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Acceptable username policy

We're having some debate about the username policy over at Misplaced Pages talk:Username.

Basically, about a month ago, the line which said random usernames aren't allowed was removed because it was causing problems (people were getting blocked erratically. like how User:Asdfghjkl:; was blocked on sight, where as User:Lkjhgfdsa and User:Asdfg12345 were not blocked, and have gone on to be decent contributers).

Now User:pschemp wants to add the line in. Because he things it should be kept. And he insists it should be kept on the policy page because there was never consensus to remove it (although there was never consensus to add it in the very first place.)

Can some people go take a look and give some third opinions? Both regarding whether the line saying "no random usernames" should or shouldn't be kept on the policy page when there is no consensus to keep it; and regarding whether we should keep it in the long term.

--`/aksha 04:57, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

There was never consensus to remove that part of the policy in the first place, thus its stays until consensus to remove it reached.pschemp | talk 06:03, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

I support removing it. The presumption that random username = vandal/sock is utterly ungrounded. --tjstrf Now on editor review! 06:08, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

Prove that please. While your opinion is nice, until consensus is reached, we don't remove things. That's the whole point. Your addition of an opinion does not consensus make. pschemp | talk 06:14, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

No offense intended, but people are given a better impression when it doesn't look like a user picked their name by randomly pounding the keyboard or dragging a finger across the center line. – Someguy0830 (Talk | contribs) 06:24, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

Hence why I put an explanation on my user page. Anyway, judge by the contributor, not the name. --tjstrf Now on editor review! 06:48, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

i agree. Usernames that look well thought-out do give a better impression. But it doesn't mean usernames which don't look well thought-out should become a bannable offense. --`/aksha 06:52, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

I still think it should be discouraged. It could be done in a nicer fashion, of course. Slap together a quick substable template saying "pick a coherent username" or something like that and stick it on the talk page when banning them. User gets a name we can understand and it's all good. – Someguy0830 (Talk | contribs) 07:01, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

I have no problems with discouraging it. I don't think many people would. I do, however, have a problem with the "ban on sight" approach some people seem to be taking. Whether they look good or not, there are people with very random names who seem to be contributing fine. --`/aksha 07:34, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

There is human error to consider. It's highly unlikely that they'd catch every randomly named account in existence. Those that slip through the cracks with good edits will inevitably survive, but only by a stroke of luck. Plus, a change in username can be forced on those editors if it was really deemed necessary. – Someguy0830 (T | C) 07:50, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

the human error in this case is exceptionally high when compared to the other username guildlines. Throughout all the discussions, no one's even bothered to try and provide some definitions/boundaries for what is meant by "random". Simply because it's almost impossible. For policies like "usernames should personally attack other groups of people", it's (in most cases) glaringly obvious whether a username falls into the category or not. The blurry grey area in between is small. For randomness, i'm afraid the blurry grey area is huge. The most obvious example i can think of is admins who don't read leet doing "block on sights" for usernames written in leet codes. As a matter of fact, leet often looks very "random" to people not familiar with it. Maybe we should disallow usernames written entirely in leet too then? See my point? --`/aksha 13:06, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

"the human error in this case is exceptionally high when compared to the other username guildlines" another statement you cannot prove Yaksha. Again, where is your proof? Where are the legions of wronged users who have complained?pschemp | talk 13:50, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

fine, let me rephrase it into "the human errer in this case would be exceptionally high".

or actually, i don't even need to. I think the example i pointed out on the username talk page of how when one username was blocked, and another almost identical one was not proves the point. I don't suppose you could dish up any example of such inconsistency when it comes to enforcing the other accpetable username rules?

the legions of wronged users...well, i hardly except newbie who gets banned within two mins of registering to make any public complaints.

you demand proof for a lot of things pschemp, but i don't see you ever supplying any proofs for your claims. (explaining how each of the other examples of random usernames that i found (on the username talk page) were in fact 'not random' or 'leet' would be a very good place to start. Since you dismissed all the examples on the basis of them all actually being not random.) --`/aksha 14:11, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

Who's to say what is and isn't random? What seems random to you may be a deeply meaningful screename that a person has used on all sorts of websites throughout their internet life. Lets say, for example that someone comes along with the username "SACGWDGSRG18" That seems a little random, doesn't it? I've never used that screen name, and probably never will as I always use ONUnicorn, but I could see myself having picked it at one time. To me that would be a meaningful name as it consists of the first, middle, maiden, and married initials of my mother's name, followed by the first, middle, and last initials of my father's name, followed by the first, middle, and last initials of my (maiden) name, and ending with my age when I first went on the internet (all caps because they are all proper nouns). On the other hand, if we block "random usernames" that seems to me like a very blockable name. Why bite new contributors before they've done anything wrong (or right for that matter)? ~ ONUnicorn (Talk / Contribs) 15:56, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

Who's to say what is and isn't offensive? Yet, we make that decision all the time and its the same thing. Nothing here is 100% as it is run by human beings and the two cases are the same. At some point, a line needs to be drawn. An example, from last night User:Plmoknijbuhvygctfrdxezswaq blocked on sight, had already vandalised the moment he created his account. Check the contribs. This happens all the time. The other point here is that this is a long standing policy and until there is consensus to change it, we don't. That's how wikipedia works. And blocks are not biting newbies, especially when done early so as to save them the aggravations of having to change later. A perfectly polite message is left for them. pschemp | talk 16:32, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

Well, I don't think there is anyone anywhere who would argue that a username like "F_U_U_(insert group of people here)_FREAKS" is not offensive. For the most part it is patently obvious when things are offensive. On the other hand, "aslgore fjoenroe", while it seems like randomness (in this case it was), may not be to the person who contributed it. As for it being a long-standing policy changed without consensus, we are encourgaed to be bold in making changes, and that includes policy. If someone disputes it after the change, then a discussion is entered into (as now). Maybe it was rude for whoever changed it not to discuss it first, but they were just being bold. As for the length of time that it was there representing consensus, I'd be willing to bet that WP:Username is not one of our highest-traffic policy pages; I know I've only looked at it once (before today) and never referenced it in discussion. Most Wikipedians have probably never paid it any attention at all. (After edit conflict) As for User:Plmoknijbuhvygctfrdxezswaq, they had already vandalised, thereby demonstrating their bad intentions. ~ ONUnicorn (Talk / Contribs) 16:49, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

Actually, I went to block before it was known they had vandalised 'cause they did it so fast after creation but decided to check because people around here are claiming innocents are getting bitten and they aren't. The other point, is that most ramdom names *are* vandals, as with this one too User:1524gf86d3sf546 which is the exact same story. (Whereas I would normally just block, I check first and lo and behold, it was vandalising). pschemp | talk 19:19, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

How many times do i have to say this. Just because most random names *are* vandals is NOT an excuse to block on sight. Most anon edits are ALSO vandals, should we start reverting on sight too? Actually, most vandals are anons, maybe we should just block off all the anons? --`/aksha 04:08, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

Again, you are taking this the the absurd, and no one has suggested doing that. You seem to be suggesting we should ignore obvious vandal usernames until they vandalise which is silly. I'm still waiting for the proof of the legions of innocent users who were harmed. pschemp | talk 04:45, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

The best "policy" on acceptable usernames is that any username is acceptable unless somebody reasonably finds it unacceptable. Lets avoid instruction creep and very harmful blocks against new editors whose only mistake is picking an esoteric username. Let common sense prevail. Thanks/wangi 05:00, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

Um wangi, its not instruction creep, the random rule has been in there for over a year. Also, they *are* deemed unacceptable at the time they are blocked, that's why they are blocked. pschemp | talk 05:05, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

Although what might have been consensus at one point might no longer be so :) Anyway, I'm not really that fussed about getting into the this debate, however I do not believe that we need to mention random character names in the policy - it simply makes it easier for good faith editors to be banned before they make a contribution (for example Someguy0830 would be banned). It's a piece-of-piss for the robot script folk to generate usernames combining dictionary words which are immediately non-random. This is a harmful "rule". But getting back to my original point - I really have no problem with individual admins blocking usernames thay find offensive (be they random or not) but see no need to enforce banning of "random" usernames. Thanks/wangi 05:22, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

The existence of a rule is not in itself a valid justification for the said existence. --`/aksha 08:21, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

Isn't there a policy against unpronounceable usernames? I think most names that would be recognised as random fall into this, so the "random" policy is redundant, and ambiguous. Remove.--SidiLemine 12:31, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

Remove: Two reasons, both already noted by other users: 1) what looks random to one user may not be random to another (pschemp looks pretty random to me) 2)judge the user by the contribution, not the name. --Badger151 14:13, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

Frankly I agree with Badger151, that pschemp looks random to me. Almost any username can be considered random. But I can see how some could be considered more random then others. Here are some usernames from the last few minutes of the User creation log. I have picked them as being the ones that seem the most random to me (but that's subjective): User:KMC1986 at 14:10, User:0101ccty06 at 14:10, User:Nanfengbb at 14:11, User:Tadg04 at 14:13, User:Pal9900 at 14:14, and User:Nkrajenka at 14:15. Let's give them a bit of time (say, an hour) and see what kind of contributions they make. ~ ONUnicorn (Talk / Contribs) 14:26, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

"Krajenka" is a surname as well as a town in Poland. A big problem with making assumptions about users with seemingly random names is that many first and last names (as well as words, especially foreign ones) would be considered "seemingly random" by some people. It should also be noted that as wikipedia gets bigger, users are going to have an increasingly difficult time finding an unused username that "makes sense". And is there a policy against "unpronouncable usernames"? Where? --Milo H Minderbinder 14:54, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

That's almost exactly my point; randomness (unlike, say, offensiveness) is entierly subjective... what seems like a random collection of letters to me is a town in Poland and someone's last name. "11100010101010" might be how someone would spell their name in binary. "SACGDWGSRG18" are meaningful initials to me. "Wyq49h" is how I'd spell my first name if my fingers were on the wrong keys (one row up) "Xbzfk" would be how I'd spell it if they were one row down. "Djstpm" is how it'd be spelled if they were one letter right and "AgEIB" if they were one letter left. I could see myself using any of those options for a username if I had to choose a new one I'd never used before. Meanwhile (from Misplaced Pages:Recently created admins) what does Aski mean (User:Aksi great)? How about User:TKD; that could be anything? It's completely subjective. ~ ONUnicorn (Talk / Contribs) 15:10, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

With all due respect, "Someguy830" doesn't make a "better impression" on me either, it seems equally careless and hard to remember or understand. But probably the prime offender would be someone trying to be cute by misspelling a common term for anonymity and sticking in the name of a small furry animal. That should be bannable on sight. AnonEMouse 14:31, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

I agree. As should anyone whose name makes no apparent sense, and consists of far more consonants than vowels, such that they have been mistaken for a bot before. Postdlf 14:35, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

Username blocks, continued

*Sigh* you guys just aren't getting how this rule has been applied in actual use. The only random ones that are blocked on sight are the really obvious ones like User:1524gf86d3sf546 and User:Plmoknijbuhvygctfrdxezswaq. The borderline ones and unobvious ones and short ones aren't and never have been. And no, randomness isn't an entirely subjective quantity. All the examples OnUnicorn has given are either short (and short ones never have been blocked since human can remember short things easily) or have an identifiable pattern. Basically people are arguing that admins can't be trusted to make correct decisions and that's a load of crap. pschemp | talk 15:28, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

Results The most random seeming username; User:0101ccty06 has made one edit(dif). It needs to be cleaned up for grammer and stuff, but seems to be fairly sound, at least it's not vandalism. User:KMC1986, User:Nanfengbb, User:Tadg04, User:Pal9900, and User:Nkrajenka (the rest of them) haven't made any contributions yet. As for them being short and easy to remember, let's say someone's from Kangerlussuaq and wants their username to be their town. Still too short for you? How about Muckanaghederdauhaulia (the longest place name in Ireland)? A wiki-deletionist, a person with severe depression, or someone who thinks that Misplaced Pages is not as good as traditional encyclopedias might pick the screen name Floccinaucinihilipilification. Some people pick screen names after favorite animals. What if someone's favorite fish was humuhumu-nukunuku-a-pua‘a? A fan of Aristophanes might pick Lopadotemachoselachogaleokranioleipsanodrimhyp...gklopeleiolagoiosiraiobaphetraganopterygon. I could go on and on, but you get the picture. ~ ONUnicorn (Talk / Contribs) 16:32, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

Um, OnUnicorn, those *weren't* blocked because they *aren't* random so you don't have much point. pschemp | talk 16:40, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

Um, pschemp, you didn't follow the links, did you? Those *aren't* usernames. To my knowledge no one has acutally tried to register with any of those names. Those are all things that, if someone did register with them, would seem like a random combination of letters to someone patrolling for unacceptable usernames. The fact that they all exist in the real world makes them not random despite the fact that they might seem random to someone who didn't know better if someone were to use them. That was my point. ~ ONUnicorn (Talk / Contribs) 16:45, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

I take it back, someone did actually register as User:Kangerlussuaq, check the log. But they don't seem to have any edits. There's also a User:Floccinaucinihilipilification. ~ ONUnicorn (Talk / Contribs) 16:50, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

The point is that they aren't random enough that they would be blocked. I wouldn't block those and neither would any admin I know, they aren't blatantly random. Agian, you seem to think admins can't make rational decisions, which isn't the case. pschemp | talk 16:55, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

My username is random? I'm hurt. Well, not really. If you can honestly say you have trouble remembering two combined words and a short number sequence, then I don't see how you expect to remember something like tjstrf. Random in this case would mean something that has no indentifiable pattern, like sdbaivb or other such nonsense. The usernames that get blocked in this policy are rarely here for a good purpose, and those that are probably register good usernames after learning better. Also, I recommend we get off the subject of bashing each other's usernames to make a point, since it's quite clear that our names do fall well within the tolerance for understandable usernames. – Someguy0830 (T | C) 16:16, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

My bad, no such policy (pronouceable). pschemp, I think the controversy comes from the fear that accounts will be deleted without warning. The way I understand hte policy, it is made so as to avoid automatically created accounts (spam, bots, etc.); A manual check (and possibly advice to change username) should be able to handle that. But for clarity's sake, the term "random" needs to be clarified with a few short definitions and examples, as are "offensive" and "wiki-related".--SidiLemine 16:45, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

Um, a username block doesn't delete an account. In fact regular admins can't delete an account at all. When they are blocked, the {{usernameblocked}} template expands to give an explanation already. pschemp | talk 16:50, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

Copied from Misplaced Pages talk:Username - "That list is intended as a guide, it is not supposed to be exhaustive (wikipedia is not a bureacracy or experiment in rule making), it is the broader purpose behind the username policy which is important, if the rationale for an item on that list doesn't tally with the broader policy rationale then there is arguably something amiss. It also has to be remebered that the emotive "banning a newbie" etc. is not the case, blocks for most inappropriate usernames are without prejudice and the autoblocks should be removed without question, it is of course important that appropriate edit summaries are used {{usernameblock}} for example expands out in the block message to give the whole text regarding the status. --pgk 12:04, 24 October 2006 (UTC)" That is exactly what is done in practice. pschemp | talk 16:46, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

Given the current power of computing, I wonder if it possible to do some sort of analysis to determine what characteristics are shared by those usernames that are the most prolific vandals, but aren't shared by other users. If this can be determined, perhaps new usernames sharing those characteristics could be more closely watched until they develop a pattern. --Badger151 17:14, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

Ok, pschemp seems to be the most vocal supporter of this policy. Let's look at some of pschemp's blocks since so far most examples have been hypothetical. User:Qwerty123456789101112 doesn't seem random to me, it seems easy to remember, and quite clever if someone wants to maintain a high degree of anonimity. Of course, the stated reason for the block was the length of the name (Is 21 characters really that long?) rather than its randomness but still... User:Qwerty123456789101112's contribution log shows one contribution (diff) that might be considered linkspam, but has not been removed from the article despite the subsequent removal of other seeming linkspam. User:1524gf86d3sf546 is much more random then Qwerty...., and the block reason was vandalism rather then randomness or length. User:NotForVandalism was blocked before making any edits with "are you sure?" as the reason... now tell me, aren't we to assume good faith? If an editor says their account is not for vandalism, shouldn't we believe them until they prove otherwise (yes, that is slightly tounge-in-cheek)? User:Plmoknijbuhvygctfrdxezswaq seems random, and was vandalising, and the block reason was, again, vandalism, NOT the randomness of the name. User:Mamamamamamamamama doesn't seem random, and was blocked because the name was too long (18 characters, even shorter than Qwerty, and exactly twice as long as my username). They had made one edit, diff, which was reverted (and probably rightly) using vandalproof by someone who, in my experience, has a history of misusing vandalproof. User:Random or unreadable text or characters looks like someone trying to make a point, and has no contributions. Same goes for User:I read your username policy and it's gay. Perhaps these are people who were blocked for seemingly random usernames and are now complaining by re-registering with pointy usernames? User:4g1rLn4M3dBoB was blocked as random with no contributions... but I can see it making sense to someone. Anyway... ~ ONUnicorn (Talk / Contribs) 18:41, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

It might be better to discuss this in just one place... use VP only to build awareness that there is a discussion. But that said, every one of your examples is a good block based on the username alone, under current policy as it has existed for months and months. You have not shown any of them to actually be bad blocks, or that there was harm caused to anyone by them (with 0 or 1 edit, getting a new username is just Not A Big Deal). And the onus is on those that want to change policy to show reasons for it, not on those that want the status quo to show reasons for not changing, because the status quo ought to be presumed to be good, in the absense of any compelling reason to change. Again, policy is descriptive not prescriptive. Admins block scads of IDS under the current policy all the time and I am not seeing a huge volume of reports at the admin incident noticeboard suggesting that this behaviour is causing massive problems. What I am seeing here by proponents of change is a lot of hypothetical supposition. ++Lar: t/c 18:58, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

oh good God OnUnicorn, I already told you above that ] and User:Plmoknijbuhvygctfrdxezswaq were ones I wast just going to block for username but that I checked first because I wanted to make *SURE* that innocent people weren't getting wronged and lo and behold, they weren't innocent. They weren't blocked because of vandalism, they were blocked because of their username!, and I just added vandalism so people would know. How many times do I have to spell this out to you? And User:Qwerty123456789101112 and User:Mamamamamamamamama aren't random, and that's not *why* they were blocked as said in the edit summary. Your assumption that they are random is illogical, I don't lie in my edit summaries. Let me repeat this again since you seem to have missed it "you just aren't getting how this rule has been applied in actual use. The only random ones that are blocked on sight are the really obvious ones like User:1524gf86d3sf546 and User:Plmoknijbuhvygctfrdxezswaq. The borderline ones and unobvious ones and short ones aren't and never have been." pschemp | talk 18:55, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

I never said Qwerty123456789101112 was blocked for randomness, but I did question the approprietness of the block for the length of that name. It's only 21 characters. User:Can't sleep, clown will eat me for example is 31. Are you going to block him? You never addressed User:4g1rLn4M3dBoB, the only one on my list above where you did give randomness as the sole reason for the block. User:4g1rLn4M3dBoB hadn't vandalized. User:4g1rLn4M3dBoB hadn't done anything yet. You also didn't address User:Random or unreadable text or characters and User:I read your username policy and it's gay. On their face, doesn't it seem like those are people who were most likely previously bitten by our username policy (specifically the part under discussion here)? Lar says we're "not seeing a huge volume of reports at the admin incident noticeboard suggesting that this behaviour is causing massive problems". How many newbies even know that the admin noticeboard even exists? I started contributing here in March and I didn't know the villiage pump existed until sometime in July. That's 5 months. I found out that the admin noticeboard existed shortly afterwords. What kind of newbie whose username of User:4g1rLn4M3dBoB is blocked under this policy is going to go complain there? ~ ONUnicorn (Talk / Contribs) 19:12, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

Guess what? we aren't discussing length of names here, we are discussing randomness. User:4g1rLn4M3dBoB is a name that I feel is not conducive to collaboration, regardless of vandalism. As for User:I read your username policy and it's gay that was from a whole string of names that quoted bits of policies. And his original name that he was blocked for was so offensive I won't repeat it (It was *not* a random name but a vulgar attack). However, since you weren't watching the username creation bots at the time, you don't know the whole story and have therefore picked out bits and pieces to use to criticize. Unless you are on the bot at the time, you don't have the whole picture and criticizing people's actions without knowing the whole story is a mighty big assumption of bad faith on your part. Last, any blocked person can complain on their talk page and request and unblock, and *that's* where I don't see complaints. That's where the proof of abuse would be should it exist. pschemp | talk 19:31, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

ONUnicorn asks "What kind of newbie would complain?" I'll tell you what kind... The kind that reads anything at all in their block message. That kind would ask the admin that blocked them, or would seek some help. But the kinds that are getting blocked for randomness aren't reading, because (news flash) they almost certainly are here for vandalism!!!! Is this a perfect system? Might we block someone inadvertantly who then chose not to create a new username despite the instructions on how to do so? Yes, we MIGHT. But the alternative is far worse. Please stop wikilawyering about this. You don't have a case for change. Get over it, internalise it, and move on. ++Lar: t/c 19:36, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

I'm sorry, I didn't realise I was "wikilawyering" and certianly didn't intend to do so. ~ ONUnicorn (Talk / Contribs) 20:15, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

Since when is it instruction creep to restore an inappropriately, non-consensus delete of a portion of policy? Discuss, get consensus, then delete. Don't delete then demand consensus to put it back. Random names are blocked. Period. Get over it. User:Zoe|(talk) 01:38, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

"Random in this case would mean something that has no indentifiable pattern, like sdbaivb or other such nonsense." You see, this is the entire problem. YOUR defintion of random is that it has no "identifiable pattern". In which case, User:Asdfghjkl:; is not random (it's just the middle row of the keyboard). But clearly, pschemp by his definition of "random" believed User:Asdfghjkl:; IS random (User:Asdfghjkl:; was blocked by pschemp for randomness.)

Pschemp - if you think randomness is not a subjective quality. Then how about gracing us with your definition of randomness? How long is two long? how obvious is an "obviously identifiable pattern". Clearly, the pattern behind User:Asdfghjkl:; was not obviously identifiable enough for you.

"ONUnicorn asks "What kind of newbie would complain?" I'll tell you what kind... The kind that reads anything at all in their block message. That kind would ask the admin that blocked them, or would seek some help." - no, they won't. The sheer size of wikipedia is intimidating to many new people. You probably don't realize it, or maybe you just don't remember when you were once a newbie. But someone who has never edited wikipedia before, comes to sign up an account, and gets blocked within a matter of minutes, is not going to go chasing after people who blocked them. Maybe if the person was a regular in internet communities, maybe if they've edited for a long time as an anon and became familiar with the environment here, they might complain. But a complete newbie isn't going to. That's what WP:BITE exists for - it protects such new users.

If new users do go and seek help from admins when they are blocked, then i suppose you could provide a few examples? Considering how many usernames get blocked, surely by now, there must be quite some records of newbies who do go seek help after sudden blocks.

"Since when is it instruction creep to restore an inappropriately, non-consensus delete of a portion of policy?" when the portion of the policy was never added in consensus in the first place. It slipped in as something that is "discouraged", then slipped in further as something which is not allowed. Then it became something which was bannable on sight. And got removed when someone noticed how users like User:Asdfghjkl:; get blocked on sight but users like User:Lkjhgfdsa and User:Asdfg12345 survived. In other works, inconsistent happy-trigger blocking. --`/aksha 03:00, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

So, why should I not block usernames with non-Latin characters? —Centrx→talk • 03:20, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

uhh...did i say anything about usernames with non-Latin characters? --`/aksha 03:42, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

Maybe not. I didn't read your rants. The length of the comments is usually inversely proportional to the soundness of the proposal. —Centrx→talk • 04:53, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

You know, I found one, User:pschemp. Looks like the "user" (he may not have vandalised, but he almost surely will!), has just randomly hammered the keyboard, coming up with a giant mass of consonants which can't possibly be a word. Quickly, to the banhammer! Lankiveil 01:25, 3 November 2006 (UTC).

Further discussion of username blocks

Huh. So, the less recognizable a username is as meaningful to an English-speaking admin, the more likely it is to get blocked as a random string of characters. In some cases, it's a vandal. In some cases, it's a legitimate contributor who picks a different name and that's fine. In some cases, it's a legitimate contributor who is so intimidated or confused by the {{usernameblocked}} message that we lose them. It seems to me that, if too many username blocks are the second or third type, then the admins making those blocks would need to exercise more restraint. There's no reasonable way to define what makes a random username, and since so many of them are vandals, it wouldn't make sense to refrain from blocking every account until it proves itself to be vandalistic. We have to depend on administrative discretion, and the fact that {{usernameblocked}} is pretty helpful and polite. Since this isn't a job robots can do, we just have to trust the humans who are doing it. -GTBacchus 03:31, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

well, lengthy/insulting/wierd-non-latin-characters/POINT aside, there aren't that many. Or at least, all the examples that have been provided as "obviously random" have fallen into the category of being very lengthy, insulting or making a point, or having wierd symbols in it. As i said, there's really no evidence that blocking usernames which are only random (and doesn't break any other username guildlines) based purely on randomness has done any good.

and rules against things shouldn't exist by default. As in, we should not take a "everything is not allowed until they are proven to be okay" approach. Assume good faith means we assume things are okay until there's evidence that they're not okay.

I'm suspicious of there even being any evidence of a Correlation between randomness of usernames and vandalism, let along any Causality between the two. --`/aksha 03:42, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, I don't think of it in terms of "not allowed". You make a new account, the username you choose may work out, and it may not. You find out pretty quickly. No big whoop. That happens to me every time I set up an account at any website - the name I first choose may or may not stick. You're thinking way too much in terms of rules, but Misplaced Pages works in terms of humans. We don't need to talk about correlation and causation and evidence and "proof" and what the word "random" really means. We just need to accept that admins exercise their judgement, and if there's a problem in a particular case, we address it.

It's really not about assuming good faith, either. Blocking an account within a few minutes of creation isn't a statement about the account holder's motivations at all. It's just a judgement, by a human, that a particular username isn't going to work. If a roughly equivalent one gets through, whatever. No big whoop. -GTBacchus 03:52, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

The reason is that usernames must be identifiable. Random strings of characters defeat most of the purpose of a username. —Centrx→talk • 04:53, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

and that justifies the appropriateness of ban-on-sights? Considering all the opposses inthis (which was for 'extreme cases'), i can't imagine how consensus for shoot-on-sight blocking would have been reached for something like randomness 7 months later when that rule was first added. --`/aksha 05:59, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

What justifies quick username blocks is that they're no big deal, and it's very easy for someone to either try again with a more wieldy username, or defend the one they first chose. It's likely that none of our policies would have achieved consensus, had they been submitted for it to a group anything like the current population of Misplaced Pages. That's not really an argument against good practices. In specific cases where problems are caused by quick username blocks, you should bring up those specific problems. If there are so many of these problems, that will become apparent, and we'll do something about it. Until then, try not to worry so much about it. There really are hundreds of things at this website more worth your energy. Most people who want to contribute to Misplaced Pages use nicely accessible usernames, on their first try. It's really ok. -GTBacchus 06:25, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

Username policy, continued

When a user's username is blocked under this policy, what type of message does that user receive? --Badger151 06:04, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

Badger151, it's {{UsernameBlocked}}. -GTBacchus 06:08, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

After being accused of wikilawyering I was going to stop participating in this discussion; but I conducted an experiment and feel obliged to state that it's not {{UsernameBlocked}}. {{UsernameBlocked}} is part of it, but the actual message is a lot longer then that and, imo, slightly confusing for a new user. ~ ONUnicorn (Talk / Contribs) 14:08, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

What else is there? -GTBacchus 17:21, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

In looking only at the {{UsernameBlocked}} template, I note that all username blocks seem to be given the same lengthy message, which starts with a huge red X and, "Your username has been blocked indefinitely because it may be rude or inflammatory..." For the moment leaving aside the issue of the wisdom of blocking random usernames, perhaps we should subdivide the username blocks based on the reasons for the block. Equally important, perhaps the message associated with the block can be made a little more friendly and/or use a block similar to those found on other sites: registration of an improper username fails to go to completion, but perhaps suggests similar alternate names. Does anyone know how many usernames are blocked on a typical day? --Badger151 17:56, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

I don't have that number handy. I asked some admins and someone said "around 50 100-150". As for making the message more friendly and helpful, I support that. What would you change about it? -GTBacchus 18:08, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

I took a moment to review the registration process by creating User:Test (see talk page), and I noticed a few things. 1) On the registration page there are some notes on what constitutes a valid username, but I don't know how many people notice or read them. 2) On entering a username and creating a password, the next screen said "Login Successful... Your account has been created...) with no mention that usernames to be found unsuitable would be blocked - I expect that most new users interpret this to mean that their account name was found to be acceptable, making subsequent blocks very unexpected. Perhaps adding something along the lines of "Misplaced Pages reviews all new usernames to see if they might match or resemble current users, or for some other reason create difficulties. This process typically take a few minutes (or hours, or days - whatever is correct). If, for some reason, your username proves to create difficulties, we will contact you and help you move this account over to another username. For the moment, click here to change your preferences, or here to go to the main page" would make subsequent blocks less shocking. For the blocks, removing the big red X might make them more friendly. The bold "blocked indefinitely" also seems a bit rough... I'll tinker some and see if I can put together a written-out proposal. --Badger151 18:49, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for taking the trouble to do this Badger151, that's very helpful. :) -GTBacchus 18:53, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

I'm actually enjoying it. It's also a nice work break. A proposed revision, along with the original template, is now at user:Badger151/templates. Please comment! --Badger151 20:00, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

Oops - looks like I connected the link wrong - thanks to RHaworth for picking that up and correcting it. --Badger151 01:53, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

There seem to be three reasons to block random usernames:

• They reduce the sewious appeawance of Misplaced Pages. I disagree. For one thing, they are not part of the encyclopedia itself. And for another, we allow all kinds of other silly usernames, such as User:Can't Sleep, Clown Might Kill Me (or whatever it is), User:Cute Hobbit, or User:Fetish Grrrl. How does User:Yuyuyuy777 look worse?
• They are often used by vandals. Sorry, this is bogus. Sure, they are often used by vandals, but don't you think they'll catch on and use acceptable names to get around those blocks?
• They're hard to remember and keep track of. For the most part, the software takes care of this for us, but other times, such as on WP talk pages, it's nice to be able to just type someone's handle. It's also good to be able to recognize names (e.g., I see User:So-and-so is active again, better check his changes, or Oh good, User:Fetish Grrrrl is on the case, I don't need to worry about it. If we think this is important, the rule needs to be written with that in mind, and to disallow usernames which appear random or are otherwise difficult to remember or recognize, even if the user has a good explanation. And we should think about user names formed with long sentences or arbitrary misspellings in this category as well (did you notice the spelling variation on the two fetish girls).

Matchups 04:20, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

God, it's just a bloody username. Apply innocent until proven guilty and get on with something more important. -- Earle Martin 21:26, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

I may be the closest-to-a-newbie poster here, so perhaps by opinion should count the least (or most according to your POV). That said:

• I noticed that the {{UsernameBlocked}} doesn't even offer the user an outlet to explain why the chosen username may be meaningful to him/her ?
• More fundamentally, I don't see the logic of blocking user for uncommitted-vandalism based on tasseography of their user names. Punish acts not thoughts, especially when reading the latter are prone to errors.
• I still fail to understand how an admin decides that a username is random. For instance, would Cadaeibfaei or Bgahbhahbhd be considered random ? In fact they are a formed by a simple alphabet substitution for digits of π and e; and while it has been conjectured that these digits are truly random, it is undoubted that they are meaningful and dear to any mathematician. Abecedare 08:50, 7 November 2006 (UTC)
• According to this , then, since I can't see how pschemp's name spells out anything, he should be banned. I wish I had a FARK Asinine tag for this idea. Banning people who haven't done anything wrong yet simply because *you* think their name is random is the stupidest policy I have ever heard of, period. If pschemp thinks it should stay because of consensus, then consensus HERE seems to indicate he's wrong. If my cousin used his usual handle, it would be cp4lb, which was his ham radio callsign (or whatever you call it). Banning him for that wouldn't be right, now would it? Most of the vandals I've seen on CVG are IP-addy only, or else annoying children with NONrandom names like Wanker4949 or l33t-luser or whatever. In any case, first strike is a horrible , horrible idea when it comes to banning people. --Shrieking Harpy 04:32, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

I tend to agree. Many things which appear "random" to one person may be perfectly meaningful to another. I used the example on the policy discussion page-what if I spelled out my first name in ASCII hex code? That would be meaningless gibberish to anyone who doesn't know what it is, but would make perfect sense to anyone who knows how to read it. What about foreign names? Do all admins know all foreign languages? Foreign words? The list of problems this policy could cause go on and on. Username policy should be applied as narrowly as possible, and only when the username in question is itself a form of vandalism (includes slurs/obscenities/advertising/etc.), or obviously confusing or bad faith ("Sylvester Stallone (unless it can be verified that's really who it is!), an obvious attempt to impersonate another user, that type of thing), it should be allowed. If the user turns out to be a vandal, well, ban 'em for vandalism. As for "hard to type"-that's a silly argument, these newfangled computer thingies have included copy and paste functionality for years and years now, and I don't imagine that going away anytime soon. Seraphimblade 09:59, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

My $ 1/50th. The issue, as many have noted above, is that ALL users should be judged solely on their contributions. Preemptive strikes are NEVER justified. If a username is not blatantly offensive (bigoted terms or "fighting words" or patently offensive swear words) than it should not be banned on sight. The issue is that, even though the policy sets out "guidelines", and are not to be put into use blindly; the existance of the policy instantly opens itself up to misuse, even unintentionally. If the policy does not exist in the first place, it cannot be misapplied. If a user makes consistantly vandal-like contributions, they should be banned regardless of username. If a user has made no questionable edits, they should be alowed to stay. Foreign words, leetspeak, vowel omission, initialisms, etc. etc. may ALL lead to usernames that appear random, but are infact meaningful. A well meaning admin may see the username and ban on sight a user that could potentially become a good editor. If we don't have the policy, than this problem will never happen. My vote is to remove the policy on random usernames altogether. --Jayron32 04:42, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

I'm with User:Earle Martin on this one. Its a damn user name. innocent (until proven guilty). Get on with living and quit beating the new user into his own, pre-defined room. Terryeo 13:45, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

References header

Isn't it about time that it becomes policy to use correct headers for the References sections. A lot of different forms are currently used, with most of them not really making sense. A lot of people use:

==Notes==

when they are references and not footnotes. Footnotes are rarely used on wikipedia since it would be just as easy to go to the article which the note refers to (if there is one, there often is). I have seen one, maybe two pages which actually had a footnote in the Notes section, although the majority were still references. So shouldn't something be added to the MoS to say that inline citations should be placed under the References header with a subheader below that for General references:

Misplaced Pages heavy emphasis placed on a person's ethnic/racial/religious background?

I'm a huge fan of WP and use it everyday, but one thing that I find a little creepy is the almost fanatical emphasis that is placed on a person's ethnic/racial/religious background. Every time I look up a person to find out more about his history, there is almost always information on his father's ethnic origins, his mother's ethnic origins, both parents religious background, his spouse's ethnic background, her parents' religious background, etc. It sometimes makes me wonder if I've logged into some racist website.

The really bizarre material is saved for the end of the article. There I can look up such groupings as Italian-Americans in the Music Industry or Arab-Americans who are Christian or Bangladeshi-Americans who were scientists. I personally believe that anyone who needs to know who in the music industry is an Arab-American may have a questionable motive.

I think that this feature of Misplaced Pages should be looked at and hopefully toned down in the future.

From an American born in South Africa, living in the southern United States with his wife who is the child of an Italian-American and a Dutch-English-American. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Njg123 (talk • contribs)

Hi, welcome Njg123, and thanks for sharing your thoughts here. (How did you find out about this page, by the way?) I think you may have a point with your observation. I think the reason is this: Once one editor starts adding such things, it is likely to attract a certain amount of controversy. The more controversy is attracted, the more attention is paid to that aspect of the article. The more attention is paid, the more space ends up being devoted to it in the article finally. It's a bit of a nuisance, but we can't really do very much against it, in my experience. Fut.Perf. ☼ 21:50, 28 October 2006 (UTC)

Njg makes a valid point. In a world where every other individual is a mouseclick away from communication, racism is a non-issue. Who cares? Perhaps as we rub and link our consonants and vowels, editor ideas of which information are important will change too. Terryeo 23:16, 28 October 2006 (UTC)

• I respectfully diagree with all of the above for several reasons:

1. One of WP's goals is to be as complete as possible. If an individual merits an entry at all, there's is no reason not to be complete.
2. An individual's background, whether religous or racial, is almost always am inportant part of who they are and many, if not most, people are proud of their background or heritage.
3. The idea that mentioning someone's ethnicity is somehow inherently rascist is simply a fallacy.
4. Personally, I have a lot more concerns about WP editors who emphasize their religous or racial backgrounds to the detriment of accuracy and quality in our articles.

--Doc Tropics 23:30, 28 October 2006 (UTC)

Well written, Doc Tropics.

Racism is the belief that one race is better than another, and I hope you're not seeing that reflected in Misplaced Pages articles. Its existence is not a reason to hide one's ethnic background (at least not where I come from, thankfully).

One of the great things about Misplaced Pages is that with contributors from around the world, it is not written from, for example, a British, American, or any other Anglo-centric point of view. Editors supply their points of view, and information from sources in other languages, and it all gets shaken out to create better articles. Yeah, I've seen it get ugly on the talk pages, but many patient and thoughtful contributors and Misplaced Pages's consensus system give great results. —Michael Z. 2006-10-28 23:38 Z

I'm sorry, njg, but Doc Tropics is correct. Simply mentioning a person's race is not racism, and to think that way is to have a very misguided view of racism (at least in my opinion). Terryeo, we're not at that stage yet (we're not even at that stage in certain parts of the world, let alone the whole world), and pretending we are at that stage creates its own of problems. ColourBurst 02:54, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

The observation is probably valid. I suppose when there seems to be a disproportionate amount of emphasis on racial background in an article, it would seem a quite odd, especially when racial backgroun isn't an important to the article subject. But the solution in that case wouldn't be to tone down on talking about racial background. But rather, tone up on talking about everything else. --`/aksha 08:28, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

I respectfully disagree. At one time, one's linage was very important within the group comprising one's society. As transportation increased it became less important to society's view of the individual. Today, we don't know the race of most of our fellow editors, tomorrow we wouldn't care if we were told. However, I do recognize the situation with people who are in the public eye. Terryeo 08:44, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

I agree with Nig123. A person's lineage is no doubt important to them, but it in most cases it has no importance to me. Sometimes it is a part of why they are notable and should be included. For example, we should note in an article that the individual was the last white man to captain the West Indies cricket team, or first black and Asian to captain them - that's notable. But to go through and make a note by each West Indian cricketer as to whether he is white, Asian or black is useless information. And as Nig123 correctly notes, it would be racist to do so.

Mentioning someone's race is tantamount to saying that it is a feature about them that is notable to others. Doing this indiscriminately is inherently racist (and DocTropics, ColourBurst and Mzajac really need to research what is meant by the term if they believe it just refers to an assertion that one race is superior to others! Would an apartheid system offering an equally good life to different races not be racist?). The solution is, of course, to remove racist categories. However, these tend to be added and strongly defended by those who use them to for their own race-politics purposes. This leave those who do not subscribe to seeing the world only in terms of black, white, Asian, etc. with the choice of putting up with a constant stream of racial epithets in certain Misplaced Pages articles, or going elsewhere for a better read, jguk 09:16, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

Hyperbole much? In all my time on WP I've never seen an article that contained "a constant stream racial epithets". That kind of absurd overdramatization does a profound disservice to our editors and it also cheapens and degrades the topic at hand. --Doc Tropics 10:09, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

Actually, an apartheid system does pretty much assert one race is better than another. There hasn't been an example in history where an apartheid system has offered equally good life to different races, so your example is a straw man (Even the crime of apartheid under the UN's definition explicitly includes oppression as part of the definition). ColourBurst 15:56, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

So I'm reading some gross generalizations above, that there's an overemphasis on race in Misplaced Pages. Please show me a few examples of articles which overemphasize race to the point of racism. I'm reading that race is not important to us, so mentioning it is apartheid and racist. I may not find someone's date of birth, age, place of birth, citizenship, religion to be significant, but I don't think that these things should be removed from articles because someone out there will perceive the very facts to be ageist, nationalist, religionist or racist. So please explain how apartheid has been manifested in Misplaced Pages. Also, please name a few of the racist categories.

If there's really a perceived problem, I don't see it, so let's make the discussion a bit more concrete. —Michael Z. 2006-10-30 00:02 Z

I, too, thank the user for his comment, but I don't really see a problem. I don't see them so much as "racist categories" as "racial categories". And, if the fact is not controversial or disputed, why not include it? Sadly, small-minded people are always going to find reasons for bigotry, and the presence or absence of these categories isn't going to do much about that. Lankiveil 01:48, 3 November 2006 (UTC).

I would like to welcome Njg123 (and maybe bandage his ears incase he feels bitten). I think his post has a point that we are overlooking -- overly racial catagorization. It's good to put the ethnic information in the article, I suppose -- but must we have long lists broken down by race of "famous black artists", "chinese acrobats", and "welsh ventriliquists" and all of this? Sometimes there are inches of categories for one article. --Shrieking Harpy 04:41, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Welcome Njg123, the references in category or information in an article about an individual's race is simply to reflect a part of who that person is. Cultural heritage is just as important in a biography about a person as referring to what color hair they may have. I agree that I hate the over-categorization but its a bit much to call the whole point of having these categories or information "racist." I myself reflected my heritage in my user name merely to reflect a feature about who I am. However, I respect your opinion and greatly value that you asserted it in a civilized manner.¤~Persian Poet Gal 21:12, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

Is a Personal "User Watchlist" ok?

Today I came across a personal "user watchlist" as a subpage of an editor's user talk. It's meant to be a list of editors that the editor in question feels should be watched for controversial or problematic activities. It just doesn't feel right to me, too much like a personal attack. Any comments? --Zeraeph 23:37, 28 October 2006 (UTC)

This has come up quite a bit recently and caused a number of controversies. As I understand it the current consensus is that such pages are probably ok if they are "generic" (ie, give no real indication of their purpose), but a list titled "Troublemakers" or "Editors to always vote against" would most likely be deleted. Of course the existence of these pages can be (and always is) discovered, usually by someone who is on the list; this generally leads to unpleasentness regardless of the original intent of the page. At this point there is no policy against such pages but some Admins may delete them on sight. --Doc Tropics 23:59, 28 October 2006 (UTC)

I've got a javascript tool that sort of does what you describe. Personally, I think if you want to see what a certain user is doing, you can easily look at their contributions page without doing anything wrong. I'd say a user watchlist is just a way to aggregate this information about multiple users without having to visit each one of their contributions pages individually. The problem, as you describe it, comes when you publicly list who you're watching. People could take offence if they find their name listed there. I think it's probably best if the list is kept somewhere confidential either inside a normal watchlist (which my tool does) or off Misplaced Pages. Tra (Talk) 00:06, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

This is indeed somewhat controversial. My opinion would be that what matters is how (if at all) the list is described. Having a "list of Foo users" isn't really substantially different from saying "this user is a Foo" — if the latter would constitute a personal attack, then so does the former. A special case to keep in mind is that an undescribed (or very vaguely or evasively described) list may lead people to assume less-than-innocent motives. The general rule applies here: when what you're doing is not obvious, explain yourself. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 00:28, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

It is clearly described as "monitoring vandals and other problematic editors", that's what worries me, particularly as the last editor listed doesn't qualify at all IMHO. --Zeraeph 01:06, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

While many are understandably upset by pages like this, they do have some legitimate uses and can be a useful tool for responsible editors and admins, especially those who frequently deal with vandals and troublesome users. As always, we should assume good faith in the absence of strong evidence to the contrary. --Doc Tropics 04:09, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure, whether publicized on a user's subpage or scribbled on a piece of paper, several editors have a short list of people they watch closely. However, it erodes good faith to publicize such a short list in a derogatory fashion. Terryeo 08:38, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

As far as I am aware ArbCom has actually approved of such lists in the past. I have, however, always seen this as a mistake. Such a page is really nothing more than an attack page - a public statement that that user intends to stalk and harrass those on their watchlist, exercising a personal, and often immediate, veto on anything they disagree with. It is also a clear statement that the person maintaining the watchlist assumes those listed on it are acting in bad faith, jguk 09:22, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

Depends on the list. At one point, I had a list that included several users who were knowlegable contributors, but had a poor grasp of spelling. Spellchecking articles recently edited by those users is hardly "harassment". --Carnildo 10:17, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

Er ... that's spelled "knowledgeable". Was that a self-referential list? :-) AnonEMouse 20:12, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

LMAO...and I was going to ask Carnildo to add me to the list! --Doc Tropics 20:17, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

Good point and good example. Also, tracking vandals isn't really the same as stalking. I keep several lists, but only one of them actually has a sinister and nefarious purpose :) --Doc Tropics 10:36, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

• These are controversial, and I always point out a similar effect can be achieved through an internet browser's bookmark facility. That seems to solve all problems to me. Steve block Talk 08:57, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

Quite. There's no need to have a public user watchlist at all - unless you want to publicise your nastiness. And, of course, there's nothing to stop you having a private user watchlist if that's the sort of person you are, jguk 13:08, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

• Follow up - This ended up in an MfD debate. After slightly modifying what was regarded as "non-neutral" language on the page in question, the result is very close to being a snowball "Keep". It seems that most editors support these pages as long as they are not clearly and solely attack pages. --Doc Tropics 19:58, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

Careful with your wording there, Doc Tropics. The developing consensus was already almost unanimously to keep the article even before the changes were made to it. Changing the article doesn't seem to have altered the consensus. —Psychonaut 23:35, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

Correction, most editors who were aware of the existance of the specific MFD support these pages :o) which is not quite the same thing.

Apart from which WP:5P states quite clearly:

Misplaced Pages is an encyclopedia incorporating elements of general encyclopedias, specialized encyclopedias, and almanacs. Misplaced Pages is not an indiscriminate collection of information. It is not a trivia collection, a soapbox, a vanity publisher, an experiment in anarchy or democracy, or a web directory. Nor is Misplaced Pages a collection of source documents, a dictionary, or a newspaper, for these kinds of content should be contributed to the sister projects, Wikisource, Wiktionary, and Wikinews, respectively. Misplaced Pages is not the place to insert your own opinions, experiences, or arguments — all editors must follow our no original research policy and strive for accuracy.

Misplaced Pages is an Encyclopaedia which I always take to mean that Misplaced Pages is about verifiable encyclopaedic content, not personalities, or personal opinions of other people.

Misplaced Pages is not...an experiment in anarchy or democracy. I take that to mean that Misplaced Pages is not about indiscrimately promulgating anything based soley on the fact that a majority vote could be produced for it.

WP:NOT expands on that idea and states clearly that Misplaced Pages is not a vehicle to make personal opinions become part of human knowledge.. I assume that also means personal opinions about other editors, which, once the actual activities of those other editors become past tense is all any watchlist consists of: personal opinions about other editors.

As I would interpret policy those opinions do not belong on Misplaced Pages, good or bad, useful or not, possibly even consensual or not, because policy would seem to state that Misplaced Pages is simply not a venue for discussing our opinions of other people.

If anyone feels that their opinions of other editors are important enough to publish then they should surely take responsibility for that decision by publishing them on their own websites? --Zeraeph 21:17, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

"Most editors..." is definitely not as accurate as "Most editors who were aware of the MfD..."; I stand corrected :)

It would certainly be a mistake to assume that the clusters of opinions expressed in any XfD represent a true cross-section of community opinion. --Doc Tropics 21:58, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

If someone wants to maintain such a list, why not just encourage them to maintain it privately and offline on their own machine? Certainly we couldn't prohibit that anyway, and I think that would prevent a lot of issues. Seraphimblade 08:25, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Certainly, it's not right to have a "user watchlist" if it's inflammatory. However, I have one myself, and it survived an MfD because:

• I try to keep its wording inoffensive by only listing those who persist at damaging the encyclopedia as vandals and stating, "Do not take it as a personal attack if you are on the list."
• It is also used to display a wikidefcon template, and to honour exceptional contributors. --Gray Porpoise 21:57, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

I think the correct link for the above is User:Gray Porpoise/Users To Watch Tra (Talk) 22:08, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

Thank you; I was wondering why the popups were telling me that it was an empty page. --Gray Porpoise 22:33, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

Copyright on image

A user has posted a photograph that is almost certainly a picture of herself, but the image has embedded on it a copyright notice with the name of the photographer. The image was uploaded with I, the creator of this work, hereby release it into the public domain - what is the correct way to deal with this? --ArmadilloFromHell 01:13, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

What's the image? Link it. As for action, you should stick a disputed tag on it. I forget the exact template. – Someguy0830 (T | C) 01:19, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

I'm not sure what you mean by link it - for articles that violate copyright I put a speedy delete db-copyvio tag on and I do that daily, but I don't think I do that with images - and this is the first copyright image problem I found. --ArmadilloFromHell 01:41, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

Link it means add a link to it here so we know what you're referring to :). (For images, use a colon first so the thing doesn't render, i.e. ]). --SB_Johnny||_books 01:48, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

Image:Judypringlephotoshoot 620.jpg Presumably the image of the user who uploaded it, but (c) 2006 John Pringle is probably the photographer, and professional photographers usually retain copyright, so it seems wrong to state I, the creator of this work, hereby release it into the public domain --ArmadilloFromHell 02:26, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

Unless said uploader can prove they're the copyright holder listed on the image, they can use a PD tag on it. I'm sure there's an improper license tag to put on it. – Someguy0830 (T | C) 02:43, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

Never mind. I've done it already. – Someguy0830 (T | C) 02:48, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanks, I noted what you did so I can do the same thing next time I get that problem. --ArmadilloFromHell 02:52, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

Note that if the uploader is the photographer, they're at liberty to make conflicting declarations. They can always choose to put into the public domain an image that they first claimed copyright on. In that case the copyright notice is only confusing; since it's embedded in the image, it can't be easily removed. An explicit note from the photographer/uploader clarifying the intent would be helpful if this is the case. However, from what we have here, it looks more like the photographer is the husband or other family member of the uploader. In that case the PD notice would be void since only the copyright owner can declare something PD. Nice picture, by the way. 207.176.159.90 04:00, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

The image is watermarked, which is against policy and grounds for deletion in itself. Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 19:30, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

To most people in general, a copyright is simply atool to keep your work from being copied, however, copyrights have been abused multiple times and there isnt a plan to stop it. Copyrights have impeded progress in genetic research and many other things. I think a copyright should only apply to things like competitors (using copyrighted things for profit). -Charlie34 8:13 09 November 2006

South Asia versus Indian sub-continent

There's been a low-level edit war ongoing in various articles and templates relating to South Asia/the Indian sub-continent. A certain cadre of editors have been replacing the term "South Asia" with "Indian sub-continent." I and others have been reversing the edits, but the game of whack-a-mole doesn't seem to stop.

I did a google test on the two terms (in quotes, so as not to get partial matches) and there are 965,000 ghits for Indian sub-continent and 29,800,000 for South Asia. Indian sub-continent was the older term, in use during the British Raj; it seems still be in use primarily in the context of geology. However, since the sub-continent was split into five countries (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal) the term South Asia has replaced the older one, as not claiming the whole sub-continent for one of its parts. As we see from the ghits, South Asia is 30 times more common than the older term.

The Partition of India was a horrible, bloody disaster that is still sparking controversy, hatred, riots, massacres, and wars half a century later. I believe that the campaign to use the older term is politically motivated. It implies that the non-Indian nations on the sub-continent are somehow illegitimate.

Can we have a policy ruling that in any context OTHER than the geological or historical, that South Asia is the more common and the preferred term? If there's consensus that the use of the common term is preferable, in which policy statement should this be enshrined? Or do we write one from scratch? Zora 07:53, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

Surely South Asia is not the same as the Subcontinent. I'm not sure most people would see Nepal and Bhutan as being in the subcontinent. Clearly Sri Lanka is in South Asia but not in the subcontinent. I'm sure there are other differences too. Use whichever term is most accurate for what you are saying, jguk 09:58, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

I think that South Asia, geologically (and politically), is actually in the subcontinent as well - it's presumably on the same tectonic plate as the rest of India? I understand that in some parts of the world, "Indian Subcontinent" may be politically charged, but at least where I live, it's a pretty neutral term that's not uncommon (among other things, I've heard my friends from that part of the world use it in a present-day context). --Improv 11:52, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

When I took a graduate level course in the history of modern India and Pakistan, the preferred term for the region was "South Asia." I'm not sure it's possible to get a policy rulng on this, but you could certainly propose renaming the disputed articles. Notify me on my talk page and I'll participate in the discussion. Durova 15:10, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

I'd like to second Durova. I don't think you can get a ruling, but I'd be very interested in the discussion. Just let me know. --Doc Tropics 19:50, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

South Asia is not an obviously self-explanatory term. Why does it not include Saudi Arabia or Indochina, which are also the southern part of Asia?--Runcorn 21:01, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

I agree that this is the problem with the term. When I read Sout Asiain the newspaper I am sure that the writer means at least India, but I am not sure what else the author means. Andries 23:10, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

Indochina is part of South-East Asia not South Asia. I would say it's understood by most SEA including those in Indochina that they're a part of SEA not South Asia. Indeed I'm somewhat doubtful that many in Vietnam would say they're part of South Asia and also why only refer to Indochina? What about Indonesia, Myanmar etc? I agree that the term doesn't make perfect sense but I think it is the understood term. Indian subcontinent arguably isn't as clear as well. Is Sri Lanka part of the Indian subcontinent? What about Nepal and Bhutan? In any case, I would suggest until there is consensus changing existing references is a no-no. If these editors write new article then perhaps it would be acceptable but otherwise I would suggest not Nil Einne 00:19, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages's mission doesn't include redefining established academic terms. Durova 04:15, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

I have always seen "South Asia" as an Americanism. I don't think it's commonly used in Britain even today. And incidentally, Nepal and Bhutan were always independent - they weren't part of the partition, since they were never part of British India. The fact is that the area has been known as India for far, far longer than Pakistan has existed. To claim its use is politically motivated is flying in the face of the facts. -- Necrothesp 21:12, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Of course it's used in the UK. Both Cambridge and Oxford have schools of South Asian Studies! Ghits, academic usage -- all point to South Asia as being preferred. Zora 05:48, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

What do the people that live there call it? That would seem to be the best choice. My feeling is that since the area including Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia is called South East Asia, then South Asia is logical. raining_girl 16:48, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Barnstars

Recently, I was given a barnstar by an editor and I wanted to express my thanks. I discovered that on their talk page, there were many messages of thanks, I checked the editors contributions and I found that the editor, had given literally, hundreds of barnstars. I confronted the editor, Sharkface217, who is very decent with this message -

It is obvious that you like to give out Barnstars by the hundred, and I'm sure everyone that has received a Barnstar from you is very appreciative. However, I must advise you that giving a Barnstar to just everyone you come across is not the way to do it. Barnstars are awarded as special recognition, and the giving out of hundreds degrades the quality and significance of the award. Please bear this in mind, as you continue to edit, and I advise that you give out no more for the time being. If you want awards yourself, trading barnstars is not a good way to do it either, it is much better to earn recognition for excellent editing and community service that to simply buy them from other editors.

He responded with:

It is probably true that I have given out far too many barnstars than what is good, I would like to note that they greatly boost the morale of long-time Misplaced Pages contributors who have received little or no recognition. Certain "Smile tags" are ok, but really serve no purpose. Almost all of those who do have Barnstars on the Misplaced Pages community have many. Barnstars awards are usually concentraded; most users who do have at least one have many more. Other users who I have awarded Barnstars to have been here for years and have edited many good articles with no recognition whatsoever.

I am willing to greatly curtail my current habits of giving out Barnstars, but I would like to note that Misplaced Pages has lost many important users, such as RickK (who, I might add, has a Barnstar named in his honor. He left because he recieved little or no recognition while those who played the system and vandalized were mistakenly rewarded), because they see their efforts as going unappreciated. -- Sharkface217

I agree with him, but think that the issuing of thousands degrades the worth. We then both decided to bring this issue into public domain. Dfrg.msc 06:40, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

In a way, you're both right, since you both made very good points. Everyone appreciates recognition, but handing out hundreds of Barnstars tends to cheapen them somewhat. Sometimes it actually is enough to just Smile and say "Thanks" :) --Doc Tropics 06:50, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

Full disclosure: I got a barnstar from Sharkface217 yesterday. Yes, barnstars do boost morale and yes, they should be handed out parsimoniously (and they are for the most part). But I don't see a big problem in the occasionnal barnstar-crazy user. That's just part of Sharkface's wikipersonality. And I think it's also ok to tell him nicely if you think he's going overboard. Pascal.Tesson 07:22, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

The value of the barnstar is only the degree of value it has to the person who receives it. For someone who maybe benefit from a "morale boost" or some recognition, a given barnstar holds just as much value to the receipt if it's given sparingly as if it was given in the thousands. For others, it may not mean anything. Then there are receivers who may increase or lessen its personal value to them based on who the giver is. I know a barnstar given from a respected editor means a lot simply because of the respect of that editor. In short, I wouldn't worry about the number of barnstars Sharkface gives out. I don't think there is any harm and at best, I'm sure there is some benefit. Agne 07:34, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

In my view, if you merely wish to thank people in general, you say "thank you". Barnstars are for ongoing contributions or single notable accomplishments. The reason they are meaningful is because they are a unique, personal award for a unique, personal contribution. Did Sharkface interact with those hundred users, or indeed even know what those hundred users had done that might deserve a barnstar? If he researched the contributions of each one and found something unique and worthy of a personal barnstar, then great. Otherwise, he's turning the barnstar into the equivalent of those "Sunshine student" and "Biggest smile" awards they give to kids in kindergarten: everyone receives an award, so nobody is actually recognized for their unique accomplishments. --tjstrf Now on editor review! 09:09, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

I agree that the barnstar craze is annoying. Incidentally, I remember a user who displayed a similar pattern of behaviour, attempting to use these flattering ways to get himself promoted to admins. Im my experience, barnstar-happy behaviour often reveals lack of interest in content, immaturity, or penchant for trolling. --Ghirla 09:17, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

I was both surprised and very pleased to have gotten a Minor Barnstar. It really was one of the best moments I've had on Misplaced Pages so far. I agree that handing them out by the "thousands" cheapens it -- but if someone deserves it, doesn't that make it okay, regardless of how many other people are getting barnstars at the same time? --Wolf530 01:37, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

Hey all, I'm here to expand upon my original point. English Misplaced Pages has over 2,000,000 accounts, most of which are used infrequently. However, a good deal of them are used quite frequently. Of those that are used quite frequently, only a very, very, very small minority have Barnstars. The other accounts get almost nothing. Today I gave several stars out to editors who had been on Misplaced Pages much longer than I had (Some since November 2004) with many edits but no credit going their way. Indeed, I notice those that get no credit often do not speak on Discussion pages often, instead spending all their time either adding and improving articles or quietly fighting Vandals.

I do understand the sentiment that giving out Barnstars en masse will degrade its significance. I also believe that thousands, maybe even tens of thousands more Wikipedians would have to have at least one barnstar before we reach that point. Sharkface217 01:58, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

I'd also like to mention that Misplaced Pages has lost many hardworking, important, and influential users (I mentioned RickK before) due to the lack of recognition or boredom. Isn't the point of Esperenza (or one of it's missions) and other Misplaced Pages projects to keep long-time users from leaving due to the stress of the site/real life? Isn't that one of the reason's why those green stress-o-meter things exist? Sharkface217 02:05, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

Where's mine? John Reid ° 06:21, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

I am one of those guys who received a barnstar from Sharkface217. For me it was one of the happy moments at wikipedia. I've been here for a year and a half and do a couple of edits almost every day. But because I've never pushed an article to FA and don't work in a specific field but rather here and there, I guess its hard to catch anyone's attention. If I really deserve a barnstar or not I don't know but its nice to get appreciation from someone and it boosts the morale. So, I guess it did its job. Thanks, Splette :) 18:27, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

I also received a Barnstar from Sharkface217 recently. While I was pleased with the recognition, I wondered how he came across me (we'd never met in editing as far as I know), and I must admit that I felt a little ambivalent when I saw that he had been handing them out by the hundreds. To me, that devalues the concept of a Barnstar. Recognition is important, true, but as someone once said to me, "a barnstar's value derives solely from the reputation of the user who bestows it". I think this is true, and that it should remain true.

Sharkface, perhaps you should realize that true recognition lies in letting someone know that you have really taken the time to read through their contributions, and that you appreciate them. A specific message ("Your expansion of Bono Manso is superb. Thanks for taking the time to actually read offline sources and improve this article. Know that your contributions to Misplaced Pages are highly appreciated.") can be of great value to an editor. Your messages in contrast are very generic (e.g. 'For many contributions with limited reward...', 'For dedication to improving and expanding Misplaced Pages....', . This makes it feel like you have not taken the time to really familiarize yourself with the contributions of the receiver. Add to this the fact that you've been handing out the exact same message to many people (, , , , , to pick some random examples), and you'll understand why some doubt the value of your approach.

Your explanation here clears things up somewhat. But still, the point remains that this may well cause inflation of the Barnstar. While I do not doubt your good intentions (and let me once again stress that I'm glad with the recognition in itself), you should keep in mind that others, seeing how much Karma it brings you, may copy your strategy for their own good and much to the detriment of the barnstar. Consider giving out a little Sunflower of Thanks, and a more personal message. That way, more of us will feel really appreciated. — mark ✎ 19:18, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

Just a bit more detail, Sharkface217 subsequently started spamming many of the same users that he gave barnstars to with requests to support his nominated article at Misplaced Pages:Australian Collaboration of the Fortnight on November 5th. He was successful, so I suppose the lesson to be drawn from all this is that spamming, bribery and vote-stacking is now acceptable. Good to know. - BanyanTree 17:15, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

Hmm, that doesn't sound too good. Sharkface, care to comment on this issue? — mark ✎ 20:16, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

My view on Barnstars is that there should be a great effort made to reward them to the countless individuals who deserve them. I agree that while nice, giving a truck load out to those who only have say 3 main space edits is a bit too casual. One thing that bothers me greatly (according to the Sharkface news above), is Barnstar debt. I think its shameless to give so many Barnstars and in return expect more than a very well thought out thank you or say another barnstar for your user page. Its more than just bad taste, its extortion.¤~Persian Poet Gal 21:28, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

Sandboxes in Wikispace

I was under the impression that sandboxes should be created in userspace only. If article X exists in wikispace, is it ok to create X/Sandbox to work on a potential addition to that article? Is there a guideline on this? I thought I saw something that said it was ok in certain cases but cannot find that information now. *Sparkhead 14:10, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

I don't know if there's a guideline, but I suggest you don't do it. There are hundreds (thousands?) of /draft, /temp and whatever "articles" in the main space, long abandoned by their creators, but counting as articles, showing up on random pages, and so on. I suggest creating them in the article talk namespace or your userspace until they're ready to stand alone as articles. But since our articles are all works in progress, the need for draft versions is not really all that great. --W.marsh 15:22, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

I didn't create it, another editor did. I'm looking for an official policy on it. I believe I've seen one but my searches reveal nothing. *Sparkhead 15:46, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

Well, there's not a policy for everything. The {{copyvio}} template used to direct people to create temporary articles in the main namespce, and that's where a lot of these come from. I don't think anyone's really going to mind if you move a temporary page to the talk namespace, or if you delete it entirely if it's long abandoned and redundant to the main article (under G6, housekeeping deletions). --W.marsh 15:56, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

The guideline is at Misplaced Pages:Subpages. I just learned that /temp pages in the main space are deprected, didn't know that before... Kusma (討論) 16:06, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

Oh, there we go. Maybe there is a policy for everything! :-) --W.marsh 16:32, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

I don't know if anyone would find this useful. What I often do is WP:Sandbox and then fiddle and use "Preview" but don't save the sandbox at all. Then I copy the thing, past to Window's Notepad and have a useable copy to save to disk in case of meltdown. And can work later on it or paste it wherever appropriate. Terryeo 20:16, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

That is useful. Though I'm wondering if using "preview" leaves a trace anywhere, even temporarily. It must do, because there is data being sent to and from the servers, but I guess it is all treated as temp stuff, and then expunged fairly soon afterwards. Carcharoth 15:40, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

I've no idea about "leaves a trace". I think that would be a technical issue about how wikipedia creates and uses temporary memory storage. I suspect it gets overwritten in a dedicated portion of hard drives. Terryeo 18:06, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

There is no "trace" left anywhere (to my knowledge) outside of the PHP parser--I just installed MediaWiki 1.8.2 on my home machine to test (and because I've been meaning to for a while). What happens is that it's submitted to the server as an HTTP "POST" value. That value is parsed and spat back out to the user who did the preview. It's not saved anywhere, unless it happens to hit virtual memory because PHP pages out--and that doesn't count. This, however, I don't see actually happening mid-send, especially not on a server farm. Hope this helps! Ed Ropple - Blacken - (Talk) 21:26, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Policy: Criticism

There is alot of debate in talk pages about handling a criticism section. I feel it is important to address this issue specifficaly. I think there needs to be a policy on how you address sections like this. --Zonerocks 20:19, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

Isn't that WP:NPOV? Specifically the "Undue weight" section. I've seen articles where criticism makes up 80% of the word count of the article. Obviously 80% is too high, but there's no magic number, how much criticism really can or should be included will vary from article to article. A criticism policy would probably be redundant to NPOV, but there's an essay at Misplaced Pages:Criticism. It doesn't appear very active, but I suppose a guideline on this topic could be explored. --W.marsh 20:33, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

I don't see why valid critical arguments must be deleted because they're overwhelming. Come up with more information to balance them out, don't delete valid information. Ed Ropple - Blacken - (Talk) 21:27, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

I agree with Blacken's sentiment. While too much criticism makes my eyes squint while reading any article, I could not be crass enough to go and edit 30% of it out just to balance the article. In this case building up arguments in favor rather than demolishing down negative arguments is a good solution to the problem.¤~Persian Poet Gal 21:34, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

This form of "undue weight" is an inevitable result of the "notability" policy for inclusion. Some people and subjects are notable because they are notorious. This automatically results in a large amount of negative information, since most of the verifiable information from reliable sources is negative. Other information would be original research or from unacceptable sources. That's life. As long as the information is properly sourced and worded in an NPOV manner (simply presenting the POV, without advocating or attacking it), then there's no problem.

For controversial subjects, with editors on both sides of the issue, this can still end up with an unbalanced article. In scientific and medical matters this is because the scientists usually have better sources and are better at presenting their arguments than the quacks, pseudoscientists, and true believers, who don't have very good sources (just anecdotes or hate sites), and whose arguments are often filled with logical fallacies.

The way forward in such cases is as suggested -- to build up what's lacking, not to exercise bad faith towards other editors by deleting their hard work. Bad people or subjects should not be whitewashed by deleting valid and well-sourced information. Suppression of opposing POV is a very unwikipedian thing to do.

Misplaced Pages's NPOV policy must not be misused so it becomes synonymous with revisionism, censorship, whitewashing, or political correctness. One must allow presentation of both sides of any controversy. To leave out or suppress one side amounts to promoting the other side's POV. Misplaced Pages should include more information than other encyclopedias, not less. -- Fyslee 22:24, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

Guideline or not Guideline

There is currently some debate on whether to keep WP:RS as a Guideline or demote it to Essay status. The issue revolves around what the community consensus is (one side claims that the Guideline has lost community consensus support and thus should be demoted, the other contends that there is consensus to keep it as a Guideline - although it may need continued work). Please pop over... read the guideline and the discussion on the topic, reach your own conclusions and tell us what you think. Blueboar 01:42, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

If there are enough people saying that something does not have consensus, then quite clearly, it does not have consensus:) jguk 13:03, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

Well, if not WP:RS, an editor should be directed to some discussion page for questionable sources. The issue comes up frequently as the internet's spectrum from unreliable, unattributed newsgroups and webpages fills in, right up to very reliable webpages. We need someplace to discuss the ongoing questions which arise. Terryeo 18:03, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

Guidelines only exist while there is consensus for them. As soon as consensus lapses (either because more people become aware of the page, or because the page changes in ways that people don't like), it is no longer a guideline. You don't vote guidelines off the island; you don't have to form a "consensus to demote" a guideline. They are automatically demoted when people stop agreeing with them. Even Blueboar agrees that the page needs a major rewrite. Until that rewrite is finished and a large number of people agree with it, the page is not a guideline, no matter how many people stick a tag on it. Consensus comes first. Then a guideline tag. The only tag it should have in the meantime is the Disputed tag. Am I right? — Omegatron 03:08, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

Is there a template to flag disputed guidelines? If so, I'd like to use it at Misplaced Pages:Naming conventions (television), where we're currently having a big debate about whether the guidelines can be enforced "as law", or whether good faith exceptions can be made by consensus, like at certain WikiProjects. My own opinion is that some of the participants are confused about the difference between a policy and a guideline (they also keep using the word "vote" <sigh>). Anyway, if anyone's interested in weighing in on that particular debate, please see Wikipedia_talk:Naming conventions (television)#RfC Episode Article Naming conventions. --Elonka 20:11, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

There is. {{Disputedpolicy}} Some people seem to think that a page can be both disputed and a guideline at the same time, which makes no sense to me. Guidelines are pages that have a wide consensus among editors. — Omegatron 05:56, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

Aha! That's what I needed, thanks. I was looking in Category:Dispute templates and not finding it. I've added it to that category now, thank you. --Elonka 20:45, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

A single person can "dispute" a guideline, yet concensus still exists at that time by all other editors. A bunch of users can dispute a policy, and yet it can still hold concensus amongst most editors. Concensus =/= 100%, nor 90%, nor any number. Concensus is determined by discussion, and until that discussion takes place, it keeps it's old status, because presumably its status hasn't changed yet. That's why it is being disputed. Daniel.Bryant 07:57, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

Guidelines are determined by consensus. Rejected guidelines are determined by a lack of consensus; not a "consensus for rejection". See Misplaced Pages:Policies and guidelines#The differences between policies, guidelines, essays, etc. — Omegatron 08:19, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

It would be great if an unbiased soul could attempt to put an end to the issue at Misplaced Pages talk:Naming conventions (television). It seems awfully clear to me (24-7 in favor of the current guideline) but certain people are trying to change it by attrition. —Wknight94 (talk) 21:16, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Voting is evil. What do the 7 people not like about it? — Omegatron 03:08, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Probably best to just look for yourself and hear it in their own words. --Milo H Minderbinder 15:31, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Elonka, please do not distort reality in order to gain sympathy. You were one of the people who were asking for a poll in the first place . We could delete that poll right now and still have the discussion area, which would still support what is being said in the guideline. I've also stated that I would not have a major problem with restarting the poll to make this all more clear, since you had concerns with the poll changes. The poll is simply a list of people who agree with certain statements, but we do not need numbers to come to the same conclusion. -- Ned Scott 23:19, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Ned, again, please read WP:NPA and WP:CIVIL. The kind of language that you used above is not helpful. --Elonka 07:17, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Elonka: "Hi, I'm gonna go votestack", Ned: "Please don't vote stack", Elonka: "I've been attacked!" -- Ned Scott 07:30, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Ned, to be fair, you said, "please do not distort reality in order to gain sympathy." That statement really goes further than necessary into speculation into Elonka's motives, don't you think? I've found that there are ways to say "please don't vote stack" that come across better than that. Your mileage may vary. -GTBacchus 08:32, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Keep as is. I see no problem with keeping this guideline as it is. We need clear-cut guidelines to help people to establish what a reliable source is. This is one of THE MOST cited guidelines on places like AfD. Even though a vocal group of editors is raising objections to the guideline, it does not mean the represent a consensus. Consensus is not measured by volume. The fact that people site the guideline ALL THE TIME in adminstrative discussions like AfD points to the consensus. Just because people don't show up in droves to say "I like this guideline, keep it" on the talk page every day does NOT mean it does not have concensus. Evidence of concensus exists in its ubiquitousness. On a second note, a guideline of this sort, whether as-is or edited to something better, is VERY IMPORTANT. If an article is to be adjudged Verifiable per WP:V and not Original Research per WP:OR we need a concrete basis to judge by. WP:RS is needed in that vein. Without this guideline, or something like it, we are left with anarchy WRT to our ability to regulate articles here. Many decisions are made every day to keep or delete articles based on the availibility of reliable sources. Without this guideline, what are we to do? For those proposing to delist this guideline, what alternative do you propose??? --Jayron32 04:59, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

• Strong keep. This is one of the most important policy/guideline/essay articles for editors who support the intent of Misplaced Pages under WP:5P. In the recent AfD and policy discussions that I've read, the people who reject consensus for WP:RS are generally the same people who reject WP:V in favor of "I like this game fan forum, I use it a lot, and that other website has an article so this one has to!" In other words, I'm not persuaded that there's a lack of consensus among policy-based contributors. Barno 16:15, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

I just don't get it.

Why are wikipedians obsessed with warning templates? Why does WP:AIV tell you not to bother listing a vandal if they haven't been warned 4 times or vandalised within the last 5 minutes?

For example: a user who replaces "Nelson Mandela" with "Buttfucker" doesn't need to be told that his edit is considered vandalism... if he's smart enough to edit a page, he's probably smart enough to know that it's vandalism.

I'm an admin on other wikimedia projects. If someone vandalises a page, they get blocked. No warning, no cute templates added to their user page, nada... just blocked.

Blatant and sophisticated vandals who upload nasty images and/or alter templates are blocked permanently. No warning, no templates, etc. Should WP:BITE really apply to vandals? Why does blocking vandals cause an existential crisis? --SB_Johnny||_books 17:49, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

Personally, I think it might be over-clinging to WP:AGF. In such clear-cut examples as the one you've given, I'd slap their talk page with {{anon vandal}} (assuming it was an anon, of course), which is listed as a "final warning" template. I never use the lower-level warnings for anything other than minor issues (adding personal POV, unsourced claims, etc.) rather than mind-boggingly obvious vandalism. EVula 17:58, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

I'm with you, Johnny -- it's nonsense. I've been dealing with a bunch of vandals in the last few days on a few articles about high schools, and I get seriously frustrated with having to follow up "warning" them repeatedly. Clearly, they know what they're doing. Why are we chasing people around constantly? This morning I pulled up my watchlist, and 7 of the top 10 lines were "revert vandalism" or equivalent. It's out of hand. And we wonder why we're so stressed around here? How about we get a little more hard-handed with vandals? No more 24/hour bans, no more one week bans. 6 months for stupid vandals, indefinite for repeat offenders. Where can we go to show our support for a new policy of harsher sentences for Wiki Criminals? :) --Wolf530 01:20, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

I agree completely. Especially with regard to blatant vandalism and "sophisticated" vandalism, I see little need to assume good faith. Edits like the Mandela/Buttfucker example are irrefutable proof of bad-faith editing; it's simply foolish for us to assume that the editor was a misguided newbie. I would strongly support the equivalent of a zero-tolerance policy in these cases. --Doc Tropics 01:44, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

You might want to look at Wikipedia_talk:Assume_good_faith#Proposal_to_consider_the_removal_of_this_paragraph_from_Wikipedia:Assume_good_faith_policy — Omegatron 03:09, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanks! That's a good start. I'd really like to see some discussion about making the admin policies/guidelines reflect something closer to a zero-tolerance policy, as well. Is that going on anywhere? --Wolf530 03:26, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

As someone who may not edit here every day, I find it frustrating to have to nominate a (previously warned)vandal for blocking within 24 hours of his vandalism. -Freekee 05:18, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

In my heart I'm sympathetic to this thread. In practice this would take a lot more administrators. The majority of random vandalism is just that: some unregistered user surfs into the site, toys with a page or maybe four, and surfs away never to bother us again. Even if they're vulgar in those four edits I consider it a more productive use of my time to sleuth claims about established editors who might be violating WP:OWN or persistently harassing other Wikipedians. When an IP creates persistent problems I'll be more proactive. Recently I made several e-mails and phone calls over a school account that had been blocked eight times in twelve months. The district's IT staff were responsive and friendly and the result might be positive for Misplaced Pages: my suggested solution was to assign the offending children to improve an article about local history. Take a look at the ratio of administrators to registered accounts. If page vandalism is the equivalent of roadside litter, do you really think we have the police force to examine every chewing gum wrapper for fingerprints and fine the offender? Durova 05:43, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

Look at your argument another way -- instead of having more admins, we currently require more editors to do tedious follow up tasks. We're asking people to follow up with vandals and leave arbitrary templates on their talk pages, instead of just having them blocked -- a quicker and easier solution that cuts down on the vandalism in the future.

Furthermore, when you think about it, as long as everyone follows the procedure and lists the vandals on Misplaced Pages:Administrator intervention against vandalism, after a while the amount of vandals will start to go down (they'll be blocked), so we'll need less admins to keep up with the nonsense ;) --Wolf530 06:07, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

Wow! Durova, your dedication and positive attitude are amazing. Your resolution of that particular case sounds like an ultimate win-win situation. But at the other end of the spectrum, I've requested, and been granted, Sprotection on 4 different articles in the past 2 days alone; the high levels of vandalism (largely profanities and the addition of blatant nonsense) were literally clogging my Watchlist. Reverts were required on an hourly basis if not more frequently.

We really need a better balance between encouraging new Wikipedians, which you managed so adroitly, and limiting the damage done by individuals who obviously have no intention of making useful contributions. The current system is far too cumbersome, despite the valiant efforts of editors and admins alike. I don't even bother dropping a warning on User Talkpages that already boast over a dozen of them; why plant another tree in that damn forest? Surely there is some better way to handle this problem. --Doc Tropics 06:03, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

That's great, Durova. Let me tell you my story, since it's a little different than the IP vandalism of your examples. I recently reported a vandal who already had a warning template on his userpage. He was registered, and the account had only been used to replace the same piece of garbage to the same article. He was one of a group of very persistent vandals. I can only hope that if I had discovered his vandalism more than 24 hours afterward, that the admins would have disregarded the technicality and blocked him anyway. -Freekee 16:55, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

The devil is in the details, of course, but under the right circumstances I've waived 24 hours. Durova 18:39, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

Glad to hear that the rules are not straitjackets. I just hope seeing the rules don't scare people off from trying to report vandals. -19:08, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

I'd like to make the point that this is a Crime Prevention vs. Criminal Lockup discussion. I don't think that we need to swing to either polar extreme by either blocking fewer people and trying to stop people from vandalism with pleading/educating or blocking everyone at first infraction. Right now, however, I think we're giving Wikicriminals -- the type who are committing crimes for the thrill of it -- too many chances. I think we're giving the Wikinaive -- the folks who are driving down one way streets because they don't know the area -- the "right" amount of discipline. I do think we should follow up where good faith is necessary and try and bring people onto the right path. Anyone, member or IP, who is committing any type of vandalism that is detrimental to the wiki and does not appear to be acting in good faith, needs to see less of our "other cheek," though. We don't need to be issuing four template warnings for people who are clearly doing wrong for the heck of it. For everyone's sake -- editor and admin alike -- we need to begin blocking vandals faster and for longer periods of time. Everyone's stress will go down, we'll see less reversions overall, and admins will be chasing fewer people around the streets cleaning up after them. --Wolf530 06:14, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

That's the kind of middle-ground I was looking for; thanks for your eloquence. What I'd really like to see is "more":

• More support for newbies.
• More immediate blocks for blatant vandals

In other words, we need to be able to nurture the flower while rather ruthlessly pruning undesireable growths. --Doc Tropics 06:29, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanks, Doc, for the vote of confidence. Part of what I'm saying is a nudge to more of our dedicated editors to try for adminship. The English language edition has one of the lowest ratios of administrators to registered users in the Wikipediverse (is that a new word?) Also, some of the things I've tried are things any editor can do. Just click the "Whois" "IP Info" link on a problematic school IP talk page until you find an e-mail or a phone number and then contact the school. I'll speculate that a good portion of our vandals make their first marks with buddies in their school library, discover they can get away with it, and carry the habit home. If we address these nexus locations - the schools themselves - it might have a positive ripple on the overall vandalism load. A side benefit is that these young users are in libraries full of books they can use to improve Misplaced Pages if the schools push in the right direction. Durova 06:33, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

Sorry about the goof. Durova 21:58, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the tips Durova, it never occured to me to follow-up that way. The possibilty of turning Problem Child into useful contributors would be worth some significant effort. In fact, I may pursue that idea on your Talkpage in the near future. I also heartily agree that we should promote more admins; in addition to vandalism, some of the "Backlog" logs now list thousands of items that need attention. With so many editors on en-wiki, there must be many available who would make fine admins. --Doc Tropics 06:58, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

Quote Durova: "the Wikipediverse (is that a new word?)" - well, that spelling is not very common, though Wikipediaverse is more common. BTW, I really like your idea of getting schoolkids to ransack their libraries for sources to add stuf to Misplaced Pages. It would teach them vital skills as well. Some schools and universities are doing this already. See Misplaced Pages:Schools and universities project. Carcharoth 08:22, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

Adminship is good, yes... but the bar is pretty high. I've been here for 3 years and haven't amassed close to the level of "experience" that is supposedly required. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Wolf530 (talk • contribs)

Close to 1500 edits, that's not bad. Have you checked out Misplaced Pages:Esperanza/Admin coaching? Durova 07:48, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

There may have been some confusion due to a forgotten sig. Wolf530 has three years experience; I'm practically a newbie :) --Doc Tropics 07:57, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

No confusion. I picked up Wolf's username through the page history. Probably should have added the unsigned template but I was too busy looking at the user contributions. Durova 08:48, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

Yes, I'm having some problems with my sigs tonight. :) More "police" (since I'm using that analogy...) on the street is always a good thing. More janitors are a good thing, too! But the more you have, the more potential for corruption you have. I wonder if, like I mentioned above, it's better to become more efficient (ask the community to streamline the processes; do more blocking for longer periods) instead of getting more hands on deck? --Wolf530 08:05, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

We probably need both. While a number of admins are certainly controversial, I suspect that actual "admin corruption" is relatively rare. I've never encountered it personally, and when I follow threads from complainants I've always found justifications for admin actions. Certainly no group or individual is perfect, but on the whole there seems to be a lot more smoke than fire. --Doc Tropics 08:18, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

Head over to Misplaced Pages:Requests for comment and Misplaced Pages:Requests for arbitration to browse. Administrator misconduct is one of the most common accusations made by editors whose own conduct is under scrutiny - usually that complaint is longwinded but unsupported by page diffs or other involved editors. The same editors who've been sanctioned sometimes come over to Village Pump to air their complaints. I try to keep an open mind because occasionally there's genuine misconduct, but the most recent time I gave the benefit of the doubt and actually went out on a limb for one of those posters I got dragged into an ArbCom proceeding as an involved party and the same editor I tried to help wound up making colorful insults about me. If you dig a bit you'll find the case. Depending on how you view things it's amusing or it's sad. Definitely a huge waste of time. Durova 18:55, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

Arbitrary conversation break

As far as the AGF argument goes, I thinik it's more important to assume the good faith of the people reporting vandals than it is to assume that vandals might not know they're vandals. It just seems a bit over the top to require that vandals be warned 4 times before a block can be "justified", and good-faith users shouldn't be required to "build a case" about the vandalishness of the vandals (unless we want to assume that people regularly report vandals because they're wikisadists and only want to block vandals because that's how they get their jollies). This only serves to further frustrate people who are already frustrated by having to waste time reverting bad-faith edits. It would be a lot nicer if when checking my watchlist I'd find mostly additions to the articles (maybe even really good additions that will teach me something new), rather than yet another reference to questionable uses of cucumbers.

I think the problem is rooted in misplaced empathy. We (the good-faith contributors to wikipedia) would be terribly unhappy if we found ourselves unable to edit. Vandals on the other hand will probably find something else to do (like throwing gobs of wet toilet paper at the nearest librarian). And even if they are terribly unhappy about being unable to vandalise wikipedia... so what?

There's a difference between newbie tests, clever jokes (which seems to be what the {{test}} templates are designed to address), inane vandalism (blanking, toilet humor, etc.), and sophisticated vandalism (uploading and placing obscene images, altering templates, and so on). The latter two kinds of vandals should just be blocked on sight, no warnings, no messages on their talk explaining it (i.e., no "monuments"). Rollback the edits, block the vandal, delete the nasty images, semiprotect regular targets (autoconfirmed only), move on. We were having a big laugh on IRC yesterday after importing a 1-page document that had over 300 revisions. A lot of the articles we import have rediculously long contrib histories full of mostly vandalism and reversions of vandalism, and a lot of the vandalism was by the same users. We don't put up with that kind of nonsense on wikibooks.

As far as needing more admins: yes, we probably do (though it's hard to believe... aren't there over a thousand already?). I've considered doing an RfA myself, but I suspect that having the tools but not being able to use them properly (because of unneccessary bureaucratic requirements) might be even more frustrating than just not having them (which is actually much more frustrating when you're used to having them). Doing an RfA on wikipedia seems to have become something akin to running for U.S. congress... it's not supposed to be a big deal. As far as "corrupt" admins are concerned, desysopping someone who isn't using the tools properly shouldn't be a big deal either.

There are exceptional cases, of course. You generally wouldn't want to block a school IP for a long period, though if the school IP is consistently a source of vandals, then it's obvious that the school either can't or doesn't bother to keep an eye on their students... if they can't be bothered with that, then their students will just have to sign up accounts on other computers (they can still read the encyclopedia, of course). And of course you can't permablock IPs (they sometimes change hands), but if an IP is causing a lot of problems, you can block them for a year (during which time the vandal might experience some personal growth). The problem is that we're making the rules based on the exceptions, which is an ass-backwards way of going about things. --SB_Johnny||_books 12:40, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

Are you saying we're making rules based on exceptions per what we're doing here? Or what already exists? Because I think the exception to the rule is "good faith" naivety. I think the "rule" is generally "bad faith" vandalism. --Wolf530 16:47, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

I'm saying that the current policy seems to assume that vandals are most likely good faith editors who are having a bad day, which seems to me an unlikely (i.e. rather exceptional) case :). --SB_Johnny||_books 17:24, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

Actually, if User:SB_Johnny was found to be vandalising, I'd hope someone would block the account, because that would mean that someone had somehow logged in with my username, and I'd be most unhappy about that! --SB_Johnny||_books 17:28, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

Okay that makes sense/is logical! --Wolf530 17:30, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

Yes and no. An editor who drops f bombs on a dozen articles is obviously up to no good. In other cases even blatant vandalism may be nothing more than a breaching experiment. Last week's article from the Chronicle of Higher Education begins with an example of a university professor who began as a vandal - just to test the wiki process - and later turned into a positive contributor. Durova 18:04, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

Would being blocked for vandalising be any less informative about the wiki process? --SB_Johnny||_books 18:18, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

Probably equally informative, but that could cause credibility problems for WP:AGF and WP:BITE. Durova 18:36, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

Slightly over 1000 volunteer admins isn't all that many in relation to the size of the English language edition. That's fewer than 1 admin for every 1000 articles, fewer than 1 admin for every 2000 registered accounts. These last several days the administrators' noticeboard has seen repeated appeals for help with the WP:AFD backlog. I specialize in dealing with personal attacks and requests for investigation, which require careful attention - most recently I've been addressing problems at an article where a disruptive user has a copious sockpuppet drawer. At a different article that was subject to heavy anonymous vandalism I've semi-protected and culled away joke claims about the Hotel California and an arm wrestling match. Another anonymous editor has been altering Formula 1 racing tables - probably good faith attempts from someone who doesn't speak English - I've issued three blocks so far and conducted an unsuccessful search for a Japanese bilingual editor to intervene. I could go on. Believe me, I wish I had time to block more of the vandals who change biographies of saints into crude sexual slurs. If that's your editorial calling, then get sysopped and go do it. Durova 16:25, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

That being said, trying to encourage more people to reach for adminship is a long process. What can we do now to start making change that will help everyone? --Wolf530 17:30, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

Earlier at this thread I proposed contacting schools that have persistent IP vandal problems. Another approach is to plug gaps at the policy and guideline level. I was one of the editors who helped draft Misplaced Pages:Disruptive editing. A related idea I keep meaning to start would be Misplaced Pages:Editor honesty as a corrolary to typical university academic honesty policies: I consider it shameful that this site has no official statement to condemn the deliberate falsification of citations. Type Misplaced Pages:Plagiarism and you get a redirect to Misplaced Pages:Citing sources which devotes most of its space to the nuts and bolts of Wikimarkup and the merits of Harvard referencing, but barely mentions plagiarism at all. If you're feeling proactive, just click my friendly red link and begin a draft proposal where I'll join. Durova 18:04, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

I think it's just theat the political nature of wikipedia's RfA process is e-vile, and scares people off. I think I'll just nominate myself to prove this point (I'm easily qualified, but I bet I'm going to get a lot of no votes and have my motives and/or mental health questioned!). --SB_Johnny||_books 18:18, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

For sure. I think it's hard to get someone to put their name up on the block when they know it's just going to be a roast of their edit history. And for what...? You end up being everyone's whipping boy :-\ To boot, there's an extremely strong anti-elitism feeling about/for admins. So, there's definitely incentive not to go through the process. That's why I think streamlining policies is a great way to go, because it cuts down work for editors and admins. --Wolf530 18:27, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

Not necessarily true. I'd had my eye on submitting an RfA for a while (my personal requirements for it, though, kept getting pushed back; originally, I felt like I would be experienced enough at 2k edits, but once I got there, realized I wasn't... wash, lather, repeat). Lowering the bar increases the number of admins, but if those admins don't have as firm a grasp on wikipolicy as their more seasoned brethren, not only do we end up with shitty new admins but resentful old ones, too. Personally, I think we need to be more pro-active in finding good admin candidates; there are plenty to choose from. EVula 18:43, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

Don't get me wrong -- I am not advocating lowering the bar for adminship, and I completely agree with what you're saying. What I'm saying is that there are strong incentives against RfA for a lot of people. Take myself, for example -- I run another wiki that has 2000+ pages on it. I'm here a lot, and I think the general trend of my edits is towards cleanup and maintenance, so I'm comfortable with a mop. I've been dealing with jerks who have threatened me numerous times in the RPG I've run for 12+ years. Nonetheless, I'm not comfortable going up on the RfA block and having 100 people tell me that I should have inflected this word one way, or not used that word with another editor because it makes me a bad Wikicitizen. It's a lot of nitpicking, which may be useful, but in the end I'm not sure if I'd be motivated to keep doing what I'm doing after everyone has ripped me apart. :-\ --Wolf530 18:56, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

I might have waited longer than I should have. From my reading of recent nominations, the things that tend draw negative votes are uncivil behavior, recent blocks, and really inadequate experience. Most other nominees get sysopped, maybe with fewer total votes. Durova 19:09, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

• NOTE: Many of our allegations in this discussion involve students. If you notice troublesome edits from an obviously young contributor, you might mention it at Misplaced Pages:Misplaced Pages Youth Foundation. I had this come up recently and their response was both speedy and discrete. I was also going to suggest that we might offer bounties for blocking vandals, but then I considered how many editors would create socks, just so they could turn themselves in... :) --Doc Tropics 19:40, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

My two cents here... I have noticed significant increase in vandalism since early September when school started. College/University students are not so much a problem, but high school and lower are often a source (when I run the IP through WHOIS). This school year, I am far less tolerant of vandalism. If the talk page has past warnings, I start with {{bv}}, and then block. Another useful tactic is to look through their recent contributions of articles they have vandalized. Pick the most embarrassing one, make the heading "Your edits to Mental retardation", for example . If it's a school, corporate, or government IP, I will also add {{Ipowner}}, such as here and . With this template, the name of the organization can be made into an external link; I will try and find the school's computer use policy and link to that. Though, kids may still vandalize, anyway. If the vandalism is really blatant, such as involving an obscene image or a template, it indicates the vandal knows what he/she is doing and will be blocked on sight. Of course it's tricky when the school IP is a shared IP. In those cases, the blocks may be relatively short, but long enough so that the kid has moved on to something else (e.g. next class). As pointed out above, we have just slightly over 1000 admins (not all that many). It's a waste of valuable admin time, to go through test, test2, test3, test4, and then block if the intent is obvious. Basically, zero tolerance is needed when the intent is clear, their vandalism is particularly harmful to Misplaced Pages, and I don't think they will stop. Other times, instinct tells me the vandal wants attention, and it's best to revert, ignore them, and they go away. And sometimes, the "vandalism" is really a test, and will handle it accordingly. --Aude (talk) 19:52, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

If these suggestions are normal policy, then we need to update Misplaced Pages:Administrator intervention against vandalism. That page makes it very clear that all vandals need to go through the scope of templates before any action is taken. --Wolf530 (talk) 20:10, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, I guess that's the point I meant to make with the school IP thing... if a school IP is being used for vandalism, it's probably just some troubled kid looking to trouble someone else. A short block will give him time to find other trouble to make (which is not our problem). If it's a constant problem, however, a more serious block may be appropriate. I do wonder, however, why it's we who have to call the schools... seems to me that if they're dropping the ball and want to take advantage of the great thing we have going here, they should be the ones contacting us!

BTW: my RfA is going exactly as expected... point proven? (This is not a WP:POINT move... I'd love to have the tools, but the response I'm getting pretty much illustrates the problem with both the bureaucratic rules and the RfA process!) --SB_Johnny||_books 20:01, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

I noticed :-\ --Wolf530 (talk) 20:10, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

Purposefully loading your RfA to fail proves absolutely nothing. Any RfA that says "I'm not going to be one of the most active of admins on wikipedia" is guaranteed to fail. EVula 20:08, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

SB_Johnny, I happen to agree heavily with you on the whole warning template thing. Is it really such an awful thing to block a school IP for two hours so that annoying kid will go away? And will Misplaced Pages collapse if we ask AOL users to register an account? At least 80% of what comes from high schools must be vandalism, probably more like 90%. Although I voted against your adminship on these grounds (sorry!!), that was because you didn't seem to understand the policy, not because I thought it was a good one. I, for one, think the warning templates ought to be used for cases where's it's questionable, not for the "buttfucker" changes. And established users who do that crap should be blocked on site for 1 day, to give them time to think, in case it was a momentary lapse of judgment, to which they later feel remorseful. (I've seen this happen). Second offense and they're done. -Patstuart 06:24, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

Changing Policy

This shouldn't fall into archive. Per my above, if it is normal policy that blatant vandals do not need the whole range of template warnings, then Misplaced Pages:Administrator intervention against vandalism and the other policy pages which require this action need to be updated. I don't want to go updating without consensus, though... --Wolf530 (talk) 16:11, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

Actually I think the policy is for giving the warnings... my argument is that these warnings are appropriate for people who are being genuinely funny (but still need reverting), since they basically just say: OK, haha, please stop now because you're wasting our time (I have often wondered why the templates don't link to uncyclopedia). But most of the vandalism is just straightforeward vandalism, not clever, just inane additions intended to annoy wikipedian editors. Keeping the "must template" rule just brings means that their nonsense requires more work from wikipedians, and helping them in their goal of being annoying and wasting the time of strangers.

There was a discussion a while back about not building "monuments" to the "famous" vandals (Willy, Bobby, etc.). A talk page full of warnings is another kind of monument. And it's a kind of monument that in itself can get someone's goat (nothing like reverting 8 pages, then going to leave a warning only to find the user has been warned 100 times before). Like I said, other projects don't do this (they just block and move on, which might be part of why no other project has vandalism problems like the english wikipedia). The blocking admin can tell how many times they were blocked already, and take it up a notch as appropriate while on the block dialog page. No medals, no monuments, just quiet, business-like blocking to avert further trouble. --SB_Johnny||_books 18:37, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

So the question becomes, how the heck do we go about changing or making policy? I'll bet that if we made an attempt, there would be a large consensus that we don't need to be as lenient on the "buttfucker"/"jonny's mother is a gay whore" vandals as on the vandal that puts "hi" at the end of a page. Any ideas? -Patstuart 20:01, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Well, there is the {{blatantvandal}} user template, but no policy for it as far as I know. It would seem commonsensical enough, to just treat it as a long term t-4, no repeat/recent warnings necessary for reblocking, racheting up the blocks every time. As far as changing the policy, I don't know... this page seems as good a page as any (it certainly gets more eyes here than on a proposal page). --SB_Johnny||_books 20:31, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

What Johnny mentions about Template:bv is exactly right. We don't need to change a policy in order to implement this, just show proof that 1. they were warned with a message that informs them they will be blocked if they continue and 2. they continued to vandalize. Give your 2 diff links, and you're set as far as WP:AIV goes. --tjstrf Now on editor review! 05:13, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Created essay Misplaced Pages:Editor honesty per suggestion by User:Durova

As suggested above, I was bold and created the essay as suggested by Durova. Everyone else should be bold as well and edit or comment on the essay. What do y'all think? --Jayron32 05:51, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Notabilty Guidelines - what happens if things change?

I have a question about notability guidelines, particularly WP:WEB... if something meets a criteria and then at some point -stops- meeting the criteria. I ask because a webcomic may be notable under point 3 for being on Keenspot, but after they leave keenspot to be independent it's not clear what that means. Webrunner 20:17, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

I may not be speaking for everyone, but the way I interpret the guidelines is that if something does not meet the guidelines at any point in time it may be nominated for deletion. —Mets501 (talk) 20:31, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

I'd think once something achieves notability, it remains worthy of an encyclopedia article even if it's subsequently forgotten. We may reassess in hindsight whether something ever truly was notable, but I don't think it makes sense to consider notability something that can be "lost," because we document history, not just current events. In the webcomic example above, the article would still able to state that it was "previously hosted on Keenspot," if being hosted on Keenspot is a sign of notability. Postdlf 20:36, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, I echo Postdlf. That Sir Joseph John Thomson hasn't won a nobel prize in a century doesn't stop him having won one. An achievement deemed noteworthy cannot be unachieved. Whether we still deem the achievement noteworthy is the issue. Steve block Talk 20:54, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

As Steve Block points out, the the consensus of Misplaced Pages editors can change as to what it takes to be notable. So even if "hosted on Keenspot" was viewed as a sufficient claim to notability yesterday, there is no guarantee that it is still so considered today. This change is, I think, more likely to occur soon, as we focus more on quality of articles and less on quantity of articles.

In general, encyclopedic notability is hard to loose. Current event newsworthiness is easy to loose. But this is Wkipedia, not Wikinews. The past few generations, print encyclopedias had a systemic bias in favor of historical subjects. Because they were paper, they would indeed weed out and trim subjects that were becoming less significant. But they couldn't, so didn't try to, cover the current state of affairs. Even the annual updates were usually a few months out of date by the time they reached customers, due to the editoraial, printing, and shipping processes. So encyclopedias only covered subjects that would be of long lasting notability. We aren't paper, so we don't need to trim just because something is no longer meets current criteria for notability.

In the case of criteria that could be lost; there should be a reliably sourced citation to establish that the criteria used to be met. In the worst case, the Internet Archives might become the citation evidence. Better would be a independent reliable source primarily about the subject of the article that happened to mention that. GRBerry 21:04, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

Being on Keenspot is still considered sufficent for WP:WEB 3. I bring it up because a notable webcomic was recently voted for deletion 'as per WP:WEB', and am trying to figure out if the policies support that or not (the comic is obviously notable but whether the rules state it's notable or not is questionable) Webrunner 21:10, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

I'm not sure it's the case that being on Keenspace is still considered sufficient for WP:WEB 3, I'm not sure it was ever established it was the case. But beyond that a link to the debate would be useful. Our deletion debates don't have to follow what the notability guidelines set out. They are, after all, only guidelines. Steve block Talk 21:36, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

Keenspot, not Keenspace. There's a difference. You have to be chosen to go on Keenspot, it's basically an online syndicate, not just hosting. Anyway, here's the AFD: Misplaced Pages:Articles_for_deletion/Girly - most of the deletes were citing WP:WEB Webrunner 21:52, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

There is no consensus for the idea that every webcomic is notable that is hosted by either Keenspot or Keenspace, or even by more notable webcomics publishers like theModern Tales sites. Girly is just one of several articles on non-notable Keenspot webcomics that have been deleted within recent memory. -- Dragonfiend 09:43, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

You helped write WP:WEB, so perhaps you can explain to me how Keenspot is not "a site which is both well known and independent of the creators". Oh, and by the way, Keenspace doesn't exist any more. Continually bringing it up (or even ComicGenesis, it's new name) is hurting your argument. Webrunner 18:19, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

I'd say once notable, always notable, because we document history, not current events. Criteria changing is entirely separate from whether something has met the criteria at some point in time or not. Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 18:04, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

Deletion of promotional photos

There is a recently created tag {{Replaceable fair use}} which is used to categorizes a given image into a dated category for deletion if it can possibly be replaced by a "free" image in the future - even if there isn't one currently available. Now it looks like this is being applied to all biographies of living people, bands, etc, with fair use images. However, there is an older template {{promophoto}} which used to say that a promotional photo (released by the copyright holder for the press) can be used "in the absence of a free alternative" (now changed) - so if no current alternative exists a fair use promotional photo could have been used, now it has been changed to say that if there is no possibility for free alternatives (which means most recent photos of living people are disqualified, as you can go out and take a picture of them).

So people who uploaded images in good faith under this criteria are still having their uploads deleted without much futher warning. Literally thousands of articles are losing their images that were put up in good faith and with a long-standing template to justify it.

Why don't we do something like what we have for fair use rationale and have some date before which these images are deemed ok to leave, but no new ones are uploaded (say October 13, 2006 when the template was changed). If it is under proper fair use then let the older ones be but do not allow any newer ones. No copyright laws are being violated here, and the only reason cited is to promote more "free" images, so I see no urgency to delete.--Konst.able 08:55, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

experence suggests that images uploaded before that date would never get deleted which isn't good. The other problem is that the exitance of "fair use" images tends to reduce the amount of effort people put into looking for free alturnatives.Geni 09:37, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

I agree with Geni. Also, from a practical standpoint, the grandfathered images would set a bad example and inspire future violations of the policy. People copy what they see more often than they read policy. ×Meegs 10:02, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

You seem to be regarding the deletion of images as a punishment of the people that uploaded them. That's not the case. Nobody's accusing people who uploaded promotional images of having bad faith, it's just that we need to focus more on being as freely-redistributable as possible. Having made the decision to get away from fair-use images as much as possible, it doesn't seem to make much difference when the image was uploaded. That seems pretty arbitrary, in fact. —Chowbok ☠ 17:26, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

Related question: Should a fair use promotional image be removed from an article in favor of a free one, even when the free image doesn't illustrate the subject as well? -Freekee 18:19, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

Depends somewhat of your definition of "as well", but yes. In fact there is not even a requirement for a free licensed alternative to currently exist. As long as it would be possible to create one. Basicaly unfree images are only allowed when they are non-reproducable (historic event (and most promo pictures don't depict historic events), subject no longer exist/live and such), or when the subject itself is a copyrighted work we are unlikely to get a release for (cartoon characters, logos, movie screenshots, statues etc). --Sherool (talk) 19:08, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

I've seen some (fair use) studio portraits of musicians deleted in favor of self-made photos taken in concert, where you can't as well see what the person really looks like. And I've seen explanations given that free images are preferable to fair use ones. I haven't seen any really bad switches happen, but I think it's only a matter of time. -Freekee 20:53, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

There's a good "as well" example on the Neil Young article. A current free-use photo is buried way down, because, in the words of one fan/editor, he looks "like a potato", and, frankly, it's not that good a photo. A fair-use image from back in the 1960s-70s is at the top in the infobox. But the idea of replaceable fair-use is that all someone has to do is ask Neil Young or his people for an acceptable photo to be released under a free license.

This policy is a pretty harsh awakening. It's tended to suck the fun out of things and it's being wantonly applied in some cases. But it seems this is way it's going to be. Acceptance and adaptability are the keys.

So, I think there should be a news release to raise awareness of the need for free-use images vs copyright images. The idea that promophotos and eventually other fair-use photos can be done away with stems from the notion that Misplaced Pages is big enough and influential enough it ought to be able to force a change. And eventually, the thinking goes, PR agencies and companies will release their promotional works under a free license. More about this policy can be found here: Misplaced Pages talk:WikiProject Fair use#Replaceable fair use and especially, Misplaced Pages talk:Publicity photos#This page is dangerous.-Wisekwai 03:56, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

You'd think celebrities, et al, would want themselves to be represented in Misplaced Pages by the photos that they have previously released to the press, signed for autographs, etc., rather than the 50-feet-away-in-a-crowd or papparazzi stalker photos that the (in my opinion, obnoxious) "replaceable fair use" policy seems to encourage (everyone—make a list of celebrities without GFDL photos and camp outside their homes with a camera, so we can replace the fair use photos we can already legally use! Yee-hah!). A news release encouraging the release of promo photos (and publicity stills from production companies/networks for TV series, films) under the GFDL (or direct submission to our site) is a good idea, as long as we can verify who actually submits it. Postdlf 18:26, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

Yes, the concept of "wikirazzi" has been raised on other discussion pages. What's more practical, and what I've had some luck with, is locating an existing image of a person (or place or thing) and then e-mailing the copyright holder - the photographer or agency responsible - and simply asking if it can be uploaded to the Wikimedia Commons. In other cases, talent agencies or the celebs/artists themselves can be contacted directly.

The results have been encouraging. And the more times I do it, the more success I'm having. Most folks are pretty excited about having their work in Misplaced Pages. I just explain the licensing terms and that it will need to be uploaded to the commons, where they will receive attribution and a link back to their site and they are happy. In just a few cases so far, I've either been flat-out ignored, or one guy wrote and said he was really sorry, he just couldn't let his work go, which was really nice, actually. At least he answered.

Flickr is a good source of images, and many of them are already under a Creative Commons license, though you have to be careful, because it's not always a CC license that is used on the Commons. Still, Flickr is a good source because you can directly contact the people through Flickr mail. And Commons has a scheme to scour Flickr for usable images to upload under free-licenses from Flickr to Commons.

Still, I don't believe the current way of going about things is the right way to go. The only people who seem to have gotten wind of this are people who have uploaded images. Understandably, many are quite unhappy that "their" images are being deleted. It is creating a lot of uncivility. There should be a general announcement to the Wikimedia community at large, as well as the general public, that free-license is the way to go and that fair-use images are no longer acceptable if they are replaceable. -Wisekwai 19:49, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

I agree that there should be some sort of general announcement. I'm not sure how that could be done, however. —Chowbok ☠ 23:30, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

Regarding Flickr: I didn't see a Firefox search plugin that only searched CC by and by-sa photos, so I created one. If anyone's interested, it can be downloaded here. I'm not sure how to make it so Firefox will recognize it as a search plugin and add it (feel free to enlighten me if you know the trick), but it should work fine if you manually save it to your seachplugins directory. —Chowbok ☠ 23:38, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

You have new messages

I'm tired of new users not understanding what this thing means and not realizing that people are leaving them messages. What if we changed it (through MediaWiki) to say "A Misplaced Pages user has left you a message. Please read it and respond if necessary"? --Rschen7754 (talk - contribs) 22:11, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

Don't think that would change much. Perhaps a help link might be more helpful (like "What's this?") Fagstein 01:12, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

When you get the "you have new messages" notice, don't you already get a link to your talk page and a diff link?

Maybe something like "A Misplaced Pages user has left you a message on your talk page, click here to view it" would make it a bit more obvious? --`/aksha 02:33, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

How do we get it changed? --Rschen7754 (talk - contribs) 02:52, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Isn't there a place to go to request for changes to system messages? It would be a good idea actually, new users don't nessasarily realize their "talk page" is a point of contact for them. --`/aksha 02:55, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

I thought this was it. I am an admin and I could change it, but want to make sure there's consensus. I'm making sure there isn't another place. --Rschen7754 (talk - contribs) 04:05, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Done. --Rschen7754 (talk - contribs) 04:24, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Well, I think the desired reaction with new members is "What the hell is this?" as they click on it, discovering their talk page in the process. I think it works just fine, but something a bit more obviously worded would probably work well, too. EVula 03:06, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Often, or at least for me, the "what the hell is this?" lead to "why the hell do i have a so-called discussion page named after me?". --`/aksha 08:50, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Why on earth should this cause problems in the first place? It's a fairly straightforward statement. -- Necrothesp 21:05, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

I reversed it before seeing this discussion, but looking at it now I don't think there is a consensus for it. "A Misplaced Pages user" is misleading. The message could be from an IP (not a user account); it could be from a bot (not a person); it could be from someone passing by who has never edited Misplaced Pages before and may never again or from a banned user's several sockpuppets (not a Wikipedian). The message is shown simply when the user talk page is changed, and adding more specific verbiage of this kind separates it even further from its real meaning. —Centrx→talk • 02:20, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

How about "You have a new message on your Misplaced Pages talk page" which should make it clear. Part of the issue seems to be that people see and assume it is one of those advertisements that tries to get you to click on it by saying you have new messages. This wording should alleviate that problem. JoshuaZ 02:27, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Yes, unfortunately some don't quite get the concept for a talk page. They then don't see stuff like block warnings. --Rschen7754 (talk - contribs) 02:28, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Well, that wording is better than the current wording, and to be blunt, if people can't even get the idea of a talk page then they might be dumb enough thay it would be best if they didn't edit anyways. JoshuaZ 02:50, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Yeah... so should we go and change it? --Rschen7754 (talk - contribs) 04:20, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

I like JoshuaZ's suggestion - although can it still retain the 'last change' link for those of us who read in diffs? I got the "A Misplaced Pages user" bit the other day, and somehow the knee-jerk reaction was 'damn joke banners!' One more thing to get used to, I guess, if it changes. riana_dzasta 19:24, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

I don't see a reason why it wouldn't need to include the 'last change' afterword.. JoshuaZ 05:54, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

This seems good. Regarding people clicking on the joke new messages, I would think they would just change the joke to the new wording and we would have the same problem. —Centrx→talk • 05:58, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Oh, no, I wasn't complaining, I just stated my reaction when I saw something new. Of course, there wouldn't have been a joke banner on my watchlist :) riana_dzasta 06:25, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Are we discussing change for the sake of change ? Maybe reverse psychology is in order here. Something like don't click here !!! Jcam 01:43, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Where did this idea that people don't understand what "You Have New Messages" means come from? Where is the evidence that people aren't seeing vandal warnings? How does adding "on your Misplaced Pages talk page" solve that? If people don't understand new messages, then they're certainly not going to know what a talk page is. If this was a site with flashing advertisements everywhere telling people they've one things, then this might be understandable. But there's not a single advert on this side (apart from possibly the contents of CAT:SPAM). -- Steel 18:09, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

User:Albertotineo10. --Rschen7754 (talk - contribs) 04:47, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

We are changing the site-wide settings just because of one user? Kavadi carrier 06:01, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

No, because of the many like him. --Rschen7754 (talk - contribs) 18:42, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

It's BRIGHT orange. It's bold. It shows up on every Misplaced Pages page until you deal with it. How more obvious can it be. If a user appears to not be reading their messages, then either a) they don't want to or b) they have read them and have chosen not to respond. Users that are so dense as to not be able to figure out what that means aren't aware enough to be much a harm to wikipedia anyways. --Jayron32 06:14, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Rschen, I fail to see how that is evidence for anything, other than that the user clearly doesn't want to discuss whatever he's doing. That user was left his first message on the 12th September. Are you suggesting that in two months he's not once clicked the bright orange banner which won't go away? -- Steel 15:30, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

• It's not explainable otherwise. --Rschen7754 (talk - contribs) 18:42, 10 November 2006 (UTC)
  • Sure it is. He read the warnings, said "screw you guys, I'll do whatever I want" and continues to vandalise. He may have stopped reading his talk page because it contains nothing but dozens of vandal warnings, but really, if it contained dozens of vandal warnings, is this a user we want around? --Jayron32 04:57, 11 November 2006 (UTC)
• Not to be blunt, but this is a change for change's sake, and that pretty much gives the impression that we believe that users are dolts who should be using Microsoft Bob. Also, remember that no one reads the manual, so we should be trying to make that bar shorter, not something like:

Titoxd 08:07, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

Criteria for AfD

I recently nominated an article for deletion (AfD) based on the criteria under "Conflict of Interest" which appeared to be an acceptable category under which an article could be nominated. However, during the discussion (discussion: ), several contributors pointed-out that although the "Misplaced Pages:Deletion policy" page gives Conflict of Interest as a reason for AfD, the page itself under Conflict of Interest specifically states that notability is the only issue for AfD, not conflict of interest. Thus, it seems that there is some ambiguity or conflicting information in the guidelines for AfD. I'm requesting discussion over whether it appears to others that the criteria need to be clarified or not in regard to this issue. Cla68 02:17, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

• It depends on the circumstances. If an employee of a big corporation writes an article on that corp, that's a conflict of interest and arguably gives a POV article - and the response is to rewrite the article (from scratch if necessary). If a Joe Average writes an article about himself, that's also a conflict of interest, and since nobody much cares about Joe we delete the article about him per WP:BIO. >Radiant< 14:04, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Don't be a dick as a component of WP:TRI

Heh, I don't clearly understand the don't be a dick case, namely the goal of its existence. Why its corollaries are Be civil, Keep your cool, assume good faith and avoid personal attacks since the principle contradicts all of them? :) --Brand спойт 03:14, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

if you are referring to the title of the guideline, i think that it sums up the aims quite succinctly; there are far, far more offensive things on the internet than the word 'dick'; and they can be found quite unintentionally by a google image search. --Kaini 03:19, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Since the don't be a dick is a part of WP:TRI (which is in turn among Wiki's basic info) I personally don't understand how this principle could be a "basic social policy", which as stated has no definition. Currently a significant part of the principle drops out of NPOV and has an ambiguous character. The renaming discussion seems to be ceased. --Brand спойт 03:49, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

the title of the guideline transgresses linguistic boundaries pretty well though, and therefore makes the meaning far more apparent to a wider audience than an alternative phrasing. if you understand the meaning of the word 'dick' in the perjorative sense, then you understand the policy. far more people understand 'don't be a dick' than understand 'don't engage in personal attacks, don't make articles or edits in order to prove a point, and apologize if you're wrong'. i think that the guideline in question gets across a relevant point in a very efficient way, personally. --Kaini 04:22, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Though I support the statement that Wiki is not censored, in this case I don't think it's the way of keeping such a title only because it has a fixed linguistic boundaries thus making the meaning far more apparent. It simply looks like an appealing to vulgarity. Apparently a much more laconic and appropriate title for this policy exists. BTW, of course there are far more offensive words on the web, but it's only a kind of one trash. In my opinion the policy should be finally renamed and the content partially revised. --Brand спойт 05:03, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

It would lose something if you tried to be tactful about it. The lack of any tact is what gives it its effectiveness. "Don't be a dick" is far more effective than, say, "Please stop acting like a child" or "Quit being a douche." – Someguy0830 (T | C) 08:38, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

I personally like the "don't be a dick" line. It encompasses a lot of stuff in one simple sentence that cuts right to the point, although it does boaderline rudeness. If you're confused about it, have you actually read the "don't be a dick" page? (http://meta.wikimedia.org/Don%27t_be_a_dick) --`/aksha 08:51, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Don't be a dick is a very important rule but note that asking somebody to follow it is "something of a dick-move in itself". I think it's really important for me to keep the rule in mind, though, and try to follow it to the best of my ability. All of us act like dicks from time to time; we need to minimize that.

The page says "dick" because that's what you shouldn't be: a dick. "Dick" has a highly specific meaning, although very hard to define. We've all met full-time dicks; you can hardly go out in the world and do business for a day without running into one. Your boss may be a dick; just being a boss tends to bring out dickness. Dicks are worse than, say, jerks; the latter may just be sort of stupid and careless; dicks are deliberately annoying. No other Anglo-Saxon word has quite the same flavor.

The most important thing to remember is: "If you've been labeled as a dick, especially if you have been told this by several people in a particular community, it might be wise to consider the possibility that it is true." This applies to all of us, everywhere, at all times. John Reid ° 09:53, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

I've read the page completely and agree that the lack of tact gives the effectiveness, but it's a vague effectiveness, which as I think shouldn't be used as a policy. The "don't be a dick" may be used as an essay, but not as a component of WP:TRI in its present form (especially while asserting that it is very hard to define). Of course being a boss or someone like him tends to bring out dickness, but Wikipedians are neither bosses nor any other kind to which the word "dick" could be applied by default. So I think that the statements like "if a significant number of reasonable people suggest, whether bluntly or politely, that you are being a dick, the odds are good that you are not entirely in the right" and "if you've been labeled as a dick, especially if you have been told this by several people in a particular community, it might be wise to consider the possibility that it is true" are simply ridiculous (mainly because Wikipedians should not label any particular Wikipedian as a "dick"). The dick policy may apply to all of its adherents. I'm out of them and personally like what Jimbo once said: "Here we are Wikipedians, which means: thoughtful, loving, neutral". --Brand спойт 16:32, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

I think the dick rule is important, but its mention on TRI needs to be reworded to avoid saying "policy". "A general community consensus" perhaps? EVula 16:44, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

One problem with the admonition is that it's US English, and so may be either confusing or more offensive than it's meant to be to speakers of other forms of English. For example, its most obvious British English equivalent has an undertone of agression that may not be present in the US form. Another problem is that it's the kind of adolescant invective I'd expect from a nerd who spends too much time of his time on Misplaced Pages. But that might just be a problem of translation. Countersubject 17:05, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

It might offend some Americans, too. Don't be dense might be a better way to go. --SB_Johnny||_books 20:32, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Ugh, do we really need to be frightened of maybe offending some Americans with "dick"? I'm from the U.S., and it doesn't offend me at all. "Dense" doesn't have anywhere near the same punch as "dick" does. EVula 21:36, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Apparently the US usage in particular doesn't reflect a global point of view. As I suspect, a significant part of non-native English speakers could be surprised the "don't be a dick" being a policy. The point is rewording to avoid saying policy, as EVula has wrote above. I know that I'm probably in minority and that the revision might be painful to the policy's adherents, but would like to know the opinions on that. --Brand спойт 22:02, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Oh I agree totally... I don't find it offensive either. I was responding to the previous comment which said it might be offensive to non-Americans.

There is a certain gracefulness in going with dense rather than dick though, since if someone's a dick calling them a dick isn't going to be helpful (since dicks are dicks and pointing that out is just asking for further dickery), but if you point out that someone's being dense, they might be more likely to say "what makes you say that?", rather than "yo mamma". --SB_Johnny||_books 21:47, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

I'm not a prude about language in general, but in a world where tempers can easily flare (read: Misplaced Pages), why go out of our way to couch it in such an abrupt fashion? As someone noted, it tends to evoke the response, "Yo mama" (or the equivalent), which isn't useful. I wouldn't say it in front of my grandmother, or my mother, or my children. Profanity and/or "colorful language" has its place, but in controversy and argument, I feel that it becomes a species of emotional violence to use it. -- PKtm 22:02, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, I think that's the thing. I'd say that to my friends when appropriate, but I wouldn't say it to someone in the supermarket without being ready for a brawl. I probably wouldn't say "don't be dense", either: maybe the best policy would be "Oh give me a break, man!". --SB_Johnny||_books 22:07, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

I agree with the above concerns, I don't think it's a very clever page - it contradicts WP:AGF - and, as Countersubject notes, it carries an undertone of aggression in British English that may not be known to US editors, where different words have different powers of offense. Basically, if one stranger in the UK said to another "don't be a dick" - that's a pretty offensive statement quite likely to lead to a smack in the face! The bottom line is that such sentiments do little to improve editorial harmony.--Zleitzen 22:17, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

"Don't be dense" just doesn't work here. Denseness refers to your intellect, not your attitude, and I don't think we have a better word for the attitude problem it describes that isn't even more offensive. --tjstrf Now on editor review! 22:20, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

One solution would be to phrase it positively rather than negatively. I vote for Misplaced Pages:Be excellent to each other. -GTBacchus 22:24, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

That sounds like something out of the King James Version... just a step below Misplaced Pages:Thou shalt not be a stumbling block to the brethren. The point of the phrasing is that it be a non-esoteric policy. The major policies such as WP:NPOV, WP:RS, WP:CIVIL, etc. all assume you know a bit about Misplaced Pages, or at least the internet, in order to properly comprehend them. WP:DICK is the absolute entry level of policy. You can't misconstrue the meaning of "Don't be a dick" the same way you can misconstrue the Undue weight policy, for instance. --tjstrf Now on editor review! 23:37, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Actually, it's straight out of Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. I don't see how it's possible to misconstrue a rule that says "hey, treat each other excellently!" Apparently the way it's couched as a "Do Not" offends some people, so I'm saying why not couch it as a "Do" instead? Is that a bad idea? Is "treat each other well" actually esoteric? Does anybody think that being a dick is an example of treating each other excellently? -GTBacchus 01:04, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

In reply to the original posting by Brandmeister... If one is applying WP:DICK to others, then it is indeed a violation of AGF, CIVIL, NPA and COOL. (It even says that calling someone a dick is itself a dick move.) If one is applying it to oneself though, then it doesn't fall afoul of any of those. Indeed, all of those corollary policies are undermined if they're used as accusations against others, and they all find their correct expression in rigorous application to oneself, even - especially - in cases where one feels that others may be violating them. This should perhaps be clarified somewhere? -GTBacchus 22:17, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, that's the point, GTBacchus. --Brand спойт 23:39, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

This discussion is either very funny or very sad. See irony. I'd also suggest see wanker, but the argument might seem a little circular ... Countersubject 23:28, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Pfft, forget all the above. I officially subscribe to Don't be a fucking douchebag instead. EVula 05:07, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

That's helpful :). What about something like Be bold in rethinking? --SB_Johnny||_books 11:20, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Actually, here's a draft... Misplaced Pages:Be bold in rethinking. Could be a start to a positive version of the policy? --SB_Johnny||_books 11:39, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

WRT to dickery: Wasn't it Oliver Wendell Holmes who said "I can't define obscenity, but I know it when I see it."?? The same could be applied to Don't be a Dick: It is why it is left undefined. We all know what a "dick" is; if you hear that someone else is called a "dick", you have a pretty good idea in mind about their behavior. We all have the same basic ideas in mind. If someone calls you a dick, you know exactly what they are accusing you of. There is a community concensus on civil behavior, behaviours outside of the norm are considered dickish. The policy is concise, to the point, and unambiguous, even if undefinable. We can't define dickish behavior, but we all know it when we see it. To define it is to inadequately capture it. A comprehensive list of dickish behaviors would never capture the whole nature of dickery. It's a very Gestalt thing. --Jayron32 06:09, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Removal of Template:Wr warning templates

This series of templates was just removed, but I cannot find the discussion where it was decided to remove them. --ArmadilloFromHell 15:35, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

It was a somewhat out-of-process speedy. It's currently discussed on WP:AN. Fut.Perf. ☼ 15:39, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

I'm definitely left confused as to why they were deleted, when an August discussion voted to keep them. --ArmadilloFromHell 16:02, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

The short answer is that they stem from a proposal that has failed 4 times to be pushed into policy. The templates were deleted under CSD T1: divisive and inflammatory. John Reid ° 06:24, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

See the comments on the Administrator's Noticeboard. It was deleted, IMHO, a bit out of process, and perhaps restored in a likewise manner. But the admins are showing restraint by not getting into a wheel war over the issue. -Patstuart 06:29, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

AFAIK it's always been a fairly contentious issue. It's hard to tell people that their talkspace is not necessarily their own. I usually try to check the page history before leaving a message, but it's not always possible. I'll miss wr. riana_dzasta 06:33, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Disambigs for very similar names

Is there a pre-existing policy for disambig pages where people have names that

• sound identical but are spelled differently, or
• are not identical in spelling, but are liable to be confused anyway?

Reason I ask is that I noticed there were two disambig pages for Charles Gray and Charles Grey. Neither of them linked to the other(!), so I added mutual links.

However, disambig pages are meant as navigation aids (not lists of identically-named things), so is it a good idea to have one for each minor spelling difference when people are unlikely to know which one they want anyway? Or should there just be one (e.g. for both spellings of "Charles Gray")?

Fourohfour 16:18, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

I'd say merge the pages, and have one redirect to the other (doesn't matter which). Carcharoth 16:29, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

If they're very large pages, then don't merge them. But if they're shorter pages, and they're minor spelling variations, then sure, go ahead and merge them. --Interiot 17:54, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

That's what I was thinking; a "common sense" approach bearing in mind the purpose of a disambig page. While I could have rushed off and done several, I wanted some sort of semi-formal consensus first. That way I could be sure I wasn't wasting my time with something the majority of editors disagreed with (and possibly for good reasons; another benefit of asking here is that it gives others the chance to spot any snags or drawbacks I'd overlooked). Fourohfour 19:47, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Personally, I'd leave them separate and use a "See also" section (see WP:MOSDAB for the recommended style). In other words, I'd do what you originally did, but formatted a little different. You're correct that some people might not know which spelling they are looking for, but other people will know. I think the odds of confusing people are more likely by merging them then having the link to the other page which they can follow. -- JLaTondre 23:54, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Biblical citations-- reference section or included in text

Does Misplaced Pages have a policy or guideline on whether or not to include bible verse citations in the reference section along with other references, or whether to just list them inside parentheses.

In most print biblical scholarship, cites are usually provided like this:

"Luke-Acts devotes a great deal of attention to women in general (Luke 1, 2) and to widows in particular (Luke 2:37; 4:25-26; 7:12; 18:3, 5; 20:47; 21:2-3)"

The alternative would be to treat them like normal references:

"Luke-Acts devotes a great deal of attention to women in general and to widows in particular "

The parenthetical style has the advantage of it being easier to view the citations-- you don't have to click on the link to see the cite. The hypertext style has the advantage of being much more readable-- when you have a paragraph full of cites, it can get a little difficult to follow the sentence itself.

Which way should we do things? Is there any kind of style guide specifying? --Alecmconroy 23:08, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

• Well first of the bat your citing analysis. You can't use the book itself, otherwise its original research because it's like saying the book analyzed itself. You need to get a source that analyzes Luke-Acts as "devoting alot of attention to women in general". On the other hand, if you quoting a text from the bible then yes you should cite the book as a footnote. Did that make sense? - Tutmosis 23:21, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, I should have picked a better example. I thought about that before I posted it, but.. I was lazy. That sentence does need a "real cite", in addition to the biblical citations. I think it's okay to have the biblical cites too, just in case someone wants to look at the specific instances, but as is, I would consider the sentence "uncited" until we get a cite that says what the sentence itself actually says.

So, is there anything I could point to in order to convince people that we should footnote the biblical cites? I find that some people are really attached to the parenthetical citations and object to them being placed in footnotes.

--Alecmconroy 00:08, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

It seems that the use of footnotes would be technically correct, in keeping with WP:MOS. --Doc Tropics 00:14, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

My understanding of the manner to present any quotation is to simply quote this is a quote,<ref>''name of book'', page number publisher</ref>. And the reason for that is the flow of the article. A reader gets his example right there and doesn't have to search around, but can explore further. However, in some instances, the second use of quotation would make a smoother reading, easier to understand article. So, it depends on style and content. It depends on an editor's understanding of the reader. It depends on what will best communicate the information to the reader. Terryeo 00:49, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Too quick to delete? Concerns with AfD trends

I think that some are being too quick to delete articles. If NOBODY sees merit in an article, well okay, but if even a couple of people find an article useful and intriguing, keeping it is less likely to do harm than not having it. I have noticed this too quick to delete trend on many articles that could have value if improved and that I in particular like. I always thought that the purpose of encyclopedias is to catalog human knowledge. Why limit ourselves? Blatantly false articles, I can understand as having no useful place here, but many lists are helpful an convenient, especially for those of us who simply don't have time to search through multiple articles. I realize Misplaced Pages must have some kind of server limits, but nevertheless many of the deletions will end up discouraging serious contributors, especially when some of the pro-deletion comments are insulting in nature. A lot of pages could be improved, but I whole-heartedly believe we should not be "delete happy." Have a pleasant week and best regards, --Le Grand Roi des Citrouilles 01:24, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

I do think people are a little too quick, as well. That being said, if there are 10 people who want to delete, and 2 or 3 who are for it, should that mean no consensus? Do we really want to go off the other end? -Patstuart 01:29, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Well, maybe we should go with something along the lines of it not taking a simple majority of votes, but rather something like 2/3 votes for an article to be deleted? I don't know how many people actually visit Misplaced Pages, but a vote in either direction could represent an actual percentage of users far beyond the number who actually vote on the AfD. For all we know, 2 or 3 people who vote for a people might actually represent hundreds or thousands who casually came across on article and enjoyed it or found it useful, but weren't around to notice the sudden deletion tag. --Le Grand Roi des Citrouilles 01:34, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Often times, those for delete will often have a concise and convincing arguement for deleting said article. I've noticed that people voting keep, Le Grand here in particular (just read his talk page logs), do not. This is usually why delete will come out on top. – Someguy0830 (T | C) 01:32, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

I've greatly improved on my comments for keeping articles after the mass attacks and vandalism to my talk page. We all have to start figuring this out somehow . . . And most of those I've seen for delete have in fact provided arguments like "sucks" and the like, which is hardly convincing . . . --Le Grand Roi des Citrouilles 01:36, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Because of the repeated vandalism to your talk page, I made a link from it to this discussion to prevent this topic to being "all about you." I hope that you approve, Monsieur! --172.148.94.163 03:15, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Log in when talking about yourself. Hiding behind an IP won't help. – Someguy0830 (T | C) 03:30, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

I do log in when I talk about myself. I use multiple computers, mostly public and in multiple cities (I travel A LOT!), and so please don't confuse all of the anonymous IPs with me. There might be a moment here and there where I forget to log in, but many times, you could just be seeing whoever is on the computer after me. Thanks! --Le Grand Roi des Citrouilles 03:58, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

So several different IPs just happen to find your talk page and revert it in the same manner? Give people a little credit. It's quite clear you're using IPs as sockpuppets. It won't work. – Someguy0830 (T | C) 04:00, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Don't give me too much credit! Anyway, Kavadi carrier, who seems to be a reputable user, said that "if the user sees these are excessive, s/he can remove them himself." I agree that the comments are the same thing over and over about my early comments on the topics, which are now irrelevant, because I've read them, responded, and now contribute different as a result. Therefore, I am following Kavadi carrier's instructions regarding my talk page and am cleaning it up accordingly. Please don't contradict each other! Best, --Le Grand Roi des Citrouilles 04:12, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

The whole prinicipal of deletion is to uphold WP:N and WP:NOT. Whether the article is "intriguing" or not has nothing do with deletion. - Tutmosis 01:36, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Okay, but based on many of the pro-delete comments, those wanting deletions simply don't like certain articles. --Le Grand Roi des Citrouilles 01:40, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Le Grand, I strongly suggest you read the actual deletion policy found here and other relevant material found here. JoshuaZ 01:38, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

I have and I still think many are too quick to delete without providing solid reasons and that there's a tendency to jump on certain proponents of articles. Thanks for the links, though! --Le Grand Roi des Citrouilles 01:40, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

I don't think that there's serious evidence that AfD is delete happy. We already have default keep when no consensus is reached and admins will often claim no consensus when enough editors have shown interest in the article, unless these editors are supporting the keep on the basis of principle (you know, those "all X are inherently notable"). Pascal.Tesson 01:39, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Is there too much of a trend then to submit articles for deletion? --Le Grand Roi des Citrouilles 01:41, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Nope. Things are working by and large just fine. JoshuaZ 01:42, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

I have to disagree, especially when articles are voted to be kept and then renominated to be deleted. This strikes me as some having an agenda against certain articles. My principal concerns are that visitors and even editors will be turned off by having articles they spend time working on or enjoy being deleted by perhaps a handful of individuals who just don't like the article. --Le Grand Roi des Citrouilles 01:44, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Calls for deletion from "individuals who just don't like the article" will generally be unsuccesful. There is no rule against renominating since circumstances can change and even with the same circumstances, the prevailing attitudes may have changed. JoshuaZ 01:53, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

I suppose it's just maddeningly frustrating when I visit an article, which I, my family, and/or friends find useful in whatever context and then all of a sudden, it's gone! For example, the original version of the article on American Idol Finalists' Album Sales (not the one deleted the second time) provided a clear sense of how successful the contestants were, but the article was deleted, re-created in a not quite as good fashion and then deleted again. I can understand the second deletion much more than the first. The deletion of the RMS Aquaculture article also baffled me in that the chain has been around for several years has had stores in around five or six different locations had a nationwide online store either had or was in negotiations for a fish farm in Mexico and so seemed more than just some minor local business. I was more recently horrified to see the fictional battles and wars and the proposed state of Superior articles being nominated for deletion. --Le Grand Roi des Citrouilles 01:56, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Do you have specific examples of this? JoshuaZ 02:01, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Yes, see my revised post above. Thanks! --Le Grand Roi des Citrouilles 02:03, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

The best way to get articles kept is to improve them, especially by adding references. People are much more likely to want to delete a poorly formatted, incoherent article with 5 cleanup tags on it than they are a clean, well-referenced one. Also, making good arguments is critical to getting an article kept (or conversly, deleted). The days of widespread support for keeping everything mostly for the sake of including as many articles as possible are gone... now the focus is more on quality than quantity. So provide quality, and it's still easy to include articles on most topics. --W.marsh 02:04, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

AfD is not a vote. Nominations with insufficient interest, or opinions that don't supply a rational reason, should be ignored by the closing admin. If they're not doing so, take the admin to task for it. Deco 02:07, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

AfD is not a vote? Gee golly I wish I'd heard that before I closed a thousand AfDs or so! --W.marsh 02:11, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

I wasn't responding to you, W.Marsh, but to the OP. :-) Blame wikithreads. Deco 08:21, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Out of curiosity, how much server space does Misplaced Pages have left versus how much has been used thus far? --Le Grand Roi des Citrouilles 02:29, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages isn't running out of disk space any time soon, it's not even an issue. Deleted articles stay on the servers anyway, as they're viewable to admins. Inclusion standards aren't about preserving disk space though. --W.marsh 02:33, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Okay, but does anyone know how much disk space something like Misplaced Pages actually has? How much bigger can this site get, especially with all of the archived material? --Le Grand Roi des Citrouilles 02:35, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

I'm using up the last few bytes as I t.y...p..e....<end> <no space left> <cucumber error> <reboot universe>. Carcharoth 02:43, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

A useful link is Misplaced Pages:Don't worry about performance. Carcharoth 02:43, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Server storage space is not a problem... in other words. Look at our server list... add up all those gigabytes, and consider that the entire current database could fit on a single one of those drives. --W.marsh 02:51, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

As has been said many times before, disk space is not the resource that we need to worry about: for all practical purposes, it's limitless. But every article requires time and effort to maintain and that is not a resource we have unlimited amounts of. Pascal.Tesson 03:03, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

And every worthless article makes Misplaced Pages worth less. Postdlf 03:42, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Wow! This discussion really took off! I whole-heartedly agree that false and/or defamatory articles do not help. I'm more concerned about factually articles created with good intentions that might get lossed in the shuffle. Have a pleasant night! --Le Grand Roi des Citrouilles 04:00, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

You appear to have tried to vote twice at this AfD, once while logged in and once while not. Please don't do this again, as it's not allowed. You may express your opinion and respond to comments, but casting multiple votes is against the rules. BigHaz - Schreit mich an 05:38, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

If I voted twice, then that was unintentional. We are able to respond to other votes and comments, though, correct, i.e. to discuss the topic? --Le Grand Roi des Citrouilles 12:38, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

In response to your question, yes - I said as much. There's nothing wrong with responding to people's voting rationales (if they say there are no sources, provide a source, if they say something might need attention by someone who speaks Swahili and you do so, then use your language skills to help out) and adding comments to the discussion. To say, however, that your duplicate vote was "unintentional" appears to be somewhat disingenuous. The comment and subsequent "keep" vote was made by an anonymous user (User:172.148.28.36), who gave every indication that s/he was unrelated to you. I responded to his/her advocation of a keep and you answered. The fact that the same anonymous editor made various edits to your userpage along similar lines to ones you have made when logged in makes it quite clear that he's simply you when not logged in. There's little or no indication that this was an "unintentional" duplicate vote, which was why I mentioned it on your Talk page. Making it more public was not my intention, but in order to support my claims I submit the following diffs from the AfD in question: the first appearance of the anon, my response to the anon, your response to my question to the anon. Also see the anon's contribution list. BigHaz - Schreit mich an 12:59, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

I do notice that sometimes when I edit, I seem to be logged out (even though I logged in earlier) and then have to re-log in. Please don't jump on the conspiracy bandwagon here. I'm giving the AfDs a rest for now anyway. Have a pleasant day! --Le Grand Roi des Citrouilles 13:06, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

If all that you did was add a comment here and there, I wouldn't "jump on the conspiracy bandwagon". The point that I'm making is that that's not all you've done. You have in fact pretended to be somebody else (an anonymous IP) in a discussion. AfD procedures are clear enough that you should know that, logged in or not, you get one "vote" only. "Voting" again, whether pretending not to be yourself or not, shouldn't even cross your mind - and yet there's yet another occasion on which you appear to have done this (this conclusion reached by looking at the contribs, Le Grand Roi not having identified himself in this case). BigHaz - Schreit mich an 13:13, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Again, any posts by me while not logged on were purely accidental. There's always the "Oh, I haven't logged in yet" mistake after making a post and moreover I use public computers a lot and so a good deal of IPs that I use are used by others as well. I recall someone trying to pin an AOL IP on me when I don't even have an AOL email! --Le Grand Roi des Citrouilles 13:17, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

That would be reasonable if all you did was add a comment. But you didn't. What you in fact did was vote twice in two AfDs, on one occasion pretending to be someone else. This "somebody else" then did a series of things identical to what you do. You either have a doppelganger or it was you all along. Those are the only two explanations I can think of. BigHaz - Schreit mich an 13:23, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

My friend, this is a dead issue and we're starting to just go around in circles. --Le Grand Roi des Citrouilles 13:29, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

This is far from a dead issue. As the administrator who issued Grand Roi block warning earlier today - a warning which has already been blanked - I'm quite interested in this accusation of double voting. Please respond to the request at WP:RFI with relevant page diffs. Durova 16:28, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Stick a fork in this issue, because it is indeed done. I checked the user’s talk page who everyone is flaming and see that the guy is gone for like a month anyway. He says it’s for work, but who knows; maybe the haters bullied him away for awhile. Let’s stick to the real question at hand, whether or not people are getting rid of good and popular articles too quickly, and not get sidetracked needlessly. Or we can just talk about who everyone voted for in the American elections today . . . (Ducks!) As to my eight cents, I think some articles are laughable, but yeah, I’m sure some semi-popular ones might be getting mowed down as well. Maybe the criteria for deletion should just be re-evaluated? Smell ya later! --64.12.116.200 21:03, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

There's always Misplaced Pages:Deletion review. Fagstein 05:58, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Total nonsequitor, but I know one thing that often results from an AFD is "transwiki to wikibooks". As one of the people responsible for the transwikiing, deleting and userifying is a really bad idea. Locking the article would be better (has no effect on import), and even blanking in favor of a soft redirect for a month or so might be a good idea since it would let contributors find where their contributions went.

If something has to be moved in a hurry, just list it on WB:RFI.--SB_Johnny||_books 18:07, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Le Grand Roi, I find it hard to believe that your talkpage is targeted so frequently by IPs. We have many long-standing contributors here who are not targeted as much. IPs appear to follow your edits, too, and you appear to follow theirs. I'm following your RFI with interest. But I digress.

AfD is definitely not delete-happy. I myself have brought an article to AfD where the result was a unanimous keep (I was unaware of ongoing policy discussion). The point of having a system like AfD is to generate discussion and consensus. If not, one would tag everything with {{prod}} or {{db}}. Alternately, we'd all be handed a delete tab.

The thing is, if an article is brought to AfD, it's usually done so by a user experienced enough to know what does/does not belong on the encyclopedia. Server-space is irrelevant. The guidelines for inclusion are clearly set out in WP:space; if the article does not adhere to these, it can and should be removed sooner or later. riana_dzasta 18:58, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Wow, that's a lot to read. Unfortunately, what I got out of this was:

1. - Deleting articles makes inclusionists sad
2. - Worthless articles and vanispamcruft are okay to keep since 'someone created them'.
3. - Anyone who puts an article up for AfD or votes to delete is evil.

• rolls eyes* See, this is why Deletionists don't listen to Inclusionists. Saying an article can be made better is fine and good -- but how often IS the article made better? IS Misplaced Pages really served by having massive listings of crap alongside the real articles?

Everytime someone takes up Jimbo's offer of 'an encyclopedia anyone can edit' they're going out on faith, trying to help. In theory. In fact, lots of articles are made that simply do - not - belong. Saying AfD is too delete happy dodges the issues.

A good way to look at AfD is look at how many get posted to Misplaced Pages:Deletion review and overturned. Show us the proof that AfD is too trigger happy with lots of overturns and I'll buy this argument and hand you my delete-key emblazoned Deletionist Membership Card.

Oh. The comment 'The point of having a system like AfD is to generate discussion and consensus. If not, one would tag everything with {{prod}} or {{db}}. Alternately, we'd all be handed a delete tab' made me giggle with glee. --Shrieking Harpy 06:08, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

AFD is completely broken. Encyclopedic content is constantly destroyed simply because people think it's in the "wrong place". It's an abuse of the system and a betrayal of our audience. Kappa 06:22, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

WTF? Look, just because, as an inclusionist, you think it's okay to deprod everything, to keep every page of every band's song as a service to "audience" and the like does not mean that actually is reality. What's broken is the rationale that some people seem to have which says "keep everything, even if it's worthless, since there is a 0.00000000001% someone might make this article better." I'm tired of seeing AfD votes with "Keep , rewrite" or "Keep, expand" and 4 months later nothing has been done to the article, and it goes to AfD again, and you same people vote the same way. When I do the Random Article test I want to cry because I get things like GamerNode, University Mall (Little Rock, Arkansas), and BZPower. Misplaced Pages is an encyclopedia, not toilet paper. --Shrieking Harpy 15:34, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Sorry if it was too rough... :) I don't mind inclusionists who offer to improve articles to save them from deletion (like TruthbringerToronto). I do object to keep !votes like "oooer, title made me laugh" or "my friends and family enjoyed it". We're not YouTube. riana_dzasta 06:22, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

• AfD doesn't work perfectly, and no system would work perfectly with so many diverse contributors. I don't find it a big problem that there are usually a few people voting to keep like Le Grand Roi who disregard WP's core policies, and a few people like Kappa whose interpretation of those policies differ widely from the consensus of the project's founders. Nor do I find it a big problem that there are usually a few people voting to delete because they don't like a topic or haven't done a minute of research to find the supporting sources that exist but aren't yet in the article. There are generally enough people who understand WP:WWI/WP:WWIN and the "Five Pillars" to get each nomination considered reasonably. A few mistakes are made, and deletion review usually works well enough to correct most real AfD mistakes. I haven't seen a proposal for an alternative which would work any better. WP is not an unedited collection of everything anyone feels like sticking in, and WP is not an "experts-only" work where you need to be accepted by an elite circle to contribute. There are projects like both of those, mostly freeloading on our past work, and frankly none have become nearly as valuable as Misplaced Pages. One reason WP is valuable is that unencyclopedic content is usually deleted if noone fixes it up and shows it to be encyclopedic. Barno 16:42, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

• One case of AfD getting it wrong recently was mentioned (by me) here. But that was a mistake of insufficient (or non-existent) research into the history of the article, which would have uncovered a previous version that was acceptable. Not a case of imbalanced voting, but voting on the wrong version of the article. Carcharoth 17:10, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

New policy proposal on schools.

See WP:SCHOOLS3. JoshuaZ 01:53, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

It is interesting to note...

Many articles in Misplaced Pages contain the phrase "it is interesting to note...". Perhaps I'm being nitpicky, but that doesn't seem NPOV. Who it to decide what is interesting? The "interestingness" of something is completely subjective. Encyclopedias shouldn't tell us what is interesting and what is not. I propose that all such instances be replaced with "it may be noted that...". --Munchkinguy 04:48, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

The two aren't semantically identical. I think the first is generally used to suggest that the "interesting" information being noted contradicts or undermines the previous statement, almost like a "However, ..." ("Bush urged private citizens to house Katrina refugees. It is interesting to note that Bush did not offer to host anyone at his 2,000 acre private ranch.") I don't think "It may be noted that..." has the same suggestion; by contrast it seems like an attempt to make the instant statement more tentative, as if you're hesitant to advance it. But both are probably surplus verbage, to be edited out based on the surrounding context. Postdlf 05:02, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

I delete 'em all. "It is interesting..." -- let the reader decide it's interesting. "It may be noted that..." -- excuse me, if it may be noted, then note it, and once you've done so, you don't need to announce that it may be noted. "Interestingly and ironically, it should be noted that..." --jpgordon 05:04, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

(edit conflict)

Go ahead and be bold. My guess that it is in imitation of the 1911 Britannica, or perhaps even leftover text from when articles were often just copies of the public-domain edition, and "It may be noted that..." has the same antique flavor. In many cases, such phrases are just fluff that can be dispensed with. In other cases, something more direct would be preferable. If many students find the concept difficult because it is counterintuitive, then call it counterintuitive. If the point has important consequences, say so: "This lemma has important consequences." If someone notable has called the point surprising or interesting, then quote them: "Edward Witten has called this the most unexpected result since energy quantization." Robert A.West (Talk) 05:10, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

As a professor once told me, if something "is interesting enought to note" then this is assumed by mentioning it and so calling it "interesting" is usually not necessary. Similarly, if something is noteworthy, then that is why you're including a mention of it. Telling the reader it's noteworthy is not necessary. --Le Grand Roi des Citrouilles 12:41, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Just delete it. If it's not noteworthy it shouldn't be here in the first place.--SidiLemine 13:17, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Well, to be pedantic, I wouldn't call the precise average molar mass of Oxygen, for example, particularly interesting. (The way it's derived from the isotopic masses and abundances, and the way those are determined, could be more interesting, if we went into any detail on that.) But we still note it, since it may be useful to some people. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 15:59, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

• See also Misplaced Pages:Avoid weasel words. >Radiant< 13:58, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

OhmyNews and WP:V

By chance I've stumbled about using OhmyNews as reference for Misplaced Pages articles. As OhmyNews accept, edit and publish articles from its readers, in an open source style of news reporting I see its value as a source as rather minimal. It's like using Misplaced Pages as source, only worse.

A quick check revealed quite a number of articles linking to ohmynews.com, I'm tempted to delete all of them:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/search/?title=Special%3ALinksearch&target=*.ohmynews.com

Pjacobi 09:35, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

The articles are vetted by paid staff who work for the company - it's not completely open source (in the way that Wikinews is). I don't know if it would qualify as a reliable source though; it depends on how accurately they check the facts. Trebor 16:51, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Ingredients in confectionery bar articles

Are there any policies (beyond the general "What Misplaced Pages is/is not")- or even policy discussions- that can shed light upon whether or not it is acceptable to have lists of ingredients in articles such as Snickers and Twix? Fourohfour 14:07, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

• Misplaced Pages:Avoid trivia sections in articles may be relevant. >Radiant< 14:17, 7 November 2006 (UTC)
  • That's interesting, thanks. However, the issues that concern me are
    • Are ingredients trivia? Their proponents argue that they're important or at least relevant information. I'm not really in favour of their inclusion, but I still don't know if they qualify as trivia.
    • The link you give above says trivia should be merged. But as ingredients lists are completist appendices/lists of organised information that don't belong in the main article (they'd just get in the way), this isn't really a solution. Fourohfour 14:30, 7 November 2006 (UTC)
      • Why not just provide a link to the nutritional info? You need to do that anyway in order to provide a reference for the info. --Milo H Minderbinder 14:46, 7 November 2006 (UTC)
• It might be a good idea to transwiki this stuff, handing it to the recipe project on Wikisource (I think, or was it Wikibooks?) and provide cross-links. --Improv 15:06, 7 November 2006 (UTC)
• Regarding the Snickers#Ingredients section, this seems not OK to me w.r.t. Misplaced Pages:Don't include copies of primary sources, as the content of that "ingredients" section appears copy-pasted from http://global.mms.com/cai/snickers/faq.html#what2 - that webpage is a primary source. --Francis Schonken 15:10, 7 November 2006 (UTC)
  • I concur with Francis's assessment. These are not trivia, unordered lists of unrelated facts. In fact, they're a highly targeted and comprehensive list of items. The issue is that they copy a primary source which may diverge in content at any time. Deco 15:36, 7 November 2006 (UTC)
    • Wouldn't the list of the ingredients on the wrapper be a case of fair use? --SB_Johnny||_books 15:38, 7 November 2006 (UTC)
      • The issue is not one of copyright, but one of sourcing. We prefer secondary sources. >Radiant< 17:00, 7 November 2006 (UTC)
        • Yeah, ingredient lists aren't copyrightable. See Publications Int'l v Meredith Corp., 88 F.3d 473 (7th Cir. 1996) (ruling that non-verbatim copying of recipe was not infringement, because underlying instructions and ingredient list were not copyrightable).
          • IANAL, but as far as Wikipedians might look at it from a copyright slant: for Misplaced Pages:Fair use#Policy you'd need to pass also criteria No. 5, "The material must meet general Misplaced Pages content requirements." - Misplaced Pages:Don't include copies of primary sources is one of these requirements... well, back to where we started... --Francis Schonken 17:13, 7 November 2006 (UTC)
            • I think saying "We prefer secondary sources" is an oversimplification. In this case I don't see any reason not to use the primary source, especially if a secondary source is just going to copy over info from the primary source. The verifiability or accuracy of the ingredient info on the Snickers website isn't in question, is it? And even if it's not copyright infringement, I don't see the point in including text that's nothing more than a copy/paste from another site. If wikipedia isn't going to add anything to that text, why not just link to that info? --Milo H Minderbinder 17:25, 7 November 2006 (UTC)
              • True, the issue is not whether "self-published" sources (the particular kind of primary sources we're talking about here) can be used "in articles about themselves". Well, they can. The issue is whether the text of such sources can be copy-pasted into Misplaced Pages. Well, generally it shouldn't, regardless of copyright issues. Leaves rephrasing and summarizing as allowable techniques to represent the primary source in the Misplaced Pages article. Or indeed, just make a link to the external website. --Francis Schonken 08:21, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

• Another issue is reliablity. I'm not convinced there list of ingredients constitues a reliable source. Companies have been known to lie even in places like the US where there are strict laws. In some countries (like Russia) ingredient lists are highly unreliable. JoshuaZ 08:25, 8 November 2006 (UTC)
  • Well, no, that is not the issue. Even if you'd have a source that contends that the Mars company are lying w.r.t. the ingredients of Snickers, you'd still need to make a reference to what the Mars company itself contends to be the ingredients of Snickers - to contrast that info with what other sources say. That's basic WP:NPOV operations.
    Note that your unreferenced contentions "In some countries (like Russia) ingredient lists are highly unreliable" (etc) are WP:NOR infringements of the worst kind (you present a POV, without providing your fellow-wikipedians a clue how they could verify what you present as a "fact"): we don't base Misplaced Pages on this sort of innuendos.
    And then I'm not yet talking about the extrapolation (also a form of original research) you're making: Encyclopedia Britannica had 123 unreliable statements in 42 articles ("Internet encyclopaedias go head to head" in Nature, December 2005) – we don't extrapolate that to "Encyclopedia Britannica can't be used for references in Misplaced Pages" --Francis Schonken 10:15, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

WP:RFSL

Wikipedians are often involved into long contentious disputes. All forms of dispute resolutions but Arbcom have no teeth - they could not enforce the solutions, so they would not work if the parties do not trust each other. Arbcom is painfully slow and does not scale well with growth of Misplaced Pages. Community ban is fast and effective but works only for simpler cases. I have wrote a proposal for a hybrid between RfC, Arbcom and the Community Ban and named it WP:RFS. It is intended to be am RFC with teeth (or faster Arbcom that works be Admins not by Arbitrators or Community ban with discussions). If works this system would allow to get the main load off Arbcom and use it only for really important or difficult issues. It could also be used for nasty content disputes that are usually rejected by Arbcom. Please review Alex Bakharev 16:01, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

I believe you meant to link to Misplaced Pages:Request for solutions. WP:RFS redirects to the historical page on "requests for summary". I haven't read the proposal yet, just clarifying. Trebor 16:40, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Ok, read it now. I am worried by the amount of power it would give the administrators who would be able to vote to enforce closing bans. This wouldn't (couldn't) have been considered when they went through WP:RFA and would be a significant increase in their capabilities. I'm don't think this can be approved by community consensus either, it would have be approved by Jimmy Wales (like the ArbCom). I am not against another method of enforced dispute resolution in theory (if the ArbCom cannot manage), but this gives too much power to too many people, in my opinion. Trebor 16:59, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

• I have edited a little to show that the results should be on the table for at least a week, so it is impossible for five admin conspirators to endorse a controversial proposal by stealth. I think that 66%+5 super-majority of admin votes make it difficult to abuse. Admins are usually reasonable folks who like to err on the safe side. Alex Bakharev 09:05, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

"Usually" is the bit that worries me. I would be wary of giving this increased power to over 1000 admins. And the similar proposal at Misplaced Pages:Requests for comment/Enforcement was also rejected on these sorts of grounds. And the users who feel hard-done by (which would be almost all who get action taken against them) would appeal to ArbCom (which I assume inherently has more power) thus not reducing the workload of it. That's my view - others may view it differently. Trebor 13:30, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Rollback to the bots!

I propose to let antivandalism bots (Tawkerbot2, etc.) be granted the rollback feature. A proposal made some time ago for giving rollback to people was not been approved, but I believe that its main objections do not apply to bots. These objection were:

1. it's additional bureaucracy
2. if you can be trusted for rollback, you can apply for adminship
3. can be abused (encourages people to use rollback when inappropriate)
4. creates an additional "access level"
5. you can still do this using popups et at.

The first objection does not apply to bots, since there are currently only a handful of antivandalism bots, and requests for rollback can be granted via WP:BRFA as normal bot permission requests. As for the second objection, no bot has so far be granted adminship (even if limited to uncontroversial tasks such as blocking open proxies). The third point does not apply to bot for the obvious reasons that the bot behavior depends on their program and not on their ego. Since bots are generally considered out the "hierarchy" of users (assuming that exists), the fourth objection does not apply as well.

As for the final question "why doing it at all?", it's true that bots can perform rollback; however, rollback would help reducing the load on the server; especially for accounts such as the antivandalism bots that make lot of reversions, this could be overall useful. Tizio, Caio, Sempronio 17:24, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

• You will have to contact the Devs about this since it involves modifying the MediaWiki software. >Radiant< 14:16, 8 November 2006 (UTC)
  • I don't think the actual software needs any (nontrivial, at least) modification for this, just the config. That said, I guess a dev (specifically, someone with shell access) will probably have to be involved at some point, if we decide that this is a good idea. Personally, I'm in favor. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 15:45, 8 November 2006 (UTC)
  • That what I also got at least by reading Wikipedia_talk:Requests_for_rollback_privileges/Archive_2006-01-06#Rollback_group_added and the following section. Once a "rollback" group is added, a steward (not a bureaucrat) can make a user a member of this group. Programming was required to make this ability availiable to bureaucrats; this was considered necessary at the time of the original proposal because of a large number of expected users requesting rollback. It's not necessary now, given the little number of antivandalism bots around. Tizio 16:45, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Policy regarding 'games' hosted on wikipedia

With the recent nomination of Misplaced Pages:Esperanza/Coffee Lounge/Games and Misplaced Pages:Hangman, I believe it is about time that the issue be discussed properly and through out, not on a whim of an afd, with a clear policy coming out of it. Some discussion topics are:

• Should games be allowed at all? Do they violate WP:NOT?
• If games should be allowed, should they be allowed in the wikipedia namespace? user namespace?
• If games should be allowed, should we restrict the type of games allowed?

Please provide your opinion on the issue. Thank you. - Tutmosis 18:01, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

No, anyone who wants to play a game can ask someone on Misplaced Pages to join any of the many chess, checkers, backgammon servers online. Misplaced Pages is a dictionary. —Centrx→talk • 18:05, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

• cough* encyclopaedia *cough* Trebor 18:07, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

In fact, WP is an encyclopedia, but I agree: Games have no place here. It is laughably easy to ask someone to play elsewhere if you need to de-stress. Distraction from actually helping the encyclopedia and violates WP:NOT a place for social networking, or a games website provider. Moreschi 18:12, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

If I might suggest something, we could host most of this games on yahoo for free, and we could use 1 page to organize a time table for tournaments or whatever you guys are currently doing with this pages. This could in a way satisfy both supporters and deletionists of game pages. Or did I miss something? - Tutmosis 18:13, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Why not create a page called "Misplaced Pages based games", and a community (or even just me!) to manage it? This would solve this problem. Or host it off wikipedia, on another site for example, but link to it? Most games could easily be transferred. If you want to play games, go on Miniclip and similar sites. Misplaced Pages is an encyclopedia, a source for information. I know I'm repeating other points, but it needs addressing now, before wikipedia might as well be 'wikigames' You wouldn't expect games in Encarta (microsoft trademark), so why should wikipedia be different? We could go all out and ban games completely, but that could cause an uproar. Misplaced Pages is about everyone, so we need a comparise. Any ideas?Micropw 17:37, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

WP:NOT a gaming server. However, IMO we can keep/allow the few games that actually involve bulding an encyclopedia, like WikiRPG or whatever else people come up with in this mood. Misza13 18:35, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Ditto Misplaced Pages:Wikistory and Misplaced Pages:Wikirace and similar games that use Misplaced Pages functionality. Carcharoth 02:01, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Seems like most agree that majority of games should be deleted. Should we add this to WP:NOT page and work it into policy? I hope I'm not the only one who hates the process of "on a random rainy day, all of sudden someone decides to delete a a project with a long history". Which happened to userboxes, which still hasn't seen a clear policy made, just mass-deletions enforced by democracy (see WP:NOT). Also on the afd, I feel I brought up a valid point which I want answered, How do barnstars help wikipedia and not encourage social networking? - Tutmosis 02:11, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Also Misplaced Pages:Esperanza is pretty much 'social networking' why not delete that too? The point I'm trying to make is we need clear boundaries so we wouldn't need this mass deletion crusades. - Tutmosis 02:14, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Well, I don't use barnstars (I felt uncomfortable about them from the beginning, along with userboxes, and I am still uncomfortable about them), and I'm not a member of Esperanza, so I'm probably not the best person to answer your questions! :-) Carcharoth 02:17, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Um... aren't barnstars generally given for doing good work on the encyclopedia? I would say that barnstars are helpful to morale in a way that is directly related to contributions to the project. They encourage us to work together on the encyclopedia in a spirit of respectful and appreciative camaraderie. They positively reinforce good work on the project. If, on the other hand, barnstars are being given out for actions unrelated to the encyclopedia, I would say that's inappropriate. -GTBacchus 02:21, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Not always. I've seen a barnstar given for having a creative username. ColourBurst 17:20, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Hence my use of the word "generally", and my last sentence. I'm pretty sure 99% of barnstars are given for contributions to the project. If that's not true, it should be. -GTBacchus 21:18, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

I think it's a problem of when social networking becomes loosely related to editing. Here's how I think of it: It's ok to interact and to get to know people (the networking part), but in doing so it should be apart of the making of an encyclopedia. Discussions can find themselves in grey area, and some stuff does get off topic, and that can be ok, but we shouldn't actively seek such activities. -- Ned Scott 02:51, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

What do you mean delete Esperanza and barnstars‽‽‽ Esperanza is to bring together a community. Basically it means strengthening the encyclopedia. The Spanish Misplaced Pages weren't a community so a whole big chunk of Spanish Wikipedians broke off to form Enciclopedia Libre. Esperanzians also make sure that Wikipedians' work feels appreciated. This is done using barnstars. Ok, so maybe some people give away barnstars for just having a creative user name, but we just want to say "well done" to all Misplaced Pages contributors (except vandals etc). Barnstars give it a personal touch. I think that games should stay on Misplaced Pages. Misplaced Pages isn't just about editing tirelessly; it's also about having fun. Games are quite good for passing the time and they don't hurt anybody. Games may not be encyclopedic but as long as this website doesn't somehow turn into Gamepedia, a bit of gaming should be ok. Games generally don't take up that much room and if you want a game that does, try putting it on Uncyclopedia. --lE☺N2323 21:36, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

I think most of these turn-based games should go. However, there are some that seem pretty harmless such as Misplaced Pages:Wikington Crescent or Misplaced Pages:Wikirace (just remove the score keeping). Also, these "games" actually uses articles and could get people to think about how readers might navigate between articles. Some of the "write a story" or "finish this sentence" games might be ok as long as they stay in the sandbox subpages as demonstrations of Wiki editing (and again, remove the archives, we don't need to keep this stuff). That's probably where I'd draw the line. -- Ned Scott 02:28, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Okay so we are getting there, could we put a border around social activities, such "they must be connected with wikipedia in subject matter"? Or does the community see no point in such activies per Carcharoth? - Tutmosis 02:31, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

"per Carcharoth"? I do see a point in some of the activities. I've supported the retention of games using Misplaced Pages as part of the process of the game. Please don't misrepresent my position. I also support other people using barnstars, and I support Esperanza in principle (though I don't intend to join). I do see people awarding barnstars for trivial or irrelevant stuff as ego-inflating or irrelevant, and that can devalue barnstars. I also support off-topic humour when appropriate, as that is invaluable for lightening the atmosphere. ie. Don't be too serious, but don't spend excessive amounts of time playing, joking and socializing. Carcharoth 11:42, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Wiki-related fun is likely ok, but things like turn based games (and/or high edit counts in order to "play"), games that have score keeping or "tournaments", or games that are not Wiki-related at all, are all red flags of going too far. So, yeah, they should definitely be connected with Misplaced Pages, be simple, and have a value other than being a game that contributes to helping build an encyclopedia (other than social networking or a sense of community). -- Ned Scott 02:41, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Personally I agree, of course it's a community decision. Do you think it be best to work something like that into wikipedia policy? So in the future we could just refer to such policy, without having people getting into arguements on afds and possibly leaving wikipedia in anger. - Tutmosis 02:45, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

We do have policy on this in WP:NOT, so I think it would probably be better to make something a guideline. For one the average editor seems to be agreeing with what we're saying, and this isn't a big issue like the userbox dispute, so I don't think we have to "lay down the law" so to speak. Is there an existing guideline that we could attach a note about keeping wiki-fun wiki-related and such? I think a simple paragraph conveying the basic idea would probably be all we need to do. -- Ned Scott 02:58, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

and when I say "no record keeping" I mean avoid things like those extensive game archives in the Coffee Lounge Games MFD. It's probably ok to mention such stuff in discussion, especially when the game is wikirelated, etc. Also, keeping track of things and collaborating for "games" like WikiRPG would definitely be ok, since they're games of collaborative editing, and such. -- Ned Scott 03:04, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Didn't come across any such page. Maybe create one? let's say regarding "Community programs"? - Tutmosis 03:07, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Who cares? — Omegatron 03:07, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

We don't want Misplaced Pages to become a general game playing forum. Nor do we want editors who only play games. That said, I would apply a similar attitude to what we say about user pages that have a lot of not Misplaced Pages-german material. As long as the users in question are making productive edits we should give them a fair bit of leeway about minor things like this. I do however, agree that game archives are in any event not good. JoshuaZ 03:11, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

"As long as the users in question are making productive edits..." What are we, the Wiki-Gestapo now? Are we going to start monitoring everyone's usage? Spying on users to see where they're making edits, and if they're being "productive enough"? Clearly, Misplaced Pages is not becoming a "general game playing forum." As far as I can tell, the Esperanza area is the main place where this is taking place. Just corral it all there, and let's get on with our day. This is a lot of useless cycles when everyone here could be more productive making useful edits to the wiki articles. --Wolf530 (talk) 03:38, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Normally, I'd agree with you. It doesn't seem like a huge issue, and it was mostly contained. One problem is when we make an exception for one place but not another, and so on. Maybe if there was a strong reason to keep those pages, even if they were the only ones allowed, but so far I personally haven't seen any good reason to keep them at all. -- Ned Scott 04:08, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

How about a clear statement on what is good and what people have a problem with?

Right things

1. Games that promote Misplaced Pages are good. WikiRPG, Wikirace, etc are fine.
2. Events and things that promote Wikilove and community are fine. Barnstars, smileys, and the like don't *directly* contribute to the project but boost people's morale and make them feel appreciated. This , in turn, helps the community.
3. Event-groups like Esperanza have the right idea, but implementation sometimes confuses those of us who are not , shall we say, wikiextroverts? Some people place more value on structure, organization, deleting crap, editing, and the relentless and psychotically-fixiated destruction of vandals than in wikifairy-esque prettying , making the newbies feel at home, and other things. These are both important concepts, even to grumpy deletionists.

Wrong things

1. Things that don't directly related to the Wiki, and don't indirectly contribute to it either. The games in question, in my view (which can be wrong) can't be said to directly or indirectly aid Misplaced Pages. Some games, like the Sandbox poetry stuff, show you pieces of Misplaced Pages you would have never seen otherwise. But chess? Come on. I'm almost sure at least one person who has played this chess game has also decided userboxes are a waste of diskspace. The games are wrong because of anyone BUT Esperanza did it (like, say, if they were on a userpage) they would be a smoking deleted salted ruin in minutes.
2. Things that become an end unto themselves. Hell, who wants to deal with vandals when you can chill out and play chess and not edit? DOES this make people more productive, or less? I can chat with AIM and play with my daughter while editing, watching Lupin's AV tool update. I don't need to play a game. Do others? (And yes, I know I shouldn't project myself onto everyone, but still...)

Alright, that's it. --Shrieking Harpy 04:17, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Very nicely summarized, I would support such guideline. - Tutmosis 13:30, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

• Hangman predates Esperanza by about seven months. IIRC Chess is older than that. Also, Barnstars serve an important function for editor morale. >Radiant< 14:15, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

How do things like the Reference desk topics fall under this? I can't really say that the non Misplaced Pages refdesks help the encyclopedia directly (maybe very indirectly by suggesting topics that aren't already covered) ColourBurst 17:27, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Why not create a page called "Misplaced Pages based games", and a community to manage it? Or host it off wikipedia, on another site for example, but link to it to show the link? Most games could easily be transferred. If you want to play games, go on Miniclip and similar sites. Misplaced Pages is an encyclopedia. You wouldn't expect games in Encarta (microsoft trademark), so why should wikipedia be different? We could go all out and ban games completely, but that could cause an uproar. Misplaced Pages is about everyone, so we need a comparise. Any ideas?Micropw 17:37, 8 November 2006 (UTC) (The preceding statement was moved from the section Misplaced Pages:Game guide by Jcam as it appears to be about "gaming" on Misplaced Pages and not articles which are/are not game guides.)

I see nothing in the WP:NOT that specifically bans games such as this. It says that Misplaced Pages is not a social networking site, but are turn-based games hosted on here the same thing as MySpace or Friendster? Unless a user tries to initiate a conversation on Misplaced Pages with whoever they're playing with, I don't think this violates anything. Spartacusprime 21:39, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Yes, they are the same. They are social in nature, and do not contribute to Misplaced Pages. To claim that WP:NOT doesn't cover these already is wikilawyering, pure and simple. In fact, I'm not sure if we need new guidelines; existing policy, plus knowledge of our core mission and common sense, already give us clear guidance on games: those that are fun and improve the encyclopedia somehow are good; those that do not contribute serve no purpose and should be moved to another site. -- SCZenz 21:55, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

The whole point of making policy is to inform all users of what is wrong and what is right. If you didn't notice, some people are voting 'keep'. Just because the majority can use "common sense", doesn't mean everyone agrees with it. Most people have the common sense to agree with NPOV. Why do we need a policy for that? - Tutmosis 02:57, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

There's a difference between core policy and new guidelines that follow from it. For peripheral details, we can't always write a new guideline for every situation that comes up. Have you read about m:Instruction creep...? I think that deleting the esperanza games page will set an adequate precedent that most users agree that such games aren't helping with our mission; there's no reason for the extra time and angst to put a guideline tag on it. -- SCZenz 03:34, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Even though I dont think this is instruction creep, I still see your point. I dont wish to have endless policies and guidelines, it's just some areas are completely not covered by any policy or guideline. Userboxes were a testimony to that. No policy was ever made, people were divided and huge amount of time was wasted. Even adding "game site" to WP:NOT would send the message so we don't have deal with this discussion ever again, since most agree with deletion of such pages. - Tutmosis 03:44, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

You could add a games section to WP:NOT, sure. But remember that WP:NOT is descriptive, not proscriptive, and that we can never hope to write down all the things that Misplaced Pages isn't. And there was no userbox policy because nobody could agree on one—sometimes doing the right thing on a case-by-case basis leads to less trauma than hashing out a guideline—and I think the same might end up being true with the games issue. -- SCZenz 06:23, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Indeed I agree with you, but I feel you might be taking my comment out of context. I don't want another section added to WP:NOT. There is a wonderful sentence there "You may not host your own website, blog, or wiki at Misplaced Pages." Would it do any harm to add "games" to this sentence? I think it still falls under "descriptive", since in my mind 'proscriptive' would be listing actual games like "Don't play chess" which isn't what I want. If another game page is ever is created, we can just point to that and * puff * afd closed with no arguing. - Tutmosis 19:46, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

If you want to add that to WP:NOT, I'd certainly be in favor. But if there's a big argument about the added text, I personally wouldn't participate very much. -- SCZenz 21:59, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

I think that hosting games on wikipedia would take the value out of this website because it would disrtact people who have work to do and are trying to gain more knowledge. Putting games on wikipedia would also attract some people who would mess around editing pages to this site. Thes are the reasons I think wikipedia should not host gamesBennyj600 21:54, 9 November 2006 (UTC)bennyj600

"If I play, and don't work, then I am a fool, but if I work and don't play, then I am still a fool." bibliomaniac15 Review? 03:48, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

I believe that games with no relation to editing, e.g. hangman and the chess championship, should be deleted. However, others, such as the India Quiz (which is educational), Word Association (which helps editors hone their linking skills and can direct to interesting pages to work on), and WikiRPG (which encourages editing) should be kept. I'll produce a list later sorting what I think should and shouldn't be deleted. The barnstars and Esperanza, which though not "games" have been mentioned here, should be kept because they encourage civility and a good relationship between fellow editors. --Gray Porpoise 12:00, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

If you want to play games on a wiki there are sites out there that will give you a free wiki to play games on. This is for writing an encyclopedia. Too often people see Misplaced Pages and they think What a great tool for all kinds of things. But they are really thinking about the MediaWiki software, which provides the functionality they want and does not have a limited scope like Misplaced Pages. HighInBC 16:05, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

I've created a page to summarize what I think: User:Gray Porpoise/Wikipedian Philosophy/Games on Misplaced Pages --Gray Porpoise 21:30, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

Elaragirl wrote further up: "Right things: ... 2) Events and things that promote Wikilove and community are fine. Barnstars, smileys, and the like don't *directly* contribute to the project but boost people's morale and make them feel appreciated. This , in turn, helps the community."
Do Misplaced Pages:Emoticons (and all those listed at Template:Smiley) really help anyone, more than they annoy the rest of us? I've been wondering whether these could all be MfD'd and strongly-discouraged. They're spreading from usertalk pages to articletalk pages, and I consider them distracting, unprofessional, and unappealing. -Quiddity 00:14, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

I agree with the belief that Misplaced Pages is more as a central hub for knowledge and not frivelous games or gaming forums. I also agree with the suggestion of keeping games that encourage strong utilization of Misplaced Pages's encyclopeadic purposes. As far as the discussion regarding Barnstars/user boxes, I honestly do not see much harm in them on this site. For one, Misplaced Pages differs from other encyclopedia websites in the sense that it views its contributers as an online community. The Barnstars/user boxes are a way to encourage the community feel and recognize those who diligently contribute to Wikipeida's various types of articles. I cannot really comment this way or that about Smileys, I have to admit I am one to abuse them (text wise not so much image wise) when sending a thank you message or the like.¤~Persian Poet Gal 00:57, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

It seems from the discussion here and the recent discussions on MfDs to delete the games that there is largely the following consensus:

1. Games that do not contribute to or leverage the encyclodia and in some way encourage or support the development of the encyclopedia don't belong here.
2. Games other than those covered by #1 above may have a place here.
3. There are other sites that are more suited to playing games than Misplaced Pages.
4. Social elements on Misplaced Pages that are directly related to the construction of the encyclopedia or to acknowleding editors for their work on the encyclopedia are OK.

With somewhat less consensus are the following views:

1. To the extent, if any, that games are here, they should be narrowly limited in scope and confined to a well-defined area.
2. We don't need to create new policies specifically regarding games as WP:NOT is broad enough. However, it may be worthwhile to include some mention of games in WP:NOT.
3. Social groups on Misplaced Pages such as Esperanza may have legitimate purposes here, but their activities should not distract from the purpose of writing an encyclopedia.

Personally, I find using Misplaced Pages to play games strange given the availability of free gaming sites—but then I've never understood the fascination with using a cell phone for text messages. These are both examples of using a technology for something that the technology is ill-suited for when there are existing and widely available technologies (email and networked game sites) that are highly suited for the purpose. At least with text messaging on a cell phone you can make the case that the proper tool may not be readily available; with playing games on Misplaced Pages you can't even say that. —Doug Bell  04:14, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages:Game guide

Any and all help appreciated on this proposal. Havok (T/C/c) 18:20, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Articles on upcoming films

As a Wikipedist who deals in primarily articles about upcoming films, particularly superhero films, I'm curious about others' perspectives about how to determine when to create articles for upcoming films. What criteria should an upcoming film meet if the film has not reached the production stage yet? Is it enough to have a writer and director attached, like Ant-Man? What about films that don't have anything attached, but still generate the occasional news, like The Punisher 2 or Wolverine? What about the notability of a sequel based on its predecessor's success, such as The Dark Knight? I've used the crystal ball and notability policies both ways, defending something like Interstellar or voting for the deletion of something like Battle Angel. When can an upcoming film go from its subsection on the source material's article or a director's article to become an article that would grow in time? --Erik (/_contrib) @ 18:43, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

I'm not aware of any guideline regarding the issue, but personally I would assume once the release date of a feature film is announced, then you can be sure there is enough useful information to atleast start a stub. Otherwise no point making an article about rumours. - Tutmosis 18:51, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

That's the issue, though. Projects have been announced without a release date. I've kept in store a lot of Variety articles that say how a studio acquired the rights for this particular adaptation and have attached the director (who is usually in the middle of something, as most mainstream directors are). These aren't rumors. In addition, something like Interstellar doesn't have a release date at all, yet the article exists due to the reasoning that it's an upcoming Spielberg film. --Erik (/_contrib) @ 18:56, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

The general guideline is Misplaced Pages is not a crystal ball. Essentially, if there are reputable, reliable sources (i.e., not a forum or blog post, but a newspaper or magazine) about the upcoming film, the article is legitimate. AfD is woefully inconsistent when it comes to reviewing them - too many people misread the crystal ball policy - but if you can back it up with sources, you should be fine. --badlydrawnjeff talk 19:00, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Personally, to me it would make more sense to just state it on the director's/(officially announced) actors articles rather than create a new article as soon a new film is announced to be in production. - Tutmosis 19:02, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Or on the fictional character article, or on the film to which it is intended to be a sequel. Individual articles really aren't justified by slavish records of the dates of pre-production press conferences and interviews. Postdlf 19:12, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Studios buy a lot of scripts, often even announce directors and cast as "attached", but often something (usually financing, that frequently comes from third parties outside the studio) throws a monkey wrench into the works. Personally, I'd be more comfortable if we waited for a reliable report that filming actually has started, not is "in pre-production" which can mean almost anything. Spielberg could announce he's going to film the Yellow Pages and people would line up to finance it. It's a little more chancy to fund the kind of projects you're talking about, and these tend to fall apart before filming a lot more frequently. Fan-1967 19:07, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

What about a film like Watchmen? It's been in and out of production, and I wrote the extensive project history for that film's article. Where should information like that go, if there was substantial coverage about the film's development? What about something like Luke Cage or The Punisher 2 where information are not rumors, but actual news about the so-called progress of these films that have yet to take off? --Erik (/_contrib) @ 19:11, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

The Watchmen article is rather interesting, but let's face it, it's not really about a movie. It's about failed (so far) attempts to make a movie, which is not really the same thing. It kind of raises the question: is the process of trying to make a movie in itself notable? Based on the amount of press coverage (nice citation work, BTW) it would seem so, but, as I said, it's not really a movie article, since, as yet, there doesn't seem to be an actual movie. Fan-1967 19:20, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

The Watchmen article is part of a larger patchwork, as well, that of the articles on the Watchmen comic book series. Like Fan-1967 says, it's not so much an article on a film as an article on an attempt to adapt a notable work. Steve block Talk 22:54, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Something of note: seems like there is already a proposed policy at Misplaced Pages:Notability (films). - Tutmosis 19:12, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

The proposal does address this in general terms at WP:NOTFILM#Unreleased_films, but I would suggest slighly more specific rules of thumb. For a clearly notable project (with say James Cameron attached, an article may well be appropriate any time after the film is green-lit by a studio/production company as long as there are multiple, non-trivial sources for it. For an average comercial film, I would prefer to wait until actual production (i.e. filming or the equivalent) has begun. Films of questionable or limited notability should not have articles prior to their completion and release (if any). Eluchil404 13:24, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

• Articles about unreleased films (and books etc) tend to attract speculative edits. One should keep an eye out for these. >Radiant< 14:03, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

"edit" option on all pages...

The edit option on all of the pages is pretty dumb. I recently changed information on a page and it was left like that for about a week. This "tool" could be potentially dangerouse to all Misplaced Pages users. I sugest that you get ride of this iption or find away to make it more... safe. By the way, I kindly went back and changed teh information back to its origanal form before I did my little "test."—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 64.255.109.142 (talk • contribs) .

Try reading this. Postdlf 22:52, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

I think you missed the wiki part of wikipedia. The entire point is that you are able to edit anything. --tjstrf Now on editor review! 22:54, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Well, I for one am glad you changed them back, if you hadn't we might not have been able to understand them at all, condidering all the spelling mistakes you made in just your post, also,tjstrf is right, this is a wiki, you can change whatever you want, I will make an educated guess that you are new, or else you would be a member, and not complain about the edit button. Tarryhoper 00:14, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Legal threats

Does this summary constitute a legal threat? Dylan Lake (t·c·ε) 02:02, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

The most beautiful girl in the world since September 9, 1989. DONT COPY THIS AT ALL! ANY USE WITHOUT PERMISSION EXCLUSIVELY WRITTEN BY ME WILL BE SUED TO THE FULLEST EXTENT OF THE LAW!

Well, it certainly isn't an acceptable license statement for an image to be used on Misplaced Pages, so the image tagged with it should be deleted. *Dan T.* 02:08, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Dealt with. JoshuaZ 08:25, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

OT but what was the picture of? A 17 year old girl? Someone who won the 1989 Miss Whatever? Nil Einne 13:31, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

Devanagari and Nastaliq script in Bollywood-related articles

One of our Indian editors, Bharatveer, feels very strongly that Hindi/Hindustani names and words should not be rendered in Nastaliq script in Bollywood-related articles. He has removed the Nastaliq script from more than a dozen actor/actress articles, claiming that since Urdu is not their native tongue, their name should not be given in Nastaliq script. He is up to three reverts on Anupam Kher.

This is a complex issue. One underlying language (Hindustani) has been written in two scripts for centuries. Muslims tended to use a Perso-Arabic alphabet (which is what they used to read Arabic and Persian literature) and Hindus used Devanagari. The Muslims also tended to speak a Hindustani that contained more Persian and Arabic loan words, a dialect generally called Urdu. The Hindu version of Hindustani is called Hindi and contains more Sanskrit loan words. Since the Partition of India, the divergence between the Pakistani version of Urdu and the Indian version of Hindi has increased. However, at the level of the man in the street, people still speak Hindustani, without fancy loan words. Bollywood films aim for the widest possible audience and they are generally written in a Hindustani-leaning Hindi that is easily understood by Pakistanis as well as North Indians. Not only that, movie titles and credits are usually given in both Devanagari and Nastaliq scripts, so that all audiences can read them.

The continued presence of Muslims and Muslim script in India is profoundly irritating to followers of Hindutva, an Indian political movement, and Bharatveer seems to be following a Hindutva line in most of his edits. Recently he tried to remove the Nastaliq script from the Bollywood article; a long edit war ensued, in the course of which it was established that most Bollywood films use both scripts in their titles and advertising, and that if there is any justification for adding Devanagari versions of words, names, and titles (the convenience of South Asian users of the English WP), it applies equally to Nastaliq.

Bharatveer gave up trying to remove Nastaliq from the Bollywood article, but has, in the last couple of days, switched to removing it from the actor/actress articles. He says that if the actor/actress isn't a "native Urdu speaker," then his/her name shouldn't be given in Nastaliq script. But of course the issue isn't native speech (many actors/actresses are NOT native Hindustani speakers -- they had to learn Hindi in order to get roles) but giving the name in forms that allow South Asian readers to figure out the proper pronunciation (which is not apparent from the Romanized form of the name).

Can we have a blankety-blank policy that says that if Devanagari is used to render a Hindi word, that Nastaliq can be used also? Without a policy, I forsee a grinding war of attrition over all the India and Indian cinema related articles, in which some editors are adding the Devanagari and Nastaliq forms of words, names, and titles, and Bharatveer is removing the Nastaliq. Over and over. He's removing information that could be useful to some users because he wants to make a political point, and it's taking time and energy away from writing the dang encyclopedia.

If a policy isn't the proper way to handle this, what is? Is this going to have to go to RfC and Arbcom? I'm not sure that stopping Bharatveer's personal anti-Nastaliq crusade would solve the general problem, since there are other Hindutva WP editors who would be happy to take up the struggle. But I'd be open to any suggestions for stopping the edit wars. Zora 08:38, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

That's interesting, I didn't realise that was such a problem. I think your suggestion is good - try to make it a policy that all Indian actors/films will have their names in at least those two scripts, as well as whatever language is native to them (Bengali, Malayalam, etc). If not an absolute policy, at least a WP:INCINE policy. Hopefully that should curb the edit-warring, at least for some time. I hope you can come to some sort of agreement with them. If not, I guess an RfC would have to be the next step. riana_dzasta 11:06, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

this is similar to the question, should the Turkish names of assorted Greek islands be given? (we give that of Crete at the moment, for instance; the presence of Turkish names is at least as irritating to Greek nationalists as the presence of Arabic script is to Hindu nationalists, even more so, since we are discussing actual territory, not cheesy starlets). Fwiiw, I am opposed to an overall "Indian actors/films will have their names in at least those two scripts" policy. It will depend whether the title or name in question were at all released or advertised in Urdu. If this can be established, by googling or otherwise, both scripts should be used. If there is a reasonable case that the name was hardly ever spelled in Nastaliq, Misplaced Pages shouldn't introduce such a spelling. Case by case, I guess. So much for the content side. Bharatveer's disruptive and belligerent behaviour is a question of user conduct and outside the scope of this page, but he could obviously do with a reminder that policies and guidelines apply to him as well as to everybody else. And by "reminder" I mean "blocks", since he has shown beyond any doubt that he is not willing to learn from debate alone. dab (ᛏ) 11:30, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Zora has made some very good points here. It is also noteworthy to know that when the issue was discussed and polled on the Talk:Bollywood page, an overwhelming majority of participants wanted to keep both the Devanagari and Nastaliq scripts of the Hindi-Urdu (Hindustani) language (see first discussion, poll, and second discussion. The arguments are evinced here. I would support a WP:INCINE policy to keep both scripts. Thanks for your time and understanding. Anupam 20:56, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

I should perhaps add that I was against adding the scripts during the first discussion, fearing just the sort of religio-political combustion we're having now. But, having scripts seemed to be the consensus of the other editors. We don't require that names/titles/words be given in both scripts -- it's up to individual editors to add them. If someone adds Devanagari (as Bharatveer is doing now), that's fine. If someone wants to add Nastaliq, that's fine too. (If there's no accepted version in Nastaliq, that suggests that one isn't necessary.) So far, we've just had a policy against deleting Nastaliq or Devanagari once someone adds it. However, Bharatveer does not recognize this policy. What must we do to make it an enforceable policy? Zora 00:24, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Let me suggest, first, that you broaden the scope of your proposal to include all articles. I'd venture something along the lines of Multiple names/spellings/scripts are not required but once inserted, do not delete. There's a tricky bit where you define which alternate expressions are reasonable. For Indian movies, any script or language common in India seems very reasonable, while there's no real justification for Japanese or Basque. Come up with a logical test to determine what's "reasonable"; a simple, local discussion (as you've had at Bollywood) is a fine test.

Getting your proposal into policy is not a straightforward process. You need to do quite a bit of policy work to see how it goes. There's the high road, the low road, and the one that goes round and round -- for a start. Short answer: Write it up, tag it {{proposed}}, discuss it for awhile. If it looks like it has broad support, tag it {{guideline}}. Encourage those with inevitable objections to edit the proposal to address their own concerns. Compromise and negotiate. When a solid consensus exists behind the guideline, tag it {{policy}}. Sounds easy.

If you do get to the point of establishing policy, then you can bring violators to heel. Meanwhile, look into violations of existing policy. It's hard for an editor who isn't in step with the rest to push his bias consistently over time without breaking a long-established rule.

Normally I'd say, "First, make every effort to address this one editor's concerns." But it sounds as if you've done that already.

If there's any way I can help, see me on my talk page. John Reid ° 07:10, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

I would agree to an extent with what Dab says. If it can be established that both scripts were released in the movie, have both of them. Baically go with the existing policy of verifiability. I think policy is a very broad word and while such a proposal can be discussed on MOS etc, to name it a policy would be quite an extreme step in my opinion. I see that a total of four people participated in the poll. As John says, a policy really requires much broader support and participation -- Lost 07:27, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Yes, some guidelines for ALL articles would seem to be useful. In addition to dealing with Devanagari and Nastaliq, I've also run into Arabic (lots of Arabic), Persian, Turkish, Tamil, Bengali, Malayalam ... It gets to be just too much at the start of an article. The article will start like this: XXX (script A, script B, script C) blah blah blah. That's actually kind of hard to read. Suppose we had a little infobox (as small as feasible) that could sit off to one side and hold the various non-Roman scripts. In tiny print. Enlargeable. No more than four scripts? I'll have think about general guidelines for which to choose. Very good points re thinking in broader terms. Zora 08:43, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Prompt anon users if they want to enter emty edit summary by default

I just had this idea. Most anonnymous users, even if doing good edits, do not enter edit summaries and therefore it is difficult to distiguish good intentions from bad ones. In preferences there is a check box saying "Prompt me when entering a blank edit summary". If you check this and forgot to fill edit summary, editor returs once again and asks if you really mean it. You can still go without edit summary, but you have been warned. What I propose is to make this behaviour default for anonymous users. It will not stop the vandalism, but it will prompt good users to explain their edits. The side efect is that it might slow vandals who do not fill edit summaries as they will have to send form twice. Is this a good idea, bad idea or what kind of idea? --Jan.Smolik 12:48, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

That sounds like an excellent idea. I don't think it'll noticeably slow down- and hence discourage- either legitimate users (fortunately) or vandals (unfortunately). However, it'll make differentiating good edits, ropey-but-well-intentioned edits, tests and blatant vandalism much easier. Nothing's stopping a vandal from lying, but they could do that anyway- and if they do, it's clear that it's not a legitimate test. Fourohfour 13:20, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

See also WP:PEREN. >Radiant< 13:37, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

I do not think it is the same thing. I am only proposing this as a default for non logged users. You can always create account to get simpler behaviour. Anyway EVERY edit should have summary. If anybody cannot be bothered with filling it is he really helping us? What more, even good reverts are to be reverted as vandalism this way. Let's say Mr. XYZ was born in 1971, but our aricle incorectly states 1970. Anonymous editor comes and changes it to correct 1971. But I see vandalism becouse somebody changed only one number without explanation and I hit revert button. There is no other way 90 % of edits as such are vandalism. So unexplained edits from anonymous users are generally going to be reverted anyway so where is the reason to do them at first. --Jan.Smolik 22:23, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

You shouldn't revert like that. If someone changes a fact, you should try and verify it before changing it back (and if it can't be verified easily, the article probably isn't well sourced). It's a violation of WP:AGF to assume that an edit is vandalism just because it's anonymous and it doesn't have a comment. --Milo H Minderbinder 23:13, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Unfortunately such a change would probably lead to vandalism going undetected in cases where the vandal uses an edit summary and the user browsing the recent changes assumes good faith and takes that summary at face value. I often come across vandalism edits with unrelated (and good) edit summaries as things are just now... Ta/wangi 14:13, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

A recent proposal on the mailing list was to force edit summaries only if for edits that remove a consistent part of text. This is in response to a recent episode when the subject of an article removed libel from the article about herself, and an administrator reverted and blocked taking her for a vandal. Forcing an edit summary would have solved the problem, becuase that subject had to explain what she was doing. Tizio 16:52, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

I don't know why this is a user preference for anybody. All edits must have edit sums, IMO. John Reid ° 06:54, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

In mainspace, probably. Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 22:13, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages:Manual of Style (lists of works)

I've overhauled Misplaced Pages:Manual of Style (lists of works) based on a 2nd round of feedback. Possibly it's complete and ready now?

The only thing I forsee as being potentially contentious is the chronological ordering of filmographies, but I still suspect (hope) a supermajority will quickly emerge, once put to wider discussion, favouring consistency and traditional listing standards.

Feedback (at it's talkpage) or improvements welcome :-) --Quiddity 20:05, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Proposed Policy on Election Coverage?

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but other than POV and verifiable sources, I don't think Wiki has a policy on election coverage. On the eve of the US 2006 midterm elections, this has led to considerable confusion / anarchy in certain articles while votes are being tabulated. For example, on the Kerry Healey page, announcements on her defeat by Deval Patrick in the recent MA election was posted and reposted multipled times throughout the evening.

Some people may feel that this is really a non-issue, as the controversy will tend to sort itself out, generally by the next day. However, I feel that some type of official policy should be in place for two reasons. First, it helps sort through the anarchy on election day. Secondly, and more importantly, many people use wiki (like it or not) as a source of information on current events, especially on election candidates. We all remember the United States Presidential Elections of 2000, when Florida flip-flopped between Bush and Gore all evening on the major networks. It has been claimed (though I have not seen solid evidence), that calling an election before the close of polls can discourage voting and is in itself a violation of NPOV.

PROPOSED

The wiki policy should extend to coverage on election tabulation as well.

Firstly, posting a projected winner of an election before the close of polls should be strictly forbidden as NPOV.

Secondly, stating a clear winner of an election in one where there is a) a very narrow margin AND b) a very possible recount should be discouraged unless the posted explicitly states it as such. Violations of such should be classified as a violation of Misplaced Pages:Verifiability.

Thirdly, posting a candidate's victory is allowed if credible sources demonstrate a substantial margin after polls have closed, though votes are not completely tabulated.

If people have an opinion on this, I would greatly appreciate your input.
Djma12 21:08, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Perhaps Misplaced Pages could rather have a section devoted to election coverage. That would be plausible - or even better. Do we want to be updated George Allen's profile 20 times in a night? I think not. The section would be nice, too, as often some media sources are bolder than others in predicting outcomes - they both could be listed. -Patstuart 02:03, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

I agree that having a special election section would be ideal, but the logistics seem unrealistic. Such a page would probably have a lifespan of 1-2 days, require a significant amount of constant editing to be up to date, then be subject to the whole deletion process (5 days, etc...) afterwards. It seems to me that having Wikipedians simply demonstrate reasonable restraint for 24-36 hrs is easy and isn't too much to ask. Djma12 03:25, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

• Please see Misplaced Pages:Candidates and elections. >Radiant< 09:34, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

• Thanks for pointing out Misplaced Pages:Candidates and elections. I have read this before and it provides good guidance on how to write candidate/election articles, but provides no guidance on how/when it is appropriate to post results of elections. It is my contention (and others may disagree) that the premature posting of election results can actually taint the democratic process, and should thus be NPOV. Any thoughts? Djma12 18:42, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

I really do not think we need policy to everythink I believe that WP:CITE and WP:NPOV are sufficient. If you have a reliable source claiming some result of election you can write it to the article. The only reliable source in this case is some electoral commission anyway. However I do not think that posting information like "after counting 78 % of votes XYZ is 2 % ahead of ZYX" is bad. It is NPOV and sourced information. Plus you can post information from exit polls which is also NPOV and sourced. So if you have a verifiable source go ahead and write it. If information is unsourced it should be quickly deleted. It is as simple as that and we do not need any policies. --Jan.Smolik 22:40, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

I agree that the spirit of WP:CITE and WP:NPOV extends to campaign coverage as well. The problem is, have you *tried* using those arguments in removing a statement before? Some people simply don't seem to agree, for example, that calling an election before even the polls close violates WP:CITE, and quite frankly I don't have the Wiki policy text to back me up when I remove such posts. The result is these long wars of posting and reposting based upon personal interpretations of CITE and NPOV. Even one of two lines added into these policies would help out a great deal. Djma12 14:12, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Let's not forget all the hassle that the Canadian federal election, 2006 caused (see here for a taster). There will be a similar "blackout" law in operation for the French presidential election, 2007 (until 2000 Paris time), so it might be an idea to get a policy together. Physchim62 (talk) 15:28, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Because of WP:NOR, it would be improper to post any alleged election results unless they have already been published by a reliable source (not just a rumor on a blog or something like that). *Dan T.* 05:13, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

Porn References

If Misplaced Pages is supposedly an online encyclopedia and not merely a collected catalog of general information, then WHY are there so many references and pages devoted to Pornographic entertainment, as in specific movies, and to Porn Stars? Why would ANY encyclopedia of repute want to include a listing of "Big Bust" pornstars or porn stars famous for "female ejaculation"? I mean, really, a page devoted to "Peter North"? Is that a joke? Are either Danni Ashe or Jenna Jameson worth mentioning in an online learning resource seeking legitimacy? How would that possibly cement the site or the Misplaced Pages concept's reputation as a valuable scholarly resource? Porn doesn't belong here except as a general heading. Adult Film stars are not notable people to be included in an encyclopedia except in the imaginations of one-handed keyboard surfers.

And the number of comic book entries, whether Marvel or DC, is worrisome, as well. Comic Books in general as a subject is perfect. It is a recognized artform. It is considered popular fiction, but of an extremely juvenile nature and NOT on the same level as the young adult fiction of, say, J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter... But do we really need a "Venom" article page? Or a complete list of Batman's villains? Or an article dedicated to "Crisis on Infinte Earths"? Where is the scholarly value in this? Why is THIS included as opposed to the works of, say, horror author Tom Piccirilli who is a Bram Stoker Award-nominated author?

I think Misplaced Pages has a lot of potential and is a fantastic idea, but until there are set, enforcible limits that are applied to ALL entries, across the board, then this subjective "wiggle room" for articles is going to negatively impact the public's acceptance of the concept as a whole.

Respectfully,

Joseph Armstead

• I have to agree here. I do a lot of new page deleting (note: I am not an admin) and I have found many sexual references. My first thought is always "Eww!" I have a feeling that this is also most everybody's first response. Nobody likes to see who the porn stars were in 1994. Nobody wants to know something like "how to have sex." (at least not in an encyclopedia) In any case, pornographic references and sexual references do shed negative light on Misplaced Pages, and I think that they should be ruled as not notable. Diez2 00:23, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

What part of Misplaced Pages is not censored do you not understand? Why should the rest of us have to let you vette which articles get posted or not? Nobody likes to see who the porn stars were in 1994. Nobody wants to know something like "how to have sex." Obviously, since we have those articles, there are people who disagree with you. User:Zoe|(talk) 03:56, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Dear Mr. Armstead: While porn may not seem scholarly to you, it's a billion-dollar industry and very much notable. The "levels" in children/teen literature you mention are point of view and Misplaced Pages strives to pursue the opposite. Please see the policy WP:NPOV for more information on this matter. I might personally agree with you that Harry Potter is of a "higher level" than many comics, but not everyone does. We receive requests similar to yours on a daily basis. You are right in that a large portion of the world's population might see Misplaced Pages of lesser quality because of certain content it contains, but, as Zoe said above, Misplaced Pages is not censored. What you might see as appropriate might be seen as inappropriate by someone else in the world of different views. What you might think is of little quality and downright disgusting is how another editor might make his or her living or enjoys, and is something that he or she sees as a high-level art form. As long as it's not illegal in the State of Florida, where the non-profit Wikimedia Organization hosts its servers, Misplaced Pages will not censor or judge on what is of a "high level" or what will increase the project's "public's acceptance". Misplaced Pages is not running for office and thus does not have to please anyone! We do have an Articles for Deletion section, where, if articles aren't notable (see WP:Notability), they can be deleted by consensus. Those are often articles that fail basic key points highlighted in What Misplaced Pages is Not. There is no such thing as "taste" on Misplaced Pages. It's about documenting what exists, whether it is universally liked and approved of or not. -newkai t-c 04:30, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

I should also address your first question, "WHY are there so many references and pages devoted to Pornographic entertainment?" Something Misplaced Pages can do nothing about is which articles are edited and to which extent. It's a simple matter of interest. Why is the there over 5000 times as much information on New York City as their is about the town I'm currently living in, Vestal, New York? Because there are over 5000 times as many editors interested in editing articles on New York City! How does this relate to porn? This might be speculation, but devoted Wikipedians spend a lot of time in front of their computers, and many probably view a lot of pornography and then edit articles on it... It's quite simple. Tom Piccirilli's article here on Misplaced Pages might simply not be as detailed (or in this case non-existant) as a random sex position simply because those interested in Piccirilli spend more time reading his books and less time on Misplaced Pages. -newkai t-c 04:48, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Mr. Armstead,

Perhaps you are confusing what is with what you think should be. I suspect you think ordinary, respectable people ought not be fascinated by naked people, especially people who are professionally naked. Social animals are always interested in each other's bodies and I imagine that you are one of those people who would like to think that humans are not animals, but angels. I say we are both. And Misplaced Pages is devoted to what is, not what anybody thinks should be. John Reid ° 06:51, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

The existence of any one article doesn't prevent the existence of any other. WP:NOT paper. Someone else can write articles on porn stars or video games or comic books and you can write articles on fine art and ancient history. We don't need to limit ourselves to the most important or cultured things. If you think we need an article on Tom Piccirilli, go ahead and write one or request one. Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 22:38, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages is an online encyclopedia, how you define an encyclopedia is you own opinion, I am not defending pornography but I am saying that just because you do not want to see it does not mean that others dont. It is an unbiased decision that states how Misplaced Pages is run. -Charlie34 8:27 09 November 2006

Misplaced Pages does not limit its content on the basis of "wholesomeness" or "goodness". The only limiting factors are: Is it notable, verifiable, not original research, and appear in reliable sources. Porn can pass all of the above with flying colors. Misplaced Pages is not in the position of deciding what is good for society. Society as a whole judges Porn to be a worthwhile venture, Misplaced Pages reflects that position. Is it right that Porn is so important to our society? That is neither here nor there. Lots of things that are detrimental to society, such as drugs, are covered in exhaustive detail at wikipedia. Porn is no different. The existance of porn related articles on Misplaced Pages also does not really interfere with non-porn related ventures. Remember, Misplaced Pages is not paper, it has nearly infinite capacity, and so feel free to read and peruse non-porn related articles here content in the knowledge that no matter how much porn content exists on wikipedia, it will not interfere with the non-porn content in any way. --Jayron32 06:34, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Who really needs discussion?

Perhaps it would be better to have four special question sections, review questions, open questions, article concerns (typographic, factual and compo), and one for non-neutral points of view.

I also believe that the focus of Misplaced Pages should be based primarily on comprehending, with a bias towards the sympathetic, sort of like Wikinfo. Lets all get on the same page. Then try to understand other people and synthesize if we can. I think that's the best way.

Yes, let's be like Wikinfo, where you can have two totally conflictory articles about the same thing. The focus of Misplaced Pages is building an encyclopedia. Sympathy is not factual. There are people sympathetic to racism, sexism, gay-bashing, euthanasia, creationism, flat-earth theories, and everything else. Being sympathetic does not lead to comprehension. Facts, that can be verified and checked, and solid writing that builds those facts into an article gives you comprehension. I'm not trying to bite you, but your suggestion just comes off as...well, unworkable. And please sign your comments. --Shrieking Harpy 05:56, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

A delicate question

Regarding the necessity to cite reliable and verifiable sources, I have a potentially controversial question:

• Is the Bible considered an acceptable source for historical events? Is it appropriate to cite Bible verses within articles in regards to historical events?

--Doc Tropics 01:18, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

It is often considered a reliable source, but it depends on the quotation. For example, citing Herod the Tetrarch as being regent during Jesus' life would not be controversial, or any of its descriptions of Paul's travels. Some others might be a problem; did you have something specific in mind? -Patstuart 02:00, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

I've been working on Christmas which includes a rather large number of Bible verses. Specifically "The Nativity" section contains a jumble of verses describing the birth of Jesus. I had the impression that this was a subject open to debate and/or interpretation, hence my question. This is the specific content I'm wondering about. What policy or guideline would this fall under? Does WP:CITE apply? If so, does the content meet those standards?

Seeing as how the Bible is really the primary source of information about Jesus for everyone who came after, I can't see how it'd be a problem. If you were to try to start sourcing the Genesis in a Biology article, I might have a problem. :) But the only source of Nativity "facts" come from the Bible, so I say go for it. The reader is already conscious that this information comes from that source anyway. --Wolf530 (talk) 06:11, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

I think that it should be written as "the Bible says that such and such happened" rather than just saying that something happened and then listing the Bible as a reference. Of course, you would not say that for every statement. Perhaps you could say something like, "the following includes descriptions of the nativity from the Bible." You could also mention that the Bible is the only source of information about the nativity (assuming it is, I thought that there are other Gospels that were not included, like the Gospel of Judas and the Gospel of Mary). I'd suggest the same thing when dealing with other ancient texts, such as the Koran and the writings of the Plinys. When dealing with modern, and especially ancient, texts, I've noticed that sources are often explicitly mentioned (rather than just using footnotes or links) if the facts are not agreed upon, if the person's credibility is questionable or if the person was the only witness. -- Kjkolb 16:12, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

I too like: The Bible states that '..statement..' in John 3:1 as compared to '..statement..', where is a reference to the Bible. Such a presentation surely is as easily understood, but in addition, editors can easily see what the reference is. And referenced statements are much more likely to stand than unreferenced statement. If there is discussion about referenced statements, the reference is more obvious, too. Terryeo 16:43, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

I think in most respects the Bible should not be considered as a reliable source on historical events as there is every reason to believe that it was not written with the objective of being factual. Of course, it's ok to say "the Bible says so and so". But I wouldn't be content with the sentence "Jesus existed, see the Bible for proof." Pascal.Tesson 16:53, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Warning removal (again)

Someone pointed out recently on the Noticeboard that we had discussions about warning removal here here and here. I'm looking at the poll, at least, and it looked pretty strongly like consensus was for keep. First, why is it not then a policy? Second, is there anything that can be done about it? I find it a ridiculous example of the "free speech" clause gone overboard - wikipedia is WP:NOT anarchy, which says: "Misplaced Pages is free and open, but restricts both freedom and openness where they interfere with creating an encyclopedia." I can't possibly see how warning removal could do anything other than reduce free speech. And if someone says "george bush is a buttfucker" on his page, I also can't see why they should have the "right" not to have that warning pasted on their talkpage. -Patstuart 01:55, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Attempts to forbid removal of warning templates were defeated 4 times. Consensus is that it's usually a bad idea to remove a warning template given in good faith -- to remove it in such a way as to make people think you haven't read it or are trying to hide it. Consensus also seems to be that a lot of such warnings are given in bad faith and that additional warnings that cite non-existent policy and threaten outpolicy blocks are sometimes given in bad faith and often a bad idea. The series of templates that warn against removal of other warning templates (perhaps, even, recursively, the same ones) was deleted under CSD T1: divisive and inflammatory templates. See WP:AN#Removing_warnings_templates. Disclosure: I attempted to salvage these templates but my edits were largely reverted and I suggested that they be deleted. John Reid ° 06:42, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

OK; so then it's allowed to restore warnings given in good faith when it's clear that the editor has removed them so that they won't be seen. -Patstuart 06:46, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

• "forget what is 'easy' for you for a moment and focus on what you are doing here. User gets a warning. They read it and remove it because they don't like it. You then restore the warning. You've just edit warred. To re-insert something you know the user doesn't want to see. On their talk page. I'm sorry, but I can't see the benefits of 'easy' in not having to click on a 'history' link outweighing the 'bad' of actions which serve to greatly annoy users. Even when this is used 'correctly' (as opposed to all the times 'User A' puts a questionable or outright false warning on the page of 'User B' and then harasses them to keep it there) it is a net negative." - citing CBDunkerson on the admin noticeboard. So no, you're not supposed to restore warnings; they're supposed to warn users, and are not intended as a permanent black mark. If a user removes a warning, you can assume he's read it; if he repeats the behavior that led to the warning in the first place, you have every reason to be stern with him. >Radiant< 09:31, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

As an administrator who's active at Misplaced Pages:Personal attack intervention noticeboard and Misplaced Pages:Requests for investigation I see this frequently. My advice is to ask an administrator to remove any dubious user warnings. That's not guideline or policy, just my take on that situation: frivolous warnings usually happen during disputes. User conduct RfCs and user block requests often follow dispute-related warnings whether the warnings were valid or not and the blanking of warnings inevitably gets mentioned in the complaint. When an administrator blanks a warning it places the action above suspicion. Sometimes I let the warning stand, explaining why it's there and how to solve the problem that caused it. I wish the community would place some restrictions on warning removal because editors who blank administrator warnings almost always continue the problem behavior and soon merit blocking for other reasons. I view the blanking of valid warnings as proof that the editor has read the warnings and as a refusal to accept feedback; this often goes along with sarcastic blanking summaries and defiant response posts. Obviously this affects the duration of a block once blocking is merited for established policies. Durova 16:54, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Agreed. Obviously, though I still have yet to understand how it progressed (see my above comments), saying "no warning removal" is going to fail. But is there any chance we can get some way to keep warnings for obvious vandals. I'm a little frustrated, for example, with a recent editor who used explicit profanity with a newbie; but I understand letting them remove their warnings (actually I don't, but I can abide by it). But I have trouble believing that any editor would have a problem making obvious-vandal only accounts keep their warnings (e.g., the "George W. Bush is a gay homo" type of vandalism). To recap, it we can't make too much an overarching statement, but some type of minimal agreement must be possible (editor John Reid, who was for the templates' deletion, is for that). We don't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater. So is there a way, guys? Or has it been done too often? -Patstuart 19:53, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

It's the slippery slope problem: disruptive users will claim that any edit they dislike is obvious vandalism. One prohibition that seems workable would be if the community decided that a warning from an administrator could only be removed by another administrator. Durova 04:02, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Which is why I said "don't throw out the baby..." because I think the slippery slope argument stinks. As for the administrator idea, I don't think it would fly, simply because there's so much emphasis on admins actually being equal to all other editors, except for a few extra privledges. Though I'd support it anyway. -Patstuart 05:25, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

• Since the aim appears to be keeping track of who was warned and when, a possibility would be to create a logfile for that. Since the CVU works mostly by scripts anyway, these could also be instructed to add a line to said logfile.
• The "warning by an admin may only be removed by another admin" is impractical since most people don't know exactly who is and is not an admin. >Radiant< 12:09, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Good point, Radiant. I suppose typing "Administrator warning" in the heading or a separate set of templates (egad, more templates) could address that. While I don't regard administrators as inherently better than other Wikipedians, they're usually accurate when they issue policy warnings. The central problem as I see it is that some users game the current situation: it draws administrators' time away from other matters to keep watching a particular user until the next policy violation occurs. Administrators have lives outside Misplaced Pages so by the time that gets caught the offending editor might have posted several more obscene diatribes. Durova 19:05, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

This sounds like a bad idea - admins aren't supposed to administer (run) the site, they just have a few extra editing tools. As for templates - in general, using boilerplate to communicate with somone is a bad idea - it's insulting, and says "I can't be bothered to type a few lines to communicate with you, so I am sending you this tersely worded boilerplate. In addition, in many cases these boilerplate warnings assume the recipient is ignorant of the policy that has been violated, and spell things out in extreme detail. While this is appropriate with a new user, it is insulting to an established user, because it says "I think you are too stupid to know this basic policy". It's much better to write someone a note and link to the appropriate policy page. Guettarda 01:26, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

• If everyone who puts a warning template on a page put a note in the edit summary that they were doing so, it would solve this problem, since the history page cannot be tampered with. A view of a user:talk history page will return the list of warnings give. I am guilty of forgetting to do this frequently, but this discussion has reinforced the importance of doing so. It also reinforces the potential need to force a non-null edit summary for every edit. When I don't fill out an edit summary, it is out of forgetfulness more than anything. --Jayron32 05:27, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

Denying image attribution in captions

Is there a policy/guideline on putting image attribution in captions within articles? I looked at Misplaced Pages:Image use policy and Misplaced Pages:Captions, but could not find anything, and am not sure where this would go exactly.

I think the traditional approach has been not to attribute the author of an image in the caption (whatever the licence - fair use, GFDL etc), but instead to do it on the image description page. For example I have never seen caption attribution in a featured article.

What do I say to a photographer who uploads a {{Cc-by-sa-2.5}} image (the licence requires attribution) and then insists on putting their name and website in the caption? At the moment I tell them that it is not the Misplaced Pages way, but pointing to a policy or guideline would be helpful. Cheers --Commander Keane 02:08, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

No policy. For longstanding example, see Image:AsimovOnThrone.png at Isaac Asimov. I don't have a problem with credit given where due, nor do I insist upon it for my own works. To tell the truth, I'd probably be happiest if images were routinely credited; if a distinct display style were reserved for the purpose, rather than in the body of the caption. I have always liked magazines that credit photos with small, all caps, sans text rotated to the vertical. John Reid ° 06:35, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

I could extend WP:NOT#Not a soapbox to captions under the advertising clause; I think that's the policy cited for linkspam. I wouldn't have the same objection to an external link in the image's page itself. Durova 15:31, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

This has come up here before. The Creative Commons license requires attribution "reasonable to the medium or means" . Putting the copyright information on the image page only would, in my non-lawyerly opinion, be perfectly reasonable to the medium (a wiki) and thus would be in full compliance with the license. I was actually tempted to email Larry Lessig and ask his opinion on it (seeing as how he wrote the license). Raul654 19:46, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Voting System

Could there possibly be a better voting system on Misplaced Pages than having to manually type the vote and reason? I mean, could there be a bunch of users set up to handle a certain vote (say, on their talk pages, or even their user pages), and then archive it once its done? Pages such as WP:RfA are getting quite cluttered with all of the questions, votes, and opinions on the pages. Could a consensus vote be handled on a user page, and the discussion on the talk page? Someone please add on to this. Diez2 02:21, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Well, you should know that we don't "really" vote around here. RfA is about as close as we ever get to a straight vote and even there, we permit some "wiggle room". There is a lot of philosophy behind our non-voting system and I won't attempt to summarize it here -- sorry, but I can't even point you to just one or two links that sum it up.

I will start you off somewhere, and that is Consensus. Read that before Misplaced Pages:Consensus. I'll also toss in the simplest argument against voting on an open wiki: We don't really know how many of you there are. You could register 12 different accounts, make enough edits from each of them to qualify, and vote with all of them. I'm sure you wouldn't but I don't know about him. Sorry.

Perhaps you'll say you understand all this. But if you really understand, then you'll see that we don't want votes at all -- not pseudo-votes, not comments that consist entirely of the word "Support". We'd like to have a reason attached to each support, oppose, or neutral comment. In other words, the discussion is what we want to see. John Reid ° 06:30, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

• For more information, you could try meta:don't vote on everything and meta:voting is evil. >Radiant< 09:08, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

The reason WP:RfA is "cluttered" is because it is a collection of many individual pages on which discussion happens. It is just an overview, and the discussions don't take place there. And the individual discussions are archived and removed from the page. Does that make sense? --Milo H Minderbinder 15:18, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

The last thing we want to do is encourage voting. Votes here are a means to finding consensus, not to be encouraged as a decision process in themselves. Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 21:53, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Stubs and categories

I have cross posted this from Misplaced Pages talk:Categorization.

I have noticed a few users "categorising" articles by simply adding stub tags, (often replacing the {{uncategorised}} tag with a stub for example). Can we formally add a sentence explicitly explaining that a stub tag (or any maintenance tag) does not categorise an article (in an encyclopedic sense), despite the fact that it does add a category.

Please reply at Wikipedia_talk:Categorization#stubs_and_categories. thanks Martin 16:10, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

• Yes, that would be good, but I think your best bet would be educating the relevant users whenever you spot them. >Radiant< 12:00, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Category:Terrorists proposal

Note: This was cross-posted at Misplaced Pages talk:Categorization, Misplaced Pages:Village pump (policy), and Misplaced Pages:Requests for comment/Policies

Category:Terrorists was up for CfD, which passed as Delete. In a deletion review, I proposed an alternative categorization that would merge several top-level categories into one. My proposal is at User:Irixman/TerrorismProposal. Before I am bold and just do it, I really want some feedback -- should I? What do y'all think? :) Please direct any and all comments to User:Irixman/TerrorismProposal#Comments -- Irixman 16:55, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Please also note that the closing of that CFD as "delete" is being challenged at deletion review. Postdlf 16:58, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/List of pop culture references in Warcraft

Could someone please helpt me explain the meanings of WP:V and WP:NOR here? Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 18:08, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

I'm not trying to be rude in my discussion, but I do think you are taking those policies to the extreme. --Pinkkeith 18:18, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

I'm skeptical of the dance moves, but most of the references in that list are so inherently obvious that a source stating "X is a reference to Y" is just unnecessary. For example, one does not need a secondary source stating that the line "My mana tap brings all the boys to the yard" is a reference to the lyric "My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard" from the song "Milkshake," because there is no other plausible explanation for that particular phrasing being used. The only needed sources are thus the game containing the reference, and the song containing the lyric that is referenced. The same with the He-Man reference: "The Arathi Basin Battlemaster is named "Adam Heman" in reference to the popular tv show character. He also has a "Zulian Battle-tiger" as a pet, in reference to his tiger, Cringer. He also appears with a gnome behind him called "Oric Coe" in reference to Orko." I'd require a source stating that it wasn’t such a reference because that is so incredibly improbable. Postdlf 18:43, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

but it's still a judgement call and an original observation. If I disagree what are you going to cite? That's why we have WP:V. Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 18:48, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

To take it out of pop culture, and into the kind of inherently obvious assumptions we make all the time as Misplaced Pages contributors: if I have two biographies that both state that they are about a man named "Franklin D. Roosevelt," and both tell the story of a New York governor with polio who is president for four terms and leads the country through WWII until his death, would I need a source stating that the biographies are both about the same individual before I can assume that? Postdlf 02:30, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Except that your example doesn't prove the argument. The argument (if you were to transplant it to the Roosevelt biographies) is that the second biography is inspired by the first because they talk about the same things. It's not at all obvious that that's the case - maybe both biographies were inspired by a third source. ColourBurst 04:50, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

That wasn't the question. Assume they don't completely overlap in their coverage of his life and that they aren't otherwise written similarly, if you need to to stay focused. This is the only question I presented: would I need a source stating that the biographies are both about the same individual before I can make that assertion? Why or why not? Postdlf 15:26, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

The word reference doesn't mean they're talking about the same character - the universe is not the same, the characters are not the same (convince me that Linken in WoW is the same character as Link in LoZ), so your Roosevelt biography analogy does not apply here. Referencing, in this context, means that the object/character/so on in X directly caused the creator in Y to make a similar object/character/so on in Y. It doesn't mean they're talking about the same person. ColourBurst 20:33, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

That wasn't my question because that wasn't my point; I'm aiming broader than that right now. My question is framed to ascertain only whether a conclusion based on the direct comparison of two sources is ever obvious enough to assert, such that reliance on a third source that itself sets forth that conclusion is unnecessary. If you're going to respond to my post, please respond to my actual content. So is it permissible to state such a conclusion without a source? Address that underlying issue first and then we can address the next step. Postdlf 02:02, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

It is obvious right now and for you because you happen to know this song. That does not hold for others in the future. If you can't come up with reliable sources on it when I ask, then it doesn't belong. This is an encyclopedia. —Centrx→talk • 03:03, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

That the lyric is in the song is sourced by reference to the song itself. That the quote from the game is a reference to the song lyric is an obvious conclusion that follows from a simple comparison. Can you respond to my biography analogy? Postdlf 04:21, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

• See also Misplaced Pages:Avoid trivia sections in articles. >Radiant< 11:59, 10 November 2006 (UTC)
  • That's the only proper argument against this article. I happen to think that a list that explains references is not quite trivia. Postdlf 15:26, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Citing info from a source isn't an observation or a judgement call. To verify a song lyric, just listen to the song. To verify a line of dialogue from the movie, just watch the movie. That's referencing a source, not doing OR or observation. The reliable sources are the game and the song. Obviously wikipedia allows using primary sources (as does any encyclopedia) - would it really make sense if to say in the article about Romeo and Juliet "Romeo and Juliet die at the end" I couldn't use Romeo and Juliet as a source and had to find the info somewhere else? It would be practially impossible to write about any fiction at all. I can see why some oppose the article on "cruft" concerns, but NOR unquestionably does not apply and isn't grounds for deletion - if it was, the vast majority of articles on fiction could be deleted on the same grounds. --Milo H Minderbinder 15:06, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Except that writing a summary about a plot point isn't what the article's doing. It also has analysis (X came from Y is an analysis - one that people are arguing is trivial, but still an analysis). WP:OR doesn't care about whether the analysis is trivial - it only cares about whether the analysis is published. ColourBurst 20:33, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

That's not true. The article doesn't claim that every one is necessarily an intentional reference, specifically "references may or may not be accidental". But there are clearly items on the list that require no analysis whatsoever. For example, "Who is John Galt"/"Who is John Galt". If something is the same, it's the same, zero analysis required. Are you going to tell me that determining whether those two are identical requires "research" or "observation"? There may be references on the list that are questionable, but the fix is to remove the specific items, not the whole list. Or just rename it "similarities to pop culture" instead of "references" if you honestly think it's possible the game designers unintentionally created dozens of bits that happen to be identical to elements of pop culture. --Milo H Minderbinder 21:08, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Page protection policy

I don't see any good reason for not protecting pages that are on the main page, especially the featured article. Isn't the whole point of having an article on the main page that the article is already good, and that few edits need to be made? When an article is on the main page, most of the edits made to it are vandalism anyway.

I'd basically like to propose a change to the protection policy. Pages that appear on the main page should be protected, as are images, or at least semi-protected so that vandalism can be reduced on the articles that are seen by the majority of people that visit Misplaced Pages. _JD 18:36, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Full protection on main page linked articles is a bad idea. Even very-high profile FAs change somewhat whilst they are on the main page, see this diff for Hurricane Katrina; its not just vandalism that occurs. Articles that get linked through a DYK mention will be quite dynamic and likely are still being edited by the primary author(s); full protection would really hurt those articles. It may be reasonable to change things so main page articles can be semi-protected if needed (like any other vandal target).--Nilfanion (talk) 18:57, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Protection of FAs is against policy, but I haven't seen any policy against Main page protection; the only thing i saw was "main page articles may be protected if vandalized" on the WP:SPP page; this sounds a lot like the policy for all other articles. Please show me somewhere if I'm wrong about this. -Patstuart 19:00, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Compact cassette saw some major improvement while on the front page, adding an infobox and fleshing out some additional details. Semiprotection would cut down on vandalism, but full protection would be a terrible idea. Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 19:11, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Just because an FA is on the front page doesn't mean it can't be improved, and having it on the front page often allows people to do exactly that. Semi-protection might be useful if the article is a vandal target, but full protection isn't necessary. ColourBurst 22:23, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

I was going to suggest that a featured article be semi-protected for as long as it's on the front page. Once it's no longer on the front page, it reverts back to editable. It's no secret that stuff on the front page tends to get a good share of vandalism by people who think they're being 'cute'. HalfShadow 00:49, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

The point of always allowing editing on main page articles is to advertise the key quality of Misplaced Pages - that anyone can edit it. Wouldn't it be somewhat hypocritical if we advertise as the encyclopedia anyone can edit, yet the first article most people see is uneditable? --Golbez 09:59, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

• Please see WP:PEREN. There are good reasons for not protecting a mainpage article, in particular the fact that it advertises Misplaced Pages, and an important part of Misplaced Pages is open editing. >Radiant< 11:57, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

I thought the main page was meant to advertise Misplaced Pages. Most of the edits made to articles on the main page are vandalism anyway, and semi-protection only prevents some people from editing it. Articles would only be semi-protected for as long as they're a big massive target labelled "vandalise me", and if people were serious about editing such articles, they would either create an account or wait for the article to be unprotected. So much vandalism occurs on articles linked from the main page; is it really worth clogging up the edit histories in hope of a single constructive edit? _JD 10:56, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

Where is the line drawn between acceptable/unacceptable image sources?

A dispute has arisen between myself and User:Dr Zak over whether Image:Inglis.jpg counts as "unsourced" and should be deleted because it doesn't contain the name of the photographer - simply the (reputable) website where it was found. There are thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of images hosted on Misplaced Pages that 'do their best' to correctly attribute the source and rationale - in fact, I daresay the vast majority of image sources contain the url where the image was found, not a photographer/newspaper name (which is certainly also acceptable). I would appreciate any clarification if this image is in fact somehow deserving to be deleted since we list the immediate source, but not the pressPhotographer/newspaperName - or if we have indeed done all the work necessary to try and find the original source of the courtroom photo, and it is all but an Orphaned work. Sherurcij 21:51, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

• Comment, since it has no sourcing information, we don't know if it's actually news print, or what, so we can't really know how much value we're hurting by including it. It seems as if we could make an argument for inclusion based on uniqueness, but how do you know the picture's even really him if you don't know where it's from? Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 21:56, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

It does say where it's from, http://www.murderfile.net/names/inglis51.htm - a reputable siteSherurcij 22:18, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

How do we know that is a reputable source? The site doesn't even list the name of who runs it! Has anyone else ever cited murderfile.net? On the other hand, most everyone will trust the Times, Guardian, or any other British broadsheet, and if the image was sourced back to any newspaper it would be credible immediately. Dr Zak 22:26, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

I'm seeing http://www.murderfile.net/research.htm which clearly says John Eddleston, the creator and webmaster of this site has written nine true crime books. I've since eMailed him to ask if he remembers his source for the Inglis photo - but even if he should not remember, he is a well-known author who runs a reputable website. This isn't exactly geocities quality, it's a database of murderers, their photos and their stories...a lot more reliable than say, Rotten.com's database, which is a lot less reputable. Sherurcij 02:05, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

• Why should the verifiability policy not apply to images? Unless we know where the image has been published we can't even be sure that it's James Inglis who is on that picture, and the picture should be deleted until a source is found. Dr Zak 22:20, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
• The source cited has to be the person, organisation or website that actually holds the copyright to the image. If the image is reproduced from a newsprint original, then the copyright of the digitized photo still remains with the newspaper even if the photo is put on another website. The website wouldn't hold copyright on the photo. Therefore, the image in question doesn't have a source from which we can double-check the copyright status. Kavadi carrier 15:49, 10 November 2006 (UTC)
  • I'm not going to disagree that this particular image is insufficiently sourced, but "source" shouldn't be interpreted to mean "copyright owner" must be established for every image, as long as it's at least sourced back to the work from which it derives, so that we know how the owner used the image, i.e., the context in which it was first published. For example, a screenshot from a film is usable in an article on that film regardless of who owns the rights to that film. The fair use analysis doesn't change based on whether Paramount owns the copyright, Paramount owned it but later assigned it to DreamWorks, the director owned it, the director's widow inherited it, etc. Before anyone objects, ask yourself whether we actually verify current copyright ownership, or just assume (reasonably) that whomever produced it owned it in the first instance and continues to own it. In this case, however, we don't even have enough source info to tell us what use was made of the photograph when it was first published. Postdlf 16:06, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

User pages in template categories

A fairly significant number of user pages are in template categories, probably due to copy and pasting. This must be common as for example Category:Food user template says After you save the user page, please edit it again to insure that no user template categories have been placed on the user page. User pages are not user templates, so they do not belong in user template categories. - so in fact they should be all fixed.

I started changing some user pages to fix this, but I have some hesitation. From one point of view it's not uncommon to see someone going through user pages and changing user boxes (without permission) to make them conform, on the other hand it seems I'm invading. Sending a messsage to the talk page, which I tried in one case, is probably not effective, as some usera are not active, and others will not bother or will not know how to fix the probelm.

I'm considering setting up an another user name specific to doing this, so it's user page will identfy the purpose of the its; edits. --ArmadilloFromHell 02:13, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Have you identified how widespread the problem is? I'd be willing to lend a hand as I'm sure other would, but if it's really widespread, maybe soliciting a bot operator would be in order. I don't think you are invading. The categories are wrong and I'm finding it hard to imagine a protest that has a valid basis. I would think most users would either not even notice the edit, or just say "oh, housekeeping."--Fuhghettaboutit 03:28, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

I haven't really done an analysis - my gut feeling is it's not enough for a bot, and probably manageable by hand. I think it varies with the type of user template, but probably around 5%. However in one template it looked more like 20%. I'd be interested in writing a bot for the experience, (I'm a full time programmer) but I'm not sure where to start looking for info. --ArmadilloFromHell 04:46, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Go ahead and remove the categories; if they complain (which is unlikely), just point them to the page that tells them they should have done it in the first place. As long as you use a descriptive edit summary, the chances of someone getting pissed off are fairly slim. EVula // talk // ☯ // 05:32, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanks to both of you for answers. --ArmadilloFromHell 06:27, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

• I second the above. Userpages should never be in categories intended for templates (nor, for that matter, in mainspace categories). Removing them from those cats is really not a big deal. >Radiant< 11:56, 10 November 2006 (UTC)
  • And sometimes a needed hint to blank a longdisused sandbox page. Agathoclea 20:35, 10 November 2006 (UTC)
• It's not invading; userpages are not the exclusive territory of the corresponding user to do with as he or she wishes, they're part of the project and anyone can edit them. Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 15:51, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

Very annoying user question

A user has routinely been removing a small piece of information from this article: Super Bowl. I've been reinserting it, but he refuses to give an explanation. I waited a whole week to reinsert it, hoping he'd disappear, but he didn't. Here's the problem: he's using many different IPs to go about it, thus circumventing 3RR. Is there any way I can deal with this? Is s-protection a viable option? Patstuart 06:36, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

I suppose you could revert him as a sockpuppet vandal. Better yet, semi-protection. The repeated removal should qualify the article. – Someguy0830 (T | C) 06:43, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

I've asked admins about this issue at a different time; they say you can't revert someone else's 3RR. At least I'm fairly sure I was told that. I hate to semi the article because someone decided to use 15 different IPs at New York University to remove 2 important sentences, but didn't want to discuss it. Patstuart 06:46, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Given that he's using a dynamic IP, semi-protection is really the only way to stop him. Also, as I understand it, removing verifiable content without explanation is vandalism. – Someguy0830 (T | C) 06:49, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Really? Hmm. I'll wait until I get an admin's second opinion before I go off doing a fourth reversion. Yes, I have messaged his talk pages several times, but I'm not going to go past 3RR without permission. Thanks. -Patstuart 06:54, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

This actually looks more like a content dispute. The tidbit in question is unsourced and somewhat speculative. It's unfortunate the Anon won't communicate. --Doc Tropics 07:08, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

I would normally agree, but the problem is that he's removing valuable information, and refusing to provide a reason. I'm under the impression that continually removing information without providing a reason is vandalism. It's exacerbated by the fact he's using many different IP addresses, clearly to avoid detection. Patstuart 19:23, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

I'm dealing with a very similar situation right now, so I can clearly understand your frustration. You might consider asking some Recent Changes Patrollers to add the page to their Watchlists. RCPs tend to have a refreshingly no-nonsense attitude about Anon IPs who delete material from otherwise stable articles. --Doc Tropics 20:10, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the "sympathy and suggestion" - always helpful. I am a recent-page patroller, so if you ever need help, feel free to shoot me a message. :) Patstuart 20:17, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Sounds good, maybe we should form our own cabal :) --Doc Tropics 04:44, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

The safe way to handle this is to cite the disputed statement to a reputable source. Then future deletion would be straight vandalism. Durova 06:47, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

3RR

Does the 3RR apply to reverts over continued insertion of copyrighted/text-dumped material into an article, or is it considered vandalism? Cheers. Bubba hotep 09:22, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

I'm not an admin, but in my experience admins tend to be very lenient on established users who "bend" 3RR when dealing with new/anonymous users who don't seem to understand/wantToCooperate/followTheRules of WP. Just be sure to mention in the edit summary "4th revert of copyvio material, not violating 3RR" or something and you'll be fine. Sherurcij 09:52, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

3RR does not apply when dealing with vandalism, and yes, repeatedly inserting blatantly copied material into an article counts. If it's subtler, like a fight over a couple of sentences, then no, find other methods than violating 3RR to deal with it. But if you're going to revert that many times over a copyright violation, you really should make an urgent notice on WP:AIV or WP:CP before getting into a revert war. --Golbez 09:56, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Seconding the above: Misplaced Pages has an obligation to respect copyright, so I wouldn't block anyone for reverting away from copyrighted text. If an editor attempts to add copyright violations to an article that many times then report to WP:AN/I. Durova 06:44, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

The 3RR does not apply to reversion of vandalism. Whether insertion of material into an article counts as vandalism or not really depends on the intent of the editor inserting the material. If it's clearly bad-faith, then you can call it vandalism. Unless it is blatant vandalism it's generally worth asking for a second opinion. As you described the situation, it's unlikely that you would get blocked for a 3RR violation, but it's better not to ask someone to make a judgement call. It's better to deal with the underlying problem - does the editor not understand that what they are doing is wrong? are they blatantly violating policy? are the terminally dense? - in all these cases, there are underlying problems that should be dealt with - reverting the insertions really doesn't deal with the underlying problem. Guettarda 01:13, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

renaming WP:FU

I'm thinking that we should rename "fair use" to "unfree content" to more accurately reflect its subject (which is more about the use of unfree content in general than compliance with fair use law), so I'm wondering if there's any reason why we shouldn't. I've opened a section for discussion on WT:FU. Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 00:03, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

We shouldn't, because "fair use" is the recognized term. User:Zoe|(talk) 03:27, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

All the discussion, including my response to you, is on WT:FU. Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 03:53, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

Photo of possibly copyrighted work needs two copyright-status statements

At Image:Piccadilly_T5_Extension.JPG it says "I, the author of this work, hereby publish it under the following license...". I presume that the person who selected this permission-template is the photographer. But the photo is of a sign of a diagrammatic route map (or more likely just part of it), which is itself a creative work and therefore probably copyrighted (by Transport for London). It seems possible that to use this image we would need the permission of TfL as well as that of the photographer. I'm no expert on what circumstances would qualify as fair use, so for all I know it might not be a violation of TfL's copyright to photograph and republish a small part of the sign, but we still need to say so.

In short, it seems to me that this sort of image page requires two, not one, statements justifying its legal right to exist: one regarding the photographer's claim to copyright, one regarding the material being photographed.

Another example is Image:Dord.jpg. In this case there is a claim of fair use that seems to refer to the dictionary excerpt rather than to the image itself, but there is also a statement that "If someone had a copy of this dicionary and could take a pic of it we could get something that's not 'fair used'." There seems to be a confusion between Merriam-Webster's possible copyright (if any — and if there isn't any, we need to say so) and the photographer's.

I don't have the time to pursue this matter in any way (I don't even expect to check back for followups), but I imagine there's someone reading this who would like to take it up. Or maybe there's a project in existence for this sort of thing, and this just needs to be brought to their attention. Or maybe they already know about the issue, and I didn't even need to post this. Thanks for your attention, or apologies for wasting your time, as the case may be.

207.176.159.90 02:12, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

"I am not an expert", but my gut instinct says that your first example of the photographed sign is acceptable. One could claim that you can't photograph a McDonald's restaurant, because you'd be infringing on their copyrighted/trademarked distinctive styling...but that's basically bullshit. Gut instinct also says that the second example you posted, of the dictionary page, is not acceptable. Sherurcij 02:16, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

Sort of. It's possible the photo could be considered a derivative work, based on the amount of creative interpretation added by the photograph. Even if this is the case, however, there would still be only one license statement - the author would not be able to release the photograph under a license of their choosing, since they're assigning rights of a work that they are not the exclusive copyright owner of. Deco 02:29, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

Deco's right about the photo possibly being a derivative work, which means that it copies (or makes use of) the copyrighted work from which it is derived (i.e., that which it depicts). But it's a derivative at best. In the case of the photo of the sign above, it's practically just an unchanged (though low quality) copy of the sign itself. The dictionary scan is even more clear-cut as a slavish copy, so whomever scanned the dictionary doesn't have any right to the scan itself. A photocopy machine or scanner just takes a picture of whatever you lay on its flatbed; the fact that you happen to be standing vertically with an independent camera in your hand aiming at that two-dimensional surface doesn't change the fact that you're just making a copy.

So if you don't have the right (or a fair use claim) to use a copy of the creative work featured in the photograph, you don't have the right to use a photograph of it (unless it's a photo of a building's exterior, but that's an express exception under U.S. law). If your photograph added nothing to the original, then you've gained no rights over your copy. Postdlf 02:41, 11 November 2006 (UTC) (IAAL, btw)

I'm looking at this, and I'll bet that it depends on how you use it. The Dord seems to be fair-use, because it was just illustrating how the Webster dictionary goofed up. It wasn't using the text in the article. The other one would probably need the second tag, IMHO. -Patstuart 04:03, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

The first image is a 2D representation of a (presumably copyright) work, so the original copyrights would apply, to the best of my understanding. To claim it as a derivative work there would have to be some creative content in the representation (framing, lighting, etc). That seems a rather long shot argument for that image.

Dort appears to be appropriately tagged. Guettarda 01:06, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

Campaign advertisements

I'd like to solicit feedback from the Misplaced Pages community on the following four points concerning campaign advertisements (i.e., advertisements supporting a particular ArbCom, Administrator, or Bureaucrat candidate):

1. Is it appropriate to upload campaign advertisements to the Image namespace? (e.g., Image:FN_bumpstick.gif)
2. Is it appropriate to post campaign advertisements which use "fixed" CSS positioning so that they are always visible on the page? (e.g., )
3. Is it appropriate to post campaign advertisements on one's User talk page instead of one's User page? (e.g., )
4. Is it appropriate to post campaign advertisements on other users' User talk pages without permission? (e.g., )

—Psychonaut 10:45, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

My few cents:

1. Campaign images? Eh, may as well, I guess. Seems about equivalent to userboxes.
2. A magic floating div seems a bit annoying, period, regardless of what's in it.
3. A user's talk page is still in their userspace; some even use it as their userpage.
4. Posting to other users' pages is spamming and should be very discouraged.

That's how I look at it, anyway. I prefer to go by "your userspace is, barring serious concerns, more or less your own playhouse," but spamming, fishing for votes, and such have always been frowned upon in XfDs and other requests for comment for as long as I can remember. Luna Santin 10:51, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

It doesn't bother me particularly. How else do you plan on getting people to vote? Without publicizing it, the arbcom elections will basically stay as a walled garden. If you actively advertise them, then maybe we will get wider input from the less prolific and less meta- editors. --tjstrf Now on editor review! 10:55, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

Agreed, however the problem with this kind of advertising is it is for one candidate only - if it read "Vote in the Dec 2006 ArbCom election" rather than "Vote for candiate x" , I'd be in support of it. I just dunno about the specific one-candidate promotion, but I guess that as an ArbCom candidate myself, I'm in no position to objectively evaluate this issue. Daniel.Bryant 11:06, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

The thing to realize there is that Misplaced Pages doesn't have political parties, or even the real potential for such a thing. (The closest thing to parties that I'm aware of are the deletionist/inclusionist groups, and arbcom doesn't rule on AfD.) Candidates don't really run against each other. Because of that, I don't view a "Vote for x" as divisive the same way a "Vote for Democratic candidate ________" box would be. Endorsing a candidate for arbcom on your talk page (via userbox, prose, whatever) shouldn't be divisive or inflammatory, and has a potential positive benefit of increasing voter turnout. It's really no different than the list of editors I look up to I keep on my user page.

Now if someone were to start spamming the village pump with campaign ads, or put a prominent "vote for x" message in their signature, or write some 2 page monstrosity and distribute it via AWB to everyone they knew, that might be cause for concern. --tjstrf Now on editor review! 11:20, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

Regarding item 4: a request was made which in this puppy's opinion obviates the need for "permission" per se. Clearly the recipient may remove the notice should he so desire. KillerChihuahua 11:25, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

See also my thoughts here. KillerChihuahua 11:27, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

Regarding KC's "campaign ad", my thought was that it was amusingly tongue-in-cheek, and I happened to agree with it, so I added it to my talk page. I might have put it on my user page, but for the moment that is pretty much blank. Guettarda 14:56, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

Yes, so far as I know, humour has yet to be banned from Wiki. &#0149;Jim62sch&#0149; 17:38, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

And if humor is banned from WP, you can go ahead and perma-block me too. --Doc "vote Flo Night for ArbCom" Tropics 22:17, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

• There was, however, a recent attempt to outlaw sarcasm. (Radiant) 13:14, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

• To answer the question - I'd say you can do pretty much whatever you like on your own userpage and talk page. Per WP:SPAM I would advise against campaigning on other people's talk pages without their permission (or indeed, anywhere else). Also, I would advise against campaigning against a candidate; the 2004 elections had a problematic page for "disendorsements" (or "I, John Doe, consider candidate Foo to be incompetent" and nastier variants). A similar page was speedily deleted in 2005 under the criterion for attack pages. (Radiant) 13:19, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

The "See Also: Wikilink Dump" format hides information from novice users

In the "See Also" section, user-friendly articles include links to both the wikilink dump and related articles, but less user-friendly articles only include a link to dump.

The practice of not including related links within the article hides information from novice users, who rely upon their browser's 'find' tool to locate specific information quickly. If a 'find' search fails to locate the keyword within the article, novice users are likely to assume that Misplaced Pages does not contain the information they seek.

Some articles are more useful than others because the "See Also" layout guidelines do not specify that the "See Also: wikilink dump" format can not be used to fulfill the requirements of the See Also section.

Discuss here 70.112.29.65 12:26, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

You're going to have to try to explain that again, because I for one have no clue what your point is! Thanks/wangi 12:52, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

Ideally, see also sections are unnecessary, because everything in them would be covered in the body of the text. Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 15:48, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

Wangi, thanks for admitting that you don't understand. I'll explain the problem in a different manner: Assume that 1) The user wants to find a list of the public holidays in a certain country, 2) The primary article for that country does not contain the list, 3) The list is in another article related to that country, 4) The user uses the following methodology:

1) User types the country name into the Wiki search box & selects "go" --> Result: User is redirected to the primary article for the country.

2) User types in 'Holidays' into his/her Internet browser's "find in this page" search tool.

The result of step #2 varies, based on the layout of the "See Also" section at the end of the article. In user-friendly articles, (such as the United States), the browser finds the link to the information in the article's primary "See also" section. In less user-friendly articles, (such as the Philippines), the browser fails to find the link to the information. Novice users may incorrectly assume that Misplaced Pages does not contain the information they seek.

The reason for the failure is that the See Also section in less user-friendly articles only gives the link to the relevant "List of xyz related articles" (the Wikilink dump). Whereas, the primary See Also section in user-friendly articles include links to the related articles and the link to relevant "List of xyz related articles" page.

This problem can be corrected by clarifying the layout guidelines for the primary "See Also" section at the end of the article. It should require that the primary See Also section contains individual links to all the related articles. 70.112.29.65 23:26, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

Uhm, what do you mean by "wikilink dump"? The United States see also is nearly unreadable, while the Philippines one is much better. I would prefer that they did list the most major sub-articles there, but it's certainly better than the US article's multiple screens of uncollapsed templates. --tjstrf Now on editor review! 23:43, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

(edit conflict)

Well I think maybe what lost me was your example of a "good" article - the US article links to a single article just like your bad example does although with a template too, maybe that's a recent edit. I'd agree with Night Gyr that ideally no article would have a see also section.

However I do not think we can possibly include enough links on any given article to match every user's expectations - it's simply not maintainable and would swamp the real content. We do try to help people along to other articles using a number of mechanisms, including:

1. Internal wikilinks in articles
2. Categories of related articles, linked at the bottom of each article
3. The search box at the left of each article.

Thanks/wangi 23:47, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

Wangi, no, it's not a recent edit. But its OK that you commented before reading the links carefully. I am sure that the clarification helped others to see the problem more clearly.

You state that one of the mechanisms for "helping people along to other articles" is the inclusion of "Categories of related articles, linked at the bottom of each article." The omission of this mechanism at the end of the "bad" article is precisely my point. It should be present, but it is not.

Perhaps you intended to state that when there are just a few related articles, links to those articles are included, like in the case of Peru. However, when there are many related links, then Wikipedians could not "possibly include enough links on any given article to match every user's expectations - it's simply not maintainable and would swamp the real content."

I disagree. If a "List of XYZ related articles" page can be maintained, then the contents of that page can be appended to the primary XYZ page. To do anything less hides information from novice users.

Tjstrf, Yes, the See Also section of the "bad" article is more readable than the one in the "good" article. The "bad" article See Only section only contains one link, whereas the one in the "good" article constains more than 50 links.

In regards to your query on on the term "Wikilink dump" it was used by Howard the duck in reference to the List of Philippine-related topics. He stated, "that list is for maintainance (for checking on related changes), and is a wikilink dump." If you need greater clarification, you will have to ask him. 70.112.29.65 03:23, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

Adding references to existing facts

What is the community position on retrospectively adding references to support facts?

Regarding this edit; the reason for the "unneeded notations" were that I had added the refs to somone else's work. Why do I consider this a potential problem?

A) If we don't know the actual source, there may be legal/academic issues in implying someone got a fact from a particular place, when in fact they got it elsewhere.

B) Circular references:-

1. Person A includes uncited "fact" in Misplaced Pages article. We don't know if fact is accurate and/or if a citable source actually exists.
2. Person B uses sees Wiki article, and includes A's "fact" in their article at www.othersite.com. (They don't mention that they used Misplaced Pages in their research).
3. Person C sees that A's Wiki article lacks a reference/back-up, and searches for one on the web. Sees B's article at othersite.com, notes that fact *seems* to back up A's. Not realising where B got fact from in first place, he/she includes it as reference.

Fourohfour 15:50, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

A) If a source supports the assertion, it is irrelevant whether the original editor used that source or another. There is no ownership of articles and hence no implication that any particular editor used any particular source. B) is a potential problem, but is only one instance of a more general issue related to evaluating the quality of sources. There is no shortage of internet sites and publications that make all manner of dubious assertions. Unfortunately, there is no simple heuristic for determining what constitutes a reliable source that covers the entire range of topics in Misplaced Pages. Circular self-references are only one variety of issue that clueful editors need to be aware of. older ≠ wiser 18:24, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages could use a lot more editors who add good citations to existing text. Per WP:RS, the sort of site that would just regurgitate Misplaced Pages's information shouldn't be used as a reference. Durova 22:54, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

Indeed although I think that we have to live with poorly cited articles on a short term basis. The FA and WP:GA processes insure that some of the more important articles (or at least most dear to some) eventually reach a state where they have to get references. It's just hard to make sure people understand that Misplaced Pages has to be used with some circumspection. Pascal.Tesson 23:39, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

Durova, you're missing the point in some respects. These sites aren't necessarily "just regurgitating Misplaced Pages's information" a la answers.com. (Straight copies are actually *easier* to spot). On the contrary, the owners of the sites I have in mind could simply be using it to add (or even verify) one or two facts that they aren't too sure of themselves.

Now, since we can't tell which sites are using Misplaced Pages as a source if they don't reference it, this means that all sites/articles that don't give references can't be used, full stop.

That's not going to happen; I think it would make more sense to note the potential problem in an unobtrusive way. Fourohfour 17:48, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

A POV term

I've added a suggestion to a POV term that I think should be avoided at Wikipedia_talk:Words_to_avoid#Homophobic. I would really appreciate comment on this one. Patstuart 05:24, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

You might not like mine, but I've given it. Durova 06:14, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

Internal Plagiarism

What is wikipedia´s policy on plagiarising other wikipedia pages? Is that against the rules? Am I allowed to, when writing an article, copy bits and pieces from other articles on the site? Franchez3 18:30, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

I think that would be OK. If you are trying to copy multiple paragraphs of information, however, it might be better to link to the article in question, to avoid duplication of content. Tra (Talk) 18:50, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

Depends on how large those bits and pieces are. One or two sentences of summary plus a Wikilink seems fair. Copy/paste operations of large blocks of text wouldn't be good. Durova 18:56, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

Per the GFDL we need to credit all authors. If you copy information from another page you need to provide a link to the original page. At the very least the edit summary should say where it comes from. Doing otherwise is a violation of copyright, as far as I can tell. Guettarda 01:01, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

As people have said above, it depends. When you find yourself needing to explain something in an article, you can either link to another article where that something is explained, or you can explain that something in the article you are writing. It is an authorial judgement on whether you think you can provide a short, relevant explanation in the article (plus a link), or whether it is better to just link to another article and leave the reader to either follow the link or not follow the link. If the explanation is essential for the article, I tend to explain in the article. If it is not essential, then just a link will do. Imagine you are the reader - would you want to have to click a link, or would you prefer to have the explanation included in the article you are reading? Another method of explaining things is to use a footnote as an aside to explain something without breaking the flow of a sentence. The linking method can also vary. You can link from inside a sentence, like this, or you can put a link at the beginning of the section if you are summarising a whole article. An example of this is the "main article" link at the Isaac_Newton#Early_years section of the Isaac Newton article. This is called Summary style; please read about this style before using it. Finally, as Durova said, copying and pasting large blocks of text is not good. It can be done, but only if you know what you are doing. The key thing here is to maintain a clear chain of attribution. This sort of thing is usually only done when merging pages, and it requires clear edit summaries that link to the pages between which text is being transferred, allowing someone looking at the editing history to find out who wrote which bits of the text. The essential thing to do is to say in the edit summary who wrote the text (though in practice this is done by linking to the article the text is being copied from), as saying nothing incorrectly implies that you wrote the text you are moving between articles. Making sure the authors of the text can be identified is part of Misplaced Pages's licence, the GFDL. Finally, a very important point about copying from Misplaced Pages pages, is that moving entire pages is done using a "move page" function, not the copying and pasting method. Carcharoth 01:09, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages:Discuss, don't vote

I would like feedback on whether the currently proposed wording of this guideline is an accurate description of the status quo in Misplaced Pages. Please respond on its talk page. (Radiant) 10:12, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages:Wheel war

An editor asked me what one policy I could enact by fiat. I had to say I couldn't do any such thing, even if I had the authority. Then I thought that was ducking the question and said No wheel warring.

I can't think of anything I'd like better than to see this tagged {{policy}}. It's not for me to do this; I'm too involved. Before the last merge, both halves of this page were tagged, without controversy, {{guideline}}. The page is stable and there is no controversy on talk.

I'd like to ask our community to visit this page, judge it on its merits, and see if the policy tag is warranted. If not, of course, please feel free to air concerns, propose changes, and edit this page. Thank you. John Reid ° 10:27, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

Given the obvious red box under the heading of "policy", i'd say "Do not repeat an administrative action when you know that another administrator opposes it." is already considered a policy, tagged or not. --`/aksha 12:03, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

• That page should probably be policy considering it's upheld in several arbcom rulings; or at the very least, guideline. However, it's a very messy page and needs cleanup, and there is some disagreement over whether a wheel war starts when admin B undoes admin A's action, or that it starts when admin A repeats his action. (Radiant) 13:12, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

Removing warnings - specific issue

I know no policy or guideline directly covers the issue of removing warnings but I'm seeking advice on a specific case, see Misplaced Pages talk:Centralized discussion/Removing warnings#Advice on what I should do Nil Einne 10:44, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

• Several proposed policies to forbid warning removal were defeated. As such, people remain allowed to remove things that they don't like from their talk page, and that includes warnings. Revert warring to replace a warning is bad form. One may assume that a user removing a warning has read said warning, so if he persists in the behavior that lead to the warning in the first place, sanctions may be appropriate. (Radiant) 13:07, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
• I disagree with this - while there are no policies forbidding the practice, it is considered very poor form to remove such warnings, and restoring them is often appropriate when the user is rapidly on their way to being blocked, especially when not doing so might cause other admins to just leave a redundant note rather than do something. --Improv 14:15, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

Agreed with Improv. It may be "allowed" but it's strongly discouraged. In many cases it's a clear cut attempt to hide a pattern of vandalism, especially when warnings are issued repetitively. Pascal.Tesson 14:27, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

The key points are that "warnings for removing warnings" shouldn't be used (they escalate the situation), that "blocking for removing said warnings" is a no-no. The best thing to do, if you think "removal of such warnings is due to the user trying to avoid others spotting a pattern of behaviour", is to bypass the talk page and go straight to the contributions page and see if there is a pattern of disruptive behaviour that continues after the removal of the warning. Then take the appropriate action. Carcharoth 17:59, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

Question about introductory paragraphs

I guess I do not understand the seemingly desperate need in many articles to try to shove a huge amount of material as close as possible to the start of the article. At least in my opinion, the introduction should be brief and just a very short summary. Readers should not be overwhelmed by a lot of details in the introduction, but just be able to learn a minimal description of the subject. In other words, the introduction should answer the question, "What is the article about?". Readers can then continue if they are interested, or move on to something else if they have learned enough in the first few sentences. I am curious as to the reasoning that drives people to want to front load these articles with several different translations and synonymous terms (all in bold) and etymology and many many dates and caveats and extraneous information and details, to the extent that the introduction tells the reader NOTHING about the subect of the article, since it is so buried in minutae.--Filll 16:10, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

Your opinion is thoroughly backed up by WP:MOS. I have a theory about this phenomenon...I suspect it is due in large part to "layered" editing when many editors participate. Each one adds a tidbit, thinking "This is so interesting it should go in the intro". Trimming an intro per MOS is always appropriate. Just keep in mind that the info removed from the opening should be moved down into a relevant section of the article, not just deleted. Not exactly glamorous work, but necessary and worthwhile. --Doc Tropics 16:39, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

This is probably due to the tension between the lead section often trying to be both an introduction and a summary. See WP:Lead section for details. Carcharoth 18:01, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

1. Luke 1, Luke 2
2. Luke 2:37; 4:25-26; 7:12; 18:3, 5; 20:47; 21:2-3)

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