recently, hyper-compressing stuff and moving something, and losing some points in the process, in the middle of implementing some of the things that gained consensus on the talk page) it triggers concerns and confusion.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  06:00, 27 July 2015 (UTC)

Sorry, I did not learn that many of my edits weren't universally supported, because there was nothing to learn: I expected in advance that that would happen, at least here and there, since I'm new to /Linking and not tuned in to some of the hard-fought subtleties of phrasing, so that what I intended to be equivalent but tighter (or better-organized) direction to the reader turned out to have subtle substantive implications. But I also expected that would be ironed out through others fixing and building-upon, not obstructionist mass reverting. If you step through a few of "the 60" I linked in my last post you'll see that's the intent there as well (and, of course, I did it in discrete bite-size bits) so I hope we will be able to continue with fix-and-build-on-but-rarely-revert for those too. I did those 60 over about three or four days, with no objection, so I figured I must be doing something right. Then of course the "silent majority" (JS, Albino), having said nothing all that time, showed up to mass-revert again.
BTW, it's apparent JS did expect yet another "proposal" for the 12 (see -- I'm guessing he watches this page) so I still have a bad feeling he's going to demand pre-discussion on everything new after the 12 are in and settled; let's wait and see how the 12 go first. And Crikey, what a comedy of errors followed by EEng (talk) 16:14, 27 July 2015 (UTC)
Meh. Consensus is consensus. If we'd already agreed some stuff is going in, lets put it in. The recent revert of someone in good faith restoring stuff that some of which is what we actually want, is not helpful. Drawing this out any longer will seem WP:POINTy.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  21:11, 27 July 2015 (UTC)
C'mon -- I reverted JS' monolithic reinsertion because it was confusing to such an extent that Flyer re-inserted duplicate material on top of it, thinking something had been deleted that had actually merely been moved -- remember? I'd like to avoid a repeat of anything like that, so I'd like to do it myself. After a month of prevent-bad-changes-at-all-costs obstruction, now he's a bull in a china shop. Just in the last few days he's been babbling about more proposals, then changing his mind, then... It's exhausting just reading his posts. Saints preserve us! EEng (talk) 23:55, 27 July 2015 (UTC)
Noted, but every minute we argue about how things should go or could have gone is time we're not spending editing. It's time to start inserting the consensus changes. I see one was inserted already (and I typo-corrected it). Good start. Let's proceed. It doesn't matter who insert the does-have-consensus change, or in what order; let's just get it done, just not in a confusing mass dump.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  00:09, 28 July 2015 (UTC)
How do talented people such as we let ourselves get lured into the ridiculous time-sinks? In 24 hours I shall swing into action. Thanks for your help. EEng (talk) 01:13, 28 July 2015 (UTC)
Consensus doesn't have to wait for you, though. It's reasonable for others to add in some of the material in question without your "permission". :-) I'll look for attempts to alter what was agreed upon, if someone adds more of it, and if I'm around to notice.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  01:42, 28 July 2015 (UTC)
Oh for heaven's sake, OWN has nothing to do with it. I'd just rather there were no more screwups to attract more sleeping reverters (a la poor innocent Flyer). I'd have done it days ago if Mr. UnclearOnTheConcept hadn't continued to imply he wanted more "proposals". He keeps his foot firmly on the brakes for a month, then suddenly floors it and runs the thing into a tree. EEng (talk) 03:37, 28 July 2015 (UTC)
My point is that "wait, I want to do it my way" isn't something anyone else is obligated to abide by, and the more you demand that people wait, yet don't actually do anything, the less likely anyone is to keep waiting. I.e. "get on with it". It's not important whether J-S's edit was great or terrible. You've made a production about wanting to do this just so. As Granddad used to say: "Shit, or get off the pot." Heh.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  05:59, 28 July 2015 (UTC)
(It's 4:15am where I am and I just got up to complete a report for work...) Excuse me, but asking for 48 hours because of IRL responsibilities -- that's not a "big production". And IRL only became an issue for me because, after I proposed "What I'd like to do is reinstall the changes we all seem agreed upon, then continue from there, but more slowly this time, with other editors modifying, fixing, and (where necessary) reverting in a targeted way. Are we all on board with this?", it took a week for JS to, um, get on board. And re your comment to PBS, I already got his/her bullshit AE notificiation (User_talk:EEng#WP:LINK) and responded in detail; of course, PBS took no notice at all of anything I said. I appreciate your calming influence but please stop cutting the baby in half. I'm nothing like JS and I'm not gaming -- for a month I've just wanted him to quit his obstructionism. EEng (talk) 08:19, 28 July 2015 (UTC)
Missing the point: Consensus is consensus, so it's entirely reasonable for any editor to make the edits that consensus agreed should be made. There is no obligation for people to wait for you to do it just because you want to be the one to do it, so the faster you get it going the more likely it is to go the way you want. The time you've spent arguing with me on my talk page and making out-of-band complaints about J-S, is all time that could have been spent adding one of the consensus-agreed changes to MOSLIST, to demonstrate progress and assuage concerns that you're stalling for some reason. ARBATC DS notices are not "bullshit", they're a signal you need to take it down a notch. Too many of your posts are about the editor not the edit, and laced with invective, accusations, sarcasm, baiting, and extraneous grousing. If you have an actual editor behavior complaint to make against J-S, please take it to ANI and (to return to the same theme again) just get it over with; don't cloud MOS talk pages with it perpetually, please. Just accept this constructive criticism in the way it's intended and move on. This being my own talk page, you're unlikely to get the last word here. >;-)  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  20:26, 28 July 2015 (UTC)
Not looking for the last word, rather looking for an indication that, should JS restarts his obstructionist nonsense you'll understand what's really going on. As recently as two days ago he was still playing the naif wanting "proposals" for everything , and I came here for reassurance you wouldn't stand by while I got shot down again. You and I now seem caught in a loop in which you keep telling me to go as fast as possible, and I keep telling you to please give me the 48 hours I asked for (because of IRL entanglements), well, 45 hours ago. I'm very careful about a high-visibility pages like this and want to be sure at each step, lest I get accused of something else. My first step is to assemble all the commentary so I can be sure not to miss anyone's thoughts on each edit (see User:EEng/sandbox). EEng (talk) 21:13, 28 July 2015 (UTC)
Still WP:NOTGETTINGIT. You need to stop making snide comments about other editors, like "he was still playing the naif" (which is both name-calling and insinuation of a motivation or mental process about which you do not have any facts obtained through mind-reading magic). If you do not stop it, especially with regard to MOS topics, one admin or another will block you or topic ban you. See WP:ACDS for how this works; it does not require an ANI case, but can be imposed unilaterally. I am not telling you to go as fast as possible. I already agreed that step-wise changes would be the best approach. But no-changes is not a good approach, and other editors may proceed to move on without you (doesn't mean I will, but two already have, and if you revert a third one, that probably won't go over well). Your IRL entanglements cannot be so great you can't insert one of the consensus-agreed edits, to demonstrate some progress in moving forward; we know this because you're on Misplaced Pages right now, for a several-hour stretch, spending an even greater amount of time and brainpower arguing with me over common-sense things I asked you not to argue further with me about. Are we done now?  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  22:20, 28 July 2015 (UTC)
What I've been putting my brainpower into is matching up different people's comments in that insane discussion (there were at least two different numberings 1-12) to see what people thought they were actually agreeing or disagreeing on. In at least some places it looks like people were talking about two different things without realizing it. I figured this was going on, and that's the main reason I wanted to take some concentrated time to be sure everyone was happy. I have to quit for tonight, but stay tuned. EEng (talk) 05:51, 29 July 2015 (UTC)
My 12 are point-by-point matches to J-S's. I can't speak for anyone else.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  16:10, 29 July 2015 (UTC)"> ">

Remember the truce

We do have a truce, or so I thought. I'd appreciate it if you'd tone down the personal attacks on the race (biology) article. I made the proposal in good faith, just because I have a difference of opinion with you does not mean that I'm being any of the things you accused me of over there. My motives are simple. You apparently missed the earlier party at this which resulted in this. I'm not fond of racism, particularly white supremacism, however masked behind quasi-scientific or quasi-philosophical "debate." I have about zero patience with people like that and I think the article is just bait for this sort of thing. You are, of course, welcome to disagree. But cracks like "The nom needs to just accept her own unfamiliarity with the topic, and drop it," (as if the reader does not exist) and a link to Shrew (archetype) is WAY out of line. Montanabw 08:34, 27 July 2015 (UTC)

Splitting this into separate subthreads.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  09:55, 27 July 2015 (UTC)

On the personality dispute

Seems to be resolved.

Opposition is not an attack, but fine; I made my point there, you made yours, no need to belabor it. I thought we had a truce, too, but you're returning to the tactics you used in trying initially to get rid of the Landrace article. I think it's understandable that this set off some red-flags. I did not accuse you of bad faith; it's just this WP:ICANTHEARYOU thing, ignoring everything that doesn't mesh with where you've already decided this should go.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  09:43, 27 July 2015 (UTC)

NB: Pursuing this even further by pestering other editors, e.g. at User talk:Peter coxhead to Google up some sources for you that have already been linked to on the article's talk page, in discussions in which you already participated, is a pretty strong indication this is an ICANTHEARYOU game. You frequently complain about faith assumptions, but need to consider that patterns like this wander into disruptive territory and make it harder to keep assuming the best.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  22:06, 28 July 2015 (UTC)
PS: What's way out of line to me is your repeated reaching as far as possible to find some excuse to find insult in unrelated comments and matters, and brand me a sexist. It's the second time you've done this in as many months, and it it's hard not to take it as a personal attack. It comes across as pointed, willful character assassination. There are two articles in living memory that I've done the kind of total-overhaul on that I was talking about (to someone else), one called Landrace and one called Shrew (archetype). The fact that one of them coincidentally has something to do with a negative view of women, and you happen to have the right chromosomes, like over 50% of the human race, has nothing to do with anything. This kind of demonizing, false insinuation of 'sexual harassment', BTW, has a lot to do with why I'm opposing the proposal at WT:HARASSMENT; things like this prove that it would be too easy to WP:GAME.

Ironically, my work on that article was to convert it to something factual and properly sourced, about a literary motif, from what bordered on a sexist attack stub that suggested that the stereotype of the "shrew" is not only an objectively identifiable type of person (which it's not) but an archetype (!!!). Seriously, read its talk page, where someone hell-bent on defending this take tendentiously derailed the RM to Shrew (stock character). I'll be re-proposing that move soon, now that I've rewritten it.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  09:54, 27 July 2015 (UTC)

On the article

I didn't miss anything there. I'm the one who went thru every single discussion on that page and archived the resolved ones, specifically to shunt away old invective that might induce more trolling! That #Social_concept one is resolved; the social "concept" (construct) material has all long been moved to Race (human classification) where it belongs. We can't document how the concept was distorted by racists if the very page on the topic is "disappeared". The drama engendered by efforts to wish the page away has been so draining I'm not going to have much enthusiasm for doing that work any time soon, but I'll at least try to rework it in the short term to be narrowly tailored.

Mycology and bacteriology haven't abandoned the taxon yet, but even if they had it would still be an encyclopedic topic (as at least 4 other editors have pointed out in that discussion, for the same reason), documenting the facts of its former usage and why it's been increasingly abandoned. If it helps, I pledge that as long as I'm around I will watchlist that page and revert racist bullshit if people try to add any. And if that page didn't exist, watchlisted by scientific minds sharply limiting the scope to the use of the word in biological taxonomy and its decline, and shunting social construct material to the other article which is well-watchlisted, trolls would just create a much worse page, mix-and-matching stuff to try to construct a case that a biological basis for human "races" is plausible, starting the debate all over again. There are a dozen different ways to write a pseudo-article like that, so it would keep getting re-generated in different form. By having this article instead, we're curtailing their ability to go that route, by filling the "race in taxonomy" niche, so that POVforks get nuked. If the niche is empty, there's no forbidden forking, just room to write craftily constructed POV crap that might be hard to get rid of at AfD.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  09:43, 27 July 2015 (UTC)

seems to be resolved
  • A simpler answer would be "sorry for the misunderstanding, I didn't mean to imply that you were being shrewish, I just got caught up in the argument. We can agree to disagree." I'd be even happier if you would say, "sorry for accusing you of having nefarious motives, when, clearly, it would have been better to address your concerns respectfully, rationally, and without personal attacks, even if I disagreed with your proposed solution." But I guess that's too much to ask. Montanabw 05:19, 30 July 2015 (UTC)
This seems to be about the personal stuff again, not the article. But okay, I'll try to address that first, then get back to the article. I am sorry there's been a misunderstanding. But I'm not sorry for it; it isn't coming from my side. I did not imply you were being shrewish; you're imagining that, and assuming bad faith. Actually, you're directly accusing bad faith, since I've already denied it and shown that it's not; you're way beyond the "assuming" phase. I didn't get caught up in the argument; you did: No one else is magically responsible for you choosing, for no explicable reason, to associate yourself personally with a negative stereotype of women, just because someone else on the same talk page mentioned having worked to improve some articles with similar problems, and in one case it happened to have been work to make a page be less about a negative stereotype of women.

It's entirely natural, given my editorial interests and the nature of this article's problems, that the only two articles I've semi-recently worked on extensively in that way that had similar problems would themselves have had either a discriminatory WP:UNDUE issue (as in the case of what is presently still at Shrew (archetype)), or (as in the case of Landrace as it was when I got to it) a poorly sourced mangling of taxonomy. Those are, after all, exactly this article's problems. I was making a direct comparison to two previous cases of similarly poor articles, where just writing and sourcing them well ended up obviating attempts by others to treat the topic as "unimprovable". You were directly involved in the Landrace case, but had nothing to do with the other one; that was some guy, trying hard to keep the article be about a stereotype (a non-encyclopedic dicdef) instead of about a very well-sourceable and largely obsolete literary motif (and I don't impute sexist motives to him; looked more like a case of WP:WINNING to me, a refusal to reconsider an already-cast !vote). You're inserting yourself fictively into a case in which you had no participation of any kind, and claiming a grievance based on some non-existent connection to it.

Yes, we can agree to disagree; I think we're doing that now. I, too, would 'be even happier if you would say, "sorry for accusing you of having nefarious motives, when, clearly, it would have been better to address your concerns respectfully, rationally, and without personal attacks"' I don't think that is too much to ask.

I haven't accused you of anything nefarious (like sexism) at all. With regard to that page, I think you are over-focusing on protection of the "breed"-related article sphere, and improperly engaging in deletionism toward a topic that, while controversial, is clearly notable and should be covered (better). That's not an accusation of nefarious motives, or an attack, it's an editorial-behavior observation. I'm not the only one making it. If it were just me, I could see, maybe, why you might want to shoe-horn this into some kind of personal dispute (though doing so would not be productive). But it just isn't the case. The ironic thing is, the page in question would actually serve our shared anti-racism interests if it were written up correctly. But your antagonism and irredentism have drained me of all enthusiasm for improving it any time soon (other than some basic sourcing work), as they have on so many other articles before this. I am going to trust that if I at least do some of that basic sourcing that you won't be obstructionist about it. I don't see anyone else lining up to work on that article. Let's not let trolls actually take it over, right?  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  06:44, 30 July 2015 (UTC)

tl;dr. Go improve the article, then. Put up or shut up. I'm tired of your bad-faith accusations, false boomeranging, gaslighting, and drama. It's also amusing that you accuse me of "deletionism," given my penchant for inclusion as a general default. But if it helps to say that I misinterpreted your intent behind your link to "shrew" and I now accept that you didn't mean it as a gender slur directed at me, then I just said it. {{sofixit}} Montanabw 23:28, 30 July 2015 (UTC)
I agree with very little of that assessment of things, other than the sentiment that working on articles is more productive than further argument. I appreciate the clarification at the end. One of my own: I don't imply that your views are deletionist generally, I just observed a three-times-in-a-row deletion pattern on the same article, that mirrored your earlier sentiments about a conceptually similar article with a similar name. Observation of a pattern isn't an "accusation", and I'm not implying any nefarious motives; it just doesn't seem practical in the face of what everyone else is saying about that article. Let's get back to editing, shall we?  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  00:54, 31 July 2015 (UTC)
We seem to have found a point in common. I support fixes to the article itself that may help address that issue. Montanabw 02:42, 31 July 2015 (UTC)
  • Of Interest: Bernstein's comments about that article are a more articulate expression of concerns similar to those I've had on the article in question. Montanabw 22:26, 31 July 2015 (UTC)
I'll have a look-see.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  22:29, 31 July 2015 (UTC)
Interestingly (though not surprisingly given my left–right centrism on many political issues), I actually agree with both Bernstein and Blackford, simultaneously. See the lead item on my userpage. Blackford is absolutely right that external "forces" (on all sides, including the far left) are misusing WP as a political propaganda platform, and I consider this the #1 issue facing WP's future. I've been saying this in various forums here for at least 5 years. In that particular case, Bernstein is also correct that the article in question was a nonsense job. The key statement, to me, in AfD#2 on that article is this one: 'A few books have been cited as using the phrase "cultural Marxism", but none of them support the existence of a school of thought called "Cultural Marxism".' The issue with that article was the fallacy of equivocation at work, substituting one meaning for a term in place of another. The race-in-taxonomy article is a different case, though it could be manipulated in that wrong direction. Real sciences really have used "race" as a real taxon, essentially to mean "sub-sub-species"; the difference is that no reliable sources have actually used "cultural Marxism" to really mean a real school of thought or socio-political movement called "Cultural Marxism"; it's a manipulative fiction. The manipulative fiction at work in taxomony has been the extension of the idea of sub-sub-specific taxonomic categorization to humans; modern genetic research has proven that it's a cultural construct, i.e. a fiction. (As an anthropologist by training, the reason for this is obvious to me: Human move around and interbreed much more freely than most species, and have been doing so since tens of thousands of years before written history. Even if we could have been classified this way during, say, the last Ice Age, it's definitely not true today). The place where b.s. arguments about a biological basis for human races is happening is at what is now Race (human classification) (which I'm RM'ing to Race (human categorization); you'll probably have an interest in that RM).  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  23:28, 31 July 2015 (UTC)
I'll look at the RM, hope that spat doesn't wind up at arbcom... sigh. I'm all for finding areas where we can find common ground. It's rather surprising that two people with center-left leanings still spat as much as you and I. I do agree that POV-pushing is a huge problem on WP, stuff like the stealth edits by the Chinese government on articles such as Dalai Lama are another example. However, another huge problem - sometimes propagated by the POV-pushers, but not always - is the simple trolling and general meanness - the infobox wars being one example (one still only tries to add an infobox to a classical music article with great caution for risk of having one's head ripped off and being beaten with it... sigh). Well, TTFN Montanabw 04:46, 1 August 2015 (UTC)
ArbCom: Well, for a dispute like the "cultural Marxism" one some intervention might have been useful, but I bet they'd've turned it down as it's more of a content dispute than a behavioral one. And it'll probably be back. I stay far away from classical music articles because of that infobox thing and certain other WP:OWN patterns. In the end, I think the "don't you dare put an infobox on one of our articles" camp will lose their war, since there's a general site-wide consensus that infoboxes are useful, and this consensus becomes increasingly inescapable the more and more our userbase percentage shifts to frequent mobile browsing (during which most users don't read anything but the infobox, unless looking for some detail). At some point, as with WikiData and much else, it probably makes sense to fork the infoboxes into an external process, and have it purposely optimized for mobile use.

Anyway, I agree on finding common ground. It's easy to let a temper flare-up lead to obstinacy (I find it helps to write the angry version, to blow the steam off, and post something more measured instead). A large percentage of the cases at ANI are people angry at each other over words and attitudes, while the central issue at whatever article they're fighting over is actually resolvable by some better writing and sourcing. This is one of the reasons I've sworn off ANI (much less AE) actions unless faced with someone who has a clear external agenda to promote some -ism, or who is in some other way WP:NOTHERE for encyclopedia writing. I used WP:AE last year to deal with some anti- PoV-warrior, letting WP:ARBAA2 disputes spill over into, of all places, the Van cat article.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  05:27, 1 August 2015 (UTC)

Someone is indeed working on infoboxes. See mediawikiwiki:Extension:Capiunto, being written by Hoo, who happens to be a Wikidata dev. --Izno (talk) 16:00, 1 August 2015 (UTC)
A Plan of Goodness +5.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  19:35, 1 August 2015 (UTC)

Please stop

You now have more edits to this RFA‎ than the candidate does. I believe you have expressed your opinion about the candidate quite well, even eloquently; now it is time to move on. Thank you. Risker (talk) 18:20, 29 July 2015 (UTC)

@Risker: I object to your "Please stop" tone, which should be reserved for WP:DE. I find your singling me out here to be interesting, given my outspoken comments very recently at WT:BARC (where your own participation is, amusingly, similar to mine at this RfA). I'm hardly the only one at that particular RfA discussing the criteria that people are, well, discussing, and whether they're valid; I don't see a similar demand from you on the talk page of, e.g., Inks.LWC. It's business-as-usual for questionable criteria to be discussed at RFAs, especially if they're made in opposition to the candidate. The rapidity with which the candidate is making their own responses (which in this case is frankly rather slowly) has no bearing on how quickly others may comment. All that said, I've removed one of my comments in that subthread, as it pertains only to the commenters and not the candidate. I think that's more than sufficient to address any concern you have. I have as much right to clarify my own posts and ask the candidate a question as anyone else does. I also think it's perfectly appropriate to address the issue when someone appears to be treating the candidate negatively simply for being honest, as this erodes the already shoddy and failing RFA system even further. If you think I'm being unreasonable in any way, you know where WP:ANI is.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  18:46, 29 July 2015 (UTC)
Hello, SMcCandlish. And here I thought "Please stop" was a polite way to address you; sorry that I have offended you. I didn't single you out because of anything other than the fact that you're the only editor with more posts to the RFA than the candidate (10 in the approximately 18 hours since the RFA opened). Perhaps you might want to reconsider your standards for responding to questions; the candidate has responded to five additional questions already within that 18 hour span. Giving advance thought to RFA questions before responding is not necessarily a weak point. I'm taking my time considering his response to my question, and I hope you do not think that I'm going too slowly. At the end of the day, one important goal of the RFA system is that candidates (whether successful or not) continue to believe that they are valued members of the community.

I have not closely followed your activity at RFA; perhaps you can tell me if being questioned about the criteria you used to determine a vote about a candidate resulted in your changing your vote. (I know it happens occasionally with some editors, but it does seem to be quite infrequent.) If your !vote was questioned, how did it make you feel? I differentiate from occasions when someone may have asked for clarification of some aspect of your vote. No matter what changes are made with respect to RFA, it will always be a stressful time for candidates. Our job as voters is to give our honest assessment of the candidate (with evidence if applicable or asked), and not allow ourselves to get into debates about other people's assessments. That too is part of RFA reform. Risker (talk) 19:19, 29 July 2015 (UTC)

@Risker: OK. Maybe I'm being over-sensitive. But "please stop" is what a lot of editors use as the heading or first words of a last attempt to get a point across before filing an ANI grievance, and they're the lead-in words of a lot of the {{uw-InsertTransgressionHere}} warning templates.  :-/   I get your point about advance thought; relates to why I self-moderated with a deletion of one of my comments; more thought before posting would have obviated that post. I think my <del>-and-<ins> self-correction of one of my posts there indicates that I do in fact take seriously others' objections to the validity of a concern I raised (though it wasn't in my !vote, I suppose). I have changed my mind at RfA before, and at various XfDs, based on others' observations and counters. I don't mind people questioning my rationales (with a counter-rationale, not just venting). I find the frequency with which people at RfA in particular respond to such points with an "I can vote any damned way I want" attitude to be unhelpful to anything, even if I'd also agree RfAs shouldn't be treated as discussion boards about extraneous issues (thus, again, my self-deletion).

RFA reform and discouraging interleaved commentary: It would need to be applied consistently, e.g. no cross-talk allowed at all, except on the talk page or in a discussion section below the voting sections. A site-wide standard for this that also applied to XfDs, RMs, RfCs, noticeboards, etc., would probably be helpful, and we're moving that way slowly in a de facto shift to using ===Discussion=== sections below !voting ===Comments=== sections. A potential problem with this is that it won't do much to stop dog-piling; someone "influential" can post something utterly stupid, and garner a lot of "me too" parroting from their entourage, without any of them noting well-reasoned objections in the ===Discussion=== section (and this kind of "influence" often has little to do with how reasonable the person is, but simply based on wikipolitics). Maybe a standard template one could insert, that produced This rationale has been challenged in the ] section. ~~~~ would work.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  19:55, 29 July 2015 (UTC)

Check out shiny new Template:Rationale discussion. Heh. Should have done that years ago.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  20:42, 29 July 2015 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:List of highest-grossing Indian films

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Kurds

Good luck with the clean-up of the Kurds article - it needs it. Just a note of caution: you may or may not be aware that the description of the Kurds as "an Iranian people" has been a hot topic with long-term edit-warring etc etc. A resolution was reached on how it was to be treated in the lead via an RfC earlier on this year (see last Archive). It may be best to be circumspect when cleaning up anything that touches on that ...can of worms. DeCausa (talk) 10:18, 3 August 2015 (UTC)

Noted. I wouldn't make an edit like that anyway; has obvious PoV/ambiguity issues due to multiple meanings of the word. My only interest in the article is sourcing cleanup, in the sense of crappy formatting, crappy sources, and crappy misuse of sources. Heh. Actually a fourth would be under-utilization. Pretty much zero of the cited sources have been WP:MINEd for much of anything. Just the stuff cited in the infobox could add several paragraphs of rich material, if anyone bothered. Hell, just converting lengthy citation quotations into encyclopedic prose would do that. But I know little about this topic, so I'm not in a good position to do such work on it. Just WP:GNOMEing.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  10:25, 3 August 2015 (UTC)

Formatting of this page

Moved to User talk:Boson § Reply from SMcCandlish – By request.

I came here because you referred to your talk page at Talk:Harassment. Starting with the section "One of the reasons gardens are walled" and continuing to the end of the page, the formatting of this page on my screen is so messed up that it is practically impossible to read it. Have you any idea what could be causing this? Perhaps some formatting code at the beginning of that section needs deleting. Given that I can't read your talk page properly, perhaps you could reply at my page. Thanks! --Boson (talk) 13:35, 3 August 2015 (UTC). PS: It appears to be trying to render everything as part of a table. --Boson (talk) 13:37, 3 August 2015 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:Mat (Russian profanity)

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ArbCom case "Editor conduct in e-cigs articles" has now been opened

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Ward Churchill articles

Just a heads up, Deicas has a very formal, ritualistic way of asking questions. Sometimes it is in the form of a declarative sentence. I'm sure he means well, but he took another editor to ANI over one of the Churchill articles, and he believes that if he asks a question (even in declarative form), that he is entitled to an answer.

I tend to answer him once, if that, and ignore the miscellaneous BS. GregJackP Boomer! 00:26, 6 August 2015 (UTC)

Meh. I'm not worried about other editors' WP:DRAMA or WP:LAWYER litigiousness. People who file frivolous or vexatious noticeboard actions get WP:BOOMERANGed with regularity.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  00:49, 6 August 2015 (UTC)

Subway

Hi there. Regarding your edit here , can you confirm whether or not the 'bargain-bin' version of the DVD contains any special features? It would be nice to be able to do a full comparison of the different DVD versions. Cheers. Freikorp (talk) 11:02, 6 August 2015 (UTC)

@Freikorp: I'll see if I can find it my DVD boxes ...  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  11:51, 6 August 2015 (UTC)
So far it is "eluding capture". Might be in my storage unit. Or I might have ditched it; I really dislike the English-dubbed version. Mine looks/looked like the one shown here, with the blonde hair on "Fred"/Lambert. The good version is this one, though the cover uses a stock photo of Lambert that doesn't match his appearance in the film: . See the top customer review (on both of those pages) for some incomplete details on differences between the versions (though I don't agree that they're "dressed as punks" on the good version's cover, having been hardcore in my day. LOL). I'm actually pretty sure now that I got rid of that version and picked up the good one later, though right now I can't find either one. There's an R2 Blu-ray, but it doesn't have the English audio track. There's an Amazon US listing for a Blu-ray here that says "all regions", and has both audio tracks. There are also various Luc Besson DVD and Blu-ray collections, but I don't see details on them, just that they contain Subway. VHS info is generally no longer encyclopedic, I guess, but the French audio, with subtitles, was available on at least one VHS release; I only ever saw it as a rental, and it was rare in the US; my guess is that it was Canadian. That's how I finally saw it in French for the first time, in the mid-1990s. My French-semi-fluent GF at the time said that the English subtitles didn't always match what the French audio track was saying (but it was more accurate than the English dubbed "translation", which often just replaced various bits of dialog completely with different material. The article should probably have a section on the major dialogue differences between the versions. Having dialogue info in the DVD section probably isn't ideal. There are also a lot of good reviews that can be WP:MINEd for material.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  12:29, 6 August 2015 (UTC)
Thanks for the info, very helpful :). Freikorp (talk) 14:16, 10 August 2015 (UTC)

MOS, CONLEVEL and "centralization"

For the benefit of anyone else that may stumble on this I am prefixing this note that the discussion here is about WP:CONLEVEL and centralization of decision making, and not about the two MOS topics from which this arose. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 21:50, 9 August 2015 (UTC)

Moved from Misplaced Pages talk:Manual of Style/Dates and numbers § Applicability of ENGVAR

Editorial control

Background material from WT:MOSNUM, for reference
You're just waving around your format warrior bogeyman again. I repeat my comment from the last time we visited this issue (at "Proposal for DATETIES on US military topics", 22:00, 22 June): Your comments show only a fear that any alteration of the status quo will unleash "format warriors" on a "Mission from God", and amount to little more than an emotional form of WP:JUSTDONTLIKEIT that impairs any objective discussion. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 04:42, 8 July 2015 (UTC)
Nah, it's institutional memory. MOS has evolved to be as detailed and specific as it is because the style wars are real and are only kept at bay by nailing down what people keep squabbling over. WP:LOCALCONSENSUS is all fine and dandy when consensus is actually reachable. When it turns into an endless river of recycled pissing matches, a site-wide settlement is called for, gets implemented, and 9 times out of 10 that's the end of. What you're complaining about is called a slippery slope argument. It's instructive to read that article. While an SS argument is sometimes a fallacy ("We can't let women wear pants or vote! It will lead to moral turpitude and a degeneration of family values!"), in many other cases, SS arguments are perfectly valid. They are most commonly spot-on in legal and other "regulatory" matters (like a style guide), when a particular rule is instituted to prevent things from continuing to slip down an already observed slope.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  08:07, 27 July 2015 (UTC)
SMcCandlish: I think you mis-take my basic premise, which is exactly as you said: "WP:LOCALCONSENSUS is all fine and dandy when consensus is actually reachable." Where consensus is lacking, I am all for "tie-breaking" rules, even if they are arbitrary. What I am against is where there is local consensus, but some outside editor, never before seen on that article, uses MOSNUM to unilaterally change formats contrary to that consensus. Note that in the case discussed below (#User converting date formats in complete articles) both of the opposing edits claimed "date formats per MOS:DATEFORMAT" (see here). That there is no style war on that article cannot be attributed to DATEFORMAT, as it is applied contradictorily. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 19:36, 28 July 2015 (UTC)
This is un-wiki, though: "some outside editor, never before seen on that article". There is no such thing as an "outside editor", there are no WP:VESTED editors at any page with more editorial rights than newer arrivals, and there is no WP:OWNership of pages by a wikiproject or other group of editors who would like to control a page. You and I and the next editor have 100% identical editorial rights to every page on the system (absent topic bans, ArbCom-only pages, and a few other odd-ball exceptions). Every Wikipedian is an inside editor as soon as they start editing somewhere. Where theres' a pre-established consensus at a page, and someone wants to change it, this usually means further discussion happens (often brief, if the rationale presented isn't new or isn't compelling). Maybe I'm missing something, but if DATEFORMAT is being cited for two different rationales that are cognizant under it, a consensus discussion will sort it out. If two parties are citing it and one is misinterpreting it, that will sort out too. This is a discussion-and-revision-based proejct. Avoiding the terrible annoyance of having to ever re-examine a decision once made, by imposing rules against change by "outsiders", isn't part of how WP works.  :-)
The only quasi-exception is the "first major contributor" criterion of ENGVAR and DATEVAR; but it doesn't give the FMC more rights, it just says "look at what the FMC did, as an arbitrary cut off point, and stick with that, absent a convincing reason not to"; consensus can overturn the FMC any time. It could just as easily have been "first contribution after the second day" or "first contribution" or "exactly 18th contribution".

The reason this "outside editor" stuff raises my hackles so much (and I encounter this sentiment around 2–5 times per week in one debate or another) is that a large number of very productive Wikipedians mostly edit rather random articles (cleaning up categories of tagged articles, going down a list of RfCs, or whatever), and because they're generally applying site-wide standards that reflect a broad consensus, but are encountering "specialized-style" quirks inserted by people who often know a tremendous amount about some topic but very little about how to write an encyclopedia, more often than not it's the "outsider" to the topic (i.e., the Misplaced Pages insider) who is actually doing the right thing. The idea that the most valuable editors are those who focus on writing an article from the start and shepherding/controlling it all the way to FA is faulty; the best articles are produced when editorial input is broad, and not micro-managed by people too close to the topic.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  01:06, 29 July 2015 (UTC)

An interesting comment, and a point I think worth some discussion. But perhaps a bit of a tangent to the discussion here. Could we explore this further at, say, your Talk page?
As to the key point here: do you still stand-by your statement that "WP:LOCALCONSENSUS is all fine and dandy when consensus is actually reachable"? ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:53, 29 July 2015 (UTC)
Begin new material. Ping: J. Johnson.

Re: 'Could we explore this further at, say, your Talk page?' – Sure. As I recall, it was about the notion that regular editors at an article should have more control over what it says than anyone else. (Actually, I included all that material in the collapsebox above.) It's "your go" for rebuttal on that thread.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  08:45, 7 August 2015 (UTC)

Thanks. I'm going to take a little time for a good review. BTW, the ping - {{U}} - didn't work, it's not clear why. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 21:11, 7 August 2015 (UTC)
Pinging seems very brittle. Been trying different templates to see if some work better. I think it may have something to do to proximity to a new sig by the poster.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  03:43, 10 August 2015 (UTC)

On LOCALCONSENSUS versus CONLEVEL

Re: 'do you still stand-by your statement' – Depends on what you mean, and whether you know what I meant; I'm highly suspicious of (often accidental) fallacy of equivocation with questions like that. The problem is that WP:LOCALCONSENSUS is used to mean two different things, one positive and one negative; I almost always use it in the negative sense, and use WP:CONLEVEL for the positive one, so I was being inconsistent there. What I mean in particular is that it is fine and dandy to rely upon a localized, low-turnout, topical CONLEVEL to arrive at a decision on an undecided matter, a) when this decision is actually forthcoming, b) when it does not conflict with site-wide rules (a violation of LOCALCONSENSUS policy), and c) when it does not confuse readers (a violation of WP:COMMONSENSE meta-policy, and WP:ENC, etc.).

The main reasons that MOS and all our other guidelines on content exist are because the CONLEVEL processes frequently fail to produced usable results, leading to interminable conflict on a particular issue, or broader conflict between clusters of editors on the same issue, that are not resolved until addressed in a site-wide manner with broader input from the editing community. This really has nothing to do with MOS in particular. It's how all our policymaking works, it's why WP:RM exists, it's why WP:RFC exists, it't why all the WP:XFDs exist. You can denigrate these as "centralization" all you want (though you seem to only do this with MOS) but they're centralized by definition not by some kind of authoritarian conspiracy. They're centralized for the same reason your liver cells are centralized in your liver instead of randomly distributed throughout your body, and for the same reason your friends are centralized at your house when they come to your party, and are not still sitting in their own living rooms.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  08:45, 7 August 2015 (UTC)

"Centralization" and "freedom"

Moved from Misplaced Pages talk:Manual of Style § Proposal: Disable giant quotation marks in mainspace; deprecate pull quotes in articles
Background material from WT:MOS
Who should be deciding which quotes are important other than the Misplaced Pages editors? ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 20:16, 2 August 2015 (UTC)
Surely reliable sources and WP:UNDUE policy decide such questons. The quote I de-emphasized in at Franklin Delano Roosevelt is a case in point. There were no sources indicating anything important about the quote. It did not lead to passage in that legislation of the idea it was promoting. It's not (unlike, e.g. "E=MC" for Albert Einstein) the best-known thing the subject said. It's not become a stock phrase. There's nothing particularly special about it, among all the pithy, political things FDR said. It was just really, really meaningful to some editor who decided to force it to be meaningful to all readers whether they'd like that or not. If reliable sources tell us that "To be, or not to be, that is the question" is the #1 best-remembered line from Hamlet, an argument could be made for pull-quoting that line in the section at Hamlet that covers that part of the play (after already quoting it in-context in the main article prose). That's an argument that should be made at Talk:Hamlet, and I think many editors would oppose it as inappropriate anyway. (I can think of multiple objections that range from: pandering to pop culture triviality instead of authorial intent; to inspiring a WP:TRIVIA-violating precedent to pull quote allegedly memorable quotes from every scene in every plot outline on WP; among others).  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  02:29, 4 August 2015 (UTC)
All that seems pretty reasonable. I believe your point is that these decisions should be made on the basis of various standards and sources, etc., rather than on pure personal "I like it". To which I agree. However, these things don't "decide" by themselves, and there is no bot to to do that; in the end a human has to decide how all these apply. My question is which humans should decide such issues: Misplaced Pages editors (presumably knowledgable and acting in good faith)? a select group of "special" editors? admins only? the WMF? or just Jimbo? If WP editors generally (or any substantial portion) are not properly applying the standards, etc., then the misuse of this template is probably a minor instance of a more general problem. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:50, 4 August 2015 (UTC)
I'm not sure I understand the point of the question. It's decided the way every other decision is made on WP: The editors who care enough to participate form a consensus as best they can. WP editor are in fact generally properly applying the template and the MOS; we have hundreds of thousands of block quotations in WP, and only a sliver of a fractional percentage of them are misusing Template:Pull quote and its giant quotation marks style. I agree taht there is a more general problem. It's the "I will do whatever I want, and MOS can go @#$% itself" attitude problem. There's not much to do about that issue other than nail down the style matters that they want to run off with, until they just knock off the "this is my blog, so give me my style or give me death" behavior.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  08:04, 5 August 2015 (UTC)
Keep in the mind the original question: "Why are Misplaced Pages editors deciding which quotes are "important"?" My point is that there is a continuum of what constitutes "Misplaced Pages editors", and the broader issue of centralizaton (or not) can be mapped to that continuum: from giving individual editors total freedom to make decisions, to giving a group ("of editors who care enough to participate") the power to decide for everyone, with no freedom for anyone else to deviate. Both extremes can be appropriate; the implicit question here is what level is appropriate for deciding on whether to use any kind of pull-quote. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 21:45, 6 August 2015 (UTC)
Why do I need to "keep in mind" a question that is moot? Actual pull quotes are almost always WP:NPOV and WP:UNDUE problems; there is already a site-wide decision, in the form of policies. The severable question of whether to use obnoxious giant-quotation mark icons (or other graphical decoration) to delimit block (as distinct from pull) quotations was also already decided, in site-wide guidelines, both at WP:MOS quite specifically, and more broadly by MOS:ICONS. Non-neutral point of view and undue weight are not permissible, and giant quote icons around block quotations are not desirable, according to the community, per those policies and guidelines. "Who got to decide" was the entire editor base in the aggregate, over many years of editing these policies and guidelines. WP:CONSENSUS does not require unanimity. The fact that some editors ignore rules they don't like (without an WP:IAR-cognizant reason) is just an WP:OTHERCRAPEXISTS argument. This never prevents us from having a rule that is generally useful and represents the general consensus, even if there are a few who'd rather that it went a different way, or virtually nothing would ever be decided on WP.

All this talk of "freedom" is hyperbole that misses WP:NOT#DEMOCRACY (much less is WP some total anarchy). By such a rationale, every rule we have might as well just be deleted, since all rules on WP are created by exactly the same process and have the exact same effect (to encourage some choices and discourage others). You've already made and I've already refuted the same argument before; this any-rules-at-all-infringe-my-freedom angle seems to be a go-to argument for you, but it's not working. If you want to tie this to "freedom", fine, let's do that temporarily just for the sake of argument: The basic maxim of civil libertarianism is Your freedom to swing your fist ends when it hits my face. Your "freedom" to festoon articles with cutesy icons ends when the community at large creates guidelines saying they don't want these editorial dukes punching us in the readerly visage. Your "freedom" to rub every reader's nose forcefully into unduly cherry-picked statements you insist on browbeating them with ends when the community enacts policies against reader facial abuse by that kind of hamfisted skewing of point of view and emphasis, too. Same request I've made of everyone here: Please show us even one single case of a genuine pull quote on Misplaced Pages that isn't a POV/UNDUE problem. It's been over a week, and zero participants have produced a single candidate.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  06:15, 7 August 2015 (UTC)

I'd also like to address this repeated (WT:MOSNUM and at WT:MOS) idea that MOS in particular is some "shackle" that takes away your "freedom", yet you don't make this argument about any other site-wide policy or guideline (that I know of). I've been fairly harsh about this viewpoint, in both places, but perhaps you can articulate why you feel MOS is somehow supposedly different from all the rest of WP's "centralized" site-wide rulemaking. The only hint I've seen to date is a suggestion that style matters are "trivia", but this doesn't match the level to which you involve yourself in style debates, nor the level of support that MOS has always had in the community at large. The fact that a short handful of MOS opponents are bent on its dissolution doesn't change the fact that most of the editorial population depended on it and are glad we have it. As I always say, if anyone thinks the tide has changed, you all know where WP:VPPRO is, so feel free to propose that it be marked {{Historical}} and watch the giant WP:SNOWBALL form against that idea.

As cofounder of various wikiprojects and a participant in lots of them, it's not like I'm unaware of or can't understand topically "local" desires for micromanagement of style issues. I really do get all of that. It just does not work here, for the same reason that having writers randomly make up their own styles in the Enclopaedia Brittanica, the New York Times or the journal Science would be a huge FAIL. Every other professional-grade publication in the world has a house style to produce consistency for both readers and writers/editors. I already provided an "your right to swing your fist ends when it hits my face" refutation of the "freedom" argument, over at WT:MOS, but that might be less distracting to go over here. Might even just move it here.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  08:45, 7 August 2015 (UTC)

My thanks for your impressive work in assembling the background discussions. I think there are several concepts here worth a good discussion (which is why I have taken some time with this), which might take a little work to disentangle, but they're all related to CONLEVEL.
I must immediately clarify something which seems to be hitting a nerve with you (and I don't wish to do that!). You seem to feel that I am "denigrating" certain policies as "centralization", that I see centralization as "authoritarian conspiracy", and that I take the MOS to be some kind of "shackle" on editorial personal freedom. Please! You have mis-taken my views; I am a lot more nuanced than you may have teken me. E.g., I am sure you understand that insisting on across-the-board adherence to some decision (however and where ever made) implicitly reduces the "freedom" of individual editors to decide differently. This is a classic centralization vs. decentralization situation. But please note: I am not saying "centralization is always evil". I have said that it is not always good, and I am sayng that it is not always necessary, but I am not opposed to centralization where it is proper or necessary. (Nor even in some cases where it is merely convenient.) I allude to these other views because others hold them, and I think they need to be addressed, but I am not asserting them.
I would also disabuse you of any notion that I am any kind of "MOS opponent ... bent on its dissolution". Not at all!! I favor having the MOS; my efforts are intended to improve it.
And I am running short today, so must return later. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 21:56, 9 August 2015 (UTC)
I'll keep all that in mind. But MOS opponents in favor of total or near-total decentralization definitely exist, so keeping your views distinct from their make take some careful wording (I don't mean with me, but in general). It's similar to the factor by which editors in favor of some kinds of adminship reform become difficult to distinguish from opponents of the adminship system existing, unless they write very precisely about what they see the issues as and what solutions they'd support for what problems.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  09:23, 10 August 2015 (UTC)

Today I am The Concederator

Note to self and WP:JAGUARs: I conceded on two different things in the same debate, pretty much back-to-back:

I sometimes wonder if I should concede points more often. Am I stubborn? But when I review the day's discussions, I find that I generally don't comment without a clearly conceived rationale for what I'm saying (the first example is an exception), and I don't seem to have any difficulty reversing myself, or being shunted into a third option, when I'm clearly wrong, there's a better approach, or I missed something (as in the second example). Still, it's good to spot-check oneself for collaborative collegiality from time to time.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  11:14, 7 August 2015 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:Dictatorship of the proletariat

 Done

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:Dictatorship of the proletariat. Legobot (talk) 00:01, 8 August 2015 (UTC)

Not factually correct

Moved to Misplaced Pages talk:Manual of Style § IMOS's own overuse of "U.S."

SMcC, I just saw this edit and the edit summary rationale for it: . Based on your rationale, I reverted the change. A majority of American style guides, the U.S. government, the legal professional and most U.S. newspapers continue to prefer "U.S." over "US," the latter largely being favored by non-American media and British and Commonwealth style guides. If you want to make these changes, please discuss them on the MOS talk page first. I believe you will find that significant percentage of our fellow American editors -- especially those who are informed about American style guides and media usage -- will disagree with your take on this. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 04:42, 10 August 2015 (UTC)

You misinterpret the point. It has nothing to do with what is or isn't dominant usage in American publications, but with whether MOS should follow its own advice about inconsistent, mixed usage on the same page. I resent your "especially those who are informed about American style guides and media usage" jab. I own probably more style guides than anyone within a 2,000 mile radius, including ones you've probably never heard of, and I don't just cherry-pick media usage data I like, but actually break it down by market segment, etc. (NB: In this regard, American legal usage and U.S. government usage are the same market; the American legal system, like the U.S. military, is an extension of its government.) That said, there are now two threads open about this at WT:MOS, separated into the two distinct issues (MOS following its own advice, and whether what MOS says needs revision).  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  08:02, 10 August 2015 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:Snježana Kordić

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:Snježana Kordić. Legobot (talk) 00:01, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

Hinting At A Block For Me For "Disruption"?

SMcCandlish, reverting your arbitrary, one-man consensus rewrite of an essay that's been here for years is not "disruptive". I can direct you again to WP:CON or WP:EW, but that would be pointless, would it not? We are not going to ignore the rules in favor of a ridiculous thing such as this. Your content does not have consensus, and adding it in repeatedly against consensus is edit-warring. Doc talk 03:02, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

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