Misplaced Pages

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by الحساوي (talk | contribs) at 23:06, 12 April 2017 (→Admin Ian.thomson: new section). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

• WP:AN
• WP:ANB

• For urgent incidents and chronic, intractable behavioral problems, use Misplaced Pages:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents.
• If you are new, try the Teahouse instead.
• Do not report breaches of personal information on this highly visible page – instead, follow the instructions on Misplaced Pages:Requests for oversight.
• For administrative backlogs add {{Admin backlog}} to the backlogged page; post here only if urgent.
• Do not post requests for page protection, deletion requests, or block requests here.
• Just want an admin? Contact a recently active admin directly.
• If you want to challenge the closure of a request for comment, use {{RfC closure review}}

When you start a discussion about an editor, you must leave a notice on their talk page. Pinging is not enough.

You may use {{subst:AN-notice}} ~~~~ to do so.

Sections inactive for over seven days are archived by Lowercase sigmabot III.(archives, search)

Template:Active editnotice

You may want to increment {{Archive basics}} to |counter= 38 as Misplaced Pages:Closure requests/Archive 37 is larger than the recommended 150Kb.

Archives

Index no archives yet (create)

This page has archives. Sections older than 6 days may be automatically archived by Lowercase sigmabot III when more than 3 sections are present.

• WP:CR
• WP:RFCL
• WP:ANRFC

Use the closure requests noticeboard to ask an uninvolved editor to assess, summarize, and formally close a Misplaced Pages discussion. Do so when consensus appears unclear, it is a contentious issue, or where there are wiki-wide implications (e.g. any change to our policies or guidelines).

Do not list discussions where consensus is clear. If you feel the need to close them, do it yourself.

Move on – do not wait for someone to state the obvious. In some cases, it is appropriate to close a discussion with a clear outcome early to save our time.

Do not post here to rush the closure. Also, only do so when the discussion has stabilised.

On the other hand, if the discussion has much activity and the outcome isn't very obvious, you should let it play out by itself. We want issues to be discussed well. Do not continue the discussion here.

There is no fixed length for a formal request for comment (RfC). Typically 7 days is a minimum, and after 30 days the discussion is ripe for closure. The best way to tell is when there is little or no activity in the discussion, or further activity is unlikely to change its result.

When the discussion is ready to be closed and the outcome is not obvious, you can submit a brief and neutrally worded request for closure.

Include a link to the discussion itself and the {{Initiated}} template at the beginning of the request. A helper script can make listing easier. Move discussions go in the 'other types' section.

Any uninvolved editor may close most discussions, so long as they are prepared to discuss and justify their closing rationale.

Closing discussions carries responsibility, doubly so if the area is contentious. You should be familiar with all policies and guidelines that could apply to the given discussion (consult your draft closure at the discussions for discussion page if unsure). Be prepared to fully answer questions about the closure or the underlying policies, and to provide advice about where to discuss any remaining concerns that editors may have.

Non-admins can close most discussions. Admins may not overturn your non-admin closures just because you are not an admin, and this is not normally in itself a problem at reviews. Still, there are caveats. You may not close discussions as an unregistered user, or where implementing the closure would need tools or edit permissions you do not have access to. Articles for deletion and move discussion processes have more rules for non-admins to follow.

If you want to formally challenge and appeal the closure, do not start the discussion here. Instead follow advice at WP:CLOSECHALLENGE.

Other areas tracking old discussions

• Misplaced Pages:Requested moves#Elapsed listings
• Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Old
• Misplaced Pages:Redirects for discussion
• Misplaced Pages:Categories for discussion/Awaiting closure
• Misplaced Pages:Templates for discussion#Old discussions
• Misplaced Pages:Miscellany for deletion#Old business
• Misplaced Pages:Proposed mergers/Log
• Misplaced Pages:Proposed article splits

Administrative discussions

Misplaced Pages:Administrators'_noticeboard/Archive367#RfC_closure_review_request_at_Talk:Rajiv_Dixit#RFC_can_we_say_he_peddaled_false_hoods_in_the_lede

(Initiated 20 days ago on 5 December 2024) - Ratnahastin (talk) 07:18, 24 December 2024 (UTC)

 Done voorts (talk/contributions) 19:44, 25 December 2024 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages:Administrators' noticeboard/Archive367#Close challenge for Talk:1948 Arab–Israeli War#RFC for Jewish exodus

(Initiated 12 days ago on 13 December 2024) challenge of close at AN was archived nableezy - 05:22, 24 December 2024 (UTC)

Place new administrative discussions above this line using a level 3 heading

Requests for comment

Misplaced Pages:Requests for adminship/2024 review/Phase II/Mentoring process

(Initiated 224 days ago on 15 May 2024) Discussion died down quite a long time ago. I do not believe anything is actionable but a formal closure will help. Soni (talk) 04:19, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

 Not done I don't think that a formal closure will be helpful given that there are several sub-discussions here on various issues. voorts (talk/contributions) 19:50, 25 December 2024 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages:Requests for comment/In the news criteria amendments

(Initiated 79 days ago on 7 October 2024) Tough one, died down, will expire tomorrow. Aaron Liu (talk) 23:58, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

Talk:Turkey#RfC_on_massacres_and_genocides_in_the_lead

(Initiated 78 days ago on 8 October 2024) Expired tag, no new comments in more than a week. KhndzorUtogh (talk) 21:48, 13 November 2024 (UTC)

 Note: This is a contentious topic and subject to general sanctions. Also see: Misplaced Pages:Administrators' noticeboard topic. Bogazicili (talk) 17:26, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

 Note: Not sure if anyone is looking into this, but might be a good idea to wait for a few weeks since there is ongoing discussion. Bogazicili (talk) 16:33, 12 December 2024 (UTC)

 Done voorts (talk/contributions) 00:31, 26 December 2024 (UTC)

Wikipedia_talk:Talk_page_guidelines#Request_for_comment:_Do_the_guidelines_in_WP:TPO_also_apply_to_archived_talk_pages?

(Initiated 70 days ago on 16 October 2024) Discussion seems to have petered out a month ago. Consensus seems unclear. Gnomingstuff (talk) 02:34, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

 Note: Needs admin closure imho, due to its importance (guideline page), length (101kb), and questions about neutrality of the Rfc question and what it meant. Mathglot (talk) 21:28, 16 December 2024 (UTC)

And in true Streisand effect fashion, this discussion, quiescent for six weeks, has some more responses again. Mathglot (talk) 01:30, 22 December 2024 (UTC)

{{doing}} voorts (talk/contributions) 23:35, 25 December 2024 (UTC)

Oops; I put this in the wrong section. voorts (talk/contributions) 00:30, 26 December 2024 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages:Reliable sources/Noticeboard/Archive 459#RFC_Jerusalem_Post

(Initiated 58 days ago on 28 October 2024) Participation/discussion has mostly stopped & is unlikely to pick back up again. - Butterscotch Beluga (talk) 21:15, 7 December 2024 (UTC)

 Note: This is a contentious topic and subject to general sanctions. - Butterscotch Beluga (talk) 21:15, 7 December 2024 (UTC)

Archived. P.I. Ellsworth , ed.  22:26, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages:Requests_for_comment/Grey_Literature

(Initiated 46 days ago on 10 November 2024) Discussion is slowing significantly. Likely no consensus, personally. Bluethricecreamman (talk) 03:09, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

Option 2 was very clearly rejected. The closer should try to see what specific principles people in the discussion agreed upon if going with a no consensus close, because there should be a follow-up RfC after some of the details are hammered out. Chess (talk) (please mention me on reply) 03:10, 6 December 2024 (UTC)

 Doing... —Compassionate727  13:43, 12 December 2024 (UTC)

@Compassionate727: Still working on this? — Red-tailed hawk _(nest) 17:18, 18 December 2024 (UTC)

Ugh… in practice, no. I'm still willing to do it, but it's in hiatus because of the three(!) pending challenges of my closures at AN, while I evaluate to what extent I need to change how I approach closures. If somebody else wants to take over this, they should feel free. —Compassionate727  22:16, 18 December 2024 (UTC)

Taking a pause is fair. Just wanted to double check. — Red-tailed hawk _(nest) 00:52, 19 December 2024 (UTC)

asking for an update if possible. I think this RFC and previous RFCBEFORE convos were several TOMATS long at this point, so I get that this might take time. Bluethricecreamman (talk) 16:34, 23 December 2024 (UTC)

Wikipedia_talk:Requests_for_comment#RFC_on_signing_RFCs

(Initiated 42 days ago on 13 November 2024) - probably gonna stay status quo, but would like a closure to point to Bluethricecreamman (talk) 06:14, 17 December 2024 (UTC)

• Done Soni (talk) 21:41, 24 December 2024 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages:Reliable sources/Noticeboard#RfC: Check Your Fact

(Initiated 42 days ago on 13 November 2024) RfC has elapsed, and uninvolved closure is requested. — Red-tailed sock _{(Red-tailed hawk's nest)} 15:49, 17 December 2024 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages talk:Manual of Style/Dates and numbers#RfC Indian numbering conventions

(Initiated 39 days ago on 16 November 2024) Very wide impact, not much heat. Aaron Liu (talk) 15:30, 23 December 2024 (UTC)

• Consensus seems clear, I don't think my Indian-ness poses a WP;COI here, closed. Soni (talk) 22:03, 24 December 2024 (UTC)

Talk:List of fictional countries set on Earth#RfC on threshold for inclusion

(Initiated 35 days ago on 20 November 2024) TompaDompa (talk) 17:50, 20 December 2024 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages talk:Naming conventions (music)#RfC about the naming conventions for boy bands

(Initiated 17 days ago on 8 December 2024) No further participation in the last 7 days. Consensus is clear but I am the opener of the RfC and am not comfortable closing something I am so closely involved in, so would like somebody uninvolved to close it if they believe it to be appropriate.RachelTensions (talk) 16:00, 19 December 2024 (UTC)

I'm not comfortable closing a discussion on a guideline change this early. In any case, if the discussion continues as it has been, a formal closure won't be necessary. —Compassionate727  13:00, 20 December 2024 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages talk:WikiProject Articles for creation#RfC: Should a bot be created to handle AfC submissions that haven't changed since the last time they were submitted?

(Initiated 40 days ago on 15 November 2024) This RfC expired five days ago, has an unclear consensus, I am involved, and discussion has died down. JJP_Master (she/they) 22:56, 20 December 2024 (UTC)

Talk:Len_Blavatnik#RfC:_NPOV_in_the_lead

(Initiated 9 days ago on 16 December 2024) RFC is only 5 days old as of time of this posting, but overwhelming consensus approves of status quo, except for a single COI editor. Bluethricecreamman (talk) 21:04, 21 December 2024 (UTC)

The CoI editor has now accepted that consensus is for the status quo, but I think a formal close from an uninvolved editor, summarizing the consensus would be helpful, since the issue has been coming up for a while and many editors were involved. — penultimate_supper 🚀 16:35, 23 December 2024 (UTC)

yes, despite multiple posts to WP:BLPN, WP:NPOVN, WP:3O, several talk page discussions, and now an RFC, I doubt the pressure to remove word oligarch from the lede of that page will stop. An appropriate close could be a useful thing to point at in the future though. Bluethricecreamman (talk) 16:40, 23 December 2024 (UTC)

 Done by Nomoskedasticity. —Compassionate727  13:30, 25 December 2024 (UTC)

Template talk:Infobox country#Request for comment on greenhouse emissions

(Initiated 89 days ago on 27 September 2024) Lots of considered debate with good points made. See the nom's closing statement. Kowal2701 (talk) 09:47, 24 December 2024 (UTC)

 Done —Compassionate727  13:29, 25 December 2024 (UTC)

Talk:Israel#RfC

(Initiated 33 days ago on 22 November 2024) Legobot has removed the RFC notice. Can we please get an interdependent close. TarnishedPath 23:08, 24 December 2024 (UTC)

Talk:Chloe Melas#RFC on allegation of making a false allegation (resubmission)

(Initiated 31 days ago on 24 November 2024) The bot has removed the RFC notice. Can we please get an independent close. TarnishedPath 23:03, 24 December 2024 (UTC)

 Done —Compassionate727  13:44, 25 December 2024 (UTC)

Place new discussions concerning RfCs above this line using a level 3 heading

Deletion discussions

Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/List of songs recorded by Mohammed Rafi (A)

(Initiated 25 days ago on 30 November 2024) Please review this discussion. --Jax 0677 (talk) 17:29, 21 December 2024 (UTC)

The discussion has now been relisted thrice. --Jax 0677 (talk) 00:42, 23 December 2024 (UTC)

 Done voorts (talk/contributions) 00:42, 26 December 2024 (UTC)

Place new discussions concerning XfDs above this line using a level 3 heading

Other types of closing requests

Talk:Arab migrations to the Levant#Merger Proposal

(Initiated 92 days ago on 25 September 2024) Open for a while, requesting uninvolved closure. Andre🚐 22:15, 20 December 2024 (UTC)

Talk:LGBT history in Georgia#Proposed merge of LGBT rights in Georgia into LGBT history in Georgia

(Initiated 80 days ago on 7 October 2024) A merge + move request with RM banners that needs closure. No new comments in 20 days. —CX Zoom 20:16, 10 December 2024 (UTC)

 Done —Compassionate727  14:11, 25 December 2024 (UTC)

Talk:Donald Trump#Proposal: Age and health concerns regarding Trump

(Initiated 70 days ago on 16 October 2024) Experienced closer requested. ―Mandruss ☎ 13:57, 27 November 2024 (UTC)

Talk:Tesla Cybercab#Proposed merge of Tesla Network into Tesla Cybercab

(Initiated 68 days ago on 18 October 2024) This needs formal closure by someone uninvolved. N2e (talk) 03:06, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

I think it would be better to leave that discussion be. There is no consensus one way or the other. I could close it as "no consensus," but I think it would be better to just leave it so that if there's ever anyone else who has a thought on the matter, they can comment in that discussion instead of needing to open a new one. —Compassionate727  14:15, 25 December 2024 (UTC)

Talk:Stadion Miejski (Białystok)#Requested move 5 November 2024

(Initiated 50 days ago on 5 November 2024) RM that has been open for over a month. Natg 19 (talk) 02:13, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

Talk:JTG Daugherty Racing#Requested move 22 November 2024

(Initiated 33 days ago on 22 November 2024) Pretty simple RM that just needs an uninvolved editor to close. ―"Ghost of Dan Gurney" _(hihi) 17:40, 21 December 2024 (UTC)

 Done —Compassionate727  14:37, 25 December 2024 (UTC)

Talk:Williamsburg Bray School#Splitting proposal

(Initiated 28 days ago on 27 November 2024) Only two editors—the nominator and myself—have participated. That was two weeks ago. Just needs an uninvolved third party for closure. ~ Pbritti (talk) 18:37, 13 December 2024 (UTC)

 Doing... BusterD (talk) 20:28, 15 December 2024 (UTC)

Talk:Winter fuel payment abolition backlash#Merge proposal

(Initiated 58 days ago on 29 October 2024) There are voices on both sides (ie it is not uncontroversial) so a non-involved editor is needed to evaluate consensus and close this. Thanks. PamD 09:55, 17 December 2024 (UTC)

Place new discussions concerning other types of closing requests above this line using a level 3 heading

Pages recently put under extended-confirmed protection

Review of an improper RfC closure

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

An RfC at Misplaced Pages talk:Copyrights#RfC: Hosting content from countries that do not have copyright relations with the U.S. was initially closed by an involved editor without discussing the arguments made in the discussion. I left a comment on the closer's talk page explaining that WP policies require that only an uninvolved editor can close the discussion and that, when closing, a summary of the consensus needs to be given. I then boldly undid the close given the clear violation of policy, but that was later undone by another editor who didn't vote in the RfC, but had left comments expressing a view on the subject and was also the editor who had nominated an image for deletion (see notifications on my talk page for speedy delete nomination, then file for discussion) that led to the RfC. That discussion between me and the second closer was at File talk:Isfahan Metro.jpg, which has since been deleted, but can't admins view the old content of the page? I tried to address the problems with the closure on the talk pages of both editors, but neither was willing to address them (see , , ).

In addition to the issues with the closure by the involved editors, the closure was not made correctly for several reasons. The consensus is not strictly determined by the number of votes. Per WP:RFCEND: The outcome is determined by weighing the merits of the arguments and assessing if they are consistent with Misplaced Pages policies. Counting "votes" is not an appropriate method of determining outcome. Per Misplaced Pages:Consensus#Determining consensus: "Consensus is ascertained by the quality of the arguments given on the various sides of an issue, as viewed through the lens of Misplaced Pages policy." When closing, a summary of the arguments should be given (see Misplaced Pages:Closing discussions#Consensus) and "arguments that flatly contradict established policy, those based on personal opinion only, those that are logically fallacious, and those that show no understanding of the matter of issue" should be discarded (Misplaced Pages:Closing discussions#Consensus).

First, most of the oppose votes raised the issue of the images possibly being subject to copyright in the future if the country of origin joins the Berne Convention, but did not respond to comments that templates could be made for those individual countries therefore allowing easy deletion of such images when a country joins the Berne Convention. Second, many raised the issue of the reusability of the content outside the US; however, as mentioned in the general discussion section, this is logically fallacious because 1) the images are free of copyright in most Berne Convention member states (currently 174 of the roughly 200 sovereign states) since copyright is based on reciprocity and countries like Iran and Somalia aren't party to significant other copyright treaties, 2) copyright exceptions (fair use & fair dealing) vary considerably from country to country and so Misplaced Pages articles containing fair use images already can't be freely reused in the many countries that don't have liberal copyright exceptions like the U.S. fair use, and 3) such a policy is inconsistent with other policies on WP, like allowing images of architecture that is not copyrighted in the US because of a freedom of panorama exception (which many countries' copyright laws don't have) or allowing works that are copyrighted in the country of origin but not the US (eg. some countries' copyright length is life+100 years).

Finally, while the result of the closure is given as "no consensus" to host the images subject to the RfC, the policy for many years has been to consider such images on a case-by-case basis and so the way the closing summary is stated it nonetheless changes existing policy. If there is no consensus on the outcome of an RfC changing a policy, shouldn't the result be to keep the status quo? AHeneen (talk) 13:52, 27 January 2017 (UTC)

AHeneen, I have undeleted File talk:Isfahan Metro.jpg. Nyttend (talk) 14:11, 27 January 2017 (UTC)

Bumping thread. Note: This shouldn't be closed until at least the last point is addressed: if result of RfC is no consensus, shouldn't status quo be kept? In this case, because of the wording of the question, the closing summary (by involved editors) changed the existing policy. AHeneen (talk) 19:26, 3 February 2017 (UTC)

I think you'll find that it's more complicated than that. When everything's simple and straightforward, then, yes, you're right: When there is no consensus, then the proposed change is usually not made (although see WP:NOCONSENSUS for some examples of when the default differs). But this does not appear to be a simple and straightforward situation. The closer may have found, for example, that there was no consensus for the old version and no consensus for the proposed change. "No consensus" means "no consensus against the proposal" just as much as it means "no consensus for the proposal". WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:22, 22 February 2017 (UTC)

WhatamIdoing The problem is 1) the closers were both involved editors and didn't really summarize the arguments made and 2) at the start of the RfC, the consensus was to accept such images on a case-by-case basis, but the question posed in the RfC was phrased in the positive ("Should the English Misplaced Pages host content that is public domain in the United States because the country of origin does not have copyright relations with the U.S.? "). The closing summary, in part, was "There is no consensus to host content from countries that do not have copyright relations with the U.S. " For the various reasons explained above, a lack of consensus should mean that the status quo be kept. AHeneen (talk) 03:34, 23 February 2017 (UTC)

I answered the general question that you asked: "if result of RfC is no consensus, shouldn't status quo be kept?" The answer to that question is "it depends". WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:55, 23 February 2017 (UTC)

OK. Sorry about the misunderstanding. AHeneen (talk) 08:38, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

 Doing...—S Marshall T/C 18:08, 2 March 2017 (UTC)

I'm going to disagree with this quite a lot. Firstly, the close was procedurally flawed because it was made by an editor who had participated in the discussion. Secondly, I don't agree that "No consensus" accurately reflects the discussion. I feel that the consensus was to reject the proposal on the basis that the copyright status of the content could change in future. Thirdly, ironically, I don't actually agree with the consensus on this point. It would be simple (and it would be standard Wikipedian practice) to create a template that says "PD-because-no-copyright-agreement-with-USA", tag the affected files with this template, and use the template to populate a category which tracks such files and enable their removal if the copyright status changes in the future. But with my RfC closer hat on I would have to say that illogical though it seems to me, there was a consensus and it was to reject the proposal.—S Marshall T/C 18:38, 2 March 2017 (UTC)

@S Marshall: Your third point is irrelevant and semantically speaking, "there is no consensus to host such content" and "there is consensus to reject the proposal" which was to host said content, is the same thing. As for the closer, Misplaced Pages really needs to get over the whole "involved" nonsense. As indicative of the ever growing list of requested closures, if the result is obvious there is absolutely nothing wrong with someone just doing it. That is what being bold is. In any case, the original closure's decision was in direct opposition to what they wanted anyways. I could see a problem if they ruled in favor of what they wanted but, come on. This nonsense has been going on for well over a month now. It is time to drop the stick and move on with our lives. --Majora (talk) 22:49, 2 March 2017 (UTC)

• Nope, neither of those points is correct. "No consensus to host" and "consensus not to host" are not equivalent, and the fact that the consensus doesn't make sense is not irrelevant.—S Marshall T/C 22:54, 2 March 2017 (UTC)

It is irrelevant in the vein that you did not participate so your opinion on the matter is moot. And in terms of English, those two ideas are equivalent. Whether or not Misplaced Pages views them as equivalent is different (and another layer of pointlessness that doesn't need to be there). --Majora (talk) 22:58, 2 March 2017 (UTC)

S Marshall: As mentioned in the OP, consensus is not merely tallying votes as per Misplaced Pages:Consensus#Determining consensus: "Consensus is ascertained by the quality of the arguments given on the various sides of an issue, as viewed through the lens of Misplaced Pages policy." Here, there were many quality arguments given for allowing the images with specific copyright tags with no response by those opposing (so there wasnt't really any attempt at reasoned discussion or consensus building). There was also basically no discussion about the status quo that allowed such images on a case-by-case basis. The semantic issue about consensus is better explained this way: there was no agreement through reasoned discussion about how to proceed forward (keeping in mind the principles mentioned in the first sentnce of this comment). This is a problem because of the way the RfC was phrased (in the positive, even though such images were already allowed).

It may be easier to understand this argument in a different context. Let's say someone starts an RfC about repeated wikilinks in articles that says "Should articles be allowed to have more than one wikilink to the same article, excluding navigation boxes?" Since this is phrased in the positive, any result other than a clear yes would be a change to the current policy (WP:DUPLINK: Duplicate linking in lists is permissible if it significantly aids the reader.). If there is a lot of disagreement about the appropriate circumstances for when multiple links are appropriate, then using the result of the closure of the copuright RfC, the result of the RfC would be "there is no consensus to have more than one wikilink to the same article, excluding navigation boxes" and the status quo would be changed. AHeneen (talk) 23:13, 4 March 2017 (UTC)

• {{Do not archive until}} added. Please remove the {{Do not archive until}} tag after the review is closed. (I am adding this because RfC closure reviews frequently have been archived prematurely without being resolved.) Cunard (talk) 00:47, 13 March 2017 (UTC)

WP:AN/CXT

Hi, Wikipedians. I wanted to give you an update on WP:AN/CXT. Since that discussion was closed about eight months or so ago, we've cleared out about 10% of the articles involved, which were the easiest 10%. The work is now slowing down as more careful examination is needed and as the number of editors drops off, and I'm sad to report that we're still finding BLP issues. The temporary speedy deletion criterion, X2, is of little use because it's phrased as a special case of WP:SNOW and I'm not being allowed to improve it. The "it's notable/AFD is not for cleanup" culture at AFD is making it hard for me to remove these articles as well, so I'm spending hours trying to get rid of material generated by a script in seconds. I'm sorry but I'm discouraged and I give up. Recommend the remainder are nuked to protect the encyclopaedia.—S Marshall T/C 23:15, 19 February 2017 (UTC)

For more context on this issue, please see Misplaced Pages talk:Criteria for speedy deletion#X2 revision. Cheers, Tazerdadog (talk) 23:33, 19 February 2017 (UTC)

Update: This link is now located at .../Archive_61#X2 revision. Mathglot (talk) 01:10, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for your work on this, S Marshall, and I don't fault you for your choice. - Dank (push to talk) 19:49, 20 February 2017 (UTC)

• Isn't there some way to use the sortware to delete all of these in bulk, if only as a one-time thing? Seems like a huge waste of time if it's being done manually by hand. Andrew Lenahan - Starblind 00:07, 27 February 2017 (UTC)

• Easily doable as a batch-deletion. I could have it wrapped up in 15 minutes. Unfortunately community consensus did not lean towards approving that option. In fact, most CXT creations which have been reviewed needed cleanup but turned out to be acceptable articles. ☺ · Salvidrim! · ✉ 21:00, 27 February 2017 (UTC)

I would support a nuke, a mass draftification, or some loosening of X2. The current situation is not really tenable due to the density of BLP violations. However, ultimately, the broader community needs to discuss what the appropriate action is under the assumption that we are not going to get much more volunteer time to manually check these articles. Tazerdadog (talk) 23:54, 27 February 2017 (UTC)

• No, the broader community doesn't need to discuss that. It's completely needless and the community has had a huge discussion already. All that needs to happen is for WT:CSD to let me make one bold edit to a CSD that was badly-worded from the get-go, and we'll all be back on track. That's it. The only problem we have is that there are so many editors who want to tell me how to do it, and so few editors willing to get off their butts and do it.—S Marshall T/C 19:34, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

• Restored from archive, as it's unhelpful for this to remain unresolved.—S Marshall T/C 17:30, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

• Support systematic nuke/ revision of X2 to enable this mess to be cleared up. It's not fair that @S Marshall: is being prevented from improving the encyclopedia like this. Amisom (talk) 15:21, 17 March 2017 (UTC)
• Support @S Marshall:'s revision or a nuke from orbit. I wasn't active when this situation was being discussed originally, but having now read over the discourse on the matter, it is clear that our current approach isn't working. No one else is stepping up to help S Marshall do this absurd amount of reviewing, leaving us stuck with thousands of machine-translated BLP violations. It's all well and good to say that AfD isn't cleanup and deletion solves nothing and we should let articles flower patiently into beautiful gardens, but if no one's pulling the weeds and watering the sprouts, the garden isn't a garden, it's a weed-riddled disaster. Give the gardener a weed whacker already. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 09:17, 24 March 2017 (UTC)
• Support the bold edit required to X2; it's true, of course, that AfD is not clean up- but neither should it be a barrier to clean up. In any case, moving a backlog from one place to another is hardly helpful. — O Fortuna! 09:39, 24 March 2017 (UTC)
• Question @Elinruby and Yngvadottir: As users who (from a quick glance) seem to have been active looking through these articles, do you think the quality is on average worse than a typical random encyclopedia article, and if so, bad enough that speedy deletion would be preferable to allowing them to be improved over time as with any other article? I don't mean to imply that this is necessarily the case, but I think it should be the bar for concluding whether mass speedy deletion is the correct answer. Sam Walton (talk) 11:22, 24 March 2017 (UTC)
• (I wish I'd seen this earlier; thanks for the ping. I feel I have totally let down S Marshall; I just couldn't stand it any more.) On the whole ... yes. Support deletion of those remaining that have not been marked as ok/fixed. As I tried to explain in the initial discussion, the basic premise here is incorrect: as it states somewhere at Pages needing translation into English, a machine translation is worse than no article. It will almost always be either almost impossible to read, incorrect (for example, mistranslating names as ordinary nouns, or omitting negatives ...) or both. Some of these translations have been ok; many have been woefully incomplete (just the start of the lede), and they all require extremely careful checking. Yes, what lies in wait may include BLP violations. I sympathize with the article creators, and I am usually an inclusionist; I put hours of work into checking and improving some of these, and I'm not the only one. But please, enough. We'd wind up with decent articles faster if these were deleted, and the majority that are bad do a disservice to their topics. Yngvadottir (talk) 12:52, 24 March 2017 (UTC)

• You haven't let me down. You've given me a truckload of support with this.—S Marshall T/C 13:47, 24 March 2017 (UTC)

• Still oppose mass deletion -- @Sam Walton: What she said: Thank you the ping; this discussion was seeming a bit reiterative and I had mentally checked out. Like @Yngvadottir: I have put considerable effort into some of these articles. In fact, two or three of them are my own translations, which I would not have attempted without the translation tool, btw. Some are from my translations on French law, and I think 1) they cover important and previously missing topics and 2) they are high-quality technical translations. In most cases they speak for themselves. A couple are not perfect, reflecting the state of the French article, yes, and need work. But while these articles -- I am speaking here specifically of my own translations that appear on this list -- may be imperfect they are still reasonable stubs that can be built upon, and they also support more important articles by helping to prevent redlinks in some of the top-level articles on French law and also the French colonial legacy in Rwanda and the Congos etc. See Biens mal acquis for example. That was painful but I am proud of that translation. I have also encountered other people's translations on that list that made me proud of Misplaced Pages; the one on a cryptology algorithm for example comes to mind, or Essai sur les mœurs et l'esprit des nations. I am an inclusionist, I have to admit, and yes yes, great wrongs and all, but I do think it is important that (for example) articles on Congolese history mention that there have been civil wars (beyond "unrest", and no, I am not kidding). The worst BLP problems I am aware of are in the articles on Dilma Rousseff and I don't believe they are on this list or were created with the tool. Some of the worst PNT pages I have seen predate the translation tool, for instance Notre-Dame de la Garde, which took me years to finish, and Annees folles which is as we speak an incredible mess requiring research in addition to copy-editing and translation. Yngvadottir is correct in saying that inappropriately translated proper nouns is a frequent problem. I recall a Hubert de Garde de Vins who became "wine", and yes, this did reduce the sentence to gibberish. It's annoying enough to make me wanna regex. But. Not mass deletion. I suggest case-by-case intervention in the case of egregious problems with particular users. It's not as though more that a very few users even try to translate. Or perhaps we should revise the criteria for translation user privileges. But even there -- one of the people tagged as delete on sight has created a number of skeleton articles about Quebec. These articles should be be fleshed out not deleted; we should have articles about Quebec. Some of the authors are unquestionably notable, the equivalent in my small culture of Simone de Beauvoir or Colette or Andre Gide. It seems to me that an article that says: this author was born, drank coffee, won the Governor-General's award and wrote these books, is better than having nothing at all. The placeholder takes the topic from unknown unknown to known unknown, or little-known in this context, I guess. We do know a little more about the folk dances of Honduras because there is a very bad article, for which I have done what I could. There are many different problems with the articles on this list. Someone has created multiple articles about, apparently every madrassa in central Tunis. Who am I? Some of the articles I have rescued at PNT were about the medieval wines of Provence, which might seem equally trivial to some. Some of the important but very flawed articles I have noted maybe should not be in the article mainspace -- I am thinking of the ones about the Virgin of Guadeloupe, pretty much everything flagged Mexican historical documents, the Spanish procession of the flowers, etc)--but an interested Spanish speaker could build these out. These topics are unquestionably notable. We should have an article about the Virgin of Guadeloupe, really, people, we should. My suggestion would be recruiting. We desperately need a Portuguese speaker and additional help with Spanish. Some of the unreferenced BLPs sitting around appear to be very fine even though they are unreferenced, and may in fact veer into fluff. But they don't approach liability for libel if that's the concern. I avoid them, personally, because I have in the past deciphered Abidjan l33t about a beloved soccer player, only to be told that we don't as a matter of policy consider these leagues notable. Fine then, they should not be on the PNT to-do list. I'd love to see the translation workflow improved but we should be encouraging the people expanding our horizons is what I think. I am sorry for the very long answer but I appear to be a voice wailing in the desert on this topic and I have now said pretty much the above many times now. Nobody seems to care so oh well, it's not like I don't have other work I can do on the history of the Congo and figuring out what Dilma Rousseff had to say about her impeachment. Reliable sources say she was railroaded (NPR for one) and that is not included in the article at all right now. The articles on Congolese history airily write off genocide and slaughter as "some unrest". In a world where these things are true I really don't care whether on not we find a reference for that Eurovision winner. Someone who cares can do that and I think ethnocentrism is a bigger issue on Misplaced Pages that these translation attempts. Move the ones that don't meet a minimum standard to some draft space or something. Educate the people who are creating this articles instead of shaking your finger at them. The article creation process is daunting enough and I myself have had to explain to new page patrollers that this punk band is in fact seminal whether you have heard of them or not and whether or not they sing in a language that you can understand. But I have been here enough to do that and I assure you, most people will not. Misplaced Pages wants to know why its editors grow fewer cough cough wikipedia, lookee here. I will shortly wikilink some of the examples I mention above for easier show-and-tell, for the benefit of anyone who has read this far. Thanks. Elinruby (talk) 20:38, 25 March 2017 (UTC)

• Support removal of these attempted articles (especially to avoid BLP problems laying around). Alanscottwalker (talk) 14:00, 24 March 2017 (UTC)
• Support I'd say "do a disservice to their topics" is a mild way of putting it. --NeilN 14:08, 24 March 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose blanket deletion. Having just checked a bunch of the remaining articles I found plenty of perfectly reasonable, non-BLP articles here, and any bad articles I did find were certainly not in greater number than you would find by hitting Random Article, nor were they particularly awful; the worst offenses I found were poor but understandable English. There's a lot of valid content here, especially on non-English topics which we need to do a better job of writing about. FWIW I'll happily put some time into going through this list. Sam Walton (talk) 14:12, 24 March 2017 (UTC)
  • Please take a look at the 20 articles I just reviewed here; none had any issues greater than needing a quick copyedit. Sam Walton (talk) 14:38, 24 March 2017 (UTC)
    • @Samwalton9: Thanks. It's been a long, hard slog. I appreciate it if any of these can be saved. However, did you check for accuracy? It's possible for a machine translation to be misleadingly wrong. And the miserable translation tool the WMF provides usually doesn't even attempt filmographies: look at that specific section of Asier Etxeandia. This is not acceptable in a BLP. Somebody who reads the original language (Spanish? Catalan?) needs to go through that article sentence by sentence and film by film. Unfortunately it's not a matter of notability (that's almost always attested to by the original article), it's a matter of whether we have time to save this article. Yngvadottir (talk) 15:27, 24 March 2017 (UTC)
      • That names of works likely don't get automatically translated properly is a good point that I hadn't considered, thanks for pointing that out. If that's one of the primary issues then I'd favour a semi-automated removal of "filmography" or similar sections, if possible. It just seems that there's a lot of perfectly good content in here. Sam Walton (talk) 15:47, 24 March 2017 (UTC)
        • I looked at the first one you listed, it is a mass of non-BLP compliant (non-neutral, no-inline source) material. Letting stuff like that hang around is not just bad for that BLP but as an example for other BLPs to be created and remain non-compliant. Alanscottwalker (talk) 16:08, 24 March 2017 (UTC)
          • Sam Walton, you didn't answer Yngvadottir's question. Can you speak the source languages? Remember that because of the defective way that software feature was implemented, you cannot assume that the translator speaks English and in many cases they obviously couldn't. (In practice the source language matters a lot because the software accuracy varies by the language pair. Indo-European languages are often but not always okay, and Spanish-English translations have particularly high accuracy, approaching 80%. Japanese-English, for example, has much, much lower accuracy.) So the correctness of the translation must be, and can only be, checked by someone with dual fluency in the source language and English.

            In the real world you can establish some rules-of-thumb. For example, you can quite safely assume that everything translated by Rosiestep is appropriate and can be retained. The editorial skills of the different translators varied very widely.

            All in all the best solution is for a human who's fluent in the source language and English to look at each of these articles and form an intelligent judgment. The thing that's preventing this solution is that, having looked at the content and formed the judgment, I can't then remove a defective article, because the defective wording in WP:CSD#X2 encourage sysops to decline the deletion unless it's a WP:SNOW case... so I've got to start a full AfD. Every. Single. Time. The effort for me to clean up is out of all proportion to the effort editors put into creating the damn things with a script.

            If you don't want the articles nuked (and that's a reasonable position), then please support the X2 revision I have proposed.—S Marshall T/C 17:37, 24 March 2017 (UTC)

When you say "the first one you listed" are you talking about Tomokazu Matsuyama? Yes, if so. it is indeed an unreferenced BLP but... I suspect five minutes of quality time with Google would take it out of that category, and it's essentially a resume, something like the placeholder articles I mentioned above. I think that perhaps we are better off knowing that this Japanese contemporary artist exists. Why not do a wikiproject to improve these like the one we just had on Africa top-level articles? It does seem to me that you could use a break from this wikitask and a little gamification might well get er done. I share your sentiment that in some ways we have our fingers in the dyke here, but the dyke does serve a purpose I think...In short I respectfully disagree with the current approach to these articles. Elinruby (talk) 21:05, 25 March 2017 (UTC)

Break

@Alanscottwalker: I found a reference for his influences in less time than it took to add the ref code....Elinruby (talk) 19:43, 31 March 2017 (UTC)

Elinruby: Did you mean to ping me back here, many days after I commented, to tell me you found a pretty crappy commercial source? When I looked at it awhile ago, the article was filled with non-npov/non-referenced/BLP violating text. It is, thus, no comfort that since I commented, awhile ago, someone has according to their edit 'removed the worst of the puffery', and you added that crappy commercial source - its still not policy compliant (even if it is marginally better, since I flagged it) Alanscottwalker (talk) 20:03, 31 March 2017 (UTC)

@Alanscottwalker: I brought you back here to tell you that while it may be have been unsourced, fixing this is extremely trivial. I don't give a hoot about this particular article, but his gallery is not a "crappy commercial source" imho and if you want people to fix then article then you should enunciate your problem with it. Sorry if that doesn't fit your preconceptions Elinruby (talk) 00:51, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

Adding a non-independent crappy commercial source is not fixing. It is selling. We are not in the business of selling. What you call "trivial" sourcing does nothing to fix just makes it worse - "trivial" should have tipped you off. -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 08:25, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

@AlanscottWalker: Um no.... I was using the term in its software development meaning. I apologize for picking the wrong dialect to make my point. I thought, since you were critiquing the software tool, you might know something about software even though you don't seem to be familiar with the features of this instance of it, or for that matter with a representative sample of its users. Commericial, hmm. The same could be said of my article about the thousand-year-old Papal vintages, you know. That vineyard is selling wine today. Is that article also commercial crap? Since it is a direct translation from French Misplaced Pages, are you saying that French Misplaced Pages is commercial crap? You really don't want to make me argue this point, seriously. Incidentally what is with the arbitrary insertion of a break in the discussion? Consider, for just a moment, that I might actually have a point. Entertain the notion for a minute. Why are you belittling my statement? Elinruby (talk) 21:57, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

Critiquing software tool? No, I was clearly critiquing an article in English on the English Misplaced Pages. And I was referring to the crappy commercial source - you pinged me, remember, so that I would know you added it to the article. That was not done in French, it was done in English. As for break, that is your doing, why should I have any idea why you added the crappy source, and then wanted to tell me about it in this break. -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 22:54, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

@Alanscottwalker: Let me use small words. CTX is software. Bad translation can happen with or without software. Lack of sources can happen without software. In software development "trivial" means "easy". Do you see now? Be careful who you patronize next time. 01:07, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

@S Marshall:I'd consider supporting your proposal, perhaps, once I have read it, but could you provide a link for we mere mortals who don't normally follow these proposals? I also disagree that all of these articles require a bilingual editor; some just need a few references and/or a copy edit. But you know I disagree at this point. And if you do, god help us, nuke all of these articles as opposed to one of the other courses of action I have (again) suggested above, please move mine to my draft space if you find them that objectionable. Some sort of clue as to what your issue is would also be nice. Elinruby (talk) 19:43, 31 March 2017 (UTC)

• The revision I want to make is this one. The intended effect is so that a human editor, who has reviewed the script-generated content and given it due consideration and exercise of judgment, can recommend the content for deletion and receive assistance rather than bureaucracy from our admin corps.

  The basic problem with these articles is that they are script generated and the scripts are unreliable. Exactly how unreliable they are varies according to the language pair, so for example Spanish-English translations are relatively good, while for example Japanese-English translations are relatively poor; and whether the articles contain specific grammatical constructions that the scripts have trouble with.

  You can test its accuracy, and I recommend you do. The script it used, during the problem period, was Google translate. I've just picked some sample text and run it through Google translate in various language pairs, first into a different language and then the translated text back into English, to see how it did. These were the results:-

I encourage you to try these and other examples with different language pairs. Can you see why you need to speak the original language in order to copyedit accurately?—S Marshall T/C 22:00, 31 March 2017 (UTC)

But that is not a fair test since it magnifies any word choice errors. There *will* be errors, yes. We clean them up at WP:PNT --- ALL THE TIME. And no, it is not necessary to speak the language always, though it certainly help. I really suggest that maybe you just need a wikibreak from this task. Bad english can mostly be fixed. There are the occasional mysteries, yes. There are colloquialisms, yes. This does not justify wholesale destruction of good content. I was just here to get the link as I mentioned your proposal to one of my PNT colleagues; I need to go but I'll look at your proposal the next time I log in Elinruby (talk) 00:46, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

The liquor was strong but the meat was rotten.

Translation wonks will recognize the (apocryphal) story behind the sentence above, concerning literal mistranslations exacerbated from there-and-back translation. (The story perhaps originated after the NY World's Fair of 1964, which had a computer translation exhibit in the Russian Pavilion.) In any case, I'm just getting up to speed on this topic and will comment in more detail later.

Briefly: yes, you definitely have to speak the language to copyedit accurately. I'm actually in favor of a modification to WP:MACHINETRANSLATION to make it stronger. I fully agree with the worse than nothing statement in the policy now, but I'd go one step further: the only thing worse than a machine translation in an encyclopedia, is a machine translation that has been copyedited by a capable and talented monolingual (even worse: by someone who knows a bit of the language and doesn't know what s/he doesn't know) so that the result is beautiful, grammatical, smooth, stylish, wonderful English prose. As a translator, puh-LEEZ leave the crappy, horrible, machine-gobbledygook so that a translator can spot it easily, and fix it accurately. Copyediting it into proper English makes our job much harder.

If it's too painful to leave it exposed in main space, perhaps moving to Draft space could be an alternative. In fact, rather than a mass-delete, why not a mass-Draft-ify? (Apologies if someone has already said this, I'm still reading the thread.) More later. Mathglot (talk) 01:31, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

mass-Draftify would work for me. And yeah I disagree with you too a little, but I knew that. My point is, we all agree that an issue exists so what do we do? I also have some more reading to do before I comment on what S Marshall (talk · contribs) is proposing. I have a story about the policy but I want to make sure it pertains to this discussion. Elinruby (talk) 22:03, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

• Elinruby is certainly correct to say this "wasn't a fair test", because going through the algorithm twice doubles the error rate. But a lot of people reading this discussion will speak only English so this is the only way I can show them what the problem is ---- without that context, they may well find this, and the original discussion at WP:AN/CXT, rather impenetrable because they won't understand the gravity of the concerns.

  It was even more unfair because it was me who selected the examples and I don't like machine translations. In order to illustrate my point I went with non-European languages and convoluted sentence structures. If you tried the same exercise with a verse from "Green Eggs and Ham" then you'd get perfect translations 99% of the time. (It tripped me up with the Sermon on the Mount because quite clearly, the algorithm recognised that it was dealing with a Bible verse, which I found fascinating.)

  The script is particularly likely to do badly with double-negatives, not-unless constructions, adverbs of time ("since", "during", "for a hundred years"), and the present progressive tense, in some language pairs.

  It would certainly be possible to construct a fairer text using more random samples of language.—S Marshall T/C 10:27, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

@S Marshall: alright, I grant you that there aren't many bilinguals here. This *is* the problem in my view. I'll also specify that I don't claim expertise outside the Romance languages, and very little for some of those. But allow me please, since I know you speak or at least read French, to propose a better example. There are common translation errors that can occur, depending on which tool exactly was used. The improperly-translated name (nom propre) problem was real but is now mostly fixed. The fact that a writer whose novels were written in French gave them titles in French should come as a shock to nobody. The correct format for a bibliography in such cases *is* title in the actual language of the words in the book, webpage or whatever. Translated title, if the title is not in English, goes in the optional trans-title (or is it trans_title?) field of the cite template. Language switch to be set if at all possible. If it is not, let me know, and I can reduce the number of foreign words that English wikipedia needs to look at. So. In all languages, pretty much, words like fire and sky and take tend to be both native to the original people and likely to carry additional meanings, as in take an oath, take a bus, take a break etc. On the other hand what the software tool does do extremely well is know the correct translation for arcane or specialized terms, often loanwords, like caravel or apse or stronghold. These words are in my recognition vocabulary not my working vocabulary and using the tool in certain instances saves many lookups. When there is a strong degree of ambiguity or divergence in meaning (like the example on my user page) then THEN yes a fluent or very advanced user is needed. There are known divergences that a bilingual would spot that an English speaker would not. Sure. "Je l'aime beaucoup, mon mari" is a good example. But the fact that this is true does not prove that every line of every one of these articles still needs to be checked before they can be permitted to continue to sully Misplaced Pages, or that each of these lines needs to be checked by you personally. If you feel overwhelmed, take a break. Elinruby (talk) 21:57, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

• I speak English, French, German, Gibberish and Filth.  :) Joking aside -- I'm not concerned about noms propres. I'm concerned when the script perverts or even inverts the meaning of the source text. It's quite hard to give you an example because the examples I've discovered have all been deleted, and there's only the one non-English language we share, but perhaps an administrator will confirm for you the sorry history of Daphné Bürki. It was created as a machine translation of fr:Daphné Bürki and the en.wiki version said she was married to Sylvain Quimène, citing this source. Check it out; the source doesn't say that. In fact she was married to Travis Bürki, at least at one time (can't say whether she's still married to him). We had a biographical article where the subject was married to the wrong bloke. It's not okay to keep these around.

  Draftification is exactly the same as deleting them. Nobody is going to fix these up in draft space. The number of editors who're competent to fix them is small, and the amount of other translation work those editors have on their hands is very large, and it includes a lot of mainspace work that's more urgent than fixing raw machine translations in draft space, and it always will; we can get back to fixing draft space articles about individual artworks when every Leibniz-prizewinning scientist and every European politician with a seat on their national parliament has a biography. (We're on target never to achieve that. The democratic process means new politicians get elected and replaced faster than their biographies get translated from foreign-language wikipedias.)

  I don't object to draftifying these articles if that's the face-saving solution that lets us pretend we're being all inclusionist about it, but it would be more honest to nuke them all from orbit.—S Marshall T/C 00:51, 2 April 2017 (UTC)

• I am just coming back to this. I agree about the relatively few translators and the large amount of work, and yet, we so fundamentally disagree. Some of the designated articles do are, in my opinion, within the top percentiles in article quality. Others have in fact been fixed up. You and I consulted about one once. Others, yes, need work, and I at least do get to articles that I say I will get to. Slowly, at times, sure. I have no problem with articles that don't meet a certain standard not going to mainspace, but I don't see why you singly out the translation tool as your criterion. I mention noms propres because I have mentioned one above from Notre-Dame de la Garde where Commander de Vins came across as wine, and this did make the sentence gibberish. But that article did not come out of the CTX tool. Ihave no idea what the Leibniz prize is, but I am not sure it's more notable, in the abstract, than Marcel Proust, but fine. Work on that all you like, sure. But don't tell me it's more important that some mention in Congolese history that there have been civil wars, or I will just laugh at you. The sort of error you mention above with Daphné Büki -- I'll look at it myself shortly, if it's from French I don't need an admin -- can be made by anyone who knows less than they think they do. Automated translation not needed. Now, I propose that since we are talking about this we work out some sort of saner translation process. For instance, if African football leagues are by policy not notable, as someone once told me, fine then, the article should not be in the translation queue. Put something in there about a minimum number of references, require the use of trans-title in the references, whatever is agreed upon is ok with me. Your proposed change would preserve most of by not all of the articles that have been worked on, which is a slight improvement I guess, except you'll also nuke the 3-4 articles that needed nothing and a whole lot of biography that I've avoid because people tend to write me snooty messages to inform me that the person isn't notable, and why waste work when articles like History of Nicaragua are so lacking? Elinruby (talk) 01:01, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

Proposal

Okay, I've gone through this and thought about it, and I'm conditionally a Yes on change to X2 and nuking the list, with an option to save certain files.

S Marshall, I take your point about draftification being pointless, as they'll just sit there with most of them never being edited ever.

I believe you've also persuaded me that the nuke is appropriate, given some conditions below. In order to keep Elinruby and Sam Walton (and me, and others) happy about not deleting certain files we are working on or wish to work on, I had an idea: what if we agree to allow a delay of two weeks to allow interested parties to go through and mark files in the list we want to keep so when the nuke-a-bot comes through, it can pass over the files thus marked. (I don't know if we can gin this up for two weeks from yesterday, but that would be auspicious.)

More specifically, to Elinruby's (22:03, 1 April) "So what do we do?" question, I think here's what we do:

• Those of us who want to retain files, mark them with {{bots|deny=X2-nukebot}} to vaccinate them against nuking.
• Change X2 accordingly
• Somebody develops the nuke script
• Nuke script should nuke "without prejudice" so that if someone changes their mind later and wants to recreate a file, it shouldn't be "salted" or require admin action to "undelete"; you just recreate it in the normal way you create any new file.
• If needed, we run a pre-nuke test against sandbox files, or can we just trust the vaccination will be respected?
• Start the script up and let 'er rip

Elinruby, if this proposal were accepted, would you change your no to X2 modif to a yes? Sam Walton, would you?

Naturally for this to have any value, we'd have to agree to not vaccinate the whole list, but just the ones we reasonably expect to work on, or judge worthy of keeping. If desired, I can envisage a way to greatly speed up the first step (vaccination) for all of us. Personally, I won't mark any file translated from a language I don't know well enough to evaluate the translation. But, going through all 3500 files is a burden, since there's no point my even clicking on the ones in languages I don't know. If I knew in advance which ones are from Spanish, French, etc., that would be a huge help. If you look at 1300-1350, you'll see that I've marked them with a language code (and a byte count; but that was for something else). I could commit to marking another 200 or 300 with the lang code, maybe more. If we could break up the work that way and everybody just mark the files for lang code, then once that's done, we could all go through the whole list much more quickly, to see which ones we wanted to evaluate for vaccination.

I really think this could be wrapped up in a couple of weeks, if we get agreement. Mathglot (talk) 18:17, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

• Entirely happy with this idea.—S Marshall T/C 19:33, 4 April 2017 (UTC)
• Agree. Amisom (talk) 11:31, 5 April 2017 (UTC)
• This is fine with me. Tazerdadog (talk) 23:03, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

Re-requesting closure of Misplaced Pages talk:Conflict of interest#Investigating COI policy

Someone already requested a closure of Misplaced Pages talk:Conflict of interest#Investigating COI policy, which concerns outing/paid editor/harassment/COI... whatever. However, Casliber says that more than one closer, preferably three-person, may be needed. I wonder whether more than one closer is necessary. If so, this indicates that the discussion would be another one of more difficult discussions we've seen lately. Thoughts? --George Ho (talk) 13:44, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

It's not obvious from the discussion and the number of editors participating and the number of proposals made that it's a difficult and controversial topic? --NeilN 19:59, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

To me, closing the whole discussion is very difficult because of the controversy of the topic. However, I concentrated more on milieus and proposals. To be honest, I saw two milieus and one concrete proposal receiving support from the majority. I concentrated on the straw polls and arguments. How about this: close separate milieus and proposals separately? They aren't that difficult to separately close due to other milieus and proposals not likely to pass. --George Ho (talk) 20:17, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

Closing each one separately probably makes more sense from a numbers perspective. However, it should still be one group of editors that does it, since there is the possibility (mentioned on the discussion) that some of the milieus could contradict each other depending on what gets passed. Primefac (talk) 01:57, 2 March 2017 (UTC)

Milieus 1, 2, and 5 are easy to close as the majority opposes them individually. Milieu 3 and concrete proposal 1 received majority support, so those would be also easy to close. But you're right; one same group of editors should do the individual closures. However, I won't be part of the closing group, so I'll await the uninvolved closers then. --George Ho (talk) 04:44, 2 March 2017 (UTC)

I would be willing to be involved in a group closure on this. Tazerdadog (talk) 19:02, 2 March 2017 (UTC)

I cast a !vote in the discussion which I had forgotten about - it would therefore be grossly inappropriate for me to participate in this closure Tazerdadog (talk) 01:04, 10 March 2017 (UTC)

I guess this means we're putting the band back together ;) Primefac (talk) 19:04, 2 March 2017 (UTC)

We still need one more volunteer for this. Tazerdadog (talk) 10:01, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

I'll step up, if you like.—S Marshall T/C 17:34, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

And... we're back down to 2. Primefac (talk) 02:30, 10 March 2017 (UTC)

Needed: Another closer please!—S Marshall T/C 15:35, 11 March 2017 (UTC)

I suggest you just go ahead with however many closers you have now. I further suggest that the "milieux" were intended to get a "general view of the community" and were very vaguely worded, so that if all you can say is "there was no apparent consensus", then so be it. As far as concrete proposal 1, which I proposed, the 28-6 result seems to make the close obvious. You might as well just go ahead and close it. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 03:53, 13 March 2017 (UTC)

• @Primefac: thoughts? Nobody else is stepping up.—S Marshall T/C 19:36, 14 March 2017 (UTC)

Meh, let's just go for it. I think I've still got your email kicking about. I'll send you my thoughts hopefully in the next 24 hours. Primefac (talk) 20:46, 14 March 2017 (UTC)

I'll write mine independently over the same period, and we can see if we agree.  :)—S Marshall T/C 21:39, 14 March 2017 (UTC)

• Sorry, I've re-opened the RFC. Re-opening interest for other editors willing to work on a close. Primefac (talk) 22:31, 16 March 2017 (UTC)

Take your time. ;) Meanwhile, what happened to closing separate, individual milieux and proposals? George Ho (talk) 10:35, 17 March 2017 (UTC)

I'll go back to what I said 4 comment above. The milieux can be very difficult to close because of the wording. I thought the reverted close was a very good attempt to make sense out of M.3 in that it focused on what the consensus there actually agreed on, but that aroused a storm and nobody seems to be able to agree on what was actually agreed on. Concrete proposal 1, which I proposed, is very much the opposite and I think can be easily closed. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 19:27, 19 March 2017 (UTC)

I'll help close it, but I think the section below the actual RFC should be considered as well, since they're actively discussing the RFC and how to proceed. Maybe we should wait just a little while longer to see how that develops. Katie 23:23, 20 March 2017 (UTC)

I'm fine with that. No point in cutting off productive discourse. Primefac (talk) 11:48, 21 March 2017 (UTC)

@Primefac, KrakatoaKatie, and S Marshall: I'm going to close a couple separate milieus that receive huge opposition. Casliber, the proposer, is fine with it. However, may I summarize the tally votes as just short rationales? I'll leave the others open. --George Ho (talk) 22:18, 2 April 2017 (UTC)

Fine by me, George Ho. It'll make the overall close a bit cleaner. Primefac (talk) 23:08, 2 April 2017 (UTC)

Closed milieu 1 and milieu 5. I closed milieu 2 as "no consensus", but I commented that another closer can summarize that better than me. --George Ho (talk) 00:51, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

I changed my mind and briefly summarized milieu 2. --George Ho (talk) 01:18, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

Someone has been dishonestly removing valid references to atheists as such

Among the pages I watch, I noticed that both John Desmond Bernal and Michael Foot had been removed from the category 'atheist'. Bernal because it was supposedly trivial and Foot because it had no main-text reference.

I restored Bernal, pointing out that his history could have made him a Deist but he was not. On Foot, it was indeed unsourced, so I added quick details with two highly reliable references.

I then thought to check, and found it was the same person, "Jobas", who had done this on a massive scale. (https://en.wikipedia.org/search/?title=Special:Contributions/Jobas&offset=20170323172504&target=Jobas.)

This has to be dishonest. The two reasons given contradict each other. And how could a committed Christian really think it was trivial? I suspect this person wants to eliminate 'off-message facts'.

How someone can think it a good idea to be 'dishonest to God' puzzles me, but is not my problem.

I hope you now take action, reversing every change that has not been fixed already.

I am busy with other matters, I do not want to spend more time on it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by GwydionM (talk • contribs) 09:11, 26 March 2017 (UTC)

Both the removals you cite look legitimate to me. See this explanation of how biographical categorization works; we categorise by what the person is known for, not every characteristic. Thus, if someone's written a book about their atheist views, recorded a Christian rock album, been persecuted for their Buddhist faith etc, they get the appropriate (ir)religious category, but they shouldn't be used for people who just happen to subscribe to a particular belief. ‑ Iridescent 09:49, 26 March 2017 (UTC)

I had a talk with Jobas (talk · contribs) about this yesterday following a WP:AIV report. I reverted several examples where they removed atheist categories, incorrectly citing WP:NOTDEF as their reason. They were blindly removing the categories without checking the text of the article for assertions of atheism. They have been cautioned against making edits like these blindly in the future. caknuck _° needs to be running more often 06:08, 27 March 2017 (UTC)

My edit was based on Misplaced Pages:Categorization/Ethnicity, gender, religion and sexuality, which cited: Categories regarding religious beliefs or lack of such beliefs of a living person should not be used unless the subject has publicly self-identified with the belief in questionand WP:NONDEF: which cited Categorization by non-defining characteristics should be avoided. It is sometimes difficult to know whether or not a particular characteristic is "defining" for any given topic, and there is no one definition that can apply to all situations. However, the following suggestions or rules-of-thumb may be helpful:. It can be verified that the subject was an atheist, but it should also be that key defining trait that the subject was prominently noted for or defining characteristic, for example in Michael Foot article, it's only instances "atheist" once inside the article. I don't deny that he is atheist, but it isn't a key defining trait that Michael Foot was prominently noted for i guess, here is anther examples of edit Iridescent (talk · contribs) John Logie Baird, Geoffrey Pyke, Simon Pegg, Andy Partridge, Gary Kemp etc, Is it legitimate?. Thanks for your concern and have a nice day.-Jobas (talk) 10:36, 27 March 2017 (UTC)

Also per WP:NONDEF: a defining characteristic is one that reliable, secondary sources commonly and consistently define, in prose, the subject as having. For example: "Subject is an adjective noun ..." or "Subject, an adjective noun, ...". If such examples are common, each of adjective and noun may be deemed to be "defining" for subject. In all but one (of 40+) of the cases I reverted, this criteria was met, and the category should have remained in place. Jobas, if you're going to cite a policy as the basis for making potentially contentious edits en masse, then please familiarize yourself with the entire policy in order to avoid causing kerfuffles like this. caknuck _° needs to be running more often 16:27, 27 March 2017 (UTC)

If you guys are going to scold someone for removing atheist categories, than GregorB has been removing numerous Catholic categories from articles even when it was clearly cited, (see examples here, here, here, here, here, here and so forth). To be fair GregorB has a lot more experience than me in this field so after a brief discussion I decided to give up on the topic as it seemed the editor knew more about the guidlines than I did, however if the general concencus here is that just a brief mention and source make it notable to add a religious (or non-religious) category than in the aforementioned instances the category should be added back too. Inter&anthro (talk) 00:30, 28 March 2017 (UTC)

Also I want to add that I am all for the inclusion of article in religious (or irreligious categories) as long as the subject identifies with them and there is a citation to back it up. Inter&anthro (talk) 00:40, 28 March 2017 (UTC)

My removal of said categories is based on WP:BLPCAT: Categories regarding religious beliefs (or lack of such) or sexual orientation should not be used unless the subject has publicly self-identified with the belief or orientation in question, and the subject's beliefs or sexual orientation are relevant to their public life or notability, according to reliable published sources. Note BLPCAT says "self-identified" and "relevant" and "living person". Note also that BLPCAT is a Misplaced Pages policy, i.e. "a widely accepted standard that all editors should normally follow".

My opinion on this issue: if the religious belief category in a BLP is unreferenced, then it may (in fact should) be removed on sight per WP:BLP. If it's referenced, WP:BLPCAT applies. Religious affiliation or atheism/agnosticism, it's the same.

There's nothing really wrong with the "subject identifies + reference" standard for categories - I suppose the consensus was that it would lead to trivial categorization of thousands upon thousands of biographies. However, since adding categories to bios of non-living persons is fair game according to this standard, I must say that doesn't make too much sense to me. This might be a question for WT:BLP or a similar forum. GregorB (talk) 08:15, 28 March 2017 (UTC)

Comment It seems to me that WP:EGRS is stricter than the rest of the WP:BLPCAT guidelines, as EGRS categories are required to be defining rather than merely verified and self-identified. I'm not sure this point is consistently reflected in all the relevant guideline pages. The summary at BLPCAT says such categories must be "...relevant to their public life or notability..." (my emphasis). "Relevant" seems to be a weaker standard than "defining". Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 10:46, 29 March 2017 (UTC)

I agree. I believe the text in EGRS tries to reflect BLPCAT and is just poor wording. BLPCAT as a policy trumps EGRS as a guideline and the latter should be interpreted the way BLPCAT intends it to be handled. I don't have to have written dozens of books on atheism for my lack of belief to be included in a category if said lack of faith has received significant coverage. Regards SoWhy 11:11, 29 March 2017 (UTC)

• Athiesm isnt a religion *gets coat*. But BLPCAT only takes effect once reliable sourcing is available for the category. Its 'weaker' once its reliably sourced because BLP is (primarily) about 'is it allowed to be on the article page' not 'should it be there'. Only in death does duty end (talk) 11:07, 29 March 2017 (UTC)

• Comment: There are actually two issues raised in the original post. I looked at the example articles given, as well as several more articles where Jobas has edited the categories, and Jobas appears to be correctly adhering to the letter of WP:CATGRS when deleting those categories: i.e.; the subject's lack of belief in gods is not why they are notable (and in many cases, isn't even mentioned in the body of the article), so is properly deleted. So far, so good. The second issue raised is whether Jobas is editing "honestly", and following the spirit of WP:CATGRS by applying it only to improve articles (and the encyclopedia), or is WP:CATGRS being invoked to selectively choose and delete certain categories to advance an agenda, in violation of one of Misplaced Pages's main policies against such motivated editing. Has Jobas been deleting 'atheist' categories as non-defining, while allowing other equally non-defining religious categories to remain in the same articles? Administrators do need to determine if this means his/her goal is not so much article improvement, but rather POV advancement. For example, does the editor still follow WP:CATGRS when adding religious categories, especially ones with whom the editor identifies? If not, it indicates a problem which needs to be addressed. I've only given it a cursory look, but I've seen enough to raise some concern. Xenophrenic (talk) 09:18, 9 April 2017 (UTC)

Cookie blocks are live!

After 11 years of waiting, phab:T5233 has finally been resolved, thanks to Samwilson of Community Tech. As a colleague who is active here on enwiki, I thought I'd make the announcement and explain what this means. For the sake of transparency please ignore any concerns about WP:BEANS.

Cookie blocks are an extension to the current autoblock system. When admins go to block an account, they can select the option "Autoblock any IP addresses used". This is generally left turned on, and means that if the blocked user moves to another IP and attempts to edit, that IP will become autoblocked. This is nothing new, it has been this way for ages. The new functionality is that after blocking a user with the autoblock option set, the next time the user accesses Misplaced Pages a cookie is stored in the user's browser that points back to the original block. It will act as the mechanism that autoblocks the underlying IP, regardless of what account and underlying IP the user is attempting to edit from. So in short, if a user changes accounts, then moves to a new IP, the cookie will still be there and the user and the underlying IP will become autoblocked. Cookies expire after 24 hours (the same amount of time autoblocks expire) or the length of the block itself, whichever is shorter.

This functionality is by no means an effective solution to long-term abuse and sockpuppetry, nor is it intended to be. Instead, cookie blocks are aimed at your "casual vandal" that operate on mobile devices, or are aware that they can reset their router to get a new IP. Even those folks will probably deduce a cookie is causing the autoblocks, but the hope is this tiny improvement will be enough to fend off at least some of the less tech-savvy.

If you have any questions, concerns, etc., don't hesitate to ask. If you have a Phabricator account, phab:T5233 is the best place, but we'll be monitoring the discussion here.

To get you sincerely excited, allow me to inform you of phab:T152462, where we may use cookies when blocking anonymous users, in effect acting as an autoblock. This is still in the investigation stage, but theoretically it will have a much more noticeable impact. IPv6 is becoming more and more prominent, where the ISP will regularly refresh the customer's IP. Currently many admins will do a WHOIS check and see if it is an ISP known to allot a /64 range to their customers, and if so do a range block. Other admins are not comfortable with this, and will instead block the single IP. Perhaps minutes later, the ISP has refreshed the user's IP and they are able to resume vandalizing. Hence, cookies may offer an effective solution to fending off your everyday drive-by vandals, without having to do any range blocks. Stay tuned! — MusikAnimal 15:49, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

• Obviously, the right way to announce a new anti-abuse provision is to openly state how to evade it... Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 15:50, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

  @Jo-Jo Eumerus: Yeah... at this point, Columbo would turn round and say 'Just one more thing-' ;) — O Fortuna! 16:12, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

  I've bolded the last sentence of the first paragraph based on your concern. We have to be transparent and keep admins informed, but the types of users we are targeting with cookie blocks are unlikely to be following internal discussions anyway — MusikAnimal 17:27, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

  w/r/t BEANS, this sounds like something that would've been better handled via the next Admin newsletter than on AN. Just my 2¢. ☺ · Salvidrim! · ✉ 20:47, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

  @Salvidrim!: isn't the admin newsletter always posted here too, anyways? ansh666 01:03, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

• Is this even legal? While the US has famously lax data security laws, the rest of the world is far stricter about these things and most countries in which Misplaced Pages's editors and readers are based—notably the entire EU and those countries that base their legal systems on it—require explicit consent from the user in question before cookies can be placed on their system. I appreciate that the WMF is based in the US, but I can see some very nasty lawsuits ahead if an EU-based admin places a cookie on an EU-based user's system without consent, and there is no shortage of deep-pocketed organisations (DMG Media springs to mind) who'd be quite happy to bankroll a class action to give Misplaced Pages a bloody nose. There doesn't appear to be any way to turn the "automatically place cookie" option off, short of unchecking "autoblock" altogether—the net effect of this will just be that I'll now always ensure I never check "Autoblock any IP addresses used" at all. ‑ Iridescent 16:01, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

  It might be if people when saving an edit agree to receive such cookies - but I don't see a single syllable in the TOU about this. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 16:10, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

  There's this, a link to which is buried in the tiny-print at the bottom of every page, but it doesn't make any mention of this kind of functionality—the only cookie use mentioned is We use the information we receive from cookies and other locally stored data to make your experience with the Wikimedia Sites safer and better, to gain a greater understanding of user preferences and interactions with the Wikimedia Sites, and to generally improve our services, which I doubt anyone could realistically shoehorn blocking into. (Although, my curiosity is certainly raised by the casual mention of tracking pixels, JavaScript, and a variety of "locally stored data" technologies, such as cookies and local storage being "actively used by the WMF"—do the Free Culture and EFF types who do so much of the heavy lifting around here realise just how creepy and intrusive the WMF has become?) ‑ Iridescent 16:19, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

  Not sure how you could even shoehorn "editors agree to have such cookies placed" into the existence of that link. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 16:24, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

  "improve our services..." (...by blocking undesirable users) isn't too much of a stretch. –xeno 16:25, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

  OK, having now looked more closely at the current Privacy Policy, "creepy and intrusive" doesn't do it justice. Even Google would baulk at we might use cookies to learn about the list of articles you are following on your watchlist so that we can recommend similar articles that you may be interested in. FWIW, I've just created User:Iridescent 3 from scratch to see what messages new users actually get, and at no point during the signup process is any mention made of any of this, and nor (given that Misplaced Pages's spent the better part of a decade bleating about transparancy and intrusiveness), is it reasonable to assume new users would expect it. ‑ Iridescent 16:28, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

  But that doesn't even make sense. Watchlists are stored server-side, so a cookie wouldn't be required to recommend articles based on it... BethNaught (talk) 16:38, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

  The only reason I can think of for doing it with cookies would be so the WMF can track what other people who use your device are reading/watchlisting, or to monitor your reading when you're logged out. Locally-stored watchlists would seem like a very shitty idea, since most users are going to be checking their watchlist from multiple devices. ‑ Iridescent 16:59, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

  Surely m:WMF legal (@Mpaulson (WMF):?) should have signed off on this? Perhaps we should provide an option to control this separately from autoblocks, in any case. –xeno 16:21, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

  All I can say is that this has been approved by the legal team, and the table of cookies has been updated accordingly. Best — MusikAnimal 16:24, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

This is in reference to potential collateral damage, not legality. A lot has changed since that comment,, and after thorugh testing we have concluded collateral damage should be minimal — MusikAnimal 16:36, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

Legal are concerned with liability to the WMF, not with damage to individual editors. Unless and until I either see an explicit "We consider this legal in all jurisdictions, and will give full and unlimited legal and financial support to anyone who is challenged in court over it" commitment from the WMF (at which point I'll probably be too busy hiding from the flying pigs), or there's a way to set "never place cookie blocks" as a default rather than having to remember to uncheck an easily-missed checkbox each time, I'd advise all admins based in countries with cookie laws (there's a handy list here; the most important ones from en-wiki's point of view are the UK and Ireland) to avoid ever using the block button. ‑ Iridescent 17:08, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

I don't work in legal so I can't really say much, but it seems if you don't like cookies you might use a cookie blocker, in which case blocks will still work just fine (if that was at all a concern). Admins are also not affected with this change, only the users who were blocked, and there's no way to know where they are located unless they disclose such information — MusikAnimal 17:24, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

That doesn't matter. If you are placing a cookie on the browser of a user from the list of countries above without their explicit permission, you are breaking the law - which is a particular issue for admins who are also located in that country. What I'm not sure about is whether it is the admin that places the block, or the WMF (who own the software) that would be held to be doing it. Black Kite (talk) 17:32, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

I don't quite understand. Correct me if I'm wrong, but currently cookies and localStorage are used by default on Wikimedia sites, and there's no way to turn this off unless you use a browser extension or the like. The new cookie blocks feature does not change this — MusikAnimal 17:35, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

If the current system places cookies without getting permission in advance, it might be illegal in some countries (including the UK). But, as I understand the issue being suggested here, that would not be a legal issue for admins as they are not playing a part in placing those cookies - but if an admin takes an action that places a cookie (as blocking will now do) that admin might then be liable. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 17:40, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

I see, well again I don't work in legal but I highly doubt admins will be held accountable. It is the software that is doing this. The block cookie is listed in the cookie statement along with all other cookies. Users are free to remove/disable whichever ones they so desire. Adding cookies without permission is something that is already being done, even when browsing anonymously (from my quick testing), so I don't see how you as an admin imposing them, intentionally or not, will change anything. This is tantamount to you setting up a central notice banner, or adding an item to the watchlist notice. These actions are done by the community and they also create or modify cookies — MusikAnimal 17:52, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

As you say, you don't work in Legal - and I don't mean to demean, but your legally uninformed speculation is no more helpful than mine. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 17:54, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

(edit conflict) You've had it explained to you repeatedly, but to explain again in bullet points:

1. It is illegal to place a cookie on any computer system within one of the countries on the list I link above, without the user of that computer's explicit consent. (We're not talking slaps-on-the-wrist, either; the penalty for non-compliance in Portugal, for instance, is a five million euro fine);
2. Because the US refuses to sign up to the relevant treaties, this law is not enforceable against companies based in the US (although it is illegal to transfer data to the US for the purposes of getting round this legislation);
3. Now this is live, there's a reasonable potential that a court will consider that the blocking admin is placing the cookie, not the corporate person of the WMF which is based in California and beyond the reach of the law;
4. If the blocking admin and the blocked IP are both located in countries on the list, and the courts do rule that the individual admin is the agent rather than the WMF, those admins are opening themselves up to virtually unlimited personal liability, since it's not uncommon for an admin working WP:AIV to block thousands of accounts at a time. To take an example whom I know is EU resident, HJ Mitchell has enacted a little over 14,000 blocks, and if only 1% of those are EU-based he'd be theoretically exposing himself to between €100 million–€1 billion in fines depending on where the users are based;
5. While normally this liability would be largely theoretical since it's unlikely that under normal circumstances anyone would take action, these are not normal times; there are people who would love to take down Misplaced Pages and will happily fund the lawsuits. If you think this is just theoretical, I'm sure Gawker will be happy to explain exactly how the process works;
6. If the WMF were willing to explain under what grounds they consider this legal, and explicitly commit to supporting individual admins caught up by this, there would be no issue. The fact that they haven't, implies that either they haven't thought it through, or they're willing to leave anyone caught by it to sink on their own.

Given the recent track record of making poorly thought through decisions without consultation—and given the general contempt the WMF displays towards the editing community—I'm willing to bet that there are no circumstances under which the WMF will commit to supporting anyone taken to court over this. In light of that, and especially given that they haven't even provided a mechanism to disable this functionality other than by checking a box for each-and-every block, in my opinion anyone living or working in one of the countries on that list would be out of their mind to place any block involving an autoblock element from now on. ‑ Iridescent 18:00, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

Had a similar discussion some time ago; the admin may go free if the action is as a secondary action he can't control. If he controls it, then he is responsible. In short, if you have a box to tick, then the admin is responsible. It follows the ability to control the action. Still note that this was in a slightly different setting, so it might not apply. Jeblad (talk) 20:28, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

Got an edit conflict; I apologize for taking a minute to grasp your point. We've already pinged legal here but I will also happily relay your concerns — MusikAnimal 18:03, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

"The exception to this rule is when the user requests a service and that service cannot be provided without storing or gaining access to information stored on their computer." from here. That seems simple...if that is the way the system works then cookies may be required for the system to work. Our user agreement may need to be modified, maybe? ...but the software may require the cookie.
 — Berean Hunter (talk) 18:10, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

That certainly doesn't apply here, since it's clearly not impossible for Misplaced Pages to provide its service without placing cookies on its users' systems without consent. ("Consent" has to be explicit; anyone who's ever used the internet in Europe will be familiar with the "This site uses cookies, click here to proceed to the site if you are willing to accept them or click here to exit" popup.) If they're going to actually try to justify it, rather than sheltering behind the skirts of the servers being based in the US, the only loophole that could apply is user‑centric security cookies, used to detect authentication abuses, for a limited persistent duration, but I wouldn't want to be the one arguing categorically that what's being proposed here falls under that. ‑ Iridescent 18:19, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

I have personally contacted legal. Sorry again for being so confused, this all went a little over my head =P While I still think we have little to worry about, you indeed raise very valid concerns and we'll get some answers for you as soon as possible — MusikAnimal 18:54, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

• Another question - when blocking IPs, are any cookies placed, and is there any difference if the "Prevent logged-in users from editing from this IP address" option is chosen. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 18:34, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

  @Boing! said Zebedee: Cookies are only added when you block accounts with the "Autoblock any IP addresses used" option set — MusikAnimal 18:50, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

  OK, thanks. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 18:51, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

• To clarify: the cookie itself expires after 24 hours, or an autoblock applied because of existence of the cookie expires after 24 hours? Or both? I ask because we currently don't do long-term blocks of IPs because of the possibility of blocking innocent users, but it's somewhat more reasonable to assume that a user trying to edit with a cookie on their system earned it by being the specific user to whom the block applies. Will there be or could there be an option to set the cookie's expiry to a longer period? Ivanvector (/_Edits) 18:47, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

  @Ivanvector: The cookie itself expires after 24 hours. Just like the old system, any fresh autoblocks also expire after 24 hours, including autoblocks imposed because of the cookie. The expiry of the cookie itself is actually configurable (via a patch to the local site settings), but we started with 24 hours to keep collateral damage minimal. So far the data we're seeing suggests the cookies are doing their job, and the current number of autoblocks has not exceeded what we would normally expect. That being said we might get away with extending the cookie expiration, but let's get the aforementioned legal issues clarified first =P — MusikAnimal 19:11, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

• Currently, admins take no action to place a cookie on anyone's system. That is done by the site when anyone accesses Misplaced Pages via a blocked account. So action against individual administrators seems highly unlikely. Action against the Wikimedia Foundation is, bluntly, their problem. It's legal's job to protect the site from liability. If they signed off on this and shouldn't have, that's on them. The pre-save message above "Save changes" could possibly be amended to include a line stating that the user acknowledges that Misplaced Pages may use cookies as described in the Privacy Policy, but that's legal's job, not ours. ~ Rob₁₃ 18:58, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

  Re: "The new functionality is that when blocking a user with the autoblock option set, a cookie is stored in the user's browser that points back to the original block." That appears to mean that the new cookie is placed directly by admin action, and not when a blocked editor accesses Misplaced Pages. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 19:05, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

  @Boing! said Zebedee: Rest assured this is not the case. Creating a cookie without the user accessing the site would be impossible. I have clarified the wording — MusikAnimal 19:14, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

  OK, so the user is blocked, and then next time they visit they get a cookie - thanks for the clarification (and yes, it's obvious really). Whether that overcomes the legal concern is part of what will need to be clarified, and I would certainly not assume myself that a delay between my action and a result of my action would clear me from being held (perhaps partly) responsible in a European court. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 19:19, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

  Sorry but delaying the action does not free the admin from responsibility. It is his action when ticking the box which triggers the delayed action. If it comes as an automated response outside the control of the blocking admin, then he might go free. That said it is still a bad solution, and in my opinion WMF will most likely break the cookie laws in Europe if they put such a cookie on the property of someone else but the blocked person. Jeblad (talk) 20:39, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

• This just another prime example of shoddy software being rushed out without any thought - I'm not entirely sure why anyone has any confidence left in the WMF.. If I understand the legality concerns above correct, as an EU resident I probably shouldn't be making any `autoblock enabled` blocks until this is clarified, right? Thoroughly disappointed because this could have been a really useful feature -- There'sNoTime 19:09, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

  It's certainly my opinion that, without reasonable legal certainty, it would be risky for anyone resident in a country on the aforementioned list to make any 'autoblock enabled' blocks. In fact, as it is necessary to remember to uncheck a checkbox to avoid making such a block and it is easy to forget to do that, I personally (at least temporarily) will not block any registered users. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 19:32, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

It's cooll, our government in the US has just demonstrated it's very strong commitment to eliminating any concept of data privacy, so we'll pick up the slack. Beeblebrox (talk) 20:07, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

• There'sNoTime, that's not really fair—if you look at the history of the original request it's been open since Aug 23 2005, so "rushed" certainly doesn't apply, and it was reasonable of the devs to assume that anyone with an interest would have seen it. (Because they're on it all the time, the devs have a tendency to forget that most Misplaced Pages editors, even the more active ones, don't even know Phabricator exists let alone read it.) Besides, it's perfectly possible either that I'm the one who's wrong about whether cookie laws will actually apply here, or that a conscious decision was made that since only about 20% of edits to en-wiki are made in Europe the benefits to the many outweigh the risks to the few. ‑ Iridescent 20:37, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

• I'm pretty sure I raised exactly the same issues as Iridescent previously but got no real response. I'm now going to have to trawl through the history to find it. In short: WMF Legal protect the WMF and (by extension) the editors/admins in the US. Other jurisdictions have much stricter data laws and editors/admins are required to comply with those laws in their respective countries regardless if the data affected is stored overseas. I cant see how Misplaced Pages's current cookie system is compliant with the UK's (or other parts of the EU's) regulations, but then it is not really required to. UK/EU based admins *are* required to be compliant, so frankly I would want a UK/EU legal specialist in data law to sign off on this before any UK/EU admin starts cookie-blocking people. Only in death does duty end (talk) 09:02, 31 March 2017 (UTC)

If anyone gets sued under UK/EU privacy law for setting a cookie on someone's machine when blocking them for vandalism, I'll upload a video to Commons of myself eating a hat. Seriously. Lankiveil 09:38, 31 March 2017 (UTC).

Well I suppose I can always raise a concern with ICO and see the response. Only in death does duty end (talk) 09:56, 31 March 2017 (UTC)

At the risk of voicing an unpopular opinion, this seems like a good step forward which will reduce the burden block evaders place on editors and admins. Nick-D (talk) 10:22, 31 March 2017 (UTC)

I suspect that the majority of admins would agree with you. I don't yet know how effective this measure will be, but I welcome it. ​—DoRD (talk)​ 12:20, 31 March 2017 (UTC)

I don't think there's any particular disagreement that technically this a reasonable solution, but the legal ramifications are quite real. Consider the following scenario:

1. A two-bit Daily Mail journalist, say, Stanley McMurtry finds his article on WP, takes strong exception to being accused of racism, and blanks the text
2. A long-time Misplaced Pages editor, let's give them a made-up name, "Wigs on the Ping" (WOTP) reverts arguing about GNG, reliable sources, we're a wiki, yada yada
3. Upset, McMurtry blanks the context. Rinse and repeat a few times
4. McMurty tells WOTP something along the lines of "Please do not restore this content, or I will ask the Daily Mail's legal department to take action". WOTP goes straight to ANI with a thread entitled "Legal threats from editor with conflict of interest"
5. The Daily Mail already have previous for wanting to see Misplaced Pages crumble and squirm under their feet, and would love to knock Misplaced Pages down a peg or two. Who fancies blocking? Ritchie333 12:57, 31 March 2017 (UTC)

... two-bit? Surely not. Yours, with rats at my feet, Uncle Tom 123 (talk) 14:07, 31 March 2017 (UTC)

Indeed I don't think anyone here is arguing that it's a technically bad idea - I think it should be a very effective one. The problem is that many of us cannot be sure it is legal for us to use it personally, and that's a very important issue. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 13:42, 31 March 2017 (UTC)

@Boing! said Zebedee and There'sNoTime: The EU cookie directive addresses "service providers" not service users or administrators. Also, the directive specifically exempts this type of cookie, i.e user‑centric security cookies used to detect authentication abuses, for a limited persistent duration. IANAL. Kaldari (talk) 14:37, 31 March 2017 (UTC)

Your argument falls down, I think. Cookie blocks are not for user-centric security, they are for our security. "Authentication abuses" I would read to mean "stop person B from logging in to person A's account maliciously". Moreover the wording of the specific UK law is stricter. As I read it, section 6 of the 2003 regulations, as amended by the 2011 regulations, applies to any person. IANAL so please correct me, but with specifics. BethNaught (talk) 15:03, 31 March 2017 (UTC)

Yes and no. When it talks about security cookies in that section it means cookies designed to show 'Yes person A is Person A'. Which arguably is what the cookie from the cookie block does. It says editor A is editor A. However when it (the regulations) talk about authentication abuses the intent is that it means cookies designed to prevent third parties masquerading as Person A. Thats the iffy bit. As the cookie block cookie is not designed for the protection of person A at all, only wikipedia. (The UK law however is correct, individuals are generally prosecutable/fineable under almost all data law in the UK - other countries vary). Only in death does duty end (talk) 15:20, 31 March 2017 (UTC)

I don't see why "authentication abuses" would be limited to logging in, as authentication just means checking someone's identity/credentials, which is exactly what this cookie is designed to do. Regardless, the exemption doesn't really matter for administrators. The directive is targeted to service providers. In the case of the UK law, regardless of who breaks the law, the service provider is liable for the penalty (a £1,000 fine). (See section 5.) Kaldari (talk) 15:39, 31 March 2017 (UTC)

The £1000 fine in 2011 §5C applies to breaches of §5A, not §6. It is also about personal data breaches, not cookies. You got that completely wrong. Note "regulation" means section of the regulations, not the whole law. The enforcement is a complete mess of amendments. BethNaught (talk) 15:59, 31 March 2017 (UTC)

Hmm, so what's the penalty for violating section 6? Kaldari (talk) 16:38, 31 March 2017 (UTC)

The theoretical maximum fine is £500,000 per offence, but ICO is never going to level that on an individual. As with English libel judgements, if they decided to get heavy the amount ICO would likely seek would be whatever amount they calculated likely to bankrupt the defendant—the purpose of ICO enforcement is to send a message to others, not to raise funds. ‑ Iridescent 18:49, 31 March 2017 (UTC)

Geez you guys, calm down. This is good news and all this amateur lawyering, when the actual WMF lawyers have OK'd this is just silly. Nobody is going to get the cyber-cops at their door over a Misplaced Pages block. Nobody. This is just something that is going to make an incremental difference in recidivism amongst schoolboy/throwaway vandal accounts. Beeblebrox (talk) 19:33, 31 March 2017 (UTC)

The actual WMF lawyers have OK'd it based on US law, with not a word relating to UK/EU law. Unless you know better and can point us to their relevant statement - can you? Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 20:06, 31 March 2017 (UTC)

Indeed. A riff on Misplaced Pages:Systemic bias. - Sitush (talk) 00:33, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

Can you point me to where lawyer or legal scholar familiar with EU or UK law has explicitly said that this kind of cookie would be valid grounds for a lawsuit with an actual chance of succeeding? Look, I understand your concerns but I think you are overreacting and that it is extremely unlikely some vandal is going to pop up and sue you over a block. Beeblebrox (talk) 02:00, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

Tortious interference with a legitimate expectation of being allowed to vandalise. Sounds like a rock solid basis for a claim to me!—S Marshall T/C 18:35, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

The real problem isn't the vandals, but people being blocked as collateral damage. Jeblad (talk) 20:52, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

No, I can't point you to "where lawyer or legal scholar familiar with EU or UK law has explicitly said that this kind of cookie would be valid grounds for a lawsuit with an actual chance of succeeding?", but then nobody is actually claiming that is the case - we don't know, we are cautious, and we are *asking*. One thing we are asking is whether WMF Legal folk have actually examined the possibility - and we have no answer yet. As for "unlikely some vandal is going to pop up and sue you over a block", no, of course it's not likely, but we block far more people than just everyday vandals - and as others have pointed out, there are plenty of high profile people out there would would do anything they could to damage Misplaced Pages. All I'm saying is, let's be sure of the legal status - is that really so unreasonable? Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 11:35, 2 April 2017 (UTC)

(edit conflict) And even if WMF Legal's opinion would be that it is not an issue, it only needs one monied litigant to find a lawyer who thinks otherwise and begin a test case. Yes, that would resolve the issue for good but it would likely put a lot of stress etc on the unfortunate admin. Daily Mail, anyone? - Sitush (talk) 11:40, 2 April 2017 (UTC)

This is why we have the Legal Fees Assistance Program of course. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:41, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

The one that says "No one should rely on the receipt of assistance or take any action with the expectation of receiving such assistance", and which seems to be close to 50% escape clauses? Yep, that's me reassured. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 11:51, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

Oh, and "Assistance provided by the program only includes lawyers’ fees and costs and may cover only a part or all of those fees and costs (at WMF’s sole discretion). It will not include payment of any incurred fines, damages (including any award of attorney's fees), or other judgments." So that means that if cookie blocks actually do violate EU law and render an admin liable to fines and/or damages, then the WMF explicitly will not cover that. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 12:01, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

Yeah that first part is in there to avoid functionaries from picking a fight with people or organisations and then expect the foundation to pay up. Like challenging another organisation over the interpretation of a legal principle, with the sole purpose of getting the foundation to pay for testing this principle in court. You can count on the program if you just do your normal work, but not if you are being an inconsiderate, an idiot or a dick (for some reason we apparently need to put such things in writing for some members of our community). And yes there are limitations to the support (because which organisation would ever upfront decide to take on any damages). But as an editor/admin, I know that legal will fight for us. And this is exactly why sometimes they will refuse to make a statement. So that at a later point in time, they will ALWAYS be in a position where they can still fight for us, as remote of a chance such may be, they need that space. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:31, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

Well, I'm glad you're happy in your knowledge - the only thing I'm confident of is that the WMF will protect themselves. Obviously I wouldn't expect WMF to agree up front to take on any fines or damages, but it actually says a lot more than that - it explicitly says they won't. And that's what makes the Legal Fees Assistance Program explicitly irrelevant with regard to the cookie block issue. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 12:42, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

This mechanism has the potential to be extremely disruptive in countries where one or more major ISP use IP addresses with short lease time. When a blocked user goes through one of those networks the impact can be quite large. If someone use a range block on a user from an ISP the other ranges will most likely also be blocked in short time. Add phab:T152953 and you have a wildfire. No this is not a good idea. Jeblad (talk) 19:14, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

Aww… It is pretty easy to abuse this to create a DOS-attack on editing. Lets say a country that controls access to internet wants to stop everyone from editing about a conflict. It is also possible for someone to block editing from a subnet, given that they have access to that subnet, for example a cell phone network (an ISP). If an adversary can poison the cache, then any targeted person can be blocked from editing. I have not set up a test, so I might be wrong. (Darn, I hope I am wrong!) Jeblad (talk) 21:30, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

There are much much easier ways for a state actor that controls access to the internet to block someone from editing an article. Kaldari (talk) 08:31, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

Sure, they can pull the plug. Jeblad (talk) 17:15, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

• I have a technical question. I'm not an expert on this at all, so please correct me if I am misunderstanding something. These cookies are files that are placed on a user's computer by the wiki software. However, how does the cookie know that it was placed there by the wiki software? Would it be possible for someone to duplicate the cookie file and manually implant it on another person's computer? If so, wouldn't this be a security issue, allowing a malicious user to block any number of users by implanting this cookie on their computers? Mz7 (talk) 23:08, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

Not really. In most circumstances if you can control someon'es computer sufficient to implant a cookie, you have much more effective ways of blocking them from ever editing wikipedia. Of course you're more likely to install ransomware. For that matter, unless for some reason this access is only very temporary and won't be repeated, you could install a keylogger and steal their financial details and use them later (at least those without 2FA). Note that barring major browser bugs or an intentional change on the part of the user to disable the same-origin policy that all websites have including for cookies, other websites cannot put a cookie for wikimedia sites. (If third-party cookies are enabled then another website could allow wikimedia sites to put cookies when someone visits them, by getting the browser to access WMF sites then setting a cookie.) Nil Einne (talk) 15:46, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

Note from Wikimedia Foundation legal

Hi, everyone. I'm Aeryn, an attorney on the Wikimedia Foundation legal team who works on privacy topics. I've spoken with my colleagues, and confirmed Michelle's approval for this feature from 2015. We've reviewed this under US and other rules. Like other features on Misplaced Pages, any cookie issued by the autoblock system is going from the Foundation's software to the affected user. The Foundation hosts the websites, operates the software that places cookies, and bears the responsibility of ensuring its software follows the law. Even if a Misplaced Pages administrator is involved in turning on "autoblock" for someone, they aren’t involved in setting the cookie's configurations or receiving any information back from the cookie. That is done by the Foundation's software. We’ve included the cookie set by this feature in our cookies table.

If you, as an administrator, face a legal issue related to the use of cookies, you should contact the Foundation’s legal team at legalwikimedia.org so that we can review and respond to the issue as appropriate. Legal cases related to a user’s work as a functionary can qualify for the Legal Fees Assistance Program, which the Foundation runs specifically to help protect the volunteers who do administrative work on the projects. If you have a case like this, please let us know at legalwikimedia.org so that we can review and see if we’re able to help. APalmer (WMF) (talk) 23:41, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

@APalmer (WMF): So have you, or have you not, examined this issue with respect to UK/EU legal requirements, and are you or are you not of the legal opinion that this does not fall foul of UK/EU law. Will the WMF commit to supporting anyone in the UK/EU facing legal action, and will the WMF commit to covering any penalties and/or costs should the use of WMF software by an admin resident in the UK/EU be deemed by law to be illegal? These are straightforward yes/no questions, so please be specific in your answer rather than giving us more evasive legalistic flannel. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 15:01, 6 April 2017 (UTC)

I don't think WMF Legal is going to be able to give you such a guarantee. If you believe that there is substantial legal risk (and that the Legal Fees Assistance Program isn't an adequate hedge) you are welcome to not use the autoblock feature. If lots of admins feel the same way, we can of course remove the feature entirely, but that seems like it would be an unfortunate over-reaction in my opinion. The reason we implemented this feature was because it was asked for in the 2015 Community Wishlist Survey, so we know there are a lot of community members who want this feature. We will, however, respect the consensus of the community if a majority feel like it's a bad idea. In my personal opinion, the legal risk has been overblown, but I can't say there is absolutely zero risk. I take a substantial risk of being sued every time I upload an image from the National Portrait Gallery or send the WMF a DMCA counter-notice, but ultimately I think such risks are worth taking if they improve Misplaced Pages. There is always a chance that the law will be abused regardless of how it is written. In this case, we don't even have an actual legal threat, just tenuous speculation. Kaldari (talk) 18:57, 6 April 2017 (UTC)

Plus, regardless of getting any specifics about EU/UK law, you have confirmation above that any legal implications will be directed at the WMF, not the admin, so it's now a non-issue as far as any individual admin should be concerned. Sam Walton (talk) 18:59, 6 April 2017 (UTC)

No, please read it again - there is no specific confirmation that UK/EU law will not be aimed at the individual admin. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 00:28, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

"any cookie issued by the autoblock system is going from the Foundation's software to the affected user. The Foundation hosts the websites, operates the software that places cookies, and bears the responsibility of ensuring its software follows the law. Even if a Misplaced Pages administrator is involved in turning on "autoblock" for someone, they aren’t involved in setting the cookie's configurations or receiving any information back from the cookie. That is done by the Foundation's software." While that doesn't mention UK/EU law specifically, as I said, it does say that if you click a button that sends a cookie, the WMF is still to blame if that cookie is somehow illegal because it was ultimately sent by their software. Sam Walton (talk) 10:53, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

As you suggest, that is not a statement that the WMF is of the legal opinion that UK/EU lawmakers will see it that way. And do you really think that people who initiate a software-mediated action can never be liable because "the software did it"? Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 10:56, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

Seriously? Everything you do in the world you could get sued for, it's up to you whether you want to do any of it. You can either accept the analysis there is no reasonable risk or not, but no one will predict the future for you.Alanscottwalker (talk) 19:13, 6 April 2017 (UTC)

I asked the simple question "have you, or have you not, examined this issue with respect to UK/EU legal requirements, and are you or are you not of the legal opinion that this does not fall foul of UK/EU law" - what do you people think is so unreasonable about asking that specific question? It should be easy to answer, yes? (And I wasn't asking general Wikipedians, I was specifically asking it of User:APalmer (WMF) - the non-legal opinions of random others are of no value here.) bit snarky, strike. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 00:25, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

Well I think the WMF have already sort of said they did, but I agree there's nothing wrong with asking for a direct answer. I think the bigger issue which raised an eye brow with your post was whether the WMF would "commit to covering any penalties and/or costs". Technically there's nothing wrong with asking, but I think it's fairly obvious the answer is going to be no so probably if you made it clearer you understod that people wouldn't have been so surprised. Also because of this, your question did IMO miss the bigger issue namely whether the WMF will consider "Legal Fees Assistance Program" to cover fines, damages etc although still at their sole discretion etc. Nil Einne (talk) 15:32, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

The "Legal Fees Assistance Program" specifically says it won't. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 10:52, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

It was a beautiful piece of fobbing though. — O Fortuna 11:11, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

Actual impact of any legal issues which may be relevant

Keep in mind that, in order for you to be punished by legal authorities for any legal violaion by your use of Misplaced Pages, they need to have proof that you are the peson behgind the account in question. This would tend to be nearly impossible without checkuser data; this information is held by the Foundation, which is in the US. To make things evenm harder, the European authorities probably don't know you're in a relevant country, so they probably won't even bother asking for this information. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 03:28, 2 April 2017 (UTC)

I would want to see a declaration from the WMF they have never handed over editor details to avoid a legal case against them before I would believe that. Given the amount of times various wikipedia editors actually have been embroiled in problems, I suspect the answer is not zero. Only in death does duty end (talk) 09:15, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

@Only in death: The answer is definitely not zero, as they've handed over data associated with child protection and blatant copyright violations, I'm sure. But I guarantee it's zero when you restrict the scope to "legal cases by foreign entities that have no basis in US law". There would be no legal case that applies to the WMF that's based in EU law. The WMF isn't based in the EU. ~ Rob₁₃ 09:18, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

@Only in death, the privacy policy has always contained loopholes big enough to drive a double-decker bus through, and could reasonably be summarised as "we won't disclose your personal information unless we want to". Whether the WMF leaks or not isn't really the issue, since the IRL identity of plenty of WP admins is publicly disclosed, and all anyone wanting to administer a punishment beating to Misplaced Pages would need is to identify one of them, look through their block log for a block on someone who's themselves identifiable, and approach that person and ask them to take part in a test case. (If I were a Daily Mail hack right now, I'd be trying to engineer a situation in which Misplaced Pages's highest-profile EU resident admin blocked me.) The fact that it's now four days since I asked if the legal implications had been considered, and thus far not a peep from the WMF, makes me think that possibly the answer isn't as clear-cut as those dismissing my question above seem to think. If there's genuinely no potential issue, then the WMF will have no problem in making a "we will provide whatever support is necessary" commitment. ‑ Iridescent 10:13, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

I've been involved with legal people regarding web sites and data protection, etc, issues before (unrelated to Misplaced Pages), and the usual response has been that if you can't say anything with certainty then you shouldn't say anything at all - to the extent that I and colleagues have been instructed to simply not answer questions. I don't expect a wildly different outcome here. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 11:19, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

Hi all. I want to note for this issue, that we record all the info about user data requests and disclosures at the Transparency Report. -Jrogers (WMF) (talk) 23:11, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

• The Foundation has definitely released IP addresses of editors before: this incident is the main one. Black Kite (talk) 15:05, 8 April 2017 (UTC)
  • To be fair, this was a case of what appeared to be an issue according to US law. Block cookies aren't. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 22:21, 9 April 2017 (UTC)

ITN Needs attention

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Could an available admin pop in at WP:ITNC. There are a couple nominations that need attention and or posting. Unfortunately I can't post either as I am INVOLVED. In particular we should try to get the Venezuelan nomination posted as that is big news and the article has been the object of a lot of work. Thanks. -Ad Orientem (talk) 22:14, 2 April 2017 (UTC)

Very questionable edit summary

Looks like there's a slow moving edit war occuring on Warsaw and it looks like on of the participants decided to | vent his spleen via an edit summary. It looks pretty questionable, not enough to rev--del, but probably enough for a time-out for that editor.  К Ф Ƽ Ħ  14:35, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

• Not having any of that - I've revdel'd the edit summary (it may well be right on the border of RD material, but I doubt anyone is going to exactly miss it..), blocked the IP and protected the page -- There'sNoTime 14:26, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

• Now that's a bizarre insult :-) Nyttend (talk) 22:18, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

• Yes...:); there are more of these rev-del'd edit summaries by this IP-hopper, but this one is kind of top of the heap, bizarre-wise. Lectonar (talk) 19:25, 6 April 2017 (UTC)

Joke edits: Herman Lunchable

I noticed some edits to insert "Herman Lunchable" into an article (see 7 April 2017 edit from Special:Contributions/104.156.98.46). It looks as if that is a long-term joke—see search for 8 articles where it has not been removed. Two examples adding the term are 8 February 2017 at Guess Who? and 25 February 2017 at Lunchables. It's easy to clean those up but I thought others should be alerted for the future. Johnuniq (talk) 08:12, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

Goodbye, Mr. Lunchable. All cleaned up for now. It looks like more than one person, as the IPs were from Austin, Seattle ("Amazon static corporate IPs"? Maybe it's their store , ), and somewhere in California. BlackcurrantTea (talk) 11:11, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

I saw some non-Lunchable vandalism earlier today from another similar Amazon IP address , this one is Amazon AWS in Oregon. Maybe VPNs/Proxies running through there? Mojoworker (talk) 00:10, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

Unban request by User:Alexiulian25

Alexiulian25 was community banned from Misplaced Pages after this discussion. They have requested that the ban be reviewed by the community under the standard offer. Their appeal statement, submitted via UTRS#17974 is reproduced below:

Hello to Misplaced Pages Community, I am writing back to you after more than one year. I want and I ask for permission to edit Misplaced Pages again with notable information and data how I did since 2 years ago when I started to edit Misplaced Pages for the first time. ] Please take in the consideration my edits that are page creations which I want to prove that I was a correct editor and never vandalized Misplaced Pages. When I discovered and I started to edit Misplaced Pages I was an excited editor which could edit, but I didn`t read the Misplaced Pages policies and my behavior was also unjustified. I feel sorry for that now. I took the Standard Offer for more than 1 year, I had time to read and understand all the Misplaced Pages`s policies and I didn`t repeat the behavior that led to the ban and I promise that the behavior will not be repeated and I will make productive contributions in the future and never get in conflicts with other editors. Thank you very much!

Posted on Alexiulian25's behalf by Yunshui _水 11:21, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

Just to add, from a Checkuser perspective: all previous socks are stale, and the IPs listed at Misplaced Pages:Sockpuppet investigations/Alexiulian25/Archive are dynamics from all over the world, sharing no particular distinguishing characteristics. The IP from which the email appeal originated is also a dynamic IP, and has made one football-related edit in January (details available to other CUs on request). I'm unable to ascertain whether the IP in question would have been allocated to Alexiulian25 at the time the edit was made, but I mention it here for transparency. Otherwise, there appears to be no evidence of socking since the last entry on the SPI. Yunshui _水 11:35, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose. Reading over the community ban discussion, including diffs like this one, their agreeing to wait for the standard offer before continuing to sock for months, and the times they were unblocked only to go back to their previous ways, there's no way I can see myself supporting this. Sam Walton (talk) 11:26, 7 April 2017 (UTC)
• Weak Oppose. Apart from the problematic behaviour mentioned by Samwalton9 above, I still see a slight WP:COMPETENCE problem just by reading the unban-request. If unbanned, I think it could be a way forward if Alexiulian25 would pledge to stay away from editing football-related pages for let's say 6 months. Lectonar (talk) 11:47, 7 April 2017 (UTC)
• Strong oppose - no, thank you. This editor is likely to reoffend and therefore WP:SO should not be granted. Patient Zero 12:09, 7 April 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose. You shouldn't need to read policies to know threatening people's lives and calling them nazis is inappropriate. If that had been addressed here, maybe, but it wasn't. Nor does the request address the other substantial problems that lead to the original block. Is the claim, "I took the Standard Offer for more than 1 year", meant to be implying the user has stayed away from Misplaced Pages for a full year? If so, that's just not true. Confirmed sockpuppetry from late May of last year, probable sockpuppetry extending well beyond that, and possible sockpuppetry earlier this year. This user has a very long way to go before an unban would be realistic. --Yamla (talk) 14:37, 9 April 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose - given their past behaviour, this is not nearly enough. GiantSnowman 15:07, 9 April 2017 (UTC)
• Strongest possible oppose - user responds to stressful situations with death threats to a degree requiring oversight. Deploy the nope hammer. Ivanvector (/_Edits) 18:33, 10 April 2017 (UTC)
• Absolutely oppose This is not an editor that "plays well with others". As stated above, death threats to a point that oversight is needed is enough for me to say no. RickinBaltimore (talk) 18:36, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

Quick RevDel on this edit summary please

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

This user may also need time on the naughty step too |for this edit summary . 13:35, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

Editing outages on 19 April and 3 May 2017

As some of you may have already heard, Wikimedia Technical Operations will be doing the major server switch project again.  The first switch will start at approximately 14:00 UTC on Wednesday, 19 April 2017. The second (the switch back) will be at the same time, two weeks later.  

There will be MassMessages to the Village Pumps, a blog post, and last-minute CentralNotice banners, but please share the word, especially to any other projects or language communities that you work. Nobody will be able to save any edits for about 20 to 30 minutes during this work. You'll be able to login, you'll be able to read, but you won't be able to edit.  The Wikimedia Foundation apologizes for the disruption.

Two things for admins to know:

• Although it seems unlikely to me, Ops will postpone this if they feel it's unsafe for any reason. This could literally happen at the last second. So if it gets postponed, please be ready to help spread the word about the new dates. The official schedule is here: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/Switch_Datacenter
• Last year, it took a bit to get Special:RecentChanges working again. A handful of edits weren't ever listed there. I don't know if that will happen again. But just in case it does, here's how to find them. All revisions are numbered sequentially. So if this is the last diff in Special:RecentChanges before editing is stopped: https://en.wikipedia.org/search/?title=Titletown&curid=18667360&diff=774316055&oldid=774316053&fromrc=1 then the next edit is https://en.wikipedia.org/search/?diff=prev&oldid=774316056, and then ...diff=774316057, and 58, and 59, etc. RecentChanges is more convenient, but if it's slow to wake up, then everything can be found and checked with a little extra work.

If you have questions, then please {{ping}} me. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:07, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

Blocked accounts

Good day, admins and Wikipedians! This user, PogingJuan, has been now almost one year. I really don't know where to put this one. I really just want to clear my Misplaced Pages conscience. The following accounts are under one person (all were used to evade blocks):

• John.neilvin (talk · contribs) (10:45, 21 March 2014) blocked Compromised account
• User:Neilvin John Aventurado (talk · contribs) (14:59, 9 May 2014) blocked Abusing multiple accounts: abandoned alternative account of now blocked editor
• Starofthiscentury (talk · contribs) (15:24, 5 June 2014) blocked Clearly not here to contribute to the encyclopedia: WP:NPOV vandalism and disruption; Clearly not here to contribute to the encyclopedia: lift autoblock likely hitting a school
• Neilvs (talk · contribs) (12:04, 23 November 2015) (blocked now)
• NeilvsJ (talk · contribs) (18:41, 16 June 2014) blocked Abusing multiple accounts
• PogingJuan (talk · contribs) (05:54, 22 May 2016)

I can't open some of the accounts stated, because I forgot the password. My latest account, User:PogingJuan is where I have realized Misplaced Pages guidelines seriously. It is where I seriously contributing in Misplaced Pages (25 articles created with 1 good article (Roman Romulo; also nominated by me). That, I think, may serve proof/s that I will not violate any Misplaced Pages policies again. I am willing to follow all instructions that will be given to me by administrators. I also promise not to use accounts, above User:PogingJuan, even they are granted the unblock. I will just put them in this user's archives. I am really apologizing for violating Misplaced Pages policies and promising that I won't do it again. I also want to ping my blockers: Yunshui (talk · contribs), Ponyo (talk · contribs), Huon (talk · contribs). ~PogingJuan 19:28, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

I don't have much of an opinion on this. Of course socking is bad, and given previous bad-hand accounts someone may want to make sure this is the only active account, but on the other hand, this is a voluntary confession after having written a GA, so that counts for something. More than half a year since the last problematic edits (other than block evasion that went unnoticed). I'd say PogingJuan should be welcomed back, while being limited to that one account from now on. Huon (talk) 20:27, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

My opinion (for what it's worth!) is that given the forthright approach here, the editor indeed deserves another chance (just the one!). They've pretty much made a fresh start and I look forward to reading more of their articles. If @PogingJuan: could just respond here after reading through the Sock Puppetry policy to confirm that they understand it, then I can't see any issue. Exemplo347 (talk) 20:37, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

One last chance is fine with me. People can change. Yunshui _水 21:56, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

@Exemplo347: I confirm my understanding on the said policy. I will surely comply with that, along with other policies and guidelines. ~PogingJuan 11:38, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

Welcome back! You have very clearly reformed since your past misdeeds. I would advise you to limit yourself to one account only, as you promised to do above. Tazerdadog (talk) 23:15, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

• Voluntary confession, has been doing good work, I say welcome back. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 10:19, 8 April 2017 (UTC)
• all were used to evade blocks What was your first account? I say this basically as a matter of curiosity, agreeing with others that we should accept your confession with thanks but not sanction you. Nyttend (talk) 10:51, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

@Nyttend: Yes, all were used to evade blocks that were laid because of vandalism. But with opening this User:PogingJuan account, due to User:Starofthiscentury block (due to "Mao Zedong" vandalism) and User:NeilvsJ block, I promised to myself that I will be a better Wikipedian (At first, I hadn't thought of confession.). My first known account was User:John.neilvin, which was used to create an article about my school, Manggahan High School. ~PogingJuan 11:38, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

Ah, okay; your wording made me think that it was the first sockpuppet account, i.e. one preceded it. As I said, just curiosity; that doesn't affect my opinion at all. Nyttend (talk) 23:35, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

I really wanna thank you all for giving me another chance to prove myself. I promise to comply with my stated promise and Misplaced Pages's policies and guidelines and I will do my very best to take part in improving Misplaced Pages. ~PogingJuan 11:47, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

• Not to be a wet blanket, but PogingJuan on your userpage you state that that your first edit ever was on 22 May 2016, which is untrue, since you've been editing since April 2014 or before. Please change that. Softlavender (talk) 13:15, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

Ahh, 22 May 2016 was the User:PogingJuan's first day. And currently, my user page is under major revamp, as an effect of this confession. Definitely, Softlavender, I will change that one. ~PogingJuan 13:21, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

@Softlavender: Wait, I thought 'first edit' under 'account statistics' of the infobox user is for the specific account and not overall, as a Wikipedian. So I thought, it is all about 'first edit as User:PogingJuan.' Nevertheless, I'll state in my user page body my 'first edit ever as a Wikipedian.'~PogingJuan 13:27, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

Just so you're clear, PogingJuan, your first edit ever as a registered Wikipedian was actually on 28 April 2014 (unless you had some undisclosed accounts prior to that one). So that would be what you would need to change the date to on your userpage. It would probably be simpler to state that you had some previous now-defunct accounts prior to the current one, and that your first edit with this current account was on on 22 May 2016. Or just omit all that "first edit" information altogether. Softlavender (talk) 13:58, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

Question for administrator

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Q. I have a subject to create an article... subject and sources are ready...At my view it is most suitable for Misplaced Pages, so my aim is any administrator can create article by taking my subject and sources? (Kjpuram (talk) 12:28, 8 April 2017 (UTC))

Anyone can create a new article. The process for this is described in WP:YFA. If you have the references and are confident in your wiki editing skills, feel free to create a draft of the article. Hertzyscowicz (talk) 12:49, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

AIV Backlog

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Hello admins!

There is a backlog of 15 reports on WP:AIV, the oldest being about 12.5 hours ago. Any assistance would be appreciated. EvergreenFir (talk) 19:18, 9 April 2017 (UTC)

@HJ Mitchell: thank you! EvergreenFir (talk) 19:27, 9 April 2017 (UTC)

Just FYI, the reason it gets backlogged is that people misuse it and report lots of things that aren't vandalism, so the report just sits there. AIV is only for clear-cut cases (it just isn't set up for anything requiring discussion or analysis; that's what ANI is supposed to be for), and if it were only used for such, it would almost never be backlogged. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 19:28, 9 April 2017 (UTC)

And if you take it to ANI, you are apt to be told to take it to AIV. Admin ping-pong. ←Baseball Bugs carrots→ 21:43, 9 April 2017 (UTC)

I've never seen an admin make a comment like that. If an admin thought it was simple enough to handle summarily, they'd just do it. Unfortunately, ANI encourages clueless but well-meaning editors to wade in and try to help, almost invariably making things worse. But if I decline something at AIV and recommend going to ANI, by all means cite that diff at ANI. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 11:48, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

I've seen it a number of times, though I don't recall you ever doing it. ←Baseball Bugs carrots→ 15:10, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

I must be looking at the wrong AIV, every time I pop in there it's empty or nearly so. Basically if I can't find an obvious case for blocking in 30 seconds on a report, it belongs elsewhere. Ritchie333 12:53, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

I worry sometimes that (for understandable reasons - everyone has limited time) admins just leave bad reports untouched at WP:AIV without commenting on them or, better still, deleting them. That saves time for one admin, but risks using up a lot of general admin time if others do the same. WP:AIV can look backlogged when in fact several admins could have concluded that none of the reports warrant further action. So please, don't be shy - point out or delete bad reports. WJBscribe (talk) 13:03, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

It depends what mood I'm in and how old the report is. If it's brand new and I can't see a case for a block, I'll leave it in case I've missed something that another admin might spot. And frankly, sometimes I leave it because the reporting editors throw their toys out of the pram when I tell them to take it somewhere else and repeating myself is less useful than blocking the actual vandals. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 15:53, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

New project to find admins

Please consider joining and participating.

• Misplaced Pages:Requests for adminship/Optional RfA candidate poll/Poll candidate search

Thank you!

Anna Frodesiak (talk) 00:33, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

Request for block review

• April Fools Day After (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log)
• Talk:Donald Trump (edit | subject | history | links | watch | logs)

This user appeared in my watchlist yesterday posting at Arb Enforcement. Because of the user's account name and area of interest I suspected trolling, and on investigating their brief history found two posts at Talk:Donald Trump (, ) which appeared to be more trolling. It appeared that the user had been adequately warned prior to their retaliatory AE post, and so I indeffed the user for not being here to contribute to the encyclopedia. The user appealed; Yamla declined.

Afterwards, another user left a note on my talk page questioning my block. Vanguard10 has accurately observed that the first of April Fools' posts ought to be interpreted as commentary on an emerging meme (e.g. ) though I don't see reliable sources on it. Further investigating the user's short history doesn't really reveal anything else of concern, and so now it appears that my block may have been overly harsh.

Please review this block. I'm inviting the user to comment on their talk page, please check there for comments. Thanks. Ivanvector (/_Edits) 10:43, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

As noted, I already reviewed the unblock request. I'm very sure this user, April Fools Day After, is just deliberately trolling. When I investigated the block, I took a look through the other contributions which appeared to be straight-forward vandalism, though looking further, it looks like there's one source (latimes.com) claiming a cruise missile hit the water (albeit not claiming that 60, instead of 59, were launched). If that turns out to be true, my belief of straight-forward vandalism would be overly harsh. I would still think the user was engaging in vandalism, but there may at least be hope that the user might contribute productively. --Yamla (talk) 10:53, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

Malice vs incompetence. I can't honestly tell whether this is somebody who is trolling, incompetent (which would be fine if they weren't also doing things gun-ho), or just very young. I can't give them more than say 13/14 years of age based on their attitude. "In contemporary times", does anybody at all use phrases like this? My gut instinct is that we're dealing with a child who is trying to think and act well beyond their age with zero apt to do so. Potential for productive contributions appears to me to exist, but, not without a guiding hand. Mr rnddude (talk) 11:10, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

• The reason I gave a final warning after reverting the Trump talk page was because this appeared to be ethnic/political trolling (which I just reverted now because I didn't realize it hadn't already.) The last line here also suggests someone trying to troll the Air Force. Combined with some of their edit summaries and username, in my mind, you have a user who is trolling Misplaced Pages but is doing it in a more clever way than some. TonyBallioni (talk) 13:05, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

Ivanvector the user posted this on their user talk:

Indefinite block is like a life sentence or death penalty. Not right when there are questions about the block. If you want to punish me, make it end this Friday. That is my compromise to accept some punishment for Abu Ivanka and other crimes.

The Faroe Islands is not having an election today. Also use of the word today isn't right if someone isn't checking the article often.

Several sources including the BBC and The Guardian, a British newspaper, report Abu Ivanka.

Puerto Rico is part of the US, not independent, not Russia, not Jamaica. Nothing sinister.

Nothing was meant against the USAF. It was a stub that I was certain others would expand.

Also there is an error that millions of people are not fixing. 60 missiles were fired, not 59. 59 hit Syria, 1 hit the water. There are reliable sources but nobody else is looking for them.

I've left them some advice on their user talk . I also think it would be fine to unblock them now per WP:LASTCHANCE. TonyBallioni (talk) 20:50, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

• After thinking about it for probably too long I came to the decision to reduce the block length, but I would have reduced it to a time which has already expired so I just lifted it. I've left a note on their talk page, and I also left the WP:ARBAPDS sanctions alert for good measure. TonyBallioni's note suggests the user change their account name, which they can if they'd like to but I don't think it's a WP:USERNAME issue so I can't force them to. All wrapped up, I think. Ivanvector (/_Edits) 12:19, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

• Yes, the rename note was a suggestion. I think its a good one that would save them some needless reverts by people, but I agree it doesn't fall clearly against WP:USERNAME. Thanks for your work on this, Ivanvector. TonyBallioni (talk) 13:55, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

Tool that reports which users/IPs added certain phrasing to a vast number of articles?

Hi all, I'm well aware that on an article-by-article basis, we can use WikiBlame to figure out who added a certain phrase to an individual article, but I'm trying to see if there's a tool that can tell me all at once which IPs/users added "Darien Amos" across a vast number of articles. I've been cleaning up after a pervasive vandalism spree by a South African IP hopper who keeps adding this content, and knowing all the IPs responsible would make mass rollbacks a little easier.

For example, in the world of spam management, COIBot can look at a ton of articles that contain a certain spam link, then tell you who added those links to the various articles, like here. Do we have anything that will do that for a search string? Thanks, Cyphoidbomb (talk) 16:14, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

@Cyphoidbomb: I'm not aware of anything. Can you clarify what you would want such a tool to do? When you say you want to do this across "a vast number of articles", do you really mean you want to search all articles in mainspace for that text and then run WikiBlame on each to see who (first?) added that text? Or can you narrow down the articles and users a bit?

If not, such a tool would be relatively straightforward to write but would be painfully slow to run and I'm not sure it would be welcome on the wmflabs tool servers due to the load if more than one or two queries per day were run. The reason is that the tools servers don't keep article revision content in their databases and you have to look up content through the API, which is rather painful when you're searching for text.

Let me know if you can qualify your requirements a bit more and I'll see what I can do. GoldenRing (talk) 07:52, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

@Cyphoidbomb: See User:GoldenRing/Darien Amos for a preliminary list. I've done a search using the (equivalent of the) search box for 'Darien Amos' and then found the first revision that includes the string 'Darien Amos'. I've not included a check for any sort of variants. The script's still running and I'll update the page if there are any more results. GoldenRing (talk) 09:21, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

@GoldenRing: The script is very helpful, thank you. What I was looking for was something that would identify each IP that added this, so I could then go into the IP contribution history and mass rollback all their edits. This is quicker than going article-by-article to identify and revert the addition of "Darien Amos". So for example, for 197.86.6.240, you'll notice that there are no Twinkle rollback options for their contributor history, that's because I previously identified them as a problem IP and rolled all their edits back. So the script you've set up helps me locate more of these IPs to rollback. Thanks for your help! Cyphoidbomb (talk) 14:24, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

@Cyphoidbomb: Glad to be of help. Feel free to make future requests - if you're specific, it'd be pretty easy to provide eg just a list of unique usernames / IPs. I'd consider setting up a tool to do this, though I'm a bit reluctant as any serious usage of it would have load implications. But very happy to run one-offs. GoldenRing (talk) 14:29, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

Edits by user Andranik Mkhitaryan

Could someone with mass rollback rights please review the edits by Andranik Mkhitaryan (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log)? Every edit has been to add {{Day Countdown}} to a number of sports tournament articles, when those articles already have the dates of the tournaments in the infoboxes. I have notified the user of this thread. — Jkudlick ⚓ t ⚓ c ⚓ s 12:41, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

Arbitration motion to standardise arbitration enforcement procedures

An arbitration motion has been proposed that would amend the discretionary sanctions procedure by moving some of those provisions into the Committee's arbitration enforcement policy to standardise enforcement of all Committee and discretionary sanctions. The community is encouraged to reviewed and commented on the motion here. Callanecc (talk • contribs • logs) 10:44, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

User talk:Best of Luck Nikki

Could an admin take a look at User talk:Best of Luck Nikki? This appears to be a userspace draft mistakenly added to a usertalk page. It's being edited by multiple editors so it appears to be a legitimate draft. Perhaps an admin could move it to the draft namespace? Another problem is the username. I'm pretty sure the creator of the page probably was not familiar with WP:ORGNAME, so I think it is just an honest mistake. I'm not sure if there's one editor claiming this as their userpage, so it's not clear who to inform about changing the name. -- Marchjuly (talk) 13:15, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

Well the user doesn't exist at all it appears. I can move this to draftspace and can remove the User talk space. RickinBaltimore (talk) 13:19, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

The article was incorrectly moved from article space on April 11th. Moved back. --NeilN 13:22, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

@RickinBaltimore and NeilN:. Thanks for taking a look at this and helping to sort it out. Also, thanks NeilN for re-adding the logo; I only removed it because it was showing up as being used on a userpage. Just for reference it looks like the same editor who moved that article has done similar things with some other articles. -- Marchjuly (talk) 13:28, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for that catch Neil, I hadn't seen that. RickinBaltimore (talk) 13:33, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

And I have fixed the bot edits incorrectly "fixing" double redirects momentarily created by this bad move. jni _{...just not interested} 18:39, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

Ugh, my bad. RickinBaltimore (talk) 18:42, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

Is this a copyvio or just a breach of a website's T&Cs?

Via an OTRS ticket I've been made aware that we have over 41,000(!) links, mostly used as references in visa requirement articles, linking to http://www.timaticweb.com. This site is a subscription site but the links inserted include a set of log in details, hence the links go through to the final page rather than a landing page. The owners of the website are naturally a bit distressed that we are hosting so many links to a trade site that users have to pay for. As they are also the owners of the public site http://www.iatatravelcentre.com there is not objection to this site being linked to instead.

By having in the link the necessary information to log into the site this would appear to be a breach of timaticweb T&C let alone security and not an action we should condone?

Suggestions for actions? I'm thinking

1. suggest the site owners disable the account that appears to being used in the links
2. we remove all the links and consider replacing with links to www.iatatravelcentre.com, however I think this needs a query completing for each combination of countries. (Bot task?)

Nthep (talk) 16:01, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

So, in other words we are using URLs that provide a login access to content, rather than plain links which point to a landing/"subscription required" page? Well, I guess it'd depend on whether the content of the public site iatatravelcentre is of the same quality as the timaticweb one. Something to compare with: What would Wikimedia do if there was a website that lists accounts with login details, allowing violations of WP:SHARE? Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 16:10, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

• There is some previous discussion of these links at Misplaced Pages:Village pump (policy)/Archive 114#links to TimaticWeb. There are also tmeplates that use Timatic Template:Timatic and Template:Timatic Visa Policy which may need to be looked at. DuncanHill (talk) 16:13, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

Anyway, I would say that without permission from both Timatic and the airline whose login we are using we really shouldn't have these links. DuncanHill (talk) 16:25, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

(edit conflict)It appears that the user details are coded into both these templates (it's appears to be a Gulf Air account). The difference between the two sites is that timatciweb gives travel trade practitioners a one page summary of visa requirements whereas iatatravelcentre gives a more personalised result based on the input of more information that just home country and destination. Nthep (talk) 16:29, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

This is not a copyright violation, probably just a breach of the other website's terms and conditions. We're not hosting any copyrighted content, and we're linking to a website that is legitimately hosting content. If the account information is being used illegitimately, that's for them to handle (or not) how they wish. We have no legal obligation not to host such URLs. ~ Rob₁₃ 16:43, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

Perhaps no legal obligation not to make our users fraudulently access another website when they follow our links, but I would suggest a moral one, to our readers if no one else. I for one would like to be warned before clicking on such a link. DuncanHill (talk) 17:24, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

Probably it's on the operators of the website to not have a login system which can be accessed by passing credentials in the URL; I would argue this makes it publicly accessible. On the other hand, if they have clearly stated that this material is meant to be accessed only by subscription, then the link probably violates their copyright (i.e. the editor posting the link here has violated their copyright) and yes Misplaced Pages can be legally liable for hosting links to copyrighted content in such a situation (IANAL, but see contributory copyright infringement). It's probably in our best interest to remove the links and perhaps blacklist the site, at least temporarily. Ivanvector (/_Edits) 17:39, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

I see no policy-based reason to change anything. Ignoring subscription access procedures is not a copyright issue (contributory infringement is impossible unless someone else is copying in an infringing manner; if we're linking to something put up by the owner, nobody's infringing copyright), and we're not bound by their T&A. However, I agree that this simply isn't the right thing to do; we shouldn't be helping someone get content that they should have to pay for. What to do? Do the links go to born-digital data, or are they merely digital versions of print originals? If the former, we'll have to replace something. If the latter, removing the links will be sufficient. Nyttend (talk) 21:43, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

Agree that the obvious solution is to not allow users to login to your site via a URL, which seems like incredibly poor security, however this is a good faith request and I see no reason not to 'fix' or remove these URLs. Sam Walton (talk) 22:11, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

Vandalism

I would like to report a vandal — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A02:C7D:BF8:B100:31AC:2736:67BB:A412 (talk) 16:33, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

You may want to go to WP:AIV for that then. That's the page to report vandal edits. Can you give details on what edits, what editor etc? RickinBaltimore (talk) 16:36, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

This anon is the vandal. 2a02:c7d:bf8:b100::/64 given some time off to do something else. ​—DoRD (talk)​ 16:38, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

Well then. RickinBaltimore (talk) 16:39, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

I always appreciate it vandals report themselves. ​—DoRD (talk)​ 16:46, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

Admin Ian.thomson

I was struglling with this admin Ian.thomson to block a user who was doing a wrong edits but he was very slow to detect the wrong behavior 1 also he processed my report and charged me instead and did not fixed until this admin listened to me 2--S!lVER M. (talk) 23:06, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

• Misplaced Pages noticeboards
• Administrative backlog