Misplaced Pages

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Happy Adminship Anniversary!

Have a very happy adminship anniversary on your special day!

Best wishes, CAPTAIN RAJU 13:00, 20 September 2021 (UTC)

Thanks… 14 years, it's depressing how little has changed—if you transported the editors of Misplaced Pages 2007 to Misplaced Pages 2021, then other than slightly laxer rules on notability and slightly more rigid bureaucracy, they probably wouldn't even notice a difference. ‑ Iridescent 08:52, 22 September 2021 (UTC)

The three biggest changes I can think of: (1) far higher expectations on sourcing, especially on new articles; (2) the spread of discretionary and general sanctions to a significant percentage of the mainspace; (3) very few new administrators for the past several years. For a gripe about the bureaucracy, see my vote comment here. Regards, Newyorkbrad (talk) 01:10, 25 September 2021 (UTC)

The other one that occurs to me is the decline of AGF when it comes to newcomers. If a new account gets things wrong they're shouted at and quite often sanctioned, but if they get things right they're "obviously not a new account" and shouted at and quite often sanctioned. There was always some element of this even back in the day—remember "edits in a similar way"?—but the path is much narrower now. There are good reasons for the change (a well-intentioned but inexperienced newcomer can cause much more damage in the era of semiautomation than they could back then, and we've all had our fingers collectively burned too often by being tolerant of "new editors" who clearly aren't), but the inability to 'learn on the job' any more has changed the internal dynamics quite significantly. ‑ Iridescent 04:41, 25 September 2021 (UTC)

Ah don't be so pessimistic, it's all good. Paul August ☎ 21:33, 29 September 2021 (UTC)

I think that how we use "AGF" has shifted. It used to feel more like a reminder that people who screw up are generally trying their best, but they just don't know how to do anything, à la Hanlon's razor. Now I see it used in situations that feel more like "Quit being mean to me!" I wonder, if everyone understood that "You need to AGF" means "You need to assume that he screwed up because he's stupid instead of because he's malicious", would we say such things? WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:03, 5 October 2021 (UTC)

I'd agree that in modern Wikispeak, "CIR" has taken on the former meaning of "AGF", and "AGF" has come to be a generic "I have a god-given right to do whatever I like and I demand you respect it". I've noticed a trend more generally for people to quote WP:TLAs as if they were Runes of Power rather than just internal links, and to treat the exact wording of policies, guidelines and anything else in the WP: namespace (even personal essays) as immutable laws, even when doing so contradicts common sense. (I'm convinced that if I changed the wording WP:CIVIL to include "in certain cultures it is offensive for a name to begin with the letter Q, as such we do not allow usernames beginning with Q", at least some of our admins would promptly head on over to listusers and start blocking away.)

I suppose this particular cultural change is inevitable; the generation who were around when the essays coalesced into policies and guidelines is dwindling, and the next generation just sees the rules rather than the discussions that led to them being written, so misses out on the nuances and the intended meanings and instead interprets things literally. The same letter-replaces-spirit thing happens with real-world rules, from national constitutions to corporate HR policies; one could certainly make the case that it's actually a good thing if it leads to a true common law in which everything is applied equally, rather than every decision being filtered through the whims of a ruling class. (No, that doesn't mean I'm coming around to support UCOC. I still firmly believe that trying to impose rules from outside—even if those rules are completely sensible and exactly what the community would have come up with on its own anyway—will be hugely counterproductive as the backlash will mean even the sensible rules no longer get enforced because they're seen as tainted.) ‑ Iridescent 06:22, 5 October 2021 (UTC)

UCoC

If we don't impose some rules from outside, then we will continue to have a world in which some communities block editors for saying that they're gay. The choice is "rules imposed from outside" or "editors from marginalized groups get blocked". I prefer rules that say gay editors can't be blocked merely for saying that they're gay, even if the only method for having that rule apply everywhere tramples on local autonomy and has other downsides. If you prefer local autonomy, then you have to own the overtly homophobic local rules and other clear downsides as part of your choice. Reasonable people can disagree on which of the two choices is better, but we need to be clear about the harms we're choosing. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:00, 7 October 2021 (UTC)

That can be a one-sentence addition to the Terms of Use. That's not what UCoC is, though; as currently worded, UCoC would make it a blocking offence to describe British editors as "European"; would make it compulsory to help someone who's made an error; would ban admins from protecting articles… (If you think these are strawmen, you haven't spent enough time with Misplaced Pages admins. English Misplaced Pages is one of the less dysfunctional of the projects, and we currently have someone blocked for six months for using the word "sloth" and famously once had someone indefblocked for 'swearing' for saying "sycophant". Roll out what amounts to "anyone can be banned if they do anything someone else doesn't like" on one of the genuinely dysfunctional sites like Commons or Croatian Misplaced Pages and you're looking at a full-scale free-for-all.) ‑ Iridescent 17:45, 7 October 2021 (UTC)

Commons or Croation WP free-for-alls. EEng 05:55, 8 October 2021 (UTC)

Putting the same rule in the TOU would still be a rule imposed from the outside. If you are opposed in principle to the idea of rules imposed from the outside, then that would also be a problem.

If your concern is that the current version is imperfect, and that you'd prefer the current verifiable problems over the predictions of doom, then that's okay. I think we've already had more editors blocked (outside this wiki) for saying they're gay than we will ever have editors blocked for calling a British person a European person. (Also: If that British person does object, shouldn't you stop repeating that label anyway? Just because that's the decent thing to do?)

I'm even more doubtful that "We strive towards...mentorship and coaching" will ever be interpreted as making it compulsory for any individual editor to help any other individual editor. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:54, 8 October 2021 (UTC)

Yes, you'd prefer the current verifiable problems over the predictions of doom is probably a fair description of my current position, although you'd prefer the current verifiable problems over the potential addition of further potentially more serious problems whilst still failing to address the current verifiable problems would probably be more accurate. The current setup certainly has its issues, but at least on English Misplaced Pages they're far less than they seem. The introduction of a death squad of "Code Enforcement Officers" reporting in turn to a shadowy committee with the power to overrule Arbcom will be a massive cultural change even if neither the committee nor the enforcers actually do anything, since the very existence of a WMF committee with the power to overrule everyone else will deliver a hefty kick to a very sensitive part of the anatomy of the delicate balance between community, functionaries, and WMF. Misplaced Pages operates on trust; I fail to see how any benefit is gained from taking authority away from an elected body whose members we can (and do) vote out if we think they're making wrong decisions, and transferring decision-making to a presumably self-selecting secret council operating in camera. Yes, there might be a case for imposing rules on particular wikis like Croatian Misplaced Pages, Commons etc where the internal governance has genuinely collapsed—and on some of the smaller wikis which have become the vanity projects of a small group of cronies who use them as mouthpieces for their own opinions—but there's a big jump from "the WMF will have the right to impose rules as a last resort" to "all editors on all projects are henceforth going to be subject to Diplock courts".

Were you around for the WP:ACPD fiasco? Misplaced Pages does not take kindly to having "this is your new Council of Elders" imposed on it, even when all the people on said Council of Elders are each widely respected in their own right as individuals—and in this case I'd consider it unlikely that any of the sort of people who'd volunteer to be "Code Enforcement Officers" are likely to be editors who are widely respected in their own right as individuals. (Hell, this was the talkpage on which Framageddon took place; you know how it plays out when the WMF tries to impose enforcement of its own particular interpretation of rules on English Misplaced Pages without having both clear buy-in from the community and a mechanism for removing decision-makers who are perceived as having made decisions with insufficient transparency, even if everyone is operating with good intentions.)

If you think People may use specific terms to describe themselves. As a sign of respect, use these terms when communicating with or about these people, where linguistically or technically feasible is straightforward, I assume you've never had any dealings with writing about or dealing with people from disputed territories. (If I adhere to the wishes of e.g. a Crimean editor who self-identifies as Russian, most Ukrainian observers will quite reasonably consider it a calculated snub if I refer to them as "Russian" without qualification. It's why we go to such extreme verbal contortions to avoid specifying any nationality on biographical articles like Gerry Adams.) I chose "British" and "European" as a deliberate example, as cases where it would be virtually impossible to comply with this particular instruction; "British", "English" and "European" are all hyper-loaded terms and there are numerous people within the UK who would be offended were one or the other to be used to describe them.

You're quoting somewhat out of context. When it comes to a minimum set of guidelines of expected and unacceptable behaviour applies equally to all Wikimedians without any exceptions … Actions that contradict the Universal Code of Conduct can result in sanctions … This includes but is not limited to Mentorship and coaching: Helping newcomers to find their way and acquire essential skills; Looking out for fellow contributors: Lend them a hand when they need support, and speak up for them when they are treated in a way that falls short of expected behaviour as per the Universal Code of Conduct., with 15+ years experience watching the more clodhoppingly strict-constructionist literal-mindedness of some elements of Misplaced Pages's admin corps, I can think of at least two admins without even trying who will use "you interacted with someone who'd made an error and you didn't help them!" as a pretext to block people they dislike, and I'm sure there are plenty of others. ‑ Iridescent 18:08, 16 October 2021 (UTC)

The devil you know is a reasonable position.

I think it is also reasonable to be concerned about whether our past approach is going to work in the future – the near future, meaning the current decade, not when we're all comfortably dead. We have the UK's new Online Safety Bill trying to protect adults from "legal but harmful" content; we have the Australian courts saying that platforms are liable for anything users post online; and then we go back to the OSB and find that the UK bill insists that platforms retain "democratically important" content, and we all wonder what will happen when the "democratically important" content is also potentially defamatory (or harmful). The platform is required to keep the content online, and they're also required to pay millions (or billions) for the privilege of doing so?

I think that the solution is eventually going to involve an international treaty, but until we get there, it is possible that we will need more than ArbCom and the Stewards to handle the problems. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:03, 19 October 2021 (UTC)

Cookie blocks

I'll bet whatever you care to wager that the UK Online Safety Bill will have exactly zero effect. If Google abandons the new superheadquarters they've just built in central London at vast expense, it will deliver a serious kick to an economy that's already shaky in the wake of recent unpleasantnesses, and Google is not about to hand the personal details of its entire userbase to Nadine Dorries; meanwhile Ireland is certain to veto any EU legislation that might cause Apple's golden goose to lay its eggs elsewhere.

If you want a real-and-present legal issue, which I've tried to point out to the WMF in the past and always been fobbed off, I'm virtually certain that the redesigned block mechanism in recent versions of Mediawiki is just straight-out illegal under GDPR (and all the other legal systems that shadow GDPR). It used to work by just logging the editor in question's username and/or IP address and preventing editing from that account and account creation from that IP. Since this change went live it now works by secretly adding a cookie to the editor's computer, which theoretically prevents them from creating an account even if their IP changes. At some point somebody in France (or Germany, or England, or Italy, or anywhere else with "no cookies without explicit consent" legislation) with deep pockets and too much spare time is going to bring a test case; while I imagine the worst outcome would be symbolic token damages, I wouldn't want to be either the admin who placed that block nor whichever poor schmoe at the WMF has to spin "yes, we've knowingly been disregarding the law for five years" to the press. ‑ Iridescent 17:32, 20 October 2021 (UTC)

My jaw dropped when I read the part about that cookie. That's appalling. I just double-checked my Firefox settings, and I have it delete all cookies each time I close the program. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:59, 20 October 2021 (UTC)

If you delete all cookies, you'll have to login again every time you want to edit.

I see a link in phab:T5233#3151976 that sounds like it forms a reasonable basis to assume that cookie blocks are exempted. If your concern is all cookies, rather than specifically security-related cookies, then work-me can go bug Legal about it. I don't know if this is on their list at the moment. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:16, 20 October 2021 (UTC)

I'll clarify. I allow cookies while I'm editing, or doing anything else online. But I automatically delete them when I close the browser program. I do indeed have to log-in each day. (Actually, I also delete them at times when my browser is open, particularly when I move from one website to another and don't want any tracking. If I were to edit here for a while, and then do some online banking, or vice-versa, you can be certain that I would clear all cookies and related history before switching from one to the other.) --Tryptofish (talk) 20:46, 20 October 2021 (UTC)

@WAID: IANAL and even if I was, this is an area where the test cases haven't happened so nobody can give a right answer, but it looks to me like that link in the Phab request is selectively quoting. The full text of the section in question is "The exemption that applies to authentication cookies under CRITERION B (as previously described) can be extended to other cookies set for the specific task of increasing the security of the service that has been explicitly requested by the user. This is the case for example for cookies used to detect repeated failed login attempts on a website, or other similar mechanisms designed to protect the login system from abuses (though this may be a weak safeguard in practice). This exemption would not however cover the use of cookies that relate to the security of websites or third party services that have not been explicitly requested by the user." (my emphasis).

While Legal would presumably argue that accessing Misplaced Pages implicitly means accepting the Terms of Use and thus "explicitly requesting" that admins have the right to plant cookies on a computer, I'm not at all convinced a court of law would see it that way—this is why when I visit even a US website from the UK or EU, I either need to navigate a "which of these cookies do you accept?" box or I get a "this site is not visible to users in your country" message if the site's not willing to sacrifice their tracking revenue. I'd still recommend that any admin based in a GDPR country uncheck the "autoblock" box if they ever block a named account; there's certainly enough gray area for someone with a grudge who's been blocked from Misplaced Pages to make life unpleasant for the admin in question, even though the WMF would presumably cover any legal bills. (Presumably, the cookie blocks aren't even having a significant effect, or Meta:No open proxies wouldn't be a thing. One doesn't need to have badass hacking skills to figure out that you can just check 'new private/incognito window' to bypass the block.) ‑ Iridescent 07:55, 21 October 2021 (UTC)

NOP is at least 15 years old, and cookie blocks are four years old. I don't think that the existence of a much older policy is evidence for or against the effectiveness of cookie blocks. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:57, 22 October 2021 (UTC)

Sure, but No Open Proxies isn't Misplaced Pages's equivalent of the Massachusetts blasphemy law where an archaic statute is only on the books because no reasonable authority is ever going to try to enforce it so it's not worth the hassle of a formal repeal. We're still feverishly active when it comes to blocking any IP address suspected of being an open proxy. As has been mentioned once or twice, owing to the "all routers are treated as communal to all our members so you can get a connection provided you're in a built-up area even if you're out of range of your home/work router" policy of British Telecom, the "have a communal wifi router on every lamppost rather than having each home individually wired to the network" model you get in places like Prague, the way the cellphone/landline line is blurring as 5G rolls out, the difficulty of distinguishing between an open proxy and a dynamic IP, and the fact that VPNs are being actively encouraged on every other part of the internet, our continued enforcement of Meta:No open proxies is essentially blocking entire populations.

(There are certainly plenty of occasions when I've spotted an error, haven't wanted to use my login on someone else's computer, and got the scary You are currently unable to edit Misplaced Pages. You are still able to view pages, but you are not currently able to edit, move, or create them. message. Presumably most of the "I've seen a typing mistake but I can't fix it" opportunity costs come from people who don't currently have an account, and it's reasonable to assume that a non-negligible proportion of potential new editors' reaction to the "you are currently blocked" message isn't going to be "I guess I'll create an account then" but "if you don't want me, fuck you", and consequently we're essentially pulling up the "casual IP editor → regular IP editor → 'this would be easier if I created an account' → regular editor" drawbridge behind us, or at least making the route more difficult to follow.)

If cookie blocks are effective, then we're causing major disruption for little benefit by continuing to enforce NOP so zealously; if cookie blocks aren't effective, then we're at worst breaking the law and at best engaging in very dubious ethical practices without even an "end justifies the means" justification. Presumably, the effectiveness of cookie blocks is fairly easily testable. Just quietly reconfigure the software to ignore the cookies for a couple of days, and see if the quantity of edits flagged as vandalism and spam varies significantly over that period. ‑ Iridescent 06:39, 20 November 2021 (UTC)

AGF and nutshells

WAID, "generally trying their best, but they just don't know how to do anything" isn't equivalent to Hanlon's razor. That adage requires that the clueless person is breaking things because they are stupid, rather than that they are ignorant but could learn. The humour is that we replace one irredeemable personal failing for a different one. Iridescent brought up AGF with newcomers, where it is better to assume they are ignorant than that they are stupid. Wrt the sanctions spreading across the project, we saw how editors who had never edited biomedical subjects before got threatened with sanctions for using the wrong sources in a Covid article. And wrt Iridescent's point about guideline history, we saw how editors could quickly be mislead into thinking MEDRS only applied to first aid advice. I'm not actually as confident that the problem is people reading the guidelines in ignorance of years of talk page discussion. The problem is often people just read the WP:UPPERCASE or the nutshell and then invent all sorts of strange ideas about what the policy means. How many people do you think came to the big RFC at Misplaced Pages talk:Biomedical information/Archive 2#RFC: Disease / pandemic origins. without ever having actually read Misplaced Pages:Biomedical information? -- Colin° 11:12, 5 October 2021 (UTC)

Ah, the thing about treating the shortcut/title of a page like a summary of the page is something I've seen on TV Tropes as well. I guess it might be a more general psychological effect. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 13:07, 5 October 2021 (UTC)

It's not even a case of people just reading the uppercase and making up their own interpretations; we've over the years acquired a culture of oversimplification, and have only ourselves to blame. (How often do you see people say "verifiability not truth" as if it were Misplaced Pages policy—either because they support the idea, or as an example of Misplaced Pages's supposed dysfunction that such a policy exists—who have obviously not read WP:VNT which is an essay explaining that verifiability is a minimum threshold for inclusion, not a policy that anything verifiable should be mentioned, and thus "verifiability not truth" doesn't reflect Misplaced Pages policy?) To stick with the WP:MEDRS example, that page has an enormous This page in a nutshell: Ideal sources for biomedical material include literature reviews or systematic reviews in reliable, third-party, published secondary sources (such as reputable medical journals), recognised standard textbooks by experts in a field, or medical guidelines and position statements from national or international expert bodies. notice at the top. One can't blame anyone for interpreting that as "if you have literature reviews etc that would be ideal, but in their absence the kind of sources normally used elsewhere on Misplaced Pages are acceptable". rather than "if you try to cite something like the Daily Telegraph which would normally be considered non-contentious, a bunch of strangers may start threatening you with a site ban".

A piece of oversimplification that comes up all the time is the wretched Misplaced Pages:Five pillars essay. Because some people (including many who should know better) tend to point people to WP:5P like it was some kind of sacred text, new editors quite reasonably come away with the conclusion that massive oversimplifications like Misplaced Pages's editors should treat each other with respect and civility are immutable fixed and non-negotiable rules, and never get as far as the actual underlying policies which explain in far more detail that (e.g.) Misplaced Pages editors come from a huge variety of cultures and assuming that something you personally find inappropriate is "uncivil" is quite possibly cultural insensitivity on your part and you're the one being uncivil by complaining about it. (There's a fairly successful local chain of coffee shops near me called "Fuckoffee" to which nobody bats an eyelid. As I live just up the road from Jimmy Wales—or at least, I assume I still do, I haven't seen him around for a while—I often wonder whether he gets a mini-lesson in cultural relativism every time he nips out for a flat white.) ‑ Iridescent 17:06, 5 October 2021 (UTC)

Break: VNT

This might be a sign of my senescence as an editor, but I remember when VNT was actually right at the beginning of the verifiability policy. At that time, it very definitely was regarded as policy (or at least as a helpful shorthand to explain how the policy works: don't claim that we have to say something because you know it's true – we need sources, and the sources trump your beliefs), and there was a very protracted discussion leading to the eventual decision to delete it from the policy and move it to an historical essay. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:58, 5 October 2021 (UTC)

As a new-er editor, it's worth mentioning this is how I've always viewed that term. (Although I've also always viewed it as a saying that arose from an essay—similar to the phrase "no amount of writing can overcome a lack of notability") This is also partly influenced by how there's a fairly often used VRT template response—originally written in 2009—named after "verifiability not truth", but it's much more focused on responding to people who are complaining their unsourced addition of someone's dating life is getting removed, or people that complain Misplaced Pages is biased against whatever—not people that are asking about policies in detail, of course. Perryprog (talk) 20:24, 5 October 2021 (UTC)

Here's a link to what it looked like just before the change was made: . (And I'll confess that, at the time of the marathon discussions, I was on the "wrong side" of history!) --Tryptofish (talk) 20:36, 5 October 2021 (UTC)

(edit conflict) @Tryptofish, this was the pre-RFC version of WP:Verifiability. Even then, the wording ("Verifiability, not truth, is not the only requirement, but it is a fundamental requirement for inclusion in Misplaced Pages—no matter how convinced you are that some information is true, if the material is unverifiable, do not add it") made it clear that our policy was (as it remains) "don't add something just because you think it's true unless there's a source", not "if there's a source for something, add it even if you know it's not true". You'd be surprised how many people—both within Misplaced Pages and outside commentators—think it's the latter. (Here's someone at MIT Technology Review getting very exercised about this alleged failing of ours, for instance. And here's an absolute boatload of honest-to-goodness Reliable Sources for this being our policy.) ‑ Iridescent 20:39, 5 October 2021 (UTC)

In fact, I'm not at all surprised that lots of people still think that. That was exactly the reasoning cited for why it was changed. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:46, 5 October 2021 (UTC)

Personally, I thought that "verifiability not truth" does have the advantage that it emphasizes that we are not here to squabble over someone's preferred interpretation of reality (because that's what "truth" means to many people) and that "I say it's the truth" is not sufficient to justify an edit. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 11:35, 6 October 2021 (UTC)

Oh yes—and it's an important principle—but the point is that it's intended to be a threshold for inclusion (i.e., "we can't include it unless it's verifiable"); a lot of people think it means a criterion for inclusion (i.e., "if it's verifiable, we include it"). Quite a bit of the most vocal criticism of Misplaced Pages comes from people making this particular mistake, including a lot of people who should know better like Larry Sanger. The point I'm trying—and I think Tryptofish is trying—to make is that the "verifiability not truth" wording misleads people into fundamentally misunderstanding the nature of Misplaced Pages; thus, when we routinely use "WP:VNT" as a buzzword, it can unintentionally lead people into thinking they're being helpful when they add some random factlet they found in a newspaper, and they consequently get confused and upset when they subsequently get warned. ‑ Iridescent 16:09, 6 October 2021 (UTC)

Back when there were the long discussions about ditching the phrase, I argued for exactly what Jo-Jo E. said. I actually found the phrase quite useful when I was a new editor, because it memorably, and somewhat joltingly, emphasized the importance of sourcing over personal opinion. As I said above, that put me on the "wrong side" of history, because the eventual consensus was what Iri describes. Nowadays, I think the biggest problem is not editors misusing the phrase, so much as people on the outside citing it as evidence of Misplaced Pages's dysfunction. Perhaps if the phrase had originally been "verifiability not belief", there would have been no controversy, although it would have been less catchy. --Tryptofish (talk) 18:06, 6 October 2021 (UTC)

That. Something like "Accurate, Relevant, Sourced and Explained" as a summary of the threshold for whether to add might not have been as pithy but would have avoided fifteen+ years of misunderstandings. ‑ Iridescent 18:37, 6 October 2021 (UTC)

Oh, I am sure that would be quite memorable... JoJo Eumerus mobile (main talk) 22:07, 6 October 2021 (UTC)

Beauty! Please make that red link blue! Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 23:18, 6 October 2021 (UTC)

(I didn't follow the VNT business particularly.) If that were the major problem, I wonder if it could have been helped by having another commonplace following phrase (memorable, alliterative when place right after VNT, ideally rhyming if that were possible, which it probably isn't), qualifying it to make threshold/criterion distinction clear, and prominently mentioned or linked in relevant pages. ("Verifiability, Not Truth!", "...But -uth!" appropriately capitalized and linked to a short acronym...) Pre-engineer knockdown phrases. --Yair rand (talk) 22:25, 6 October 2021 (UTC)

This is the website that needed to hold an earnest discussion as to whether Eating pussy should redirect to Cunnilingus or Cat meat. Trying to get something like this, that's seen as part of underlying culture, changed would be like getting an aircraft carrier to perform a three-point turn—Misplaced Pages doesn't do cultural change at all well. (As I've said before, I see the innate conservatism as a strength not a weakness; Misplaced Pages has survived at least in part because—despite the WMF's best efforts—the editor experience doesn't change substantially so people can drift in and out without being made to feel uncomfortable for not keeping up with changes.) ‑ Iridescent 05:44, 7 October 2021 (UTC)

I know you and I disagree on...

...the inherant corruption level at WMUK, but it is very hard to not consider it a cesspit when stuff like this crops up. Anyone else found to be engaging in such rampant sock and/or meatpuppetry would have resulted in the entire lot being indeffed. Instead what we have is wagon-circling and quite frankly unbelieveable and not-credible excuses in order to avoid blocks. Only in death does duty end (talk) 08:40, 8 October 2021 (UTC)

I dunno, is this a case for Arbcom? If private information (CU data and explanations involving them) and accusations of collusion including on-wiki collusion are involved... Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 08:56, 8 October 2021 (UTC)

I've already commented there. I actually find the explanation plausible—I can easily see a situation where a bunch of Welsh Misplaced Pages types meet up socially (and hence don't bring laptops with them) but then someone brings up a particular Misplaced Pages page and everyone decides to have a look. However those with long memories will recall that we went through this whole "we're not the same person, we're a group of friends who happen to be interested in the same topic" stuff in excruciating detail at WP:EEML, and as far as I'm aware nothing has changed since then.

I think "this is WMUK circling the wagons" is probably a misread of the situation; other than Llywelyn2000 himself, the only person there I recognise as having anything to do with WMUK is Mike Peel and IIRC even he no longer has any connection to it. Although WMUK nominally has 500 members, that's because one needs to be a member to apply for one of their "buy this book for me" microgrants, not because it's some kind of mass movement. The actual core of WMUK is a lot smaller than people think; it's not a bloated tag-team like WMDC. (Johnbod is much better placed than me to say whether this is the case, but I'd argue that most of the well-documented problems have been precisely because WMUK is so small, it's historically been possible for a pair of nutcases to repeatedly try to hijack it for their own purposes.)

It's not particularly surprising that a bunch of Llywelyn2000's friends have turned up, since they're the ones who'll have his talkpage watchlisted and thus will have seen the notification that the SPI is taking place. One sees the same thing whenever any long-term editor is accused of anything; the closing admins know (or should know) how to distinguish between friends defending their buddy (or enemies looking for a chance to land a free hit) and genuinely neutral analysis.

I doubt this needs to go to Arbcom (or that they'd accept it), unless it develops further. Access to the CU evidence would seem to be a red herring—as far as I can tell, nobody involved is disputing that the accounts were using the same computer, and there's no secret technical evidence that could determine whether two accounts using the same computer are the same person using two logons or two people each using one logon. In theory T&S or the stewards might need to get involved if the allegation spreads into "they're also socking on cy-wiki", but that's well above my pay grade. ‑ Iridescent 15:29, 8 October 2021 (UTC)

This is all news to me, & I must say I can't get excited about, rather agreeing with HJ Mitchell (I too have met Llywelyn2000 many times, though not for some years). It doesn't really have anything to do with WMUK imo. The reason WMUK has 500 members is because some years ago the annual appeal donation online form allowed you to divert the £5 fee for WMUK membership out of your donation, making you a member. I don't know if this is still the case, but the "retention" on UK appeal donations from year to year used to be extremely high, and I imagine the bulk of the current membership arrived by that route (hardly any of the editors I speak to still seem to be members). The membership suddenly jumped to the current level. Unfortunately, one would imagine that most of these donors have never edited WP & really know next to nothing about its internal affairs (& they won't receive any enlightenment from WMUK newsletters etc). Before the AGM they get an online proxy form with the Board's recommendations, and almost all of them follow it entirely. The effect can be seen in the choices for board elections. When I was a trustee we considered this way of expanding the membership, then about 80, but nearly all regular editors, but decided not to take that route, precisely to avoid the current situation. I don't agree that the small size led to the problems - the German equivalent had a far larger membership (up to 2000?), and problems that were probably at least as bad, but all conducted in the decent obscurity of a foreign language, so they hardly impacted Anglophone awareness. Johnbod (talk) 18:21, 8 October 2021 (UTC)

Apologies for snark in advance. Yes I guess it would be news to you that the Wales Programme Manager/WMUK Manager (Wales) appears to have been running a sockfarm for a substantial period of time, out of their home office which is what they describe as the WMUK drop-in. So nothing to do with WMUK at all then. Forgive my sarcasm, but this is just the last in a long line of WMUK members doing shady things (and by members, I dont mean random person who wants a discount. Remember the Shapps affair?). There are other links to users on the SPI page from WMUK, but lets just say that posting them publically would likely hit all sorts of outing rules. The reason why none of the arguments is particularly credible is that on different occasions they have directly referred to themselves using multiple accounts, have clearly been logging in and out of multiple accounts etc. In order to be a plausible you have to accept that a)multiple people were in the same place, using the same hardware, in succession. B)they have to have similar enough writing styles and idiosyncrasies that you accept different people use and/or spell words incorrectly. The first in context of teaching etc is at least somewhat plausible. The second is not. Now let me preface this next bit with something Iridescent may have forgotton (or I may have never mentioned, tbh it doesnt really come up) - that I am from the Rhondda. The idea that multiple people in Wales just happen to congregate in one spot, have the same grasp and use of English is just rediculous (see what I did there). For a start the Welsh language stats are well documented. So the concept of multiple people being *that* similar in their use of English would only hold if they were remarkably similar people, which would require their cultural, age and educational level to be near identical given the Wales population demographics. Or that they were all primarily Welsh speakers who had the same bad English teacher. It is just not remotely credible. Substantially because the Welsh education system has been significantly better than that for at least 20 years or more. The much more likely explanation, and the only one that would be entertained for pretty much any other user who didnt have ties to a chapter/affliate, is that it is one person. As it is, they have received favoured treatment, not even blocked as a CU-block, so any administrator can lift it at any time. How long are we taking bets on before someone does it? A week? Maybe a month? Only in death does duty end (talk) 20:45, 8 October 2021 (UTC)

Unless there's something I'm missing, to me this is a case of an individual with their hand metaphorically caught in the cashbox, not a case of institutional corruption. As per my previous comment, I'm not seeing any WMUK wagon-circling—other than Mike Peel, I don't recognize anyone at the SPI as having any connection at all to WMUK. (A couple of people may have attended WMUK-run events, or accepted a £20 buy-this-book-for-me grant, but I wouldn't consider that a COI.) I've always been fairly critical of WMUK, which sometimes gives the appearance of being a mechanism by which people sign off on grants to each other and which has historically had something of a blind spot regarding obvious sleazeballs trying to use it for their own ends, but I think the accusation of collusion in this case is barking up the wrong tree.

I agree that behavioral evidence strongly suggests this was one person using the different logons, but that's not incompatible with L2000's explanation, if they're passing the laptop back and forth and losing track of who's logged on as who. To me that aspect of things is largely an irrelevance, since "one person using multiple logons" and "multiple people colluding off-wiki" are treated the same way in Misplaced Pages terms and this is certainly one or the other.

(It's unlikely but not impossible, but I can actually just about believe which would require their cultural, age and educational level to be near identical given the Wales population demographics. Or that they were all primarily Welsh speakers who had the same bad English teacher in this case. If the people involved are a group of L2000's friends, it's entirely plausible that they're all the same age, from the same area, and attended the same school, particularly if the circle of friends is drawn from the relatively tiny pool of Welsh-speakers in Denbighshire. Per my comment above, this is missing the point, since by the EEML precedents we don't care if they're the same person or not provided there's evidence of collusion.)

I wouldn't have blocked as a checkuser block either. The reason we have the separate {{CheckUser block}} block rationale with the You must not loosen or remove this block, or issue an IP block exemption, without consulting a CheckUser or the Arbitration Committee wording isn't that we deem sockpuppetry some kind of mortal sin that required special treatment, but that if someone disputes the CU evidence, only people with access to the CU tool have the technical ability to examine it. Since in this case L2000 admitted from the start that they were all using the same device, the CU evidence isn't relevant to the case, so in the event of an appeal a vanilla admin is just as competent to assess it as a CU.

Regarding How long are we taking bets on before someone does it? A week? Maybe a month?, under normal circumstances in this situation I'd accept an appeal after about six months provided there was a firm undertaking not to do it again and ideally an undertaking to stay away from contentious discussions; I'd accept an appeal sooner if there was a convincing reason a particular discussion would benefit from their input, under a strict "any more of this and you're banned for life" proviso. (What makes this not usual circumstances is that commentary like this very likely violates a strict interpretation of UCoC, and at the moment we don't yet know whether English Misplaced Pages is going to take a "you must not offend anyone" or a "we accept that some people's opinions are inevitably going to upset others" interpretation of UCoC once the dust settles.) ‑ Iridescent 05:21, 9 October 2021 (UTC)

I don't see how that violates UCOC. The UCOC is about genuine problem editors, not about giving admins a stick to beat people with. There might be problems around giving extra powers to the WMF, but this kind of paranoia clouds the issue and isn't helpful. 2A04:4A43:461F:DCA3:0:0:DCD:E63C (talk)\ — Preceding undated comment added 09:48, 21 October 2021 (UTC)

It probably doesn't—the point is we don't know if and how UCoC is going to be enforced. My point is that even if it's not enforced, its existence has the potential to create a chilling effect. ‑ Iridescent 18:37, 21 October 2021 (UTC)

There were similar concerns about the Technical Code of Conduct, which was implemented several years ago (applies to MediaWiki.org, Phabricator, the wikitech-l mailing list, and in-person events). Since then, there have been very few concerns raised, and apparently no serious disputes. I think it's reasonable to assume that the UCOC will have a similar experience, but I also think it's reasonable to worry that it might not. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:11, 22 October 2021 (UTC)

Movement Charter Drafting Committee elections

And by the way the elections for the UCOC drafting committee (or part of it) are closing very soon (11:59, 25 October 2021), and I hope people will vote. There are 72 candidates for seven places. Their number of edits on the various projects vary between over 15,700,000 and 10! You have to find these out from the links as the table summarizing the candidates unhelpfully, if not suspiciously, doesn't give them. WMUK conspiracy theorists will be excited by two of them, and many other candidates have history in chapters, WMF committees etc. Johnbod (talk) 04:00, 23 October 2021 (UTC)

Actually, that's the Movement Charter Drafting Committee, not the UCOC drafting committee. Disclosure: I'm a candidate. Wackiest election I've ever seen in my life; technically it's two elections rolled into one. Risker (talk) 04:10, 23 October 2021 (UTC) Adding a couple of potentially useful links: This one is a way of viewing the "20 questions" that all candidates had to answer. This one, drafted by Guerillero, gives basic details (including edit counts) of all candidates. Risker (talk) 04:16, 23 October 2021 (UTC)

Aah, thanks - well I still think we should all vote. Amended to "Their number of edits on the various projects vary between over 1,570,000 and 10!" on the basis of the very useful Guerillero link. Now we have no excuse. Johnbod (talk) 15:24, 23 October 2021 (UTC)

That's 15,700,000. And I bet he looked at every single one. —Cryptic 16:19, 23 October 2021 (UTC)

I not only can't make head nor tail of that election process, I can't even understand what a "Movement Charter Drafting Committee" actually is or why I should care who is on it (let alone why I should care enough to read 70+ candidate statements). I'm probably more up-to-speed than most with WMF jargon and with WikiSpeak in general; if I don't understand it, it's a reasonable bet that most other editors don't either. ‑ Iridescent 05:18, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

Oh, I know where you're coming from. Only about 850 people from all of the wikis have participated to date (with en.wp responsible for about 35% of the voting, probably because we're one of the few projects with a watchlist notice). There will be a movement charter drafting committee because enough people said during the strategy sessions that we needed a movement charter to make it necessary for someone to draft it. And yeah, I know there aren't very many people who are interested in the strategy, either. The process by which those "someones" will be selected is excessively convoluted, and was further complicated by the forced delay of the Board elections (because nobody actually tested if the software worked!), and the necessity of having this election cleared before the next scheduled use of SecurePoll a few days after this one ends. Yeah...it's only possible to run one instance of SecurePoll at a time. Risker (talk) 05:27, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

I think I am closer to understanding the meaning of life than understanding whatever the "Movement Charter Drafting Committee" is. If I am any evidence, then your "reasonable bet" seems spot on. Aza24 (talk) 05:29, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

Browsing through the Meta pages, it appears that it's a process to select the group of people who will work out how to get to these supposed goals. Since We will become a platform that serves open knowledge to the world across interfaces and communities. We will build tools for allies and partners to organize and exchange free knowledge beyond Wikimedia. Our infrastructure will enable us and others to collect and use different forms of free, trusted knowledge. describes a state of affairs which I suspect most of the active participants on the four big wikis consider actively antithetical to the values of Misplaced Pages—I joined up to ensure topics that interested me were better covered online, not to be an unpaid intern trying to improve the effiency of the data-mining operations of a bunch of morally dubious corporations, and I assume the same is true of you—I can't see how anything other than bad feeling is going to come out of this. ‑ Iridescent 05:46, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

(Disclosure: I'm also a candidate.) Summary of the important parts: We've got one shot at making a constitution-like document that the WMF (and all our other orgs) will actually be bound by, with systems to make sure that the included rules are actually enforced. We're talking about legally-binding transfers of power, reworked systems of funds-distribution and high-level decision-making, basic requirements for our organizations, and a whole pile of new structures with various responsibilities. The Drafting Committee will run the drafting process for this, and the election ends in ~28 hours (at 12:00 UTC, no idea why). --Yair rand (talk) 07:46, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

Given that this is the WMF we're talking about, surely if it looks like it's going to come up with anything that isn't in line with their agenda they'll just abolish it? (If I'm reading it right, this committee is going to have seven members elected and eight appointed. I don't pretend to be a mathematical genius but even I can see something suspicious there.) ‑ Iridescent 13:32, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

Eh. It's 7 by the community, 6 selected by a committee whose members are selected by affiliates, and 2 selected by the WMF. I'm personally somewhat less sceptical of affiliate-selected members after good interactions with Shani, an affiliate-elected trustee. But I do think there's a bit too much weight given to affiliates, in general. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 15:11, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

As the assorted WMUK people lurking on this page can testify, the WMF has form for cutting off funding to affiliates if San Francisco takes a dislike to their management, and cutting off recognition altogether if SF takes a sufficient dislike. (It isn't some unique thing that only happens in exceptional circumstances, either; they do it so often they even have a boilerplate form for it, and the chapters who've been kicked off the gravy train aren't tiny operations but biggies like India, Hong Kong and the Philippines.) It would be a brave affiliate indeed who chose not to follow the party line. ‑ Iridescent 16:01, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

...Or maybe just reasonably self-interested, given the possibility of actually fixing those problems (see the Hubs/GC plans, which will likely take the relevant powers away from the WMF, afaict). I would guess that the affiliates would be very well-motivated to not follow a WMF line at the expense of their own interests, and to ensure that the Charter is something the community likes (to ensure that the community ratifies it in the first place, a necessary prerequisite to it taking effect). --Yair rand (talk) 17:47, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

Maybe, but I'm skeptical that replacing the existing "loose collective with a central authority and a handful of local chapters which are there if you want them but which you're free to disregard" setup with a formal "WMF → regional hub → local chapter → peons" hierarchy will have any obvious benefit in most cases, other than ensuring that people in places without local chapters theoretically have at least some local representation to lobby on their behalf. Having an explicit power structure would seem to me to be likely to make it even more difficult to deal with the next Gibraltarpedia or LauraHale situation when it arises, since a hierarchical structure means more high places in which bad actors can have friends and protectors—and since WMF is presumably still ultimately going to have control of funds, the hubs will still not want to antagonize their masters. (To be clear, I agree with the WMF having its hand on the funding tap. Without some kind of central oversight, there's far too much risk that local chapters get hijacked by a small group who self-declare themselves "consultants" and start awarding grants to each other.) ‑ Iridescent 04:16, 25 October 2021 (UTC)

I think it'll be more "Global Council → hubs → chapters" than having the WMF at the top, but I agree that the risks from bad actors in the outlined hierarchy are concerning. --Yair rand (talk) 05:37, 25 October 2021 (UTC)

As long as the power and the liability end up in the same place, any arrangement is likely to work for me.

I have formed the impression that the affiliates' general goal is to get more power into their hands, while making as much liability as possible be Someone Else's Problem. I have no reason to believe that this will address any of the hard questions, like what the movement should do if (as has been proposed) large websites are legally required to take complaints about content by telephone or to suppress legal-but-harmful speech, or to prevent minors from reading pages not deemed fit for children and teenagers, or what to do if the organizations with the liability are being put in legal jeopardy by the organizations with the power, or by volunteers. Some problems can't be solved by us (the internet needs a treaty that settles the question of what to do when drawing the line here on your map is illegal under Indian laws, but drawing the line there is illegal under its neighbor's laws), but I don't expect us to solve even the problems that we could, because the solutions are unpopular. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:09, 29 October 2021 (UTC)

Election compass tool

Out of curiosity, I put myself through the election compass tool, and only four of the candidates even manage to pass the 50% agreement mark. Yair rand, I don't know if you'll be flattered or horrified, but other than some guy I've never heard of from Hausa Misplaced Pages you're my closest match. (Interestingly Risker, with whom I assumed I'd match quite closely, comes out quite near the bottom on 38%.) ‑ Iridescent 04:39, 25 October 2021 (UTC)

You're not the first person who has said that, Iridescent. Someone on Wikimedia-L said something to the effect of being surprised how I came out low on their comparison, but when they read the responses, they agreed with most things that I wrote. I know that I found that other candidates gave a different "rating" for questions and then largely responded the same as someone else. Let's just say it's a very imprecise tool. In an election with too many candidates for anyone to seriously assess, I don't know if the compass has helped or hurt. Like I said, it's one really wacky election. Risker (talk) 04:54, 25 October 2021 (UTC)

(random tps pile-on) From idle interest I just used the election compass as well, with supports for editorial independence and decentralisation and opposes for things that smacked of One World Government. As above the top match was Yair rand and someone I've never heard of from China, with a bottom third placing for Risker who was my top voting pick in the actual election. Makes me wonder how accurate this tool really is, and its potentially dubious role in influencing how people voted. (Fwiw Yair I voted for you also: this is more about the low ranking for others than your constant top-place-getting in compass run-throughs). -- Euryalus (talk) 05:00, 25 October 2021 (UTC)

Agree that the tool is very imprecise. (Interestingly, my own results have Risker as second-closest at 67%.) It's also an issue that some candidates interpreted certain questions very differently from others. --Yair rand (talk) 05:37, 25 October 2021 (UTC)

I found the tool produced quite different results to my votes yesterday, which surprises me as I made sure to read the candidate statements, which I would expect to reflect a tracker like that. Perhaps it is due to the ambiguity of eh questions, many of which I found somewhat unhelpful, with potential interpretations that could swing me from support to oppose. CMD (talk) 07:37, 25 October 2021 (UTC)

I didn't try the compass at all. I am wary of using these interpretative tools because one never has an idea how they interpret your answers. I just threw my hat into Risker's ring and called it a day. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 08:24, 25 October 2021 (UTC)

Did the same. More than once Risker has been a rock for me and mine, and perhaps is uniquely respected. Ceoil (talk) 18:40, 30 October 2021 (UTC)

I did notice that there were a lot of questions with only one reasonable answer (like "Do you feel the Charter should be written in gender neutral language?", to which any answer other than "obviously, but since this is going to need to be translated into 200+ languages some of which are strongly gendered languages, I'm not losing sleep if something is poorly translated on Elder Futhark Misplaced Pages provided it's made clear than in the case of disagreement the English-language version takes precedence"). I suspect that how much weight the candidates gave to these non-questions skews the results dramatically, since everyone taking the test is presumably going to agree with every candidate on them so those who marked them "high importance" get an automatic fake advantage. (I did vote in the end, but mainly because when I looked at the full list of candidates there's one candidate who I think is genuinely crazy and who I wouldn't trust to look after a goldfish, let alone potentially influence a major information source. By the nature of the universe, if I hadn't voted that person would probably have won by one vote.) ‑ Iridescent 16:48, 25 October 2021 (UTC)

Rambling aside about change

The belief in Murphy runs strong in this one. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:18, 29 October 2021 (UTC)

Not really. If we're going by aphorisms, my attitude isn't so much "anything that can go wrong will go wrong", but "a leader is best when people barely know he exists". Misplaced Pages and the WMF more generally don't have a divine right to exist, any change has the potential to annoy at least some people, and anything with the potential to drive editors or readers away risks leaving the field open for Big Tech to slide into our niche. (We know from history that Microsoft and Google have both in the past had their eyes on the position we currently occupy; it's reasonable to assume the other big players do as well.) No matter how much criticism is directed towards the chaotic administration of the WMF and Misplaced Pages, it's still a hell of a lot better than the idea of Zuckerbergopedia. In this position, I'd say cultural conservatism (in the "opposed to change" sense, not the Donald Trump sense) and only making changes when there's a clear consensus for that change is the only rational course—"run fast and break things" can work for startups, but our great strength is that we don't significantly change either technically or culturally, so both readers, editors and functionaries can drift in and out without feeling out of place. The 3000-ish regulars on en-wiki and their equivalents on the other wikis may make the most noise, but without the swarms of casual editors we'll collapse, and if they start thinking "this place has changed since I was last here and I don't want to put in the effort to learn the new expectations" they're not easily replaceable. ‑ Iridescent 18:51, 1 November 2021 (UTC)

One of the problems with requiring a clear consensus for change is that sometimes there is a clear need for change but a consensus against doing it. High-volume editors don't believe that certain problems are real, but we are convinced that our opinions are the only ones that ought to counted towards consensus. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:24, 1 November 2021 (UTC)

By "a clear need for change", I mean that this is clear to all the people who actually know what they're talking about, e.g., Ops for server problems, lawyers for legal problems, affiliates for affiliate problems, people who run edit-a-thons for edit-a-thon problems, etc. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:26, 1 November 2021 (UTC)

And high-volume editors for high-volume editing. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:55, 1 November 2021 (UTC)

After all these years together, do you still imagine me thinking that my opinion should be limited only to subjects related to high-volume editing? ;-) WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:23, 2 November 2021 (UTC)

I'm sure we could each write volumes about it. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:32, 2 November 2021 (UTC)

But since the editors are ultimately what keeps the entire WMF ecosystem afloat, in situations where a problem's been identified but the solution is potentially going to alienate editors isn't there an onus to convince the editors that the problem needs addressing? (Or, in the case of genuine emergencies, at least to explain why the urgent action was taken and discuss whether whatever action was taken is appropriate as a long-term fix.) It might not always lead to the results the WMF think are optimal, but if the four big wikis (and in particular English Misplaced Pages) fall below a critical mass of editors the whole thing will just fizzle out. It does the WMF no good at all if they have a beautiful user interface and a written constitution that would make Jefferson green with envy, if in getting to that point the en-wiki and de-wiki editor bases have defected to Amazonopedia or whatever and the WMF is left presiding over a near-unusable photo-sharing website, a highly questionable travel guide, and a giant spreadsheet of insects.

Don't think editor bases aren't going to jump ship if they get sufficiently annoyed and a competitor is offering another ship to jump to—just ask Wikitravel. If one of the tech giants forked the existing content and offered $10,000 bounties for any established Misplaced Pages editor willing to defect to Knol 2.0, they could probably kill Misplaced Pages overnight if they timed the offer to a time when the editor base was already restless over something. (At the time of writing we have 468 active admins on en-wiki. It really wouldn't take much of a nudge to make us unmanageable since fewer admins would lead to more office actions which would in turn push more admins into resigning—and if English Misplaced Pages dies, the other projects will eventually follow.) ‑ Iridescent 11:16, 3 November 2021 (UTC)

Yes, ^ that. --Tryptofish (talk) 11:44, 3 November 2021 (UTC)

I'm doubtful. Transitions can be ugly, but I am not irreplaceable. If I quit – if a hundred "editors like me" quit – then I have no reason to believe that another editor wouldn't appear in my place. Maybe the new ones would even do a better job of it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:28, 21 November 2021 (UTC)

I'm irreplaceable. Your mileage may differ. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:08, 21 November 2021 (UTC)

Facetious or not, I'm not convinced that You are not irreplaceable is particularly true except in the technical sense that we could hypothetically train someone to do any given task. Misplaced Pages's history is full of examples where the departure of one editor or a small handful has left a huge dent—a decade later we're still doing by hand what GimmeBot used to do automatically because nobody can replicate the bot, WikiProject London has gone from one of the most active groups on the site to completely moribund without Kbthompson and myself keeping things moving, etc etc etc. I assume the effect is even more pronounced on the other wikis where there's a smaller pool of active editors, and thus less chance someone else will step up to do any given boring-but-necessary job when the person currently doing it leaves. ‑ Iridescent 06:01, 22 November 2021 (UTC)

Oh, that essay is absolutely not true in many areas. Looking at a few that I'm familiar with—anti-spam, WP:CCI, and WP:URLREQ—then there's a single person (or sometimes two or three) who if they departed Misplaced Pages there would be massive effects on the rest of Misplaced Pages, with a "replacement" likely never being feasible due both to the amount of work being done by those people and the high amount of domain specific knowledge that their roles require. Maybe for something like content creation the essay is more accurate, but that's an area of Misplaced Pages I have far too little experience in to state anything insightful on. Perryprog (talk) 20:49, 22 November 2021 (UTC)

Indeed; to take a couple of relatively trivial examples, you only have to look at how quickly the Signpost degenerated into gray goo when the couple of people holding it left, or how chaotic FAC became after Raul's defenestration. I'm certainly not saying "relying on a few key individuals" is in any way something we should be proud of—it's frankly embarrassing that a top-ten website relies on the goodwill of a handful of people who in many cases have grossly inflated opinions of themselves—but it's where we are. ‑ Iridescent 18:50, 23 November 2021 (UTC)

Under Raul, FAC did not “rely on a few key individuals”, because Raul was truly a delegator, and was always committed to building a team. When they killed the director position, the FA process degenerated into factions representing FAC, FAR and TFA, bereft of any overarching vision, dominated by egos and reward seeking, and absent any concept of community or teamwork. It’s a wreck. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 01:57, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

Yes, that's my point. I consider You are not irreplaceable to be demonstrably false since there are cases where the departure of one individual has had a clear negative impact, and Raul leaving FA was one of them. He 'wasn't irreplacable' in the sense that Misplaced Pages has still survived without him, but the presence or absence of a single person can cause clear changes even though the "wisdom of crowds" dogma would have us believe it doesn't. ‑ Iridescent 06:45, 30 November 2021 (UTC)

musings on WP:You are not irreplaceable

How are Yahoo Answers, WikiTravel and Myspace doing these days? Nobody is irreplaceable, but the web is now old enough that we have clear evidence that if a collaborative site falls below a critical mass of experienced participants, it goes into a death spiral as the remaining userbase can't keep up with maintenance, the site starts looking like a mess, and that in turn discourages new people from signing up. You can already see the process beginning to take hold on Commons despite them having the massive advantage of one of the world's largest websites pushing a constant feed of potential new editors in their direction, and there's no reason to think it couldn't happen here. We can barely keep up with the spammers as it is; it wouldn't take many new page patrollers resigning for us to be overwhelmed, once we get a reputation for untrustworthiness it will be very difficult to restore credibility, and if we lose the reputation for credibility we kill the primary incentive for editors to want to work here in the first place. ‑ Iridescent 05:09, 21 November 2021 (UTC)

I don't think the You are not irreplaceable essay is arguing about generalities. It doesn't even need to be true. Instead it is a warning to editors who think they are irreplaceable and who may indeed be widely felt to be irreplaceable and who then act like they can't be replaced/removed. Either the person ends up devoting too much time to the project that their real life and mental health suffers, and/or they behave in suboptimal ways that get tolerated (for a time) but really shouldn't be (and ultimately aren't). For the essay to work, it only has to convince the problematic editor and their supporters.

Business lore comments about irreplaceable or indispensable employees and generally they are considered a bad thing. Harshly, some even recommend dispensing with such employees as soon as you can, lest they become even more indispensable. But more positively, some offer advice on fixing or avoiding such a situation. The fact that various groups and wikiprojects on Misplaced Pages have had users who appear irreplaceable or whose loss killed off the wikiproject is a pathological sign. I get the message that pissing off the existing user base could be fatal but at the same time, we have to be realistic that current editors will leave for all sorts of reasons. -- Colin° 11:21, 22 November 2021 (UTC)

I'm not sure business is really the same situation. Businesses have an effectively unlimited pool of potential replacements provided they're willing to pay enough to recruit the right people, while "replacing someone" on Misplaced Pages means finding someone else among the relatively limited pool of active editors who's willing to take on whatever the departed person was doing.

The real-world analogy to (e.g.) the chain of events that led to RexxS resigning would be if the only mechanic in a small town was arrested and on his release decided he didn't like the notoriety and decided to move out of town—it might well be the case that it was necessary and there was no reasonable other course anyone involved could have taken, but it nonetheless means that the only alternatives the locals have are to make the effort to recruit another mechanic from outside, to persuade another local resident to give up their existing job and retrain as a mechanic, or to make do without and hope their self-repaired automobiles don't explode.

The aging of the 2005–08 intake means we're now witnessing a demographic timebomb as people die, resign, or just get bored. New blood is no bad thing but neither is institutional memory, and we're beginning to reach the point where we're losing too many of the people who do the unglamorous behind-the-scenes stuff—the Facebooks of the world can pay people to do the behind-the-scenes stuff, but our model means we don't usually have that luxury except in the few limited cases where the community is actually willing to have the WMF interfering and the WMF is willing to do so. Generously assuming that one editor in five hundred has both the expertise and the inclination to do something like advanced template maintenance, that means there are perhaps a dozen editors currently active who could maintain something like Module:Asbox. And we're the biggest game in town; when it comes to something like Hindi Misplaced Pages (which is hardly some ultra-niche project only catering to a handful of enthusiasts) with ≈20 active editors and seven current admins you're literally talking about an active editor base so small that an outbreak of food poisoning at their AGM would destroy the project's administration. ‑ Iridescent 17:41, 22 November 2021 (UTC)

Businesses do not have an unlimited pool of candidates. I have been (distantly) involved in a hiring process for which we had realistic estimates that approximately 100 people in the world were qualified. One hundred people in the world is enough if you only need one coder (and we did hire someone), but it is not my idea of "an effectively unlimited pool of potential replacements provided they're willing to pay enough to recruit the right people". In other cases (e.g., historical buildings), there may be only one or two plausible candidates. Some skills are rare, no matter how much money you have, especially if you can't wait a couple of years to teach someone what they need to know.

But I think that what's different about Misplaced Pages, or wikis in general, is that when we can't find one of the few people in the world who know how to repair degraded copper wires in old-fashioned core memory, then we can just replace the old stuff with some modern electronics, and we can still go to Space today anyway. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:06, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

More on irreplaceability

In theory yes, but in practice "we can just replace the old stuff with some modern electronics" isn't as straightforward as it sounds. Enacting cultural change on Misplaced Pages is like doing a three-point turn in a space shuttle; "if the bot that does foo goes down it doesn't matter because we'll just write another bot or learn to do it by ourselves" is a nice sentiment but doesn't tend to actually happen. In the wiki context people can't be either compelled or paid to do the things they ordinarily wouldn't do; if only one person is willing to do a particular job and that person leaves, then the job doesn't get done. (In your hiring process, you can keep upping the pay until you tempt one of those hundred people to leave their current employer. We don't have that option here; if User:Σ resigns and nobody else wants to write a talkpage archiving bot then talkpages will no longer be archived. Repeat that statement for the hundreds if not thousands of other instances where a process is reliant on a single individual.) Yes, this isn't how it should be, but it's how it is, and if this is the case even on English Misplaced Pages with its mass editor base, it can only be worse on the smaller wikis with only a handful of active editors. ‑ Iridescent 07:12, 30 November 2021 (UTC)

Case study: GAN is dependent on a barely-functioning bot with several major known errors that the maintainer has no plans to fix; he steps in when it shits the bed entirely, which it does on about a monthly basis, and no more. This is an unusually good case, because someone is actually in the process of writing a new bot and has been since about June. He's also fitting that in between all his other on- and off-wiki commitments. I'm hoping the current bot doesn't give up the ghost completely first. Vaticidalprophet 09:42, 30 November 2021 (UTC)

On the other hand, Legoktm is the third person to operate that bot (it was previously run by Harej and Chris G), so I'd say that GA is more of a counterexample than an example. Also, re talk page archiving, that exact situation did happen back in 2013 when MiszaBot died, and somebody was willing to write another bot within a few weeks. (And, all this time, ClueBot III has been running in parallel, so the bus factor is at least two). * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 00:00, 1 December 2021 (UTC)

On the other other hand, since GimmeBot went down in 2013 then AFAIK nobody has fully replicated its functionality. In any case, bots are just a single relatively trivial example of the "a given area is dependent on a single editor or a small group" issue. (Perhaps I'm violating WP:BEANS here, but I'm sure the vandals have already figured it out; a lot of article groups are the result of a single editor with a particular interest. When that single editor leaves, there's a good chance nobody is watching those pages any longer; as long as the vandalism is plausible enough not to set off alarm bells at New Page Patrol, a vandal can go through those pages merrily changing dates and so forth, which thanks to Google's laziness in not fact-checking Wikidata will then ripple out across the internet.)

As of today we have 5082 editors reaching even the fairly minimal activity threshold of 100 edits-per-month and we have 6,416,100 mainspace articles. A static number of people maintaining a steadily growing site is unsustainable, and the only potential point of dispute is just where the breaking point is and what measures we can take to delay or mitigate it. It's not being Chicken Little when one can see incontrovertible evidence of the sky getting steadily closer. ‑ Iridescent 06:30, 1 December 2021 (UTC)

Interesting point. Is this the fate of most voluntary endeavors then, even on the web? For me the continued draw is working collaboratively in an increasingly atomized world, on a project of worldwide importance (creating and preserving virtually the only remaining encyclopedia in existence of its size and scope). For me the community I have found here is also of major importance. I found very friendly help and abundant collaboration from the moment I joined (people were in much better moods then). That said, I also found a great deal of bullying in some quarters my first few years here, and had to completely leave certain editing areas to escape it. I think community and kindness are the key to editor retention, and editor retention is the key to WP's survival. When editors have a bad experience during their first couple of years, they are likely to leave. A lot of old hands are excellent encyclopedists, but they didn't start out with the skill level and skill set and learning curve they now have. I think we need to trust that well-meaning newbies of any scholarly or research bent are eventually going to be good encyclopedists, and treat them with kid gloves and much social interaction, so they will stay longterm. Softlavender (talk) 09:57, 1 December 2021 (UTC)

My personal feeling—as I've been saying with various wording since at least 2009 and probably earlier—is that Misplaced Pages is heading for a "flowers growing in the sewers" model, in which we give up any serious attempt at holding back the flood of crap and just concentrate on preserving and improving those parts that we deem worth preserving and improving, and on making it clear to readers which is which. (It's partly why I spend so much time banging on about making article assessment fit for purpose.)

It will mean a radical shift in mindset, but unless there's going to be either a massive boom in editor recruitment or a mass cull of stubs—neither of which seems particularly likely—a shift from a 'curators of everything' model to a 'marking what's important so readers can filter out the garbage, but otherwise only moderating when problems are actively flagged' model seems the only way to go. I'd argue that some of the other projects like Commons have already taken this route, even if they've not yet reached the point at which they'd admit it. ‑ Iridescent 16:42, 1 December 2021 (UTC)

It isn't just WMF who have to watch out. Wikipedians can be our own worst enemies when over-enforcing rules and sanctions ends up scaring away newbies. Another difference with business is that employees are largely recruited to do something the owner wants. Whereas many "jobs" on Misplaced Pages happen because someone decides spontaneously to do it. So it was a bonus they volunteered to edit here in the first place, and a bonus they decided to do something nobody else was doing or could do, and so we should be a bit philosophical if they leave.

As an aside, I do personally have experience of being replaced. I created the monthly Commons:Photo challenge in 2013 and ran it for a few years. When I gave it up, someone else volunteered to take over and have done so very well since. I have occasionally helped out when they go away on holiday around a month end/start, but strangely haven't needed to do that these last couple of years. On any long running project like wiki, getting replaced is probably a very healthy thing, and a measure of the activity being considered worthwhile. -- Colin° 17:35, 1 December 2021 (UTC)

This has happened to me at TV Tropes as well. Now if only I could be replaced at updating the articles at User:Jo-Jo Eumerus/article work... Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 18:36, 1 December 2021 (UTC)

It's happened to me also, but when a process has relied on a single individual or a small group, a succession relies on there being either someone being shown the ropes beforehand with an eye to them taking over, or someone lurking in the background with the ability to take over if the need becomes critical. Even English Misplaced Pages with its thousands of editors has had issues in the past with processes depending on the single person who's willing to keep them running. For some of the smaller wikis where the main editor base could fit comfortably in a Ford Tourneo, the departure of even a single person could wreck the project.

Although it's long-since rambled, this thread is nominally about Welsh Misplaced Pages so let's stick with them as an example. Last month only five editors made more than 100 article edits and only 16 editors made more than 10 edits there. Had the WMF decided to get heavy regarding the unpleasantness mentioned in Only in death's original post and issued a global lock on Llywelyn2000 it would have left a gaping hole in the project's maintenance; had an investigation uncovered evidence of collusion which led to both Llywelyn2000 and Deb being blocked it would literally have wiped out the project's administration. Repeat this a hundred times for all the other smaller wikis in the WMF ecosystem—from the vantage point of English Misplaced Pages it's easy to lose sight of just how small the editing communities of all the other Wikipedias are. (If meta:List of Wikipedias is to be believed, and that's bot-updated so I've no reason to doubt it, at the time of writing there are 35 Wikipedias that have ten or fewer active editors—not admins, editors.) ‑ Iridescent 07:18, 6 December 2021 (UTC)

I live in Wales, suffice to say there are other issues which wouldnt necessarily make that a bad thing if it happened ;) You dont have to look very far on Cymru for the same issues that crop up with all the smaller wikis where the admin pool is essentially a group of close friends. But that is a result of what happens when you have a very small self-governing pool of people and no accountability. Its not a Wiki issue. Only in death does duty end (talk) 12:51, 6 December 2021 (UTC)

Well yeah, I don't think cy-wiki would be missed; it's a charmless mix of nationalist tub-thumping and performative wokeness. It's not a great example, though, since even the most ardent nat is used to "the Welsh-language version of this is inadequate, let's check the English version" as a part of everyday life. For something like Burmese (33 million speakers, lots of politically sensitive topics, unique alphabet so stewards have difficulty monitoring it remotely, Misplaced Pages has four admins) an increase or decrease in the number of editors can literally have a material impact on people's lives. ‑ Iridescent 15:34, 6 December 2021 (UTC)

Next time someone asks me why I dont vote Plaid Cymru, I am using "it's a charmless mix of nationalist tub-thumping and performative wokeness" rather than my usual "bunch of muppets". Only in death does duty end (talk) 09:41, 7 December 2021 (UTC)

Watching the usual suspects trying to euphemismify away any mention of extremism from Plaid Cymru provides hours of peaceful relaxation; the changes tend to stick since nobody except PC supporters cares. "Adopted a neutral standpoint" is probably the winner, although "controversial remarks" warrants an honourable mention, and to read all the tales of electoral triumph you'd never suspect that this is a party that got less than 10% of the vote at the last election. (Today I Learned that the new PC logo is supposed to be a poppy, and not as every single person assumes a badly-drawn daffodil.) ‑ Iridescent 16:48, 7 December 2021 (UTC)

Three admins, actually, my:အသုံးပြုသူ:အလွဲသုံးစားမှု စိစစ်စနစ် is just the abuse filter. Elli (talk | contribs) 16:54, 7 December 2021 (UTC)

Clicking that link, looks like someone's Spirograph is on the blink. EEng 17:05, 7 December 2021 (UTC)

Deep lolness. Martinevans123 (talk) 17:08, 7 December 2021 (UTC) p.s. sorry, I mean ငိုရယ်မောမော အီမိုဂျီ

Apparently, it's because paper was in short supply so they'd write on palm leaves, and using the traditional alphabet with its straight lines would rip the leaves so the alphabet was redesigned to be all curves. That's two things I've learned today. ‑ Iridescent 18:51, 7 December 2021 (UTC)

Probably explains why my Spirograph doesn't work well with palm leaves... Martinevans123 (talk) 16:15, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

How very Iechyd-dare you! ""Come home to a real fire, buy a cottage in Wales". Meibion Glynneath 123 (talk) 16:58, 7 December 2021 (UTC)

That link takes me (indirectly) to List of International Emmy Award winners. Looking over that list, I can only conclude either that someone on the Emmy panel is transfixed by RADA accents, or that the media in every part of the world not within the M25 is unspeakably bad. ‑ Iridescent 19:36, 7 December 2021 (UTC)

Yes indeed. A travesty that Aneurin Anus and Kenny Twat have not yet been suitably honoured. Martinevans123 (talk) 16:20, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

RE 'Controversial remarks', they were indeed controversial at the time but you could probably say them now in the current Welsh economic climate with nary a remark in return (except for possibly the 'must learn Welsh' one). The impact of house purchases on rural and other remote communities is well documented, seaside purchases - buy-to-let - the inability of people growing up in Welsh communities to move into the local housing market is a big issue. COVID had an interesting effect where all the people with second homes attempted to flee the cities under the various lockdowns/work-from-home to set up down here. They didnt seem to be prepared for the anger they got from what is normally a quite placid populace. The issue with health board resources and centralised government funding is a thorny one as well. Only in death does duty end (talk) 09:30, 13 December 2021 (UTC)

Hmmm, it's almost as if something had happened in the last 20 years that had brought "damn foreigners coming over and stealing our jobs", "they're just parasites who use our public services without putting anything back" and "people speaking another language are a danger to our cultural values" out of the crazysphere and into mainstream conversation… (FWIW, I don't believe in "Once you have more than 50% of anybody living in a community that speaks a foreign language, then you lose your indigenous tongue almost immediately" as remotely the reason the Welsh language is in decline, or you'd be seeing Spanish extinct as a language in the US. What's killing Welsh—and Sorbian, Griko, Occitan, Breton, Romansh, Frisian et al—isn't cultural imperialism, but a relative lack of written materials (both online and paper) making it less convenient to use in day-to-day life than other languages, and speakers of the language choosing to move out of the area.)

The phenomenon you describe during Covid wasn't specific to Wales. Small towns and villages across the world were overwhelmed by people pouring out of the cities into second homes and AirBnBs, and nowhere were the locals very pleased about it. ‑ Iridescent 07:05, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

Managing scale

Managing scale (scaling up, maintaining current size, or scaling down) is the fate of all endeavours. It's more upfront with for-profit projects, as they have to decide on how to allocate their financial resources. Volunteer initiatives can be more vulnerable to the availability of volunteers, and in an environment like Misplaced Pages that lacks hierarchy, long-term planning is very hard. There's no one responsible for it, and anything that a group of like-minded editors tries to plan for is subject to the whims of the consensus discussions of the day, and the continued participation of the editors in the group. isaacl (talk) 21:13, 2 December 2021 (UTC)

When it comes to scaling up or down, Misplaced Pages has additional problems that for-profit companies, government bodies, and more traditional charitable groups don't have. The traditional way for an organization to handle growth is to break up into separate operating units. Misplaced Pages doesn't really have that option—it's not as if we can sell the 2,047,682 biographical articles to a venture capital firm to free us up from the need to maintain them, or split the science and arts articles into separate operating divisions to ensure that problems affecting one don't spread to affect the whole. Likewise, when it comes to downsizing the traditional way to handle it is through mergers, but we don't realistically have that option either—the only other bodies that would have both the inclination and the technical ability to absorb Misplaced Pages are national governments and big tech, and if Misplaced Pages ever did go into terminal decline the Googles and Chinese Community Parties of the world would much rather kill it off and have control over its replacement, rather than try to absorb twenty years' worth of contradictory rules and interpersonal squabbles. I assume the WMF's 'hubs' plan is at least in part an attempt to address the scaleability issues, but the whole "anyone can edit" nature of the beast means there ultimately needs to be a single place for the buck to stop. ‑ Iridescent 07:26, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

English Misplaced Pages can't divest itself of articles, but it could take other steps to reduce churn and thus maintenance, such as protecting more articles. Traditional charitable groups at least have people directing what its volunteers do, and thus can choose to stop working on projects that they can no longer adequately staff (or provide other resources for). English Misplaced Pages currently requires large group conversations to try to decide what to cover and in what detail, and it's ineffective for managing scale. isaacl (talk) 20:55, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

and taditional encyclopaedias have editorial boards and editors, who decide what needs covering, and more or less at what length. WP has never had any of that. I presume "English Misplaced Pages currently requires large group conversations to try to decide what to cover and in what detail" should be understood in the future conditional tense - I see no evidence any such process is currently being attempted at other than an individual level. Johnbod (talk) 21:28, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

While a lot of decisions are made on an article-by-article basis—sometimes setting precedent, sometimes not—the big group discussions about how and where the margins of Misplaced Pages's scope are going to be defined take place quite often. You particularly see them on things like sports and music, where a change in the interpretation of "notability" or "reliable source" has the potential to cause mass deletions. Here's one that's just been opened on how esports teams (or "groups of videogamers" to anyone over the age of about 20) should be treated, for instance. ‑ Iridescent 04:45, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

There is a discussion now on how to cover fringe theories. There are interminable discussions on what standards should be used to determine if a subject should have an article. There's an ongoing conversation on how to judge the potential availability of CC-BY SA compatible photos, in order to decide if a copyrighted photo can be used instead. There was a long discussion on portals a couple of years ago, where people tried to figure out how many people were willing to actually maintain them. There are lots of attempts to establish more guidance, but huge group conversation aren't great at reaching definitive conclusions. A very small number of recalcitrant participants can stall progress, because most people really are trying to find a happy consensus that everyone can live with. isaacl (talk) 05:23, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

The huge group RFCs can still reach a result even if there are stubborn holdouts, provided they get properly formally closed and it's made clear that even those who don't like the closure are expected to abide by it unless and until they formally challenge it. For an obvious example, as far as I know my closure of Religion in biographical infoboxes is still holding and still being grudgingly abided by, despite my ruling going explicitly against the opinions of some of the most vocal members of the "IAR means the rules don't apply to me" tendency. ‑ Iridescent 17:30, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

It's of course possible to reach a result in some cases if one side is willing to push for an outcome. These days, this generally happens in cases where there is some urgent concern (say, COVID-19 coverage). Typically, though, editors don't like pushing for a result when they know it will cause significant dissatisfaction with some people, and a lot of the more ambivalent editors passing by will push for a "please just stop arguing and go do something else" ending to discussion, rather than trying to work out an agreement on guidance. isaacl (talk) 21:10, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

All too many of the people at WP, are there because they like to argue about rules and details.It's not surprising that we should atttract people who are perhaps a little stubborn and even obsessive-compulsive, but perhaps we cna figure out a way to redirect them to arguing about content. I may be heretical here, but about half our articles would benefit form a direct challenge about the relevance and basis of the content, and atr least the result would be an improved WP. In deciding such things, we need to stick to arguments based on one and only one basic principle: what makes a better encyclopedia. We won't agree, but the way forward is to recognize the disagreements, and accept that the encyclopedia will as seen by any one person, contain detailed content on things we don't care in the least about; the counterpart to that is that it will contain content about what we individually do care about. As an example, it should not really bother me if we contain detailed articles on minor football professionals or beauty contest winners, of the detailed plots of stupid video series--as long as we can have articles on the scientists and and writers and historians whom I consider important. That's why I've always been an inclusionist -- in the hope for reciprocity. DGG ( talk ) 10:18, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

Notability vs appropriateness

As I've said many times before, if I were in charge the sole notability criterion would be "using genuine reliable secondary sources, can you write 1000 words about this topic without waffling or padding?". If we applied this scrupulously—and accepted that it would mean deleting some pages on things that "are obviously notable" if the sources don't exist to back that claim up—it would solve about 90% of our problems in a single stroke. ‑ Iridescent 17:51, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

A thousand words feels like too much. I'd be happy if we could write 200 words without waffling or padding. (But I'd specify independent reliable sources rather than secondary ones.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:06, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

200 words seems to me too short—the point is to filter out all the "we know this person/village/company/species exists, but there's nothing to say about it" chaff that's generated from directories, atlases etc. That said if it was a 200-word limit or nothing, I'd take the 200-word limit. Yes, it would mean losing stand-alone articles for "but this is obviously a notable topic" topics like the wonderfully-named Edmund Bastard (politician). To use that as an example, an article complying with the new rules could almost certainly be written—if he was a Member of Parliament for 25 years he'll surely have been mentioned in coverage of Parliamentary proceedings even though Dartmouth was a rotten borough in this period so the usual "we can assume he was covered in detail in the local press" argument doesn't apply. But this page is now 10 years old, other than its initial creation hasn't had a single non-bot edit that I can see, and is sourced solely to a book from 1834 called A Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Commoners of Great Britain and Ireland. Unless and until there's something actually to say about him, this is a straightforward example of a topic where we'd better serve the readers by directing them to an entry in a list rather than a content-free pseudoarticle, with the added bonus of helping keep {{NUMBEROFARTICLES}} down to a manageable size.

My thinking in "secondary" rather than "independent" is that it's easier to define, and for a change this drastic we'd want as few gray areas as possible, but that's a very minor point. ‑ Iridescent 08:06, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

Eh, in sciencey topics it's often not so clear what "secondary" is. There are a lot of sources that satisfy WP:PSTS but not WP:MEDRS for example. And I have always advocated the viewpoint that the intro section of an academic paper more commonly than not is a secondary source. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 09:32, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

It's an interesting point, about scientific publications. Although it's true that introduction sections (and often portions of the discussion section) are reviews of the literature, and thus somewhat secondary, they are always constructed to support the significance of the primary research, and therefore are not particularly independent. (Yes, peer review is supposed to at least partially mitigate that, but I can say from experience that it rarely does, unless the peer reviewer pushes to cite their own work.) --Tryptofish (talk) 17:44, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

I think you meant to say that they are not necessarily "comprehensive", which is a nicer way of saying that the contents might be cherry-picked. They can be "independent" if the previous work was done by other people, no matter how biased the summary is. The problem for Misplaced Pages editors is that we can easily be led astray if we are too trusting of such summaries. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:38, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

It's true that they are not necessarily comprehensive, but they are not necessarily independent as well, and the latter is indeed what I meant. In other words, the sort-of cherry picking of what to emphasize, what to include or exclude, in itself constitutes a lack of independence. If authors cherry pick the prior literature that is useful in making their point, then that reduces the independence for our sourcing purposes. It's the difference between not being comprehensive simply because it's brief, and – as is the case in what I'm talking about – not being comprehensive because of a deliberate (even if good-faith) effort to present a one-sided review of past work. --Tryptofish (talk) 16:23, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

I'm not sure that concept fits with the way that we normally talk about Misplaced Pages:Independent sources. Merely agreeing with someone else/someone else's research doesn't make you non-independent of that research. If agreeing with someone meant the end of independence, then book reviewers would stop being independent every time they said a book was good (but if they hate it, they're still independent), and in the field of physics, only crackpots would be considered independent of Einstein.

I think I understand what you're driving at, but independence isn't quite the right wiki-jargon. Maybe the word we want is closer to self-serving. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:07, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

I should explain how I mean this. If this discussion were in project space, I wouldn't be saying it the way that I say it here, but this is of course user space, so I'm speaking more informally. I recognize that "I have seen biased writing of introductions and discussions, so we should deprecate such sourcing" would rest too much on OR and would be somewhat inappropriate for policy discussions. But I'm coming at this (and I know what I'm talking about) as someone with decades of experience working within the peer review system and seeing what happens from the inside. You are right that "self-serving" is applicable here, but the kind of self-service going on would indeed translate into non-independence (or at least bias/POV in the source). For example, I had a rather unpleasant competitor in the specific research area of my research, and he always either wrote his papers (and even reviews) omitting any mention of the (highly relevant) publications from my lab, or occasionally would cite my work misrepresenting what it said and dismissing it. Colleagues from other institutions would roll their eyes when talking with me about it, and his work eventually went out of favor, so insiders often understood what was going on, but I'm sure that lay people would have no idea. People who haven't seen the sausage-making from the inside would be quite surprised if they knew about this kind of thing, but it's more common than the public would suspect, and peer-review doesn't work as well as it's purported to. Obviously, I'm not even close to a reliable source about that for Misplaced Pages's purposes, but I cannot un-know what I know, --Tryptofish (talk) 17:36, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

I thought about it some more, and it occurred to me that you are thinking of independence as being "the source is independent of the other references that it cites and discusses", which is quite reasonable, and more precise in terms of the Misplaced Pages meaning than the way I was thinking of it (at least when the introduction or discussion refers to papers written by other authors). I was approaching it as "the source is not necessarily independent in its citing of its own publications, and not necessarily neutral in its citing of publications by others". It is reasonable for you to point out that the latter, non-neutrality in citing the work of others, is really bias but also independent in the Misplaced Pages meaning of the word. I didn't pick up on that until just now. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:06, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

I suspect I've seen a case of dueling academics on wiki. From our POV, there's a clear right–wrong division: One of them has been socking, and the other isn't.

You doubtless remember that one of my pet peeves about people claiming "unreliability" when the real problem is undue weight. A sound theoretical structure for our policies seems to be important to me. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:10, 16 December 2021 (UTC)

An academic socking on Misplaced Pages. What a wonderful example to set for one's students. I'm facepalming, and yet I'm not surprised. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:15, 16 December 2021 (UTC)

I don't know the context of the particular case in question, but an academic socking isn't automatically going to be A Bad Thing. I can imagine circumstances when an academic might have legitimate reasons for editing using an account that isn't linked to their real-world identity, either to prevent their opinions being given undue weight, to experience Misplaced Pages as a new editor as part of their research, or just to avoid giving the impression that they're trying to pull a "do you know who I am?". (Yes I'm well aware that 99% of the time none of these will be the case, and the actual reason will be "I'm the Regius Professor of Foology, your rules do not apply to me".) ‑ Iridescent 17:43, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

I don't know the context either, but I'm fine with editing under an anonymous username, as opposed to one's real-life name, or to using a legitimate alt account. But actual socking, in the sense of using multiple accounts in order to appear to be more than one person (or to evade sanctions) is A Bad Thing (or A Bad Thing, PhD). (Foology, by the way, is a popular topic at faculty meetings.) --Tryptofish (talk) 18:39, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

This is the SPI kind of socking. I've seen at least four accounts blocked so far. WhatamIdoing (talk) 08:04, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

Why doesn't that surprise me… Let me guess, it's either about (a) a completely trivial point about which literally nobody other than the editor involved cares or (b) us not giving due prominence to their own recently-published book which is available in all good stores and makes an ideal Christmas gift? ‑ Iridescent 14:22, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

Jo-Jo Eumerus, WP:MEDRS does mention these sections: "In addition to experiments, primary sources normally contain introductory, background, or review sections that place their research in the context of previous work; these sections may be cited in Misplaced Pages with care: they are often incomplete". It doesn't mention the "not particularly independent" aspect that Tryptofish mentions. Independence can sometimes be a problem with a dedicated review, such as in a small or polarised field. There was a discussion recently at WT:MED which highlighted again that peer review is no silver bullet and doesn't magically confer reliability on the work. We frequently get editors assuming that everything in a "peer-reviewed journal" is peer reviewed, when in fact only a portion of the work is. -- Colin° 08:56, 10 December 2021 (UTC)

My general thinking—which may not be policy but seems to me to be straightforward common sense—is that if the paper is discussed elsewhere we should be using wherever it's discussed rather than the original as our source, and if it's not discussed elsewhere that should generally be a massive red flag as to whether it's something Misplaced Pages should even be mentioning. Misplaced Pages is, in theory anyway, a directory of topics that are demonstrably considered important by other sources, not the Grand Repository of Every Piece of Information. ‑ Iridescent 18:40, 10 December 2021 (UTC)

This is true (and as far as I can tell at least adjacent to PAG status) as a rule of thumb, but sometimes hits odd edge cases for uncommon or underresearched disorders. MEDRS is written assuming a significant and progressing body of literature; the significant majority of individual diseases are rare conditions not sexy enough for funding where you're lucky if the last literature review is from this century. Misplaced Pages's niche-filling role of "being the most comprehensive source on the open internet on a narrow topic" is even more important for rare medical conditions -- without us, things too weird for the NIH/NHS/WebMD types to have coherent articles about them are excluded from the general population, which is not great if you or someone you care about has just been diagnosed with one of them.

In general, a lot of discussions on the definitions and borderlands of reliable sourcing are written assuming people are working on the most controversial thing a given subject matter could cover. My participation in the Covid MEDRS discussions has mostly been trying to prevent people from, in the laudable effort to stop people from rewriting all our articles to say orange juice cures Covid, forgetting this is not most of our medical content and turning MEDRS into something that makes it impossible to write about anything in Orphanet/NORD's scope. In non-medical content, I've seen some horrendous games of telephone in the RSN-to-RS/PS-to-source-highlighter-script pipeline -- an RfC of six people where all agreed a source was apolitically reliable but two (who I happen to agree with -- its political content is a dictatorship mouthpiece -- but not enough to trump the apolitical reliability the way this did) argued it politically unreliable, the RfC was closed as 'politically unreliable', and this was translated to the source highlighter scripts as a giant red glowing "DON'T USE THIS" sign. Vaticidalprophet 19:33, 10 December 2021 (UTC)

Medicine

Medicine is a special edge case, as the only significant field where the use of outdated sourcing can cause real-world consequences. The subconscious assumption underlying Misplaced Pages is that the ideal of a Misplaced Pages article is an aggregation of all the sources that haven't been superseded by something better since they were written. This works great for something like vintage automobiles, since even if nobody's written about it for five decades nobody's going to come along and discredit the theory that the Ford Whatever was a four-door saloon with a maximum speed of 122 mph. This is imperfect but works adequately for a broader swathe of biographies and humanities topics—there are a lot of niche historical topics where the most definitive references are hopelessly outdated books with titles like The Wogs Are Out For Blood, but where the facts aren't disputed so it's a case of separating the non-problematic facts from their problematic interpretation.

On medical topics, the underlying "notability doesn't expire so if it was only covered in depth in 1923 it remains worthy of an article" leads to problems, since the 'best' sources by our usual standards are often totally discredited but the discrediting doesn't necessarily itself meet our standards for reliable sourcing. MEDRS is a valiant effort to square that circle, but brings its own issues in that it's not always clear what is and isn't a medical article. (Coffea → Coffee bean → Coffee → Caffeine → Caffeine citrate; at what point on that line does MEDRS kick in? Is Heroin a medical or a social history topic? How about Bee sting?)

In an ideal world, Misplaced Pages wouldn't cover medical topics and we'd have a separate Wikispecies-style wiki for medicine, where we could both rewrite the sourcing and notability rules to suit the unique circumstances, and be a lot harsher when it comes to blocking and protecting than Misplaced Pages's rules allow. "Anyone can edit", "be bold" and "if we get this wrong people might die" aren't a good mix; a separate project where we could enforce "get consensus for any given change before you make it" and "think about whether this is actually an improvement rather than about whether it complies with Misplaced Pages's arbitrary rules" would solve an awful lot of problems.

The whole "politically unreliable means 'never use this'" thing is an issue that comes up all the damn time. I once had someone—and a very experienced editor from the 2004 intake to boot, not an overenthusiastic n00b—earnestly explaining to me that the Daily Mail RfC meant that the Daily Mail wasn't a reliable source for a quotation from the Daily Mail. ‑ Iridescent 06:52, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

(Tryptofish clears throat, and then says something that will be like kicking a wasp nest.) At the risk of being reviled, I'll point out that the reviled Doc James created the reviled Medicine Wiki, which is exactly a separate wiki that deals only with medicine topics and has its own content rules. (That said, I'm perfectly/painfully aware that the creation of a separate project with separate rules arose from the desire to have rules that permit drug pricing information, and that the project may suffer from too little participation, so no one needs to point any of that out to me.) --Tryptofish (talk) 23:06, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

Yeah -- the project that hosts the pre-rewrite versions of all the articles I've done in the past year, so we can have permanent public-facing preservations of a bunch of outdated Starts. I became active in the post-Case/Medicine era, and I honestly can't make sense of what I've read of it (and I've read much of it). It just sounds like an archetypal case of the Infobox Phenomenon, where people tear themselves apart over issues barely noticeable outside their bubble.

On the broader point, there's simultaneously a tendency to treat Misplaced Pages's medical content in exactly the way you (Iri) describe, and an open question of how useful it really is. The protection threshold is de facto far lower for medical articles -- indef semis over single-incident vandalism are, maybe not routine, but I've certainly worked on articles in that situation (e.g. tetrasomy X has exactly that protection log). Ajpolino has been working for several months now on trial unprotections of many high-profile medical articles, and of the articles called out on that list as unprotected, I took a look at Healthy diet, Multiple sclerosis, and Parkinson's disease to see none reprotected or wracked by newfound severe issues. (Oldfound severe issues are outside the experiment's scope...) The aforementioned tetrasomy X and its big sister trisomy X were unprotected adjacent to the experiment, as a procedural result of histmerges with userspace rewrites, and similarly haven't faced any issues. Vaticidalprophet 23:25, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

Your point about mirroring out-of-date versions of our articles is an excellent one. What they really need over there is some kind of crawler/bot that continuously (or at least periodically) mirrors the edits made at en-wiki, rather than just staying frozen in time. (Has there really been that much time post-case? I've certainly been seeing you around a lot, and productively so.) --Tryptofish (talk) 22:02, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

Jamesopedia appears to be down to just three editors. Assuming that's the case, it's a zombie project that isn't really comparable to what I'm suggesting. Assuming that SUL continues to function (and there's no reason it shouldn't) and that we make GlobalWatchlist enabled by default, any transition should be virtually invisible to both readers and editors other than on switchover day itself.

Spitballing further, we could even continue to host non-technical versions of the articles on Misplaced Pages complete with prominent Warning! This page is potentially inaccurate and does not constitute medical advice, do not take any action based on it! disclaimers. That would address something that's always been an issue since the earliest days, that we're simultaneously trying to cater for the target intelligent fourteen year old with no prior knowledge, and for people with decades of experience. For a handful of the most sprawling topics we already have pages like Introduction to genetics, but it's very much the exception; there's no policy basis for these pages existing, and there are only about a dozen. As things stand, the ≈20,000 readers per day visiting COVID-19 are presented with "reverse transcription loop-mediated isothermal amplification from a nasopharyngeal swab" within about 30 seconds of reading. ‑ Iridescent 07:02, 13 December 2021 (UTC)

Iridescent, you are being very unfair. While they do only have three editors active in article space (Whispihistory, Ozzie10aaaa and King James), you are forgetting QuackGuru, who has created more than 20 sandboxes on e-cigarettes. Ok, now you are suggesting the splinter medWiki would be technical, presumably aimed at health professionals, and wouldn't need disclaimers. And that the core Misplaced Pages could continue to have lay friendly pages on cancer that were held to a lower standard and admined by people who wouldn't know a catheter from a catherine. While editors are motivated by several factors, I think having a readership is a big draw. So why would I edit a specialist publication for people who already have the information they need and know where to get it, or a non-specialist publication that is read by millions? Consider that in the UK the British National Formulary is freely available to all. And Datapharm's emc provides summary information sheets for professionals and patient info leaflets for lay patients for pretty much all drugs. Wrt drugs, what's your medWiki offering that those don't? A History section? -- Colin° 08:54, 13 December 2021 (UTC)

I won't presume to speak for everyone who originally signed up at the Med Wiki, obviously, but I can explain what my experiences have been. I signed up originally because I figure that any alternative to en-wiki is worth giving a chance, and I believed that I could help with fixing inelegant writing. (I still feel badly about not having done that.) Over time, I ran into two issues. One is that the login process over there has some problems. Logging in directly over there raises some preservation-of-privacy issues, and I'm extremely protective of my privacy. There has been a process of being logged in as part of the Wikimedia global login, but that has only worked on-and-off. Second, I think there has been an "after you; no, after you" problem: potential editors (or at least, me) see the low level of participation and wait to see who else participates, and it becomes self-fulfilling with hardly anyone going first. Early on, James and Ozzie were very busy with the mirroring (such as it was), and it felt to me like I might as well wait until they had gotten through that step. And after a while, those two problems I describe made it seem easier and easier not to bother. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:01, 13 December 2021 (UTC)

Iri, what you have in red is what I have long advocated for all medicine content. That RFC failed because of how I structured it, and the subsequent worse additions by others; it would be grand if a better formulated RFC could get some sort of real disclaimer on medical content (as opposed to the site wide disclaimer that no casual reader will ever see). Search for my comment in this discussion. You have it right on Jamesopedia, but (besides hosting the efforts of a topic banned editor) there are other issues there that need not be shared publicly. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:26, 13 December 2021 (UTC)

He was topic-banned from pricing, not from medical topics as a whole. And the purpose of the new wiki was, in significant part, to have different rules on pricing content than at en-wiki. There's an inconsistency with saying that we should spin off a separate medical wiki with different rules on content, and then treating a separate wiki with different rules that we don't like as though it were Wikipediocracy. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:31, 13 December 2021 (UTC)

I am iPad editing in the car on a long trip home from a wedding, hotspot connection, so I could be wrong, but I was fairly certain he was more broadly topic banned: “QuackGuru topic banned: QuackGuru is indefinitely topic-banned from articles relating to medicine, broadly construed.” SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:37, 13 December 2021 (UTC)

Struck, with my apologies. I thought you were referring to James, but you are correct about QG. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:39, 13 December 2021 (UTC)

My writing tends to lack clarity even when not editing from the car :) :) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:41, 13 December 2021 (UTC)

"Hosting the efforts of a topic banned editor" isn't necessarily a bad thing. If Misplaced Pages is going to have "your only rights here are the right to leave and the right to fork" as a mantra for two decades, we can't then complain when people leave and fork. I said much the same once to someone at WMF (I assume WAID but can't honestly remember) regarding proxying. "If you're a really excellent historian but you're just not able to work with others, we should help them -- go and make your own website, release it under Creative Commons license and we'll try to use some of that material, because it's just not working out" may not be formal policy, but given that it was publicly announced by Jimmy Wales to a crowd of people at Wikimania, any normal observer would assume that it is policy. That being the case, it's not reasonable for us to complain either about people who don't fit in to Misplaced Pages's environment going and doing their thing elsewhere, or about other people then importing things they've written. ‑ Iridescent 06:35, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

^Well-said, thanks. --Tryptofish (talk) 17:41, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

(Has there really been that much time post-case? Time is a cruel mistress. Case/Medicine was opened April 2020 (fantastic timing, eh) and closed June 2020, so a year and a half ago now. I became active a year ago and have passed the >100 edits 'highly active editor' (ask the WMF, not me) bar for about eight or nine months of that.) I think both Colin's "what is medical content" (which, as it happens, was one of Iridescent's points as well w/r/t "when does MEDRS kick in" and "when do altmed DS sanctions kick in") and "why would people write for X minor publication when they could write for Y major publication with as much or more ease" are both significant points that any split would need a good answer to. Impact of writing is a huge part of why people in any field end up on Misplaced Pages. I've been published in "real outlets" of significant reach, and I doubt it gets anywhere near the readership of even my most damnably obscure articles. In turn, debating the borderlands of what a given subject-specific PAG actually applies to has never been simple, from much more trivial cases ("does a MOS note about how to write fractions in science-related articles apply to medical articles, and in turn is someone changing it to that format being disruptive?") to broad existential debates when people get dragged for noticeboards for flying too close to their tbans. Vaticidalprophet 19:56, 13 December 2021 (UTC)

What I'm thinking of shouldn't have any significant impact, positive or negative, on the readership for any given page; to anyone other than the actual editors, it would be a behind-the-scenes shift regarding where specific pages were hosted. If and when it became more fork-y—e.g. when articles start to exist in two versions, an introductory one on Misplaced Pages and a technical one on Newwiki—there would be a dip in readers but hopefully an increase in satisfaction, as we'd no longer have the "this article is too simplistic!" and "this article is too complicated!" complaints.

Again this is thinking out loud rather than a policy proposal, but if "two separate domains" and "where to draw the subject boundaries" are what's causing the problem, there are ways it could be done that would still keep the whole thing in-house. As well as expanding the use of ] articles (User:Encyclopædius had some thoughts once on going the other way as well, and having ] pages, but I don't know how far he got), we could cobble together formal definitions of "High Importance Topic" and "Topic Where Inaccuracy Poses an Increased Risk", and enforce stricter sourcing/balance rules on them along with some kind of automated system to flash warnings at anyone attempting to edit pages falling into these categories… If "preserving the unity of the wiki" is the top priority, there are still ways we could start preparing for the time when we admit we can't monitor every change and need to prioritize the topics where accuracy is most important. ‑ Iridescent 06:35, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

Would you need it to be a separate wiki (maybe with a bot updating it, or some sort of cross-wiki transclusion)? Medical articles (as chosen by consensus) could be moved into a different namespace, and the entire namespace could be protected against anyone who doesn't have a "medical-editor" userright. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:13, 16 December 2021 (UTC)

The way I'm thinking about this, if it's a separate wiki, it has separate rules for (potentially) everything. If it's this wiki, then the normal rules and existing infrastructure applies, and the main difference is that there's an extra level of page protection. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:14, 16 December 2021 (UTC)

If it stays on this wiki, it surely wouldn't need a new namespace? We could just create a new medical=yes, or even a more generic potentially_sensitive_high_readership_topic=yes, flag, come up with an agreement as to how we decide which pages are covered by it, and then restrict the right to edit that page to people who've passed an "I understand the specific extra rules regarding this subset of articles" test (either an actual exam or an RFA-lite interrogation). Call it Pending Changes Level 3. If it failed we could just quietly abandon it as we did with Flagged Revisions etc, if it worked we could potentially expand it to all the other shit-magnets like American politics, climate change, I/P etc. It could hardly be a more dysfunctional system than WP:ACDS. ‑ Iridescent 19:31, 16 December 2021 (UTC)

I think it'd be easier to keep track of a namespace than to keep track of which article gets which flags, but a "PC3" could also work, if admins didn't mind the extra hassle of protecting all the pages.

Having a separate wiki might reduce some of the drama. At smaller wikis, everyone knows everyone, and the editor who's annoying you today is very likely the editor who helped you solve a problem yesterday. You're not being annoyed by a faceless random luser; you're being annoyed by someone whom it is likely in your own best interest to maintain a functional relationship with. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:56, 17 December 2021 (UTC)

As per my previous comments in this thread my slight preference would be for a separate wiki for the reasons that you mention, although I can see good arguments for "keep it all in one place". An obvious drawback to separate wikis is that—as we already see with Wikidata and with different language wikis—there will inevitably be times when the different versions of articles disagree, and readers would understandably be confused if Google returns two different "Misplaced Pages" results each saying different things; an obvious drawback to keeping it on-wiki with an additional article flag would be that it adds yet another layer to Misplaced Pages's byzantine bureaucracy; an obvious drawback to "do nothing and carry on as we currently do" is that we know the system is already creaking at the seams and eventually the number of articles in any given area is going to overwhelm the number of editors monitoring that area, and for some topics like medicine and BLPs this has more potential to cause issues than it does for others. ‑ Iridescent 07:07, 18 December 2021 (UTC)

On breaking up Misplaced Pages

Back to the drum I’ve been beating for years. Medicine needs a BLP-type policy which would allow us to massively remove poorly sourced and dated content. That would address, I believe, everything Iri raises. We could effectively blow up dated and miserable medical content, because nothing is better than something poor in the medical realm. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:57, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

The problem with Doc James's if-I-can't-win-every-time-I'm-taking-my-ball wiki isn't its existence, but the fact that it mirrors Misplaced Pages so is always going to lag behind since if the literature changes any editor is going to update Misplaced Pages, but not everyone is going to update Jamesopedia (even if he deigns to allow them to create an account). What I'm envisaging is something different, in which we export the medical articles to a separate site, delete the pages from Misplaced Pages, and replace every internal link with a link to the relevant page on the new site, and the existing wikilinks on the medical articles with backlinks to Misplaced Pages. (It's not beyond the bounds of possibility; this is what we did when we moved the images en masse to Commons.) The change would be virtually invisible to readers since the only sign that they'd temporarily left Misplaced Pages would be the replacement of the death star with the Medwiki logo and vice versa as they navigated between pages.

Such a move would have the advantage of allowing us to have genuinely separate rules on notability, sourcing, protection and editor interaction on this particular set of articles, and (importantly) to block people from editing medical articles as a whole while leaving them still able to edit everything else. I don't believe I'm giving away state secrets in saying that WP:MEDRS is a fudge of a solution which regularly leaves good-faith editors confused and upset when they think they're improving an article, only to find themselves summarily reverted and warned even though they've been faithfully following all the 'normal' rules on sourcing et al which we've just spent ages explaining to them. It would also allow us to have a separate group of "medical admins" who've demonstrated familiarity with the particular issues affecting medical articles and thus can be appointed admins on the new wiki, without having to go through the whole "please demonstrate your familiarity with the circumstances in which deletion criterion A10 should be invoked on a userspace draft" charade of RFA.

Looking further forward, a stand-alone Medwiki could also start looking at the unique circumstances affecting COI on medical articles, where the most up-to-date information is often proprietary and the people with the best knowledge of a given topic are often directly employed by firms or organizations working directly on that topic. As things stand, we have an uneasy dancing around policy where we're often choosing either to intentionally fail to provide all the information readers are likely to be looking for, or we're turning a blind eye to the use of sources which are technically inappropriate and to editing by editors who technically should be avoiding a particular topic.

I don't expect this actually to happen any time soon, but I do think that "preserve the best of Misplaced Pages in separate walled-garden sites that are small enough for the admins to actually administer" will increasingly be seen as the route to take as Misplaced Pages proper becomes unmanageably large. As long as this line shows no sign of levelling off while this line remains flat, the question of how we decide which articles need to be kept up to date and which can safely be ignored is going to become slightly more pressing with each year that goes by. ‑ Iridescent 07:06, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

Well, at least you didn't call it the King James Version. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:04, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

A-series CSD criteria aren't applicable in userspace. (Sorry, nerdsniped.) On the note of how a hypothetical Wikimedicine would permit blocking editors from all and only medical articles, it's worth noting a recent significant ANI thread was about exactly this issue. The combination of ANI's nonspecific search function with the fact the board's recent archives are absolutely screwed by "the longest thread of all time by over 200k bytes more than the next, followed by several spinoffs" gave me some issues narrowing it down, but I eventually managed to get to Misplaced Pages:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive1084#JCJC777, and Multiple sclerosis, and long-term concerns unheeded. It's a bit of a stretch to call the discussion resolved -- he ended up getting pblocked from the article at the core of the issue, but no further restrictions either technical or social.

As it stands, I'm not sure we can't just tban people from medical articles within the Misplaced Pages context. The problem is, AFAICT, more rooted in hesitation to tban people from major and wide-ranging topic areas that aren't under Discretionary Sanctions™. I recall you having a fairly negative view of Discretionary Sanctions™ -- I'm more in the "well, things aren't going to get better if we repeal it without a clear plan elsewise, I guess" school of thought, which seems vaguely on the more cynical end of community consensus -- but medicine is certainly an area where the treatment of subject matters as "either normal or Really Bad" crashes into reality. (I don't agree medical articles should work on a consensus-required format -- if nothing else, bikeshedding is such a pervasive problem for significant improvement of big-subject articles that I suspect nothing would ever get done, which for these articles is going backwards. I've had the experience of everyone who edits in a topic area suddenly coming out to give their input on a high-profile article twice over in topic areas much less contentious, and I completely understand why many people stop editing such articles entirely over it. In turn, I suspect trying to enforce Discretionary Sanctions™ in medicine, which is an unfortunately plausible outcome of making a big deal over how complicated a topic area it is to the wrong people, would have all kinds of horrible domino effects.)

BLPs might be the same, actually. They're nominally a Discretionary Sanctions™ area, but in practice, if a BLP article has that tag on its talk page it's an unusually heated one, and if someone gets a 'neutral statement not implying there are issues with your contribs' DS notice for BLPs they're probably skirting right up against the borders of an oversight block. There is probably a better way to recognize areas as sensitive without doing the same things for them you do for intractable millennia-long ethnic conflicts. Vaticidalprophet 07:47, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

I personally think discretionary sanctions are a lot of work for minimal benefit. If someone is causing problems, they're causing problems whether the article is under DS or not. Plus, unless the scope of the sanction is very specifically targeted, it's very difficult to say whether a given topic falls into their scope. (An existing DS in medicine is Any edit about, and all pages relating to, Complementary and Alternative Medicine. Since it's routine for disease/condition articles to include some variation on "traditionally people ate honey to reduce the effects but clinical trials have shown no evidence of any benefit", does that mean that e.g. Common cold is subject to the discretionary sanctions? The wording of the DS says "all pages relating to…", not "only those sections that deal with…", after all.) Plus, the DS regime is so complicated that nobody except a handful of professional wikilawyers can even remember what WP:DSTOPICS covers, let alone how each individual circumstance is interpreted. As I say, moving the medical articles to a separate wiki where the rules can be re-written if necessary and where we don't treat "anyone can edit" as some kind of Holy Writ would negate the need for most of the confusion, without having any obvious negative impact for the reader. ‑ Iridescent 08:01, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

My consensus-required comment is re. a separate project where we could enforce "get consensus for any given change before you make it". I don't think that's a useful way to edit most articles in any field -- smaller articles don't have anyone who cares to make a consensus over, bigger articles have everyone come out of the woodwork to argue minor details -- and for the specific considerations of medicine it might be even worse if bias towards inaction prevents updates or radical restructuring of low-quality articles. (I've discussed with Aza24 the issues of people bikeshedding things like, er, infoboxes while ignoring that the article they're arguing so much about is terrible.) I'm open to the idea of topic-level splits in the broad context of "this might be how we end up handling the too-many-articles-for-editors problem", but I suspect there's a lot of mid-hanging fruit with being less wildly culturally hostile towards newer editors. (Mid-hanging -- there are many, many reasons Misplaced Pages is a tough environment to jump into, some of which are eminently valid, others of which are not but not well fixed.) Vaticidalprophet 16:18, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

Personally, if an article is in such bad shape that it needs "updates or radical restructuring" then if I were in charge we'd be about a thousand times more willing to take the WP:TNT approach and move it to draftspace unless and until it's in decent shape again. I can't imagine the WMF allowing it, though; if {{NUMBEROFARTICLES}} ever does go into reverse, it has too much potential to damage the "constantly improving" narrative and frighten the horses among the big corporate donors. ‑ Iridescent 17:05, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

I'm not sure about that. Svwiki has been deleting articles hand over fist for the last several years (about 20–25% of all articles deleted), relevant people in the WMF know this, and AFAICT nobody thinks it's a problem at all. WhatamIdoing (talk) 07:08, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't the mass deletions on sv-wiki the cleanup following a malfunctioning translation bot, rather than a conscious "we've decided to delete these articles" decision? If so, it's not really comparable. Plus—and meaning no disrespect to the Swedish language—neither the big corporate donors nor the 99.86% of the world's population that doesn't speak Swedish has an opinion on Swedish Misplaced Pages. When the number of articles on English Misplaced Pages levels off—as it will have to do one day—it will cause a wave of "Is Misplaced Pages Dying?" pieces across both the specialist and the popular press, which unless carefully handled will translate directly into a collapse in donations. Nobody wants to be backing a loser, and "help us grow" is a much easier message to sell than "help us stabilize and improve what already exists" even if the latter is actually more important. ‑ Iridescent 07:23, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

Nobody wants to be backing a loser, and "help us grow" is a much easier message to sell than "help us stabilize and improve what already exists" even if the latter is actually more important. This might be sellable by using a different axis for 'growth'. It's a recurring complaint that readers have little to no awareness of GA/FA status -- why not solve both problems? Certainly both processes have their issues, but introducing readers to the concept of good and featured articles, and framing improvement through increasing their numbers rather than the raw article count, might reframe the issue well. Vaticidalprophet 07:25, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

Barring a major change of notability criteria, the number of Misplaced Pages articles added every year isn't going to go to zero ever. Even accounting for deletion of existing articles, every four or eight years we'll need a new article on the last US president to leave office, at a minimum. That and a number of tropical cyclone articles, catastrophes, dead celebrities, presidents and prime ministers of other countries etc. The annual article creation rate can approach a lower limit set by this type of "a new notable topic every year" article, yes, but I dare say that this "floor" isn't much lower than the present-day article creation rate. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 10:51, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

and far, far more numerous than any of these, new sports people becoming notable, and the accompanying articles on seasons, championships etc. I don't see any reason why "help us grow" can't easily be redefined as based on total text size rather than the number of articles, plus "necessary" new ones. Since I haven't done it for a few years, now might be the time to repeat my regular call for a 6 month ban on all new articles that aren't about things or people whose notability is new. Johnbod (talk) 16:09, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

How would an embargo on new articles about topics whose notability isn't new work? There are a lot of unquestionably notable topics where nobody's got around to writing the article yet—there are Featured Articles on (e.g.) French Misplaced Pages that are still redlinks here (example, example, example), and this is French, not some obscure language where nobody here speaks the language to translate the sources, or a niche project with more dubious notability rules than our own. For any pre-internet topic, our coverage is still full of gaping holes—half the entries on Charles Dickens bibliography are redlinks for example (and some of the bluelinks are just links to Wikisource rather than actual articles).

I'm not convinced permanent growth is inevitable. We delete 250–300 pages per day over the normal course of events, and it's not inevitable that the same number of new footballers, pop groups, charting songs etc are always going to come into existence. Even if they do, it's not a foregone conclusion that the articles are going to keep being created—statement of the obvious maybe, but those articles aren't magicked into existence. (I'm sure new netball players are achieving 'notability' by Misplaced Pages's definition of the term every day, but with Laura Hale ejected there's a lot less chance they're each going to get their cookie-cutter biography.) ‑ Iridescent 17:10, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

Getting it to work would be very easy, since we have many officious editors who would be delighted to police it, once approved, which of course it never ever will be. Non-compliant articles should be booted in draftspace for the duration, which would be enough to quickly stem the flow. DYK etc efforts would intstead go into expanding existing articles x5 etc, which would be a very, very, good thing, and the main point of the excercise. I would be more affected than you (see above); having recently developed an interest in writing on garden history, I find our coverage full of gaping holes - Canal (garden history) was completely new, Woodland garden is a disam page for shopping malls in the Mid-West etc, Medieval garden redirects to a very crappy Monastic garden, no Wilderness (garden history), and so on. But I would be prepared to make the sacrifice. Johnbod (talk) 19:02, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

I imagine it would be a recipe for endless arguments over whether any given topic is "newly notable" or not. (How would we handle an performer who'd had a song in reach #39 in the Moldovan charts in 2006 so was technically "already notable" by Misplaced Pages's rules, but has now just switched to Broadway or the West End and been nominated for a slew of major awards? Or something like the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, which technically always met our notability requirements but where there was no need for an article prior to recent events?) What would be just about within our capabilities both to implement and to get consensus for would be an ACTRIAL-style experiment of banning creation of new articles, or the moving of drafts into article space, unless the new page meets the "non-trivial coverage in multiple, independent, reliable sources" test, with NPP ruthlessly zapping any page that doesn't meet the "prove this topic is actually notable" test. (Per my comments elsewhere in an ideal world I'd throw a minimum size requirement for new articles in there as well.) ‑ Iridescent 06:21, 16 December 2021 (UTC)

Johnbod, I don't want to consider that ban until you've gotten those articles written.

I will add to Vaticidal's marketing ideas that there are two other ways to measure: to look at all the Wikipedias (vs enwiki only), and to contemplate the impossibility of counting "articles" once Abstract Misplaced Pages is functioning (they're probably saying several years from now, so maybe in a decade).

The idea for Abstract Misplaced Pages is that you "program" an article once – maybe something like "'''Subject''' (altname) = 1 category(disease(]))" – and then you instantly have as many articles as you have languages sufficiently translated to turn that into "Dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB) is a type of dementia". WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:26, 16 December 2021 (UTC)

They've been running an experimental version of that on ht-wiki for years. Based on that—and on Reasonator—I'm not holding my breath. The "anything can be broken down into data and then reassembled into text" approach can just about work in a very few cases (Johann Sebastian Bach is the one they like to show off), but anyone who thinks an algorithm can capture the nuance of even a dull stub, let alone anything complex, is talking out of their hat. The WMF has been sold a bill of goods; I doubt even Google has the capability to do what Abstract Misplaced Pages is promising since it's an approach that would only work if every word in every language was unambiguous and never depended on context. We instantly banninate anyone we catch using the Content Translation Tool for a reason. ‑ Iridescent 19:47, 16 December 2021 (UTC)

What's at htwiki is there because I begged Moushira to make the Web team install it, and it's not the same. I suspect that Abstract Misplaced Pages will work just about as well as Rambot worked for US census content (speaking of which: Is anyone working on the 2020 census update?). I hear that it's meant to be modular, so that you could choose individual sections/paragraphs and write the rest however you want to.

The CX filter exists because one guy was dumping unedited machine translation from Spanish into the mainspace. I think we overreacted. Also, anybody in this discussion can use CX freely (the filter only requires EC; I've used it to create three articles), and even total newbies can use CX here if they publish their translated articles first outside the mainspace. Which is to say that any logged-in editor can use CX to translate an article, save it to something like User:Newbie/My_first_article, make nine other edits, wait until your account is 96 hours old, and then you can WP:MOVE the page to the mainspace with no further barrier. The CX "ban" is security by obscurity at best. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:08, 17 December 2021 (UTC)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't the mass deletions on sv-wiki the cleanup following a malfunctioning translation bot, rather than a conscious "we've decided to delete these articles" decision?

No, the bot was functioning precisely as expected: importing data into multiple wikis from any of a variety of low-quality sources in the operator's two pet topic areas of geography and species (sv.wp, ceb.wp, war.wp, andddd one other). Swedish WP simply has the manpower and willpower both to reject further additions by that bot as well as to clean up the prior additions. Izno (talk) 06:23, 16 December 2021 (UTC)

Break: splitting

In essence, then, spinning out a portion of Misplaced Pages articles in order to manage scale, thus turning Misplaced Pages into a federation of communities. isaacl (talk) 16:22, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

Yes, exactly. Most of the articles would stay on Misplaced Pages, but those on fields where particular issues mean the vanilla Misplaced Pages rules aren't a good fit (medicine is the obvious one, but I could see a case for other specialist topics) would move to semi-autonomous wikis with a different set of rules. In the long term I could imagine it going the other way as well, allowing things like the biographies of fictional characters to operate in a more Wikia-like environment with looser rules on notability and sourcing—it's never sat entirely comfortably with me that we host articles like Sil (Doctor Who) that have an obvious in-universe notability but no evidence of any real-world recognition. It's worth pointing out that we already have precedents for this with Wikivoyage and Wikispecies, both of which have their own rules on style, their own inclusion guidelines and their own independent administration but still fit into the broader WMF ecosystem; this wouldn't be detonating a bomb under Misplaced Pages, it would be restoring Misplaced Pages to its original purpose while still retaining the two decades worth of accretions. (A more diffuse ecosystem might also finally provide a valid reason for Wikidata to get its act in order, as it would become an essential resource for tracking which topics were covered where.) ‑ Iridescent 16:55, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

I don't think your medical-Misplaced Pages offshoot would work. It isn't clear to me if the "anyone can edit" model applies there too or some hurdle is imposed. I'm sure there are plenty folk who think some medical qualification should be required. I dread to think about a species called "medical admins", and don't see how they might be any less "scare away the newbies" than those on Misplaced Pages have been. MEDRS is a surprise to both lay and academic editors. The former get confused that BBC News isn't an ideal source and the latter frustrated they can't demonstrate their knowledge of the latest research by citing the primary literature. But handling that requires a degree of people skills that appears to be in short supply. We increasingly had admins who just saw MEDRS as a hammer to hit folk with, regardless of the collateral damage. I'm not sure how moving it to a separate database would change that. It really helps, IMO, that MEDRS is fundamentally just the application of core policies to an topic field. I can reject text citing a primary research paper source just citing WP:WEIGHT, for example. It helps that editors with varied interests are involved in supervising and establishing rules. Some recent medical battles were overseen by an admin who writes about children's literature.

Your proposal assumes that the split for biomedical information is article based. The high profile recent case that kills that idea is the Covid 19 origins battle, which is part political, part forensic/criminal/health-and-safety, part biomedical, etc. What would you do with Dentistry, say? At what point in that article topic and its daughter articles would you say "this should be on MedWiki"? What about Heroin? And if MEDRS was dropped from Misplaced Pages, we'd end up with people using biographical or commercial articles as coat racks to describe wonder therapies.

I think Medicine (or biomedical subjects generally) is enormous both in quantity of topics and variety. We have major conditions like diabetes and cancer and we have rare diseases, major blockbuster drugs taken by millions, and strange therapies that are only offered hundreds of times a year in a country like the UK. We've got minor complaints like headaches and dandruff and major killers like HIV and malaria. I'm not really sure that a wiki model with volunteer editors works for all of that. And perhaps that problem gets solved by Google, which doesn't return Misplaced Pages in the first page of results for many topics today. Generally, the stuff it does return is pretty good. For example, a topic that I've edited occasionally over the years is tuberous sclerosis, a 1/6000 rare disease. If I Google that then I get... the NHS with a short simple-English overview; the Tuberous Sclerosis Association, which is the UK patient organisation; RareDiseases.org which has such a comprehensive and well written article, that we might as well send readers to that instead of whatever I've written. This isn't true for every topic. And textbooks could be offered as e-books to the developing world at zero cost if there was a will to do so. -- Colin° 18:52, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

The way I'd envisage it would be for Misplaced Pages to have a structure more like Wikia, where "anyone can edit" still applies everywhere, but the rules vary depending on topic. It wouldn't just be for topics like medicine where we might want stricter rules; it could also cut the other way as well. (A lot of the sources we blacklist as hopelessly biased would be perfectly legitimate as a source of reviews on arts articles, for instance.) Regarding admins, my thinking would be that they'd be wiki-wide as they are now, but with the option to only be admins on a particular subwiki if it was thought more suitable, but this is currently very speculative off-the-top-of-my-head spitballing at the moment.

The suggestion SandyGeorgia doesn't quite make but implies a little way up, of resurrecting a variant on WP:STICKYPROD for "medical articles, broadly construed" would also be a good one. Slapping "either ensure this is up to date or it will be summarily moved to draftspace in a month" tags on pages would go a long way towards clearing out the crud. As far as I'm concerned, it's better we have nothing than we have either outdated or badly written content; we shouldn't be hosting pages like Poppy tea. ‑ Iridescent 19:26, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

Some pieces of dated articles are salvageable, so a solution would be a hybrid between “sticky prod, move to draft space” and “WP:BLOWITUP”. That is, after you place a sticky prod and after it moves to draft space, you blow up everything except the irrefutable and well cited basics, keeping a stub or start-class article. This would basically reduce more than half of the current medical FAs to start class articles, a few salvageable paras, which I think is a just fine, even optimal, solution to some very dangerous content (for which I have long advocated we need a better and more prominent disclaimer). When Misplaced Pages has a poor article up, we are being irresponsible, and readers should go elsewhere for the info they seek. (IPad typing, sorry for typos and brevity.) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:33, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

But even before that, why can’t I, as a knowledgeable medical editor, simply go through dated articles and apply a BLP-style hatchet to dated, unsourced, or poorly sourced content, simply removing that content, rather than tagging it for an update that no one will ever do ? Akin to the ability to delete any poorly sourced content in a BLP. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:35, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

No argument from me. As I say somewhere in the morass above, if I were in charge the sole notability criterion would be "using genuine reliable secondary sources, can you write 1000 words about this topic without waffling or padding?". If we applied this scrupulously—and accepted that it would mean deleting some pages on things that "are obviously notable" if the sources don't exist to back that claim up—it would solve about 90% of our problems in a single stroke.; as far as I'm concerned "no article is better than a bad article" is something that should be applied across the whole of Misplaced Pages, not just the medical topics. The reason I say the sticky prod should move pages to draftspace rather than outright deleting them is that crucially draftspace is {{noindex}}ed. As such it would render the pages invisible to search engines, while still keeping them in existence to allow people to work on them without the pressure of "if I don't fix this right away it will be lost altogether" which might lead to people cutting corners. (The cynical but true answer to why can’t I … simply go through dated articles and apply a BLP-style hatchet to dated, unsourced, or poorly sourced content is that it would be a recipe for constant edit-warring. A universally-applied expiry date system would—hopefully—not have the problem of people feeling targeted or harassed.) ‑ Iridescent 19:44, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

Me three on the very important point that there needs to be a BLP-like way to purge anything that misleads readers on health-related matters. As for breaking up en-wiki into a federation of communities, we kind of come around, circularly, to whether Misplaced Pages is in decline, because there might be little value in creating multiple projects that would all be in decline. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:12, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

One way to try to break the stalemate of consensus not scaling upwards is to enable smaller groups of interested editors to make consensus-based decisions in a given area. Having separate wikis for each is one way to do this. Popular areas will likely continue to do fine (Wookieepedia is a very well-maintained resource), but less popular ones will probably suffer, and lose the potential of drawing from a broader, more diverse community. (If it's true that this potential is already lost in a flood of biased editors, then those areas might be a lost cause in any case.) It would be a large change in operating procedure, so there is a risk in a lot of editors opting to leave instead of learning new ways. isaacl (talk) 23:37, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

Well, we already basically do this. This is my mini-rant, but since the GNG is so vaguely written to as to mean whatever you want it to mean WP:OUTCOMES has significantly more practical weight than the GNG does, regardless of what we pretend. What the GNG means in practice for a BLP is different than what it means for a 14th century religious figure is different than what it means for an MMA fighter. That's the easiest example, but Misplaced Pages is a website built on many local consensuses, and when you eventually have enough small decisions about the similar topics, only then will you get enough people to agree with it to actually pass a major policy change.It's also a self-selective thing no matter how big it is: the RfA RfC is a great example of this. A significant portion of the "influential voices" on this project ignored the entire thing or ignored most of the proposal because 1) RfA being broken is not a widely held opinion by people who don't regularly participate on WT:RFA, so why should people who don't think it's broken be part of proposals to "fix" it and 2) Don't care because they're already admins.Because of this, two of the more visible changes (RFC/U-reborn and not defaulting to autopatrolled for admins) from that RfC have exactly nothing to do with RfA and will have zero impact on it, but because the people who thought it was an issue agreed that it was one, and the people who didn't think it was an issue ignored it, they passed. TonyBallioni (talk) 03:17, 13 December 2021 (UTC)

The key difference is that local consensus is not empowered to make final decisions. Because consensus doesn't scale upwards well, there's almost always going to be some significant number of unhappy people in a larger group. The RfA RfC is an example of this. The problem of scale means it's really hard to get everyone who might be interested to participate and engage fully. So the outcomes may or may not have broad consensus support across the entire community. With federated communities, there's a possibility that each individual community can be more satisfied with its own rules than it would be now. (I think the problems of scale with consensus will still come up, but it may be easier to mitigate them in a smaller, more cohesive community. And a smaller community could well decide to use a different decision-making method, like an editorial board.) isaacl (talk) 05:52, 13 December 2021 (UTC)

@TonyBallioni, I haven't seen anything suggesting that Misplaced Pages:Requests for comment/User conduct be reborn. What are you thinking of? WhatamIdoing (talk) 07:32, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

I very much agree we should be more aggressive with outdated articles. In the climate change space this is a major problem too. We're playing into the cards of climate deniers by citing old research that overstates uncertainty with respect to current knowledge. I've started a a cross-wiki review on climate denial, and non-English Wikipedias are far worse, relying almost completely on pre-2008 sourcing. A lot of projects stimulate translation of new articles, rather than re-translation of existing articles.

One of the ideas I had to partially counter this, is to develop tools that display the median source age. (For WP:The Core Contest, I wrote a little offline python script to do this). On a centralised place (like wikidata?), we could put a maximum median source age per article. For instance, if a page on climate change is based on sourced with a median age of 12 years, they should typically be stubbified/draftified. For the biography of an 18th century playwriter, a median age of a 100 years may be acceptable. Femke (talk) 21:12, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

Ew. Don't remind me of updating the climate change related articles. Of all the articles I had to update the past two weeks, Pacific Meridional Mode was by far the most painful. JoJo Eumerus mobile (main talk) 21:40, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

• The idea of a 'sticky prod' for a few other types of articles is not new. However, due to the creation of the BLPPROD having been the subject of what was at the time one of the messiest and most heavily debated issues on en.Wiki, no one has taken the initiative (or risk) of starting the dialogue for other sticky-prods. As RFC go, the size and participation of the BLPPROD discussion(s) has only been surpassed by the two rounds of ACTRIAL discussions that were several years apart. Although both BLPPROD and ACPERM both address the need for quality in articles, the similarity stops there. The reasons why the debates were so drawn out and garnered such huge participation were quite different. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 23:03, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

  Yes, but these aren't normal circumstances when it comes to medical topics. The "retired, hurt feelings" departure of the two most vocal "but we've always done it this way" obstructionists in the wake of WP:ARBMED has created a window of opportunity for a more general "who is our target readership and how do we best serve them?" debate with less chance of degenerating into shouting. ‑ Iridescent 07:10, 13 December 2021 (UTC)

  There doesn't seem to be a great place to put this without seeming to point at any individual. Sorry about that.

  I am uncomfortable with the way people are talking about other editors. I think editors should be free to volunteer as much or as little as they happen to feel like, without people running them down in public for their personal choices. We can disagree about things without being ugly.

  Also, Iri, last month you were trying to convince me that I was irreplaceable, and that wonderful opportunities wouldn't appear if I (or people like me) disappeared. This comment of yours sounds more optimistic about future changes. WhatamIdoing (talk) 07:58, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

  Normally yes, but in this particular case it's impossible to talk about that particular project without talking about specific editors, since it's literally the embodiment of a single person's vision. Discussing medwiki without mentioning James would be like discussing the origins of Misplaced Pages without mentioning Jimmy Wales.

  Nobody is completely irreplaceable, but equally a relatively small number of people carry an undue amount of weight. Sometimes their loss can be a positive in opening up a niche for new people and new ways of thinking; sometimes their loss is devastating and means essential things don't get done. Where on that spectrum any given person falls is probably something on which every single editor who's interacted with them has a different opinion. ‑ Iridescent 17:22, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

Defining “independent”

To be fair, it's also not clear in a lot of cases what "independent" is. (To bang a drum that's been banged many times before, we sometimes place an unhealthy premium on sources meeting our arbitrary rules on which sources are "better", rather than on which sources are actually most useful in a given situation. Back in the early days of Misplaced Pages we knowingly had an incorrect birthdate on Jimmy Wales because an independent article had got it wrong, and nobody would let him correct it because "he had a conflict of interest" and "his birth certificate was a primary source". There are some unique advantages we get from having a resident gang of weirdos with an unhealthy obsession with rules—I can't imagine anyone on Twitter voluntarily going through every page checking the copyright status of images, or a Britannica employee checking every article for the consistent use/non-use of serial commas without expecting to be paid—but there are also some unique drawbacks.) ‑ Iridescent 16:04, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

The Wales thing seems like people confusing independent and reliable; a birth certificate is surely the most reliable source in this situation. My pet problem along these lines is that all scientists debunking the idea of a Cumbre Vieja tsunami are saying "a giant landslide can't create a tsunami" rather than "it is highly improbable that this eruption will cause a tsunami", even though the evidence for the former is fairly unreliable and America-centric whereas the latter is undisputable AFAIK; thus the article Cumbre Vieja tsunami hazard puts major emphasis on the probability point. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 16:34, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

The confusion with Wales's birthdate seems to be a question of "was he born shortly before midnight or not?" A similar thing happened with George Harrison, when Harrison himself announced in the 1990s that the date that all sources and his birth certificate had reported were wrong and he'd actually been born the night before. (It's been largely ignored though). Pawnkingthree (talk) 01:17, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

The confusion with Wales's birthdate is more a question of him being unable to keep his own story straight. Here he is edit-warring to change it to August 7, here he is complaining to the press that August 7 is incorrect, here he is complaining that we give his birthdate as August 8 when it should be August 7. The current version of the article says shortly before midnight on August 7, 1966; however, his birth certificate lists his date of birth as August 8 and cites Britannica as a source, but Wales publicly claims the Britannica entry is wrong about this. Were this Joe Blow from Kokomo, it wouldn't be an issue—we routinely remove exact birthdates from biographies if the subject doesn't want them known and there's no public interest in listing them—but for someone who's made an entire career out of being the public face of "information wants to be free" to be openly lying and obfuscating when it comes to his own information, it's at best unseemly. ‑ Iridescent 07:46, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

Quality and deterioration

We see a lot of deterioration already in maintenance-heavy parts of the encyclopaedia and in some of the behind the scenes areas. As a prominent example, most portals died by undermaintenance when the original creators/maintainers left or lost interest (and most of the remaining ones have been replaced by something heavily automated). Many WikiProjects are moribund and just serve as convenient hubs for useful maintenance listings (article alerts/deletion sorting), not as places where anything much gets organised. In article space, things like the 299 German constituencies do not magically update with every election, but sometimes they go six years and two elections out of date. (We currently have an editor who has diligently updated them all, but should they stop it may again take a few years until they are replaced). The standard response is to add cleanup tags that declare this as somebody else's problem (but may help readers to filter them out as semi-garbage).

At the same time, we have a much greater emphasis on quality for new article now than we had ten years ago. I have some hope that the better sourced stuff written now will look better fifteen years from now than the unsourced crap from fifteen years ago does now. (Incidentally, the "unsourced" backlog is 15 years at the moment, perhaps another example of Misplaced Pages failing already). —Kusma (talk) 23:10, 1 December 2021 (UTC)

Yes and no. The crap coming through now is superficially better than the leftovers from back when it seemed a good idea to copy-paste the 1911 Britannica (of which at the time of writing we still have 11,760), but boy oh boy are we building up a nest of problems for ourselves by not keeping up with the PR crud with a superficial veneer of "sources" that on closer inspection turns out to just be a bunch of reprinted press releases. If Kudpung is still around, he'll probably be able to put it more eloquently than me. (Back in Misplaced Pages Review days, among the insane drivel were some very perceptive predictions from Somey on what Misplaced Pages would evolve into once it passed into its maintenance phase. I always felt we never gave him enough credit for his insights because we—arguably justifiably—dismissed him owing to the crank company he kept. I once seriously proposed that provided we could convince him to sign a binding NDA not to leak sensitive information, he should be given formal observer status on any future variation on WP:ACPD; he had a real knack for spotting where things were likely to go wrong before the rest of us did.) ‑ Iridescent 17:51, 2 December 2021 (UTC)

Of these two positions, I'm more in agreement with Iri's - a lot of the early stuff was/is actually pretty good, but nobody felt the need to provide references - certainly not inline ones. It's not rare for "updating" and adding crap online sources to actually reduce the quality of the article. The EB1911 wasn't that often downright wrong, and sometimes what is now left from an original complete copypaste is just a sentence or two, or even nothing - people hesitate to remove the tag, or check if anything is actually left. It's very persistent in bios of lesser Old Master painters & other artists though. Johnbod (talk) 12:08, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

Many WikiProjects are moribund and just serve as convenient hubs for useful maintenance listings (article alerts/deletion sorting), not as places where anything much gets organised. Even the active wikiprojects (and I have two plenty active talks on my watchlist) are interestingly hollow -- large projects like WPMED used to have tons of subsets and taskforces. Some months back I was looking at the Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Medicine/Medical genetics task force page, wondered who the current active members are, and suddenly realized I am WikiProject Medicine's medical genetics taskforce. (I also note the page is out-of-date enough that the "recently featured" article prominently advertised in an ambox has since been defeatured.) On the EB1911 note, total rips are both concerningly common still and turn up in strange places. In the last GAN backlog drive, I quickfailed Aberdeenshire (historic), which is both predominantly taken from the EB1911 and far substandard in the patches that aren't (either uncited or cited to questionable sources, and poorly integrated with the article/probably better placed in Aberdeenshire proper). Vaticidalprophet 12:21, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

That squares with my experience at Galileo Galilei, where nobody commented on my GA reassessment until Buidhe delisted it today, as well as with the deafening silence at Misplaced Pages:Featured article candidates/Pali-Aike volcanic field/archive1. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 12:25, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

I'm not particularly surprised at Misplaced Pages:Featured article candidates/Pali-Aike volcanic field/archive1. A lot of people hate commenting on the reviews for more technical subjects since they're worried they're just going to look foolish if they misunderstand the specialist language. Plus there's the purely practical matter that we've just come out of Thanksgiving week in the US and are now in the run-up to Christmas, and people are busier than usual. ‑ Iridescent 17:21, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

@Vaticidalprophet, WPMED's task forces were a failed experiment. With the exception of the EMS group, none of them ever seemed to establish a group that was active in the task force and not completely redundant to the main group's talk page. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:44, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

WikiProjects are kind of an interesting beast to me. People will often mention them, as kind of this abstract notion ("you can always go see if anyone at WikiProject Whatever can help with that!" and the like), but it's really hard to see evidence of life at any but the biggest. Today I went through all of the historical newsletters listed in the big template here, and noted their last publication date + number of issues: out of twenty-three newsletters total, there are only eleven active WikiProject newsletters. Yet there are 119 inactive. Most of them have less than a half-dozen issues (and many of them never even released a first issue), but there's a considerable number that had a long history before abruptly ceasing with no warning. My best guess is that these were the work of a couple highly involved people whose departure instantly tanked the publication. I suppose in the halcyon days of 2008 or whatever, it really did seem possible that there'd be enough people to justify (and sustain) something like Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Nickelodeon/SpongeBob SquarePants task force/Newsletter — 11 issues — whereas nowadays WikiProject Television has had fewer than 11 talk page sections in the entire year of 2021. It gets me to wondering, a little, if the problem with WikiProjects might just be that hundreds of them were created, either because of optimistic growth projections or because of an actual extant editor base to support them, for a wide variety of subjects that no longer have the "critical mass" of editors necessary for any kind of communal activity. With animals, for example, we have Cats (3 talk page discussions from this year), Dogs (4), Rodents (3), Cetaceans (1) — not exactly a hopping place to get perspectives and find collaborators. WikiProject Mammals, on the other hand, has 31 talk page sections from 2021: a little under 3 per month is still kind of desolate but it's a pretty noticeable improvement over 0.08 per month. I can't help but think that folding them all into one might give some chance of survival (of course, if the dog or horse or cat lovers found themselves represented in such numbers that they stood a chance of holding together their own WikiProject, they'd be free to do that). jp×g 07:29, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

@JPxG, I'm one of the old hands at Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Council, so of course I have well-developed opinions. IMO merging projects together is a good idea. IMO one of the problems with the endless creation of WikiProjects is that people did not understand that a WikiProject is a group of people. They frequently thought that it was a categorization system ("all the articles about SpongeBob") or had irrational hopes of the Build it and they will come variety. I would cheerfully prohibit the creation of new WikiProjects unless they could prove the existence of a group of participating editors with at least 20 years' combined experience between them.

The process for merging up old WikiProjects is a bit fiddly. First, you need to ask whether the existing remnant would object to being merged (and wait for a month or so to see if you get an answer). Then there's a mess about merging templates and pages. It would probably be worth it for about half of them. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:13, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

Merging Wikiprojects is quite fiddly, and quite hard to get help on. I've been working for awhile to try and upmerge Template:WikiProject Philippine History to be a taskforce template for Template:Wikiproject Tambayan Philippines, but the coding is not obvious. The task force system should provide an easy way to consolidate Wikiprojects without immediate disruption, but a system to do so hasn't developed. There was for example consensus to fold some Wikiprojects into WP:WEATHER in 2020, but it does not seem to have yet happened. CMD (talk) 08:01, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

@Chipmunkdavis, did you already ask for help at Misplaced Pages talk:WikiProject Council? I'm not sure who's active with the banner templates (the banner template is the hardest part) these days. WhatamIdoing (talk) 08:02, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing: I did, in addition to a few other places! It's in

I see you've also already asked for help at Template talk:WPBannerMeta#Merging one banner into another, which was going to be my next suggestion. Hmm... I might have to use my brain today after all. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:41, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

On some occasions, even the dead WikiProjects are worth keeping around. Something like WP:WikiProject London Transport is completely moribund, but still has a useful purpose in that a post to the talkpage will appear on the watchlist of a lot of people interested in the topic so it makes sense for announcements. They can also serve as a ready-made neutral space in which to hold contentious discussions without all the usual look-at-me types who hang around the Village Pumps making uninformed comments. ‑ Iridescent 08:06, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

Only 22 active editors are watching that page. WhatamIdoing (talk) 08:01, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

And I find I'm one of them - anything useful from me in that area is not to be expected, I'm afraid. Johnbod (talk) 15:29, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

It's still 22 (or 21 anyway) more than nothing. Experienced editors know the right people to ask and the right places to get a particular comment seen, but no good faith new editor is going to know who to speak to. WT:LONDON has only 25 active watchers at the time of writing, but there's nowhere else a new editor could have asked a question like this and got an answer. Since these project talk pages take essentially no effort to maintain and occasionally serve a useful purpose, then IMO they should be kept around even if we delete the portals, taskforces and all the other accoutrements of an active wikiproject. ‑ Iridescent 07:34, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

• I’m actually very much ‘around’ because I have to use Misplaced Pages many times a day as a reference work, but I’m trying very hard not be be proactive and to resist even stopping to correct a typo when I see one. I've even taken this talk page, the last vestige of sanity on Misplaced Pages, off my watchlist. Nobody is irreplaceable, but in a volunteer environment even if it is just changing the flowers in the church for mass on Sunday or managing hundreds of other volunteers, if it's something you saw needed doing, everyone is quite happy to sit back and let you do it for ever - you get taken for granted. So when I felt I had done as much as I could for NPP and handed the reins over, it’s probably just a coincidence that it’s been an organized chaos ever since and it just ended up getting me in trouble for continuing to help out.

Nobody ever wanted to realise how important NPP is and they still don't. With over 6 mio articles, the encyclopedia has gone way beyond the point of non return for cleaning it up and radically pruning it of all the crap and nonsense. The 50 or so active registered New Page Reviewers out of the 750 hat collectors can't even handle the daily flow - WP:ACPERM somewhat stemmed the tide but it is already nearly 4 years ago, the spammers and scammers have caught up and it's time to think of something else. Since March last year I just make the occasional comment and add a vote to major RfC and elections because every single vote is important - especially if it means trying to obtain some form of proper Arbcom for the future generations. Those events are rather rare and I'm really only there to rubber neck. When the current ACE is over (God help us when the results are published) I will be seen again a lot less until the next firework show or Framgate. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 01:27, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

I know the feeling; I'm also virtually absent nowadays, other than monitoring my own talkpage and responding to questions.

I agree that we've almost certainly passed the critical point where New Pages Patrol can no longer keep up with the new pages and the combination of Recent Changes patrollers and Cluebot can no longer keep up with vandalism. Moreover those are both backlogs where once they've built up, they'll never be cleared, since reviewing old changes is difficult and thankless. I already said it further up this thread, but it bears repeating—Misplaced Pages is heading for a "flowers growing in the sewers" model, in which we give up any serious attempt at holding back the flood of crap and just concentrate on preserving and improving those parts that we deem worth preserving and improving, and on making it clear to readers which is which. I have a feeling that where we end up will be the article mainspace becoming a de facto draft space, and some kind of beefed-up and much more public-facing assessment process to flag "this is a page that's actually monitored for quality".

It does not escape my irony detector that this is the Nupedia model which failed first time around, but for all our faults we're in much better shape to run an assess-and-flag process now. The Meta:Internet-in-a-Box people are already doing such a "hide the drivel and only display the pages that have actually been checked" exercise for the medical articles, and as far as I know it's yet to cause the world to come to an end. ‑ Iridescent 04:37, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

I've joined the not really here but I was visible enough at one point that for some reason people still listen to what I say club mainly through real life circumstances (all good), and like Kudpung I made a name for myself originally in NPP and by getting ACPERM through.This would be a better discussion over drinks at a bar, but as I'm a few thousand miles away from both of you, here goes: while I agree with both of you we've past various points of no return on quality control; I also think we've somewhat aged to the point where it matters less in practice, even if I'd prefer it was still maintained: in our early phases, having low quality control just to get stuff in was important; you need content to drive views. When we were in our mid-development stage, the quality control began to matter more: if you want to be the default source of knowledge, people have to take you seriously. We've now become the default source of knowledge for the world, which means that we have relatively well developed articles on most of the subjects people care about, and while I'm sure the three of us could think of any number of niche articles that are currently trash that could be developed into something better because there is abundant academic sourcing, their mere existence isn't a threat to our credibility.On the NPP front, this has a corollary: because most of the articles people actually care about already exist, the public isn't going to notice that we have hobbyists creating articles on relatively unknown serial killers for fun. They're also not going to notice the flood of Bollywood advertisements or no-name tech start-ups with paid articles because they're things no one is actively searching for. Our success in becoming trusted has oddly enough become our best defense at staying trusted — no one is looking for the shit articles except WPO and the like to make points.In my view the biggest threat to the project in terms of credibility with the public is the paid stuff, where I'm more with Kudpung than you Iri, but since becoming a CU I've become less intense on it than I used to — mainly because the CU data makes it abundantly clear that it's just a bunch of freelancers doing gigs for the same client and not an Orangemoody-esque type operation anymore. There's really not all that much we can do from a functionary perspective to deal with it at this point. My solution has been for the CU team to wash its hands of it and return it to the "regular" admins as enforcement through existing non-WMF policy since most of the paid article spam is obvious and can be deleted and blocked on those grounds without anything private. Regardless: if the extent of the paid crap became known to the broader public, it could cause a credibility crisis. It hasn't yet because the inner workings of Misplaced Pages are opaque enough despite being completely transparent that it wouldn't be worth a journalists time to figure out when there are more headline grabbing stories. TonyBallioni (talk) 05:41, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

We still have our fair share of incoherent drivel even on the core topics people care about. (Home and Man are both total gibberish but are about as core topic as it gets; we also have gems like Performing arts, Injury, Western Europe, Manufacturing, Human behavior… Misplaced Pages is often a lot better at covering the smaller topics, where it's actually possible to read all the relevant literature, than at high-importance topics like these, or even smaller topics where the story is convoluted enough to make it difficult to give due weight (Spoon, anyone?). ‑ Iridescent 06:26, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

Yes, we agree on that, but oddly enough, I doubt people are actually looking to us for information on those things. It's topics like Lenin and Taylor Swift, to use both of our favourite examples, that we excel at in terms matching public interest with quality content. We do have a lot of niche articles that are phenomenal, but that really isn't where many readers look all that much. It's the narrower topics on specific events/people that are well known that we get good-enough content that also has a lot of page views. I don't really think we're in danger of those types of article deteriorating, which is why we still have credibility with the public. No one's reading articles on 17th century conclaves, much to my dismay... TonyBallioni (talk) 06:41, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

To pull out an example from that list, Manufacturing is getting 35k views a month, so clearly someone is looking at it. (Swift and Lenin both get much, much more -- and I concur more overall with the "Misplaced Pages is big enough to take a lot of hits" model -- but that's not chump change.) That said, the article has also improved quite a bit in the past year due to the return of the Core Contest, which is probably our best bet at getting improvements to those kinds of articles. (Speculation on the level of dysfunction involved in the nth-biggest site on the internet and the canonical modern reference work getting improvement to its core topics primarily through fifteen-odd people competing for a share of £250 once a year is...not invalid.) Vaticidalprophet 06:54, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

The niche topics do sometimes flare up unexpectedly and unpredictably, either because a previously-obscure topic makes the news or because they get mentioned in the media or on a celebrity's social media. All it would take would be an HBO drama set in early 18th-century Rome, and you'd get the pleasure of scraping the Randies off of 1724 papal conclave. (As I've said before, I'm not too concerned about the quality of articles like Taylor Swift and Lenin. If Misplaced Pages shut down tomorrow, readers could find out just as much from whatever took its place at the top of the Google results. It's the less familiar topics where Misplaced Pages is important; to me it's more important that we cover Vice Squad than that we cover The Beatles. It's why I'm not concerned no matter how bad Manufacturing is, since anyone who actually needs to know can find better-quality sources with no difficulty.) ‑ Iridescent 06:58, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

Yes, I actually agree with all that. I suppose my main point is that from a credibility standpoint, we're really not at risk so long as the things that are most regularly viewed are at a sufficient level of quality, which I think they are. So long as we can maintain that, I'm not really all that worried about us returning to the 2005 public perception of the project. Doesn't mean that all the other things you mentioned aren't important, just that we have enough goodwill from Lenin and Taylor Swift to make up for the papal conclave articles that are copy/paste from out of copyright anti-Catholic polemic tracts available for free online and a sprinkling of hobbyist blogs as sources (which is what they were before I gutted most of them 5 years ago...) TonyBallioni (talk) 07:20, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

I think we're on the same page. This is what I mean by "flowers in the sewers"; as long as the things people actually want to read are adequate, we need to stop worrying so much about trying to clean up the torrent of sludge beneath. ‑ Iridescent 07:43, 6 December 2021 (UTC)

Gatekeeping & NPP

Yes, Iri, your spot-on irony is accurate, and I couldn't agree more with TonyBallioni (Hi, Tony, I was kinda wondering where you have got to, you've been rather conspicuous by your absence!). There is even growing corruption within NPP itself (or perhaps the sleuthing is getting slightly better?) WT:NPR has become a dynamic venue since I began it a couple of years ago, but like everywhere else now, it's all talk and little action; their November backlog drive didn't work out as they expected either. Some possible solutions would be to upgrade ACPERM to Extended confirmed, and, based on ORES, to have bots or filters take on more of NPP: automatically declining stubs and/or articles with only one source and tagging stuff flagged as spam or COPYVIO automatically for PROD or CSD. Not to be confused with AfC, but simply a 'Sorry, your submitted article does not yet conform to our minimum criteria for inclusion. Please read the advice on your talk page, then Your first article, create the article in your sandbox, and when it's ready, submit it to AfC for review. There's plenty of help to be had, don't hesitate to ask at the Tea House'

The biggest challenge to all this however, is that there is an excruciating entrenched reluctance by the WMF for years to create a proper landing page for new users. Not to mention the boring Misplaced Pages skin which is about as interesting as the monochrome test card on pre-colour British TV. It's certainly not due to a lack of funds. There is also a huge amount of negative (but possibly unintentional) publicity for Misplaced Pages - do you remember that old episode of Lewis where Supt. Innocent says to Lewis "C'mon, Robbie, if you believe everything you read on Misplaced Pages you'll believe anything. You're a detective, do your own research."

Like Tony says, however, not everyone goes for a swim with the bottom feeders in a sea of effluent, some of the sewage doesn't get noticed, and it's even less searched for. Yes, I guess your right: 'flowers growing in the sewers'. Another problem is that this has now become more the South Asian Misplaced Pages in English and some of it needs forking off, at least into a Bollywood Wiki. BTW, did you read the alarming new demographics stats about Birmingham? Only 25 miles from my home town, oh, and that's where RexxS lives, shame I can't pop in for a pint...

There is a distinct apathy setting in on Misplaced Pages towards governance and maintenance work. I have horror visions of it looking like Tchernobyl, abandoned and overgrown with weeds in a few years time - not exactly what I would want for something I spent the equivalent of 2 years full-time work on as a volunteer. All this drafting of UCOCs and grand plans for the future are only attempts to disguise the fact that everything is far from rosy, and an excuse for the WMF to spend more money on themselves and their friends. Even on The Signpost the editorial team is now almost suffering from burnout, or so it seems, and the periodical is only a shell of its former self. Maintenance work? No one wants to do it. No one clambering to be an admin. A tiny bunch of (mostly) unsuitable candidates for Arbcom, meaning we'll have to put up and shut up with what we can get rather than what we want or what is best for Misplaced Pages, and low turnouts for most other policy debates. Top marks for Barkeep49's arduous RfA reform programme though (at least they are stripping the toolbox of Autopatrolled - ironic really as pointing out a case of that was one of the things that lost me the bit). The successful parts of the reform still won't encourage more candidates to come forward and it won't improve the toxic nature of the process either. Hardly likely anyway with Arbcom's modern trend to line up admins like plastic ducks in a shooting gallery - new admins will be lambs for the slaughter; the malevolent elements of the community are almost certainly being even more encouraged to sift through admins' histories to dig up any and enough dirt to provide us with more sleazy entertainment. I've taken to having the occasional peek at WO. There seems to be a hard core of rather unpleasant people there and what they don't know, they simply make up. Totally immature, hardly surprising most of them are blocked or banned (or still socking away). I dunno why Beeb bothers with the place (or Ritchie333 for that matter). It's simply got Beeb some flack on his re-bid for arb. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 07:40, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

As one of the people running the backlog drive -- and someone who's watched the NPP project over the past year or so -- we were really, really hurt by the loss of a few of our top reviewers. At least, we were hurt numbers-wise. One of the reviewers, who I will not name here, did not exactly have the reputation for doing good reviews, moreso doing a lot of them. While losing them really hurt the backlog, I think it's safe to say the level of quality control they performed was iffy at best.

This brings up a somewhat existential question for the NPP project: can we really trust the reviewers? Sure, everyone says they've read the guidelines -- and they've been vetted -- but it's a difficult task that different people will have different ideas of how to do right.

At this rate, we might have to consider whether it should be required for people to create their first N articles in draft-space (perhaps require ten created in draftspace before they can create in mainspace, then require fifteen more before autopatrolled). Drastic but I don't see how else we get out of this. And creating in draft-space would pressure the iffy-promo articles to be less bad, whereas in NPP they can slip through by virtue of being a total pain to review. Elli (talk | contribs) 08:08, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

The problems with "actually-mandatory draftspace" solutions are manifold. The big issue is that "we don't have enough maintainers" is not an issue solved by putting up more barriers upfront to crossing from 'person who idly fixes a couple typos' to 'Misplaced Pages editor' -- and we are already absolutely full of upfront barriers (like the fact everyone who's been editing for less than a year is assumed to be either a CIR case or a sock). If we want more maintainers, which is an integral half of the "too much to maintain and not enough maintainers" issue, it needs to be much easier to make that jump (and to make the other, first jump of 'person who doesn't edit Misplaced Pages at all' to 'person who makes nonzero edits and doesn't see them reverted on sight'). "Put up more upfront gatekeeping" is a common solution out of desperation, but it's a death spiral, because the people turned off by the upfront gatekeeping don't replenish editors. There's a tie from here to the fact basically every editor cohort since the early 2010s on has had much worse retention than their predecessors. Vaticidalprophet 08:25, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

Fair enough with that, just one more active editor is worth a decent amount of editor effort for the ROI. Where would you find the extra 200 somewhat-active NPPs we need though? (assuming one article per day is a reasonable amount for one to do) Elli (talk | contribs) 08:32, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

Tricky problem, isn't it? I do my best (I'm not going to ping my latest attempted recruit to something this inside-baseball at his current point in Misplaced Pages editing, but he's happily translating a zhwiki article right now). I think there are reasonable places to pick up the slack both in recruitment and in not producing a billion things volunteer editors shouldn't have to deal with. One of the mid-hanging fruit of the latter I've been thinking about lately is a failure in the opposite problem (WMF and WMF-adjacents trying too hard to recruit and falling flat on their face) -- every time the m:Wiki Education Foundation program runs, NPP, DYK, and GAN are all flooded with no-hopers. It...would for various reasons be difficult to convince the people involved to get rid of it...but it makes up such a horribly disproportionate amount of issues when it's in full swing that I really struggle to see that the benefit it offers outweighs the strain it puts on those systems, even before accounting for low-quality edits to existing pages. Vaticidalprophet 08:43, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

Wouldn't that just put more pressure on AfC by keeping the amount of garbage constant and routing it elsewhere? There are about three thousand drafts awaiting review right now -- it seems to me like it might be more effective to screen out garbage by something like an account age or edit threshold for accounts making submissions. jp×g 08:26, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

@JPxG: well, most New Page Patrollers would likely switch to doing AfC. And it's a lot easier to decline crap at AfC than get rid of it at NPP. Elli (talk | contribs) 08:32, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

More gatekeeping has never hurt the content-building, ACPERM proved that outright, especially if one reads this thread from the top where it has been clearly described that all the essential traditional encyclopedic stuff has already been written and is being quietly maintained by true specialists and academics without the shite that populates ANI. No one is interested in the mixtapes Mike is making in his garden shed in Macclesfield.

Like I keep banging my drum: NPP is the most important single process on the en.Wiki, far more important than AfC which is still not an official system of quality control, and it also has its own issues of corruption. What doesn't get treated there can gladly evaporate automatically at G13. We know it, and DGG, WSC, Barkeep49, and Primefac know it, even if there is the occasional rare gem that can be salvaged. There are a few suggestions above, and there is a project for discussing it all at WP:NPPAFC. I could probably clear a lot of the backlog out myself single-handed over the Christmas break, and correctly, and start a well formed RfC argument for changes if I wanted to, but I'm hardly going to bust a gut helping out this time round. FWIW and the thanks I'd get, I'm more likely to end up doing a complete runner like RexxS did 😉 Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 08:52, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

I agree on that (the importance of NPP). Ultimately the entire WMF ecosystem is based on public trust in English Misplaced Pages. I sometimes get the feeling that the WMF don't appreciate that if we get a reputation for being full of PR garbage, the donation streams will dry up and all the shiny new projects will need to be abandoned—our only real asset is our reputation and if we lose it, it will be very difficult to get it back. It would be do-able just about—some kind of sticky prod deal where we ruthlessly delete pages unless someone can provide a reason to keep them, as we did for unsourced BLPs way back before the dawn of time—but I assume I speak for everyone in saying it wouldn't be a fun experience for anyone involved. ‑ Iridescent 18:06, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

More on quality

Part of me wonders if it might be easier to just have two separate queues of article creation (with two separate sets of criteria for submissions): one for companies, bands, TikTokers and entrepreneurs, and one for literally everything else. An article about a historic church or a Roman senator goes to the normal queue (with 50 pending submissions in front of it), and an article about a turnkey, just-in-time provider of scalable solutions and disruptive technology leveraging AI and cyber to provide value-add insights goes to the other queue (with 5,000 pending submissions in front of it). jp×g 09:02, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

I was unironically about to suggest that, yeah. I think our Big Problem is trying to kid ourselves about what the actual inclusion guidelines necessary for Misplaced Pages are -- specifically that we want articles that don't suck, regardless of what Some Guy's Essay says we're supposed to want -- such that our current attempts to shove every square peg into the round hole of 'notability' are mostly just flailing. A companies-and-entrepreneurs stream (whether as a dedicated part of AfC or NPP, a "you need to go through AfC specifically for this", or whatever else) would solve a pretty sizable array of our inflow problems. Vaticidalprophet 09:06, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

I thinks that's all to complicated for the moment. The biggest problem is that there is a lot of talk at NPR but nobody is coordinating it, that's where you need to start. The venue is WP:NPPAFC, and it's time to give Iridescent his talk page back and for me to enjoy the rest of my Sunday (what's left of it) and watch the snooker final. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 09:10, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

If AfC continues to have several thousand drafts and NPP continues to see almost five digit queues, perhaps it's time we discuss broadening our criteria for speedy deletion or increasing the purview of our various notability guidelines. For a technical approach, we could start disallowing the creation of pages that lack an external hyperlink (unless they're redirects) to force (mainly new) editors to at least try to find one source. I'd also not be opposed to raising the permission to create mainspace articles to EC, but then we'd just end up moving the problem to AfC, though as many people have said above, it is a lot easier to kill an article in draftspace (whether that's good or bad is subjective). Anarchyte (talk) 09:21, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

That's all been discussed above (start at the top of the thread), and it's good to see some support for it, but the place to discuss it is at WP:NPPAFC. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 09:54, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

This will send the ironymeter off the scale entirely, but what you're proposing (a second track for pages with a potential COI, which only get moved to mainspace and indexed after they've been reviewed for sourcing and neutrality) is pretty much exactly the MyWikiBiz proposal of 2006, which led to sitebans flying around like confetti and ill-feeling that still hasn't fully dissipated 15 years on. I'd support it, but as long as Jimmy Wales is on the board you can guarantee the WMF will find a pretext to veto it; admitting he was wrong is not something Jimmy handles well. ‑ Iridescent 17:47, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

I think many of the NPP and AfC reviewers do work on two streams--the most likely articles and the worst first, and then all the mediocre. But I am one of the very few people looking at AfCs about to be deleted , and I find I can rescue perhaps 5 to 10% of them. That is, I can mark them for rescue--I can't myself fix more than a few or I would never keep up. But I do look at every article on an academic or possibly notable organization or general topic--if I can understand it. Nothing important in the fields I look at is going to get lost by expiring G13s while I'm still able to do it. I don't like our concept of notability, as I've been saying for years, but I know how to work around it.

I emphatically do not think our quality is deteriorating--most of the existing junky promotional articles are the old ones; most of the weakly sourced bios have been here for years; most of the coterie POV general articles were started very early on. I think this is due to 3 factors--fewer volunteers come here nowadays without the intent of doing some actual work; we are much better at detecting coi and promotionalism ; and, most important, an immensely greater amount of material is available on the internet--and even paywalled material from many sources through the WP Library. DGG ( talk ) 10:37, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

Agree with DGG that net quality is still rising. But I'm curious about the current state of the Wiki. I hear people talking about defunct portals, and Misplaced Pages:RFA by month shows RFA currently as quiet as it has ever been. But Misplaced Pages:Time_Between_Edits shows that we are still above the editing levels of the late 2014/early 2015 minima. I have to wonder where all that activity is. Do we just have loads of people quietly beavering away in mainspace and sticking close to their subject? Or just a growing proportion of editors with a COI focusing on the articles about their school, business or charity and otherwise keeping their heads down? To respond to Vatricidal and Kudpung, there is a big difference between retention of editors who start by creating new articles and those who start by improving an existing article. Twas always thus, the minority who start by wanting to add an article get short shrift, and though I'm pretty sure a high proprtion of them are spammers or have a broader view of notability than we accept, I do believe we lose some good newbies in draftspace. The bigger picture re editor recruitment and retention has been the shift of a large proportion of internet usage to smartphones and tablets, and the WMF decision to optimise the mobile platform for readers rather than editors. I know there has been some work done to make the mobile platform less editor unfriendly, but the days when mobile was less important than PC access are long gone. In the US Mobile access to websites is now twice that of PCs. It doesn't take more than a cursory look at recentchanges to show that we are largely a PC based editing community with mobile edits a small minority. I don't know to what extent the WMF is keeping an eye on such things, but if total editing volumes dropped back towards levels last seen in the 2014 minima I would hope I wouldn't be the only one sounding the alarm. Whether its adding a tablet view to the mobile and desktop ones, or making the mobile view more editor friendly, or using fundraising style banners to recruit volunteers to do some editing, there are ways in which we could turn more of our readers into editors. And if the community started to appear to shrink again we'd need to. ϢereSpielChequers 11:22, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

I'd be very surprised if we don't see a rapid drop fairly soon. The editor levels and editing activity levels have been artifically inflated since March 2020 for obvious reasons; at some point, workplaces and schools will be fully reopened and we're not going to have the free gift of people bored at home with nothing better to do. (If you—or WAID—or anyone else with the power to get changes through the WMF's sclerotic bureaucracy—wants a fairly easy free hit, just reconfigure {{citation needed}} et al to display a "this is potentially problematic, click here to fix it" popup which when clicked shows a mini-tutorial on how to add a reference, format text, add an additional statement, or whatever else the "problem" template in question indicates needs fixing.) ‑ Iridescent 17:47, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

I think Ed already built what you want. See phab:T211243. When they finally solve the two-parser problem, I believe it will be possible to offer this tool in read mode. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:35, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

That's pretty much what I mean, although what I envisage is that the "clink here to fix it" is displayed by default in read mode, rather than the reader having to click on the to bring up a dialog box. ‑ Iridescent 08:06, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

Election results

Looks like the results are in. Risker made it, I don't know anyone else in that group and the only one that stands out is Li-Yun Lin and that's only because of the "Jamie" before it. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 20:36, 1 November 2021 (UTC)

Thanks - actually (after chance conversations with two people in the know on these matters) I think I voted for all of these except my compatriot (among my 17-odd votes). Wierd election - only 1018 votes, and one winner (Ravan) only got 20 votes in the first round. The 2nd round was a damp squib, as none of the 3 people eliminated had received any votes at all.... Risker was ahead from the start with 59 votes, and had 101.65 by the time she was elected in round 35. Now where's my swingometer... Johnbod (talk) 21:34, 1 November 2021 (UTC)

I'm struck by how few votes there were (even allowing that the numbers are first-ranks). It also looks like (though I only looked quickly) that some of the appointed members were eliminated from the voting pretty early. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:29, 1 November 2021 (UTC)

Other than Risker I've only heard of one of those who made it, and that's someone I'd have put a "strong oppose" next to were such a thing possible. The fact that the WMF announcement itself seems to carry the implication that anyone wanting to engage with this process be obliged to join Telegram does not exactly fill me with confidence. ‑ Iridescent 06:35, 2 November 2021 (UTC)

I've run across most of the community-elected folks, and I think it will make a reasonably balanced group. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:27, 2 November 2021 (UTC)

Oh dear. It took me a bit too long to realise that this was not an ArbCom election, but something else. I think I need to re-lurk again (and resist the temptation to read any other thread on your talk page!)... Carcharoth (talk) 02:55, 11 November 2021 (UTC)

I wouldn't have known any of this was going on were it not for this thread, and I still don't understand exactly what this election was about or how it worked. Ultimately, however the WMF like to bleat about every project being equal, the reality of the WMF system is that English Misplaced Pages is the sun, German, French and Spanish Wikipedias are the planets, and all the other projects are asteroids. Ultimately, although they may nominally be in charge the only rights the WMF has over English Misplaced Pages are the right to be consulted, the right to encourage, and the right to warn, given that we have the clout to ignore anything with which we disagree. As such, it doesn't really make sense to think of the four big wikis as "parts of the WMF" in the same way that Wikispecies or Frisian Misplaced Pages are. ‑ Iridescent 07:53, 11 November 2021 (UTC)

... And Commons is a black hole. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:56, 11 November 2021 (UTC)

For the record

Those with an interest in WMUK (either pro or anti) probably ought to be aware of Misplaced Pages:Conflict of interest/Noticeboard#"One rule for them another for us" at Wikimedia UK. (My personal view, FWIW, is that this looks like a series of good-faith mistakes rather than any kind of smoking gun, although all those thought the sourcing here was acceptable for a BLP should certainly have known better; if I'd seen a page like that created by a new account I'd have flagged that account as a probable paid editor without blinking.) ‑ Iridescent 07:18, 20 November 2021 (UTC)

I lack entirely any good faith anymore when it comes to *organisations*. But that shouldnt be surprising to anyone. Only in death does duty end (talk) 14:08, 22 November 2021 (UTC)

If it had been one of the usual suspects I'd agree with you, but this looks like straightforward cockup rather than conspiracy. The editor in question has only 300-ish edits across the entire WMF ecosystem and only 55 to English Misplaced Pages; it seems completely plausible to me that someone whose only significant experience with WMF sites has been on non-public-facing sites like Meta and WMUK's wiki—and who's presumably watched people like Fae and Mabbett getting away with worse for years—wouldn't appreciate just how bright a red line COI now is. ‑ Iridescent 17:50, 22 November 2021 (UTC)

The first part is correct, I think, but I very much doubt she's heard of Fae, and very possibly not Mabbett either, & that she's put in any time at all watching anything on English Misplaced Pages. Most of her few edits to articlespace are I imagine responses to the subjects of bios complaining to WMUK about this or that. Johnbod (talk) 18:09, 22 November 2021 (UTC)

Given that she's obviously read the "Controversies" section, I'm fairly confident she's heard of Fae… (For what it's worth, I very much doubt … that she's put in any time at all watching anything on English Misplaced Pages is in my opinion not exactly a testimonial. Her job description includes "Ensure appropriate consultation and engagement with volunteers and the Wikimedia community in the development of the charity's work"; for anyone at a local Wikimedia chapter, let alone the CEO, not to keep at least a weather eye on their language's Misplaced Pages seems to me akin to appointing someone to the board of a TV network who doesn't own a television.) ‑ Iridescent 18:51, 22 November 2021 (UTC)

It wasn't intended as a testimonial. Rupert Murdoch has apparently never watched a tv programme in his life - otherwise an unlikely comparison. Calouste Gulbenkian, holidaying in the Med, once asked the captain of his yacht what that very large and very very long ship in the distance was ..... Johnbod (talk) 19:14, 22 November 2021 (UTC)

FWIW, "Rupert Murdoch doesn't watch television" is an urban myth; he quite regularly comments on shows he's watched. (If nothing else he's certainly watched The Rise of the Murdoch Dynasty, given that he's spent the better part of the last year complaining about it.) Indeed, if this FT article is to be believed (and the FT is usually absolutely scrupulous about fact-checking since even their most trivial comments can potentially affect markets), the reason Britain has the dubious prospect of talkTV (British TV channel) to look forward to is his being stuck in lockdown with nothing on TV he wanted to watch. Quite how he made the leap from "there's nothing worth watching on at the moment" to "what the world needs is more of Piers Morgan", I leave as an exercise for the reader. ‑ Iridescent 05:25, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

Say what you like about Piers (and I do regularly, I loathe the man) he does create watchable television on a fairly regular basis. But I am in the minority of people who actively try to watch people with opposing views because I already know what my 'side' thinks about an issue. Only in death does duty end (talk) 10:44, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

He does, but for the wrong reasons. Just getting viewers isn't enough, advertisers want to know why people are watching; not many companies want "petulant attention-seeker" to be a value customers associate with their product. (I'm not sure actively try to watch people with opposing views because I already know what my 'side' thinks about an issue really relates to Piers Morgan. He doesn't really have a 'side' as such other than whichever way he thinks the wind is blowing.) ‑ Iridescent 07:48, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

Given your previous comments on the topic

... you might be interested in Misplaced Pages:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia 1.0. The result is a foregone conclusion, obviously. Graham87 11:04, 13 October 2021 (UTC)

Commented there. As you say, anything I say won't affect the outcome, but if it eventually leads to our ditching the ridiculous S-S-C-B-G-A-F "quality" scale and its equally obnoxious sibling "low,, medium, high and top importance"—both themselves foisted on us by WP1.0 "because we need to know what to include on the different releases"—the discussion will be worthwhile. ‑ Iridescent 15:44, 13 October 2021 (UTC)

I wonder if it would be possible to remove the importance ratings from the WikiProject templates and leave it to each project to make/maintain their own ratings tables. JoJo Eumerus mobile (main talk) 21:26, 16 October 2021 (UTC)

It's certainly technically possible—the importance ratings are disabled on Visual Arts articles, for instance, and the world has not come to an end. Given the number of people who are psychologically invested in article assessment and who get a buzz from feeling themselves the arbiters of what's important (check out Misplaced Pages talk:Vital articles and its subpages if you ever want to see Misplaced Pages at its most insane), I'm fairly certain we'll never get consensus to deprecate article importance rating, even though as you presumably know, I think "importance" is a meaningless concept in the Misplaced Pages context since the important article is whatever contains the information you're looking for. (Despite all the hundreds and often thousands of incoming links they each have, none of the supposed "ten most important articles on Misplaced Pages" averages more than 10,000 views per day, and at the time of writing three of them fail the 'Tarrare Test'. Our most-read 'Vital Article', Earth, gets readership figures 1⁄3 those of Scarlett Johansson and 1⁄8 those of Microsoft Office.)

What we could potentially get consensus for is to get rid of the concept of an importance scale and just have "key topic"/"other". I still think this would be a pointless distinction for all my usual "no such thing as importance" reasons, but it would be a good first step. It wouldn't get rid of the arguments around marginal cases, the dichotomy between "what specialists in a given field consider important" and "what the general public have heard of in that field", or the argument over whether "importance" on English Misplaced Pages should reflect the topic's importance to en-wiki's readership or to the world more generally; but, if it got rid of the concept of "low importance", it would be worthwhile. ‑ Iridescent 05:59, 17 October 2021 (UTC)

Ah yes, "key" topics. Even then the distinction might be somewhat contentious? Martinevans123 (talk) 09:21, 17 October 2021 (UTC)

To be pedantic, the importance ratings aren't "disabled" on Visual Arts articles, they are just deprecated & the categories for them don't exist. The usual suspects often add them. Johnbod (talk) 17:43, 17 October 2021 (UTC)

MILHIST and WikiProject Biography also avoid the priority/importance rating. I believe that in both cases, this was due to editors sensibly realizing that reasonable people would never agree on the correct rating for many subjects. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:41, 19 October 2021 (UTC)

One of the most surreal disputes I ever saw was in the early days when Wikiprojects actually meant something, and someone tried to make Edgar Allan Poe high-importance on every Wikiproject that covered him. The argument was along the lines of:

Why have you reverted this to low-importance?

Because he's of low importance to WikiProject London.

But he's one of the most important American writers!

Exactly, he did all his writing in America, he left London when he was 11.

Well why is he of interest to WikiProject London?

Because he lived in Stoke Newington until he was 11.

Then if he's a Londoner he's one of London's most important writers, I'm changing it back.

Repeat to fade

If I recall correctly, in the end someone just quietly removed the {{WPLondon}} tag. (Personally I'd question whether Poe is actually significant at all—he probably even beats Joyce and Orwell for the ratio of "people who have a vague idea who he is" to "people who've actually managed to read more than five pages of anything he wrote"—but that's someone else's problem.) ‑ Iridescent 17:04, 20 October 2021 (UTC)

• Some articles are more important than other articles. The folks at Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Lewis (baseball) (2nd nomination) are probably going to determine that there isn't consensus for that statement, but I will stand by it. User:力 (power~enwiki, π, ν) 22:45, 20 October 2021 (UTC)

  Well, importance is a separate issue from notability. My own view is if there is enough on a subject to get it to FA, then it's probably worth keeping. My first reaction on seeing that AfD was "who would nominate a Featured Article for deletion?", before I realized it was the main author of the FA - apparently as a reaction to a similar article being redirected. Not quite sure what point they are making but it could backfire. Pawnkingthree (talk) 00:03, 21 October 2021 (UTC)

  "Importance" and "Notability" aren't synonyms; if I'm writing a paper on the 19th-century Players' League, Lewis (baseball) is going to be more important to me than Babe Ruth even though the notability level is different. If one takes readership as a rough approximation of importance, the non-spider readership level for Lewis actually compares quite favorably to a sampling of other niche FAs (the peculiar date range I'm using is just to avoid distorting effects from mainpage appearances or from the AFD, I'm not cherry-picking). There are precedents for FAs being taken to AFD—2012 tour of She Has a Name was probably the most rancorous, while back before the dawn of time I was the AFD nominator for Nude celebrities on the Internet. In general I'm firmly in the "if you can write 1000 reliably-sourced words that are specifically about the topic rather than fluff or background, then that topic is notable in our terms" camp (with an additional dose of "if there's a subject-specific Misplaced Pages rule that all articles on a particular topic be stand-alone, the article shouldn't be penalized for being short if there's genuinely nothing more to say about the topic.) ‑ Iridescent 07:18, 21 October 2021 (UTC)

  Heh, just looked more closely at Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Nude celebrities on the Internet (2nd nomination). All the people at Misplaced Pages talk:Arbitration Committee/Noticeboard#Eostrix Blocked coming out with prim variations on "we haven't had an admin-sock since Archtransit" ought to look over the histories of some of the participants there—with the benefit of hindsight, it looks like somebody set off the Sockpuppet Batsignal. ‑ Iridescent 07:37, 22 October 2021 (UTC)

  I am glad I am not the only one whose sock flag went up at that. Only in death does duty end (talk) 10:57, 22 October 2021 (UTC)

  An RFA candidate who hasn't been involved in any kind of dispute tends to set the sock flag in me off immediately. Even the most saintly person is going to be involved in an argument of some kind just by virtue of the nature of any website with 4000+ active participants, even if they're genuinely confining themselves to the most mundane maintenance tasks; the only people who never get involved in any kind of dispute are people who are intentionally keeping their head down. It's the "internal processes" equivalent of the I don't think editors who haven't had the experience of putting large amounts of work into an article, and/or defending their work against well-intentioned but wrong "improvements" or especially AFD, are in a position to empathise with quite why editors get so angry when their work's deleted and/or The Wrong Version gets protected, and I don't support users who don't add content to the mainspace being given powers to overrule those who do boilerplate with which I used to irritate people by cut-and-pasting at RFAs; someone who's not been involved in an argument is either someone who's deliberately evading scrutiny, or they're someone who has no experience of Misplaced Pages's internal processes and shouldn't be trusted with any kind of advanced permission. It's totally counter-intuitive to say "people shouldn't be trusted unless they've caused a problem", but it's nonetheless true. ‑ Iridescent 16:15, 22 October 2021 (UTC)

  It takes a thief. EEng 20:20, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

  Well, I think there's some truth to this in another aspect as well: it's important for the community to understand how a potential sysop responds to conflict, both in cases where it is and isn't through their own "fault". Knowing how a potential sysop is able to deal with conflict (are they amicable about it, do they let themselves get pushed around, do they try to dominate the situation, etc.) is very important when it comes to someone whose job very often necessitates some type of dispute resolution, regardless of what administrative areas one decides to work in. It's also of course important to know how they handle a situation where it seems they're the instigator or the one at fault: do they recognize their mistake, own up to it, and commit themselves to not making that mistake in the future? Or do they shift the blame to avoid looking bad? Even though not being involved in constant conflict is prooobably a good thing in a sysop, it's still critical to know how they'll handle conflict when they inevitably encounter it. Perryprog (talk) 16:42, 22 October 2021 (UTC)

  As a victim of Icewhiz (Iri, I think you're aware of the general context here, but if not feel free to poke me via email), I'm certainly glad this got caught. That being said Edgar181 almost certainly has another admin account that we'll never catch. It was very clear he was intentionally editing in a way that there would be other accounts CU could never catch, and without using proxies. There's more admin socks out there. Despite what some think, RfA isn't particularly hard to pass if you're at all familiar with how the community works and are willing to dedicate 2-3 hours a day to the project for a year, which the type of people who admin sock would be. TonyBallioni (talk) 04:20, 23 October 2021 (UTC)

  There are certainly other adminsocks out there. As I think I've said to you privately before, there's one admin I'm fairly certain is a good-hand sock but in the absence of actual beyond-reasonable-doubt proof can't do anything other than monitor. Assuming some are better at hiding, I'm certain there are others.

  That said, as I said way-back-when during the furore over Law, in a lot of these cases it doesn't really matter. Icewhiz is an unusual case in trying to get advanced permissions so he can use them to skew Misplaced Pages politically. Most socks are just people who've done something stupid, been blocked for it, and would rather sneak back under a new name than go through the ritual self-flagellation of the Standard Offer after which their reputation will be permanently tainted by the way Misplaced Pages handles block logs—in these cases, I don't see any problem with our turning a blind eye as long as the new account behaves itself even if the new account runs at RFA. ‑ Iridescent 05:18, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

  Ah, Iri. I seem to remember that one of the "debates" on my own RFA all those years ago was that I was either a really good admin candidate because I worked in contentious areas, or I was a troublemaker because I worked in contentious areas. (I also remember you changed from oppose to neutral to support during the course of that RFA.) So I do tend to agree with you that someone who hasn't really dealt with tough stuff anywhere is far less likely to be a good admin than someone who's dealt with some challenges. Risker (talk) 04:28, 23 October 2021 (UTC)

• Do you think a different system might be better than scrapping it altogether? Or at least more likely to obtain consensus. e.g. dawiki has w:da:Misplaced Pages:Lovende artikler before "good article" status, described as Promising articles are articles that Misplaced Pages users improve in order to get them ready for nomination as good articles. (according to Google Translate, anyway), and presumably everything that isn't FA/GA/'promising' is just marked as 'Unrated'. Basically wondering if there exists a hypothetical grouping that might provide for actionable article improvement, or if you think the only good idea is to scrap it all entirely? ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 13:04, 8 November 2021 (UTC)

Assessment streamlining

I doubt that what Danish Misplaced Pages does would be viable on Misplaced Pages. Officially, the structure exists here as well—the "formally assessed" article classes aren't just FA and GA, but A-class is there as an intermediate stage between the two.

Article statistics as of 11 November 2021
Quality	Importance
	Top	High	Mid	Low	???	Total
FA	1,410	2,248	2,179	1,557	166	7,560
FL	164	604	670	619	107	2,164
A	302	623	739	498	90	2,252
GA	2,763	6,412	12,827	15,746	1,646	39,394
B	14,608	28,313	45,446	46,957	17,209	152,533
C	14,449	45,185	109,694	204,871	69,705	443,904
Start	18,678	88,203	379,086	1,261,587	378,105	2,125,659
Stub	4,430	32,470	277,404	2,525,850	847,868	3,688,022
List	4,360	15,056	45,852	148,059	77,478	290,805
Assessed	61,164	219,114	873,897	4,205,744	1,392,374	6,752,293
Unassessed	116	479	1,486	15,184	409,719	426,984
Total	61,280	219,593	875,383	4,220,928	1,802,093	7,179,277

In practice, people just ignore the intermediate A-class (I've posted the full statistics as of today courtesy of our friends at WP:1.0; note just how moribund A-class is), and its main use is by WP:MILHIST as a parking area for pages they're preparing to take to FAC.

If I were building the assessment system from scratch, the categories would be:

1. Comprehensive, neutral, reliably sourced, and comprehensible by a bright 14-year-old with no prior knowledge of the topic;
2. Neutral, reliably sourced and comprehensible but not comprehensive;
3. Neutral, reliably sourced and comprehensive but not comprehensible;
4. Untrustworthy.

This realistically isn't going to happen. Too many people have too much invested in the existing setup (those 150,000+ B-class articles all have authors who are proud their work was recognized and will sulk if the recognition is taken away). Besides, even assessing the existing FA/A/GA articles against any new criteria would be a herculean timesink—Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Good articles/Project quality task force/Sweeps was one of the most time-consuming projects ever untertaken on Misplaced Pages, and Misplaced Pages was a lot smaller then. (The sweep took 30 months to check and assess 2810 pages. We currently have 50,000 FA/A/GA articles, coupled with a smaller base of editors who are willing to put in the thankless work of telling people their precious article no longer measures up.)

If we're going to restructure the system, it would need to be in baby steps. I'd suggest that deprecating C-class would be the obvious place to start, followed by a new set of criteria for future FA/A/GA based on my A–D scale above, leaving the existing FAs and GAs as a legacy group which we can sort out over the long term (the existing A-class is small enough that we could realistically reassess everything in it against any new criteria). ‑ Iridescent 07:38, 11 November 2021 (UTC)

If you are serious in suggesting and trying to get consensus for such reform I would be interested to help with brainstorming and preparation. I will not do it on my own though.--Ymblanter (talk) 09:55, 12 November 2021 (UTC)

At an absolute minimum, it would need all of @FAC coordinators: to agree that there was a problem, since the FA reviewers realistically represent a disproportionate number of the people with the requisite skills to carry out the necessary reassessments. While I personally would support a reform I doubt there would be the will to carry it out. Misplaced Pages doesn't handle cultural change well at the best of times—as I've said before, our cultural conservatism and risk-aversion is probably the reason for our longevity and in general a refusal to change to suit passing fads is A Good Thing, but oh boy does it make it hard to get necessary change accepted. And this isn't the best of times; as per my comments above, a lot of people are wedded to the existing cumbersome WP:1.0 scale because the micro-gradations between the current seven different "quality" rankings give plenty of opportunities for people to give meaningless awards to each other, and although the awards are meaningless it doesn't mean people won't be hurt and offended if we start taking their "Congratulations, you raised this article from C-class to B-class!" userboxes away. What we'd really need is to turn Meta:Universal Article Quality Scale blue and get the WMF behind it, but I can't see that happening any time soon. ‑ Iridescent 16:40, 12 November 2021 (UTC)

Pinged here as a FAC coord. Generally agree that the article assessments below GA- or A-class are a waste of time and poor indication of the quality of an article. So I'd be in favor of scrapping them. I know the MILHIST coordinators require independent editors to assess articles to B-class and have specific criteria for each status, but that simply doesn't exist for most wikiprojects. A-class is awarded after a peer-review process so I oppose removing it or regrading as a different class.

IMO, the scheme proposed by Iridescent above is essentially equivalent to B = current GA class and A = current A or Featured. (t · c) buidhe 17:01, 12 November 2021 (UTC)

Also pinged here as FAC coord. I'd go with 5 classes, instead of 4. GA and FA should continue to have equivalents. A-class is used as a project-specific rating, I don't think it should be eliminated without a signoff from the projects that use it. I know as a MILHIST coordinator we don't consider MILHIST A-class to be a project-wide rating, just use it as a rating for the project only. And then there's the two levels of below b-class - the difference between Battle of Cotton Plant and Skirmish at Albany, Missouri is fairly obvious and should probably be reflected in assessment ratings. As to the weight of FA reviewers that could be thrown into reassessment, FAC processes around 30-35 per month recently, and FAR maybe 10-15. There's an ongoing project to reassess older FAs to make sure they still meet FA criteria, I think the activity there would be a good model for what to expect for FA re-reviewing. It can be pretty hard at time to get people to shift energy and time from FAC and creating new FAs to maintaining/assessing older FAs. Hog Farm _Talk 17:10, 12 November 2021 (UTC)

Iri, you are imo correct in doubting "there would be the will to carry it out", if only because of the colossal and wasteful amount of work required to make any changes. Personally I see very little evidence of a sub-culture with "plenty of opportunities for people to give meaningless awards to each other, and although the awards are meaningless it doesn't mean people won't be hurt and offended if we start taking their "Congratulations, you raised this article from C-class to B-class!" userboxes away." Currently the somewhat similar Misplaced Pages:Take the lead! contest to supply/improve lead sections is running, for only the 2nd time in 5 years, which I see as rather useful, not least in providing me with modest amounts of WMUK gold to buy books with. There are about 100 entries after 12/30 days, & the latest rules make it a very convenient way for people to get some monetary compensation for the immense harms that WMUK & WMF have apparently done them (to judge by the regular complaints here & elsewhere). Just saying. Otherwise, the relatively few editors still attempting mass-grading are mostly wasting their time, but as far as I can see in a solitary and unthanked way. I don't myself find the current system too terrible - the main problem is the grading is usually too low, and usually just based on length. Let's face it, almost no readers are even aware of the system, and not that many editors take notice of it either. Johnbod (talk) 18:59, 12 November 2021 (UTC)

I take it from a very convenient way for people to get some monetary compensation that they've finally dispensed with the fiction that their payments to editors are "to buy materials which will remain the property of WMUK"?

I doubt it. Like their £200 awards to Misplaced Pages:The Core Contest, when it happens, these are specifically prize pots for the judges of these contests to hand out to the winners, which they've been doing since 2012, at a cumulative cost of under £2,000 I think. How many of the other type do they actually hand out? Not many I think. Johnbod (talk) 17:28, 13 November 2021 (UTC)

Mass assessment at the lower ends of the scale is very much still going on. Over the past six months, the change has been:

FA:	+217
A-class:	+122
GA:	+1,528
B-class:	+5,948
C-class:	+29,391
Start:	+79,950
Stub:	+60,080.

Whether it's actively damaging is a matter of opinion (although watchlist any of the noticeboards to which we regularly direct newcomers, and you'll see a steady stream of upset people complaining about what they see as arbitrary assessments), but the mass assessments—particularly between C, Start and Stub—are very much still with us. (Those figures obviously only capture absolute change; the actual scale of assessment and reassessment will obviously be higher.) Even if we're extremely generous in saying that an editor can judge within one minute whether any given page is Stub, Start, C or B class, add the appropriate templates to the talkpage, and move on to the next article, and that editors can devote eight hours a day to Misplaced Pages, that's a minimum of 720 editor-days lost every year to something that has no effect on anything—neither readers, reusers, nor other editors care in the slightest whether a given page is B or C class.

To be absolutely clear, I'm not suggesting either an abolition of article assessment or the mass regrading of existing articles. What I'm suggesting is a streamlined structure with a clearer delineation between WP:WIAGA and WP:WIAFA and with the B, C, Start and Stub classes merged into a single "has a serious issue of some kind" class for future article assessment. The ratings on existing articles would remain using the legacy system until they happened to he reassessed anyway against the new system as part of the continuing ongoing reappraisal that (in theory at least) happens over time to every page on Misplaced Pages. It would be no different to when an educational system changes its award structure—e.g. when England restructured the General Certificate of Secondary Education a couple of years ago to a 1–9 scale, they didn't need to reassess the qualifications of everyone with qualifications on the former scale. ‑ Iridescent 17:14, 13 November 2021 (UTC)

Switch-based assessment

In our current assessment scheme, essentially only FA and GA have gone through in-depth checks for things like comprehensiveness and sourcing quality. Almost everything else just has had quick drive-by checks (or even just application of mw:ORES via WP:RATER) that probably were done faster than in one minute, and without reading the article. Anyway, your proposed system isn't very far from dropping the manually-assigned classes and replacing them by something akin to the B-Class criteria, which in some assessment templates (e.g. Template:WikiProject Germany) are checked by individual switches that then automatically decide whether the article is classified as B-Class or not. In theory, this tells people not only whether their article is reasonably ok (that's what "B-Class" is supposed to mean) or not, but also why it isn't reasonably ok. In practice, this doesn't work, because this is far too complicated for the tiny difference between C and B, and because the parameters are stupidly named and the "what needs to be done" isn't displayed prominently on the assessment template. Part of that is connected to the historical error of having the assessment inside the WikiProject templates.

Anyway, back to your suggestion: perhaps having a few criteria-based switches (comprehensive:y/n/?, neutral:y/n/?, sourced: y/n/?, readable:y/n/?) and then choosing a "class" depending on the combination of chosen switches could improve our current system, and it wouldn't be too hard to do technically (main difficulty is getting people who will actually dare to assess comprehensiveness and neutrality). Actually, assuming that article assessment is good for something, changing the system would be a way to fix the issue that currently a large percentage of assessments have not been checked for ten years. But whether improving the system is worth it depends on what it is supposed to be used for (other than giving you a warm fuzzy feeling when you look at your top edited pages). —Kusma (talk) 20:28, 13 November 2021 (UTC)

It's largely fallen out of favor nowadays, but I always really liked the old {{GAList}} template. Its format as a series of pass/fail questions made it much easier to have "here's what you're doing right, here's where you're going wrong" conversations with far less risk of the article writers feeling we were either attacking their hard work or impugning their integrity. It also helped to focus reviewers' minds on what they were actually supposed to be checking—a lot of reviewers have a tendency to forget that they're supposed to be checking against a specific list of criteria, not "does this comply with my particular stylistic hobby-horse?". A rollout of similar processes across all the "article quality" review processes wouldn't entirely replace the human element—there would still be scope for "is there a legitimate reason to use non-standard formatting?", "what do we mean by 'thorough and representative survey of the relevant literature' exactly?, and "Under what circumstances is this particular source reliable?" arguments—but IMO rolling out a checklist approach everywhere would make things move more quickly, would go some way towards getting rid of the arbitrariness problem, and would make the tempers considerably less frayed. ‑ Iridescent 06:49, 20 November 2021 (UTC)

It's been quite a while since I've done a GA review, but I am sure I used {{GAList}} and some people who have reviewed my own nominations also do. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 10:24, 20 November 2021 (UTC)

Oh, there are certainly reviewers who still use it (I said "largely fallen out of favor", not "totally"). That said, if you go to Misplaced Pages:Good article nominations and do a ctrl-f for discuss review (which will give you those reviews that are currently active), it's clear that:

1. Those reviewers that are still using {{GAList}}, or some other variation on the checklist approach, are very much in the minority;
2. Quite a few reviewers are serving up inappropriately-long essays as reviews rather than straightforward "here's what needs to change, here's why" bullet-points;
3. A lot of reviewers are raising issues in GA reviews that aren't actually part of the GA criteria, and are treating the process as an opportunity to push their personal preferences (akin to a mechanic refusing to pass your car's roadworthiness test because they don't like the color of the seat covers); and most importantly
4. Looking at the reviewers engaging in (b) and (c) and treating the review process either as an opportunity to showboat about How Damn Clever they are, or as an opportunity to push good-faith newcomers into complying with the reviewer's own personal prejudices and preferences, I'm seeing way too many people who should know better.

Apologies for the rant. The way in which the GA process—which was supposed to be a simplified process which could ease editors into the concept of quality assurance within a collaborative environment, and allow articles to have relatively quick and painless compliance checks without the negativity and nitpicking of FA reviews—has begun to degenerate into a bully pulpit for the GA project's self-appointed owners to push their personal prejudices is one of my major pet peeves. It shouldn't be quicker and easier for an article to pass FAC than GAN, but in my experience that's getting to be the case far too often nowadays. ‑ Iridescent 04:51, 21 November 2021 (UTC)

Where's your "how to write an FA" thing?

If it's easy. Cheers, Johnbod (talk) 01:40, 27 October 2021 (UTC)

I can knock up an essay if you want, but it will probably largely be User:Giano/A fool's guide to writing a featured article updated to reflect the fact that Misplaced Pages 2021 is generally both nastier and more obsessed with arbitrary rules than was Misplaced Pages 2008. I imagine if you asked 20 people, you'd get 20 answers, since so many unwritten rules are subject-specific. ‑ Iridescent 05:37, 27 October 2021 (UTC)

Mine is

1. Find a topic that interests you, and time to work on it.
2. Find an appropriate search query for the topic. Many topics have multiple names or multiple languages, or the name is ambiguous and you need to cut out irrelevant hits.
3. Check on Google Scholar for sources. If there are too few or too many, don't bother.
4. Go through each source and see if it can be used in the article.
   • Exclude unreliable sources, GS does include WP:PREPRINTS and WP:PREDATORY journals which are not good sources. To a lesser degree, theses also aren't good sources. Be mindful of WP:PSTS too.
   • If it's a book, you can't find the full text online or WP:PAYWALLed, make a note for yourself to check a library, use WP:TWL or ask in WP:RX. Google Books isn't usually sufficient, although you can use it to determine whether a book is likely to contain substantial information or not.
   • Use each suitable source as you come across it to expand the article. If it's iffy, park it on the discussion page. Skip sources that don't add anything new.
5. See for non-GS sources. On some topics, newspapers, government websites and the like are useful. Basically repeat the same procedure as in the preceding bullets but with specialized Google searches.
6. Now it's time for a WP:NPOV check. Having read all these sources you now should have an idea of what the mainstream take on the topic is, and adjust accordingly.
7. Go through each section and rewrite to remove redundancy, bad prose and unduly complicated verbiage.
8. Write a lead section.
9. Park a {{refideas}} template on the talk page with the query strings, with "sources published after {{CURRENTYEAR}}" parameters set in the URLs so that you can update your article more easily.
10. If you did this all in a sandbox or draft, move the article to articlespace, add categories and WikiProject tags.

Note that this assumes that while Google doesn't contain all sources, it usually mentions most it not all of them.

The next article in my queue is Tupungatito and if there are no unexpected problems TRAPPIST-1. JoJo Eumerus mobile (main talk) 09:57, 27 October 2021 (UTC)

It all looks quite sound, although re points 6 and 7, unless the article looks particularly well-written already, I would often ignore what's already there and be rewriting the prose myself from scratch. Or at least only retain bits that look relevant and part of the overall balance. Most existing pages are not written to anything like FA quality.  — Amakuru (talk) 10:54, 27 October 2021 (UTC)

Aye, this guide is more for writing a FA from scratch. Or when you discard most of the existing text, but careful about doing that - someone has written the existing text, after all, and they may not like seeing it thrown out. JoJo Eumerus mobile (main talk) 11:16, 27 October 2021 (UTC)

A quick recipe off the top of my head, albeit one with none of the elegance or eloquence of Giano's essay:

1. Find a topic that's the subject of at least two but no more than four books. (It doesn't need to be the sole topic of these books—for something like an artwork or a building it may well only be a chapter—but if nobody's written about it that's a red flag when it comes to notability, unless it's a genuinely new topic in which case it probably ought to be avoided anyway since it's inherently unstable and thus not suitable at FAC.);
2. Create a sandbox draft (in your userspace or offline, not in draftspace. In these early stages you don't want anyone else editing the draft; you're going to be cut-and-pasting later on and it's a PITA in terms of attribution if more than one person has edited the draft. Some editors consider anything in draftspace fair game, whereas most people respect the convention of leaving userspace drafts alone.);
3. Go through each of the books cover-to-cover adding anything that seems relevant as you go along;
4. Only now, go through Google Scholar and see if there's anything that ought to be included. If it's not in the books you used, ask yourself why it hasn't been included as that's a likely sign it's either a fringe theory or something the experts on the topic don't consider important enough to mention, and if it is in the books then those are what you should be citing, not academic papers;
5. Go through the resulting article trimming out the duplication and making sure it's not too unbalanced;
6. Go through the existing Misplaced Pages article (if there is one), and if there's anything in there that's not been covered in your article, import it into your draft if and only if the source actually backs up what it's claimed to say. (Prior to this stage, completely ignore the existing article, as it can introduce unconscious bias as to what weight should be given to what aspects. The important parts to cover should be what the sources considered important enough to cover, not what either you or whoever wrote the previous article thought was important.);
7. Go through the draft again, and see decide whether the sections are actually in the best order. For some topics a straight chronological approach makes sense, but for some things—particularly if they contain dull technical detail—you probably want to put the things a non-specialist would find interesting near the top, and treat the more nerdy stuff as a giant appendix after the main text;
8. Go through top-to-bottom checking for obvious MOS violations. You don't need to comply with the MOS, but you need to be prepared to explain why you're not complying;
9. Cut-and-paste the wikitext of your draft over the existing article. Don't do this until you're certain that any reasonable observer would consider your text an unequivocal improvement over the previous version or you're setting yourself up for unpleasantness;
10. Even if you hate AWB and everything it stands for, run the article through it with "general fixes" and "typo fixing" both enabled. You don't have to accept everything it suggests, but you'd be surprised how many things it picks up even on something you've proofread a dozen times;
11. If it's eligible (5× expansion and hasn't previously appeared), nominate it at DYK. Although DYK is a pointless timesink which 99% of readers don't care about, a main page appearance is a quick and easy way to get a couple of thousand complete outsiders to read your article, and they won't be shy in pointing it out if something isn't clear to non-experts and needs to be reworded;
12. Take it to FAC. I personally wouldn't bother going through peer review first; the process is largely moribund, and I find you get better results posting requests on the talkpages of people you know might be interested. Ditto for GAN; the FA process is for all its faults populated largely with competent people who want to help (and the delegates are usually quite good at shutting down the cranks), but GAN is a pure crapshoot regarding who chooses to review it, and the odds of getting a lunatic making unreasonable demands are in my experience too high to make it worthwhile.

There's probably more I've missed, but that's the formula that usually works for me. It doesn't work for topics with a lot of sources, in which case you have to decide which sources you're going to use, but for more niche topics it's a fairly straightforward formula. ‑ Iridescent 16:55, 27 October 2021 (UTC)

I'd say that's all good advice, except you should skip XII and take pleasure in what you've done without worrying about getting the little star, which isn't worth the anguish. EEng 17:02, 27 October 2021 (UTC)

It depends. Because FA gives a small but constant & permanent boost to an article's readership, if you're interested in a topic and you want it to be more widely known, it's quite an effective mechanism for getting it to a wider audience. On the general concept of "article assessment" more generally, I assume you know my opinions. ‑ Iridescent 17:16, 27 October 2021 (UTC)

Thanks, I think an essay would be good, although the ones we have on FAC-writing are remarkably hard to find. I was actually thinking of the one, I think pre-packaged somewhere & produceed here, pwerhaps in the spring, using Rita Hayworth or some such star as an example, starting something like "get and read the top nine biographies...." Not important though. This is all very sensible, though I see standards have slipped somewhat re the number of sources needed (which is fine with me). Does "FA give a small but constant & permanent boost to an article's readership" - I've always doubted that. In my experience, significantly expanding and improving an article (and placing appropriate links to it) will do that (often not such a small increase either), with GA/FA status making no discernable difference, other than a main page blip. Johnbod (talk) 17:14, 27 October 2021 (UTC)

I think you're thinking of the articles SandyGeorgia wrote for the Sighpost back in the days before it deteriorated into drivel. Someone will remember where they were. ‑ Iridescent 17:19, 27 October 2021 (UTC)

What is this Sighpost of which you speak? EEng 05:14, 21 November 2021 (UTC)

I don't think I was - never mind. Johnbod (talk) 17:22, 27 October 2021 (UTC)

Drivel = understatement. Those are found at {{FCDW}}. Hope you are well SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:21, 27 October 2021 (UTC)

Johnbod and Iri, I may have found where we store all of them (and I just added mine) at Misplaced Pages:Mentoring for FAC, which is linked in the template at the top of WT:FAC. About a year ago, I worked to try to get all of our FA-related links into one template, but per usual, my attempts were criticized, so whatever ... My guide, User:SandyGeorgia/Achieving excellence through featured content, aims specifically at medical content and was written to encourage medical editors to re-engage after a long downturn, but there is some general advice in the lower sections. (Writing a medical FA is substantially different than many other areas ... ) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:27, 27 October 2021 (UTC)

Johnbod, I think you were thinking of this about Audrey Hepburn, from Iridescent to Ritchie. Vaticidalprophet 02:54, 9 November 2021 (UTC)

Vaticidalprophet, Indeed I was - many thanks! 2018, my goodness! But I think it was linked to more recently. But it seems standards have slipped a little now; I blame Brexit. Johnbod (talk) 03:20, 9 November 2021 (UTC)

Indeed, the only guide I can think of is Giano's. Misplaced Pages:100,000 feature-quality articles was for a while the only "guide" I was aware of, and I had to go off Giano's work as a model for Ludwigsburg Palace. –♠Vami_IV†♠ 17:34, 27 October 2021 (UTC)

@Johnbod: Be careful, though! Nominating an article at DYK can actually decrease its quality because of the high number of editors making good-faith edits. This is called edit creep. Minkai_{(see where I screwed up)} 17:40, 27 October 2021 (UTC)

Hey! Who are you calling a creep?! lol Don't worry, Iri, we know "It's your thing!!". Martinevans123 (talk) 17:44, 27 October 2021 (UTC)

That's not too much of a problem - you just have to watch them for a day or so, & be prepared to revert. FA can be worse, but the same applies. Johnbod (talk) 17:46, 27 October 2021 (UTC)

Regarding Does "FA give a small but constant & permanent boost to an article's readership" - I've always doubted that, this one is empirically testable—just find an article that had already existed for a while before its FAC and look at the readership figures over time. All things being equal, FA status gives a page between 10-20 extra readers per day, which doesn't sound like much but adds up over time; for a niche topic like Droxford railway station it consistently gets roughly three times as many readers post-FAC than prior. It also makes the articles much more likely to be picked up on elsewhere by lazy journalists and bloggers, leading to viewspikes and a subsequent persisting rise in readership as people tell their friends (the most extreme example I know of, which I may have mentioned once or twice, is the manner in which Misplaced Pages created the Tarrare meme). ‑ Iridescent 18:38, 27 October 2021 (UTC)

The only article of mine that someone else has copied is Nevado Sajama, which was extensively "used" (plagiarized?) by an academic publication, and that's not even a GA. <rant>Why couldn't even one geologist bother to write an article about that volcano...</rant> Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 19:34, 27 October 2021 (UTC)

Yes, but taking an article to FAC is by definition "significantly expanding and improving an article (and placing appropriate links to it)" in almost every case. I'm saying that alone will produce increased views. If it wasn't the middle of the night I'd hunt up examples. Johnbod (talk) 04:03, 28 October 2021 (UTC)

But it's not, though. Unless the page is one that you created from scratch, expanding an article shouldn't have any impact on the number of incoming links. FA status generates a link from WP:FA, which is what creates a small but steady stream of extra visitors, adds an incoming link from the front pages of the relevant WikiProjects, and (depending on whether the topic fits their diversity-at-all-costs agenda) can make it more likely the WMF's official social media accounts publicize it. (Since FA status by definition doesn't stop anyone visiting the page but creates additional opportunities for people to discover it, it would beimpossible for it not to cause an increase in pageviews. The only question is whether the scale of that increase is significant.)

Plus obviously there's the TFA factor. As you presumably know I think the original rationale behind TFA ("Everybody thinks Misplaced Pages is poorly written and is obsessed with American pop culture, let's make it clear to readers that we can do high quality writing on a diverse range of topics") no longer applies and we should seriously consider replacing it with something else. That said, there's no denying that if you give it a well-written blurb you can supercharge readership on the day, and a small but not negligible proportion of those readers are subsequently interested enough to want to find out more about the topic. (See the spikes in pageviews for Etty's biography when Sirens and Cleopatra were on the main page a couple of months ago.) ‑ Iridescent 06:23, 28 October 2021 (UTC)

On the contrary, a proper expansion should include checking the appropriate incoming links are there - very often they are not, with some amazing omissions. This is something I also look at (at least a bit) doing an FAC review, though it is evident most people don't. The FA list page averages under 2,000 views per day (a good number no doubt by the FA workforce), with over 6,000 articles on it, but no doubt very catchy titles attract extra attention, and "art" is at the top of the page. Of course the main page draws extra views to main articles linked from there - this effect can be strong even for DYK - but those going to Etty's biography won't know, or I believe care or mostly notice, whether or not it is FA, and I don't see why that would add to the effect. Johnbod (talk) 20:24, 28 October 2021 (UTC)

"Art" may be at the top of WP:FA and the articles tend to have engaging titles, but most of what I do is neither art-related nor has an engaging title—I'd say with reasonable confidence that Quainton Road railway station, possibly the least engaging-looking page on the entire site, wouldn't get the readers it gets were it not on that list, for example. (Granborough Road railway station and Calvert railway station, the next stations on the line—and thus linked from the same templates and pages as Quainton Road and likely to be of equal interest to anyone who'd actually go searching for the topic—consistently get less than half its pageviews.) Remember the master list at WP:FA isn't the only place people find them; the rusty sheriff's badge also means that the page goes on the "recognized content" lists for multiple wikiprojects and the like, gets highlighted on the list of interwiki links on other projects, gets mentioned in the Signpost on the increasingly rare occasions they remember to update their list, and so forth.

My point about the spikes in pageviews for Etty isn't that the biography's an FA; you see spikes in articles linked from the TFA even if the articles in question are poor-quality stubs. The point is that when articles go on the main page, a non-negligible proportion of people who click on them are actually reading them enough that they want to find out more so move on to related articles, demonstrating that at least some readers are actually reading the TFAs rather than just clicking them by mistake, and you can—to at least some degree—make a rough guess as to how many readers are actually engaging with items on the main page rather than just clicking on them, thinking "this looks boring", and moving on by looking at the size of the spikes in views of pages linked from the article that was on the main page. It's not specific to me, I just used it as an example but you can repeat the exercise with any TFA. Here are the equivalent spikes for Charles Sargeant Jagger & James Glen Sivewright Gibson and Linn County, Kansas & Marais des Cygnes River when Portsmouth War Memorial and Battle of Marais des Cygnes were on the main page a couple of days ago, for instance. The public actually do sometimes read the items that are linked from the main page.

(TL;DR summary: at least some people do actually read and pay attention to TFA and DYK rather than just skim the first paragraph, and this is demonstrable because we can see people following wikilinks from things mentioned in the articles.) ‑ Iridescent 21:59, 28 October 2021 (UTC)

Just saw this thread and it strikes me that "how to write an FA" depends a good deal on why you're writing it. If it's because you enjoy TFA or you just like to accumulate the stars, it's tempting to look for topics that allow for repeated application of an approach, or at least repeated use of a given set of resources. If you're doing it as a way of checking that you've brought the article to a high standard, the rules about references go out of the window. There's a fair amount of overlap -- if you're writing about obscure railway stations or US coins or science fiction magazines because you're already very knowledgeable about them and enjoy the process, then you're going to be able to repeat the work regardless of your motivation. But if you're doing it because you somehow got interested in the topic and wanted to see if you'd done a good a job as you hoped, then the research, writing, and FAC will look very different. In my case that would describe radiocarbon dating and ice drilling, for example, whereas the long sequences of Anglo-Saxon king or science fiction magazine FACs I've nominated could be of either type. I would guess most prolific FAC nominators have some of both types. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 02:44, 9 November 2021 (UTC)

Huh, I have literally no recollection of writing that Audrey Hepburn thing. I'm glad to see that what I wrote now tallies with what I wrote then, so at least I'm not totally making it up as I go along. (The discrepancies are that the Hepburn one has some extra steps—like using more sources than usual and leaving changes long enough for people to object before continuing—to take into account that she's a potentially contentious topic.) I agree with what Mike Christie isn't quite saying, that the FA process is generally better off viewed as the closest thing Misplaced Pages has to a formal peer review process, rather than as an achievement in its own right. (Misplaced Pages:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by featured article nominations was a decade ago, and we've still to implement the recommended change of making WP:WBFAN alphabetical by default to reduce the "high score table" aspect. We probably ought to revisit that.) ‑ Iridescent 06:35, 11 November 2021 (UTC)

For the interested, User:Jo-Jo Eumerus/TRAPPIST-1 is an example of what a draft looks like when you are between steps 4 and 5 of my list. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 17:27, 13 November 2021 (UTC)

ArbCom 2021 Elections voter message

Hello! Voting in the 2021 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23:59 (UTC) on Monday, 6 December 2021. All eligible users are allowed to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once. The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Misplaced Pages arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail. If you wish to participate in the 2021 election, please review the candidates and submit your choices on the voting page. If you no longer wish to receive these messages, you may add {{NoACEMM}} to your user talk page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:10, 23 November 2021 (UTC)

So here it is. I threw in my headbands for Enterprisey and Opabinia, uncertain on the others. JoJo Eumerus mobile (main talk) 18:01, 23 November 2021 (UTC)

Good god, is it that time of year already? Looking at the crop of candidates—and even more so, looking at the candidates whose terms are expiring and aren't running again—I have a feeling Misplaced Pages:You are not irreplaceable is about to be stress-tested to its limit. ‑ Iridescent 19:01, 23 November 2021 (UTC)

Of those not rerunning, at least two will be missed. One seems to have been on the Committee ever since I can remember. There are about two expiring terms who will probably be reelected and those two have the best experience and institutional memory (don't interpret that to mean they are automatically the best arbitrators). Tactical voting is probably the best solution. If some seats are left empty, so be it. Time for a reform of the system Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 23:08, 9 December 2021 (UTC)

I assume every candidate other than the obvious no-hoper will clear the 50% mark, so things will carry on as normal. What we really need is an election with fewer viable candidates than vacancies. Misplaced Pages is inherently very conservative when it comes to structural change, which is normally a good thing in that it prevents us from following every passing fad, but has the drawback of making it harder to steer the ship away from icebergs. An arbcom with half-a-dozen vacant seats would be the signal that maybe the structures that worked in 2004 are no longer fit for purpose. ‑ Iridescent 08:40, 10 December 2021 (UTC)

It's probably safe to predict that we will go through repeated spasms of lowering the percent threshold to pass, then raising it, then lowering it, and on and on. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:36, 10 December 2021 (UTC)

Or, we grit our teeth and have the conversation about unbundling which we've been avoiding for ten years. Unbundling the functions of Arbcom actually makes more sense than unbludling the admin toolkit—block, delete & protect are three tools for dealing with the same root problem, but "dispute resolution panel", "top-level law enforcement body" and "court of appeal for the interpretation of ambiguous policies" don't really have much in common other than that they're all functions Jimmy decided to divest himself of at the same time. If the job had less authority—or at least, less perceived authority—there wouldn't be the annual outburst of angst since the occasional crazy or bad actor making it through would be "legitimate representation of other perspectives" rather than "giving out powerful tools with minimal oversight". ‑ Iridescent 05:45, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

Perhaps, but then we'd have to have a process for picking the members of three different high-level bodies rather than one. The election each year takes a lot of time and effort, and I don't think we'd want three of those, so we'd need to figure out how that would work. Plus the three roles you identify sometimes do overlap in a given case or situation; an ArbCom case could easily involve (1) a dispute (2) over whether someone violated a potentially ambiguous policy, and (3) if so, what to do about it. I'm not saying it's a bad idea, but as always, there are these ancillary questions to think through. For what it's worth, I still believe that ArbCom, while of course still important, is much less so than in the past, for reasons we've discussed before. Regards, Newyorkbrad (talk) 14:36, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

The process for selecting members of three bodies with limited scope would be less problematic since we wouldn't need the whole SecurePoll rigmarole if we weren't engaged in the annual appointment of the Misplaced Pages Justice League. Some kind of Mediation Committee to gatekeep disputes could probably just have its members appointed on the basis of "anyone who wants to join can just sign up provided nobody has a strong objection", leaving Arbcom's vestigial "final authority when all else fails" function as "an annually-elected body with the power to issue binding closures to RFCs". (Both the existing RFC process for resolving disputes over policy, and the new Misplaced Pages:Administrative action review, would slot neatly into this structure.) ‑ Iridescent 07:15, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

When multiple definitions exist

It seems that everyone, from scummy pseudoscience peddlers on up to mainstream academics in traditional scholarly fields, wants their thing to be called "scientific". I get it; science is respectable, and there's money there. Nobody, even the actual fine arts, really wants to be called a non-science. The stupid idea that "non-science is another word for nonsense" seems to have discredited every traditional non-science subject. Even people who study poetry have tried to claim that they are scientists: "Poetics is a science concerned with poetry as art", writes one, and "poetics is the scientific study of 'artistic' language", writes another. All scholarly fields want to be up to date and scientific.

The article Linguistics, which begins by defining the subject as the scientific study of language – complete with the link to Science – has made me wonder again whether we should avoid using that label on the non-traditional or borderline subjects. Our discussion on the talk page demonstrates that the opening sentence merely parrots what many, but not all, definitions in textbooks and dictionaries give as their definition; it is not merely a verifiable sentiment, but a word-for-word copy of a statement that can be found in many books.

However, we have also found a reference work that explains what linguists mean when they say that linguistics is "scientific": The "Four aims of the scientific approach to language, often cited in introductory works on the subject, are comprehensiveness, objectivity, systematicness, and precision." I think this contrasts with the definition at Science, which is "a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the world". If you read the opening sentence of linguistics, and click through to the linked article about science to figure out exactly what's meant by calling the study of language "scientific", you will get a mostly incorrect idea. Both claim to be systematic enterprises, and possibly both are meant to be comprehensive (at least with regards to suitable subject matter), objective, and precise, but only one of them is characterized by testable explanations and predictions.

I have been wondering whether we should stop using the word science (and its various derivatives) in such cases, or at least to stop linking to the article Science when we know that the definition that's intended is more like "scholarly" or "intellectually rigorous". What do you all think? WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:05, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

I clicked on one of the sources for the definition of science in the lead sentence of our article. Merriam-Webster included both "the science of linguistics" and "the science of theology" as examples supporting their definitions. The talk page of "science" has repeatedly discussed how it should be defined. The articles Branches of science and History of science reinforce there are multiple meanings, which have changed over time. I wonder if that lead sentence only really covers one modern usage, and reflects the difficulty of writing an encyclopaedia article about a "thing" with multiple definitions. -- Colin° 14:34, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

"The science of linguistics" is given as an example for the definition "a subject that is formally studied in a college, university, etc.". Under that definition, almost anything is "a science", including dancing, glass blowing, cooking, sewing, and wine tasting. I still don't believe that we should write "Dancing is the science of" anything, even though you can get a graduate degree in it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:04, 30 November 2021 (UTC)

Whether or not the Scientific method is used is the key point about the modern definition, as opposed to the lingering older definition of just "knowing stuff". At least historical linguistics can I think fairly claim to be scientific, although actual experiments are hard to do. Theology not so much, although parts of Biblical studies touches on science. Generally literary studies people are happy enough to be in The arts, & the claims at Poetics should maybe go, not that I know much about the subject. Unlike art historians and archaeologists they don't now have an important laboratory-based wing. Adding a sourced version of some of this might be good. Johnbod (talk) 15:17, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

Historical linguistics absolutely is scientific (see comparative linguistics or simply philology in its older sense), and like any discipline making hypotheses about the past can be tested against what we know of the past (there is a parallel with testing some astrophysics theories by what we can observe out there in the universe, which is another way of saying we are observing the past history of the universe as we look out further and further into space). I do like what someone put at philology:

Philology, with its focus on historical development (diachronic analysis), is contrasted with linguistics due to Ferdinand de Saussure's insistence on the importance of synchronic analysis. The contrast continued with the emergence of structuralism and Chomskyan linguistics alongside its emphasis on syntax, although research in historical linguistics is often characterized by reliance on philological materials and findings.

Now, is the structuralist mode of reasoning scientific? I guess you would have to ask the post-structuralists... :-) Carcharoth (talk) 08:17, 3 December 2021 (UTC) I agree that 'scholarly' or 'intellectually rigorous' can often be a better descriptor. Carcharoth (talk) 08:20, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

Arthur C Clarke wrote "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." I wonder if "Any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from pseudoscience". From Dark matter we have "a hypothetical form of matter thought to account for approximately 85% of the matter in the universe...it does not absorb, reflect or emit electromagnetic radiation, and is therefore difficult to detect." From Quark we have "All commonly observable matter is composed of up quarks, down quarks and electrons. Quarks come in six flavours: up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom. Sea quarks form when a gluon of the hadron's color field splits." These advanced scientists wear white coats, talk complete gibberish, and cost the public billions of pounds. The pseudoscientists wear white coats, talk complete gibberish, and cost the public billions of pounds. Is it any wonder the general public are confused about what science is?

Consider also "scientific racism". There's that "science" word, and the article lists immensely important figures in science. At many times in history, these views were considered part of the mainstream scientific canon of knowledge and belief. I don't think scientific racism transformed from being mainstream to pseudo because of the scientific method. Its destruction came from outside of science. So I think science has more complexity than we'd like, contains more convenient beliefs than we'd like, and doesn't necessarily improve itself though continued application of the scientific method. -- Colin° 17:40, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

I don't really agree - like phrenology, "scientific racism" claimed to be based on the Scientific method, and was defeated when these claims were disproved, a process speeded up when the Nazis were so keen on it. Most pseudoscience makes little or no claim on the public purse, doesn't it? Decades ago, I went to the main Delhi railway station to book a reservation. A huge hall on the upper floor, formerly the Third Class Ladies Waiting Room or something, had been cleared out, and some twenty computer terminals spread around, each on its own table. All pretty new then I think. It took me some moments to work out why there was a strong impression of being in a James Bond movie, until I realized that it was the white lab coats all the ticketing staff were wearing. Johnbod (talk) 17:54, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

We are getting a little off topic but... I know it claimed to be scientific (and even today there is still poor quality "science" going on) but I don't really buy the idea that it was scienced into the fringes. It wasn't just about Nazis. There were eugenics programmes in many countries, and the ideas also supported slavery and colonialism. Your Ladies Waiting Room example reminds me of that other "scientific" idea that women were inferior to men. That didn't disappear just because men scienced their way into realising women were equal. Wrt pseudoscience, this market research claims "The global dietary supplements market size was valued at USD 140.3 billion in 2020 and is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8.6% from 2021 to 2028". That's just one portion. There used to be homeopathic hospital funded on NHS, and this is still popular IIRC in Germany. -- Colin° 19:24, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

I think that "scientific racism" took hits all round: it is wrong in its factual claims and evil in its values, and most people will accept at least one of those two reasons as a sufficient reason to reject it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:11, 30 November 2021 (UTC)

My take would be that the "science" line is too blurry to have any kind of straightforward definition. To stick with scientific racism, in the context of its 19th century heyday I'd consider it a legitimate field of study. In the context of advanced animal species and particularly those species with which the 19th-century scientists were most familiar, humans are something of an outlier in not having a demonstrable strong correlation between appearance and abilities. (Statememt of the obvious, but all the scientists in the period we're talking about, between Darwin and Hitler, would have grown up surrounded by dogs, cats, horses and cattle, all of which are species for which "the breeds from different places have different physical and behavioral characteristics" is unquestionably true.) Since "people of different backgrounds behave differently" is true even now and would have been a lot truer in an era before mass travel and broad cultural mixing, "are differences in ability the result of genetic variation or purely of cultural and economic factors?" would have been a reasonable question, in the same way that alchemy and astrology were once legitimate fields of scientific study until there was sufficient scientific evidence that elements weren't transmutable and that the planets were too distant to have measurable effects on earth.

@Colin, lumping all of dietary supplements into "pseudoscience" isn't entirely fair. Certainly there's a fair share of stuff sold that won't be metabolized and just consists of people paying large sums for their pee to be a slightly different color, but there are some dietary supplements like iron for anaemia which unquestionably have genuine health benefits when used correctly. ‑ Iridescent 06:40, 30 November 2021 (UTC)

There's a supplement that makes my pee a different colour? Ooooh. But yes, I totally agree that's an unfair statistic. I'm not sure how to extract the supplements that never help; the supplements that could help but are taken by people who have enough in their diet anyway; and the supplements that are harmful. If these market data folk have ever done that kind of breakdown, it is probably locked away in one of those research publications you have to pay lots of money for. But I suspect they haven't as helpfulness isn't relevant to profit. Precedence Research claim "the global homeopathic products market size was valued at US$ 6.2 billion in 2020...expected to hit around US$ 19.7 billion by 2030". IBISWorld says the chiropractic industry is worth $18 billion in the US alone. The Large Hadron Collider cost $4.75 billion. The James Webb telescope costs $9.7 billion.

Coming back to the what is science question. You note that astrology was "once legitimate field of scientific study until there was sufficient scientific evidence..that the planets were too distant to have measurable effects on earth". That's one way of rejecting it, but I don't think a reasonable explanation of how it might work is necessary for science. There are plenty drugs (and ketogenic diet) where we are pretty clueless about how they might actually work. The dark matter that I mocked earlier is an imaginative idea to explain why some models/calculations don't work, but is as non evidential as water memory. Wrt falsifiability, if you can't see or detect dark matter, how do you prove it doesn't exist? Perhaps someone brighter than me knows how dark matter fits into "science" vs "something we need to invent for our model to work". If the explanation for astrology is cognitive bias at seeing patterns of cause and effect that don't exist, how did it get off the ground as a science? And although we comfortably dismiss it as a pseudoscience, that debate continues in India. What is science, if millions of people think something is a science but which can't be a science according to our definitions? -- Colin° 10:47, 30 November 2021 (UTC)

I've heard of supplements who make your poop a different colour! No, don't ask me where...

Regarding dark matter, we do see its gravitational effects, I don't think it falls squarely into one of the two boxes. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 11:06, 30 November 2021 (UTC)

Pretty much any multivitamin supplement—or food boosted with B-vitamins like Red Bull—will turn your pee an alarming shade of day-glo orange, as your kidneys politely observe that unless you're living entirely on candy bars you're already getting everything you need from your diet and flush your expensive purchases straight back out of your system. Any food supplement containing senna will make your pee an alarming pink, while some more dubious supplements are laced with methylene blue (probably more for the placebo element of "it made my pee change color, it proves it's having an effect" than for any health benefit). Regarding poop, lots of things will change its color; beetroot is probably the most obvious.

I doubt that the explanation for astrology is cognitive bias at seeing patterns of cause and effect that don't exist. From the perspective of an ancient Babylonian/Greek/Chinese, I'd imagine the line of thought was along the lines of "The movements of the sun and moon have clearly observable effects on the earth. It stands to reason that the planets will also have effects although to a lesser extent as they're either smaller or at a greater distance depending on which model of the celestial sphere I subscribe to. Thus when the planets come into conjunction, the cumulative effect of multiple minor pulls acting in the same direction ought to be measurable." Add in a dose of divine design—when god(s) created the universe why did they go to the hassle of creating the stars if they didn't serve some purpose?—and astrology is a completely reasonable theory for its time. ‑ Iridescent 06:29, 1 December 2021 (UTC)

I'm off down to Holland & Barrett to ask them for some of the blue, pink and orange wee pills. You are quite right that astrology has a physical explanation. I'd forgotten about the sun and moon. -- Colin° 11:12, 1 December 2021 (UTC)

You may be right that this is how it started. But why would astrology continue for so long? The one explanation I have is that for a long time, the main purpose of astrology was to get sucker rulers to pay for the funding of astronomy... —Kusma (talk) 12:57, 1 December 2021 (UTC)

I'd argue that you need to look at things from the perspective of the times. From a creationist viewpoint—which up until the late 18th century was synonymous with the scientific viewpoint—it was a given that everything was divinely designed. In that context, why would the creator have bothered creating the stars if they didn't have any effect? Prior to Hutton and Darwin, science was much more akin to what in the modern world we'd call taxonomy; to a Newton, Owen or Galileo for any given object/species/chemical/natural law/phenomenon the question of "what is its purpose?" was just as important as "what is it?". ‑ Iridescent 16:57, 1 December 2021 (UTC)

Back to the "My take would be that the "science" line is too blurry to have any kind of straightforward definition" part of this thread:

When:

• We can verify that a word (any word, really: science, hypoglycemica, poverty, god) has been used, in a potentially appropriate way, by enough sources to make that a DUE thing to say about the subject, but
• what those sources actually mean isn't exactly what the article of that same name (e.g., Science, Hypoglycemia, Poverty, God) is talking about,

then

1. I don't think we should link to the (arguably) "non-matching" article.
2. I think we should normally describe the subject in a way that either avoids the potentially confusing terminology or explains it (e.g., Human science#Meaning of 'science').

Does anyone completely disagree? WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:49, 2 December 2021 (UTC)

I disagree to some extent. There's nothing wrong with linking to the "non-matching" article provided that it's made clear what the issue is. I have no problem with Astronomy linking to Astrology; the problem is how we signpost what's undisputed, what's disputed, and what's fringe. ‑ Iridescent 17:56, 2 December 2021 (UTC)

I would tend to agree with the broad strokes of both takes here. Sure, a RS is a RS... but common sense dictates that some reasonable accomodation be made for differing uses of language in a S that is otherwise R. Otherwise, there are all kinds of absurd and fully-citable insinuations about Toronto being a gay city in 1897("'Tis a gay city". The Leader-Post. Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. 1897-06-17. p. 2.) or Hugh Johnson's involvement with big boners in 1940 ("Hugh Johnson". The Times Dispatch. Richmond, Virginia. 1940-09-10. p. 11.). With a term like "science" that has a generally understood definition as well as a technical academic definition, the situation seems similar to something like "exponential increase". Here we see that term used by an attorney to describe a series with two terms increasing from three to five ("Death". Springfield News-Sun. Springfield, Ohio. 2014-02-23. p. 6.). This does not mean he's a crap attorney, or that the Springfield News-Sun is a crap newspaper. Certainly, "the series is a clear example of exponential increase" would be a fringe opinion for a mathematician. Personally, I would try not to quote that directly in an article, but it doesn't seem prima facie absurd to do so. It definitely doesn't belong in exponential increase -- it might belong in capital punishment in Ohio -- but I think wikilinking exponential increase would be a little strange. jp×g 19:59, 2 December 2021 (UTC)

Those are good examples, @JPxG. Thanks for posting them.

Using the Toronto example, I think that "Toronto was described as a gay city" would be preferable to "Toronto was described as a gay city". Or to use Iridescent's example, I think we'd want to say that "The American heavy metal band CAGE's second album was called Astrology", rather than "The American heavy metal band CAGE's second album was called Astrology". The link seems to signal that the linked article/definition is the relevant one. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:37, 2 December 2021 (UTC)

I agree with that, but I'd have no problem with "The American heavy metal band CAGE's second album was called Astrology, named for the belief that the relative position of celestial bodies affects human affairs". (Astrology isn't a great example as every reader knows what it means so defining it would be overlinking, but you get the idea. "Ozuna's third album was called Nibiru, named for the belief that a planetary body is on a collision course with Earth" would maybe be a better example.) ‑ Iridescent 07:37, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

I don't think we can safely assume that all of Misplaced Pages's readers are able to remember whether astronomy or astrology is the one that's responsible for fortune–cookie-type sayings. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:52, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

I agree, but I've long since given up banging my head against the brick wall erected by the strict-compliance obsessives who enforce MOS:OVERLINK. ‑ Iridescent 05:30, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

I think the blatant wrongness of OVERLINK in the mobile era is finally crashing into reality. At the very least, I've never lost an argument about it at either GAN or FAC (I did fail my only foray to FAC, but not for links) and when I've discussed the issue of "if you follow current MOS about linking you're screwing over most readers" to people they've generally been receptive. On the other hand, this is mostly regarding relatively jargon-heavy topics. Vaticidalprophet 05:39, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

FWIW, I think it's wrong even for the least jargon-heavy examples. Provided we're not linking every single word, I see no problem either with linking the same thing on multiple occasions (owing to the "collapsed sections on mobile so readers don't see the first usage" issue), nor with linking things with which the reader is already likely to be familiar. I have no issue at all with "Tom Hardy currently lives in France", even though readers already known what France is and don't need it defined; readers are used to wikilinks and aren't going to have their experience disrupted by seeing one, while if even one reader in ten thousand thinks "that reminds me, I'd like to learn more about France" then we're doing them a service by including the link.

All that said, this is not a fight worth fighting. The clique which owns MOS:OVERLINK reads like a Who's Who of Misplaced Pages's most obsessive cranks; life's too short to spend the months of foul-tempered arguing it would take to get anything changed, even if one wasn't fairly certain that the defenders of the status quo would dig in their heels until any discussion closed as "no consensus". ‑ Iridescent 06:08, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

We got pretty close to changing OVERLINK back in May. See Misplaced Pages talk:Manual of Style/Linking/Archive 21#Proposed change: Allow linking once per section, not just in first section after lede? I don't know where the consensus eventually fell. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:40, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

Funnily enough, the clique which owns MOS:OVERLINK dug in their heels until the discussion closed as "no consensus"… ‑ Iridescent 08:09, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

For the connoisseurs of English history...

...is the claim made by this book that 1258 was the year where the English Parliament was established reasonable? Naturally, it's about 1257 Samalas eruption since that book draws a connection between the largest volcanic eruption of the last 2,000 years and events in England and it's December where I do the annual update of all my FAs/GAs/DYKs. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 12:44, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

Parliament of England - it's ... arguably one of the possible dates you can choose. Parliament isn't something that has a foundational document like the UN so it's notoriously subject to argument about when exactly it was "founded" - but 1258 isn't an awful spot to pluck out of the possibilities. Generally the more usual date is 1295 with the Model Parliament but... sometime in Simon de Montfort's efforts is also supportable. Ealdgyth (talk) 13:15, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

That's the Oxford Parliament (1258). It's a common claim, though of course it resembled a grand mafia convention of barons rather more than modern Westminster. But it was the first English Parliament, though there were Anglo-Saxon precedents. Johnbod (talk) 13:18, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

The transition from absolute monarchy to parliamentarianism was more of a bumpy process than an event. After Magna Carta (1215) (no new taxes without consent) you need the Provisions of Oxford (1258) and then the Provisions of Westminster (1259). But the body of nobles established then looks little like parliament as we know it today. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.132.232.157 (talk) 13:21, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

The preceding Provisions of Oxford (April), and the start of the Parliament in June were not long after the eruption (probably September the previous year), & all part of a long-running political row, so I doubt any connection should be made. Johnbod (talk) 13:26, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

Quite so. List of parliaments of England starts in 1236/7 but the Statute of Merton was enacted a year or so earlier. Any connection with a volcanic eruption in 1257 seems tenuous at best. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.132.232.157 (talk) 15:19, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

What they said. The English Parliament wasn't created by fiat like the US Congress, but gradually evolved out of more or less informal gatherings of landowners and the descendants of William the Conqueror's knights, and possibly surviving folk memories of the Witangemot. I find it very unlikely that a volcanic eruption had anything to do with it; the issues that pushed the baronial class into prominence were the crusades simultaneously upping the tax burden while depleting the military thus sapping the Crown's power to suppress banditry and rebellions, and the difficulties of a single monarch being ruler of both England and France and thus having to leave one or the other unattended and delegate power to local sheriffs and nobles. ‑ Iridescent 17:07, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

Seems like my gut feeling was correct, there. I'll leave it out, then. The idea that the eruption influenced the Mongol empire at least has backing by more than one source. Unrelated, but interesting factoid of the day: There are mice on another volcano in Chile/Argentina's desert. JoJo Eumerus mobile (main talk) 18:07, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

You have to wonder what the mice are doing up there. It might be free of predators, but there can't be much if anything for them to eat. ‑ Iridescent 04:50, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

There are apparently algae and plants on volcanic gas vents (albeit these are better documented at Socompa) and this mouse species apparently isn't very picky with food. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 11:11, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

Administrators will no longer be autopatrolled

A recently closed Request for Comment (RFC) reached consensus to remove Autopatrolled from the administrator user group. You may, similarly as with Edit Filter Manager, choose to self-assign this permission to yourself. This will be implemented the week of December 13th, but if you wish to self-assign you may do so now. To find out when the change has gone live or if you have any questions please visit the Administrator's Noticeboard. 20:06, 7 December 2021 (UTC)

So our solution to "NPP is currently unable to handle the flood of incoming articles" is to add more articles to that flow? Sometimes I get the feeling that Misplaced Pages's hive mind is attempting collective suicide by deliberately strangling itself in its own bureaucracy. ‑ Iridescent 08:05, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

Technically, it was our "solution" to the "RfA is broken" problem. But, I shouldn't complain as I gave my thumbs-up to that proposal. Granted, my thinking there was influenced by the impression that admins having autopatrol causes some people to escalate certain content issues - that should be handled at AN/ANI - to Arbcom prematurely. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 09:32, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

I already said this elsewhere, but I'm annoyed enough at this change-for-change's-sake that I'll repeat it here: I suspect most of the people parroting some variation on "it won't increase the NPP workload because most admins will qualify for autopatrolled anyway so they can just be re-awarded it" have no conception of how strict the requirements are. It took me three years to meet "prior creation of 25 valid articles, not including redirects or disambiguation pages", and that was back in the days when there were still a lot of redlinks so it was actually possible to find topics on which a page didn't already exist. My most recent 25 ab nihilo page creations stretch back to 2010, and I'm more prolific than most when it comes to writing about niche topics where we're less likely already to have a page. What we're actually doing here is formalizing "people who spam Misplaced Pages with a flood of stubs are considered more trustworthy than people who put some thought into whether a new stand-alone page is actually a good idea". ‑ Iridescent 17:00, 9 December 2021 (UTC)

When I got my Autopatrolled, one needed 50 articles - that ought to be reinstated. This change is a token change because admins can give it to themselves and half the active admins have already done so. The idea behind it was that adminship candidates should bring Autopatrol with them to their trial of ire and thus avoid oppose votes from trolls on the lines of 'not enough content work'. The irony is that admins themselves who should know better have been caught blatantly abusing it. This change will not unduly increase the burden on NPP. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 23:21, 9 December 2021 (UTC)

Ah. the good old days—the explanation for why the threshold changed from 40 to 50 is possibly the stupidest comment in Misplaced Pages's history. FWIW that threshold is not easy to reach; you and I score only 90 and 78 respectively on "mainspace non-redirect non-disambiguation page creations" threshold despite being two of this wiki's most active editors (I've created 14,650 pages on this wiki alone, but 14,572 of them don't meet the strict requirement of counting towards the autopatrolled threshold). Because it's harder to create a page from scratch nowadays (even if the article doesn't exist, there's a good chance it exists as a redirect), a lot of Misplaced Pages's most active editors fail to meet even the reduced 25-creation threshold; BradV, Risker, L235 for instance.

I don't see how this change will avoid oppose votes from trolls on the lines of 'not enough content work'. Typically on any given RFA where this is the case, the first such oppose is mine and the rest are "per Iridescent". (The raw boilerplate is "I don't think editors who haven't had the experience of putting large amounts of work into an article, and/or defending their work against well-intentioned but wrong "improvements" or especially AFD, are in a position to empathise with quite why editors get so angry when their work's deleted and/or The Wrong Version gets protected, and I don't support users who don't add content to the mainspace being given powers to overrule those who do.", but I try to tailor it to the particular circumstances of that RFA so I don't necessarily use that exact wording.)

The opposition has nothing to do with whether or not the candidate can be trusted with autopatrolled status, but on the fact that it's impossible to judge whether someone with little or no experience of content work (whether it be page creations, image uploading, or editing existing articles) can empathize with the degree of investment people involved in on-wiki disputes can feel over things which appear trivial to outsiders. (We have a long and inglorious history of admins who don't appreciate this, primly lecturing genuine subject-matter-experts on the fact that Misplaced Pages policy says their expertise counts for no more than the opinion of some guy who's just wandered in having a read an article on the matter in his local paper, and then wondering why the expert is getting angry and frustrated.) As long as admins have some kind of "judge and jury" role rather than purely maintenance functions, I think it's reasonable that someone who wants authority over people engaged on a particular task should have demonstrated some understanding of that task.

It's not as if writing a handful of 200-word stubs, or uploading some photographs of a local landmark, is particularly onerous. If someone isn't even willing to meet this minimal requirement yet they're still requesting adminship, I think it's completely legitimate of me to question both their motivation and their understanding of the fact that Misplaced Pages adminship is supposed to be about the maintenance of an information resource, not the moderation of a social network. ‑ Iridescent 08:13, 10 December 2021 (UTC)

I bet I can find even stupidester comments! --Tryptofish (talk) 19:34, 10 December 2021 (UTC)

I'll start you off with my usual example of "username lacks moxy, candidate should change it to something more fear-inspiring and re-apply". ‑ Iridescent 05:28, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

I hinted at this at Floq's page, but one of the main functions that +autopatrolled had for admins was that it exempted all of the maintenance pages that pretty much only admins create from needing to be patrolled in the new pages feed or in the page curation tool. Despite what some might think, we actually do have people who patrol new user pages, both admins and non-admins, and given that a fair amount of user space needs to be suppressed, it is something that is needed.I don't really think adding a few hundred sock tags to that pool of pages needing review with even less patrollers than we have patrolling articles is a net-benefit to the project. To use myself as an example - I don't qualify for autopatrolled, but I gave it to myself anyway since no one needs to look at my sock tags. I also have pretty strong content chops as the generic functionary goes, even if I haven't done much in that regards in a few years. My having autopatrolled cuts down on work while also being low-risk from a content perspective. Though if a wiki-lawyer wants to take me to RFC/U reborn, I suppose they can have at it. TonyBallioni (talk) 06:16, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

My I've created 14,650 pages on this wiki alone, but 14,572 of them don't meet the strict requirement of counting towards the autopatrolled threshold above is making much the same point. Something as basic as "emptying Category:Expired proposed deletions and creating procedural AfD nominations for those instances which aren't clear-cut and would benefit from a second opinion rather than being summarily deleted" means creating a bunch of new pages; I can't see how it benefits NPP to suddenly have thousands of dull administrative pages dumped into their queue. (This is true for all admins; I'm not some kind of outrider. To pick on User:ToBeFree, just because he seems to be the first person making an "I never create pages so this won't have any impact on NPP!" argument at the RfC, his not having the autopatrolled right would have dumped a little over 14,000 pages into the NPP queue.) ‑ Iridescent 07:15, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

Heh. 13,642 of which are user talk pages. Hm hm. ~ ToBeFree (talk) 11:33, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

I went through a portion of the NPP queue the other day, and noticed that large numbers of redirects from intra-userspace moves, and redirects from moving userspace drafts to mainspage, were in there (about a thousand in the last 30 days). I'm thinking of setting up a bot/script to go through them, because I can't think of any reason why we should give a damn about userspace redirects (unless they're something like User:Example/Worthless fraud and piece of trash child molestor redirecting to a BLP). There were about a thousand in 30 days of unreviewed pages (ot of a total queue of 8,000) -- it wouldn't be an Industrial Revolution of NPP technology, but it'd certainly count for something. jp×g 07:45, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

On that note, there are a whopping 19,851 unpatrolled userspaces in total since November 10, compared to 10,083 mainspace pages. What da...? jp×g 07:48, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

Less people tend to review user space, but it has a ton of creations, because ACPERM doesn't impact it, and some of our tutorial pages suggest creating things there. A lot of it tends to be problematic. TonyBallioni (talk) 08:22, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

Well there is over a thousand useless pages right there for an indefinately blocked user (who is unlikely to ever be unblocked) that someone could do something about if they felt the need to cut down the total amount. Only in death does duty end (talk) 11:22, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

That editor (a) is an inveterate pusher of boundaries and (b) has a lot of very active cronies who will proxy on his behalf. Any admin trying to clean up the messes he's left would spend the next year or so being constantly dragged to noticeboards by his coterie for alleged "admin abuse". I don't think you were around for the very similar case of Betacommand, but have a read of WP:AN/B and its archives to get a feel for how such a cleanup is likely to go. ‑ Iridescent 07:24, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

Actually I was around for BC/Delta but not visible. I was aware of the issues but had no real need to get engaged. Mainly because I am fairly hardline on NFCC, their actions didnt impact me so much. I think I only commented when the obvious BC/Delta sock Weriath started to ramp up the behaviour that got BC/Delta sanctioned. And even then it wasnt BC's actions that drove me to it, it was the utter blatant hypocrisy in the Admins who enabled and protected Betacommand's socking that was so disgusting. Betacommand has probably done more than any other single editor to make tolerance of problematic and disruptive automated editing lower than it would otherwise be. I could make a good argument that had not Betacommand thoroughly laid the groundwork before 2010, Magioladitis and Rich Farmbrough would not have incurred blocks relatively swiftly in comparison. Of course the extended-duration to which they were allowed/enabled in disrupting other editors, after the initial problems were identified, were similar to Betacommand/Delta/Weriath. ENWP admin corps is remarkable in its tolerance of clearly disruptive editors, while also being remarkable in its complete absence of consideration for the victims of said disruption. And this despite the fact that most of the policies and procedures are not actually written that way. Only in death does duty end (talk) 10:07, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

All three of the editors you mention had one common factor: an extreme "I don't care what everyone else thinks, I'm doing the Lord's work so I can't be wrong" attitude towards their bots and scripts. It's sometimes easy to lose sight of the fact that 99% of automated editing is completely uncontentious; all it would have taken for any of the three to avoid sanctions would have been either "I see what the problem is, I'll fix that", "I personally don't agree that it's problematic but if it's causing issues I'll stop", or "You're mistaken, it's not causing problems, and here's an explanation as to why". Rich had a particular issue, which even BC didn't have, in that he was actively evading the safeguards and throttles that we have in place to prevent crapflooding; I suspect that's why when the book was finally thrown, it was thrown harder than usual. ‑ Iridescent 16:07, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

ACE2021 stats

There is a kind of election analysis here (not of the candidates, but some stats and coloured pics) of the process that may be of interest. Comments welcome on the talk page. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 23:32, 9 December 2021 (UTC)

One thing I will say is that the "page views of guides" is misleading. The huge spike in pageviews of TRM's guide on the 16th, for instance, won't reflect a sudden surge of interest in him on that day, but the fact that he made a lot of edits late on the 15th and throughout the 16th, so those people who had the page watchlisted would have refreshed it on multiple occasions as it kept popping up on their watchlist and they re-looked to see what had changed. If you want an actual picture of how much cut-through each of the guides had, you'd need to pester the WMF to release the relevant unique page views data. ‑ Iridescent 08:23, 10 December 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for pointing that out. I don't think it matters. I'll include that in my analysis though. The WMF is never very helpfull so I won't waste my time on that. I'm doing this to try and gain an impression as to how effective the voter guides are at influencing the voting. Probably like at RfA, such stats don't mean much due to the small sample size. Much better would be to find out what experience the actual voters have like we did at WP:RFA2011. At first blush it looks as if the real regular editors (names that are familiar to me) voted later than on the first day stampede. A very high % of the voters do not list en.Wiki as their home Wiki; I wonder if that means anything. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 12:47, 10 December 2021 (UTC)

I am pretty sure that at many elections (RfX and Arbcom) experienced editors take their time to investigate and/or see what things crop up before throwing in their votes. After all, a first day vote is just as effective as one cast on the last day. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 12:56, 10 December 2021 (UTC)

Election Results, with my predictions and comments. I think that between them, the voter Guides probably had a significant impact. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 01:20, 16 December 2021 (UTC)

1570 votes, about as usual. Only 2 got 50% supports (of the total), one only just. Johnbod (talk) 03:38, 16 December 2021 (UTC)

• Don't really think the guides do much. I'd actually be interested to see what the result would be if we decreased the advertising next year. I only voted for 4 people this time. First time I couldn't get to a full slate. I know a lot of the older names I talked to couldn't either. We'd probably have gotten 8 even without the bot, but I think we would have had several one-year terms. TonyBallioni (talk) 05:42, 16 December 2021 (UTC)

  It's impossible to measure, but my instinct is that since the mass-mailings began the guides do have an effect. Prior to that the only people participating in the election were by-and-large people already familiar with the candidates, and if not then they were familiar with recent policy changes, arb cases etc and thus could interpret the candidates' statements and "how would you have dealt with this?" questions. The mass mailings invite a lot of people to participate, many of whom have probably not heard of the candidates before and most of whom probably aren't particularly keen on reading vast reams of text.

  This year, the "candidate statements" page alone clocks in at 4600 words, while the Q&A to the candidates comes in at 66,600 words. For reference, the whole of Lord of the Flies clocks in at under 60,000 words. In that context, I'd be more surprised if there wasn't a strong element of "I feel it's my duty to participate since I've just had this mailing telling me how important it is, but I haven't the time to read all that, can someone please tell me how to vote?" going on. We know this happens with real-world elections after all or candidates wouldn't spend so much time trying to get positive media coverage and celebrity endorsements, and if people aren't going to do their own research on elections that are going to have a genuine material effect on their lives and the lives of everyone they know, they're unlikely to do their own research on elections where the only issue at stake is the internal administration of a website. ‑ Iridescent 06:45, 16 December 2021 (UTC)

  I'd actually be interested to see what the result would be if we decreased the advertising next year. I only voted for 4 people this time. First time I couldn't get to a full slate. I know a lot of the older names I talked to couldn't either. Well, I only got 2 and both were elected so... Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 10:17, 16 December 2021 (UTC)

  My qualifications for opining on the significance of the guides are that: (1) I wrote one of the guides, and (2) I have absolutely no empirical evidence, and am purely guessing, and so I might just be pulling this out of my nether regions. I think the guides have some effect, but they are not necessarily decisive. I also think that some guides are more influential than others. I'm sure that there are users who look at the guides, find some of them useful, and dismiss other guides as bizarre and worthless. Based on what seems to have been the conventional wisdom before the results were announced, the biggest surprise was that Beeblebrox came in as low as he did. --Tryptofish (talk) 17:25, 16 December 2021 (UTC)

  The figures for Beeblebrox look pretty much in line with similar candidates in the past. He got the level of support one would expect; if you (plural) are surprised he didn't do better, I think you're not taking into account how many people he's annoyed who will have actively opposed him this time around, rather than just sit on their hands and leave him in 'neutral' as one normally does with "not my cup of tea" candidates. I personally think a lot of the concerns are an overreaction, but his self-appointment of himself as Wikipediocracy's ambassador to Misplaced Pages unquestionably struck some nerves in a way that e.g. Izno's involvement with Discord didn't even though the latter is arguably more problematic. Note how few "neutral" votes he got compared to the others. (Even if one discounts the "participant in a hate site!" hysteria, there are purely practical concerns over having an Arbcom member who will probably have to recuse from anything potentially controversial. There's a legitimate argument to be made—I've made it myself in the past—that the people who do best as arbs are the bland candidates you've barely heard of rather than the vocal and high-profile personalities.) ‑ Iridescent 18:27, 16 December 2021 (UTC)

  Yes, I think that's a good analysis, and it may reflect significant numbers of voters making informed decisions independently of the guides. Or maybe using guides to inform themselves, and then voting as they choose instead of voting the same as the guide writers. (For instance, I supported Beeblebrox with some reservations based on the things you described, and people who read my rationale may, perhaps, have been influenced to oppose while ignoring my personal conclusion.) --Tryptofish (talk) 18:41, 16 December 2021 (UTC)

  I'd say more likely, there was a general trend to support based on the guides, but 357 people were sufficiently annoyed with him to actively oppose. Consider that even if you completely discount the Wikipediocracy stuff (which I'm sure did have an effect), he's responsible for 6000 blocks plus a fair few "lock him up and throw away the key!" comments on ANI and at Arbcom, and at least some of those blockees are going to have friends. ‑ Iridescent 19:16, 16 December 2021 (UTC)

  "Izno's involvement with Discord" is interesting, given that 5 of the 8 elected this year (WTT, Wugs, Cabayi, and Enterprisey, besides myself) and another 4 of 7 in the other tranche (Bar, L235, Eek, and Cas) are also present to various degrees where most have been at least since last year's election, never mind the dozen or so previous and exiting arbs. (And I think maybe all the clerks?) Clearly Wugs and I are the ringleaders of the cabal, though, if you were to go by who got questions about the topic this year. :^) Izno (talk) 23:22, 16 December 2021 (UTC)

  I wasn't the one raising it; you'd need to ask Joe Roe why you two were singled out while other candidates weren't. I don't know if this was the case with you, but I know from previous elections (and from being around long enough to remember the legendary WP:BADSITES debates) that this kind of situation isn't usually a binary "participation in off-wiki sites is automatically bad" situation. It's a complicated set of variables regarding the nature of the site, the nature of the specific discussions participated in, the nature of the comments made, whether there a potential involvement in attempts to circumvent or sway on-wiki consensus, whether even if there wasn't, there's a potential for accusation of potential involvement in attempts to circumvent or sway on-wiki consensus, and whether there's a perception that the individual concerned has tried to cover up some or all of their off-wiki activity.

  My personal position, which I don't think is any great secret, is that except when it's done for legitimate and genuine technical reasons—"if you're having difficulty logging on to Misplaced Pages contact us via IRC", "this statement on Twitter is factually incorrect, this is what actually happened", "I need to speak to a now-banned user about something they once wrote, doing so on Wikipediocracy is more open than via email since at least it leaves some kind of audit trail in case people want to know exactly what was said"…—it should be a fairly hard-and-fast rule that the more hats a Misplaced Pages functionary is wearing, the less they should engage in anything off-wiki except when there's a genuine privacy concern in which case the off-wiki discussion should take place in a venue that's genuinely restricted and which nobody else can sign up to. There's very little legitimate reason not to have discussions in public, particularly when other users are being discussed, and even when nothing remotely untoward is going on the very fact of discussions taking place that aren't publicly visible to everyone has far too much potential to create the perception that something untoward is going on. (If there's nothing problematic, why isn't the discussion being held publicly on-wiki where everyone can see it and where there will be a record of it if anyone questions or challenges something that was said?) It's taken us years to shake off the "Misplaced Pages claims to be egalitarian but actually has a two-tier system in which those who are members of off-wiki cliques get preferential treatment" reputation and we still haven't entirely done so, and the continued participation of high-level functionaries on IRC, Discord, Wikipediocracy etc (and the continued existence of Arbwiki) just reinforces that perception even if the functionaries in question aren't actually doing anything wrong. ‑ Iridescent 20:14, 18 December 2021 (UTC)

  One wonders also about email communications. I know, hypocritical from me since I, Joe Roe, Rosguill and Seraphimblade came up with the close for Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Mass killings under communist regimes (4th nomination) via email. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 20:35, 18 December 2021 (UTC)

  Email (and face-to-face or phone) seems to me to be a different kettle of fish to IRC et al. There are quite often genuinely legitimate reasons for a specific conversation not to be made public: privacy matters, legal concerns, and sometimes just plain "can I get a second opinion on this before I go public?". Where I think off-wiki discussion groups cause problems is the potential for them to be perceived as an "insider" clique with the potential to distort consensus, even if they're not actually engaged in any kind of corrupt practices in reality. (It's not exclusive to online channels either. Some of the worst offenders for back-channelling and tag-teaming are some of the individual chapters whose members can be relied on to turn up in lockstep to support each other.) As regards something like Discord, Wikipediocracy etc, my advice to anyone involved (speaking very much in a personal capacity) would be "before you post the comment you're about to post, could you give a convincing explanation if challenged as to why you're not making it on-wiki?". ‑ Iridescent 07:00, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

  If you plan on doing cross-wiki work, IRC is also useful because of the stewards channel and access to steward. It also provides live logging of every steward/WMF action via steward tools, which is useful from an accountability standpoint (The Fram situation was noticed on IRC before it was on-wiki because of the live logging.)I'm no fan of the Discord and really have never been, but that's more to do with the social dynamic than anything else. I've described it as the worst of #wikipedia-en , which I quit years ago for the social dynamic, even while still being active in the functionary channels on IRC. Comes off to me as a bunch of young users trying to cozy up to admins. That's both annoying and somewhat creepy. That's not just a Discord problem though, -en on IRC had it for years as well. I think what probably makes it come off worse on Discord is that a bunch of younger people already use it, versus IRC which is an ancient technology that required an extremely minimal degree of familiarity to figure out. TonyBallioni (talk) 00:28, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

  How could the Fram situation have been noticed first on IRC? The blocking would have popped up on the watchlist of every person who had Fram's user/usertalk page watchlisted the moment it happened, just by the nature of MediaWiki software. The ban was enacted at 17:41 and I made the complaint that eventually spiralled into WP:FRAMBAN at 18:01; it's not what one could call a significant lag. ‑ Iridescent 07:45, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

  Short version: the block didn't show up but the desysop showed up immediately in #wikimedia-stewards because it was handled on meta via the user-rights interface there. That specific situation aside, the stewardbot IRC feed is the easiest way to see what's actually going on re: changes in user rights via meta or with global locks on accounts, since those don't show up on watchlists on a local project, and there's really no reason to check your meta watchlist most of the time. TonyBallioni (talk) 17:39, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

  As one of the ones bringing up the discord thing in her guide - I'll clarify that it's not the existence of discord that gets my goat - it's the fact that the discussions on discord are treated as if they are not at all connected to wikipedia and that while in some cases they can influence events on wiki, there is no accountablity for statements there. I use discord constantly throughout my day in my "day job" and I KNOW how it works. Things are almost always visible and searchable ... even if you're not on/in when something is stated. And almost all discord participants know that things they say are "logged". But yet, while the wiki-discord channels can be used to sway discussions on wiki, the fact that they are used that way ... can't be used on wiki as evidence of misbehavior/swaying/etc.... this is just wrong. I'm not going to ding people who use discord - but I did call out the folks who contributed to what I see as a problem. In some ways, it's worse than the old IRC-no-logs-days... because you CAN go see the crap that gets slung around but some folks seem to want to treat it like the old smoke-filled-backrooms of American politics. BLECH. So much for the wiki-way! Ealdgyth (talk) 17:58, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

Standard questions and political compasses

• I was thinking about whether a few standard broad questions could help voters identify candidates – like left/center/right or "taxes: too high/too low/about right?", for real-world legislators. However, I'm not sure what the questions would be. It depends on whether voters feel like they are voting for someone to represent them/their views, or if they are looking for someone who is good at problem solving and conflict resolution. In the former, you'd be asking for political views, such as enwiki-vs-WMF/chapters, and in the latter, you'd be asking questions like "Have you ever, or will you soon, take a formal training program on conflict resolution?" WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:32, 16 December 2021 (UTC)

  There was a discussion on this topic at WT:ACE2021#Compass. Izno (talk) 23:23, 16 December 2021 (UTC)

  My thoughts are already on the record on compass tools. I think for Arbcom elections it would be even less useful. Arbcom isn't the Misplaced Pages Parliament and arbs aren't representatives, and except for a few very specific questions like "under what circumstances do you feel people should be given second chances?" I can't see how candidates' views on internal wikipolitics are relevant. What one is looking for in Arbcom elections is "is this person going to give participants a fair hearing?", "how will this person react to attempted bullying and bluster?" and "will this person be able to work with the rest of the committee?", and none of those are attributes that can be given a mark-out-of-ten and placed on a scale. ‑ Iridescent 06:22, 17 December 2021 (UTC)

  I think that asking questions about second chances, fair hearings, bullying, teamwork, etc. (and not about internal politics) would help editors discover that these qualities were important in ArbCom members. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:56, 17 December 2021 (UTC)

  Maybe, but what's being discussed is the possibility of an "electoral compass" tool, not whether it's appropriate to ask questions of the candidates, and I don't see how this would translate into any kind of "how should I vote?" tool. See my comments in the #Election compass tool section a couple of threads up; with the arguable exception of second chances (where there are legitimate grounds for dispute between "turn a blind eye" and "banned means banned"), none of these are issues on which candidates are going to have differing opinions. No candidate is going to say "well, I'm all in favor of bullying", and although they might give different answers as to how it should be tackled and whether it's an issue that should be dealt with at the community, the arbcom, or the T&S level, there's no easy way to score that into a format which a machine can translate into some kind of grade. (You see the same problem with the "real" Political Compass test, where all the questions are written with the very atypical politics of the US in mind and consequently even avid hardline authoritarian extremists in Europe come across as centrists, because there are so many questions to which anyone no matter what their political views would give the same answer. As an experiment, I just tried answering all their questions as best I could in character as Priti Patel—arguably the most right-wing politician to hold office in the UK in postwar history—and scored almost dead center at 1.13/10 "right" and 2.46/10 "libertarian".) ‑ Iridescent 16:24, 17 December 2021 (UTC)

  The US political compass is also written in such a way to make everyone think they're a libertarian. It's not actually a tool to see where you stand. It's a tool to make you believe you're Ayn Rand. TonyBallioni (talk) 16:34, 17 December 2021 (UTC)

  They also have some really whacky "analysis". To take the last UK election as an example just because it's one where I'm familiar with all the parties involved, the previously-mentioned Plaid Cymru—who literally have "To ensure economic prosperity, social justice and the health of the natural environment, based on decentralist socialism" as their stated primary objective after Welsh independence itself are shown as almost dead centre, while the Conservative Party—already by that time under the live-and-let-live and state-subsidies-all-round governance of Boris Johnson—are shown as more right-wing than even the actual extreme-right-wingers of UKIP (and also further to the right than Donald Trump). The UK still fares better than Germany, where apparently the only party in the entire country that isn't "authoritarian" is (checks notes) the remnants of the East German Communist Party. ‑ Iridescent 18:20, 17 December 2021 (UTC)

  I took it again in the first time in years just to see where I fell. Answered it all accurately. I'm apparently a hardcore libertarian. Which is odd, as I'm definitely not a libertarian by any reasonable use of the term. TonyBallioni (talk) 23:13, 17 December 2021 (UTC)

  I just took it answering it all accurately as myself, and am apparently an ultra-leftist libertarian (7.25 left, 2.36 libertarian), which is news to me. I think that what's going on with the "libertarian" thing is that they treat 'libertarian' as 'the absence of authoritarian', and they have a preponderance of questions where any reasonable person—whatever their politics—is going to answer "that's not the government's business".

  To TPWs, there is (for once) actually a point to this rambling sidetrack. These "political score" tools have years of experience (TPC has been running for over 20 years) and are working in an area where huge stacks of books and research papers have been published into the best ways to measure and interpret political sentiment. If they're unable to given even rough approximations of an accurate reading, what is the likelihood that a volunteer writing a tool as a hobby, or a WMF dev ordered to write such a tool, is going to come up with something that can interpret the often contradictory responses of Arbcom candidates? (As Kudpung points out in his essay linked in the OP, many of the questions this time round were so garbled and vague that it's literally impossible to compare the candidates' responses. I can say from experience that this is not a new phenomenon this year.)

  Dubious tools aren't so much of an issue in real world elections, since the overwhelming majority of voters won't be using them so any distorting effect will be drowned out. In the context of Misplaced Pages/Wikimedia elections, where there's a small electorate most of whom won't have even heard of most of the candidates, anything that misleads even a handful of participants is potentially going to have a significant distorting effect on the outcome. (I take any voter guide that doesn't have a huge "THIS IS JUST MY PERSONAL OPINION!" disclaimer with a major pinch of salt for the same reason.)

  This is why I opposed and still oppose mass mailings to people who haven't explicitly requested they be added to a "notify me of Arbcom elections", "notify me of RFAs", "notify me of all Requests for Comment in a given area" etc mailing list, and oppose secret ballots in the Misplaced Pages context, even though opposing either seems counter-intuitive. Participants who aren't either already aware that there's an election/RFC/RFA going on or people who've asked to be notified, are in general not going to be familiar enough with the candidates/issues to make informed choices, and not going to be people who'll want to put in the effort to read up on all the background. At RFA/RFC the open voting goes some way to allaying that, as the "here's why I'm supporting" and "here's why I'm opposing" are all laid out in detail so even if one's unfamiliar with the candidate or unfamiliar with the issue it's possible to get a feel for what the issues are. I know mine is a minority opinion, but I honestly do believe that Arbcom elections worked better when they looked like this as a collection of RFA-style support/oppose comments where it was actually possible to see who was supporting/opposing whom and why. ‑ Iridescent 06:35, 18 December 2021 (UTC)

  Yes, that's what they're doing, and they're also wording the questions in such a way as to make you select the options that will increase your libertarian score. Using myself as an example — I don't think the students at the local university should be arrested for smoking pot. I think that's a position most people in the United States would hold. That says nothing on my overall views on drug policy, which are not anywhere near what the libertarian fringes want. The compass takes a question meant to encompass drug policy; gives you an option (should possession of marijuana be criminal) that even right-wing states have adopted or de facto adopted, and then uses the response to move you further down the libertarian spectrum. There are a fair amount of questions that take answers that the majority of Westerners, even in the United States, have the same opinion, and then they take your response and move you down into the lower two quadrants. It's an obvious bias of the compass.Relating it to Misplaced Pages: I could write a compass test that has people agreeing that a banned user should be an arb and that NYB is a fringe lunatic, just based on how I worded the questions. That's an extreme hypothetical, but you know as well as I do that the type of people who would be writing ACE compasses would also likely be the people with axes to grind. TonyBallioni (talk) 17:22, 18 December 2021 (UTC)

  Likewise e.g. the homosexuality question; I'd be fairly confident in saying that the majority view in conservative America is "personally I think it's sinful but the government has no business interfering, this is for God to judge", which according to the compass tool would be "libertarian".

  We already have the questions they used to construct the compass tool for the movement charter elections, so I imagine anything here would be similar. Any compass tool not created by 'consensus' will just be denounced as illegitimate, but if we create a tool by consensus than as you can see we'll just get a mixture of platitudes and whoever happened to be drafting the questions trying to force candidates to endorse their pet projects by putting them in a situation where they'll find it hard to say "no".

  I suppose if the existing committee (or a commission of recent former arbs) drew up a list of questions they felt would be genuinely relevant to the people who'd be taking over from them, that might work, but could reasonably be accused of being a mechanism for entrenching bias. In fact thinking about it, if I remember I might suggest something similar when they hold the RFC on how to structure next year's election; if all the candidates got asked a bunch of standard questions from current or former arbs at the beginning of their Q&A page it would at the very least mean they had some sensible and relevant questions to start with before they had to engage with the annual parade of cranks and grudge-holders. ‑ Iridescent 18:10, 18 December 2021 (UTC)

  There used to be a set of standard questions for arb candidates, which grew longer each year; you answered those questions yourself in ACE2010. (You also answered more than the usual quota of non-standard questions, such as "if you're both elected, how will you be able to coexist on ArbCom with Newyorkbrad after what you wrote about him on Misplaced Pages Review?", which you dealt with well.) A couple of years later, the standard questions were deprecated in favor of just having the individualized ones, although typically most of the "individual questions" are posted identically to each candidate. A short set of standard questions isn't a bad idea, but whoever might prepare it should be sure to look up the reasons the prior set of questions was dropped. Newyorkbrad (talk) 22:40, 18 December 2021 (UTC)

  According to recent polling, 70% of the general public, and 55% of Republicans support same-sex marriage, up from 35% and 17% in 2009. The same is true for marijuana. Scorpions13256 (talk) 00:07, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

  I'm not sure I even realized those were standard questions, rather than just a section for "one-off questions the questioner had chosen to ask of every candidate that year, rather than just addressed to a particular candidate". (As regards Misplaced Pages Review, in light of my comments about Discord above in this thread, I hope you'll note that the day the election results were announced I immediately withdrew from WR and never touched it again. I do actually practice what I preach.)

  The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of a set of pre-formatted questions to be answered by each candidate as part of their candidacy process, the same as we currently do at RFA. It would give candidates space to expand on their initial statements without cluttering the candidate statements page, would pre-empt people having to ask the questions we know are going to be asked every year, and as previously mentioned would reduce the problem of the first (and thus most visible) questions each year quite often being variations on "what is your opinion on insert obscure issue which nobody not actually involved cares about?" and "do you agree that the existing committee is hopelessly corrupt for blocking my friend/not blocking my enemy?". ‑ Iridescent 07:00, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

  I like your sample question ("What is your opinion on <insert obscure issue which nobody not actually involved cares about>?"), and I hope that something similar will someday appear as an example in a help page.  ;-)

  Writing the software is the easy part; it could be done in a spreadsheet.

  Finding questions that correctly divide groups is harder. If you don't do that correctly, then your tool will either give the same results for everyone, or it will produce essentially random noise. This is a solvable problem, though it would probably take resources (e.g., a couple of hours' each from many former ArbCom candidates to "playtest" survey questions) and professional-level skills in survey writing. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:10, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

More election thoughts

This is very much thinking out loud rather than any kind of even partially-formed plan, but in this context I'm not sure dividing the group is the issue. In the context of arbcom elections we're appointing—or at least trying to appoint—people with the ability to dispassionately assess a situation rather than a policy-making body. As such, what the questions to the candidates ought to be about should primarily be about how people react when they're placed in a situation where whatever they do is going to make people unhappy, and about whether people can be fair when asked to reach a decision about the conduct of people they know. There are some genuine 'political' issues involved in arbcom elections—I mentioned "where do you stand on the 'turn a blind eye' vs 'banned means banned' spectrum?" and "how many second/third/fourth chances should someone be given and under what circumstances?" but most of the issues affecting arb candidates aren't the type of issue that lends itself well to a spectrum. (Even if we did try to place candidates on a numerical scale for issues like "are you likely to be biased in cases involving people who hold views with which you disagree?" and "are you likely to give undue weight to the opinions of your friends?", we'd end up annoying a lot of people.) The "compass" approach might be valid for elections to things like the WMF board, where successful candidates are potentially going to influence policy, but for arbcom elections I'd say the purpose of standard questions would be more to create a managed environment for the candidates to give an impression of themselves, rather than for people with competing views to write manifestoes. ‑ Iridescent 04:56, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

I think that you want to divide the group, e.g., into people who can dispassionately assess a situation vs those who can't, and people who will cope when their friends turn against them vs those who won't.

Another possibility would be to require candidates to do some basic training first. The obvious problem with that is becoming better informed about the work might result in very few people being willing to stand for election. How many people would do this, if they understood up front that it's a time-sucking experience that will lose you half your friends and make Misplaced Pages completely un-fun for the next three years? WhatamIdoing (talk) 08:11, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

We do try our best to stop candidates going into it blindfold; you can't add your name to the candidates list without being confronted with assorted dire warnings like You are running for a seat on the Arbitration Committee. This is a position that is extremely demanding on time and energy; please run only if you desire to contribute to the encyclopedia in this difficult role. and Candidates should be aware that they are likely to receive considerable internal and external scrutiny. External scrutiny may include attempts to investigate on- and off-wiki activities; previous candidates have had personal details revealed and unwanted contact made with employers and family. We are unable to prevent this and such risks will continue if you are successful.

Being informed about the nature of the work isn't really an issue, since anyone who can convince enough people to support them in the election is almost certainly going to be someone who already understands what Arbcom does. (They'll also almost certainly be admins, or at the very least have had long dealings with admins, so will at least be familiar with the back-office workings of Misplaced Pages and to some extent the WMF.) The issue is more that time pressures select for people who are inclined to act as arbs largely full-time rather than trying to remain active as editors as well; the constant dealing with the worst of people selects for people with a particular thick-skinned mentality (and has a tendency to instil an us-v-them attitude); and the way the elections are structured selects for people who are good at telling people what they want to hear without offending others, not necessarily for people who are good at doing what's necessary even if it means offending others (and creates an additional pressure against re-election of arbs who've made necessary decisions that inevitably antagonize half the participants in a debate).

It's part of why I'm so keen on seeing Arbcom's remit split up and redistributed across a few smaller committees rather than one big one. If we had different people tackling different tasks rather than a single group doing everything, it would be less of a commitment both in terms of time, and in terms of exposure to crazy people. If it genuinely only took up a couple of hours a week, candidates were able to specialize rather to be experts in everything (we don't expect members of the Bot Approvals Group to be experts in assessing the notablity of roads, why do we expect people appointed to an alleged conflict resolution body to be able to interpret Checkuser results?), and one wasn't automatically signing up to an inbox full of incoherent threats every morning for the next five years, we could attract a broader spectrum of people rather than relying on recruitment from within an ever-shrinking professional political class. (Remember the fuss a couple of years ago when we fell below 500 active administrators for the first time? As of today that number is on 465.) ‑ Iridescent 05:54, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

Io, Saturnalia!

		Io, Saturnalia!
		Wishing you and yours a Happy Holiday Season, from the horse and bishop person. May the year ahead be productive and distraction-free. Ealdgyth (talk) 14:56, 17 December 2021 (UTC)

And the same to you! December seems to come along earlier every year. ‑ Iridescent 16:25, 17 December 2021 (UTC)

Songs of the season

		Holiday cheer
		Here is a snowman a gift a boar's head and something blue for your listening pleasure. Enjoy and have a wonderful 2022 I. MarnetteD|Talk 02:44, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

Likewise! I do like that photo… ‑ Iridescent 07:02, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

Happy holidays...

And the same to you! ‑ Iridescent 04:58, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

Your reverts

It appears that I have run into this situation yet again. See everything in this diff. It appears that even though the source is public domain in other countries, most published works later than 1926 are still copyrighted in the United States. This chart appears to be the most handy guide we have. Pinging Nthep and Premeditated Chaos just to be safe. Scorpions13256 (talk) 23:26, 21 December 2021 (UTC)

This guide appears to be even clearer. Scorpions13256 (talk) 23:39, 21 December 2021 (UTC)

Meyrick lived in England, the book was published and printed in England, he died in 1938 meaning his books are out of copyright in England, and the holding institution for this particular book is in England. I'm inclined to agree with the BHL where they say Copyright Status: Public domain. The BHL considers that this work is no longer under copyright protection; even if it weren't, I'm not going to start revdeleting since there's obviously zero potential that Meyrick's heirs are going to take legal action over our republishing content from a book that's undoubtedly in the public domain under English law. ‑ Iridescent 07:20, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

(Since I got pinged). No one's disputing that the books are PD in England, but the problem is that the URAA restored US copyright to foreign works. Since the WMF is on US soil, it has to go by US copyright law, as idiotic as it may be. Of course it's unlikely that we'll be sued by the estate, but whether or not legal action may be taken is not the bar for removing content that violates copyrights. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 08:11, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

As per PMC. The URAA is a complete pain and unfortunately we have to work within it. Nthep (talk) 10:18, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

I see that the source says "1923-1930" so - assuming that it's a publication date and that parts of it were published sequentially - it seems like parts might be under copyright and other parts would not be. Which parts are we talking about here? Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 11:11, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

Sorry I took so long to respond. I don't have internet access until after 5:30 on weekdays. It appears that the whole thing is just one giant book on individual species of Lepidoptera. The species do not appear to be separated by year of publication. I am not sure how much of the book you have read. If we have all been wrong this entire time, I am more than willing to go through all of my past edits and request that the content come back. I always use the same edit summary, so it won't take long. Scorpions13256 (talk) 22:44, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

It was literally published as a series of booklets that were then collated into volumes, so the publication date changes every few pages (example example). Parts will be PD by any definition, but it's cartainly not a good use of time checking them all individually. ‑ Iridescent 05:33, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

Was the book copyrighted in the United States? If so, was the copyright renewed? Newyorkbrad (talk) 23:02, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

I've been unable to determine whether or not the book was published/copyrighted in the US at the same time it was published in England, so my guess is that it was not. Unfortunately, it was not in the public domain in its source country as of the URAA date of January 1 1996, so it doesn't meet the special case whose criteria is "1926 through 1977: Published without compliance with US formalities, and in the public domain in its source country as of URAA date" (see Commons:Hirtle_chart). ♠PMC♠ (talk) 23:14, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

I think an adminstrator may want to review what has been redacted at Keiferia chloroneura. I went through all of my old edits as I promised, and this is the only one from the same source that may have been published before 1927. All of my other removals look good. The four that Iridescent reverted were likely also published in 1925. Scorpions13256 (talk) 22:01, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

Diannaa, I wouldn't normally bother you but if you're around would you mind giving Scorpions a second opinion regarding the above one? This is a slightly odd case, as the sources in question were published as a partwork series of installments and only later collated into a book, so the copyright status is literally different for individual pages of the same source. (Although this very much goes against WMF dogma, I do stand by what I said above that this is not something about which I'm losing the slightest sleep if we get it wrong. The articles have such minimal traffic that if we delete something we shouldn't we're not inconveniencing anyone, and the commercial value is so minimal that if we keep something we shouldn't there's zero realistic legal risk.) ‑ Iridescent 11:21, 28 December 2021 (UTC)

Ironically, if we let the Ruigeroeland CCI sit untouched for as long as most CCIs sit, the majority of his sources will hit PD and we won't have to care. I'm not saying that's the only reason I've been ignoring it (it was something like 75 unbelievably tedious subpages long to start with), but... ♠PMC♠ (talk) 12:10, 28 December 2021 (UTC)

I wouldn't even call it ironic. There's more work at CCI than there is people to do it especially since MRG left; prioritising "blatant copyright violations with the potential to have genuine commericial and/or legal impact on Misplaced Pages and reusers" over "technical cases to do with differing copyright expiry dates between the US and other jurisdictions" would seem to be straightforward common sense. ‑ Iridescent 12:46, 29 December 2021 (UTC)

My preference is not not base copyright decisions on the likelihood of us getting caught or getting sued. I would just go by the Hirtle chart and US copyright law. In cases where we are unable to determine the copyright status, my preference is to assume material is copyright unless proven otherwise.— Diannaa (talk) 12:37, 28 December 2021 (UTC)

Happy Christmas!

		Season's Greetings
		Wishing everybody a Happy Holiday Season, and all best wishes for the New Year! Adoration of the Kings (Bramantino) is my Wiki-Christmas card to all for this year. Johnbod (talk) 14:50, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

And to you! ‑ Iridescent 14:30, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

Nadolig llawen a blwyddyn newydd dda

		Nadolig llawen a blwyddyn newydd dda
		So here's some Jingle Wings and some Jingle Navidad Cubana and some Bryn and some Crickmore:Crewe just for you!! Very best wishes for Christmas and the New Year. Martinevans123 (talk) 14:24, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

A'r un peth, gobeithio y cewch chi flwyddyn newydd fendigedig a gwyliau hapus! (Beio google os mai gibberish yw hwn, ni allaf ond siarad am dri gair o hyn.) ‑ Iridescent 14:29, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

Yes, Google Translate is Still a Cucking Funt, etc. looks fine to me! Martinevans123 (talk) 14:38, 24 December 2021 (UTC) p.s. sorry about the effing and jeffing

ANI response

I edit conflicted as you closed the thread ... may I add my defense anyway ?? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:39, 30 December 2021 (UTC)

• It's curious that Nutez failed to notify me of this thread, as they similarly failed to notify others per the instructions at WP:FAR, even as they continued editing and the FAR Coord, Nikkimaria asked Nutez to do so. I would not like to think that Nutez was intentionally poking me, since I am the editor who always verifies the notifications at FAR. But looking on the bright side, I suspect that we have seen progress on Misplaced Pages since 2012, when male editors could refer to respected female editors as bitches, Wicked Witch of the West sending out her winged monkeys, and accuse other female editors of hate mongering for a neutral notification of a now blocked user engaging in serial falsification of references. I don't think those kinds of misogynistic posts would fly today, and they were shocking even then. I rather foolishly (but brashly and proudly at the time) called out the assholery in all caps no less; I had not engaged in any such behavior before that, and have not done it since. I hope my little contribution towards highlighting misogyny on Misplaced Pages (for which I was fully prepared at the time to be blocked) made a wee bit of difference. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:39, 30 December 2021 (UTC)

  Feel free to add to the ANI thread if you want; as the subject of the thread you're entirely within your rights to do so. My closure wasn't any kind of formal "nobody else is allowed to comment" closure—I only closed it to prevent other people wasting their time checking the fake diffs, and combing through your recent contribution history in case the OP had just made an error with the diff and you actually had done something problematic. (One of the wearily well-documented problems with Misplaced Pages noticeboards is that as we don't have a formal "closed without action" marker. Thus spurious threads end up wasting a lot of time since each admin coming afresh to the complaint sees that no action has been taken, and concludes that that's because they're the first admin to see it and thus they have a duty to investigate it now they've been made aware, so we end up with 20+ people all reading the same nonsense trying to figure out what's actually being complained about.) ‑ Iridescent 16:30, 30 December 2021 (UTC)

  Thanks, Iri; since you don't mind, I will add that response there (lest the "assholery" be drug up again in the future), and I have notified Nutez of this thread. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:34, 30 December 2021 (UTC)

  "Misogyny from a male editor" doesn't really paint the full picture. What you actually mean is "Misogyny from a male 'Audience Engagement Content Strategist' at the Wikimedia Foundation". ‑ Iridescent 17:44, 30 December 2021 (UTC)

  "Holey Moley, more WMF assholery." Chuck Hoolery 123 (talk) 17:57, 30 December 2021 (UTC)

  Lovely. Well, I like to think he was just a kid then, and it didn’t occur to him that it wasn’t OK to go around calling women bitches, witches and hatemongers (right after we had a civility arbcase). I never knew if putting the shoe on the other foot got the point across, even with the all caps, but in hindsight, I could have said instead, “How would you like it if someone called you a churlish prick”, which would have been more comparable to what he was condoning and covering up with hate-mongering bitches and witches content. I do think that such a situation would not happen today. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:05, 30 December 2021 (UTC)

  Ooh, "Bitches and Witches", sounds very modern to me! Martinevans123 (talk) 18:14, 30 December 2021 (UTC)

  Who knew I would go down this rabbit hole for using the words darn and heck ? What a strange world … SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:18, 30 December 2021 (UTC)

  Darned rabbits! Martinevans123 (talk) 18:37, 30 December 2021 (UTC)

  If I were stretching AGF to near breaking point, Nutez's previous account says that they're a Norwegian-speaker with limited English. Dropping "darn and heck" into Google Translate for English→Norwegian renders faen og pokker; re-translate that Norwegian→English and it comes back as "fuck and heck". If he's relying on translation software for unfamiliar words, I could just about buy that "darn" and "heck" may not translate properly, and he genuinely believes that he's being sworn at. (I'm singularly unconvinced by this—most Norwegians have a decent knowledge of English, and these aren't hyper-obscure terms we're talking about—but it's just about plausible. We did once have a case of a virtually fluent English speaker getting very upset at the phrase "get your knickers in a twist" because he thought he was being accused of wearing women's underwear; the reason book translation is such a lucrative gig is that idiomatic English is an absolute nightmare to translate without messing up the nuances.) ‑ Iridescent 19:01, 30 December 2021 (UTC)

  I just want to know why they don’t do notifications :) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:07, 30 December 2021 (UTC)

  When I'm editing Misplaced Pages, I'll wear what I like.... if you don't mind! Martinevans123 (talk) 19:09, 30 December 2021 (UTC)

  He certainly isn't the first and won't be the last. The "you must notify everyone" warning that's shown to people starting new sections at ANI could practically be designed to be ignored—everything from the font to the color scheme is almost designed to say "you can skip this part". ‑ Iridescent 19:12, 30 December 2021 (UTC)

  I see what you mean :) Norwegian: interesting. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:38, 30 December 2021 (UTC)

I tried giving SandyGeorgia an ANI notice, but got in an edit conflict with an admin censuring me. The Google translate theory is funny though: on my talk page you recently wrote bullshit, which I don't consider to be particularly civil. If I put that particular 8-letter word into GT (English→Norwegian) it comes out as "tull", which re-translates to English as "nonsense". In that case it works in your favour, so I shall not complain. Slightly amusing is it, nevertheless. Anyway, I'm done here – it seems like you had a lot of fun at my expense. Nutez (talk) 11:38, 31 December 2021 (UTC)

You posted at ANI at 11:25 UTC; no admin posted at User talk:SandyGeorgia until 16:59 UTC (and that wasn't to "censure you"). This is a wiki and the histories are preserved for anyone to check; for the second time, if you're going to tell lies tell lies that aren't obvious and easily-checked fabrications. ‑ Iridescent 11:49, 31 December 2021 (UTC)

You sure? On my screen it looks like Nil Einne posted the ANI notice 11:36, i.e. only ten minutes after I created the section at ANI. Nutez (talk) 12:07, 31 December 2021 (UTC)

Nil Einne however isn't an admin. And I think it's generally expected that the person who makes a report also notifies its subjects. More substantively, though, nine year old edit summaries are not a good grounding for a complaint and it doesn't seem like Sandy made any questionable edit summaries after your post on their talk page - or at least you didn't link any Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 12:17, 31 December 2021 (UTC)

I didn't know that, I just assumed that they were, since they intervened so readily. I got into an edit conflict with them several times, both at ANI and on User talk:SandyGeorgia, so I gave up in the end. Nutez (talk) 12:21, 31 December 2021 (UTC)

It's not expected only admins will intervene at ANI. Also there is zero point notifying someone twice. So once you saw that I had notified SandyGeorgia there was no reason to notify them anymore. You could have offered an explanation or apology for failing to notify them. I'd note that I while I have a tendency to edit my posts. I did not do so either at SandyGeorgia's talk page or ANI so it was impossible for you to get into an edit conflict with me more than once on either page. I did make a followup on ANI mentioning that pings weren't sufficient, 50 minutes later. If you were still trying to notify SandyGeorgia nearly an hour after you posted, that's largely a you problem not an us problem. Nil Einne (talk) 12:29, 31 December 2021 (UTC)

You see, edit conflicts do happen (even here). It is correct, I was trying to add more evidence and decided to edit post or post something more before giving the notice, but I got in an EC with you, and lost my hope.

I'm letting you know as it doesn't look like the thread starter is going to.
— User:Nil Einne
— User_talk:SandyGeorgia#ANI_notice

It seemed to me that you simply assumed that I wasn't going to post an ANI notice ever. Nutez (talk) 12:35, 31 December 2021 (UTC)

(EC) You said an admin posted, but I'm not an admin. And while my comment at ANI could be considered "censuring" you, but it's unreasonable to call my ANI notice such. Yes I did offer a brief explanation to SandyGeorgia of why I was posting when the thread had nothing to do with me. I consider this reasonable when I'm notifying someone because the thread started did not do so, so whoever I'm notifying understands I'm just posting because someone else did not and it's otherwise nothing to do with me. It did occur maybe you just decided to edit your post or post something more before giving the notice, or maybe were just very slow. Hence why in both my comment at ANI and on SandyGeorgia's talk page I implicitly acknowledged the possibility maybe you were just slow. (In most cases it's been long enough I don't bother.) I'm not sure why it took you so long to post an ANI notice since AFAICT your next post at ANI was a reply to me so I see no sign why it would take 8+ minutes for you to do so. But in any event, from what I saw, this is the first time you even mentioned you had planned to post an ANI notice but got delayed by 8+ minutes, indeed your previous comment seem to suggest you thought a ping was enough. So personally I have no problem accepting you just got very delayed, you also need to understand why none of us knew this is what happened. Nil Einne (talk) 12:23, 31 December 2021 (UTC)