Misplaced Pages

User talk:SMcCandlish: Difference between revisions

Article snapshot taken from Wikipedia with creative commons attribution-sharealike license. Give it a read and then ask your questions in the chat. We can research this topic together.
Browse history interactively← Previous editNext edit →Content deleted Content addedVisualWikitext
Revision as of 11:41, 6 September 2016 editNorthamerica1000 (talk | contribs)Autopatrolled, Administrators707,982 edits →New article improvement drives: new section← Previous edit Revision as of 23:35, 6 September 2016 edit undoSlimVirgin (talk | contribs)172,064 edits →Editing other people's posts: new sectionTag: contentious topics alertNext edit →
Line 520: Line 520:
* ] – aims to reach 10,000 article improvements for UK- and Ireland-related articles * ] – aims to reach 10,000 article improvements for UK- and Ireland-related articles
* ] – aims to reach 10,000 article improvements for Africa-related articles * ] – aims to reach 10,000 article improvements for Africa-related articles

== Editing other people's posts ==

Do not edit other people's posts. It isn't up to you to shut down or merge someone else's RfC.

I don't know whether you've been alerted to the MoS discretionary sanctions within the last year, but in case not (and, as I understand it, the repetition is necessary for reasons I've never fathomed), here it is again. Someone is likely to take this situation with you to AE, AN/I or ArbCom. You should pull back before that happens. ] <small><sup>]</sup></small> 23:35, 6 September 2016 (UTC)

{{Ivm|2=''This message contains important information about an administrative situation on Misplaced Pages. It does '''not''' imply any misconduct regarding your own contributions to date.''

'''Please carefully read this information:'''

The ] has authorised ] to be used for pages regarding , a topic which you have edited. The Committee's decision is ].

Discretionary sanctions is a system of conduct regulation designed to minimize disruption to controversial topics. This means ] administrators can impose sanctions for edits relating to the topic that do not adhere to the ], our ], or relevant ]. Administrators may impose sanctions such as ], ], or ]. This message is to notify you sanctions are authorised for the topic you are editing. Before continuing to edit this topic, please familiarise yourself with the discretionary sanctions system. Don't hesitate to contact me or another editor if you have any questions.
}}{{Z33}}<!-- Derived from Template:Ds/alert -->

Revision as of 23:35, 6 September 2016

Status: Busy

Greetings! I'm a real person, like you. Collaboration improves when we remember this about each other.
If you leave a new message on this page, I will reply on this page unless you ask me to reply elsewhere.
Welcome to SMcCandlish's talk page. I will generally respond here to comments that are posted here, rather than replying via your talk page (or the article's talk page, if you are writing to me here about an article), so you may want to watch this page until you are responded to, or let me know where specifically you'd prefer the reply.
RfA candidate S O N S% Ending (UTC) Time left Dups? Report
Sennecaster 215 0 0 100 17:20, 25 December 2024 1 day, 15 hoursno report
RfB candidate S O N S% Ending (UTC) Time left Dups? Report

Last updated by Talk to my owner:Online at 01:20, 24 December 2024 (UTC)

Template-edit requests

28 template-protected edit requests v·h
Page Tagged since Protection level Last protection log entry
Template:Designation (request) 2024-12-03 05:23 Template-protected (log) Modified by WOSlinker on 2013-10-19: "allow template editors to modify"
Template:Chem2 (request) 2024-12-03 23:08 Template-protected (log) Modified by Oshwah on 2021-08-18: "High risk template."
Template:Nihongo (request) 2024-12-06 16:47 Template-protected (log) Modified by Mr. Stradivarius on 2014-11-26: "Highly visible template: allow template editors"
Template:Expand language (request) 2024-12-07 12:31 Template-protected (log) Modified by Anomie on 2013-11-17: "Allow templateeditors to edit, per WT:RFPP#Mass protection lowering from "sysop" to "editprotected" (script-assisted edit)"
Template:Draft article (request) 2024-12-08 09:00 Template-protected (log) Protected by Gogo Dodo on 2015-05-02: "Highly visible template"
Template:Country data Syria (request) 2024-12-09 17:46 Template-protected (log) Modified by WOSlinker on 2013-10-19: "allow template editors to modify"
Template:DYK tools (request) 2024-12-10 19:58 Template-protected (log) Protected by Hut 8.5 on 2016-12-22: "Highly visible template"
Template:Template for discussion/dated (request) 2024-12-11 14:35 Template-protected (log) Protected by Anthony Appleyard on 2016-10-30: ""
Template:Tfm/dated (request) 2024-12-11 14:35 Template-protected (log) From Template:Tfm/dated: Protected by Ged UK on 2013-11-12: "Highly visible template"
Template:Infobox German place (request) 2024-12-15 12:52 Template-protected (log) From Template:Infobox German location: Modified by Mark Arsten on 2013-10-18: "Allowing Protected Template editors"
Template:Taxobox (request) 2024-12-15 21:31 Template-protected (log) Modified by WOSlinker on 2013-10-19: "allow template editors to modify"
Template:Infobox sportsperson (request) 2024-12-16 04:11 Template-protected (log) Modified by Mark Arsten on 2013-10-18: "Allowing Protected Template editors"
Module:College color/data (request) 2024-12-16 08:54 Template-protected (log) Modified by Galobtter on 2019-01-24: "High-risk Lua module"
Template:Rail-interchange (request) 2024-12-16 09:05 Template-protected (log) Modified by Primefac on 2018-02-23: "high-risk template with 4000+ transclusions"
Template:Infobox language/family-color (request) 2024-12-17 04:09 Template-protected (log) Modified by Primefac on 2018-02-23: "high-risk template with 4000+ transclusions"
Template:0 (request) 2024-12-17 10:57 Template-protected (log) Modified by Fuhghettaboutit on 2013-11-02: "Enable access by template editors"
Template:Ushr (request) 2024-12-18 04:25 Template-protected (log) Modified by WOSlinker on 2013-10-20: "allow template editors to modify"
Template:Infobox rail (request) 2024-12-19 14:20 Template-protected (log) Modified by Mark Arsten on 2013-10-18: "Allowing Protected Template editors"
Template:Bracket (request) 2024-12-19 21:15 Template-protected (log) Modified by Xezbeth on 2016-04-13: "I forget that template editors are a thing"
Template:Welcome-unconstructive (request) 2024-12-21 21:36 Template-protected (log) Modified by Scottywong on 2020-11-12: "Highly visible template"
Template:R to section (request) 2024-12-22 12:57 Template-protected (log) Modified by AlexiusHoratius on 2016-04-15: "Highly visible template"
Template:Authority control (request) 2024-12-23 02:06 Template-protected (log) Modified by WOSlinker on 2013-10-19: "allow template editors to modify"
Template:PD-ineligible-USonly (request) 2024-12-23 04:44 Template-protected (log) Modified by Primefac on 2018-02-23: "high-risk template with 2000+ transclusions"
Template:Pp-blp (request) 2024-12-23 06:25 Template-protected (log) Modified by Callanecc on 2014-02-03: "Highly visible template: 750+ transclusions"
Template:Wikia (request) 2024-12-23 19:35 Template-protected (log) Modified by WOSlinker on 2013-10-19: "allow template editors to modify"
User:AmandaNP/UAA/Whitelist (request) 2024-12-23 21:48 Template-protected (log) Modified by AmandaNP on 2020-07-24: "Try Template editor per main blacklist page"
Template:Cite wikisource (request) 2024-12-23 21:49 Template-protected (log) Modified by Primefac on 2018-02-23: "high-risk template with 2000+ transclusions"
Module:Country alias/data (request) 2024-12-24 01:27 Template-protected (log) Protected by Primefac on 2019-02-04: "High-risk Lua module"
Updated as needed. Last updated: 01:28, 24 December 2024 (UTC)

Most recent poster here: SlimVirgin (talk).

As of 2016-09-06 , SMcCandlish is Active.
I'll reply to your message within 24 hours if possible.

WikiStress level
Wikimood
The Signpost
The Signpost

The Signpost
2024-12-12
Volume 20, Issue 17

About · Subscribe · Newsroom
Please stay in the top 3 segments of Graham's Hierarchy of Disagreement.
 User talk:SMcCandlish/IP

Archives
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019
2020
2021
2022
2023
2024
Search   Index of topics

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
Extended content

Good news! You are approved for access to 80 million articles in 6500 publications through HighBeam Research.

  • Account activation codes have been emailed.
  • To activate your account: 1) Go to http://www.highbeam.com/prof1
  • The 1-year, free period begins once you enter the code.
  • If you need assistance, email "help at highbeam dot com", and include "HighBeam/Wikipedia" in the subject line. Or go to WP:HighBeam/Support, or ask User:Ocaasi. Please, per HighBeam's request, do not call the toll-free number for assistance with registration.
  • A quick reminder about using the account: 1) try it out; 2) provide original citation information, in addition to linking to a HighBeam article; 3) avoid bare links to non-free HighBeam pages; 4) note "(subscription required)" in the citation, where appropriate. Examples are at WP:HighBeam/Citations.
  • HighBeam would love to hear feedback at WP:HighBeam/Experiences
  • Show off your HighBeam access by placing {{User:Ocaasi/highbeam_userbox}} on your userpage
  • When the 1-year period is up, check the applications page to see if renewal is possible. We hope it will be.

Thanks for helping make Misplaced Pages better. Enjoy your research! Cheers, Ocaasi 04:47, 3 May 2012 (UTC)

Your Credo Reference account is approved

Unresolved – Needs to be renewed.
Extended content

Good news! You are approved for access to 350 high quality reference resources through Credo Reference.

  • Fill out the survey with your username and an email address where your sign-up information can be sent.
  • If you need assistance, ask User:Ocaasi.
  • A quick reminder about using the account: 1) try it out; 2) provide original citation information, in addition to linking to a Credo article; 3) avoid bare links to non-free Credo pages; 4) note "(subscription required)" in the citation, where appropriate. Examples are at WP:Credo accounts/Citations.
  • Credo would love to hear feedback at WP:Credo accounts/Experiences
  • Show off your Credo access by placing {{User:Ocaasi/Credo_userbox}} on your userpage
  • If you decide you no longer can or want to make use of your account, donate it back by adding your name here

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.
Extended content

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.
Extended content

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)

Redundant sentence?

Unresolved – Work to integrate WP:NCFLORA and WP:NCFAUNA stuff into MOS:ORGANISMS not completed yet?
Extended content

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)



Current threads

Category:User templates about userboxes

Unresolved

Hi, following the discussion about Category:User templates about userboxes, I've purged N-Z. Will you do the rest soon-ish? Otherwise I'd post it at WP:CFDWM. – Fayenatic London 15:56, 30 July 2016 (UTC)

@Fayenatic london:: I will try to get to it soon, but I've been taking a kind of forced wikibreak for the most part (had a tooth problem, turned into jaw infection, and cost me two weeks of real-world work, so I'm focused on working extra to make up the lost income). Later this week I can probably find the time.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  13:10, 1 August 2016 (UTC)
Update: I've identified all the miscategorized ones (about 40 of them), and have them open as a series of tabs in a window; just need to figure out what userbox categories they do belong in, and recat them. Also, there are many that do belong in the category that are listed at Misplaced Pages:Userboxes/Userboxes but are missing from the category. I don't have the heart to update the list with infoboxes in the category that are not in the list, since it doesn't seem like a good use of editing time, even if cleaning up confusing categories (arguably) is.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  21:11, 17 August 2016 (UTC)
Update: Done about half of them.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  04:34, 18 August 2016 (UTC)
Update: Done about 3/4.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  19:47, 27 August 2016 (UTC)

Note to self

Unresolved

Finish patching up WP:WikiProject English language with the stuff from User:SMcCandlish/WikiProject English Language, and otherwise get the ball rolling.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  20:22, 17 August 2016 (UTC)

Notice of discussions regarding updates to MOS:TV

 Done

This is just a notification to a series of discussions that are taking place regarding updates to MOS:TV, given you participated in the discussion and/or expressed interest in the discussion seen here. You can find more information about the initiative and the discussions, here. - Favre1fan93 (talk) 03:40, 18 August 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for the note; will go take a look.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  04:35, 18 August 2016 (UTC)

Quote box

By the way, what is your opinion on {{Quote box}}? Sure, no one uses it to format pull quotations. But it isn't used in the same way as {{Quote}} either. {{Quote}} is typically used when a long quotation is an integral a part of article prose and its flow. It's directly tied to text before and/or after the quote, i.e.:

"When X happened to Y, he said:

{{Quote|Lorem ipsum.}}

After having said that, Y proceeded to do Z."

{{Quote box}} Isn't used like this at all. It's used to present excerpts of relevant material that is not as directly related to statements made in article prose, but that support it, not unlike illustrations. For a very typical example, see the following FA: Thorpe affair#Revelations. Indeed, I don't think I've ever seen a {{Cquote}} in a FA, but quote boxes used in this fashion are fairly common. – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 08:44, 18 August 2016 (UTC)

Has the same problems as the template the "RfC" is at, other than the MOS:ICONS concern is reduced (I don't think that page addresses borders and background colors as such, just graphical icons and text dingbats; there probably is something in MoS somewhere about not decorating things with borders and colorizing/colourising). All the UNDUE, relevance, etc., concerns remain. Every way that {{Pull quote}} is used and misused, so are all these other decorative quote templates. WP should have a consistent block quotation style, like it has a consistent style for every other noteworthy aspect of presenting content to readers. Presenting actual excerpts is what a pull quote is for, and we virtually never do that in mainspace, so we don't need templates for it that people cannot resist using as wild emphasis of material that is not an excerpt. I've spend days in a row cleaning up abuses of the templates, and in the case of every single one of them, less than 1% are used for actual excerpts. Even for material that would be excerpted verbatim, it almost always raises NPOV concerns, which is why it's just not an encyclopedic style except under unusual circumstances (and even then, there are better approaches). As far as I'm concerned all these quote templates other than {{Quote}} should be eliminated, after we make a consistent block quotation style that is distinct enough without being ridiculous. And MoS should just ban pull quotes in mainspace. There's not a single case on WP where it's actually needed. You can get the overall effect of one by leading a section with a block quotation, then using prose to elucidate its importance. This is both more encyclopedic instead of journalistic in style, and more contextually and educationally useful, instead of being solely cute and dramatic at the likely expense of injecting emotion where it does not belong, and leaving readers confused.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  09:23, 18 August 2016 (UTC)

@Finnusertop: Looking over the Thorpe affair cases, both are problematic. The first instance highlighted (actually the second misuse of the template on the page, out of three) is completely devoid of context or contextual meaning. When someone arrives at this part of the page, their eye is practically forced to that box – THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING HERE! READ THIS EVEN IF YOU READ NOTHING ELSE! – but it's excessively rambling trivia, and over-quotation that should be removed from the article entirely, since it's already encyclopedically treated sufficiently in the main text. If it were kept, it should be quoted, inline, immediately after being mentioned in context. The template grabs attention, does not deliver, then forces the reader to wade through the entire section (which should not be titled "Revelations", a tabloid journalism hook) to even try to figure out what relevance this could have to anything. It's just a total failure. The second mentioned (third in page) is a pseudo-pullquote being inappropriately used again as a "cheap news" hook, a teaser soundbyte. "He said that? Wow, I'd better 'stay tuned' and read the rest! What juicy gossip!" It's not encyclopedic writing. That quotation belongs inline as part of the narrative of the matter. There is no rational reason to (as usual) start with facts leading up to an incident, details of the incident, and various fallout of the incident being presented as a cohesive narrative, then cut a key party's reaction out of this narrative and put it in a sidebar in a template. Especially given that the allegations are likely mostly or entirely true (according to decades of investigative journalism), it's just plain wrong to have Misplaced Pages side with that party in a heavy-handed manner. Even aside from the policy problem, that template will be excluded by probably most WP:REUSE of this article, thus losing the content, and it appears in a kind of random place for users of screen readers or text-only browsers. It's actually in the wrong section (placed apparently for graphical layout "I'm a designer!" reasons), and pertains not at all to the aftermath of the trial, but to the nature of the evidence presented in it and the defense's strategic reasoning, long before the judge even sent the jury to its deliberations. No experienced writer of documentary prose would ever do such a thing. It's pure marketing/PR style. Even if the material were made to appear in the main prose in context and still quote-boxed – i.e., done as an actual pull quote – we would remove it anyway, because it serves no purpose as a pull quote other than blatant bias and "steering" of the reader. It is not pithy, memorable, a key "if you remember one thing about this page, make it this" point, famous, a summarization of what is at stake in the issue, or any other reason for a pull quote in encyclopedic material. Even as a real pull quote, it would be news style writing. WP has evolved, like most media and large publications, some uses for sidebars (in our case, infoboxes, images with captions, and some navigation templates). An argument could be made that we need more them (e.g. tables of data supporting a technical article, the way newspapers and magazines often do, and which WP instead has as typically centered-in-mid-document tables), but if we did expand the formal role of sidebars (unlikely, or we would have done it years ago), it certainly would not be to draw attention to material that is trivia, or divorce direct quotations from their contexts, or (against neutrality policy) grandiosely highlight one party's view of a dispute or event.

The first quote box, higher up the page, is even worse, being totally confusing, as it introduced non sequiturs that made no sense in the article until one reached the trial section, where the names were finally explained and linked. Definitely not how to write Misplaced Pages. I just did an overall cleanup on the article, fixing these and several other problems.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  17:31, 18 August 2016 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:Dersim massacre

 Done

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:Dersim massacre. Legobot (talk) 04:23, 19 August 2016 (UTC)

Hows this?

Resolved

OK, my RfC was poorly considered. I opened a new one at WP:MOS and hopefully this one is better... I envision a two-part process with maybe another RfC later with specific wording to clear up the disconnect between documentation and use... I did not realize that it is {{Quote box}}, at half a million (!) transclusions, that is the big bugbear here. We'll have to see how it goes. Herostratus (talk) 21:37, 20 August 2016 (UTC)

@Herostratus: That's probably the RfC we need, though it missed a huge part of the concern/dispute/debate (and I added it in): It's mostly the attention-demand sidebar and centered block usage that is problematic, though the giant quotation marks and other gimcrackery are frequently causes of debate even with the default layout. The side-lining of quotes introduces problems that inline use does not, like random placement of context-free quotations to "beautify" (in someone's mind) the layout, often further leading to including of extraneous trivia quotations just to decorate.

Anyway, I'm working on getting better stats; the advanced search stuff can be used with regular expressions to force it to tell us an exact count of pages, by namespace, where templates or HTML tags are being used. These searches are difficult to construct, and are very hard are the server, so I'm mostly working on them slowly and carefully. The transclusion counts are misleading, because the same page may transclude a template many times, and it doesn't tell us anything about usage in article in particular.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  04:22, 21 August 2016 (UTC)

Verse translation

Hi SMcCandlish. I noticed your recent screed at Misplaced Pages talk:Manual of Style#RfC: What (if anything) to do about quotations, and the quotation templates? (I'm being jocular: I'm with you almost all the way). I recently created the tangentially-related {{Verse translation}} and wonder if you have any comment on that. (I'm trusting that its essential modesty will render it inoffensive at worst.) If you think it's good enough to be worth improving, there are a handful of tweaks I have in mind, but either I'm not sufficiently confident they'd actually be improvements, or I'm not competent to implement them. Maybe after you take a peek, you'd be willing to chat about them? Thanks. Phil wink (talk) 04:10, 21 August 2016 (UTC)

@Phil wink: That seems very reasonable, though I'm not sure how it really differs from Template:Text and translation. I wonder if they could merge. Also wonder if they'd be any good for doing linguistic interlinear glosses; would have to pore over the parameters. We'll always need some specialized quotation templates, and there are several at Category:Quotation templates. We just don't need decorative, non-neutral ones.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  04:30, 21 August 2016 (UTC)
Well, the reason I created it ... was that at the time I didn't know {{Text and translation}} existed. But in retrospect, I think {{Verse translation}} has several slight advantages.
  • It has <poem>...</poem> under the hood, so <br /> is not needed in the parameter values.
  • It accepts 2 independent attributions (1 for each side) rather than just 1.
  • By default it italicizes the left text, which is appropriate for all Latinish-alphabet originals -- I expect the vast majority of cases, although this can be turned off for other character sets. (By contrast, while T&T is structurally neutral concerning which side is text and which translation, all transclusions happen to put the original on the right -- which seems backwards to me.)
Differences (which might be good, bad, or indifferent) are that VT is not really appropriate for prose, whereas T&T seems to accommodate it just fine (although not as I'd personally want... Idaean Dactyls (poem) shows that long prose texts stack rather than sit side-by-side). T&T's structure is based on <div>...</div>, whereas VT is a table. As far as merging, T&T has only 6 article transclusions, whereas I've really gone to town with VT, which now has almost 200 -- so, maybe I'm being a dick, but I'd incline to just replacing the few instances of T&T and deprecating it.
My impression of interlinear glosses are that one wants to keep parallel texts stacked directly on top of each other, which is the opposite of the goal for Verse translation. Phil wink (talk) 05:27, 21 August 2016 (UTC)
@Phil wink: Just 6? Yeah, that's a template that can just be replaced out of existence, after some kinks are worked out. In response to the above points, I agree <poem> is the better approach (its existence post-dates that other template), though you should probably have a switch to turn it off so that regular prose works in it. The T&T template's name is probably the one to eventually merge to, being more general. About left versus right, I agree that the traditional order in linguistics, textual criticism, historiography, etc., is the original on the left. I think that it was put on the right here because of what WP is and who our readers are and why they're here. Probably 95% of them only care about the English version. That said, I don't think their heads will asplode with a default left-right order. It would be nice if it were switchable; there is, for example, virtually no use in putting something like cuneiform on the left, which almost no one alive can read other than a handful of academics. Flexibility is king! I can see a variant of this template, with CSS-based code like that in {{block indent}}, and sans the <blockquote> element, being useful for all sorts of things: giving pseudocode and real code, showing a stylesheet next to the HTML it acts upon, giving a table of Proto-Indo-European roots on one side and English derivatives on the other, etc., etc. And the interlinear gloss thing I want (Left: line in original, interlinear morpheme-by-morphone gloss under it, next original line, next gloss, etc.; on the right, a more convention prose translation in natural language). Re: Table and div – This might be resolvable with using divs that have table display properties, so we can have the document structure benefits of divs and the more dependable formatting of tables. I have not experimented with that on WP, though. If not, the table should be marked as a layout-role table (see the MOS:ACCESS material on tables). Anyway, good work.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  07:16, 21 August 2016 (UTC)
Thanks for your comments. For now I've implemented role="presentation" on the underlying table (best resolution? dunno -- but it was easy!). Regarding flexibility (in this case, specifically the flexibility of symmetry): if |italicsoff=y, then the template becomes symmetrical so, e.g., one could place English on the left and Cuneiform on the right. I think that the template beginning asymmetrical is justified, in order to push people to what we seem to agree is at least usually the correct use: English on the right. Regarding prose, I think that putting prose through <poem>...</poem> has no negative effect on the prose; for example, I believe it will still wrap correctly. If this is true, then I don't believe there's a need to be able to switch off "poem", even if the template were used for prose. I'm a little preoccupied right now, but sometime in the future I hope to post a sort of grab-bag of notes (e.g. possible tweaks, alternative uses, contraindications) at the template talk page... and if that ever happens, I'll be sure to ping you. Phil wink (talk) 19:27, 22 August 2016 (UTC)
@Phil wink: Ok, I thought you'd said that it wasn't working well for prose. <poem> might not typically be an issue, but could be if the input material contains linebreaks or other code-level spacing stuff that does not normally show up in the rendered output when the HTML parser compresses away all stray whitespace that's not hardcoded. Might do weird things with lists, too; worth testing. Agreed beginning asymmetrical should be fine, since the common use case would be (and already is) the one you developed the template for. I just hope people do not abuse it for italicizing block quotes just to italicize them, e.g. putting italicized quoted material (in English) on the one side, and notes about it on the other, as a way to over-decorate with quotations. Given the knock-down-drag-out nature of "don't you tell me I can't use decorative quotation boxes any way I want!" disputes (see Talk:Thorpe affair and the quotation templates RfC at WT:MOS), I would not be surprised if people do bad things with this in exactly that vein, so documentation that forestalls such misuses would be a good idea. MOS:QUOTE is already clear about not italicizing quotations or using quote decoration in mainspace, but people keep doing it, because the templates allow it, and it's one of various common styles on blogs to render pull quotes and other news-style "billboards" (which WP should not have, but try getting that through to all editors!).  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  20:22, 22 August 2016 (UTC)
I think my prose comment you're referring to was the one about how the other template ({{Text and translation}}) worked. But your points about whitespace, etc. are well-taken. Not to discount other uses, but for me that's still a bit of a mañana issue, as today I'm still focused on the original purpose: literally Verse translation. With respect to misuse, I had thought a bit about putting additional good/bad use notes in the documentation, and perhaps I shall. But I can't get too exercised about it: it's so easy just to put '' around a quote to make it lovely, that I've gotta believe that there will be (probably literally) 10,000 articles doing that to every 1 that misuses this template for a cheap italic thrill. To use (in a way) your own words against you, you've already argued (I think rightly) that policies and guidelines are no use against a large proportion of template misuse because they are misused mimetically. Currently this template is named very specifically ("Verse translation"), used seldom, and (so far) 100% for its legitimate purpose. It strikes me that expanding its name (e.g. to "Text and translation" or even something broader... I don't know "Parallel content"?), expanding its flexibility and stated purposes (to prose, code...), and therefore expanding not just the count, but type of instances of its use -- would all inevitably lead to more (I'm guessing geometrically more) misuse. Phil wink (talk) 21:40, 22 August 2016 (UTC)
@Phil wink: Yeah, the fact that average editor doesn't read MoS or template docs means they just do what they want. The benefit of spelling out the dos-and-don'ts in both places is that undoing the misuses has a rationale that can be cited. :-) I'm not sure how many italic quotes there are. It would be hard to guestimate even with a insource:/regeular expression here/ searche for " followed by since there are many markup situations where that would be called for (e.g. a quote beginning with something in italics, or a quote of non-English material, or a quotation mark starting something that isn't a quote (e.g. a term of art or a words-as-words case).  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  22:49, 22 August 2016 (UTC)

Sorry, but I had to roll back your ed

Resolved

I had to roll back your additions at Misplaced Pages talk:Manual of Style. You can't make substantive alterations to the body an RfC. For one thing, they're under my signature. As far as I'm concerned, neutral corrections that any reasonable person would avow are improvements are probably OK. (You have to be careful about that, to be sure that people are discussing and voting on a stable version, but its early in the process and it not really a voting RfC, so some slack there.)

But you introduced terms such as "mimic teasers" for non-pagewidth quotes. That's your opinion, it's not helpful to laying out the situation to the other editors. You're also being a bit prolix. It's true that it's a complicated issues with many aspects. However, the main body of the RfC was already probably about as long as possible without other editors' eye glazing over. (I deliberately omitted material on the non-full-pagewidth versions (except to not them for for editors to look at if they wanted) to avoid "TL;DR, so Oppose everything" type responses.)

I'm not saying that this isn't valuable, what I'd suggest is:

  • Only making straightforward corrections to the transclusion counts as succinctly as humanly possible as long as you can look at them at say to yourself "I an confident that all reasonable intelligent informed good-faith persons, regardless of their stand on these issues, would find this change an improvement". Use strikeouts if necessary.
  • Even then we have to find a way to put then under your signature, not sure how to do this.
  • And/or put the material in a separate section.

I'd further recommend, if I may, that you relax. It's just a website. Soon enough none of this will matter. The project has survived fine so far with the present state of affairs. Other editors are also intelligent and also have views that are reasonable. There's manifestly no one right or wrong answer to these questions. There just isn't. So relax. Herostratus (talk) 20:29, 21 August 2016 (UTC)

So for instance, I put in your research on the actual correct usage of the templates. I just replaced the old bad info. We all want the work from the correct numbers. I did it all as succinctly as possible. Herostratus (talk) 21:28, 21 August 2016 (UTC)


@Herostratus: I actually looked and didn't see a sig; must not have looked closely enough. It's not uncommon for an RfC to have no sig (see WP:RFC, where this is explicitly covered), and not having one is often advisable for matters like this that are not cut-and-dry and very simple, because it is often necessary to adjust the RfC before comments really get rolling in. I don't mind re-adding my stats research, etc. below the RfC, though I think that will not be as helpful, and it is apt to cast doubt on the RfC instead of improving it. The principal problem with the RfC is that it entirely misses the principal source of dispute: It's the sidebar and page-center "screaming for attention" usage that causes the most problems. And, yes, the stats you provided turn out to be very misleading, though this would not be apparent if you didn't know about the geeky ways to get the real page and article stats (i.e., I don't think you did anything wrong, but the end result of the stats you provided is serious negative, unintentionally).  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  23:12, 21 August 2016 (UTC)

@Herostratus:: I just checked again, and you did not sign any of the material under issue, only "The basic questions of this RfC" intro (and the request to use the threaded discussion subsection, at the top of the threaded discussion subsection). I'm going to review what's happened since then, and reserve to right to restore material (minus "mimimc"), under its own subheading (signed), if it hasn't been integrated already. And you should sign your two "Reference" sections, or anyone else is also apt to interpret them as freely improvable, not asserted to be one-author content.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼ 
You're right. I meant to add a signature at the end (of the entire RfC) but looking back I see I neglected to. At any rate I wasn't accusing you of violating a rule or any other bad thing -- just trying to keep things neatly separated.
But I apologize. It was entirely my mistake.
You might well be right that the "sidebar" use of quotes is more problematical. It is at any rate a complication to the basic issue of full-width quotes. Since it's a sub-issue of the issue of quote templates in general, I didn't include examples because I was (and remain) concerned over the main body of the the RfC becoming too long. I see that you added them in a collapsed section and that's probably the best way so everything should be all Sir Garnet. Herostratus (talk) 12:22, 22 August 2016 (UTC)
However, you still weren't able to restrain yourself from open advocacy within the body of MY RFC. This annoys. I request you to change
While the above examples illustrate the default use of these templates, a major source of contention about them is the use of their additional parameters or variations, to remove the quotation from the overall flow of the article and treat it as a decorative sidebar, or to dominate the center of the page. A large number of uses of these templates are in such styles, which often present issues that do not occur as frequently with default-mode inline use of the templates, including trivial, redundant, unreasonably highlighted, and out-of-context quotations.
to something like this:
While the above examples illustrate the default use of these templates, they can also be used to make sidebars (as shown below. A large number of uses of these templates are such, which can present issues that do not occur with default-mode inline use of the templates.
or something along those lines.
See the difference? It's also shorter which is a virtue here. AFAIK the use less-than-page-width quotes is not "a major source of contention" since I doubt that many people are excited by this either way.
I myself haven't seen very many instances of "trivial, redundant, unreasonably highlighted, and out-of-context quotations" but maybe. Just like trivial, redundant, unreasonably highlighted, and out-of-context images or trivial, redundant, unreasonably highlighted, and out-of-context text material, they should be redacted when encountered, I guess. Maybe its true, maybe its not, so I don't like seeing presented as a flat statement of fact in the body of the RfC.
In the transclusions section, I'm not happy with
Even taken separately, the MoS-prescribed {{Quote}} and <blockquote> greatly outnumber all other options combined...
Let the reader see the numbers and decide for herself what they mean. That's what we do for articles. You could as well say "Note that almost 20% of editors use forbidden templates". So if you'd take that out it would be a kindness. Herostratus (talk) 12:51, 22 August 2016 (UTC)
@Herostratus: Done (mostly) and done. I've retained a neutralized mention that the sidebar usage in particular is often the locus of dispute (I was not joking when I said it accounts for about 80% of disputes about these templates, and I would know, since I spend more time doing MOS:BQ cleanup than just about anyone). Hope this is amenable. Also hope it's clear that I have not been approaching this as "your" vs. "my" RfC, but as "an" RfC. I've learned the hard way that it's best to modify, or allow modification to, RfCs (when they are still new) if respondents to them feel they're unbalanced, counterfactual, or missing the point. If one does not, what usually happens is the opening of a whole section on why the RfC is broken, or a counter-RfC proposal, and usually the entire thing derails. This one remains unbalanced to me, though neutral in your eyes, because it is approaching this as if it's a "we've never discussed this before" matter, as if all options were equal and we should just pick one on present whim, without regard to years of previous discussions and their rationales favoring avoidance of decorative quote framing. This is why I tried to balance it (in my view) with mention that the "MoS version" totally dominates mainspace despite claims to the contrary based on bare transclusion counts (people try to use that number frequently without realizing it's misleading). But, I can live with it as it stands now. I'm not intending to get into a WP:THERIGHTVERSION dispute!  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  18:33, 22 August 2016 (UTC)

Thorpe affair

Partially moved to Talk:Thorpe affair

Your recent edits on this article have been reverted. There may or may not be merit in some of your proposed changes, and I and other editors with an interest in this article will be happy to discuss them. This article has in the not-too-distant past been through various review procedures, including FAC, in which a good number of editors participated and approved its promotion. You should respect that, even though it is accepted that the article is not inviolable and is capable of improvement. You know as well as I, however, that the simple assertion of a "right to edit", when the edits are likely to be contentious, is a sure-fire route to trouble; I assume that is not what you want. The way to go about improving the article is through civil discourse on the talkpage, not through imposed changes and aggressive and contemptuous edit summaries. I am ready for that discussion whenever you care to instigate it in a proper, civil manner. Brianboulton (talk) 00:11, 22 August 2016 (UTC)

@Brianboulton: I copied the above to the article talk page, and responded to it there, in the matters pertaining to that article. I did want to respond to the non-content-related part of it outside that venue, though, and after some time to reflect on it (knee-jerk reactions being often poor).

I concede that I could have used more brown-nosing language in my edit summaries, but let's be clear that criticism of content and the policy and clarity problems with it is not personal criticism of another editor. If one cannot tell the difference between, e.g., "this sentence is silly and irrational" and "you, loser, are a silly and irrational person for not noticing before I did", one needs to have a stiff cup of coffee or something.  :-)

If, as you indicate, you recognize that at least some of the changes I made were for the better, then it would be far more constructive to substantively address any problems you have with any of the changes you have doubts about, and to distinguish those questions or objections clearly from what you are not objecting to or are actively supportive of, and to do so at the article talk page. It's especially unhelpful to leap in to defend the amazingly clumsy mass-revert-everything-that-didn't-have-my-permission behavior of some other editor, especially one with a long track record of following his "enemies" around page after page to battleground against them.

I did not make any kind of "I have a right to edit and you can't stop me" statement about those edits, so your message to me being a stand taken against this position looks rather thatchy. Since you bring it up, though: WP:EDITING is policy, the overriding policy of the entire project. Objections to good-faith edits have to be grounded in objectively defensible rationales based on policy or sourcing, otherwise they are just WP:IDONTLIKEIT noise. Yes, we do take care in editing them, but WP:MERCILESS still applies, and no amount of WP:LOCALCONSENSUS game-playing can trump site-wide policies and guidelines. "Being careful" is not synonymous with never editing without a discussion first (or with reverting everything one did not get to discuss and then failing to open a discussion). I never substantively change articles like that without a clear and careful rationale. The care I have is primarily for readers' needs, however, not editorial egos. And when it comes to WP:OWN behavior, I do not shy away from dealing with it, head on. I am not impressed by WP:OTHERCRAPEXISTS arguments (some older FAs having guideline-compliance problems means they need to be updated; they are not magical precedents to cite against future compliance!), or attempts to game the system, e.g. using a patently false MOS:ENGVAR claim about a single punctuation mark to mass-revert all changes to an article one feels proprietary toward or (in this case, more likely) just to stick it to an opponent of one's incoherent campaign against MOS:BQ compliance at FAC.

The changes I made were in lieu of taking the article to WP:NORN or WP:FAR for serious PoV and distortion problems, steering the reader brow-beatingly to Thorpe's dismissive view that the case against him was frivolous, when the sources actually suggest that he was guilty of conspiracy. (Among many other problems at that article.)
 — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  06:14, 22 August 2016 (UTC)

In the first place, you apparently don't know the difference between "brown-nosing", as you put it, and normal courtesy. I see the caption you have inserted under your image – is that hypocrisy? You certainly have a unique way of fostering the collaboration to which you pay lip service.
Secondly, I have not "recognized that at least some of the changes made were for the better", merely that they might have some merit when properly argued through. That is what collaboration means. I generally assume good faith, even when disagreeing with edits, but in your case I have doubts: your recent interventions on other articles, plus the fact that you have been called out on your own talkpage for interfering with the text of an Rfc, and the intemperate brandishings, above, of those well-worn chestnuts WP:IDONTLIKEIT, WP:MERCILESS, WP:OWN, etc, indicate the temperament of a warrior and a bully, rather than a collaborative editor.
You say your edits were in lieu of taking the article to FAR, a threat you repeat in your edit summaries. If you had bothered to read the WP:FAR page you would have seen that the prior stage in this process is to raise issues at article talk: "In this step, concerned editors attempt to directly resolve issues with the existing community of article editors, and to informally improve the article." Exactly what I have requested that you do. I will deal with your nonsensical allegations about serious PoV and distortion there.
Brianboulton (talk) 10:26, 22 August 2016 (UTC)
@Brianboulton: I'll take the courtesy bit at face value (especially since I already conceded on this point, just in wording you didn't like). The below is largely a "where I'm coming from" exercise, not an attempt at debate, since you seem to have doubts about my good faith even while saying your assuming it. People are different, some sweeter than others. Plenty of us treat WP as a meritocracy of volunteer work toward important goals, not a social networking enterprise. We have pages like WP:SPADE for a reason. I come from the civil liberties activism community, and the free software world, and several similar collaborative but results-oriented endeavors, where the expectation is "get on with it, and do it well, or get out of the way." WP:COMPETENCE, in this corner of its implications, runs both ways. One does have to be not a raging asshole, but one also has to not have a paper-thin skin and not misinterpret no-nonsense treatment of content problems as if it were a personal insult due to self-identification with ephemeral content and with specific topics. At any rate, it's difficult to see how "a proper, civil manner" (see your first post here) aligns with "I will deal with your nonsensical allegations", which is the kind of aggressive wording you accused me of, and strongly suggests you've already made up your mind (on the basis of a personality conflict) before the discussion you demand has begun in any substance. But whatever; I'm not going to take it too personally. I've had no issue with you, other than a request not to be an enabler of SchroCat's 'WP:P&G don't apply to me, except when I like one and can use it as a cudgel' game-playing.

Second part: Difficult to respond to without seeming defensive. There's not a lot of substance there, just book-by-its-cover judging. I did not "interfere" with an RFC, I corrected serious factual problems in it (in material not signed by the original poster); he actually adopted my corrections himself in a later edit. (Notice the same "don't you touch my content" theme, though? When people complain on my talk page, it is very, very frequently in that vein – "you should have consulted WikiProject Whatever first", "why did you RM this instead of talking to me on my user talk page about it?", "you're not even an editor of this article, so why are you trying to change something in it?", and 100 other variants on this theme of vested and special personal (or good ol' boys club) exceptionalism; all about territorial control and primate dominance behaviors, not about value of content to readers). I mostly arouse the ire of PoV pushers, but sometimes incidentally also that of over-controllers of insular pages with a history of little outside input. Our policies are frequently cited nuggets because they're meaningful and important. Let's turn this around a little.

One thing that collaboration definitely does not mean is mass-reverting all edits to get at a couple of allegedly contentious changes, and doing it again after it's pointed out why that is wrong. It also doesn't mean backing up that reverter and trying to force a good-faith editor to over-discuss everything – to pointlessly repeat all the rationales already given in edit summaries, most of which are self-evident upon reflection anyway – until the status quo is defended simply through attrition and wearing out, and seemingly for no reason other that to treat FAs as near-exempt from normal editing processes. I'm a fan of useful process, myself, but not pursuit of bureaucracy against common sense. BRD is an optional process that only works when everyone acts in good faith and reasonably; it cannot be abused to trump policy, and the attempts to promote it to a guideline last year was shot down in flames. If I seem intemperate in this article's case, it's because I (like at least five others) have been viciously and repeatedly personally attacked by SchroCat and his tagteam buddy (what was that about bullying by warriors?) for daring to question their attempts to lobby FAC to ignore guidelines any time they stamp their feet. The good faith tank is running dry (especially given that SchroCat appears to have engaged in the revert because I used this article as an example of cleanup of misuse of pull-quote templates – he really, really likes to misuse them, so monkey-wrenching my example serves his anti-MoS campaigning needs). Lots of people have temperance issues, but there's a difference between criticizing content or behavior patterns, and making ad hominem insult tirades one's go-to tactic.

It is true I spend almost no time in WP:DRAMAboards and don't memorize their rules. I would, of course, have read FAR's before using it (I never have before, only commented in FARs already running). Deciding to use a formal WP process (for once), because the current situation is characterized by filibustering and dodging, is not a "threat", it's standard operating procedure; we have noticeboards and dispute resolution avenues for a reason. As I predicted, SchroCat is unable to articulate plausible rationales or specific objections, just totally subjective handwaving about quotes and layout, and red herrings about punctuation. So, the talk-page-first requirement will be satisfied soon enough. I think FAR, or an RfC, is probably the best course of action. (I do RfCs all the time, but they aren't very good for multiple-problem pages; maybe FAR will be more flexible). Issues like this are rarely resolved in local-consensus echo chambers consisting of one person trying to gain consensus with a handful of "old timers" at an article they don't think should be changed in any way ("this already passed FAC"); it usually requires external input from the uninvolved. The other course of action is to tediously present a more cogent argument than the opposition, point by point, over days, even months if it comes to it. I'm skilled and patient at that, but a collective decision from FAR or RfC is less one-sided and has more impact, while using less time and energy, and defusing the circular tendency of the debate-it-out method.
 — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  13:12, 22 August 2016 (UTC)

Noted. Brianboulton (talk) 14:03, 22 August 2016 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:Eritrea

 Done

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:Eritrea. Legobot (talk) 04:24, 22 August 2016 (UTC)

Re: Diacritics

Unresolved – An anti-diacritics pseudo-guideline is a problem and needs an RfC.

Greetings. I was referring to conventions like "All North American hockey pages should have player names without diacritics.". Cédric 23:26, 24 August 2016 (UTC)

@Cedric tsan cantonais: Wow, thanks for drawing that to my attention. Don't know how that one slipped past the radar. That is actually a bogus WP:LOCALCONSENSUS "guideline" and needs to be fixed! My point still stands, though, that "any" covers both this any any new proposal someone might come up with. :-) Anyway, I'm not sure how to deal with the "screw the MoS, we're going to ban diacritics in hockey" crap, other than probably an RfC hosted at WP:VPPOL.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  23:30, 24 August 2016 (UTC)
For your information, I'm using "any and all" on the template so both our grounds can be covered. Cédric 05:05, 25 August 2016 (UTC)
Fortunately, the universe did not implode.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  18:30, 26 August 2016 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:Miniature Australian Shepherd

Disregard – I'm the one who wrote that RfC.

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:Miniature Australian Shepherd. Legobot (talk) 04:24, 25 August 2016 (UTC)

A heads up

Resolved

You made a post at the CFDs for yesterday but it was in the wrong section. (People from Marshall Arkansas, instead of Obese cats) I took the liberty of moving it. Hope you don't mind....William, is the complaint department really on the roof? 13:08, 26 August 2016 (UTC)

@WilliamJE: Thanks! Eyestrain must've been getting to me. Or maybe a non-obese cat in lap distracted me. I don't think anyone from Marshall (where?) did. Heh.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  17:34, 26 August 2016 (UTC)

Formal mediation has been requested

Moot 
The Mediation Committee has received a request for formal mediation of the dispute relating to "Eritrea's geographical naming". As an editor concerned in this dispute, you are invited to participate in the mediation. Mediation is a voluntary process which resolves a dispute over article content by facilitation, consensus-building, and compromise among the involved editors. After reviewing the request page, the formal mediation policy, and the guide to formal mediation, please indicate in the "party agreement" section whether you agree to participate. Because requests must be responded to by the Mediation Committee within seven days, please respond to the request by 3 September 2016.

Discussion relating to the mediation request is welcome at the case talk page. Thank you.
Message delivered by MediationBot (talk) on behalf of the Mediation Committee. 03:38, 27 August 2016 (UTC)

Request for mediation rejected

The request for formal mediation concerning Eritrea's geographical naming, to which you were listed as a party, has been declined. To read an explanation by the Mediation Committee for the rejection of this request, see the mediation request page, which will be deleted by an administrator after a reasonable time. Please direct questions relating to this request to the Chairman of the Committee, or to the mailing list. For more information on forms of dispute resolution, other than formal mediation, that are available, see Misplaced Pages:Dispute resolution.

For the Mediation Committee, TransporterMan (TALK) 03:39, 27 August 2016 (UTC)
(Delivered by MediationBot, on behalf of the Mediation Committee.)

Uh, okay. I just went to dinner and came back and all this happened? Ha ha.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  05:42, 27 August 2016 (UTC)

Disambiguation link notification for August 27

 Fixed

Hi. Thank you for your recent edits. Misplaced Pages appreciates your help. We noticed though that when you edited Winged cat, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page Chimera (check to confirm | fix with Dab solver). Such links are almost always unintended, since a disambiguation page is merely a list of "Did you mean..." article titles. Read the FAQ • Join us at the DPL WikiProject.

It's OK to remove this message. Also, to stop receiving these messages, follow these opt-out instructions. Thanks, DPL bot (talk) 09:53, 27 August 2016 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:SIG MCX

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:SIG MCX. Legobot (talk) 04:24, 30 August 2016 (UTC)

Archiving tip

I appreciate the heads up. I'm aware of that, I'm just the kind of guy who wants to not only save, but quickly access everything, so I've been reluctant to do that. However, I do believe it's about time for it. I get the impression you tried to load my talk page on a slower device and by the time it was done loading, were ready to say something about it. If that's not a cue, I don't know what is. :) MjolnirPants Tell me all about it. 13:14, 31 August 2016 (UTC)

@MjolnirPants: It was getting a bit slow to load (Chrome, on a Mac, but one from 2010); didn't break anything. I'm also often slow to archive my own page, so don't feel bad. :-)  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  21:27, 31 August 2016 (UTC)

Drama in films and television

Hi - I saw your proposal and responded on moving Drama (film and television). I've also been talking to User:Rwood128 about similar issues on the Drama talk page. Once I'd responded, I thought I really ought to wade through all of the old discussions and some edit histories on the subject. That gave me a clearer sense of how it's developed, so I thought I'd try to do something more substantial to sort it all out with some decent sources. As well as theatre material, I've got quite a number of film studies books on genre kicking around, so I've scanned through what I could find there. There isn't much. So, I thought I'd take a look on Google books. It was similarly slight.

From what I've read on my books on film genre, and from following the development of discussions on the various talk pages, it seems to me that the present state of affairs has developed from some initial assumptions (unsourced) and misunderstandings, which I wasn't aware of when I started talking to User:Rwood128. I'm going to leave a note with him/her too, along the same lines. The basic gist of all this is: "drama" isn't a genre used much in film studies, as counter-intuitive as that sounds. What is used, however, are the various 'sub-genres' that are more familiar: historical drama, comedy-drama, melodrama, etc. For example, Steve Neale in Genre and Hollywood explains that what came to be known as the "women's film", and what film studies tends to call "melodrama", Hollywood tended to call "drama" (they called thrillers or action movies 'melodramas'). Looking through the article, much of the lede has just been imported from the drama article and supplemented with a dictionary definition. Most of the content of the article are generalised statements about cinema with the adjective "dramatic" added on. I don't think anyone would seriously call E.T. or Blade Runner examples of "drama" as a film genre. Most of the examples suffer from the same problems--they are, biopics or epics or whatever, rather than belonging to a film genre called "drama". The index for Neale's book, for example, does give references to "dramas" but in each case they are treated under the long list of sub-s that he gives: costume drama, domestic drama, home front drama, social drama, etc.

So, if I remove all the material that comes from the umbrella term Drama and the unsourced material, all we're left with are the links to the various sub-genres. After I've left a note at User:Rwood128's page, and unless you have any objections, I'm going to be bold and remove the unsourced material and turn it into, in effect, a disambig page pointing readers to the specific genres they might be interested in. From what I can tell from my research, that would bring us closest to reflecting it's use in film. There's already an article at radio drama, so that presents no problems. Rather than just doing it, then, I thought I'd explain first here. Oh, and what I meant to say too: all of which means, I think, that the rename wouldn't be necessary, so I'll remove the proposal, if that's ok?  • DP •   15:40, 31 August 2016 (UTC)

D'oh. I just realised you didn't propose it. Sorry...  • DP •   16:58, 31 August 2016 (UTC)
No worries. Something needs to be done about the current content-fork, in one way or another. PS: I would call Blade Runner a drama, though it is also sci-fi, and an action film, and a cops-and-bad-guys story, and a Dickian metaphysical piece, and several other things all at once. ET, not so much. More of a melodrama combined with a morality play.  :-)  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  21:24, 31 August 2016 (UTC)

My RFA

Just a point of information, it may be instructive for you to read the first of my RFAs to establish why the second was so successful, having more than addressed the criticism levelled at me then. If you really are interested, you can see it here. The Rambling Man (talk) 20:39, 31 August 2016 (UTC)

@The Rambling Man: Will do.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  21:21, 31 August 2016 (UTC)
I see what you mean, and trimmed my bit at the case page. FWIW, I agree with something you said in some "evidence" someone posted . The more I think about this, the more I think I'm just reacting negatively to a general "admins can be hostile because we gave them badges" attitude, and it's not really about you in particular (especially since, as you pointed out in that diff, your cantankerousness is lower than that of some other admins who seem to never receive any serious flak for it).  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  21:49, 31 August 2016 (UTC)
Cheers. It won't mean much, I see how this ends and it ain't pretty (for me). But that's what eleven years (and nine of them as sysop) means, you upset a lot of people who think mediocrity makes for a good encyclopedia. Or that Misplaced Pages is a good alternative for Facebook or Twitter. I look forward to the solution of the Catch 22 Arbcom are now placed in, it should test their mettle and comprehension skills a little more than normal. The Rambling Man (talk) 21:40, 1 September 2016 (UTC)
@The Rambling Man: I actually agree with most of that. On the up-side, a lot of the Arbs seem more concerned about drama in general at ITN, DYK, and other features that some characterize as activities approaches as "badge-collecting", not with you in particular.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  22:03, 1 September 2016 (UTC)
No, that's just a smokescreen. The reason it's taking so long to move to the next phase is that they haven't quite worked out how to phrase me being scuttled. Either way they're doomed. I collect no badges, I gave that up a decade ago. After all, when you have about 350 featured or good articles or lists or topics or DYKs or ITNs, it's pointless worrying about it, especially if you don't engage in the children's games like WikiCup. One final note, I thought that you'd actually agreed with me way back when you notified me of Arbcom's arcane machinations and I suggested that most of us were blissfully unaware of them. Yet you seem to suggest now that all admins should be intimately familiar with all the detritus that pours from Arbcom's funnel. Perhaps I misinterpreted your posts. Some of us admins are just here to improve Misplaced Pages, not to frequent the drama boards and expend our energy in the Misplaced Pages namespace. How many edits have you made in the mainspace in the last few months, as a percentage? Not being confrontational, but just a question. We seem to have top-loaded with process-mongers and arbitrators and lost out on contributors and article creators. Terrifying when taken its inevitable conclusion. The Rambling Man (talk) 22:12, 1 September 2016 (UTC)

Books & Bytes - Issue 18

The Misplaced Pages Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 18, June–July 2016
by The Interior (talk · contribs), Ocaasi, Samwalton9, UY Scuti, and Sadads

  • New donations - Edinburgh University Press, American Psychological Association, Nomos (a German-language database), and more!
  • Spotlight: GLAM and Wikidata
  • TWL attends and presents at International Federation of Library Associations conference, meets with Association of Research Libraries
  • OCLC wins grant to train librarians on Wikimedia contribution

Read the full newsletter

The Interior via MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 23:25, 31 August 2016 (UTC)

RfC on Quote Boxes.

 Done – Asked WP:ANRFC that this "anti-RfC" should be speedily closed as disruptive of the actual RfC.

Hello SMcCandlish! This is just a message to let you know that I have recently initiated a 'support/opposition' section at the RfC discussing the issues surrounding the use of "quote boxes" (here). As you previously expressed a view on this issue over at the MoS talk page several days ago, you may wish to reiterate your opinion in a 'support/oppose' format. Best, Midnightblueowl (talk) 21:53, 31 August 2016 (UTC)

"mass, anti-discussion smear" and other over-exaggerations

You may not like it, but don't delete it. Feel free to ask the original poster, EEng if he will remove it, or if he minds if you remove it, but don't unilaterally decide what you want on the talk page. – Gavin (talk) 13:49, 1 September 2016 (UTC)

Pardon? EEng 14:14, 1 September 2016 (UTC)
Certainly not. It's a serious comment on attitudes toward what the reader's experience should be. I point out that the bit in quotes re "tedious to write" was added by someone else, though I absolutely endorse it as the perfect final touch. EEng 14:51, 1 September 2016 (UTC)
Quite right too. – Gavin (talk) 15:45, 1 September 2016 (UTC)
@SchroCat: See WP:REFACTOR, WP:OWN, and WP:TALK. Anyone is empowered to remove disruptive posts and other edits. Changing people's posts is discouraged. Removing patently uncivil ones is not. This isn't about EEng's smear-box in particular, really, but the entire WP:FACTION-looking mass invasion of WT:MOS with advocates of decorative quote boxes, not to participate in the RfC and address the issues raised in it, and discuss adjusting the default quote template, but rather to forum-shop, seemingly canvass (I see two canvassing notices posted already), and otherwise disrupt the RfC. Abusing the talk page as billboard to uncivilly straw-man the opposing side is just a small piece of this mess, though one you should not have edit-warred to restore. I think AN should be aware of this entire situation, which is clearly abnormal and unconstructive. You reverting to uphold a "principle" you and your buddy Cassianto ignore any time you feel like deleting posts you don't like, cannot be taken as any kind of serious position. (I'll be sure to remind you of your reverts and this conversation next time I see you do it, or backing up him doing it.) It's just part of your clumsily-revert-SMcCandlish-when-he-makes-me-mad pattern.

I've already written the AN request (not about you in particular; that would surely be over infobox battlegrounding, which hopefully ARCA will pour cold water on before that escalates any further). But I'm tired and should not invoke "process" in an off-the-cuff manner, and someone whose judgement I trust e-mailed me discouraging noticeboard action on this particular thing, so I'll sleep on it. I'm not so prideful I can't back down from a promise of AN/ANI/whatever action just because I stated one, if there are doubts it would deal with the matter effectively.
 — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  15:08, 1 September 2016 (UTC)

  • OWN??? PMSL! In my entire Wiki career I have left 29 comments on that page; you are getting up to 2,000 and taking the unilateral decision to delete other people's comments: who do you think is displaying signs of ownership here? – Gavin (talk) 15:45, 1 September 2016 (UTC)
We do not OWN our posts here, and others may change or remove them under particular circumstances, as you well know, since you do it as you please, then feign outrage if anyone does it with anything you agree with. I didn't touch your material, so how often you edit there is irrelevant. The fact that this is about appropriateness but you think this is about editcounts and page control – a very frequent and sorely mistaken "you aren't a regular editor of this page so you have no right to change it" theme of yours that you're now hypocritically trying to reverse (which seems to be your go-to tactic for everything) says a whole lot. So does the fact that you evidently feel proprietary about others' content and will editwar to retain it if it's on "your side", without any actual rationale for doing so, and regardless of the rationales for the changes (another recurrent SchroCat theme).  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  20:46, 1 September 2016 (UTC)
  • @EEng: I thought I knew you better as an editor than that. How can you possibly think it is reasonable to mischaracterize in this way the views of everyone who has concerns about the excessive and undue promotional effect of these templates for whatever viewpoint is put in them? It's no different from referring to anyone who puts an infobox in an article as an "idiot" "non-reader" and "vandal". I really had faith you knew better than to pursue this "try to win by demonizing anyone who disagrees" angle. Oh well; the fact that you're totally unrepentant about it actually supports my view that this is disruptive, not accidental, and should be administrative;y shut down.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  15:08, 1 September 2016 (UTC)
For those playing along at home, we're talking about my insertion of an image here . You do know me better than that, you're reading way too much into this, and I wasn't demonizing anybody. Of course I support concerns about excessive and undue promotional use of quotes, but I oppose those who think things like (as was stated two posts above my insertion) "Stylistically such isolated quotations are a train wreck. If there's no way to integrate such a quotation into the article text, it probably doesn't belong there" i.e. that there's no place for quotes which draw the reader in and spark interest, consistent with many people's belief that any time the reader says to himself, "Wow! This article is a pleasure to read!", then something's wrong. EEng 21:34, 1 September 2016 (UTC)
The image has nothing to do with it. The straw man psychological projection of a crazy/stupid viewpoint onto everyone who doesn't agree with you about decorative quote boxes is the issue. But thanks for vividly highlighting exactly why these quote templates are PoV problems. "Draw the reader in and spark interest" in one particular party's viewpoint is a blatant policy violation. There are other ways to attract reader interest that do not favor particular viewpoints. But doing so at the sub-article content level is not a WP goal anyway, per WP:NOT#MAGAZINE. Grabbing reader eyeballs for as long as possible, much less precisely steering them, is not our job; providing information they actually want, arranging it logically, and backing it up with reliable sources, is our job. This is not an advertisng-funded site, and we have no incentive at all to keep people here longer than they need to be here to get what they came for (much of what WP:NOT is about, especially WP:NOT#INDISCRIMINATE is grounded in this fact). Life is short, and WP is not escapist entertainment in text form, it's a a particular kind of information source.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  22:12, 1 September 2016 (UTC)
There are plenty of situations in which an interesting quote illuminates, gives depth to, or brings to life the adjacent text -- even well into the article. There's a great example (though a bit long) at Oscar_Wilde#Imprisonment. Of course these should not be used in ways that promote a particular POV, just as article text should not promote a particular POV. But that's an orthogonal issue. EEng 23:12, 1 September 2016 (UTC)
I don't think that imagery like "brings life to" is apt here, and it implies that (to steal SchroCat's own anti-infobox campaigning stump out from under him) all the hard work of other editors on the article is just "dead" material unless you, in your infinite wisdom, force a USA Today-style decorative sidebar on it. All of the "redundant eyesore marring a beautiful article" arguments that you guys bring against infoboxes (which actually serve a demonstrable utility function) actually apply, without reservation of any kind, to quote boxes, which are not utilitiarian in any way, and only exist to "steer" readers into accepting as "the take-away message" what you personally want to brow-beat them with. This is absolutely not encyclopedic writing, and it's why all the comments in the "anti-RfC" poll over there, aside from supports that are pure WP:AADD noise, are opposes. There's nothing even faintly tangential about the fact that quote boxes unduly draw attention to particular quoted material; that's the very crux of the matter. Taking material out of its context does not "give depth" to material, it robs the material of depth and makes it confusing and sound-bitey. It's a cheap-ass PR, marketing, and tabloid journalism trick, a form of tacky teaser.

The really unfortunate thing about all of this is that the misguided attempt to sail the longship around the RfC and dodge the issues raised in it, with a "voting invasion" that is doomed before it starts, is that it's probably going to derail also the discussion of more subtly adjusting the default block quote style, which would obviate almost all of this dispute, site-wide. So, good job creating another gory style battlefield; you can now go make up heroic poems about yourselves.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  23:47, 1 September 2016 (UTC)

Chill. I'm not part of your RfC war. EEng 23:56, 1 September 2016 (UTC)
I'm done. It's just severely frustrating to finally begin to get some maybe-traction on adjusting the default quote template enough to stop people abusing pull-quote templates because they don't think the default style is distinct enough, only to have the very people who don't think it's distinct enough derail everything. It seems more important to them to "make a stand" for "real FA editors" against "the rabble", and the principal point of it seems to be nothing but denigrating other editors and their work just because they don't think giant quotation marks or huge garish boxes are the right approach. It's even more ridiculous than the "infobox wars". It's like burning the stadium down rather than compromise in the slightest way on what code of football to play today.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  00:23, 2 September 2016 (UTC)
Look, SM, you're obviously under stress right now and I feel bad for what you seem to be going through. All I said is that sometimes, in some articles, there's a place for boxed quotes, and that a complete ban on them is wrongheaded. I have nothing to do with any of these cosmic conflicts you refer to. For God's sake snap out of it, and let's have back the levelheaded Sandy McCandlish we know and love. EEng 03:45, 2 September 2016 (UTC)
@EEng: I'm not "under stress", I just take NPoV policy seriously. What you just said there is a reasonably phrased statement, nothing like the straw-man hatchet job you pulled in your sidebar at WT:MOS. As to the meat of the question: What place is there for boxed quotes? Define it with precision, please. Now justify that in reference to ENC, NOT, NPOV, NOR, etc. Now, how you are going to actually limit applications of this style to only what that supposed definable and justifiable role is, especially when we all know for a fact that the majority of uses of these quoteboxes are PoV-laden highlighting of particular viewpoints? How would you stem that tide? After all that, riddle me this: Why do you give a damn when virtually no one else on WP wants these things?

I did an experiment about a year ago. I took the first 100 articles that came up using one of the decorate quote templates, and converted every single one of them to standard {{Quote}}, citing MOS:BQ, except two which were genuine pull quotes, and in both cases there was no need for a pull quote, so I simply removed them. A total of 0 (zero) out of 100 of these changes was reverted or even questioned. The bare fact of the matter is that approximately a dozen editors are hot, hot, hot for decorative quotes and no one else is. A number of other, mostly noob, editors insert them because they have not read MOS:BQ and are just copy-catting what they saw in some other article. The vast majority of articles follows MOS:BQ. This has been proven with incontrovertible numbers at the (original, not hijacked) RfC at WT:MOS. The only conclusion that can reasonably be reached is that use of décor quotes is a bloggish/tabloid style that a tiny handful of editors are promoting and who will fight to death to keep it, when no one else wants this garbage here. It's the tail wagging the dog.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  07:47, 2 September 2016 (UTC)

I agree that probably few editors understand how to use quote boxes properly, and that they have a place in relatively few articles -- perhaps no more than 99 1 out of 100 (or 100 1 out of 101). Maybe that means they're not worth the trouble and should be banned, I don't know (though I doubt it). But all I said is that there is a place for them, and that many who object to them are those of the school that think that being dull and dry is a sign of article quality.

I'm actually sorry, at this point, to hear that you say you're not under stress, because at least it would explain all this: "I cannot say that Mailer was drunk the whole time he was on camera. I can only hope he was drunk." Can we stop now? EEng 13:25, 2 September 2016 (UTC)

I'm not sure if you mean to imply that 1% of articles should have quote boxes, or are sarcastically saying 99% should. "Dry" and "dull" aren't even the same thing, in writing terms. Can you diff someone saying our articles should be dull? Can you also diff them saying quote boxes should be removed? If not, you are projecting stuff from your imagination onto other editors. It's difficult to get any clear picture of why you want quote boxes, other than a vague sense that anything that isn't "dry" or "dull" should be permitted. So, why don't we add reader opinion polls, links to gossip, embarrassing photos, and 1,000 other things that aren't dry and dull, if the need to decorate is so overwhelming? Why does it exactly have to be quote boxes, when we know that the typical use of them is WP:UNDUE? I'm sorry you seem to think I'm not approaching this rationally. I think my questions indicate I have the same concern about those in favor of quote boxes, and are the questions themselves not rational? What questions are the opposition asking? None, they're just engaging in character assassination. Ad hominem is the last refuge of someone who has no logical reason for their stance. The more I ask such questions the more the collective answer comes back that we should have quote boxes "just because". I actually said this almost word-for-word over a week ago, and the situation has worsened not improved, despite more people being asked such questions in clearer terms. That fact is very meaningful.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  20:04, 2 September 2016 (UTC)
Sorry, I meant 1/100 or 1/101 of course -- hadn't had my coffee yet. Here's someone saying articles should be "cold" (open the collapse box -- and don't fail to note the reactions from others in the thread that immediately follows). You may very well be right that typical uses of quote boxes are UNDUE (or tabloid- or blog-ish), and I repeat that "Maybe that means they're not worth the trouble and should be banned, I don't know (though I doubt it)." I'm sure we'll be collaborating happily again in the near future. EEng 20:24, 2 September 2016 (UTC)
"Cold", "dry", and "dull" aren't the same thing. Encyclopedic writing is "cold" in being neutral and fact-cite-fact-cite, compared to "fiery" investigation and "flaming" public relations and marking prose, which may be mostly nonse with no basis, but full of emotion. It's also "dry" in being focused on neutrally presented, significant facts in a logical order, versus "juicy" in using supposition, out-of-context inflammatory quotations, "weird" but irrelevant details designed to provoke a reaction, etc. It's only "dull" if the writers suck. But the typical justification for quote boxes (other than "to highlight this because it's important" – i.e., to push an editor's particular PoV) is "to break up blocks of text". This is why we have section headings, and an encyclopedia article is meant to mostly be blocks of text; someone who hates blocks of text should not be editing here, but making YouTube videos. Anyway, I agree this will blow over, and apologize if I was overreacting.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  11:43, 3 September 2016 (UTC)
Apology accepted, though it really isn't necessary. We all have our moments. EEng 14:54, 3 September 2016 (UTC)

Quote boxes

Now that you're haranguing at least two Featured article writers about quote boxes I'm going to request that you disengage and find something else to do. Your use of derisive language like "people not involved in FA horse-trading", "decorative, cutesy quote framing or side-barring gimmicks", and "WOW! CHECK THIS OUT! tacky reader lure" indicate to me that you've left logic behind and are pushing an agenda. The next stop will be discretionary sanctions for you. --Laser brain (talk) 22:33, 2 September 2016 (UTC)

@Laser brain: I concede that the "horse-trading" comment was unnecessarily provocative, though hardly an attack and probably not even uncivil, just disgruntled and expressive of consternation at "wikipolitics". It is certainly not difficult to show particular FA-focused parties backing each other up inappropriately; other admins have pointed it out before themselves, about the specific parties now announcing at least temporary departures (conveniently just as ARCA starts looking like it may authorize DS for the "infobox wars").

But where are your DS threats about flat-out attack comments made at WT:FAC today? "Machinations", "regularly targeted ... by editors ... pushing a ... agenda", "have opened up a new line of attack", "very small groups ... are targeting the work of a very small number ", etc., are all uncivil aspersions, direct accusations of conspiratorial bad faith. It's a serious claim levied en masse, with no evidence at all, against everyone with a differing viewpoint. Oh, never mind; you just repeated the attack yourself and added another: "you've left logic behind and are pushing an agenda". I note also your post at the same talk page indicating you have a very firmly pre-determined view of the entire debate and are itching to crack the heads of one side of the issue , despite the personal-attack evidence all pointing in the other direction.

This is what WP:INVOLVED means, and you should step away. You seem to be at least as emotionally invested in this debate as the parties you're supposedly intervening between, and unmistakably taking one side. You quite explicitly side with all three of those individuals here, and say you plan to step in at FAC to fill their impending vacancy. But one even makes it clear that the dispute in question doesn't even have much to do with his departure, and the others say nothing about it.

What I've said, that you object to, is backed by very clear logic. There is no civility issue whatsoever is characterizing an unencyclopedic, PoV-pushing, and MoS-deprecated content framing technique as decorative, cutesy, gimmicky, tacky, or functionally a lure. It has zero to do with any editor, and casts aspersions at no one, but is strictly about whether the content presentation is properly encyclopedic. It's no different from saying "ain't" doesn't belong in our articles for several similar reasons, or that we don't use giant all-caps headlines at Misplaced Pages for more such reasons.

I hadn't bothered going this route yet, but I can certainly source external materials indicating what decorative quotation presentation is for and why it should not be used here.

I can do this all day (and it's not even wasted sourcing, since our articles on such matters actually need work). But I guess being able to actually back up what I'm saying means I've "left logic behind" to "push an agenda"? The only thing I'm "pushing" is what any editor should: that WP:ENC, the WP:CCPOL and WP:NOT aren't a bunch of optional nonsense.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  12:53, 3 September 2016 (UTC)

PS: I definitely do have other things to do. I haven't touched the related WT:MOS RfC since 1 September, I think, and like Brianboulton, I completely left the Thorpe affair article and talk page alone for a long time, both after dispute started, and after the original parties said their initial piece in response to Boulton's review (in which he reinstated many of my edits despite being angry with me). I trusted the matter to resolve itself with normal discussion if I just left. I returned to find a train wreck, with predictable parties (directly canvassed in the open by SchroCat) accusing everyone who disagreed with them of being in an anti-FA conspiracy. Surely it must be wicked collusion by an MoS cabal! People not summoned by SchroCat couldn't possibly be commenting there because the article was mentioned prominently in two recent RfCs, right? "Incontheivable!" It was patent assumption of bad faith, but I don't see you or anyone else leaving {{Ds/alert}}s about that. I'm a much more convenient target. If I left Ds/alerts, despite it being the approach ArbCom demands, I'm sure I'd get accused of "disruption" or something. I left one the other day and all it did was generate more drama. This strikes me as "non-optimal" process.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  14:00, 3 September 2016 (UTC)

Surely you are familiar with the concepts of logos and pathos. When I say you've left logic behind, I'm referring to your derisive and provocative remarks which create an unneeded appeal to emotion rather than logic. And don't insult my intelligence by claiming you don't have an agenda. You're quite right that I'm taking sides—I take the side of anyone who's here to create content and has to drop what they're doing to read your walls of text and argue about things like infoboxes and quote boxes. That includes people who are labeled as pro-infobox. Your various arguments that amount to, "Well why aren't you talking to Jimmy about his behavior?" are needless diversions from the point, a problem I see people trying to bring to your attention frequently. I'm quite well aware that I'm emotionally invested in this issue and won't be applying any sanctions personally. I will seek them at the appropriate venue. I don't intend to pursue this discussion with you any further, because you've essentially indicated that you view others' behavior as problematic and not your own, and that you are fully justified in blowing up talk pages for days on end to push your interpretations of style. You saw to it that Darkfrog was banned for the same behavior—maybe you should take a second to realize you're now cooking yourself in your own stock. --Laser brain (talk) 14:25, 3 September 2016 (UTC)
@Laser brain: Fair point! Appeal to emotion is actually central to the very reason that pull-quote styling doesn't belong in an encyclopedia, so it would be hypocritical for me to engage in it while opposing it. I concede that using florid language like I did can have that effect, and I shouldn't get worked up that way. And, yes, I'm clearly also wordier than you and several others prefer. Aside from that, what would you advise, though, about how to participate in these discussions? (Other than "just run away from every so-called style dispute and let the chaos of random whims reign" of course; I obviously care about stability, consistency, and not using style arguments to dodge policies – this matters.) I redacted a bunch of diffs and gripes about SchroCat and Cassianto at WT:FAC, in the interests of peace, and also quoted Schro positively.

No one is more aware than me how many people want to pillory me and all other MoS regulars. (Actually, I think I can specifically enumerate those who do, and why.) I'm not complaining that particular other parties aren't being punished (I think the whole ArbCom punishment regime is detrimental when not applied strictly to reader-facing content PoV-war behavior like "my ethnicity versus yours" and "crystal healing is real science" crap). The complaint is that "down with MoS" rants full of gross incivility almost never receive any "please don't do that" response from admins, but any slight line-crossing from an MoS regular will, like we're being held to higher standards than anyone else. The administrative response to style disputes is to side against anyone seeking guideline compliance about 80 to 90% of the time. The regular editors of no other guidelines on the system have to live with a whole array of Damoclean swords over their heads like that. No one gives a damn if we feel stressed out and attacked. We're those "twattish MoS nutters", remember.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  18:36, 3 September 2016 (UTC)

Aside from that, what would you advise, though, about how to participate in these discussions?: Don't think for a minute I don't care about the MoS. I spent years working as a technical writer, teaching college English comp, and helping doctoral students edit their theses. I've used and even written manuals of style. To me it was something to have in mind as I authored content or graded student papers. I've also brought MoS compliance issues to writers' attention thousands of times. Usually there is no fuss, but sometimes there is. I suppose I've learned to pick my battles over time and I've also learned that the world is more "shades of grey" than it is black and white. I don't have to be right all the time and I don't lose sleep if something is contrary to a MoS entry—especially when the author has a thought-out response to why they diverted. My job as an FAC coordinator here is to assess consensus for promotion, but I also personally look at each candidate before I consider promoting it. If it's not in compliance with the MoS, I'm going to look to see if a reviewer caught it. If not, I'll make a comment myself and see if it was an oversight or if the author has a rationale. It's somewhere between there and creating pages of discussion and frustration that you and I have a disconnect. Maybe you can help me out there, maybe not. --Laser brain (talk) 17:30, 4 September 2016 (UTC)
@Laser brain: Thanks, that helps a lot. I'm not sure yet how to address the matter you highlight since it arises from everyone frustratedly/frustratingly discussing. This would continue indefinitely even if I keeled over dead this very hour. I am trying to come up with ways to approach the matter differently, e.g. turning to external style guide sources to "back up" what MoS says, as long as the sourcing can be used more productively and isn't wasted research time. It doesn't seem to help moods, though it does tend to resolve a dispute in a particular direction (and has even led to MoS changes, e.g. MOS:JR). I just have to figure out a way to approach this more effectively (in the "how to make friends and influence people" sense); I come from two professional backgrounds – civil liberties activism and standards-compliant coding – which color my approach too much. Or maybe I'm just an asshole (people who think so seem unaware how much my approach has changed since ca. 2012, or how deeply troubled I was about the "bird caps" fiasco, and how hard I've worked to prevent a repeat of it over other matters). I could try obsequious wording, but this is actually one of the things that infuriated people about the indeffed MoS editor you mentioned (along with the 7 years of "source the MoS itself" campaigning); it comes across as patronizing and insincere if one is too polite in making a point.

Anyone is going to be "frustrated" if, as a native or at least fluent speaker, they deeply feel they know the one true way to use the language, even if they know intellectually this isn't really true (variant: as a professional in X, they have conviction there is only one proper way to write something about X, even if no one does it that way except in topical journals). If they feel really strongly about it, they'll demonize, and drum up support from other people irritated about some different and unrelated style peccadillo, using "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" reasoning, when there should be no enemy-think at all . It's rooted in topical territory control, not reader needs.

I don't have an easy answer for the overall "MoS turmoil" problem other than to keep angling for consistency , discouraging "because I wanna" exceptions that don't have a legit IAR basis , pointing out when people are using their personal frustration/desire as an excuse to attack people and foment anti-MoS cabals . I try to remind people that we have MoS and other guidelines not as documentation for what the world should do or most commonly does . It's simply a set of internal, reader-oriented game rules so we're all playing the same game instead of standing on the field fighting about what game to play. The particular rules often don't matter much; just agreeing to something so we can get on with it is the point.

The MoS regulars have loved that the FAC regulars include MoS compliance in the FA criteria; we just wished this was adhered to more firmly because of the "this FA doesn't comply so none of my articles have to, either" pattern, which is growing. (CITEVAR is another issue, too; it was created to reduce fights over cite formatting, but has PoV-forked from the rationale of ENGVAR and DATEVAR to instead enable OWN-ish claims down to the one-character level. I see that FAC gets plenty of "don't you dare touch my cites" debate, stemming from the same territorial instincts as "give me this style variance or else".)  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  01:00, 5 September 2016 (UTC)

Sourcing on pull-quote styling

This can be re-used to improve articles like Pull quote.

As just one example, here's several statements from a magazine's house style guide :

  • "Quotes are used to emphasize excerpts of text."
  • "we need to provide with some focus anchors to fix their attention to the most important parts of our articles."
  • "They are used to pull a text passage out of the reader’s flow and give it a more dominant position in the post or the article."
  • But this contrasts very sharply with what they say about block quotes (the kind MOS:BQ calls for): "Just like a pull quote ... block quotations ... are also set off from the main text as a distinct paragraph or block. ... are usually placed within the reader’s flow."

Here's a source for the fact the the style is an explicit "lure", in an definition of the pull quote style, from one of the most reputable publishers in the entire field of online copy and content presentation, SitePoint :

  • "It’s a device designed to isolate and visually highlight a particularly interesting sentence within the body copy. It’s a 'lure' intended to draw skimmers into the content."

National Geographic Style Guide, on not misusing pull-quote style for block quotations or sidebars:

  • "pull quotes be just that, material pulled from the text and not stand-alone information."

Just a few examples from a couple of minutes on Google. I haven't even delved into things like The Chicago Manual of Style on this question yet.

Arbitration Case opened

 Done

You recently offered a statement in a request for arbitration. The Arbitration Committee has accepted that request for arbitration and an arbitration case has been opened at Misplaced Pages:Arbitration/Requests/Case/The Rambling Man.

Evidence that you wish the arbitrators to consider should be added to the evidence subpage, at Misplaced Pages:Arbitration/Requests/Case/The Rambling Man/Evidence.

Please add your evidence by September 17, 2016, which is when the evidence phase closes. You can also contribute to the case workshop subpage, Misplaced Pages:Arbitration/Requests/Case/The Rambling Man/Workshop. For a guide to the arbitration process, see Misplaced Pages:Arbitration/Guide to arbitration.

For non-parties who wish to opt out of further notifications for this case please remove yourself from the list held here

For the Arbitration Committee, MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:04, 3 September 2016 (UTC)

IB question

Hi -- I have a question about the current and past infobox debates that I hope you can answer for me. Since this is such a divisive topic, perhaps I should preface this with a couple of quick points. As far as I know you and I have never interacted much, and certainly not with any rancour that I can recall, and not over infoboxes. I've removed infoboxes from some but not all articles I've worked on and have had a few discussions about those cases, but it's never become unpleasant. I've not read the Arbcom infobox case and was only vaguely aware of it; I've looked at barely any of the many links to the debates that have been provided in the most recent discussions. You can consider me mostly ignorant of the history, but aware it exists.

My question is about a particular point that I see made that I'd like to hear your side of. A couple of times, people have said that certain FA writers, and FA articles in general, are being treated differently by editors who feel infoboxes are high value. (I'm trying to avoid using "pro-infobox" and "anti-infobox" as I don't think either is a fair characterization.) I feel sure you would not agree that they are being targeted in any way, but I'm curious to know how that relationship looks from your side. Are they wrong when they say that editors try to add infoboxes to their articles more often than random chance would appear to suggest? I have written dozens of FAs to which an infobox might be added, but I've only rarely seen that discussion on those talk pages. What is it that leads to these discussions happening, and why do you feel it appears to some editors that they are being singled out? Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library)

@Mike Christie: I'm just going to do a brain-dump that goes beyond your question, because I need to write it out to help sort it all in my own head. It's been a long day.

I have't seen FAs singled out prorammatically. At an MfD against a page written by Gerda Arendt (claimed to be the most "pro-infobox" person, or something to that effect), it's actually being alleged that she adds about an infobox per day to random articles, which is "un-targeting". Then someone else claims they're all about him and "his" articles (but that's not actually borne out by the data on the page in question).

I think the most obvious explanation of the I-box/FA connection is that everyone who is focused on "the best" articles, which includes many people who have a tendency to favor infoboxes are part of a "complete article package", if you will, is very protective of them, and very certain that there's one way, or a sharply limited number of ways, to do them well. An infobox-favoring person really into FAs is naturally going to want to make sure FAs have them, and that might be an overriding concern for them. Someone opposed to infoboxes (in reality, more often opposed to infoboxes only either wikiproject WP:LOCALCONSENSUS party lines like "no I-boxes for classical music", or against them in certain general types of articles, e.g. biographies) feels the same way about FA, just that an i-box is an "eyesore" or whatever on them, and may consider them a detriment to to act against. Either group may act without discussion, knowing full well it's apt to produce dispute. This is what people are getting at about both sides being disruptive. (There are really many sides – mine is that good ones are generally helpful, especially for mobile users, but are best in long articles, and rarely useful in stubs except when the add some special feature like the original infobox, {{Taxobox}} does.) Regardless of alleged targeting, when really it's mostly just half a dozen or so people who care enough about I-boxes to argue and argue and argue about them every day, the same people show up in ever other discussion, whether they've edited the article or not. They'll make nonsensical arguments like "you haven't even editing this article!" when they haven't either. It's all about WP:WINNING. And WP:FAC, WP:GAN, etc. provide forums for them all to get together and fight regularly, giving an illusion of "targeting" (probably to everyone).

Anyway, I think "targeted" is just battlegrounding and demonizing conspiracy theory language designed to further polarize the debate. And I would not be surprised if there's someone somewhere saying that FA editors who don't like infoboxes (at all, or in particular cases) are "targeting" various FAs for infobox deletion. Most of the claims made by one side against the other are made vice versa, though it is very clear that the bulk of the civility problems are coming from opposers of the addition of i-boxes to FAs and GAs and PRed articles in which the feel they have a stake. And I know that this deletion is happening, without consensus, since I've witnessed it myself. I've also seen lots of squabbling to add one.

A serious complication, that no one ever seems to address, is that because of WP:EDITING policy, we're expected to be adding information and consensus-permissible features to articles, not removing material from them unless there's a policy rationale or an obvious common sense reason to do so. This combines with WP:CONSENSUS, which defaults to the presumption that content long present and stable has tacit consensus, but cannot possibly presume that content not present has consensus to be absent (otherwise WP would have one article, with only the first edit ever made to it). It's a necessary but non obvious fact (cf. the "discovery" of gravity) that policy presumes that an infobox can be added without a prior consensus discussion (though someone might controvert its addition leading to discussion), while one should not be removed without prior consensus, unless there's a policy based reason to do it (e.g. BLP - criminal infobox used some singer's page as vandalism) or some other obviously actionable reason (e.g. totally incorrect, like a dog beed i-box on a cat article, but often, as in that example, replacement is better than removal). I tend to feel this is never going to be aired, that ArbCom or whatever is just going to "kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out" without any sensitivity to the how-WP-works nuances.

There's a tense discussion happening at WT:FAC about the personalities and "camps", but I'm not sure how constructive it will ever be. It feels like being a peasant in the hall of the king, the attitude is so thick in there. (FAC people are "content writers" you see, and everyone else is not, especially not those "inexperienced" "MoS obsessives", etc., etc. Ridiculous levels of false dichotomy and territorializing, but probably cannot be helped much due to the nature of that beast; FA is actually hard work, and no one wants to chase away FA editors, even if some are being WP:JERKs about something, frequently.)

On the up side, I see increased support in all these venues for:

  • The idea that MOS:INFOBOX needs to spell out why/when to have an infobox and what kinds of things should be in it, instead of just throwing up its hands and saying "argue about it at each article".
  • Recognition that WP:ARBINFOBOX actually made matters much worse, by demanding it be argued at each article, and being punitive toward site-wide discussion of the matter if the issue at hand is particular article. (This is yet another case of ArbCom being a separation of powers failure, the wikicourt dictating what the wikilegislature/parliament is allowed to enact.)
  • DS: The ongoing WP:ARCA requests to enable WP:AC/DS in this area might, finally, actually happen, so that vicious incivility and disruptive editwarring can be dealt with swiftly (they haven't been to date because, while WP:ARBATC enables DS for MoS/AT matters generally, the perpetual argument is that infoboxes are content not style, and that MoS having a section on style relating to them doesn't make them a style matter per se, so on one's been willing to apply DS to "infobox wars" to date, that I know of).

On the down side, see thread above this; some admins seem already to want to use (or have others use) the forthcoming DS to go after only those in favor of adding infoboxes, as a general class, instead of using it to address actual disruption problems regardless of "side", and I can easily see some big drama coming out of that if it's pursued that way. I'm sure if you ask someone else you'll get a radically different answer. :-) Personally, I think this isn't really about infoboxes at all, but actually about territorial control; it exactly mirrors the "our wikiproject says you can't put an infobox on our articles" nonsense that led to ARBINFOBOX in the first place; it's not about FAs, but about whether "outsiders" have a "vote" in content development after someone stakes a claim. It's localconsensuses against the whole rest of the project. This is clear as day to me, but no one wants to address that either. I firmly predict that in a few years, the community will finally say "enough! we've told you before there are no WP:VESTED editors", a bunch of FA people and wikiproject people will quit, hands will be wrung, and other editors will fill the gaps over time. That's what's always happened in similar matters. People have quit over date formatting, citation style, capital letters, commas, you name it.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  19:45, 3 September 2016 (UTC)

I appreciate the extra detail; it helps me understand your position. There's just one thing I'd like to respond to -- you say 'FAC people are "content writers" you see, and everyone else is not, especially not those "inexperienced" "MoS obsessives", etc.'. I understand that you wrote that as a parody, but I think it's inaccurate. I consider myself a "FAC person", and I don't recognize that attitude in myself or in any of the other editors I deal with regularly. I'm sure there is polarization as well as discourtesy, and no doubt some people have expressed unreasonable opinions, but personally I'd appreciate it if at a minimum you would qualify sentences like that with "some FAC people", rather than giving the group a monolithic character. I wouldn't consider myself a "MoS person", though I like the MoS, but I'd object to anyone saying "MoS people are X". Thanks -- Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 12:38, 4 September 2016 (UTC)
@Mike Christie: Certainly agreed. I was parodying, but using direct quotations of things people at WT:FAC posted only yesterday. What I posted over there myself repeatedly impresses upon the participants that the dichotomies and polarizations editors are bandying about are illusory and silly; sorry that my point in this regard wasn't clearer here. I certainly don't mean to imply that most FAC participants really hold this viewpoint. It's just that the tenor of the discussion has turned in this direction (and often far worse, e.g. "twatty MoS nutter", etc.).

A side essay that relates to all this in a background manner: I would say I expect it to just blow over, but it's been my experience otherwise. E.g., in the same forum, someone is repeating the "evil MoS people chased away birds editors" myth, and I'm sure will repeat it again in a year and in five years. What really happened is about half a dozen people ran that wikiproject aground by picking fights all over WP for a very long time, then quit in a huff when they did not get what they wanted. One of them had been loudly "quitting Misplaced Pages" since 2005, and two of them were constantly agitating about how worthless WP is and how they should go start their own more reliable online ornithology encyclopedia, etc. Just a whole pile of WP:NOTHERE, including what they were fighting over to begin with. (They were trying to force onto WP a specific organization's draft bird names standard, with very little real-world adoption, then apply rules from it to all other biological categories, and even updating that third-party organization's website, as they went along, on the status of WP's use of their "standard". Raised serious WP:COI, WP:SOAPBOX and other concerns.) But it's just so very much easier to say "damn those MoS nuts! they drove away some editors!" What MoS people really did is bring to a close years of trouble caused by one project with many others, compounded by attempts to PoV-fork guidelines, etc. The one productive editor out of the three who did quit during this mess explicitly stated he was retiring for a number of reasons, and had already left almost a year before the big RfC finally settled this stuff, but in the mythology, the MoS RfC drove him away.

People like to mythologize things like this in anti-MoS/AT ways because everyone has at least one thing they disagree with in MoS; if you're just really adamant about that one thing, it's easy to manufacture allies who don't care about it but have their own nit to pick, and all feel they could get their heart's desire if only MoS would just die. It's like blaming "the damned government". Very easy to do, because if you're not unhappy with the road maintenance, you're probably irritated about the tax rate, or some international policy matter, without any of these things being related in any way. People do this about MoS especially, versus other guidelines, because of the innate sense that native (and even fluent non-native) speakers have that they are masters of the language, thus any divergence from what they're used to or prefer must be an error, something substandard. It doesn't matter how much proof you have that this is not the case, the feeling is hard for some people to shake. The MOS:JR hair-pulling is a great example. Various editors were utterly convinced that it must, always, be written "X. Y. Zounds, Jr." in American English, because they were American and old enough (like me) to have learned this in grammar school. After being shown proof that the convention is increasingly abandoned in American publications and now a minority usage, and never existed elsewhere, thus something WP can dispense with, several (four, I think) continued to insist it was a hard-and-fast rule in AmEng no matter what and fought page by page to stop MOS:JR's implementation for about three months, failing to carry the day at a single RM discussion, but never giving up until the last article. We see this sort of thing all the time, and MoS people get backwards-blamed for it. There's a reason most MoS regulars quit after a few years. It's very stressful to be ganged up on over personal and unrelated peccadilloes, especially when you know that if it were not for MOS, editors would be at each other's throats all day long, page after page, fighting over every imaginable style quirk, just as society would collapse if "the damned government" disappeared.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  15:39, 4 September 2016 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:List of European countries by average wage

 Done

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:List of European countries by average wage. Legobot (talk) 04:24, 4 September 2016 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:Lino

 Done – Commented over there.

Template:Lino has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. Codename Lisa (talk) 09:32, 5 September 2016 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:Linum

Template:Linum has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. Codename Lisa (talk) 09:36, 5 September 2016 (UTC)

@Codename Lisa: One's enough, and please do them as a group nom, so we don't have to comment over and over.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  09:37, 5 September 2016 (UTC)

Disambiguation link notification for September 5

 Fixed

Hi. Thank you for your recent edits. Misplaced Pages appreciates your help. We noticed though that when you edited Marilyn Manson – Columbine High School massacre controversy, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page Bill O'Reilly (check to confirm | fix with Dab solver). Such links are almost always unintended, since a disambiguation page is merely a list of "Did you mean..." article titles. Read the FAQ • Join us at the DPL WikiProject.

It's OK to remove this message. Also, to stop receiving these messages, follow these opt-out instructions. Thanks, DPL bot (talk) 10:33, 5 September 2016 (UTC)

Quote template RfC research

Hi, SMcCandlish. I want to thank you for researching third-party stylebooks and presenting your findings to the RfC participants. Your work simplifies things for the rest of us. Kudos. Fdssdf (talk) 04:06, 6 September 2016 (UTC)

@Fdssdf: No prob; I do that regularly to bring interminable style disputes to a close. Unfortunately, due to construction at my place, most of my books are packed up, so I don't have access to the bulk of the works I usually turn to (I own almost every major style guide published in living memory).  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  05:36, 6 September 2016 (UTC)

New article improvement drives

Check out the following new article improvement drives and contests. North America 11:41, 6 September 2016 (UTC)

Editing other people's posts

Do not edit other people's posts. It isn't up to you to shut down or merge someone else's RfC.

I don't know whether you've been alerted to the MoS discretionary sanctions within the last year, but in case not (and, as I understand it, the repetition is necessary for reasons I've never fathomed), here it is again. Someone is likely to take this situation with you to AE, AN/I or ArbCom. You should pull back before that happens. SarahSV 23:35, 6 September 2016 (UTC)

This message contains important information about an administrative situation on Misplaced Pages. It does not imply any misconduct regarding your own contributions to date.

Please carefully read this information:

The Arbitration Committee has authorised discretionary sanctions to be used for pages regarding , a topic which you have edited. The Committee's decision is here.

Discretionary sanctions is a system of conduct regulation designed to minimize disruption to controversial topics. This means uninvolved administrators can impose sanctions for edits relating to the topic that do not adhere to the purpose of Misplaced Pages, our standards of behavior, or relevant policies. Administrators may impose sanctions such as editing restrictions, bans, or blocks. This message is to notify you sanctions are authorised for the topic you are editing. Before continuing to edit this topic, please familiarise yourself with the discretionary sanctions system. Don't hesitate to contact me or another editor if you have any questions. Template:Z33 Categories: