Misplaced Pages

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Muscat Hoe (talk | contribs) at 21:19, 11 September 2015 (→What's better and what's worse?). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Jimbo welcomes your comments and updates. He holds the founder's seat on the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees. The three trustees elected as community representatives until Wikimania 2017 are Denny, Doc James, and Pundit. The Wikimedia Foundation Senior Community Advocate is Maggie Dennis.

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Getting better?

Is Misplaced Pages getting better? --Bob K31416 (talk) 15:43, 6 September 2015 (UTC)

@Bob K31416: That depends on how you classify "better". It is growing. Rubbish computer 19:29, 6 September 2015 (UTC)

There was a study before showing it gradually getting more neutral in terms of wording, but still being biased to the left. Unfortunately I can't remember where. Rubbish computer 19:30, 6 September 2015 (UTC)

I agree at it would depend on what you mean by better since there are several ways to interpret better (including more non Western content, Quicker response to vandalism and POV Pushers, improving the software to make editing easier, etc).--65.94.253.185 (talk) 03:05, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

"It is growing." Well, then it obviously must be better, mustn't it?. Because everyone knows that bigger is better. Q.E.D.

However, if instead of looking at the number of articles it contains and creates (many of which are of mediocre quality) you instead look at the number of active contributing editors, then Misplaced Pages has actually been shrinking since 2007, and continues to do so. Of course, no one involved in Misplaced Pages wants to hear that - especially old guard "well-entrenched" editors who wish to perpetuate, as part of their own Peter Pan denial of changing reality, the period just prior to circa 2007 when Misplaced Pages was in its heyday and had become a web institution. However, since its 2007 zenith at over 50,000 active editors, Misplaced Pages editorial participation has been steadily declining due to it becoming a bureaucratic behemoth with no structure or leadership and a high level of policy creep. By its very nature Misplaced Pages eschews any sort of central planning and conventional expertise. Thus it considers contributions by subject matter experts in real life to be a conflict of interest since they get paid for their expert knowledge, and that's not "the Wikiway" - which is amateur volunteerism. Consequently, Misplaced Pages articles are created mostly by unemployed management consultants, dilettante telephone sanitizers, and a Scouse hairdresser called Rita who mostly contributes on her two half days off work.

Over the intervening years since its 2007 peak Misplaced Pages's culture, which was always feisty and argumentative (but ultimately in a good, constructive way), has now become top heavily bureaucratic and highly confrontational (in an obstructionist and persnickety unproductive way). The rules and guidelines for contributing to the project (which used to be just the "five pillars" of policy guidance) have now reached labyrinthine levels that long ago crossed "Teal Deer" thresholds, becoming internally inconsistent and self-contradictory in the process. This, in turn, only creates more opportunities for daily acrimony and disputes to occur, thereby requiring an ever-increasing volunteer work force of officious and sometimes abusive admin panjandrums to police it. Jimmy Wales has been dismissing suggestions that the project will get worse for years now (despite hard evidence to the contrary), but is on record as stating that he believes the project cannot significantly improve without an influx of new editors who have different interests and emphases (not to mention gender!). Yet Misplaced Pages's complete intransigence - or perhaps its inept incompetence (e.g., the "Visual Editor" debacle); it's actually a lot of both - at abating the ever-increasing levels of acrimonious confrontation and bureaucracy is not only failing to attract his desired new blood, but is preventing what new editors that do venture to dip their foot into the Wikipedian waters from also staying very long, in addition to driving away long established "old guard" editors as well.

On the flip side of the coin, with Misplaced Pages receiving more than ten billion page views every month that keep it in the top ten of the most used websites in the world, and with the project still creating lots of new articles and pages, there are many Pollyannaish Wikipedians that feel everything is simply fine and dandy and generally tickety-boo. Misplaced Pages has continually grown from day one and will continue to do so in the foreseeable future. For instance, it hasn't even started to scratch the surface yet when it comes to documenting all the Finnish and Czech ice hockey players, so still plenty of work to do right there. Ask any Misplaced Pages editor and he'll tell you it's "a work in progress" with still no end in sight where that Borgesian day is eventually arrived at when the encyclopedia will have finally documented and defined everything that has ever existed in the world. No doubt the editors of Encarta felt as equally confident and bullish. If Misplaced Pages is bigger and brighter today then it can only be even bigger and brighter still tomorrow. Indeed it can, but one does suspect that such ostrich Wikipedians may have never read this particular article. — not really here discuss 05:56, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

Wow, that'a really, really long comment there. I doubt that many people will read all of it. I prefer to be concise. The best available metrics show that the number of active editors is actually increasing modestly, rather than decreasing. Read a recent Signpost article about the data. Cullen Let's discuss it 06:31, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

There ya go, old fella. I've now broken my post up into four separate messages so that even people with IQs less than ambient room temperature, or recovering from cataract surgery, like yourself will now be able to follow it. I also made sure I did it in as many edits as I could in order to maximize my edit count. That way I will soon be a Senior Editor, which will hopefully allow me to wander around Misplaced Pages with a gold star stuck on my forehead like an over-achieving preschooler too. Good call. — not really here discuss 08:15, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

Thank you for the gracious remarks. They reflect well on you, I'm sure. Cullen Let's discuss it 21:13, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

My favorite way of checking this is to "click random article" on 10 articles, and go back and look at them a year ago, 5 years ago, 10 years ago. Every time I have tried, it's unambiguous: Misplaced Pages is getting better by this test.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 08:28, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

So just checking that ten random articles all get longer in any chosen five year span conclusively proves Misplaced Pages is getting better? Wow, that's really scientific! Do you perhaps have any sources you could cite that verify that such a methodology is remotely meaningful of anything? How do your random checks prove the quality of the writing is improving; or that it's becoming more NPOV; or more factually correct; or better sourced? Does you random check methodology conclusively show that the percentage of women editing Misplaced Pages is significantly increasing over every five year span? Or that more articles are being written about Africa than, say, Finnish ice hockey players? BTW, by "citable sources" I mean reliable secondary sources from independent publishers ... not a Signpost article produced by Misplaced Pages as an Orwellian morale-raiser for the troops ; and by "percentage of women" I mean the percentage of real independent thinking women, not women who get paid by, or receive college course credits from, feminists to intrude ultra-feminist POV material into Misplaced Pages anyway they can (because they don't count). — not really here discuss 09:22, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

Perhaps your could read what Jimbo actually wrote? The word "longer" or any synonym doesn't appear in his post. --NeilN 16:01, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

Perhaps YOU should read what Jimbo actually wrote. And Jimbo too, because he states below that he "suggested checking the quality." Show me where the word "quality" appears in his two line post? He merely states, "Every time I have tried, it's unambiguous". Unambiguous WRT what? Length, quality, truth, format, sourcing, dates, wombats? It's a meaningless statement. He may have intended "quality" - and I'm sure he did - but it's not what he wrote. He cannot expect readers to magically divine his intent. Incorrectly assuming what another person says goes right to the heart of WP:AGF. It applies just as much to expecting someone to correctly divine what you really meant to say (but didn't) as it does to expecting them not to read something entirely different into what you did say.

His persnickety reaction to my post may have been justified if I had chosen to divine "wombats" given the context of the discussion, but not for choosing any of the others meanings I listed as they are all pertinent. I went with "length" because that is the ONLY objective criterion on my list; all the other criteria require subjective analysis and assessment and are thus POV, therefore they could not possibly be considered unambiguous. — not really here discuss 06:59, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

"Misplaced Pages is getting better by this test." You were the one who started a rant based on the facile assumption that better equals longer article lengths. --NeilN 18:59, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

His point is that no method at all was given. Jimmy wrote "My favorite way of checking this is to "click random article" on 10 articles, and go back and look at them a year ago, 5 years ago, 10 years ago. Every time I have tried, it's unambiguous: Misplaced Pages is getting better by this test". By what test? By just looking at articles written 5 years, 10 years ago? Peter Damian (talk) 19:36, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

I'd say it was his opinion, just like any of us could compare an article today with what it was like 5 years ago. You might try it with an article chosen with the random article generator, just to get an idea of what it's like to make such a comparison. --Bob K31416 (talk) 19:45, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

No, he assumed Jimbo equated getting better with longer. If someone says to you get better meat at supermarket x than at supermarket y do you assume they're talking about the quantity of meat you get? And the method was given. One test to see if Misplaced Pages is getting better is to look at random articles at specific points in time and see if they're getting better. --NeilN 19:49, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

The key word here is "unambiguous". Jimbo did not specify what the test criterion was (criteria were). The only criterion that might possibly be unambiguous after looking at the two versions of an article would be length. If one of the randomly selected articles was a FA article five years ago and still is now, but there had been inevitable textual additions and deletions to it in that interim five years, making it a couple of paragraphs longer, there would be unanimous agreement amongst all editors following Jimbo's outlined process that it was unambiguously longer (and thus better if bigger is better). If quality of writing or factual truth were criteria instead then different editors performing Jimbo's process may come to completely different conclusions about the two versions of the article.

Some may regard that the newer (longer) version is now too verbose and thus the article has regressed for that reason alone. Others may feel that the additional material was sorely missing from the previous version and thus the longer version is a clear improvement. The newer version of the article may have corrected some earlier factual errors while introducing a few more new ones. The decision over which one was considered more factually correct may divide the reviewing editors right down the middle. There may have been some awkward phrasing introduced with the text added to the newer version that despite it being more comprehensive (longer) and more factually correct still made editors claim the earlier version to be a better quality read. Quality and truth are not unambiguous attributes within the context of this discussion; they are subjective and need to be carefully weighed and factored. Jimbo's claim that his test with unspecified criteria was unambiguous can only lead a reasonable reader to the conclusion that he meant length.

It was NOT a bad faith assumption on my part as you keep confrontationally claiming in violation of WP:AGF. It was a perfectly reasonable one, even more so given that bigger is better was the concept at the front and center of the discussion at that juncture. One of my own fields of interest is Critical thinking, which is an important branch of philosophy, and I don't wish to waste my time in juvenile arguments with somebody with your own poor levels of comprehension, anymore than Einstein would want to waste his time discussing relativity with someone who can barely do arithmetic. Until Misplaced Pages can find a way to fix this sort of problem then it will not get the participation of the brain trust that it desires to take the project to the next level. I'm not in academia, I'm just well read with diverse interests, but if this sort of thing cheeses me off, it most certainly will cheese off members of the Royal Society. — not really here discuss 20:11, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

Comparing yourself to Einstein, or even claiming that you have expertise in critical thinking, doesn't help your argument at all. It might also help to take an intro to stats class. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 20:20, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

I didn't compare myself to Einstein. The analogy applied to a situation not to individual personae. The analogy, like most such analogies do, exaggerates the roles to emphasize the disparity involved. I have never claimed any expertise in stats. — not really here discuss 22:31, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

Gee, Gamergate much? That's a lot of questions, and virtually every single one of them contains an invalid premise or is asking me as if I made claims that I did not make. Let me answer your questions, all of them, and then you can go away and never ever post on my talk page again unless you take that chip off your shoulder.

1. "So just checking that ten random articles all get longer in any chosen five year span conclusively proves Misplaced Pages is getting better?" - Checking the length is not what I suggested. I suggested checking the quality. 'any chosen five year period' - not 'any' - the relevant 5 year period, the one ending now. Does checking 10 articles "conclusively prove" anything? Of course not. I said that it's my favorite way - it is something that I do from time to time, and I encourage others to do it.
2. "Do you perhaps have any sources..." No, I don't. I made the method up out of thin air. But it's a good idea, and you should try it sometime. I would actually love it if we had a tool to allow lots of people to do it and track the results across thousands of articles over many years.
3. "How do your random checks prove.. (various things)" - try it and you'll see what I mean. All those things are true.
4. " Or that more articles are being written about Africa than, say, Finnish ice hockey players?" - This particular method is focussed on the quality of individual articles and will completely miss problems with balance across various fields. A different test would be required to deal with that. Again, I told about a favorite way to check on the quality - it is not the only way nor even a comprehensive way. I never claimed it was, so your hostility is unwarranted.
5. As to the rest of your comments - they contain little content but they do reveal your agenda, so thanks for including that.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 16:05, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

Of course you didn't say 'longer', but since you gave no methodology for assessing 'quality', he was teasing you with 'length'. Given that the random method generally gets you 10 articles that you would never find in a standard reference work, a better method is to start with random articles taken from a standard reference work, and see if Misplaced Pages through time is approaching the quality of the standard work, using an appropriate understanding of 'quality'.

Another method, if you are a specialist in some subject, is to watch the progress about articles in that subject. As you know, I know a little about this guy, and this recent edit was just plain weird. On that measure, it's not getting better at all. And that's despite my occasional attempts at improvement. Peter Damian (talk) 17:19, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

Apparently it's not getting better. I have had many differences with Fram, but he is on the mark here. Peter Damian (talk) 09:30, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

@Me? I'm not really here: I know bigger isn't better, I was simply stating a fact. Rubbish computer 11:49, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

@Me? I'm not really here: Do you have a source for the number of active contributors continuing to decrease? --Rubbish computer 12:06, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

I have a number of sources (a dozen or so off the top of my head, possibly more) that support most of the points I made in my original post. If I was posting that text into an article they would, of course, have been cited at the appropriate places. But this is a Talk page and I made my comment extempore, not with those sources directly to hand, some of which I have not read in a long while, so I will have to go Google them in order to locate them. There is a possibility that some no longer exist (as some might go back as far as 2009). I will post each source as and when I find it and append it as a bullet underneath this reply. This might take awhile. However, before even starting that process, I first wish to address Jimbo's response(s). — not really here discuss 20:03, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

OK, here is the first reference source for some of what I initially posted (but not re Misplaced Pages contributors getting smaller, those will follow in due course). It can be summed up by the quote: "So long as an illiterate drug addict can override the work of a Harvard professor, Misplaced Pages will never be an authoritative reference." This is the source / basis for my comments at the end of my first paragraph (although obviously I cannot source my own humor) and it is clearly pertinent to the sort of posting interchange that just occurred with user JBL (which is why I found it first). Peter Damian also appears to be having a problem with this obvious flaw regarding how Misplaced Pages works.

• http://www.dba-oracle.com/t_credibility_wikipedia.htm

— not really here discuss 03:59, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

Here is a source reference that covers much of the material in my first post here (it is one of many and no doubt there will be much overlap). It addresses your initial question as to whether I could cite sources for "the number of active contributors continuing to decrease". It states categorically that they decreased by a third from the zenith contributor rate sometime in 2007 until ... well until it was published in October 2013. It doesn't prove the editor count hasn't increased again during the last two years, but I would have thought that highly unlikely, if only based on the sample behavior of people posting on this section of Jimbo's Talk page alone. My comments re paid feminism advocacy that upset Jimbo is based mostly on things I've read elsewhere (hopefully I can find those links too). This source actually contradicts that statement, claiming that articles on women's literature and feminism have actually declined in favor of computer games, which appears to be the exact opposite. I had no idea what "Gamergate" was until Jimbo stuck that label on me in order to try and suggest I had a hidden agenda, and so I had to go read the Misplaced Pages article on that topic in order to find out about it (to be honest I didn't expect to find an article on it). My source reading for that comment came from an Ivy League university source, if I remember correctly, but it may still have been an indirect reference to "Gamergate" without calling it that as such. I'm next going to redact that part of that comment until I can find, re-read and re-assess my sources supporting (or not) its validity. It is not at all critical to many of the other points I made, but it appears to have touched a nerve, and I apologize to Jimbo for that.

However, there's no hidden agenda here. If Jimbo wants me to declare my agenda then he need look no further than this comment in the Daily Mail article: "Unsurprisingly, the data also indicate that well-intentioned newcomers are far less likely to still be editing Misplaced Pages two months after their first try." If Jimbo wishes to fix that problem then he might wish to listen to some of the things I have to say. I consider myself to be such a "well-intentioned newcomer" albeit a "reincarnated newcomer", so I'm probably not as typically naive and more tech savvy than an actual newbie. However, the problem people on Misplaced Pages that are causing new blood not to stick around don't know that, so I've been getting the same treatment. Anyone in retail knows that 99% of people who feel aggrieved by a store or vendor don't bother to go back and complain (where the situation might be resolved) - they just cut the crap and simply start shopping elsewhere. I'm the other 1%. If Jimbo sincerely wants to see new blood come into Misplaced Pages and wishes to listen to why it might possibly be leaving from a first hand perspective, then I'll try and explain it to him. If he cannot do anything about it, then so be it; but one always has to understand what the problem is before you can start to fix it. If he simply doesn't want to hear because he believes he's heard it all before, or he wishes to deny that Rome is burning, then that's fine too. I will have given it my best shot.

• http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2477432/Is-decline-Misplaced Pages-A-staff-quit-site-thanks-dumbed-software-auto-delete-tools.html

— not really here discuss 05:35, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

While the Daily Mail article above mostly addresses the fact that long time editors are leaving because they are not willing to limbo dance in response to the new initiatives taken by Misplaced Pages in 2007, this study addresses the parallel lack of retention of new blood since 2007. However, it is purely a statistical analysis. Nobody appears to have talked to any exiting newbies to find out first hand why they left. Their reason for leaving is mostly speculative based on statistical analysis of new user accounts. But it does confirm statements I made in my initial post (and have repeated since) re linear falling newbie retention.

• http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~halfak/publications/The_Rise_and_Decline/

— not really here discuss 06:20, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

This WSJ sourced article from 2009 even comes with a video for the ADD crowd that now appear to dominate Misplaced Pages. Although from 2009, nothing appears to have changed from what was already trending even six years ago. Are Jimbo and the folk at WMF simply just covering their eyes and ears and ignoring these long term trends or are they not able to do anything about them? I don't believe they are completely unaware of them since they keep coming up for discussion at the annual Wikimania meetings. A couple of notable quotes included in this particular source:

- "Misplaced Pages is becoming a more hostile environment, contends Mr. Ortega, a project manager at Libresoft, a research group at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid. Many people are getting burnt out when they have to debate about the contents of certain articles again and again."

- "He argued that Misplaced Pages needed to focus less on the total number of articles and more on 'smarter metrics' such as article quality."

• http://cuppacafe.com/author/the-perfessor/page/204 (the second discussion item, not the first one on climate change)

— not really here discuss 06:49, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

Using Jimbo's method, I pushed the random article button in the side menu 10 times. I only tried the 5 year part of Jimbo's time ranges of 1, 5, and 10 years, which would have been more thorough. Below are the links to the diffs from 5 years ago to now. In cases where the page was created less than 5 years ago, I gave the current version, which is essentially the diff from it's nonexistence 5 years ago to now.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/search/?title=Kim_Hee-sun&type=revision&diff=678916354&oldid=383599363
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/search/?title=Dunleavy&type=revision&diff=652077569&oldid=369884357
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/search/?title=Iniquity_%28band%29&type=revision&diff=662721521&oldid=378161666
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/search/?title=Chamaemelum_nobile&type=revision&diff=672437156&oldid=380965667
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/search/?title=Walter_G._Alexander&type=revision&diff=679298867&oldid=372115853
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/search/?title=Uilenburg_%28Amsterdam%29&type=revision&diff=545941955&oldid=379618447
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/search/?title=Tadahito&oldid=536153308
8. https://en.wikipedia.org/search/?title=Niemi&type=revision&diff=540632279&oldid=372534500
9. https://en.wikipedia.org/search/?title=Simon_Petrie&oldid=655260314
10. https://en.wikipedia.org/search/?title=Eoxin_E4&oldid=670415197

--Bob K31416 (talk) 14:32, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

Great. I don't have time right now to study all those... how did we do in your random set?--Jimbo Wales (talk) 16:07, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

Here's some comments for each page. (I use "page" because some are disambiguation pages.)

1. Improved. Changed from small article with no figure and almost no cites to moderate sized article with 36 cites and figure.

2. Improved. A disambiguation page that grew with more wikilinks to articles and a discussion of item that was disambiguated and with a figure added for the discussion.

3. Unreferenced and about the same.

4. Uncertain but probably improved. It would take study. Reflist increased from 2 to 6, which is a good sign.

5. About the same with a few lines added.

6. A stub about the same.

7. Stub created about 3 years ago.

8. A disambiguation page that is about the same.

9. A small article created a little less than 5 years ago.

10. A stub created 8 months ago.

Overall, it looks like an improvement to me. (Just an aside, but most of the 10 pages were about people.) --Bob K31416 (talk) 21:03, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

I would be careful about inferring from this result anything about the rest of the encyclopedia, considering the limited subject matter of these pages and other factors. --Bob K31416 (talk) 21:31, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

You have just spent upto 7 hours (based on the difference in timestamps between posting your initial ten diffs and then posting back with your cursory analysis of them) discovering for yourself first hand the wisdom that Peter posted at 17:19, just under three hours after you first posted your diffs, and which was also the basis of my, "Wow, that's really scientific!" comment made at 9:22, over five hours before you even embarked on this experiment. You just stated in your last two posts:

• "Just an aside, but most of the 10 pages were about people."
• "I would be careful about inferring from this result anything about the rest of the encyclopedia, considering the limited subject matter of these pages and other factors."

What you have just said, in effect, is: "Yeah it appears in a touchy-feely sort of way that some have improved, while a few others have remained about the same, so 'overall, it looks like an improvement' (your exact words)" ... and then having thought about your analysis some more, you felt obligated to post further to add words to the effect: "But this doesn't really mean anything, given how skewed the sample was."

Not only was the random sample skewed, it was a totally indeterminate and meaningless sample rate for an encyclopedia that now boasts however many millions of articles. If you know anything about statistics and probability sampling rates then you would have realized, without embarking on your recent exercise to indulge Jimbo, that in order to make any useful inferences about a sampled population, choosing an insignificant sampling rate is basically counter-productive. It is simply going to fool you into believing that your sampled results mean much more than they really do. That is, it's not going to be predictive of anything meaningful, no matter to what kind of population (in this particular case, all currently extant Misplaced Pages articles) that sampling is applied, because the likely error rate is going to be way too large.

Even if we allow Jimbo the grace of a much larger than normal margin of error in his choice of sample size (since it is meant to be a quick sanity check, frequently applied, rather than a one-shot prediction of who is going to win the upcoming election), sampling only ten random articles would only have had some merit if the encyclopedia was orders of magnitude smaller than it currently is. All the necessary formulae are in that linked article should you wish to perform the math yourself. In layman's terms, the exercise you just undertook is the equivalent of trying to predict the outcome of a general election in the United States by asking only half a dozen voters how they voted as they left the polling booth. Thus it was an exercise in futility before you even began it. Which is the conclusion you came to yourself the more you thought about it afterwards.

It was also what I meant with my "that's really scientific" remark, but I can hardly expect you or anyone else to infer all of the above from that single remark. However, that observation came out in that curt manner due to some other numpty having previous played the WP:TL;DR card who I was also trying to satisfy with my post. IMO the "Teal Deer" contribution to WP guidance is the biggest cause of confrontation on Misplaced Pages (and thus editors leaving) because anyone trying to have intelligent open discourse in order to achieve consensus can be simply closed down by someone else, who cannot provide a convincing counter-argument for anything themselves, by their repeatedly using it to try and silence any arguments they disagree with by simply declaring the more constructive contribution to be longer than a Tweet. No wonder most differences of opinion on Misplaced Pages never reach consensus as they are meant to, but end up in AN/I instead. — not really here discuss 02:06, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

I also forgot to add in my comment above, for such a sampling exercise to be meaningful, in addition to the sample being large enough you usually also require a control group reference population in order to make any sense of what your sampled data is telling you. I don't wish to turn this discussion into a Math 101 course so you will have to work that one out for yourself. In this particular case, Misplaced Pages is your friend (but that is not always the case). However, exactly that point had already been made by Peter, as I stated above, before you ever reached the conclusion you did yourself. Please go read Peter's post again. A standard reference work, such as the Encyclopedia Britannica, that Peter refers to would be the control group or reference population in this instance. Peter explains in his post that unless you choose some sort of reference point for apples-to-apples comparison then your random sample is going to be fairly useless - such as disambiguation pages incorrectly treated as articles or bios of people or heavy metal bands of dubious notability. If Jimbo had instead randomly selected ten articles from the EB (all of which are written and peer-reviewed by subject-matter experts) and asked, "OK, how does Misplaced Pages treat these same ten topics?" and then compared the Misplaced Pages articles with the corresponding EB ones based on some well-defined and mutually agreed upon definition of what constitutes "quality" then we might actually have the makings of a useful metric. All Jimbo has done is given you a pseudo-metric that looks and feels like it is more scientific / mathematical than it really is. It's the Misplaced Pages equivalent of a proof that all triangles are isosceles. — not really here discuss 02:42, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

In contrast with my earlier comment below, I would like to note that this exhibits real style. I mean, we've got nearly 50Kb of edits here in the past week (plus tens of Kb on other talk pages) and in the middle one finds sighing laments about WP:TL;DR. The care and craftsmanship applied is almost touching. --JBL (talk) 02:47, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

Also of course the choice of a username echoing WP:NOTHERE is all class. --JBL (talk) 02:50, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for violating WP:AGF by making your puerile assumptions about the origins of my user name simply to post a personal attack. My user name has absolutely nothing to do with WP:NOTHERE (bit unfortunate that) but is instead a nodding reference to Paul Lake, plus also the fact that I left Misplaced Pages due to encounters with people like you but would infrequently post anonymously now and then to correct things. Interestingly, what I discovered (purely by accident) while posting anonymously is that others paid much more attention to just the edits being made (simply because they had nothing else to go on in order to make entirely invalid and almost libelous assumptions about the person that made them like you just did) such that they never led to any confrontation and were rarely challenged. I only re-registered with a user id. because I had to change my static IP address of some fourteen years or so standing, by which time I had a lengthy Talk page associated with it, and it just seemed easier to redirect to a user name than another IP address. I was reluctant to do that (hence my new user name) for the reasons you just validated. — not really here discuss 03:30, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

Making the Wales method work

The wall of text by the editor who is not really here makes exactly one valid point. A sample size of 10 is not big enough to draw serious conclusions. Big deal, everybody knows that already. So the question arises "How could you make this method work to draw serious conclusions?"

I actually made three main points. One of the other ones was that Student's t is usually applicable in situations where sample sizes are extremely small relative to the population being sampled, which was most definitely the case for Jimbo's original process of taking only ten articles as a representative sample of a four? million article encyclopedia. I don't know if 400 is the right sample size; it depends on what error rate you seek and the current size of the encyclopedia, but a ~1/10,000 sample is definitely a big step in the right direction. It is the fact that you are now considering much larger sample sizes that makes my other point no longer pertinent, not because it wasn't valid. My third point was that in addition to comparing how Misplaced Pages is improving relative to itself, it should also measure how well it is doing at getting to where it needs to be - i.e., where the asymptote lies. It is misleading to say that an article has improved 300% if it has only improved from 1% to 4% of what most people would consider to be an adequately decent article. At least three other people have also expressed this same point in different ways. As for "walls of text" readers need look no further than the "Yet another method" section to see that a double standard is possibly being used here. — not really here discuss 21:25, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

I'm sorry if I was too direct above, but it is a fact that when somebody who knows nothing about statistics talks to somebody who does the 1st person's lack of knowledge becomes obvious. The proper sample size most definitely does not "depend ... (on) the current size of the encyclopedia." For a test of proportions, one of the first tests you'd learn in intro to stats, all it depends on is the standard error you're willing to accept. For n= 100, the approximate s.e. is 5%, for n=400, the s.e. is 2.5%, for n=1,600, the s.e. is 1.25%, etc.. It's a general principle throughout stats that population size doesn't affect the required sample, which is the main reason that random sampling and statistics are useful. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 22:28, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

Good. I stand corrected. But I'm glad that my original taking to task of Jimbo has inspired you to subsequently make all your productive inputs here. I neither have the time nor expertise in this area to pursue it further so I'm pleased that someone else has now taken the bull by the horns and is willing to run with it. Let's hope some or all the ideas that have been suggested below bear some fruit.

I'm also glad you clearly see that a disparity in statistical knowledge creates an issue when the person that knows less about it (not necessarily nothing) gets to disagree with a person that knows more. If it really cheesed you off then you now know how others might feel in comparable situations. To make useful inputs to Misplaced Pages you don't have to know anything about probability and statistics - any disputes in such an area of knowledge are going to be confined to the content of the articles that handle probability and statistics topics (or a discussion like the one here). OTOH, to make useful inputs to Misplaced Pages everyone has to use language, for both the edits to the article and for the discussion on the Talk pages. So if there is a simiar disparity in language skills, then the person that has the lesser language skills - such as logic, reasoning and comprehension - is going to cheese off the other person in exactly the manner you just felt. This disparity problem is a much, much bigger one than the comparable disparity of stats. skills because it affects every aspect of Misplaced Pages input and interaction, including all the discussions on the Talk pages to resolve contentious issues, not just the articles about probability and statistics (or any other specific area of the Misplaced Pages knowledge base). — not really here discuss 23:44, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

• 1. you need to understand that this is just one way to evaluate the improvement of the encyclopedia. It could answer the question "Is the average article getting better?", but ignores completely how many articles there are.
• 2. It would be nice to have some sort of measurement of article quality. Many measures are presumably related to article quality, e.g. size, number of editors editing in the last month or year, number of footnotes, number of tags on the page, and perhaps even the number of see-also links, or illustrations. But these don't really get to the heart of the matter. I wouldn't completely trust the stub, start, C, B, A, FA ratings. They generally seem out of date and inconsistently applied, and probably change in meaning over time. A subjective assessment of quality might be applied (say 1-10) but care would have to be taken to make sure different reviewers rate consistently.
• 3. A sample size of 400 articles should be able to do the job, if you want to test for a 5% change in the proportion of improved articles. (Notice this doesn't depend on the number of articles in the encyclopedia, whether it's 10,000 or 10,000,000 articles)
• 4. Since you want to measure the quality of articles, ditch the disambig pages, but leave in every other type of article, e.g. lists
• 5. I can't see any reason that the random article function, which is actually pseudorandom, shouldn't be good enough. It wouldn't be good enough if for some reason it selected e.g. newer articles, or larger article more frequently. Anybody have any info on the random article function?
• 6. One fly in the ointment is that deleted articles would not be sampled, so the "average article" from 1 or 5 years ago would be biased. Presumably, if our editors believed the encyclopedia was better off without the article, then the bias would work against finding improvement. The missing deleted articles were bad, and now that they're gone the encyclopedia is improved. I doubt the %'age of deleted article is high enough to effect any results however, and you never can tell for sure whether our editors delete good articles.

So it is definitely possible to make this method work, with just a couple quibbles as is usual. I'd suggest doing it over time, say 25 article each week. Then you'd have a large enough sample size to draw conclusions every 3 months, and then 4 samples per year to see how things change over time. Anybody interested? Smallbones_(smalltalk) 04:27, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

Very interested. One twist I'd like to add. Presumably we care a lot about improvements in quality in articles that people actually read, as well as improvements in quality in articles that are more obscure. It might be useful if the random selection of articles were weighted to article popularity.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 06:32, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

By Friday I'll set up a user page/sandbox, outlining my ideas. I'll bounce the basics off a few people before then. It would be a lot of work just doing one article, but I think it could be designed that it could be done in 30 minutes per article. The subjective quality rating would be the hard part, probably a rubric (rating guide) would have to be developed. The idea of selecting the most popular articles is good, but I only have some vague ideas now on how to do it. I'd have to see at least 5 qualified reviewers sign up before I'd commit to this. It's not a 1 person job. Perhaps call it WP:Random article. One thing I'd insist on, Jimmy Wales could not be a reviewer - people might think he is biased. Sorry Jimmy, you don't get to (have to) do the hard work of rating, but your suggestions on designing the rubric, work flow, etc. would be appreciated. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 11:24, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

Welcome to 2014, everyone. - 2001:558:1400:10:84B5:2235:9D3B:1BF5 (talk) 16:48, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

Regarding weighting for popularity, one way is to exclude articles with fewer than a certain number of page views in the last 90 days. For the list of 10 pages previously given, here's what their page views were in the last 90 days, along with a very brief description of each page.

1. 25,686 – person

2. 594 – mostly people disambiguation page (dab)

3. 526 – musical band

4. 4,525 – plant

5. 345 – person

6. 866 – city, stub

7. 67 – a given name of people, stub

8. 507 – people dab

9. 321 – person

10. 460 – chemical, stub

--Bob K31416 (talk) 15:18, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

Yes, just including articles with 90 day page views above x (say the 50th percentile for all articles) would get articles that a lot more people are interested in. Another, way would be to take articles over a specific length. This would increase the work of the random reviewers quite a bit. Stubs would be very easy to review, but longer articles would take much longer. Also, it then wouldn't make much sense to test if articles with higher page views, or articles with greater size, are positively related to quality - that's essentially in your assumptions.

This brings up the 500 lb. gorilla in the room. Bob's 10 random articles look incredibly weak in content. This might be true for a large percentage (40%?) of our articles. This type of exercise might just end up convincing folks that we need to delete a ton of articles. Some guesses here - we might look at articles with less than 100 page views per month, that have been stubs for over two years, that have less than three sources of any type, and are less than 40 words (all 4, not 1 out of 4), and find that 20% of our articles fit the description. My feeling is that we could probably delete 20% of our articles and lose only about 1% of our page views. I'm not saying I expect this to happen, but do please be prepared for what the data tells us. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 20:09, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

Using a percentile to choose the cutoff seems like a good idea. Also note that there may be a correlation between page views and length of an article, i.e. people may be more likely to come back to view a longer article.

Personally, I wouldn't delete any of those articles because there's always the potential that someone may come by and decide to expand them, it's easier to expand an article than create one, and it's not as if it was a print encyclopedia where space is being taken up.

Just out of curiosity, I pushed the random article button another 10 times.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/Kattakkada_Assembly_Constituency

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/Roger_L._Stevens

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/Graphoderus_bilineatus

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/Delvim_Fabiola_Bárcenas

5. https://en.wikipedia.org/Amphiplica_knudseni

6. https://en.wikipedia.org/Stillwater_Range

7. https://en.wikipedia.org/John_Swift_(politician)

8. https://en.wikipedia.org/Maria_Awaria

9. https://en.wikipedia.org/Small_Cajal_body_specific_RNA_18

10. https://en.wikipedia.org/STK25

--Bob K31416 (talk) 21:42, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

Article size statistics can be found at . From these statistics, these random article lists are expected to contain mostly stub or start size articles. (See the red and orange parts of the pie chart.) --Bob K31416 (talk) 22:34, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

I went thru all of the 10 new articles nd my first impression was that they are quite a bit better that the previous ten. My second impression was that I must have been in a bad mood when I went thru the first 10. But still most below 100 page views a month, and pretty short. Definitely we need to do this in a systematic way. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 00:18, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

If we had the following type of data for previous years, do you think that may indicate whether Misplaced Pages is getting better?

All rated articles by quality and importance Quality Importance Top High Mid Low ??? Total FA 1,581 2,512 2,423 1,971 182 8,669 FL 180 702 772 695 100 2,449 A 372 684 787 582 92 2,517 GA 3,263 7,420 14,875 19,850 1,768 47,176 B 17,152 33,232 55,019 70,943 23,752 200,098 C 17,159 54,823 137,183 317,296 93,084 619,545 Start 18,552 93,050 419,018 1,647,112 415,488 2,593,220 Stub 4,257 31,309 277,312 2,810,894 760,133 3,883,905 List 4,941 17,460 54,771 203,084 81,640 361,896 Assessed 67,457 241,192 962,160 5,072,427 1,376,239 7,719,475 Unassessed 112 398 942 16,312 392,879 410,643 Total 67,569 241,590 963,102 5,088,739 1,769,118 8,130,118 About this table

--Bob K31416 (talk) 05:25, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

You know Misplaced Pages pages have a history, right? ‑ iridescent 11:33, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

Two points: first, I note the lower right entry is over 5 million, what is in this list that isn't in our article count? Second, picking up on Iridescent's point, it shouldn't be too hard to look at the table at selected points and provide a summary of changes - absolute increases in counts of higher quality items, plus a measure of relative changes- are we adding low quality faster than we are improving quality of older items?--S Philbrick(Talk) 12:55, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

Using data from September 30, 2010 and September 9, 2015 , I constructed the following table of article count for each quality rating.

Quality
	2010	2015
FA	3,237	5,513
FL	1,626	1,988
A	670	1,509
GA	9,772	24,620
B	66,490	103,337
C	71,602	207,091
Start	631,690	1,316,024
Stub	1,621,445	2,728,973
List	54,967	178,726
Assessed	2,461,499	4,567,781
Unassessed	394,094	504,314
Total	2,855,593	5,072,095

In the table, article counts for each quality category significantly increased over the last 5 years. --Bob K31416 (talk) 20:42, 9 September 2015 (UTC)
On the average over the last five years, there is a net gain of 10 articles per day in the group consisting of Good Articles and above. --Bob K31416 (talk) 05:13, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

Quality
	2010	% 2010 total	2015	% 2015 total
FA	3,237	0.11%	5,513	0.11%
FL	1,626	0.06%	1,988	0.04%
A	670	0.02%	1,509	0.03%
GA	9,772	0.34%	24,620	0.49%
B	66,490	2.33%	103,337	2.04%
C	71,602	2.51%	207,091	4.08%
Start	631,690	22.12%	1,316,024	25.95%
Stub	1,621,445	56.78%	2,728,973	53.80%
List	54,967	1.92%	178,726	3.52%
Assessed	2,461,499	86.20%	4,567,781	90.06%
Unassessed	394,094	13.80%	504,314	9.94%
Total	2,855,593	100%	5,072,095	100%

I was bold and added the percentage columns. It's clear that the largest absolute numbers added are in the stub class, but the percentages are going down (from 56.78% stubs in 2010 to 53.80% in 2015). Which class did they go to? Almost all to "Start" and a few to "C". Note that the total percentages above "Start" were only 5.4% in 2010 and 6.8% in 2015. We've also been doing a better job in assessing articles (3.9% increase of total) and are creating relatively more lists (1.6% of total). Smallbones_(smalltalk) 16:16, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

Another method

I made a start earlier this year on this, using the methodology I mentioned above, i.e. take a standard reference work, in this case Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, randomly select articles from there, and compare with the corresponding WP article. See the small sample on the page I just linked to. The evidence to me seems compelling: WP compares very unfavourably to a traditionally produced, peer reviewed-by-specialists reference work. The objections I have received so far are mostly on the lines that my subject is a highly specialized one. Perhaps, but then educational content is educational content, no? Peter Damian (talk) 18:40, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

That doesn't indicate whether or not Misplaced Pages is getting better, which is the topic of this Talk secton. --Bob K31416 (talk) 19:32, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

Well change it so that we look at the articles, using this sampling method, 5, or 10 years ago. In any case, some of the articles in the sample are so bad that it is hard to imagine them having been any worse. The point is to get an appropriate statistical sample. Random selection, which just gives you a lot of weird stubs, is a poor method. Peter Damian (talk) 19:38, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

The main problem I see is scaling up your method. How would you do it for math articles? How about articles on the history of eastern Europe? And then how to make sure that these separate analyses were comparable. Scaling up, of course, is a challenge for any method. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 19:47, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

It depends what the objective is. If simply to establish that in some areas, WP is not getting better, that would be a start. The WMF has trillions of $ to spend and quality improvement would be a useful place to spend it. If it can be shown that WP needs help in certain places, that would be helpful. Peter Damian (talk) 19:56, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

I made a start. “Abstract and concrete are classifications that denote whether a term describes an object with a physical referent or one with no physical referents.” This opening definition to Abstract and concrete was added on 13:53, 5 July 2013, i.e. comparatively recently. It actually makes no sense. So, Misplaced Pages is not getting better. Peter Damian (talk) 19:51, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

There is much in common between the two exercises. I'm thinking you'd take the same approach to each: Person A picks out two drafts to compare - one being the current version of Misplaced Pages, the other being either an old version or an external competitor. Persons B and C each receive one of the two drafts blindly, not being told where they come from (and implored not to peek!), and are asked to dissect each into a series of separate claims. After they have done this, they exchange the lists of claims and each decides if their own article makes a similar claim as the list they received, and return that yes-or-no feedback to the other party. Now we have a list of claims made by one article, the other, or both. You transmit each claim (including the sources from both articles) separately to a pool of volunteers D who are again blind to the source, who are called on to evaluate whether it is true or false. I picture this more as a scale-of-10 thing than a pass/fail, because it's not always that clear-cut. After each volunteer makes his call, he gets to look over the two articles and decide which presents a true fact more clearly, or checks whether the false statement is really made or was merely misinterpreted. Then somehow you work all that data together into a scoring system. However, that scoring system involves quite some philosophy in its own right! A longer article contains more claims than a shorter one - should it be scored higher? Well, common sense demands it, because if Misplaced Pages articles keep getting longer, that is a sign of progress. Yet an external publisher might have felt compelled to trim articles to fit the length of a book; any author knows it's harder to make writing short than to make it long, yet that indicates negative progress by this metric. A different dimension would be the average number of errors, and a third would be how well-written the same claims are in each article. As a Wikipedian I'm inclined to put the first dimension foremost - we simply want to have an expansive encyclopedia that covers everything, and so long as the error rate is not extraordinarily high, it doesn't matter that much to me if it is 5% or 1%. But others would doggedly define the quality solely in terms of the error rate, however small, without regard to whether we cover a subject in depth or not. Still others want readable text as a high priority, and then again ... readable to who, by what standard? I think the choice of philosophy in this scoring system largely determines, in advance, the outcome of the exercise. Wnt (talk) 21:10, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

This might work for philosophy, but in my main field of art history, where Misplaced Pages scores is in the articles that the standard work, Grove Dictionary of Art aka Oxford Art Online simply doesn't have. Despite being enormous (32,600 pages in ye olde print version), this is full of odd gaps - very few individual works, hardly any iconography - that Misplaced Pages covers far better. Also their short entries are by single authors, which sometimes leads them to neglect or entirely miss out one aspect of a subject. Also their links and search engine are pretty hopeless, and the layout of the articles (lacking good TOCs) unhelpful. When they have an article of reasonable length, and you have managed to find it, it is normally much better than WP, and perhaps worth the hefty subscription non-UK readers need to pay. Johnbod (talk) 15:16, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

Action

See below for a table of changes over 10 years to the Action article. My view is that the changes are for the worse. The original article was clearly developed by a professional philosopher. The subsequent additions are confusing, and sometimes distort the flow of the original. For example,"Other events are less clearly defined as actions or not." in the original is a segue to the 'deciding to do ...' list. But the inserted "distractedly drumming ones fingers" is indeed a distraction.

Peter Damian (talk) 20:16, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

Would you please add a third column with the parts which you think got better and worse with the reasons so we can see what you mean? 65.118.77.74 (talk) 23:57, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

Reframing the question

To me the important question is not whether Misplaced Pages is improving (because surely it is), but rather where the asymptote lies. Is Misplaced Pages approaching the level of a high-quality general encyclopedia? When it comes to academic topics, in my view the answer is no. In my own domain of neuroscience at least, we have a few high-quality articles but lots of crappy ones, and over the past five years the situation has hardly changed at all. For what it's worth, I don't view this as meaning that Misplaced Pages is a failure, just that it is not strong in all areas and not likely to be any time soon. Looie496 (talk) 00:30, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

True. Even if Misplaced Pages has turned the corner and stopped losing net editors, the problem is that the existing number is too small to complete every article on every topic. The phase of exponential growth certainly illustrated that the project could have reached the number needed, but then (in 2007) deletionism, conflict, political strife, and excessive reverence for BLP at the expense of reality intervened. Basically, once Misplaced Pages became a respectable reference for some things, and sites like Google were pushing people toward it, it became something that people all over the world wanted to own, and then the environment became toxic enough to drive people away. So the politics of society choked it off just before it could reach its true potential. Wnt (talk) 00:37, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

This is a legitimate, albeit different question. One can test this, using an appropriate whose design is simple, although the execution isn't trivial. Choose a high quality general encyclopedia, select n articles at random, and see how the quality compares. I believe this is the approach done by some well-know studies comparing WP to EB.--S Philbrick(Talk) 01:04, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

I agree that for topics that I already know something about (and thus feel competent to judge), Misplaced Pages has not appreciably improved in the past 5 or 6 years. Short Brigade Harvester Boris (talk) 01:18, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

@Wnt: Please explain how "deletionism, conflict, political strife, and excessive reverence for BLP" hampers the improvement of the crappy neuroscience articles. --NeilN 02:31, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages attracted people when it was a collective project for the common good. When it becomes dominated by arcane wikilegal maneuvers, that drives off volunteers of all stripes. There have been plenty of editors who were doing good editing on technical articles, only to be keelhauled through an administrative proceeding over a small portion of their overall work that ran afoul of some vocal interest. More generally, the intrusion of such conflict turns everything into a fight, and imposes a consistently negative tone. No matter why editors are banned or driven off, their experiences have given Misplaced Pages a terrible reputation that is keeping its numbers of editors down. Why, just today I read another statement about this at Nature News: , "academics often feel too busy to get into some of the admittedly “petty discussions” that sometimes take place around Misplaced Pages edits." I didn't even look for that; it's just one of the sites I commonly page through. Wnt (talk) 13:30, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

You would be more convincing if you provided solid examples with your general answer to my specific question. Perhaps Sphilbrick can do so. Do you think "deletionism, conflict, political strife, and excessive reverence for BLP" hampers the improvement of the crappy neuroscience articles? --NeilN 14:18, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

I don't want to dredge up anybody's case here. I think we all know we've lost many good technical editors because of overblown objections and obstructionism. You need only look at any list of the most prolific editors to see how many have been stricken off of it or stopped contributing on account of some teapot tempest. Wnt (talk) 13:17, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

My observation would be that at the heart of the conflict and confrontation issue being discussed in this particular subsection is the rather puerile nature of the question NeilN jumped into the middle of the conversation to ask, and the way in which it was framed. Neil's question was pointless and unconstructive. It simply put words into Wnt's mouth that he never said in order to try to ... well what? Deny the obvious? Obstruct the conversation because he didn't like where it was heading? Looie496 never stated that some neuroscience articles were crappy due to the four conditions Wnt mentioned; he merely made the observation that from his own perspective and expertise that some were not so good. End of. Neither was Wnt offering up his summary of events as the specific explanation for why neuroscience articles were crappy; instead he was constructively building on Looie's comments and providing an explanation why articles in general have suffered since Misplaced Pages's peak year of productivity and positive culture in 2007.

To conflate those two separate concepts the way Neil did simply demonstrates abysmal reading comprehension. To compound his error by then zealously challenging Wnt to justify a statement he never made was unnecessarily confrontational. Wnt is not on trial here and Neil needs to stop pretending he is a public prosecutor. Nevertheless, Wnt took Neil's false challenge in good grace and expounded very eloquently on his original statement. That should have been the end of the matter. Neil's further zealous pursuit of a conflated issue that exists solely in his own head is totally out of order. That is exactly the sort of situation that drives intellectual participants away. If editors get burnt out due to having to endlessly debate about the contents of certain articles over and over then they most certainly are going to get burnt out due to having to endlessly defend themselves for words they never even said. Neuroscientists, doctors, philosophers, whoever, have more constructive things to do with their lives than argue with someone whose reading comprehension is worse than that of most 12 year olds. — not really here discuss 17:35, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

You're talking about making puerile comments and putting words into other editors' mouths? You? You might want to reread some of your earlier comments (some of which you tried to delete). Looie496 put forth observations on a specific set of articles. Wnt offered explanations ("deletionism, conflict, political strife, and excessive reverence for BLP") I found largely unconvincing. I then asked if Sphilbrick (should have been Looie496, sorry) agreed with Wnt. Pretty simple. Two rather short comments when compared to your walls of text and random disparaging comments should have people wondering who's doing the "endless debating". --NeilN 01:47, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

Sigh. Yes, I was removing redacted text. The redaction to the text was that I had retracted words by deleting them. So I was deleting deleted text as part of a tidy-up. There is nothing sinister in that as you are claiming. You only wanted the text retained so you could post your "facile ... rant" remark. A paragraph of text is neither a rant nor a wall of text. Which part of this advice in the WP:TL;DR essay do you not understand? ...

Maintain civility Being too quick to pointedly mention this essay in an exchange with a wordy author will come across as dismissive and rude ... Avoid ad hominems. Substituting a flippant "tl;dr" for reasoned response and cordiality stoops to ridicule and amounts to thought-terminating cliché. Just as one cannot prove through verbosity, neither can they wielding a four letter acronym. When illumination, patience, and wisdom are called for, answer with them.

I was indeed confused by the "Sphilbrick" reference but I don't see that error as being any different than any of your other misunderstandings or misuse of the English language. Such as your still being unconvinced that the four conditions Wnt mentioned hampered the development of the crappy neuroscience articles ... which part of the word conflate do you not understand? Nobody has claimed that "deletionism, conflict, political strife, and excessive reverence for BLP" hampered the growth of the neuroscience articles; only YOU have claimed that because you are the only person to have conflated those two separate statements together. — not really here discuss 05:50, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

Actually I kind of did claim that, as I explained above. It perhaps isn't the best thought-out phrase, but the common thread I was digging at there is the idea of "editorial judgment". This is what is invoked when things are omitted for BLP, or deleted as "cruft", or when the two sides of a political issue are "balanced" by taking out "excessive" documentation of one side's position. There are people on Misplaced Pages who like to make out that it is a high-minded writing and publishing enterprise where the artiste in charge carefully decides what ought and ought not be mentioned in order to present the most perfectly balanced article that covers each aspect of a topic just to the right extent. But that can't happen. First, who decides who is the editor in chief, whose grand plan orders all the other little minions around and tells them what part of an article to work on and what not to cite there? And of course in practice, we see what happens - people muscle in, impose their own "editorial judgment" based on the strength of their beliefs ---- or for pay. So I prefer to think of Misplaced Pages editors more as migrant laborers putting bushels of fruit in the back of a truck. (It doesn't require expertise, only a passing interest in the topic. Why, I just started cometary knot recently over a couple of hours, without knowing the difference between a planetary nebula and an H II region. Just one sentence before another, learning things for the first time and putting them in not five minutes later. I'd say I didn't do as good a job as an expert would, but you should see the other articles on photoevaporation flows!) Now you can say that abandoning editorial judgment as a concept makes for less artful writing, but I would prefer to view it as more honest. In any case, the lesson I take from Orangemoody is that editorial judgment will be abused. Wnt (talk) 11:43, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

Yet another method

The inclusion of the table and graph above jogged my memory that there is another method currently in use on Misplaced Pages to judge "quality" and coverage in a specific area. I put "quality" in quotes because many people might think the measure doesn't go to the heart of the matter. Rather it measures things like "does a subject we know should have an article, actually have one?" "Does it have a photo?" "Is there more than one source cited?" "Does the talk page have the appropriate project tag?" Not the measure of quality a lot of people might like, but certainly some sort of quality indicator. This "Net Quality Rating" (NQR) Is calculated every week by bot for the entire project (US), by state and by county. It could even be calculated for individual articles, but AFAIK nobody does. By this measure project quality has increased from 33.3% in January 2014 to 44.2% as of yesterday.

The project is WP:NRHP which covers historic buildings and sites listed by the National Register of Historic Places (part of the US Park Service). In total there are 90,000+ sites listed. We have 66,000+ articles (60.9% of sites + county tables + misc). These articles make up well over 1% of the number of articles on en:Misplaced Pages, with many on other language versions as well (e.g. in German where I think they have county tables and articles on about half the sites). Go to Misplaced Pages:WikiProject National Register of Historic Places/Progress for all the numbers you'd ever want plus a couple more graphs. Go to the article history to see how this has progressed over the last few years.

As I've said, this type of quality measurement is not for everybody, but let me give you a subjective quality assessment for the whole project. There are only 3 or 4 sites on the web that even pretend to give access to info on a large portion of NRHP sites. NRHP focus - the federal government site, Misplaced Pages, and a few commercial sites. The commercial sites, just repackage a government database, summarize a small amount of government text without the help of humans, and update once or twice a year. Not really worth considering IMHO.

The government site has a very clumsy interface, is down much of the time, and if you are lucky will give you access to a bureaucratic, and jargon-filled academic form (the nomination) dated to the time the site was first listed. There's very little updating except for new listings, e.g. if a building burned down you may not be able to tell that from Focus for decades (literally). Most frustrating is that you'll find that for many states you have to go to state websites to get the nomination, but Focus won't even tell you that. The state website are often inferior to Focus. So if a general interest reader who knows the name and location of the site goes to Focus, I'll estimate the following: he or she will spend 15-60 minutes on the site, and get the bureaucratic nomination form about 25% of the time.

If the same general reader, who has a general knowledge of how to navigate in Misplaced Pages, searches here it will take him or her 15-60 seconds to find the site's article, 60% of the time they will find at least a couple of information-packed sentence about the site, and an infobox, sometimes with a direct link to the nomination form (!), sometimes they'll find much, much more. Also, even if the site doesn't have an article, summary info (100% of the time) and a photo (72% of the time) will be available in the county list. If the reader is not familiar with Misplaced Pages navigation it may take them 1- 5 minutes to find all this. In short, for the general reader, Misplaced Pages is head and shoulders better than anything on the internet or anywhere else, for finding information on NRHP sites. And yes, we are improving. More later. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 17:51, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

Please excuse me if I got carried away above. The point is that, either via mechanical methods or via personal impressions, we can evaluate whether Misplaced Pages is improving. In at least the NRHP area, we are.

National Register of Historic Places pages by quality and importance
Importance→ Quality↓	Top	High	Mid	Low	Related	???	Total
FA	1	24	10	45	3	0	83
GA	3	82	64	362	9	0	520
B	10	244	135	890	49	1	1,329
C	10	447	281	2,611	108	3	3,460
Start	9	2,106	1,143	22,271	495	31	26,056
Stub	0	50	698	42,670	463	7	43,888
Total (articles only)	33	2,953	2,331	68,851	1,127	42	75,338
FL	0	3	0	3	0	0	6
List	2	116	2,882	370	65	1	3,452
Unassessed	0	0	0	3	0	5	8
Total	35	3,089	5,237	69,465	1,202	48	80,751

Click here for a bot-updated list (i.e. not real-time) that also includes stats about Category-, Disambig-, File-, Redirect-, Template-, and NA-Class articles.

Can other projects/areas do something similar? Absolutely. The table above can be generated for any individual project AFAIK, so at least some summary measure can be generated from that. WP:NRHP is lucky to have an official list of articles that we should have, but I don't see why other projects couldn't do something similar, e.g. go to the "Encyclopedia of Paleontology" and copy out the names of all articles that should be in Misplaced Pages (likely not a copyright problem), then see how long it takes to get there. Maybe even make a list of all articles that should have illustrations in the area. You might be able to get things like number of references, page length, page views, stub-FA rating for each article from a bot (somebody should be working on this). I'll repeat that I don't like the stub-FA rating very much - it is seldom reviewed and inconsistently applied - but it is a type of quality rating..

The NRHP method above is essentially a census - we try to look at each article. Censuses have their advantages, but in general doing something as complicated as a quality rating can be done about as well in less time with a random sampling method. To answer Bob's question, we don't really need to get a quality rating for all 5,000,000 or so articles. 400 should do it just fine, unless you want to do detailed analyses of specific subject areas. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 18:57, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

One of the problems of stats is that the rarer something is the larger the sample size you need to test it. 400 articles would be a good sample size to work with to answer a question such as are we increasing the proportion of articles with references, and the subproportion within that of articles with references we would regard as independent and reliable. But our normal measurements of quality don't just go up to 11, they go up to FA standard, and less than one in 400 Misplaced Pages articles are assessed at FA standard, so a sample size of 400 should really treat FAs as an excluded outlier. ϢereSpielChequers 12:42, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

And from a different angle

I don't dispute that Peter Damian is aware of topics where Misplaced Pages is not improving or even deteriorating, and Smallbones is aware of topics where quality is improving. But we all know that a significant proportion of content creators have particular areas of interest, and therefore progress or even regression is going to be very variable by topic according to the interests skills and POV of our currently active editing community. It could just be that each year we add another year to the tally of years that wikipedia covers pretty well, and everything else is a bit complex to measure. So when it comes to overall quality I would be inclined to look for indicators that cut across multiple topic areas. On the crudest scale, I patrol Misplaced Pages for certain easily confused words that a non lycanthropic spellchecker would regard as OK, public spelled without the l, possess without the final s and several others. I know that on that very specialised quality test Misplaced Pages is tending to improve, with occasional relapses when the bot writers I work with retire. But overall as I've got on top of particular words I've added more, to the chagrin of some sports fans who regard the shouty sweary guy on the touchline as interfering in the chain of command from the fans to the players, I recently secularised quite a few mangers to managers. Of course if a typo becomes rarer I don't know whether that means someone who used to make that typo has now learned the difference between calvary and cavalry, or they've just left; And for every additional typo that I now patrol there could be another gnome retiring. But in combination with the recent increases in the number of very active editors I think of these as positive indicators of quality.

Other possible indicators of quality would be to measure how the number of citations from Misplaced Pages articles to various reliable sources changes over time, or the proportion of articles with images, or the quality of those images. A few months ago I had a note from our Wikipedian in Residence in York that all the photos I'd taken when he'd shown me round the museum he is a resident at had now been replaced in all the articles that used them by studio quality images from the museum, a fair and neutral observer, i.e. pretty much anyone other than myself, would consider that a clear improvement in quality.

My own instinct would be to put this on its head, and think of the areas that we would like to prioritise for quality improvement and find ways to measure that. If the theory is true that people focus on the that which is measured then "percentage of citations that are to a reliable source" might be a good metric. If we could agree what reading age Misplaced Pages should be written for, then percentage of content that is understandable by someone of that reading age would be good. Perhaps we could hire some academics to do random checks each year and assess how we are progressing in terms of gender neutral coverage and language. ϢereSpielChequers 12:42, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

There are some good ideas here from @WereSpielChequers:. Specialized measures of quality, perhaps monitored by projects, would be a very good idea. Getting a random sample of articles for a specific category may be a bit difficult. There is template randomincategory I think, that sorta does this, but gets stuck on subcategories. Maybe somebody could come up with a tool that randomly selects articles in a category and all its sub- and sub-sub-categories. That would certainly help specific projects. Prioritizing specific measures that you want to improve is a great idea, but faces a problem with mass measurement when you put in "from reliable sources" - since what is a reliable source in different context is not immediately obvious (to a computer). So that type of measure would be limited to hand gathered samples, which make it pretty limited in scope.

Something like "the number of images in an article" is pretty easy to gather (even by hand since no judgement is involved) and likely could be done by bot. I didn't realize it until looking at the 2 samples given above - but photos are very rare in articles - perhaps 1 in those 20 sampled! I'm starting to think that most Wikipedians edit and write in a very limited range of articles. Sure we run into stubs all the time, but over half our articles are stubs. About 50% of the articles I work with have images, not 5% as seems more typical in all our articles. Almost all of the sampled articles have sources and links below what I thought was normal. So maybe regular editors are just living in a very narrow part of Misplaced Pages, and we don't know what is really going on with the rest of it. Random sampling would certainly help this problem. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 16:08, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

Battle for number of articles in the Swedish Misplaced Pages

Hello, Jimbo! What do you think about this way of competition in the battle for the number of articles? sv:Големо Градиште, sv:Golemo Gradiste, sv:Golemo Gradište.--Soul Train (talk) 12:16, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

@Soul Train: If you're on the Swedish language Misplaced Pages, unless they have different rules about this, I would convert sv:Големо Градиште and sv:Golemo Gradiste into redirects to sv:Golemo Gradište, as only one disambiguation is needed here and in its current state this will likely cause confusion. --Rubbish computer 11:07, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/ScoopWhoop

Editing environment getting better?

I think there are at least two worlds of Misplaced Pages regarding the question posed in a previous section, "Is Misplaced Pages getting better?". One is the reader's world, where the content of the encyclopedia is the consideration. This is the world that has been discussed in a previous section. Another is the world of the editors, where the editing environment is important.

Is the Misplaced Pages editing environment getting better? --Bob K31416 (talk) 21:05, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

This will depend on the particular constellation of articles and personalities that each editor deals with. I think it reached a trough a few years ago and has improved slightly (or at least not deteriorated) since. Or maybe I've just gotten used to all the bullshit. Short Brigade Harvester Boris (talk) 00:58, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

• In 2006, when I first started editing, there was a completely different atmosphere in most of Misplaced Pages. There were literally hundreds of editors who would roam around and try to help newbie or other editors format their inputs correctly, correct minor problems in random articles, and cooperate in a collegial manner in the different wiki-projects. There were some exceptions of course, notably in some of the environmental, political, scientology, and Israel-Palestine articles. However, hardly any of that altruistic cooperation takes place anymore. Now, if a newbie editor makes a mistake in editing an article, it usually either gets reverted or stays broken. If you leave a notice on a wiki-project talk page or admin notice board asking for help, half the time or more it goes unanswered. The Featured Article and other article improvement forums (like DYK) now get much less attention and participation than they used to. WP is now, for the most part, a colder, bleaker place to edit. Cla68 (talk) 01:23, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

Given your extensive block log for a variety of unpleasant behaviors, you may wish to reflect on how you may have personally been a part of helping to make your own experience of Misplaced Pages "colder and bleaker".--Jimbo Wales (talk) 15:29, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

My experience is that sometimes Cla68 himself makes editing Misplaced Pages an extremely unpleasant experience for other editors. I would assume that his extensive block log is an indication that my experience with Cla68 is not unique. Bill Huffman (talk) 18:40, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

Well FA and DYK are get less attention in part because they have become little walled gardens of people competing for 'credit', toxic environments where the goal is to get more points than the opponent. Offputting for someone who is collaborative rather than competitive. The point of a FA or a DYK appearing should be that the article itself has improved or is of a high standard, not who gets the credit. The previous promotion issues and ongoing quality problems at DYK illustrate this the most. Only in death does duty end (talk) 10:12, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

I can't comment on what Misplaced Pages was like a few years ago. The impression I get now is that when an established editor makes a mistake or unintentionally gets into a dispute, bad faith is often assumed and they are treated in a rude and uncivil manner, regardless of how tiny or innocent their mistakes were. It seems that editors are more likely to be polite and civil towards newbies who have just written an article advertising their cat, when in fact being polite and civil should be applied universally. --Rubbish computer 10:45, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

(ec)Having been editing Misplaced Pages for about 10 years, I've seen a number of changes. But I don't think a decline in the environment for editors is one of them. I have noticed that most people who complain about a growing toxic environment around here are editors who spend more of their time participating in various dramas than in actual editing of articles. Deli nk (talk)

@Deli nk:I guess you weren't talking to me, but I wouldn't say it's gotten worse, as I wouldn't know. Apologies if I sound like I'm moaning in my above post. Rubbish computer 13:36, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

I was making a general comment in response to the original "Is the Misplaced Pages editing environment getting better?" question. Sorry, I didn't mean to imply anything about you or your comment. Deli nk (talk) 14:55, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

@Deli nk:It's fine, I didn't think you were, anyway. Rubbish computer 15:36, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

I would like to comment on the extent to which those holding preconceived biases are unwilling to rationally survey the reliable sources as opposed to accusing others of misconduct. I have been accused of misrepresenting a body of literature as conclusive simply because I was unaware of an inconclusive reliable source from several years ago. I hope as a community we are able to grow into a nurturing, caring, polite group instead of remaining bogged down in accusatory urges. EllenCT (talk) 13:16, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

Some things are definitely better. Edits save faster, the wikilove feature means that lots of people now thank me for fixing typos where once I wondered if anyone noticed; I can upload fifty photos on commons more easily than I used to be able to upload ten. Vandalfighting bots and edit filters have reduced the amount of vandalism that requires manual intervention. But not everything is positive. The tension between the WMF and the rest of the community in the last four years or so seems far worse than it did before. There are also tensions within the volunteer community. Template bombing has replaced much of the collaboration. Revert unsourced has largely replaced <citation needed>. Spam is rising, possibly in proportion to our audience size. There is a growing wikigeneration gulf between the admins and those who started editing in the last four or five years. ϢereSpielChequers 14:16, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

"Revert unsourced has largely replaced <citation needed>." I've noticed this as well. Is that a reflection of a more confrontational editing environment, less tolerance towards unsourced material appearing in articles, a recognition that a cn tag is likely to stay there until the material is removed in the future, or something else? --NeilN 15:57, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

As an administrator that regularly patrols AIV, I've noticed a significant increase in reports (inappropriate in my opinion) there for editors whose only offense is adding unsourced content. I'm concerned that too many regular editors are starting to view unreferenced content as vandalism. -- Ed (Edgar181) 17:12, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

While I seldom revert for anything not obviously out of whack I do have pretty strong opinions on unsourced content. Misplaced Pages is a reference work and few of us are subject matter experts in all of the areas which we edit. If there is not a source or reference there is no way to vet the material for accuracy and Misplaced Pages is useful only in relation to its reliability. We teach Bold, Revert, Discuss and that is what the bulk of editors will do if they have doubts. The person who is adding the material should be able to come up with a good source if asked. If they can not then, well.... the material should not be in Misplaced Pages per WP:V. Whether this process makes the editing environment better or worse depends on how willing editors are to engage with each other.

Since most drama comes when people are discussing whether the sourcing is adequate and there is more than enough drama dealing with that. My guess is after engaging repeatedly on WP:RS most editors are likely to be disinclined to engage in extensive conversation when there are no sources. Jbh 18:26, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

The BRD essay itself says: "BRD does not encourage reverting, but recognizes that reverts will happen" and WP:Reverting says: "revert vandalism on sight, but revert an edit made in good faith only after careful consideration", (emphasis mine). To habitually revert non-contentious content by removing the content instead of requesting a citation fails the "fundamental principle" of assuming that editors' edits and comments are made in good faith, and places the cart before the horse by answering a Bold edit with a revert in cases where another Bold edit, often called WP:SOFIXIT, is the better practice. It is tantamount to "a lazy mans load" with regard to building encyclopedic content; making the latter much harder to achieve while belying the good counsel of the aforementioned which wholly encourages an opposite approach as better, indeed even easier. Consider what would likely have come of this content if I had not observed the edit on my watchlist, Gave the answer I believe our guidelines suggest, and followed through with a demonstration of how nicely our best practices conform with our goals. If my interpretation here is wrong, I hope to have made the best of my error. Cheers, and do correct me now.--John Cline (talk) 21:10, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

• I agree that there are some articles in which editors have a solid lock on the subject matter, and in which not just new editors but different points of view are treated with hostility. Once not long ago I was summoned by RfC bot to comment on an RfC as to whether a well-known deceased actor should have an infobox. I opined yes, Oh no! Heresy! I was immediately jumped and pounded down by the editors controlling the page. Then I noticed that the RfC was prematurely closed by one of the editors opposing the infobox! Now in such a situation I could either go to ANI or just get the hell out of there, and I chose to do so. I have no idea if this kind of situation is getting worse or better but yes, there are some "no go zones" in Misplaced Pages and I blundered into one there. Coretheapple (talk) 18:50, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

What's better and what's worse?

What's gotten better and what's gotten worse about the English Misplaced Pages since I started editing in 2006 (with uncharacteristic brevity):

• Better:
  • Increased numbers of articles, reflecting greater coverage of a broad variety of topics.
  • Increased overall amount of content (numbers of articles plus content within individual articles).
  • Increased sensitivity to the importance of the BLP policy and how our articles can affect their subjects.
  • Increased sensitivity to copyright, plagiarism, and related issues.
  • Increased scrutiny of administrator and functionary actions where warranted.
  • Increased receptiveness to constructive criticism.

• Worse, or at least widely believed to be so:
  • Higher barriers to entry—are we as friendly to newcomers, even those who make mistakes, as we should be?
  • Increased complexity of the rule-set (Pundit is the expert on this, I believe)—lots of individual changes, good in themselves, but cumulating to just too many policies and guidelines to follow?
  • High rates of editor and administrator turnover and burnout (maybe not actually worse than years ago, but certainly not better).
  • Decreased numbers of new editors, and of new highly active editors.
  • Increased backlogs caused by the above.
  • Increased air of overall contentiousness, or so it seems to me, though of course it depends on where one spends wikitime.
  • Decreased collaborative spirit, as perhaps reflected in the number of moribund wikiprojects and the like.

• Disputed as to whether worse or better:
  • Overall quality of content (see discussion above, or Fram's upcoming piece in the Signpost).
  • How well are we actually improving BLP compliance and addressing similar issues, beyond the most blatant violations, as opposed to just talking more about them?
  • Effectiveness of dispute-resolution processes (not just the formal ones, but how day-to-day issues actually get resolved, other than by someone just giving up and wandering off).
  • The lack of formal governance and coordinated leadership—in the current state of Misplaced Pages, is that a bug or a feature?

Thoughts welcome from JW and others. Newyorkbrad (talk) 15:47, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

"High rates of editor and administrator turnover and burnout". If you mean rates in the relative sense, as in fraction of administrators that retire per year, then this is false. Annual retention percentages for both very active users and admins have improved. However, the creation rates for admins have plummeted and that for active editors has also fallen, with the net effect that both groups have shrunk over time. Dragons flight (talk) 20:11, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

It certainly isn't going to improve in terms of creating new admins, at least not as long as every proposal to make it easier to remove admins is defeated by the obstinate attitude of the admin corps. They can't have it both ways. If they want more admins, they are going to need to make it easier to remove the ones who aren't working out. Coretheapple (talk) 20:30, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

Is the increased number of articles necessarily a positive? Personally I think it would be better to see higher quality articles than an excess of stubs or poorly sourced current events (via blogs and op-eds that shouldn't be dictating how an encyclopedia article is written). WP:NOTNEWS is a joke of a policy when we have a front page with an "In the News" section. Instead of looking at how events will be viewed 10 years from now, we've become no better than the mainstream media in trying to get the information out as fast as possible so we can cite our favorite Huffington Post blogger for their "expert" analysis. Muscat Hoe (talk) 21:18, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

Nomination of Mrs. Wilkes' Dining Room for deletion

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Mrs. Wilkes' Dining Room is suitable for inclusion in Misplaced Pages according to Misplaced Pages's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Mrs. Wilkes' Dining Room until a consensus is reached, and anyone is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article. sovereign°sentinel (contribs) 18:47, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

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