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Revision as of 01:33, 17 July 2020 editSMcCandlish (talk \| contribs)Autopatrolled, Extended confirmed users, Page movers, File movers, New page reviewers, Pending changes reviewers, Rollbackers, Template editors201,793 edits →On cite: r← Previous edit		Revision as of 03:04, 18 July 2020 edit undoNetoholic (talk \| contribs)Autopatrolled, Extended confirmed users39,917 edits →2nd opinion: new sectionNext edit →
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	::Of course I watch your talk page :^). I think this is a case of "we want it to match the default styles" rather than "we want it to match how people are using it", which totally defeats the purpose of why we have semantic HTML and not styled HTML and also defeats the purpose of having a living specification (to wit: that it is the use that comes first, not the specification). We should propose a {{tag\|work\|o}} (along with proposing some suggested classes like {{tag\|work\|o\|attribs=class="lesser"}} just to see what would happen. I'm sure the editor's brain would explode. :^) --] (]) 14:19, 16 July 2020 (UTC)		::Of course I watch your talk page :^). I think this is a case of "we want it to match the default styles" rather than "we want it to match how people are using it", which totally defeats the purpose of why we have semantic HTML and not styled HTML and also defeats the purpose of having a living specification (to wit: that it is the use that comes first, not the specification). We should propose a {{tag\|work\|o}} (along with proposing some suggested classes like {{tag\|work\|o\|attribs=class="lesser"}} just to see what would happen. I'm sure the editor's brain would explode. :^) --] (]) 14:19, 16 July 2020 (UTC)
	:::I've written to them about this problem many times over the last 6 or so years, and the one time I got any response, it was extremely testy, and was basically just a defensive rant against W3C. Probably the most childish thing I've ever received from a formal organization other than FSF (lesson: do not put people with a temperament like Stallman's in positions of authority). I noticed that a lot of people (including some other Wikipedians and colleagues I know from other circles) were regularly updating WHATWG's wiki with various implementation and spec-conflict notes, so I registered to become an editor there, and document this "spec fork" and that actual usage is mostly the broader W3C definition of this element. My registration was blockaded, presumably by the same personage who flamed at me. So, forget those people. We all just have to work around them until they are replaced. If one wanted to change this, it would probably be more constructive to contact the right people at the browser makers, and get them to pressure WHATWG from inside its own little reality tunnel. It is not really plausible that the browser makers want their software incompatible with actual dominant usage. The spec was original broad to begin with, so the change to something very narrow (and stylistically wrong and impractical anyway) is an brain-fart they should just undo. <span style="white-space:nowrap;font-family:'Trebuchet MS'"> — ] ] ] 😼 </span>		:::I've written to them about this problem many times over the last 6 or so years, and the one time I got any response, it was extremely testy, and was basically just a defensive rant against W3C. Probably the most childish thing I've ever received from a formal organization other than FSF (lesson: do not put people with a temperament like Stallman's in positions of authority). I noticed that a lot of people (including some other Wikipedians and colleagues I know from other circles) were regularly updating WHATWG's wiki with various implementation and spec-conflict notes, so I registered to become an editor there, and document this "spec fork" and that actual usage is mostly the broader W3C definition of this element. My registration was blockaded, presumably by the same personage who flamed at me. So, forget those people. We all just have to work around them until they are replaced. If one wanted to change this, it would probably be more constructive to contact the right people at the browser makers, and get them to pressure WHATWG from inside its own little reality tunnel. It is not really plausible that the browser makers want their software incompatible with actual dominant usage. The spec was original broad to begin with, so the change to something very narrow (and stylistically wrong and impractical anyway) is an brain-fart they should just undo. <span style="white-space:nowrap;font-family:'Trebuchet MS'"> — ] ] ] 😼 </span>

			== 2nd opinion ==

			You're move familiar with . I've only looked back the last couple days and tried to fix two recurrences, but was reverted. I'm not willing to get involved any more with it than that at this time. -- ] ] 03:04, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

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Old stuff to resolve eventually

Cueless billiards

Unresolved – Can't get at the stuff at Ancestry; try using addl. cards.

Extended content
Categories are not my thing but do you think there are enough articles now or will be ever to make this necessary? Other than Finger billiards and possibly Carrom, what else is there?--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 11:12, 18 January 2010 (UTC) Crud fits for sure. And if the variant in it is sourceable, I'm sure some military editor will fork it into a separate article eventually. I think at least some variants of bar billiards are played with hands and some bagatelle split-offs probably were, too (Shamos goes into loads of them, but I get them all mixed up, mostly because they have foreign names). And there's bocce billiards, article I've not written yet. Very fun game. Kept my sister and I busy for 3 hours once. Her husband (Air Force doctor) actually plays crud on a regular basis; maybe there's a connection. She beat me several times, so it must be from crud-playing. Hand pool might be its own article eventually. Anyway, I guess it depends upon your "categorization politics". Mine are pretty liberal - I like to put stuff into a logical category as long as there are multiple items for it (there'll be two as soon as you're done with f.b., since we have crud), and especially if there are multiple parent categories (that will be the case here), and especially especially if the split parallels the category structure of another related category branch (I can't think of a parallel here, so this criterion of mine is not a check mark in this case), and so on. A bunch of factors really. I kind of wallow in that stuff. Not sure why I dig the category space so much. Less psychodrama, I guess. >;-) In my entire time here, I can only think of maybe one categorization decision I've made that got nuked at CfD. And I'm a pretty aggressive categorizer, too; I totally overhauled Category:Pinball just for the heck of it and will probably do the same to Category:Darts soon. PS: I'm not wedded to the "cueless billiards" name idea; it just seemed more concise than "cueless developments from cue sports" or whatever.— SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(ل)ˀ Contribs. 11:44, 18 January 2010 (UTC) I have no "categorization politics". It's not an area that I think about a lot or has ever interested me so it's good there are people like you. If there is to be a category on this, "cueless billiards" seems fine to me. By the way, just posted Yank Adams as an adjunct to the finger billiards article I started.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 11:57, 18 January 2010 (UTC) Cool; I'd never even heard of him. This one looks like a good DYK; just the fact that there was Finger Billiards World Championship contention is funky enough, probably. You still citing that old version of Shamos? You really oughta get the 1999 version; it can be had from Amazon for cheap and has a bunch of updates. I actually put my old version in the recycle bin as not worth saving. Heh. PS: You seen Stein & Rubino 3rd ed.? I got one for the xmas before the one that just passed, from what was then a really good girlfriend. >;-) It's a-verra, verra nahce. Over 100 new pages, I think (mostly illustrations). — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(ل)ˀ Contribs. 13:41, 18 January 2010 (UTC) If I happen to come across it in a used book store I might pick it up. There's nothing wrong with citing the older edition (as I've said to you before). I had not heard of Adams before yesterday either. Yank is apparently not his real name, though I'm not sure what it is yet. Not sure there will be enough on him to make a DYK (though don't count it out). Of course, since I didn't userspace it, I have 4½ days to see. Unfortunately, I don't have access to ancestry.com and have never found any free database nearly as useful for finding newspaper articles (and census, birth certificates, and reams of primary source material). I tried to sign up for a free trial again which worked once before, but they got smart and are logging those who signed up previously. I just looked; the new Stein and Rubino is about $280. I'll work from the 2nd edition:-)--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 14:16, 18 January 2010 (UTC) Hmm... I haven't tried Ancestry in a while. They're probably logging IP addresses. That would definitely affect me, since mine doesn't change except once every few years. I guess that's what libraries and stuff are for. S&R: Should be available cheaper. Mine came with the Blue Book of Pool Cues too for under $200 total. Here it is for $160, plus I think the shipping was $25. Stein gives his e-mail address as that page. If you ask him he might give you the 2-book deal too, or direct you to where ever that is. Shamos: Not saying its an unreliable source (although the newer version actually corrected some entries), it's just cool because it has more stuff in it. :-) DYK: Hey, you could speedily delete your own article, sandbox it and come back. Heh. Seriously, I'll see if I can get into Ancestry again and look for stuff on him. I want to look for William Hoskins stuff anyway so I can finish that half of the Spinks/Hoskins story, which has sat in draft form for over a year. I get sidetracked... — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(ل)ˀ Contribs. 14:29, 18 January 2010 (UTC) It's not IPs they're logging, it's your credit card. You have to give them one in order to get the trial so that they can automatically charge you if you miss the cancellation deadline. Regarding the Blue Book, of all these books, that's the one that get's stale, that is, if you use it for actual quotes, which I do all the time, both for answer to questions and for selling, buying, etc. Yeah I start procrastinating too. I did all that work on Mingaud and now I can't get myself to go back. I also did reams of research on Hurricane Tony Ellin (thugh I found so little; I really felt bad when he died; I met him a few times, seemed like a really great guy), Masako Katsura and others but still haven't moved on them.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 18:31, 18 January 2010 (UTC) Ah, the credit card. I'll have to see if the PayPal plugin has been updated to work with the new Firefox. If so, that's our solution - it generates a new valid card number every time you use it (they always feed from your single PayPal account). — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(ل)ˀ Contribs. 18:37, 18 January 2010 (UTC) PayPal Plugin ist kaput. Some banks now issue credit card accounts that make use of virtual card numbers, but mine's not one of them. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(ل)ˀ Contribs. 19:49, 8 February 2010 (UTC) Thanks for trying. It was worth a shot. I signed up for a newspaperarchive.com three month trial. As far as newspaper results go it seems quite good so far, and the search interface is many orders of magnitude better than ancestry's, but it has none of the genealogical records that ancestry provides. With ancestry I could probably find census info on Yank as well as death information (as well as for Masako Katsura, which I've been working on it for a few days; she could actually be alive, though she'd be 96).--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 04:52, 9 February 2010 (UTC) Sad... How well forgotten some very well known people are. The more I read about Yank Adams, the more I realize he was world famous. Yet, he's almost completely unknown today and barely mentioned even in modern billiard texts.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 13:47, 21 January 2010 (UTC) Reading stuff from that era, it's also amazing how important billiards (in the three-ball sense) was back then, with sometimes multiple-page stories in newspapers about each turn in a long match, and so on. It's like snooker is today in the UK. PS: I saw that you found evidence of a billiards stage comedy there. I'd never heard of it! — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(ل)ˀ Contribs. 15:17, 21 January 2010 (UTC) Jackpot. Portrait, diagrams, sample shot descriptions and more (that will also lend itself to the finger billiards article).--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 01:34, 22 January 2010 (UTC) Nice find! — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(ل)ˀ Contribs. 06:07, 27 January 2010 (UTC)

Extended content

Categories are not my thing but do you think there are enough articles now or will be ever to make this necessary? Other than Finger billiards and possibly Carrom, what else is there?--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 11:12, 18 January 2010 (UTC)

Crud fits for sure. And if the variant in it is sourceable, I'm sure some military editor will fork it into a separate article eventually. I think at least some variants of bar billiards are played with hands and some bagatelle split-offs probably were, too (Shamos goes into loads of them, but I get them all mixed up, mostly because they have foreign names). And there's bocce billiards, article I've not written yet. Very fun game. Kept my sister and I busy for 3 hours once. Her husband (Air Force doctor) actually plays crud on a regular basis; maybe there's a connection. She beat me several times, so it must be from crud-playing. Hand pool might be its own article eventually. Anyway, I guess it depends upon your "categorization politics". Mine are pretty liberal - I like to put stuff into a logical category as long as there are multiple items for it (there'll be two as soon as you're done with f.b., since we have crud), and especially if there are multiple parent categories (that will be the case here), and especially especially if the split parallels the category structure of another related category branch (I can't think of a parallel here, so this criterion of mine is not a check mark in this case), and so on. A bunch of factors really. I kind of wallow in that stuff. Not sure why I dig the category space so much. Less psychodrama, I guess. >;-) In my entire time here, I can only think of maybe one categorization decision I've made that got nuked at CfD. And I'm a pretty aggressive categorizer, too; I totally overhauled Category:Pinball just for the heck of it and will probably do the same to Category:Darts soon.

PS: I'm not wedded to the "cueless billiards" name idea; it just seemed more concise than "cueless developments from cue sports" or whatever.— SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(ل)ˀ Contribs. 11:44, 18 January 2010 (UTC)

I have no "categorization politics". It's not an area that I think about a lot or has ever interested me so it's good there are people like you. If there is to be a category on this, "cueless billiards" seems fine to me. By the way, just posted Yank Adams as an adjunct to the finger billiards article I started.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 11:57, 18 January 2010 (UTC)

Cool; I'd never even heard of him. This one looks like a good DYK; just the fact that there was Finger Billiards World Championship contention is funky enough, probably. You still citing that old version of Shamos? You really oughta get the 1999 version; it can be had from Amazon for cheap and has a bunch of updates. I actually put my old version in the recycle bin as not worth saving. Heh. PS: You seen Stein & Rubino 3rd ed.? I got one for the xmas before the one that just passed, from what was then a really good girlfriend. >;-) It's a-verra, verra nahce. Over 100 new pages, I think (mostly illustrations). — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(ل)ˀ Contribs. 13:41, 18 January 2010 (UTC)

If I happen to come across it in a used book store I might pick it up. There's nothing wrong with citing the older edition (as I've said to you before). I had not heard of Adams before yesterday either. Yank is apparently not his real name, though I'm not sure what it is yet. Not sure there will be enough on him to make a DYK (though don't count it out). Of course, since I didn't userspace it, I have 4½ days to see. Unfortunately, I don't have access to ancestry.com and have never found any free database nearly as useful for finding newspaper articles (and census, birth certificates, and reams of primary source material). I tried to sign up for a free trial again which worked once before, but they got smart and are logging those who signed up previously. I just looked; the new Stein and Rubino is about $280. I'll work from the 2nd edition:-)--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 14:16, 18 January 2010 (UTC)

Hmm... I haven't tried Ancestry in a while. They're probably logging IP addresses. That would definitely affect me, since mine doesn't change except once every few years. I guess that's what libraries and stuff are for. S&R: Should be available cheaper. Mine came with the Blue Book of Pool Cues too for under $200 total. Here it is for $160, plus I think the shipping was $25. Stein gives his e-mail address as that page. If you ask him he might give you the 2-book deal too, or direct you to where ever that is. Shamos: Not saying its an unreliable source (although the newer version actually corrected some entries), it's just cool because it has more stuff in it. :-) DYK: Hey, you could speedily delete your own article, sandbox it and come back. Heh. Seriously, I'll see if I can get into Ancestry again and look for stuff on him. I want to look for William Hoskins stuff anyway so I can finish that half of the Spinks/Hoskins story, which has sat in draft form for over a year. I get sidetracked... — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(ل)ˀ Contribs. 14:29, 18 January 2010 (UTC)

It's not IPs they're logging, it's your credit card. You have to give them one in order to get the trial so that they can automatically charge you if you miss the cancellation deadline. Regarding the Blue Book, of all these books, that's the one that get's stale, that is, if you use it for actual quotes, which I do all the time, both for answer to questions and for selling, buying, etc. Yeah I start procrastinating too. I did all that work on Mingaud and now I can't get myself to go back. I also did reams of research on Hurricane Tony Ellin (thugh I found so little; I really felt bad when he died; I met him a few times, seemed like a really great guy), Masako Katsura and others but still haven't moved on them.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 18:31, 18 January 2010 (UTC)

Ah, the credit card. I'll have to see if the PayPal plugin has been updated to work with the new Firefox. If so, that's our solution - it generates a new valid card number every time you use it (they always feed from your single PayPal account). — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(ل)ˀ Contribs. 18:37, 18 January 2010 (UTC)

PayPal Plugin ist kaput. Some banks now issue credit card accounts that make use of virtual card numbers, but mine's not one of them. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(ل)ˀ Contribs. 19:49, 8 February 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for trying. It was worth a shot. I signed up for a newspaperarchive.com three month trial. As far as newspaper results go it seems quite good so far, and the search interface is many orders of magnitude better than ancestry's, but it has none of the genealogical records that ancestry provides. With ancestry I could probably find census info on Yank as well as death information (as well as for Masako Katsura, which I've been working on it for a few days; she could actually be alive, though she'd be 96).--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 04:52, 9 February 2010 (UTC)

Sad...

How well forgotten some very well known people are. The more I read about Yank Adams, the more I realize he was world famous. Yet, he's almost completely unknown today and barely mentioned even in modern billiard texts.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 13:47, 21 January 2010 (UTC)

Reading stuff from that era, it's also amazing how important billiards (in the three-ball sense) was back then, with sometimes multiple-page stories in newspapers about each turn in a long match, and so on. It's like snooker is today in the UK. PS: I saw that you found evidence of a billiards stage comedy there. I'd never heard of it! — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(ل)ˀ Contribs. 15:17, 21 January 2010 (UTC)

Jackpot. Portrait, diagrams, sample shot descriptions and more (that will also lend itself to the finger billiards article).--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 01:34, 22 January 2010 (UTC)

Nice find! — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(ل)ˀ Contribs. 06:07, 27 January 2010 (UTC)

Some more notes on Crystalate

Unresolved – New sources/material worked into article, but unanswered questions remain.

Extended content
Some more notes: they bought Royal Worcester in 1983 and sold it the next year, keeping some of the electronics part.; info about making records:; the chair in 1989 was Lord Jenkin of Roding:; "In 1880, crystalate balls made of nitrocellulose, camphor, and alcohol began to appear. In 1926, they were made obligatory by the Billiards Association and Control Council, the London-based governing body." Amazing Facts: The Indispensable Collection of True Life Facts and Feats. Richard B. Manchester - 1991wGtDHsgbtltnpBg&ct=result&id=v0m-h4YgKVYC&dq=%2BCrystalate; a website about crystalate and other materials used for billiard balls:No5 Balls.html. Fences&Windows 23:37, 12 July 2011 (UTC) Thanks! I'll have to have a look at this stuff in more detail. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(ل)ˀ Contribs. 15:54, 16 July 2011 (UTC) I've worked most of it in. Fences&Windows 16:01, 17 July 2011 (UTC) Cool! From what I can tell, entirely different parties held the trademark in different markets. I can't find a link between Crystalate Mfg. Co. Ltd. (mostly records, though billiard balls early on) and the main billiard ball mfr. in the UK, who later came up with "Super Crystalate". I'm not sure the term was even used in the U.S. at all, despite the formulation having been originally patented there. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(ل)ˀ Contribs. 21:04, 17 July 2011 (UTC)

Extended content

Some more notes: they bought Royal Worcester in 1983 and sold it the next year, keeping some of the electronics part.; info about making records:; the chair in 1989 was Lord Jenkin of Roding:; "In 1880, crystalate balls made of nitrocellulose, camphor, and alcohol began to appear. In 1926, they were made obligatory by the Billiards Association and Control Council, the London-based governing body." Amazing Facts: The Indispensable Collection of True Life Facts and Feats. Richard B. Manchester - 1991wGtDHsgbtltnpBg&ct=result&id=v0m-h4YgKVYC&dq=%2BCrystalate; a website about crystalate and other materials used for billiard balls:No5 Balls.html. Fences&Windows 23:37, 12 July 2011 (UTC)

Thanks! I'll have to have a look at this stuff in more detail. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(ل)ˀ Contribs. 15:54, 16 July 2011 (UTC)

I've worked most of it in. Fences&Windows 16:01, 17 July 2011 (UTC)

Cool! From what I can tell, entirely different parties held the trademark in different markets. I can't find a link between Crystalate Mfg. Co. Ltd. (mostly records, though billiard balls early on) and the main billiard ball mfr. in the UK, who later came up with "Super Crystalate". I'm not sure the term was even used in the U.S. at all, despite the formulation having been originally patented there. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(ل)ˀ Contribs. 21:04, 17 July 2011 (UTC)

WP:SAL

Unresolved – Not done yet, last I looked.

Extended content
No one has actually objected to the idea that it's really pointless for WP:SAL to contain any style information at all, other than in summary form and citing MOS:LIST, which is where all of WP:SAL's style advice should go, and SAL page should move back to WP:Stand-alone lists with a content guideline tag. Everyone who's commented for 7 months or so has been in favor of it. I'd say we have consensus to start doing it. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ Contrib. 13:13, 2 March 2012 (UTC) I'll take a look at the page shortly. Thanks for the nudge. SilkTork 23:19, 2 March 2012 (UTC)

Extended content

No one has actually objected to the idea that it's really pointless for WP:SAL to contain any style information at all, other than in summary form and citing MOS:LIST, which is where all of WP:SAL's style advice should go, and SAL page should move back to WP:Stand-alone lists with a content guideline tag. Everyone who's commented for 7 months or so has been in favor of it. I'd say we have consensus to start doing it. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ Contrib. 13:13, 2 March 2012 (UTC)

I'll take a look at the page shortly. Thanks for the nudge. SilkTork 23:19, 2 March 2012 (UTC)

You post at Misplaced Pages talk:FAQ/Copyright

Unresolved – Need to fix William A. Spinks, etc., with proper balkline stats, now that we know how to interpret them.

Extended content
That page looks like a hinterland (you go back two users in the history and you're in August). Are you familiar with WP:MCQ? By the way, did you see my response on the balkline averages?--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 15:54, 6 January 2013 (UTC) Yeah, I did a bunch of archiving yesterday. This page was HUGE. It'll get there again. I'd forgotten MCQ existed. Can you please add it to the DAB hatnote at top of and "See also" at bottom of WP:COPYRIGHT? Its conspicuous absence is precisely why I ened up at Misplaced Pages talk:FAQ/Copyright! Haven't seen your balkline response yet; will go look. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ɖכþ Contrib. 21:34, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

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That page looks like a hinterland (you go back two users in the history and you're in August). Are you familiar with WP:MCQ? By the way, did you see my response on the balkline averages?--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 15:54, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

Yeah, I did a bunch of archiving yesterday. This page was HUGE. It'll get there again. I'd forgotten MCQ existed. Can you please add it to the DAB hatnote at top of and "See also" at bottom of WP:COPYRIGHT? Its conspicuous absence is precisely why I ened up at Misplaced Pages talk:FAQ/Copyright! Haven't seen your balkline response yet; will go look. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ɖכþ Contrib. 21:34, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

Hee Haw

Unresolved – Still need to propose some standards on animal breed article naming and disambiguation. In the intervening years, we've settled on natural not parenthetic disambiguation, and that standardized breeds get capitalized, but that's about it.

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Yeah, we did get along on Donkeys. And probably will get along on some other stuff again later. Best way to handle WP is to take it issue by issue and then let bygones be bygones. I'm finding some interesting debates over things like the line between a subspecies, a landrace and a breed. Just almost saw someone else's GA derailed over a "breed versus species" debate that was completely bogus, we just removed the word "adapt" and life would have been fine. I'd actually be interested in seeing actual scholarly articles that discuss these differences, particularly the landrace/breed issue in general, but in livestock in particular, and particularly as applied to truly feral/landrace populations (if, in livestock, there is such a thing, people inevitably will do a bit of culling, sorting and other interference these days). I'm willing to stick to my guns on the WPEQ naming issue, but AGF in all respects. Truce? Montanabw 22:40, 6 January 2013 (UTC) Truce, certainly. I'm not here to pick fights, just improve the consistency for readers and editors. I don't think there will be any scholarly articles on differences between landrace and breed, because there's nothing really to write about. Landrace has clear definitions in zoology and botany, and breed not only doesn't qualify, it is only established as true in any given case by reliable sources. Basically, no one anywhere is claiming "This is the Foobabaz horse, and it is a new landrace!" That wouldn't make sense. What is happening is people naming and declaring new alleged breeds on an entirely self-interested, profit-motive basis, with no evidence anyone other than the proponent and a few other experimental breeders consider it a breed. WP is full of should-be-AfD'd articles of this sort, like the cat one I successfully prod'ed last week. Asking for a reliable source that something is a landrace rather than a breed is backwards; landrace status is the default, not a special condition. It's a bit like asking for a scholarly piece on whether pig Latin is a real language or not; no one's going to write a journal paper about that because "language" (and related terms like "dialect", "language family", "creole" in the linguistic sense, etc.) have clear definitions in linguistics, while pig Latin, an entirely artificial, arbitrary, intentionally-managed form of communication (like an entirely artificial, arbitrary, intentionally managed form of domesticated animal) does not qualify. :-) The "what is a breed" question, which is also not about horses any more than cats or cavies or ferrets, is going to be a separate issue to resolve from the naming issue. Looking over what we collaboratively did with donkeys – and the naming form that took, i.e. Poitou donkey not Poitou (donkey), I think I'm going to end up on your side of that one. It needs to be discussed more broadly in an RFC, because most projects use the parenthetical form, because this is what WT:AT is most readily interpretable as requiring. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ɖכþ Contrib. 00:12, 7 January 2013 (UTC) I hate the drama of an RfC, particularly when we can just look at how much can be naturally disambiguated, but if you think it's an actual issue, I guess ping me when it goes up. As for landcraces, it may be true ("clear definitions") but you would be doing God's (or someone's) own good work if you were to improve landrace which has few references, fewer good ones, and is generally not a lot of help to those of us trying to sort out WTF a "landrace" is... (smiles). As for breed, that is were we disagree: At what point do we really have a "breed" as opposed to a "landrace?" Fixed traits, human-selected? At what degree, at which point? How many generations? I don't even know if there IS such a thing as a universal definition of what a "breed" is: seriously: or breed or . I think you and I agree that the Palomino horse can never be a "breed" because it is impossible for the color to breed true (per an earlier discussion) so we have one limit. But while I happen agree to a significant extent with your underlying premise that when Randy from Boise breeds two animals and says he has created a new breed and this is a problem, (I think it's a BIG problem in the worst cases) but if we want to get really fussy, I suppose that the aficionados of the Arabian horse who claim the breed is pure from the dawn of time are actually arguing it is a landrace, wouldn't you say? And what DO we do with the multi-generational stuff that's in limbo land? Montanabw 00:41, 7 January 2013 (UTC) I'm not really certain what the answers are to any of those questions, another reason (besides your "STOP!" demands :-) that I backed away rapidly from moving any more horse articles around. But it's something that is going to have to be looked into. I agree that the Landrace article here is poor. For one thing, it needs to split Natural breed out into its own article (a natural breed is a selectively-bred formal breed the purpose of which is to refine and "lock-in" the most definitive qualities of a local landrace). This in turn isn't actually the same thing as a traditional breed, though the concepts are related. Basically, three breeding concepts are squished into one article. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ɖכþ Contrib. 00:52, 7 January 2013 (UTC) Side comment: I tend to support one good overview article over three poor content forks, just thinking aloud... Montanabw 23:01, 7 January 2013 (UTC) Sure; the point is that the concepts have to be separately, clearly treated, because they are not synonymous at all. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ɖכþ Contrib. 02:07, 8 January 2013 (UTC) Given that the article isn't well-sourced yet, I think that you might want to add something about that to landrace now, just to give whomever does article improvement on it later (maybe you, I think this is up your alley!) has the "ping" to do so. Montanabw 21:55, 8 January 2013 (UTC) Aye, it's on my to-do list. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ɖכþ Contrib. 22:25, 8 January 2013 (UTC) Although I have been an evolutionary biologist for decades, I only noticed the term "landrace" within the past year or two (in reference to corn), because I work with wildland plants. But I immediately knew what it was, from context. I'm much less certain about breeds, beyond that I am emphatic that they are human constructs. Montanabw and I have discussed my horse off-wiki, and from what I can tell, breeders are selecting for specific attributes (many people claim to have seen a horse "just like him"), but afaik there is no breed "Idaho stock horse". Artificially-selected lineages can exist without anyone calling them "breeds"; I'm not sure they would even be "natural breeds", and such things are common even within established breeds (Montanabw could probably explain to us the difference between Polish and Egyptian Arabians). The good thing about breeds wrt Misplaced Pages is that we can use WP:RS and WP:NOTABLE to decide what to cover. Landraces are a different issue: if no one has ever called a specific, distinctive, isolated mustang herd a landrace, is it OR for Misplaced Pages to do so?--Curtis Clark (talk) 16:21, 7 January 2013 (UTC) I have been reluctant to use landrace much out of a concern that the concept is a bit OR, as I hadn't heard of it before[REDACTED] either (but I'm more a historian than an evolutionary biologist, so what do I know?): Curtis, any idea where this did come from? It's a useful concept, but I am kind of wondering where the lines are between selective breeding and a "natural" breed -- of anything. And speaking of isolated Mustang herds, we have things like Kiger Mustang, which is kind of interesting. I think that at least some of SMc's passion comes from the nuttiness seen in a lot of the dog and cat breeders these days, am I right? I mean, Chiweenies? Montanabw 23:01, 7 January 2013 (UTC) The first use of the word that I saw referred to different landraces of corn growing in different elevations and exposures in indigenous Maya areas of modern Mexico. I haven't tracked down the references for the use of the word, but the concept seems extremely useful. My sense is that landraces form as much through natural selective processes of cultivation or captivity as through human selection, so that if the "garbage wolf" hypothesis for dog domestication is true, garbage wolves would have been a landrace (or more likely several, in different areas). One could even push the definition and say that MRSA is a landrace. But I don't have enough knowledge of the reliable sources to know how all this would fit into Misplaced Pages.--Curtis Clark (talk) 01:01, 8 January 2013 (UTC) Landraces form, primarily and quickly, through mostly natural selection, long after domestication. E.g. the St Johns water dog and Maine Coon cat are both North American landraces that postdate European arrival on the continent. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ɖכþ Contrib. 20:16, 9 January 2013 (UTC) I see some potential for some great research on this and a real improvement to the articles in question. Montanabw 21:55, 8 January 2013 (UTC) Yep. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ɖכþ Contrib. 20:16, 9 January 2013 (UTC)

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Yeah, we did get along on Donkeys. And probably will get along on some other stuff again later. Best way to handle WP is to take it issue by issue and then let bygones be bygones. I'm finding some interesting debates over things like the line between a subspecies, a landrace and a breed. Just almost saw someone else's GA derailed over a "breed versus species" debate that was completely bogus, we just removed the word "adapt" and life would have been fine. I'd actually be interested in seeing actual scholarly articles that discuss these differences, particularly the landrace/breed issue in general, but in livestock in particular, and particularly as applied to truly feral/landrace populations (if, in livestock, there is such a thing, people inevitably will do a bit of culling, sorting and other interference these days). I'm willing to stick to my guns on the WPEQ naming issue, but AGF in all respects. Truce? Montanabw 22:40, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

Truce, certainly. I'm not here to pick fights, just improve the consistency for readers and editors. I don't think there will be any scholarly articles on differences between landrace and breed, because there's nothing really to write about. Landrace has clear definitions in zoology and botany, and breed not only doesn't qualify, it is only established as true in any given case by reliable sources. Basically, no one anywhere is claiming "This is the Foobabaz horse, and it is a new landrace!" That wouldn't make sense. What is happening is people naming and declaring new alleged breeds on an entirely self-interested, profit-motive basis, with no evidence anyone other than the proponent and a few other experimental breeders consider it a breed. WP is full of should-be-AfD'd articles of this sort, like the cat one I successfully prod'ed last week. Asking for a reliable source that something is a landrace rather than a breed is backwards; landrace status is the default, not a special condition. It's a bit like asking for a scholarly piece on whether pig Latin is a real language or not; no one's going to write a journal paper about that because "language" (and related terms like "dialect", "language family", "creole" in the linguistic sense, etc.) have clear definitions in linguistics, while pig Latin, an entirely artificial, arbitrary, intentionally-managed form of communication (like an entirely artificial, arbitrary, intentionally managed form of domesticated animal) does not qualify. :-) The "what is a breed" question, which is also not about horses any more than cats or cavies or ferrets, is going to be a separate issue to resolve from the naming issue. Looking over what we collaboratively did with donkeys – and the naming form that took, i.e. Poitou donkey not Poitou (donkey), I think I'm going to end up on your side of that one. It needs to be discussed more broadly in an RFC, because most projects use the parenthetical form, because this is what WT:AT is most readily interpretable as requiring. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ɖכþ Contrib. 00:12, 7 January 2013 (UTC)

I hate the drama of an RfC, particularly when we can just look at how much can be naturally disambiguated, but if you think it's an actual issue, I guess ping me when it goes up. As for landcraces, it may be true ("clear definitions") but you would be doing God's (or someone's) own good work if you were to improve landrace which has few references, fewer good ones, and is generally not a lot of help to those of us trying to sort out WTF a "landrace" is... (smiles). As for breed, that is were we disagree: At what point do we really have a "breed" as opposed to a "landrace?" Fixed traits, human-selected? At what degree, at which point? How many generations? I don't even know if there IS such a thing as a universal definition of what a "breed" is: seriously: or breed or . I think you and I agree that the Palomino horse can never be a "breed" because it is impossible for the color to breed true (per an earlier discussion) so we have one limit. But while I happen agree to a significant extent with your underlying premise that when Randy from Boise breeds two animals and says he has created a new breed and this is a problem, (I think it's a BIG problem in the worst cases) but if we want to get really fussy, I suppose that the aficionados of the Arabian horse who claim the breed is pure from the dawn of time are actually arguing it is a landrace, wouldn't you say? And what DO we do with the multi-generational stuff that's in limbo land? Montanabw 00:41, 7 January 2013 (UTC)

I'm not really certain what the answers are to any of those questions, another reason (besides your "STOP!" demands :-) that I backed away rapidly from moving any more horse articles around. But it's something that is going to have to be looked into. I agree that the Landrace article here is poor. For one thing, it needs to split Natural breed out into its own article (a natural breed is a selectively-bred formal breed the purpose of which is to refine and "lock-in" the most definitive qualities of a local landrace). This in turn isn't actually the same thing as a traditional breed, though the concepts are related. Basically, three breeding concepts are squished into one article. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ɖכþ Contrib. 00:52, 7 January 2013 (UTC)

Side comment: I tend to support one good overview article over three poor content forks, just thinking aloud... Montanabw 23:01, 7 January 2013 (UTC)

Sure; the point is that the concepts have to be separately, clearly treated, because they are not synonymous at all. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ɖכþ Contrib. 02:07, 8 January 2013 (UTC)

Given that the article isn't well-sourced yet, I think that you might want to add something about that to landrace now, just to give whomever does article improvement on it later (maybe you, I think this is up your alley!) has the "ping" to do so. Montanabw 21:55, 8 January 2013 (UTC)

Aye, it's on my to-do list. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ɖכþ Contrib. 22:25, 8 January 2013 (UTC)

Although I have been an evolutionary biologist for decades, I only noticed the term "landrace" within the past year or two (in reference to corn), because I work with wildland plants. But I immediately knew what it was, from context. I'm much less certain about breeds, beyond that I am emphatic that they are human constructs. Montanabw and I have discussed my horse off-wiki, and from what I can tell, breeders are selecting for specific attributes (many people claim to have seen a horse "just like him"), but afaik there is no breed "Idaho stock horse". Artificially-selected lineages can exist without anyone calling them "breeds"; I'm not sure they would even be "natural breeds", and such things are common even within established breeds (Montanabw could probably explain to us the difference between Polish and Egyptian Arabians).

The good thing about breeds wrt Misplaced Pages is that we can use WP:RS and WP:NOTABLE to decide what to cover. Landraces are a different issue: if no one has ever called a specific, distinctive, isolated mustang herd a landrace, is it OR for Misplaced Pages to do so?--Curtis Clark (talk) 16:21, 7 January 2013 (UTC)

I have been reluctant to use landrace much out of a concern that the concept is a bit OR, as I hadn't heard of it before[REDACTED] either (but I'm more a historian than an evolutionary biologist, so what do I know?): Curtis, any idea where this did come from? It's a useful concept, but I am kind of wondering where the lines are between selective breeding and a "natural" breed -- of anything. And speaking of isolated Mustang herds, we have things like Kiger Mustang, which is kind of interesting. I think that at least some of SMc's passion comes from the nuttiness seen in a lot of the dog and cat breeders these days, am I right? I mean, Chiweenies? Montanabw 23:01, 7 January 2013 (UTC)

The first use of the word that I saw referred to different landraces of corn growing in different elevations and exposures in indigenous Maya areas of modern Mexico. I haven't tracked down the references for the use of the word, but the concept seems extremely useful. My sense is that landraces form as much through natural selective processes of cultivation or captivity as through human selection, so that if the "garbage wolf" hypothesis for dog domestication is true, garbage wolves would have been a landrace (or more likely several, in different areas). One could even push the definition and say that MRSA is a landrace. But I don't have enough knowledge of the reliable sources to know how all this would fit into Misplaced Pages.--Curtis Clark (talk) 01:01, 8 January 2013 (UTC)

Landraces form, primarily and quickly, through mostly natural selection, long after domestication. E.g. the St Johns water dog and Maine Coon cat are both North American landraces that postdate European arrival on the continent. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ɖכþ Contrib. 20:16, 9 January 2013 (UTC)

I see some potential for some great research on this and a real improvement to the articles in question. Montanabw 21:55, 8 January 2013 (UTC)

Yep. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ɖכþ Contrib. 20:16, 9 January 2013 (UTC)

Redundant sentence?

Unresolved – Work to integrate WP:NCFLORA and WP:NCFAUNA stuff into MOS:ORGANISMS not completed yet? Seems to be mostly done, other than fixing up the breeds section, after that capitalization RfC a while back.

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The sentence at MOS:LIFE "General names for groups or types of organisms are not capitalized except where they contain a proper name (oak, Bryde's whales, rove beetle, Van cat)" is a bit odd, since the capitalization would (now) be exactly the same if they were the names of individual species. Can it simply be removed? There is an issue, covered at Misplaced Pages:PLANTS#The use of botanical names as common names for plants, which may or may not be worth putting in the main MOS, namely cases where the same word is used as the scientific genus name and as the English name, when it should be de-capitalized. I think this is rare for animals, but more common for plants and fungi (although I have seen "tyrannosauruses" and similar uses of dinosaur names). Peter coxhead (talk) 09:17, 3 May 2014 (UTC) I would leave it a alone for now; let people get used to the changes. I think it's reasonable to include the "general names" thing, because it's a catch-all that includes several different kinds of examples, that various largely different groups of people are apt to capitalize. Various know-nothings want to capitalize things like "the Cats", the "Great Apes", etc., because they think "it's a Bigger Group and I like to Capitalize Big Important Stuff". There are millions more people who just like to capitalize nouns and stuff. "Orange's, $1 a Pound". Next we have people who insist on capitalizing general "types" and landraces of domestic animals ("Mountain Dogs", "Van Cat") because they're used to formal breed names being capitalized (whether to do that with breeds here is an open question, but it should not be done with types/classes of domestics, nor with landraces. Maybe the examples can be sculpted better: "the roses", "herpesviruses", "great apes", "Bryde's whale", "mountain dogs", "Van cat", "passerine birds". I'm not sure that "rove beetle" and "oak" are good examples of anything. Anyway, it's more that the species no-capitalization is a special case of the more general rule, not that the general rule is a redundant or vague version of the former. If they're merged, it should keep the general examples, and maybe specifically spell out and illustrate that it also means species and subspecies, landraces and domestic "types", as well as larger and more general groupings. I had noticed that point and was going to add it, along with some other points from both NCFLORA and NCFAUNA, soon to MOS:ORGANISMS, which I feel is nearing "go live" completion. Does that issue come up often enough to make it a MOS mainpage point? I wouldn't really object to it, and it could be had by adding an "(even if it coincides with a capitalized Genus name)" parenthetical to the "general names" bit. The pattern is just common enough in animals to have been problematic if it were liable to be problematic, as it were. I.e., I don't see a history of squabbling about it at Lynx or its talk page, and remember looking into this earlier with some other mammal, about two weeks ago, and not seeing evidence of confusion or editwarring. The WP:BIRDS people were actually studiously avoiding that problem; I remember seeing a talk page discussion at the project that agreed that such usage shouldn't be capitalized ever. PS: With Lynx, I had to go back to 2006, in the thick of the "Mad Capitalization Epidemic" to find capitalization there, and it wasn't even consistent, just in the lead. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ≼ 11:11, 3 May 2014 (UTC) Well, certainly "rove beetle" and "oak" are poor examples here, so I would support changing to some of the others you suggested above. I think the main problem we found with plants was it being unclear as to whether inexperienced editors meant the scientific name or the English name. So you would see a sentence with e.g. "Canna" in the middle and not know whether this should be corrected to "Canna" or to "canna". The plural is clear; "cannas" is always lower-case non-italicized. The singular is potentially ambiguous. Whether it's worth putting this point in the main MOS I just don't know since I don't much edit animal articles and never breed articles, which is why I asked you. Peter coxhead (talk) 21:55, 3 May 2014 (UTC) Will take a look at that later, if someone else doesn't beat me to it. Beats me. Doesn't seem too frequent an issue, but lot of MOS stuff isn't. Definitely should be in MOS:ORGANISMS, regardless. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ≼ 00:46, 4 May 2014 (UTC) Worked on both of those a bit at MOS. We'll see if it sticks. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ≼ 01:18, 5 May 2014 (UTC)

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The sentence at MOS:LIFE "General names for groups or types of organisms are not capitalized except where they contain a proper name (oak, Bryde's whales, rove beetle, Van cat)" is a bit odd, since the capitalization would (now) be exactly the same if they were the names of individual species. Can it simply be removed?

There is an issue, covered at Misplaced Pages:PLANTS#The use of botanical names as common names for plants, which may or may not be worth putting in the main MOS, namely cases where the same word is used as the scientific genus name and as the English name, when it should be de-capitalized. I think this is rare for animals, but more common for plants and fungi (although I have seen "tyrannosauruses" and similar uses of dinosaur names). Peter coxhead (talk) 09:17, 3 May 2014 (UTC)

I would leave it a alone for now; let people get used to the changes. I think it's reasonable to include the "general names" thing, because it's a catch-all that includes several different kinds of examples, that various largely different groups of people are apt to capitalize. Various know-nothings want to capitalize things like "the Cats", the "Great Apes", etc., because they think "it's a Bigger Group and I like to Capitalize Big Important Stuff". There are millions more people who just like to capitalize nouns and stuff. "Orange's, $1 a Pound". Next we have people who insist on capitalizing general "types" and landraces of domestic animals ("Mountain Dogs", "Van Cat") because they're used to formal breed names being capitalized (whether to do that with breeds here is an open question, but it should not be done with types/classes of domestics, nor with landraces. Maybe the examples can be sculpted better: "the roses", "herpesviruses", "great apes", "Bryde's whale", "mountain dogs", "Van cat", "passerine birds". I'm not sure that "rove beetle" and "oak" are good examples of anything. Anyway, it's more that the species no-capitalization is a special case of the more general rule, not that the general rule is a redundant or vague version of the former. If they're merged, it should keep the general examples, and maybe specifically spell out and illustrate that it also means species and subspecies, landraces and domestic "types", as well as larger and more general groupings.
I had noticed that point and was going to add it, along with some other points from both NCFLORA and NCFAUNA, soon to MOS:ORGANISMS, which I feel is nearing "go live" completion. Does that issue come up often enough to make it a MOS mainpage point? I wouldn't really object to it, and it could be had by adding an "(even if it coincides with a capitalized Genus name)" parenthetical to the "general names" bit. The pattern is just common enough in animals to have been problematic if it were liable to be problematic, as it were. I.e., I don't see a history of squabbling about it at Lynx or its talk page, and remember looking into this earlier with some other mammal, about two weeks ago, and not seeing evidence of confusion or editwarring. The WP:BIRDS people were actually studiously avoiding that problem; I remember seeing a talk page discussion at the project that agreed that such usage shouldn't be capitalized ever. PS: With Lynx, I had to go back to 2006, in the thick of the "Mad Capitalization Epidemic" to find capitalization there, and it wasn't even consistent, just in the lead. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ≼ 11:11, 3 May 2014 (UTC)

Well, certainly "rove beetle" and "oak" are poor examples here, so I would support changing to some of the others you suggested above.
I think the main problem we found with plants was it being unclear as to whether inexperienced editors meant the scientific name or the English name. So you would see a sentence with e.g. "Canna" in the middle and not know whether this should be corrected to "Canna" or to "canna". The plural is clear; "cannas" is always lower-case non-italicized. The singular is potentially ambiguous. Whether it's worth putting this point in the main MOS I just don't know since I don't much edit animal articles and never breed articles, which is why I asked you. Peter coxhead (talk) 21:55, 3 May 2014 (UTC)

Will take a look at that later, if someone else doesn't beat me to it.
Beats me. Doesn't seem too frequent an issue, but lot of MOS stuff isn't. Definitely should be in MOS:ORGANISMS, regardless. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ≼ 00:46, 4 May 2014 (UTC)

Worked on both of those a bit at MOS. We'll see if it sticks. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ≼ 01:18, 5 May 2014 (UTC)

Note to self on WP:WikiProject English language

Unresolved – I think I did MOST of this already ...

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

Excellent mini-tutorial

Unresolved

Extended content

Extended content
Somehow, I forget quite how, I came across this - that is an excellent summary of the distinctions. I often get confused over those, and your examples were very clear. Is something like that in the general MoS/citation documentation? Oh, and while I am here, what is the best way to format a citation to a page of a document where the pages are not numbered? All the guidance I have found says not to invent your own numbering by counting the pages (which makes sense), but I am wondering if I can use the 'numbering' used by the digitised form of the book. I'll point you to an example of what I mean: the 'book' in question is catalogued here (note that is volume 2) and the digitised version is accessed through a viewer, with an example of a 'page' being here, which the viewer calls page 116, but there are no numbers on the actual book pages (to confuse things further, if you switch between single-page and double-page view, funny things happen to the URLs, and if you create and click on a single-page URL the viewer seems to relocate you one page back for some reason). Carcharoth (talk) 19:10, 12 September 2016 (UTC) @Carcharoth: Thanks. I need to copy that into an essay page. As far as I know, the concepts are not clearly covered in any of those places, nor clearly enough even at Help:CS1 (which is dense and overlong as it is). The e-book matters bear some researching. I'm very curious whether particular formats (Nook, etc.) paginate consistently between viewers. For Web-accessible ones, I would think that the page numbering that appears in the Web app is good enough if it's consistent (e.g., between a PC and a smart phone) when the reader clicks the URL in the citation. I suppose one could also use `\|at=` to provide details if the "page" has to be explained in some way. I try to rely on better-than-page-number locations when possible, e.g. specific entries in dictionaries and other works with multiple entries per page (numbered sections in manuals, etc.), but for some e-books this isn't possible – some are just continuous texts. One could probably use something like `\|at=in the paragraph beginning "The supersegemental chalcolithic metastasis is ..." about 40% into the document`, in a pinch. I guess we do need to figure this stuff out since such sources are increasingly common. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ≼ 20:29, 13 September 2016 (UTC) Yes (about figuring out how to reference e-books), though I suspect existing (non-WP) citation styles have addressed this already (no need to re-invent the wheel). This is a slightly different case, though. It is a digitisation of an existing (physical) book that has no page numbers. If I had the book in front of me (actually, it was only published as a single copy, so it is not a 'publication' in that traditional sense of many copies being produced), the problem with page numbers would still exist. I wonder if the 'digital viewer' should be thought of as a 'via' thingy? In the same way that (technically) Google Books and archive.org digital copies of old books are just re-transmitting, and re-distributing the material (is wikisource also a 'via' sort of thing?). Carcharoth (talk) 23:13, 13 September 2016 (UTC) @Carcharoth: Ah, I see. I guess I would treat it as a `\|via=`, and same with WikiSource, which in this respect is essentially like Google Books or Project Gutenberg. I think your conundrum has come up various times with arXiv papers, that have not been paginated visibly except in later publication (behind a journal paywall and not examined). Back to the broader matter: Some want to treat WikiSource and even Gutenberg as republishers, but I think that's giving them undue editorial credit and splitting too fine a hair. Was thinking on the general unpaginated and mis-paginated e-sources matter while on the train, and came to the conclusion that for a short, unpaginated work with no subsections, one might give something like `\|at=in paragraph 23`, and for a much longer one use the `\|at=in the paragraph beginning "..."` trick. A straight up `\|pages=82–83` would work for an e-book with hard-coded meta-data pagination that is consistent between apps/platforms and no visual pagination. On the other hand, use the visual pagination in an e-book that has it, even if it doesn't match the e-book format's digital pagination, since the pagination in the visual content would match that of a paper copy; one might include a note that the pagination is that visible in the content if it conflicts with what the e-book reader says (this comes up a lot with PDFs, for one thing - I have many that include cover scans, and the PDF viewers treat that as p. 1, then other front matter as p. 2, etc., with the content's p. 1 being something like PDF p. 7). — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ≼ 08:07, 14 September 2016 (UTC)

Somehow, I forget quite how, I came across this - that is an excellent summary of the distinctions. I often get confused over those, and your examples were very clear. Is something like that in the general MoS/citation documentation? Oh, and while I am here, what is the best way to format a citation to a page of a document where the pages are not numbered? All the guidance I have found says not to invent your own numbering by counting the pages (which makes sense), but I am wondering if I can use the 'numbering' used by the digitised form of the book. I'll point you to an example of what I mean: the 'book' in question is catalogued here (note that is volume 2) and the digitised version is accessed through a viewer, with an example of a 'page' being here, which the viewer calls page 116, but there are no numbers on the actual book pages (to confuse things further, if you switch between single-page and double-page view, funny things happen to the URLs, and if you create and click on a single-page URL the viewer seems to relocate you one page back for some reason). Carcharoth (talk) 19:10, 12 September 2016 (UTC)

@Carcharoth: Thanks. I need to copy that into an essay page. As far as I know, the concepts are not clearly covered in any of those places, nor clearly enough even at Help:CS1 (which is dense and overlong as it is). The e-book matters bear some researching. I'm very curious whether particular formats (Nook, etc.) paginate consistently between viewers. For Web-accessible ones, I would think that the page numbering that appears in the Web app is good enough if it's consistent (e.g., between a PC and a smart phone) when the reader clicks the URL in the citation. I suppose one could also use |at= to provide details if the "page" has to be explained in some way. I try to rely on better-than-page-number locations when possible, e.g. specific entries in dictionaries and other works with multiple entries per page (numbered sections in manuals, etc.), but for some e-books this isn't possible – some are just continuous texts. One could probably use something like |at=in the paragraph beginning "The supersegemental chalcolithic metastasis is ..." about 40% into the document, in a pinch. I guess we do need to figure this stuff out since such sources are increasingly common. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ≼ 20:29, 13 September 2016 (UTC)

Yes (about figuring out how to reference e-books), though I suspect existing (non-WP) citation styles have addressed this already (no need to re-invent the wheel). This is a slightly different case, though. It is a digitisation of an existing (physical) book that has no page numbers. If I had the book in front of me (actually, it was only published as a single copy, so it is not a 'publication' in that traditional sense of many copies being produced), the problem with page numbers would still exist. I wonder if the 'digital viewer' should be thought of as a 'via' thingy? In the same way that (technically) Google Books and archive.org digital copies of old books are just re-transmitting, and re-distributing the material (is wikisource also a 'via' sort of thing?). Carcharoth (talk) 23:13, 13 September 2016 (UTC)

@Carcharoth: Ah, I see. I guess I would treat it as a |via=, and same with WikiSource, which in this respect is essentially like Google Books or Project Gutenberg. I think your conundrum has come up various times with arXiv papers, that have not been paginated visibly except in later publication (behind a journal paywall and not examined). Back to the broader matter: Some want to treat WikiSource and even Gutenberg as republishers, but I think that's giving them undue editorial credit and splitting too fine a hair. Was thinking on the general unpaginated and mis-paginated e-sources matter while on the train, and came to the conclusion that for a short, unpaginated work with no subsections, one might give something like |at=in paragraph 23, and for a much longer one use the |at=in the paragraph beginning "..." trick. A straight up |pages=82–83 would work for an e-book with hard-coded meta-data pagination that is consistent between apps/platforms and no visual pagination. On the other hand, use the visual pagination in an e-book that has it, even if it doesn't match the e-book format's digital pagination, since the pagination in the visual content would match that of a paper copy; one might include a note that the pagination is that visible in the content if it conflicts with what the e-book reader says (this comes up a lot with PDFs, for one thing - I have many that include cover scans, and the PDF viewers treat that as p. 1, then other front matter as p. 2, etc., with the content's p. 1 being something like PDF p. 7). — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ≼ 08:07, 14 September 2016 (UTC)

Current threads

Books & Bytes – Issue 36

The Misplaced Pages Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 36, September – October 2019

#1Lib1Ref January 2020
#1Lib1Ref 2019 stories and learnings

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Misplaced Pages Library team --MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 05:21, 21 November 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Template talk:Senate of Canada

Done

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Google Code-In 2019 is coming - please mentor some documentation tasks!

Hello,

Google Code-In, Google-organized contest in which the Wikimedia Foundation participates, starts in a few weeks. This contest is about taking high school students into the world of opensource. I'm sending you this message because you recently edited a documentation page at the English Misplaced Pages.

I would like to ask you to take part in Google Code-In as a mentor. That would mean to prepare at least one task (it can be documentation related, or something else - the other categories are Code, Design, Quality Assurance and Outreach) for the participants, and help the student to complete it. Please sign up at the contest page and send us your Google account address to google-code-in-admins@lists.wikimedia.org, so we can invite you in!

From my own experience, Google Code-In can be fun, you can make several new friends, attract new people to your wiki and make them part of your community.

If you have any questions, please let us know at google-code-in-admins@lists.wikimedia.org.

Thank you!

--User:Martin Urbanec (talk) 21:58, 23 November 2019 (UTC)

Ship gender

You said "We've been over this many times before, seemingly about every year or so..." which was also very much my impression, as a distant and uninterested onlooker. But when I asked, a little way above you, for links to the equally interminable previous discussions, the guy who raised the matter said he didn't know of any... Do you have links? Johnbod (talk) 01:29, 24 November 2019 (UTC)

@Johnbod: Not right off-hand. It comes up in different venues. I know it's been discussed at various MoS talk pages, and at a number of article talk pages, and in some wikiproject ones. Maybe also Village Pump. It's not the kind of thing I keep track of. I directed VPPOL, and various additional wikiprojects (since ships and MilHist were already notified) to the current thread, so the input should be broader this time. Maybe put an RfC tag on i? — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 08:50, 24 November 2019 (UTC)

PS: If it's important, I would start with searching the MoS archives for "ships". — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 08:51, 24 November 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Template talk:Infobox officeholder

Done

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Arbitration Case Opened

You recently offered a statement in a request for arbitration. The Arbitration Committee has accepted that request for arbitration and an arbitration case has been opened at Misplaced Pages:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Portals. Evidence that you wish the arbitrators to consider should be added to the evidence subpage, at Misplaced Pages:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Portals/Evidence. Please add your evidence by December 20, 2019, which is when the evidence phase closes. You can also contribute to the case workshop subpage, Misplaced Pages:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Portals/Workshop. For a guide to the arbitration process, see Misplaced Pages:Arbitration/Guide to arbitration. For the Arbitration Committee, SQL 20:38, 26 November 2019 (UTC)

Noted. I'm going to start gathering diffs, but not at a fast clip. I want to see how much the scope gets constrained. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 20:13, 27 November 2019 (UTC)

Question about Senate of Canada's seating plan image

Hi @SMcCandlish:

I was mousing over your miniature userbox and user rights' icons at your your userpage and, noticing your file mover rights, wondered if you might be able to resolve an outstanding question I had in this discussion. Long story short, I don't think it's a caching issue or a problem with my web browser because the updated seating plan image that MikkelJSmith2 uploaded to the Commons on 21 November 2019 at 19:14 loads fine when you maximize that version. However, notice the thumbnail for that version shows the older version from 15 July 2019? Similarly, at commons:File:Senate of Canada - Seating Plan By Province.svg, it still shows the old version (without the new Senate groups). Likewise, here, it shows the older version. I'm not sure what the problem is, but I suspect there's something we're not doing piping it over to the Misplaced Pages file namespace maybe.

Cheers,
--Doug Mehus T·C 00:23, 27 November 2019 (UTC)

DmehusIt honestly shows the new version everywhere for me just like Huon said in the original discussion. - MikkelJSmith (talk) 13:03, 27 November 2019 (UTC)

MikkelJSmith2, Nevertheless, there's something somewhere that needs to be corrected—that you and I aren't doing to get it to show up properly on the Commons and on the "File:" namespace. I'm hoping we can get it resolved, so we know what we're not doing for next time. I honestly think Huon prematurely closed, or short-circuited, the discussion I raised to close an active "help me" request instead of taking the time to properly show us what we hadn't done. Doug Mehus T·C 15:47, 27 November 2019 (UTC)

@Dmehus: If page reload doesn't work, try deleting you WP-related cache and cookies, and re-login. If that doesn't work, try WP:PURGE (or maybe do that first, then the cache/cookie/login thing). I use a user Javascript (in the "Gadgets" section of the "Preferences" menu) that puts a UTC clock top-right (near "... Contributions Log out"). Clicking that clock will purge the current page and everything it transcludes. That's probably one of the best userscripts ever, since you get two useful features in one. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 19:45, 27 November 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Misplaced Pages:Village pump (proposals)

Done

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Please comment on Misplaced Pages talk:Manual of Style

Disregard – I was already knee-deep in this one before the RfC bot came around.

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Misplaced Pages talk:Manual of Style. Legobot (talk) 04:24, 28 November 2019 (UTC)

Legobot, Oh the WP:MOS, that's right up SMcCandlish's alley. Thanks, Legobot. You do us proud. ;-) --Doug Mehus T·C 05:03, 28 November 2019 (UTC) (talk page stalker)

Yeah, pretty rare for this thing to drop of an MoS RfC notice for something I haven't already commented in (or opened as the OP). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 08:26, 28 November 2019 (UTC)

Giving thanks

Thanksgiving
Cassia javanica, Torremolinos

... with thanks from QAI

Happy Thanksgiving! --Gerda Arendt (talk) 16:24, 28 November 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Misplaced Pages:Village pump (technical)

Done

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Precious anniversary

Precious
Two years!

--Gerda Arendt (talk) 07:46, 1 December 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Misplaced Pages talk:New pages patrol/Reviewers/Redirect autopatrol

Done

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Please comment on Talk:Epstein didn't kill himself

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Exemplification of your humourous EFF essay

@SMcCandlish:,

Hope you're doing well. Well, this ANI discussion exemplifies why sometimes it's best when you're the subject of an ANI discussion to just ignore it. It's probably a good thing I was absent from Misplaced Pages for a few days as I might've been tempted to get involved (to a potential detriment). I'm sure you've probably had an editor take you to ANI before, so I guess I can say I'm no longer a WikiVirgin (if that shortcut wikilink doesn't exist, it might be a useful, humourous Misplaced Pages essay on ANI). ;-)

Interestingly, this was despite my previously trying to use ANI as a de-escalation medium Misplaced Pages:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive1022#Seeking de-escalation over at User talk:Dennis Bratland#Kinda bitey reply at Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Erica C. Barnett, which Britishfinance closed as consensually de-escalated. I realized then, thanks to Rhododendrites, that ANI is not normally known as the medium for de-escalation; indeed it's the opposite.

It seems Misplaced Pages has a lot of incivility...I wonder if we could establish consensus to make mandatory dispute resolution prior to taking another editor to ANI? It seems like a reasonable solution.

Cheers,
--Doug Mehus T·C 15:22, 3 December 2019 (UTC)

ANI is a WP:DRAMA factory. ANI is part of WP:DR. The lower sorts of DR, like WP:3O and WP:DRN are themselves voluntary (and often not applicable – they won't take "cases" than involve things like disruption of internal material, e.g. squabbles over guideline wording). So, ANI already is the first stage of mandatory DR. Which may account for its high drama level. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 10:49, 4 December 2019 (UTC)

PS: WP:WikiVirgin would indeed be a funny essay, but since the metaphoric referent involves sex and females, you'd almost certainly get castigated for writing it under that title. Learn from the User:SMcCandlish/It MfD drama, repeated attempts to MfD WP:DIVA (presently WP:HIGHMAINT though even that title and the longer version WP:Don't be high-maintenance have been accused of sexism), and the ongoing brouhaha about ships and she (at WT:MOS), and so on. A spectral WP:BATTLEGROUND can arise from the fog in an instant, like a portal to a hellish otherworld, despite one's best intentions. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 11:28, 4 December 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Misplaced Pages talk:Did you know

Done

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Please comment on Template talk:Infobox person

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Please comment on Misplaced Pages:Reliable sources/Noticeboard

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Off-Broadway

Hey there! I see the discussion has been closed and page moved for off-off-Broadway. Does not the same logic apply to Off-Broadway? Cheers, GentlemanGhost (séance) 14:01, 10 December 2019 (UTC)

@GentlemanGhost: Yes, it does. I'd already made that change, a week ago, but someone reverted it. Then I did that RM, so I think I'll go re-instate that change. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 08:38, 11 December 2019 (UTC)

Ah, I should have dug into the edit history. Thanks for following through! GentlemanGhost (séance) 08:52, 11 December 2019 (UTC)

@GentlemanGhost: Well, I would almost bet money I'll get knee-jerk reverted again. If that happens, I'll RfC this at WT:MOSCAPS. I'm really getting tired of the "capitalize every term related to theatre, acting, dance, and other arts" WP:SSF nonsense, and it's getting increasingly wearying dealing with it on an article-by-article basis. This is just another sliver of MOS:ACTCAPS. We extended it to explicitly cover non-trademarked games, sports, and dance terms about a year ago, and probably need to mention acting/theatre more specifically (though it already includes "method acting" at MOS:DOCTCAPS, for related reasons). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 09:29, 11 December 2019 (UTC)

Yeah, that could easily happen. Experienced editors should be aware of the MOS, but some notions may be hard to dispel. In the case of off-Broadway, The New York Times MOS (and probably the AP Style Guide) may make some editors more familiar and comfortable with the capitalized variation but the bottom line is that the only MOS which applies here is our own. Even though it personally feels odd to me, in the same way that a British spelling of a word does, I see the value in consensus and applying MOSCAPS consistently, so others should be able to as well. --GentlemanGhost (séance) 10:11, 11 December 2019 (UTC)

The main thing is to not apply an unnecessary stylization (including capitals). The entire problem with the "we should write about theatre the way theatre-centric writers do, and write about birds the way ornithologists do" is every specialization wants to over-capitalize various things within their little fiefdom, and the end result would be nearly everything capitalized on every topic. E.g., the theatre/acting/film/TV people would capitalize every occurrence of "off-Broadway" and "method acting" and "director of photography" and yadda yadda yadda at every occurrence in every article, and the bird people would capitalize every common name of every bird species (and – as we know from direct experience – then go around doing this to every common name of every species of everything), and the skateboarders will capitalize the names of every skating trick, and the dance people will capitalize the names of every dance, style, and step, and there'll just be no end to it. There already is no end to it, just a suppression of it via MOS:CAPS, a sea wall over which the waves frequently crest. It goes way beyond capitals, though, and includes things like mimicry of odd stylization in trademarks (backwards letters, etc.), unnecessary punctuation (like the comma in "Sammy Davis, Jr.", preferred by Americans over the age of about 50), dropping of punctuation (e.g. "St Peter Ave" when every British style guide says it should be "St Peter Ave." – British English only drops the dots from contraction abbreviations that begin and end with the same letters as the whole word, as in St and Dr for Saint and Doctor; the "just drop them all" nonsense is sloppy journalistic writing used by some newspapers desperately trying to save column space, which people them imitate, not knowing any better), and unit symbols and abbreviations (things like "2 foot six" and "2'6''" are ingrained in some styles). And on and on. It simply is not physically possible for editors to all get their personally preferred way on every style matter, because they're going to conflict in many ways and it would just lead to constant editwarring over style trivia. That's how MoS came about in the first place, so stop that constant disruption. That and the problem of letting every specialist camp write in a specialist way leads to material that looks to the average reader like it was written by the barely literate, and even when it doesn't, it results in impenetrable writing that only specialists in a particular field can understand - and even then only if the topic in question is "claimed" by just one camp of specialists imposing one weird set of styles. If you get a topic like "fauna of Madagascar", you end up with ornithologists and primatologists and ecologists and ethologists and etc., etc., all trying to do conflicting things. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 22:28, 12 December 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Misplaced Pages:Reliable sources/Noticeboard

Disregard – No need; this is already a WP:SNOWBALL.

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Please comment on Misplaced Pages:Requests for comment/Partial blocks

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It’s that time of year!

Christmas tree worm, (Spirobranchus gigantic)
	Time To Spread A Little Happy Holiday Cheer!!
	I decorated a special kind of Christmas tree in the spirit of the season. What's especially nice about this digitized version: it doesn't need water won't catch fire *and batteries aren't required.
	Have a very Merry Christmas - Happy Hanukkah‼️ and a prosperous New Year!! 🍸🎁 🎉

Cheers

Damon Runyon's short story "Dancing Dan's Christmas" is a fun read if you have the time. Right from the start it extols the virtues of the hot Tom and Jerry

This hot Tom and Jerry is an old-time drink that is once used by one and all in this country to celebrate Christmas with, and in fact it is once so popular that many people think Christmas is invented only to furnish an excuse for hot Tom and Jerry, although of course this is by no means true.

No matter what concoction is your favorite to imbibe during this festive season I would like to toast you with it and to thank you for all your work here at the 'pedia this past year. Best wishes for your 2020 as well SMcC. MarnetteD|Talk 02:00, 17 December 2019 (UTC)

Thank you ...

Vision in 2020

missing Brian

... for improving article quality in December! There's a peer review open for Clara Schumann and a FAC for Jauchzet, frohlocket!, DYK? We miss Brian who would have helped. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 17:01, 19 December 2019 (UTC)

Merry Christmas!

A very happy Christmas and New Year to you!
May 2020 bring you joy, happiness – and no trolls, vandals or visits from Krampus! All the best Gavin / SchroCat (talk) 07:49, 20 December 2019 (UTC)

Season's greetings

SubGenius leaders cast J. R. "Bob" Dobbs as a "World Avatar".

Hello SMcCandlish: Enjoy the holiday season, and thanks for your work to maintain, improve and expand Misplaced Pages. Cheers, North America 15:42, 20 December 2019 (UTC)

New Page Review newsletter December 2019

Reviewer of the Year

This year's Reviewer of the Year is Rosguill. Having gotten the reviewer PERM in August 2018, they have been a regular reviewer of articles and redirects, been an active participant in the NPP community, and has been the driving force for the emerging NPP Source Guide that will help reviewers better evaluate sourcing and notability in many countries for which it has historically been difficult.

Special commendation again goes to Onel5969 who ends the year as one of our most prolific reviewers for the second consecutive year. Thanks also to Boleyn and JTtheOG who have been in the top 5 for the last two years as well.

Several newer editors have done a lot of work with CAPTAIN MEDUSA and DannyS712 (who has also written bots which have patrolled thousands of redirects) being new reviewers since this time last year.

Thanks to them and to everyone reading this who has participated in New Page Patrol this year.

Top 10 Reviewers over the last 365 days
Rank	Username	Num reviews	Log
1	Rosguill (talk)	47,395	Patrol Page Curation
2	Onel5969 (talk)	41,883	Patrol Page Curation
3	JTtheOG (talk)	11,493	Patrol Page Curation
4	Arthistorian1977 (talk)	5,562	Patrol Page Curation
5	DannyS712 (talk)	4,866	Patrol Page Curation
6	CAPTAIN MEDUSA (talk)	3,995	Patrol Page Curation
7	DragonflySixtyseven (talk)	3,812	Patrol Page Curation
8	Boleyn (talk)	3,655	Patrol Page Curation
9	Ymblanter (talk)	3,553	Patrol Page Curation
10	Cwmhiraeth (talk)	3,522	Patrol Page Curation

(The top 100 reviewers of the year can be found here)

Redirect autopatrol

A recent Request for Comment on creating a new redirect autopatrol pseduo-permission was closed early. New Page Reviewers are now able to nominate editors who have an established track record creating uncontroversial redirects. At the individual discretion of any administrator or after 24 hours and a consensus of at least 3 New Page Reviewers an editor may be added to a list of users whose redirects will be patrolled automatically by DannyS712 bot III.

Source Guide Discussion

Set to launch early in the new year is our first New Page Patrol Source Guide discussion. These discussions are designed to solicit input on sources in places and topic areas that might otherwise be harder for reviewers to evaluate. The hope is that this will allow us to improve the accuracy of our patrols for articles using these sources (and/or give us places to perform a WP:BEFORE prior to nominating for deletion). Please watch the New Page Patrol talk page for more information.

This month's refresher course

While New Page Reviewers are an experienced set of editors, we all benefit from an occasional review. This month consider refreshing yourself on Misplaced Pages:Notability (geographic features). Also consider how we can take the time for quality in this area. For instance, sources to verify human settlements, which are presumed notable, can often be found in seconds. This lets us avoid the (ugly) 'Needs more refs' tag.

Delivered by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) at 16:11, 20 December 2019 (UTC)

Io Saturnalia!

		Io, Saturnalia!
		Wishing you and yours a Happy Holiday Season, from the horse and bishop person. May the year ahead be productive and distraction-free. Ealdgyth - Talk 16:37, 20 December 2019 (UTC)

Merry Merry!

Merry Christmas and a Prosperous 2020!

Hello SMcCandlish, may you be surrounded by peace, success and happiness on this seasonal occasion. Spread the WikiLove by wishing another user a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past, a good friend, or just some random person. Sending you heartfelt and warm greetings for Christmas and New Year 2020.
Happy editing,
★Trekker (talk) 13:50, 21 December 2019 (UTC)

Spread the love by adding {{subst:Seasonal Greetings}} to other user talk pages.

Happy Holidays

Thank you for continuing to make Misplaced Pages the greatest project in the world. I hope you have an excellent holiday season. Lightburst (talk) 21:39, 22 December 2019 (UTC)

Happy holidays!

Hi SMac! All the warmest wishes for this seasonal occasion, whichever you celebrate - or don't, while I swelter at 27℃ (80.6℉), and peace and prosperity for 2020, hoping that you'll join me for a cool beer in Bangkok in August when it will be even hotter!
Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 10:04, 24 December 2019 (UTC)

Happy Holidays

Hello SMcCandlish: Enjoy the holiday season, and thanks for your work to maintain, improve and expand Misplaced Pages. Cheers, DBig Xrayᗙ Happy Holidays! 17:59, 24 December 2019 (UTC)

Spread the WikiLove; use {{subst:Season's Greetings1}} to send this message

Speedy deletion nomination of Category:Cue sports external link templates

Disregard – No such deletion nomination by the time I got to it.

A tag has been placed on Category:Cue sports external link templates requesting that it be speedily deleted from Misplaced Pages. This has been done under section C1 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because the category has been empty for seven days or more and is not a disambiguation category, a category redirect, a featured topics category, under discussion at Categories for discussion, or a project category that by its nature may become empty on occasion.

If you think this page should not be deleted for this reason, you may contest the nomination by visiting the page and clicking the button labelled "Contest this speedy deletion". This will give you the opportunity to explain why you believe the page should not be deleted. However, be aware that once a page is tagged for speedy deletion, it may be deleted without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag from the page yourself, but do not hesitate to add information in line with Misplaced Pages's policies and guidelines. UnitedStatesian (talk) 03:29, 26 December 2019 (UTC)

UnitedStatesian, I see no such CFD-speedy, listing, nor a speedy tag on the category. I do see that at least one template has been added back into the category since I last looked at it. I'm not sure we need a category for what now many only be two templates (there used to be more), but it's also an internal-purposes category, not reader-facing, and it's of use at the wikiproject level, so I would oppose deleting it. The maintenance is helps likely exceeds the maintenance it requires. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 21:10, 26 December 2019 (UTC)

@SMcCandlish: the tag was removed once the category was populated. Best, UnitedStatesian (talk) 21:45, 26 December 2019 (UTC)

Sorry, this one is on me. I populated the cat as it became empty after the deletion of the cuetracker links. I added the two external links templates we had. I always prefer templates over regular links, as they can have metadata and such added. Best Wishes, Lee Vilenski 21:50, 26 December 2019 (UTC)

@Lee Vilenski: Yeah, someone or other a few years ago was on the warpath against single-source citation templates and got a lot of them deleted (mainly just because TfD isn't well-watched and not always well-reasoned). This "campaign" has stopped, and various cue sports templates might be worth re-creating (in substantially better form than originally) so that the citations we keep making to the same sources over and over again are more consistent and easier to make. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 21:53, 26 December 2019 (UTC)

I think at the very least, an external link template to the snooker.org entry for tournaments would be beneficial. I might spend some time in the new year on this.Best Wishes, Lee Vilenski 21:59, 26 December 2019 (UTC)

In case you weren't aware

Resolved

Your name was recently invoked on ANI, with the implication that you were promoting the fringe content that (from where I'm reading your comments, anyway) you had actually been arguing against. According to the above comment (in which you weren't pinged) you had become "not too sure" about your original support for version C over versions A and B, but I'm really not seeing that.

In case you actually interpreted my reply as "bludgeoning" you, I should apologize. I meant merely to clarify why I was asking your opinion on later developments in the RFC.

Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 06:40, 26 December 2019 (UTC)

@Hijiri88: I don't agree with either of those interpretations by Francis Schonken, and said so at the ANI thread. I don't think your case for blocking the other editor is good, though a T-ban might actually be appropriate. I do think your decision to back away is wise, though. When one gets too worked up about a topic here, it can make one seem like the real problem, as I've had to learn the hard way myself. :-) 21:03, 26 December 2019 (UTC)

So, what happened to that break? :-/ — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 17:27, 2 January 2020 (UTC)

RfC notice (low priority)

Based on your participation in an earlier discussion, you are invited to comment at WNGH-TV#RfC about TV and radio station style variances. Thanks. – Reidgreg (talk) 19:11, 27 December 2019 (UTC)

Happy New Year!

MMXX Lunar Calendar

SMcCandlish,
Have a great 2020 and thanks for your continued contributions to Misplaced Pages.

– 2020 is a leap year – news article.
– Background color is Classic Blue (#0F4C81), Pantone's 2020 Color of the year

Send New Year cheer by adding {{subst:Happy New Year 2020}} to user talk pages.

– North America 22:33, 30 December 2019 (UTC)

Some advice?

Hijiri88 (talk · contribs) here. Posting this logged out for obvious reasons (but doing so "publicly" rather than by email so as to dispel any impression that there's any "funny business" going on).

Background: I came across the email address of the author of one of the sources that was being quoted out of context, for a point that was peripheral to their main argument and so apparently came from Misplaced Pages. I briefly considered emailing them myself to ask if they could recall where they actually got the information (since their cited source says nothing of the sort), but then decided that emailing a scholar in a field related to my own with a message asking/insinuating "did you get this from Misplaced Pages?" was not a good idea. I then figured maybe explicitly placing the burden of doing that on the four parties still advocating for the apparently-circular citation to be restored might be a good idea; then, right before clicking "Publish changes", I realized that that could potentially open the door to "Yeah, I emailed him and he replied -- he said he would never dream of getting information from Misplaced Pages, and his copy of McCullough has linguistic footnotes that do support his text", and the only ways for me to disprove such a lie would be to (a) contact Taylor myself to ask if he had written such an email, which would be borderline harassment far worse than just emailing him in the first place, or (b) |prove that no such edition of McCullough exists.

Long story short, I'm asking you for a second opinion on posting the following at the bottom of Talk:Mottainai#"Genpei Jōsuiki".

I didn't notice until now, but Taylor's staff profile at the University of Memphis gives an email address for him. {{ping|Martinthewriter|Francis Schonken|IvoryTower123|Challenger.rebecca}} Since you are all apparently still advocating for our citation of Taylor for content that was in this Misplaced Pages article seven years before he wrote the "source" in question, would you like to contact him and ask him where he got the information? I've already checked his cited source, which doesn't say anything about mottainashi one way or the other, leading to the most reasonable conclusion being that, because it was a peripheral point to the one he was making in his essay, he checked Misplaced Pages and then located the corresponding passage in a translation of the Heike, without verifying that the Japanese text supported our assertion. ~~~~

Any advice you could offer on the matter (even unrelated to posting the above -- if you were in my shoes would you just bite the bullet and email Taylor yourself?) would be most appreciated.

Cheers, 211.135.108.100 (talk) 06:41, 31 December 2019 (UTC)

I would just write to him myself, but post something like the above explaining why I was doing so. (But I'm not an academic; I was a professional online activist for over a decade, so writing to important people with difficult questions wasn't something I shied away from. >;-) — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 00:56, 2 January 2020 (UTC)

For what it's worth, I didn't "look hard to find potential insult in every phrase" -- I looked hard at every phrase of Francis's proposed change, much of which was, yes, insulting to me (since it contained numerous grammatical errors, misreadings of sources, and outright nonsense, while he repeatedly referred to it as an "improvement" on my work), but I didn't actually mention that anywhere in my long commentary on the edit (which, as I will give you credit for not failing to notice, he admitted to not having read). I think if you change your !vote just because you want the RFC to end in "no consensus" sooner ... well, that's somewhat unsettling and bad for the project -- did you find something in all of that discussion that convinced you that either version A or version F is not inferior to version C?

Yes, I think a simple !vote count at present would probably come out to "no consensus", but a proper close would take into account the fact that several of the !votes (virtually all of the ones for version A) were clearly drive-by comments by editors acting in bad faith.

And ... well, I will seriously consider whether I intend to take your above advice. Not because I don't think it is sound on its face, but because I am really having serious doubts about whether any of this has been worth my time, and now even you are apparently saying you think the best solution would be for us to wait another month for a new RFC to be opened and then closed. I honestly don't think any good could come from that proposal, and would rather just change my !vote to version A and walk away from the article, if not the entire project, to allow me to enjoy my life again.

Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 11:49, 2 January 2020 (UTC)

Union Jack's knives in the back

IMHO, Welsh, Scottish & Irish nationalism is behind a lot of the push to use Welsh/Scottish/Irish-N.Irish/English in such UK-related articles. Anyway, just mentioning it here, as one gets blasted out there for bringing up the elephant in the room. PS: Feel free to delete this post. GoodDay (talk) 16:17, 2 January 2020 (UTC)

I'm sure that's true, but it's a common perspective and isn't "wrong". It's not any less or more righteous than a "blur away all these distinctions and let them go the way of Cornwall and the Cornish" extreme unionism. Over here in Yankeeland, we have a similar split between states'-rights advocates and fans of increased federal government authority (which also tend to align with right-wing versus left-wing politics, respectively). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 17:26, 2 January 2020 (UTC)

Except on issues where it's the other way around. Happy New Year. Dicklyon (talk) 05:27, 3 January 2020 (UTC)

Yeah. The Republicans tend to be big fans of things like the Dept. of Homeland Security, and lots of dope-smokin' liberals love the fact that California legalized pot. >;-) — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 05:57, 3 January 2020 (UTC)

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!

Hello SMcCandlish: Thanks for all of your contributions to Misplaced Pages, and have a great New Year! Cheers, Clovermoss (talk) 00:41, 3 January 2020 (UTC)

Send New Year cheer by adding {{subst:Happy New Year snowman}} to people's talk pages with a friendly message.

A message to all and sundry

Happy Newt Year! →

I'll refrain from delivering these on a zillion talk pages. Heh. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 05:57, 3 January 2020 (UTC)

Oh, yeah! I find this variant all the time. Kept a few around (fed them fruit flies) for a while. A visitor was checking out the terrarium: "Hey! This worm ... it has legs!" — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 06:54, 3 January 2020 (UTC)

Zigbee vs ZigBee spelling

Resolved – Opened it as a WP:RM so it just gets decided instead of just two people having a bilateral back-'n'-forth about it. :-)

Hi, I just left a note at https://en.wikipedia.org/Talk:ZigBee#Capitalization:_Zigbee,_not_ZigBee about your Zigbee -> ZigBee modifications a month+ ago -- I think the changes should be the other way around. Maybe discuss this further on the Talk:ZigBee page? Vskytta (talk) 20:07, 3 January 2020 (UTC)

WP:ANI

Resolved – I've said all that needs to be said at that waste of time. There's clearly no consensus for sanctions in either direction, though a boomerang would've been entirely appropriate.

There is currently a discussion at Misplaced Pages:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. The Drover's Wife (talk) 01:52, 6 January 2020 (UTC)

Nine-ball History

Hi Stanton, long time! I hope you are well. I've been working my way through the nine-ball article, cutting some more of the in-depth parts, and expanding some more on the game as a whole. I'm looking to do up a history section (I know it's a 1920s America thing, but outside of that I'm lost), and expand the section on tournaments. I know you have an encylopedic knowledge of these things, so if you have any sources, or ideas where to look, I'd appreciate it. I currently have the following:

very minor mentions of history
The Pool Bible - just says about it's preported beginnings
- not sure if reliable
History.co.uk basically barely mentions it.

I know A Brief History of the Noble Game of Billiards by Shamos is a good reference, but I don't see a great deal on the origins and history of the sport (I'd assume that's why we don't already have one.)

Any ideas for this one? Thanks for your help. Best Wishes, Lee Vilenski 10:50, 7 January 2020 (UTC)

@Lee Vilenski:. Nine-ball originated in the US, so UK sources will likely be late and dubious (like American works on snooker). Probably the best bets are:

Shamos, Mike (1999). The New Illustrated Encyclopedia of Billiards. New York: Lyons Press. ISBN 9781558217973 – via Internet Archive. – Inexpensive, commonly available, and a real trove.
Stein, Victor; Rubino, Paul (2008) . The Billiard Encyclopedia (3rd ed.). New York: Balkline Press. ISBN 9780615170923. – It's possible there's a later edition, but every ed. of it is very expensive, so it's better found via inter-library loan. The work is important enough some UK libraries probably have it.
Shamos also regularly writes/wrote a history column for one of the pool mags (I'm pretty sure it's Billiards Digest). I know he did an in-depth piece on the history and development of eight-ball, so it's probable he did one on nine-ball (and likely earlier that the eight-ball piece, given the pro pool focus of the mags). I doubt back-issues are common in the UK, and I don't know if they have a full archive of back issues online.
One way to really dig into it is to dig up past editions of the Billiard Congress of America and earlier Billiard Association of America rulebooks. The WPA's later rules are based on those (I think they are now kept in sync). BAA probably produced the first published rule set, other than maybe in booklets produced by table manufacturers like Brunswick, Balke & Collender (they produced two early rulebooks for what became eight-ball, as "B.B.C. Co. pool", around 1912 and 1925 if I recall correctly).

I no longer have a collection of these books and magazines, after downsizing about a year ago (my back could no longer take dealing with 4,000 books and 15,000 comics and magazines, and my bank account wasn't happy about paying for space to store it all). As for BAA/BCA rulebooks, they're often available on eBay for $5–10, but most are likely also available through ILL in the US and Canada (not sure every year's edition would be, though; libraries tend to divest old editions of books that are regularly updated). That likely doesn't help you in the UK, since these books would not have made their way across the Atlantic very often. I don't know what year the nine-ball rules first appeared in BAA/BCA rulebooks, though asking someone at BCA via e-mail might work. For all I know, they might even have archival PDFs now.

— SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 22:57, 8 January 2020 (UTC)

Holy moly, 4,000 books and 15,000 comics and magazines, that's a veritable mountain. Hopefully you made some cash selling them at bookstores, even though nowadays they offer chintzy buy pricing, likely thanks in part to the internet, which has eliminated the need for books! North America 00:34, 9 January 2020 (UTC)

That, and Amazon in particular is putting local bookstores out of business. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 01:15, 9 January 2020 (UTC)

I've migrated my library to work, and hope that my company will take care of the 3000 volumes (many of which they paid for) after I retire, so I won't have to deal with them. Selling is hard and slow. Used booksellers that I know buy up books for about $1 at "Friends of Library" sales and such, and sell them online via abebooks.com and such (now part of Amazon, sadly). I still buy a couple of books every week via abebooks.com, because you can't argue sources without sources. Google book search is good for finding snippets, but then you need to get the book to find more. In this way the Internet has been good for used book sellers, by making their wares searchable, but instead of stores they have storage. Turnover is very low, so storage needs to be cheap. If you're in a hurry to unload, you might as well give them to the library and let someone else try to make a buck off them. Dicklyon (talk) 01:39, 9 January 2020 (UTC)

Yeah, I guess it's resulting in a general "consolidation" of bookstores; those that could adapt to the model of a storefront plus a whole lot of e-tailing survived, while traditional ones just running as storefronts have had a tendency to go under. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 01:47, 9 January 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for this mate. I knew you had gotten rid of the books, but thought you'd know better than me where to start looking. Something on how/why/when the game was founded would probably be enough, as it's not fantastic just saying "around 1920, America". Best Wishes, Lee Vilenski 09:15, 9 January 2020 (UTC)

It's been said it originated as a children's and a training/practice game. Oh! Another likely source is Robert Byrne's book series; Byrne's Wonderful World of Pool and Billiards, Byrne's Book of Great Pool Stories, and Byrne's New Standard Book of Pool and Billiards in particular have all kinds of info in them (the third of those is primarily instructional, but still contains a fair amount of background info; Byrne had a hard time not making what could have been dry, rote material into entertaining prose). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 16:57, 9 January 2020 (UTC)

conversation you may be interested in

Done

Hi Mac, hope you are well! There's a topic at WT:SNOOKER#Power Snooker that I would appreciate your comments on. Best Wishes, Lee Vilenski 20:26, 13 January 2020 (UTC)

Trust me

He wasn't kidding. E Eng 04:04, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

P'r'aps so, but it was an excuse to make a username joke (and "is no" ones are pretty stale at this point). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 04:58, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

Per your reply to me at the DRV to review the AfD for List of REITs in Canada

Hi SMcCandlish,

Per your reply to me at the DRV to review the AfD for List of REITs in Canada, where you wrote, "ounds like a good talk-page discussion after closure of this brouhaha (which is really about whether there was a BADNAC, not what to do with the content, if anything)," I'm wondering, since the discussion has been relisted, should we invite MrOllie and DGG in to the discussion via pings? I thought I'd approach you first before randomly pinging them.

Cheers,
--Doug Mehus T·C 22:08, 17 January 2020 (UTC)

Well, I meant more the article talk page (and if a merge is what's going to be on the table, that would be the talk page of the merge target, the better article). However, that may be just premature until the renewed AfD closes (which might be for delete anyway). Regardless, I'm okay with some side-band discussion of it now, whether that be here, or on the AfD's own talk page, or whatever. If merge-and-redir is the goal, it could even be now, at the target's talk page, as an "If that isn't deleted, should we merge it to here?" thread. Despite being all Mr. Process when in a process, I'm anti-bureaucracy outside of one. :-) PS: I may be overdue for nap time, so I might not get back to this stuff until tomorrow, after I'm done with the two on-going RfAs. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 23:13, 17 January 2020 (UTC)

SMcCandlish, Thanks for the reply...I get the thinking behind a redirect or a merge, though I'm not sure a merge is necessary since all of the blue-linked REITs are at the target article (as far as I'm aware). A redirect is possible, but like I said at DRV, I'm just not thinking the need to preserve the attribution history here. Either editor could've very easily compiled this list of REITs from primary or otherwise non-independent secondary sources so I don't really see the need for keeping it in a refactored List of real estate companies of Canada combined list.

As for RfA, kudos to you for participating in that. I personally just avoid that as S Marshall described it best and most concisely for what it is, a ritual hazing. I'd kind of actually prefer the bureaucrats to have the powers to appoint administrators, similar to the processes for page mover, pending reviewer, etc., based on an extensive list of defined criteria. In exchange, I'd like to see the community develop a formalized process for de-sysoping (whether by consensus or by bureaucrat based on an extensive checklist as to whether the bar for de-sysoping had been met). I realize that sort of goes against our mantra of consensus-based decision-making, but from what I've observed, the bureaucrats we have, for the most part, shown themselves to be highly competent and neutral administrators of administrators. Doug Mehus T·C 23:27, 17 January 2020 (UTC)

Not sure I see a reason to avoid preserving the page history, but I might not really care. I'm not a "history nut" when it comes to revisions no one's going to care about anyway. I don't disagree with your description of RfA (and I kind of comment on that a bit, in different terms, at User:SMcCandlish/RfA standards). But I figure I don't have a right to complain about any "badmins" if I did nothing to keep them out of "office". We have two long-term problematic but still standing ones whom I could have almost certainly prevented being given the mop (or in one case getting it back!) with just a few diffs, but I was on wikibreak at the time (I actually wonder if that's why they RfAed when they did). And a couple of times I've seen people who'd be good admins just barely fail to pass, due to a couple of histrionic opposes over trivial crap, where just a few more supports would have mattered. We definitely need a community desysop process, because ArbCom basically won't do it most of the time, unless the need to do so is so bad that there'd be a wikirevolt if they refused to. (Reminds me of a certain president of a certain country and the difficulty of impeaching him). Would rather see RfA seriously reformed than 'Crats turned into an admin electoral college; the risks are too high, even if the current process is so very, very shite-full. Anyway, I'm getting "grainy eyes" now and gotta hit the sack. I'm yawning like the cat in my editnotice. PS: I appreciate that our debatorizationing at DRV, though grumbly at parts, remained generally aloof and not very personalilzed. Sometimes it's hard to really hash out an issue here without someone getting butt-hurt. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 23:52, 17 January 2020 (UTC)

The community elects sysops but can't impeach them, and all sysop errors no matter how egregious are automatically forgiven if the sysop retracts and apologises. It follows that the only time you can ever remove a sysop is when you can show Arbcom smoking-gun diffs and evidence that the sysop has doubled-down on their error. You usually need several examples so it's basically hopeless. Once a sysop has tenure, the will to remain a sysop, and the absolute minimum of clue, the community is permanently stuck with them.
The best model is the one we use in the real world with police officers. The community elects commissioners; the commissioners set standards and they recruit, train, monitor and if necessary, discipline, the enforcers. Our existing body of bureaucrats consists of people who didn't volunteer for this commissioner role, and the community hasn't assessed their suitability for it, so we clearly can't ask them to do the job. We need the commissioners to be a separate, elected body that's subordinate to arbcom. But I can't build consensus for that big a change -- simply put, Misplaced Pages's consensus model means we can't get there from here.
On the matter of retaining people's contributions in the history, that's a terms of use issue. We don't pay our volunteers, but we do promise to give them credit for their contributions in the article history. Therefore wherever their contributions appear in the encyclopaedia, even if it's in very highly modified form, the article history needs to reflect their work. It's literally the only incentive we offer to build Misplaced Pages, so I feel quite passionate about not reneging on it.—S Marshall T/C 00:09, 18 January 2020 (UTC)
On history: Sure, but if we do not retain any of the mateiral at all, there is not need to retain history. In this case, the argument is that the target page of a potential merge-and-redirect already contains all the entries we would keep, so it may just end up being blank-and-redirect. On adminship and self-governance stuff: Interesting idea, but I don't see how to get there from here without much deeper changes to how WP works, i.e. a "revolution" of sorts, or in other terms a crash and burn followed by a restart, at least at some level. This will almost inevitably happen anyway as part of the organizational lifecycle, and an argument can be made that it is already long overdue (like a decade+), both as to some of how the community operates, and as to how the WMF as a whole is still populated by people from the commercial software world and still operating like a software and online-services company instead of like a globally important NGO with a constituency (probably the largest constituency in history – everyone – though that scope is also shared by a few world health and civil rights organizations, I suppose). Many of the things wrong with WP and with WMF more broadly are not going to change until most of the board are replaced, and WMF's goals and charter are reworked, and WMF imposes some changes on the community. I've already been through this multiple times at other major organizations like EFF, which had precisely the same problem. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 11:01, 21 January 2020 (UTC)
Even in those cases where there's no strict need to retain the history, I feel that it's good practice to do more than the minimum. We're losing our volunteers, on Misplaced Pages, faster than we're gaining new ones and that's because we're no longer doing enough to engage with people. Needlessly obliterating their contributions is part of that.—S Marshall T/C 18:43, 23 January 2020 (UTC)
I don't object to the history retention in such a case (and it would happen anyway with a blank-and-redirect, unless the page were deleted first), though I don't think it has any impact at all, positive or negative, on editor retention. Noobs aren't leaving over such matters, since they're not aware of them. Long-term editors are leaving for much more serious reasons like abusive admins, entrenched PoV-pushing WP:FACTIONs with their own pet admin, ArbCom flip-flopping between a "just punish everyone make the shut up and fuck off" kangaroo court and an administrators' defense association, and so on. From an org. lifecycle perspective (even aside from such problems) editorial participation decline is inevitable. Most of the work has already been done, and certainly most of the "sexy" work has. We're just polishing the chrome, neutralizing biases, and filling in obscure coverage gaps, except when a genuinely new and notable topic arises (new blockbuster, new war, whatever), which causes a spurt of activity when then fades rapidly. WP is pretty much necessarily going to run on a skeleton crew, compared to 2005, because we've already filled in the several million most obvious gaps; meta:Eventualism doesn't exist any more; this isn't a project trying to become an encyclopedia, it's already the dominant encyclopedia. The trick to replenishing the editorial pool in the future is getting people hooked on working here when they first arrive to work on some hot new band's article, or add some content about a newly notable politician, or whatever. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 19:54, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

Hey, can you take a look at my colon?

Hi, SMC. I think you've given me formatting/markup advice before, so maybe again? RE: display of verse in articles, I'm aware that indenting with colons produces bad markup, but my sense is that if they are used within {{quote}} or simlar templates, they get transformed into harmless leading spaces, so they're OK. Or, to put it in terms that even I would understand:

:Indent with colon even once:
:The markup gods will curse your bones.

(archaic rhyme intended)...but...

{{poemquote|
My sense is that colons
:in {{quote}} are legit-y;
But maybe I'm wrong
:and they're totally shitty!}}

I haven't found precise direction on this, though, and I can't recall how I formulated these ideas. Any insight? Thanks. Phil wink (talk) 22:14, 19 January 2020 (UTC)

@Phil wink: Now that I have on my proctology exam gloves: The use of : to cause indentation in articles is a bad idea (even if it's a lost cause on talk pages); use some other method like {{blockindent}} or {{in5}}. (That's covered in MoS somewhere, maybe near the stuff on quotes, or at paragraphs, or layout, or accessibility.) Whether the <dd>...</dd> (the :) is inside a template or not is irrelevant; the templates aren't doing any kind of conversion on them. However, for this exact case, you can dispense with a lot of this, by just using <poem>, which preserves whitespace as-entered, or using {{poemquote|<poem>...</poem>}} if you need the template's additional features. (It's weird to me that the template doesn't use the <poem> markup internally.) Anyway, entering:

{{poemquote|<poem>
My sense is that colons
  in {{tnull|quote}} are legit-y;
But maybe I'm wrong
  and they're totally shitty!</poem>}}

will produce:

My sense is that colons
in {{quote}} are legit-y;
But maybe I'm wrong
and they're totally shitty!

But unless you're using the attribution features of the template, you can just remove the {{poemquote|...}} part and use only <poem>...</poem>. Hope that helps. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 10:26, 21 January 2020 (UTC)

Thanks. {{poemquote}} does implement <poem>...</poem> within it, so I could have been using initial spaces all this time. The reason I preferred colons (given that I thought their markup got "cleansed" via the template) was that I found them much clearer in the wikitext: since monospaced spaces are so much fatter than display spaces, you never quite get what you thought once you hit Publish; moreover (especially for the sometimes-elaborate Jacobethan and Romantic stanzas) it's so much easier to count colons to make sure each line has been indented its own special amount. But I'll stop. In fact, I'll probably go back and start cleaning up all my junk. Sigh. Sometimes I fear Misplaced Pages won't get finished by the deadline! ;-) Phil wink (talk) 15:49, 21 January 2020 (UTC)

Thank you ...

January

... with thanks from QAI

... for improving articles in January! Today - 20 in 2020 - is a birthday, she is pictured on the lower choir pic, enjoy listening. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 23:32, 20 January 2020 (UTC)

WP:DOGS

Done

Hello SMcCandlish, I'm writing to you because yuor nmae is in the list of the "WikiProject Dogs" and you're one of the last still active. There's a discussion you might be interested in, here. I'd be glad to know your opinion about this matter, so I hope that you'll read the thread I opened. Thank you in advance if you decide to join. 151.64.171.8 (talk) 11:33, 21 January 2020 (UTC)

I have to thank you for replying in the thread. I've read your long answer, and I must tell you that the opinions you've expressed there are based on wrong suppositions. I'm not contesting your "no", but the reasoning you followed to get there. Please, read my answer where it's explained why your arguments are wrong and, after having been provided with correct information by it, reply on the base of that. Thank you for your time. 151.64.168.204 (talk) 08:24, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

I'll take a look, but remain highly skeptical, especially given the weird Italian nationalism perspective you've been injecting into that talk page in two threads in a row, with no one else buying into a word of it. Malta is not part of Italy, and is not linguistically, culturally, or otherwise Italian except at a minority level. I provided a very strong and researched case for the position I took, so you would have to do at least equal levels of fact-based research and reasoning to surmount it. I will take a look at it, but am not holding my breath. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 19:35, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

And I was right to be skeptical. Your WP:BATTLEGROUND behavior is likely to lead to a topic-ban or a block pretty soon. WP is not a forum for your unsourced pet hypotheses that contradict all the sourcing. There is no evidence whatsoever that Maltese dog is an Italian breed, and even closest known varieties are from Switzerland and southern France anyway. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 20:12, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

I wonder why replying here instead of the discussion...

There's nothing like nationalism in here! We could say the opposite, there's a prejudice against Italy. That pronunciation has always been in the page, nobody has ever challenged it, it was consensual, but it was removed without any discussion, which doesn't mean that to make an edit you have to discuss but that if an edit is reverted by another user you have to stop and discuss with him instead of going on with your edit, and it isn't me saying it but the consensus diagramme and the "BOLD, revert, discuss cycle". I was a victim of an older registered user o abuser his powers, and the Italian pronunciation too.
Malta has nothing to do with the "Maltese" dog breed, once and for all! A child might make such a connection, an adult should READ what other adults tell him! And it isn't me the adult you should read, it's an international association globally recognised like the FCI! If you'd had a look at the document I linked, you'd have read "The name Maltese does not signify that the breed originates from the island of MALTA" and "in the name Adriatic island of Méléda, the Sicilian town of Melita and also in that of the island MALTA" is found the Semitic root where also the "Maltese" name comes from...
Also, if you'd have read that document you won't contest the Italian belonging of the dog breed, because under the voice "PATRONAGE" it's written "Italy", while the origin, again, isn't "Malta" but generically the Central Mediterranean Sea area which includes Italy, Malta and other countries. Malta has nothing to do specifically with this dog breed, get it through your head once and for all.
Where on Earth would my assertion be not only "unsourced" (go and READ!!!) but even "contradicted by sources"??? I don't think you're lying knowing that you're lying, like "Magnolia677" did, you just didn't deign to read the sources before making such a statement, and it's patent you didn't because if you'd done you wouldn't have spend so many words in defense of the "Malteseness" of this dog which is all but Maltese. I apologise for being carried away earlier, but you should apologise to me for the false accusations you've written here about the sources.
If the English name of the breed was "Maltian" and the Italian "Maltese", I wouldn't insist in the need of its presence in the page. But since both English and Italian name are "Maltese" (while the Maltese name is another one I don't know), an indication of the Italian pronunciation of that word "IS" useful to the readers, exactly as for "pasta", because on of the most important international associations about dog breeds states that the patronage of this dog is... Italian!
Last but not least: take a second to read this question of mine and think in your head what could be the answer. WHY all the users who're now fighting so hard not to restore the Italian pronunciation have never tried removing in during all these years? HOW COME users from the WikiProject Dogs who've edited that page so many times and have never challenged the presence of the Italian pronunciation are now using all they have to keep it removed? What do you think could be the reason? Among these we mustn't count he who started all this, "Magnolia677", because he has nothing to do with dogs, he didn't even know that this dog existed before starting this circus, mindful that his position would keep him safe from respecting rules of Misplaced Pages and from any anonymous user who protests for this...

I won't force you to answer, I'm starting thinking that entering into Misplaced Pages community as registered users leads many good persons to the "Dark Side", I've hoped that you at least could be unbiased enough, but now I'm afraid you've chosen "your friends" in place of "truth" (i.e. an independent source linked in almost all pages about dog breeds who says exactly what I've always been saying and the opposite of what all the dog-friendly users are...). 151.64.189.26 (talk) 08:44, 24 January 2020 (UTC)

I replied here because you posted here; I also replied at the other page when you posted there. There is no "instead". To cover this briefly, and in the same order:

You are pushing a nationalist PoV; everything is Italy/Italian this, and Italy/Italian that. There is no "prejudice" against Italy, any more than there is against Japan or Botswana, at that page, because the subject simply has no encyclopedic to any of those countries, only to Malta (and – maybe, depending on more detailed sourcing – peripherally to Switzerland and France, though I would want to actually examine the sources in detail where they are trying to draw genetic relationships between the Maltese dogs and continental dogs from so. France and from Switzerland. Lots of breed-related sources are actually unreliable and uncritically repeat nonsense claims that breeders make up for promotional purposes).
"Malta has nothing to do with the "Maltese" dog breed, once and for all!" That's not what the sources are tell us. The end. Neither I nor anyone else here is going to entertain any further WP:FRINGE assertions from you, devoid of evidence. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and you not only haven't provided any, you haven't provided enough to surmount all the other sourcing that ties the breed (naturally) to Malta. You actually are onto something, though (seemingly without realizing it), and there are hints of it in the article already, and I raised it in more detail on the talk page: it's neither clear that all references in ancient sources to dogs in/from Malta (even when we're sure they really do mean Malta) have anything to do with this modern breed and its foundation stock, nor that all historical references even into the Early Modern period which have been interpreted as referring Malta actually do so; some seen to refer to other places with similar names in one language or another. If you would stop ranting at people and start researching these specific matters, you would probably both have a more enjoyable time here and actually help improve the article. However, if your current nonsense continues any further, I will definitely seek you being topic-banned from the subject, because your behavior to date has been nothing but disruptive.
"Patronage" is weird FCI jargon for "some later breed development done outside the area of origin using dogs from the area of origin as the foundation stock". It's not dispositive of much of anything (there's dispute at Template talk:Infobox dog breed on whether to even retain a parameter for this), no other organization makes use of such terminology (in dog breeding or any other kind of breeding), and in any cases where such concerns really did make a difference, it is not an infobox matter but something to cover in detail in the article's main text, with reliable secondary sources (FCI is a primary source). A good example would be Persian cat, Angora cat, Turkish van, and Van cat, where various confused and sometimes even deliberately confusing breeders have either been imprecise about what cats from where were used as breeding stock, or even blatantly lied about it, resulting in a lot of contradiction in the sources, over more than a century, about all four of these varieties. It's a mess (in the real world of cat writing and cat pedigrees and cat breed standardization, not just in encyclopedia writing) that is only going to be cleared up by patient and calm research, not by ranty fighting on talk pages. The last time sometime tried to engage in ranty fighting on those talk pages, he also got topic-banned, actually. Same thing happened twice last year at some dog-breed articles, too. We do not have the time or patience for angry, venting bullshit. You're just going to have to learn and accept this, or the system is going to eject you. Period.
I can't even make sense of that one. Look, it's simple: We have an article, and it cites sources. You have an opinion, mostly without sources, and unsupported by the few sources you do have (you are leaping to conclusions that the sources themselves to not reach – WP:OR), none of which are sufficient to surmount the sources already present in the article. That's it. There is no more to it. No one is "lying" to you. There is no conspiracy. You're just not actually competent to do encyclopedia work because you do not understand how reliable sourcing works, you are extremely uncollaborative, you are here to push a viewpoint, and your English-language skills are too sketchy to produce quality material here anyway (I would say you should focus on it.wikipedia.org, but you won't do well there, either, because of the other problems. I would not be surprised at all if you've already been banned or long-term blocked over there, which might explain your sudden appearance here trying, poorly, to lecture others on policy, and generally making a nuisance of yourself, along lines addressed by WP:NOT#FORUM policy.)
You're still just not getting it. The Italian pronunciation isn't relevant because it is not an Italian breed and Malta is not an Italian territory, and Italian isn't an official or unofficial-but-majority language there. There's just no connection between Italian language and culture, on the one hand, and the Maltese dog breed, on the other.
"What do you think could be the reason?" That's really, really obvious: It's trivia no one noticed until you start making a hell of a lot of noise about it, which has attracted lots of attention to it and to your unreasonable behavior and pro-Italy nationalistic viewpoint-pushing. While most editors would not have cared before, you've forced them to care, and to notice that you're using this Italian pronunciation stuff as a wedge to drive a pro-Italy viewpoint about the breed which does not agree with the reliable sourcing.

"I won't force you to answer." Well, yeah. Last I looked there is no means for you to do so. I've sat on this for some time, reviewed it all again, and decided one last time to try to talk some wiki-sense into you. When you say things like 'I'm starting thinking that entering into Misplaced Pages community as registered users leads many good persons to the "Dark Side"', you're pretty much begging to get indefinitely blocked on WP:NOTHERE grounds, as someone whose purpose in being here is simply starting shit and accusing everyone who doesn't agree with you of being in a conspiracy. Same goes if you keep asserting your viewpoint is "truth" (see WP:TRUTH and WP:GREATWRONGS and WP:BATTLEGROUND). If you keep up this behavior, I bet real money you'll be blocked within a week or less (probably dependent on how quickly I or someone else bothers taking the case to WP:ANI). I'm disinclined to get involved in WP:DRAMA, but at this point I'm not sure there's any option but asking ANI to at least topic-ban you. I invite you to prove me wrong by sticking to reliable sources and avoiding any more accusatory outbursts against other editors. Address the content not the contributors. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 05:34, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

MOS:COLON entry

Hi SMcCandlish, I didn't see any pushback to your suggestion at Misplaced Pages talk:Manual of Style#MOS:COLON entry. What is the standard for determining consensus in a project page? Does silence imply consensus here? I'm certainly comfortable with your suggestion, and feel that you should be the one to implement it, if consensus has been achieved. Cheers, HopsonRoad (talk) 15:52, 21 January 2020 (UTC)

@HopsonRoad: I would think lack of objection is sufficient in this case, since what's proposed isn't a substantive rule change, but simply a clarification of the wording and a merger of colon material into a single place (from MOS:TITLES to MOS:COLON), as well as trimming of semi-colon "rule mongering" at MOS:TITLES that's not encyclopedically pertinent. It would be rare for someone to insist on retaining obvious WP:Instruction creep in a guideline or desiring the material to be scattered instead of consolidated and simply cross-referenced. That said, the last time I did major revise-and-merge at MoS, even after considerably more discussion some people belatedly tried to object (not on the merits but on an iffy "you didn't ask enough first" basis) just because not every relevant talk page had been notified. I think the most useful approach would be notifying WT:MOSTITLES of the discussion, then at the discussion saying something like the above (i.e. "should we proceed, or are there any objections?" and let it sit for a week. There's no hurry, after all, and I'd rather avoid WP:DRAMA if possible. It's probably better if I don't personally do this all this, since I didn't open the thread, and some MoS-skeptics tend to complain that my personal input into its text/processes is more frequent than they'd like. Just more silly drama (the WP:Fallacy of the revelation of policy), but it's heartburn I don't need. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 16:27, 21 January 2020 (UTC)

Your input is requested

Done – Sorta.

at Misplaced Pages:Misplaced Pages Signpost/Next issue/Community view before Friday.

Only 100 or so words. It should be fun and serious at the same time.

All the best,

Smallbones_(smalltalk) 00:24, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

I'm actually skeptical this is a good idea, as explained at Misplaced Pages talk:Misplaced Pages Signpost/Newsroom#Deadline +1 day, 6,000,000 likely already written . — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 21:16, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

Discussion at Talk:Project M (video game)#Requested move 23 January 2020

You are invited to join the discussion at Talk:Project M (video game)#Requested move 23 January 2020. SMcC, I am neutrally notifying you to the above discussion as it is more suited to your area of interest and/or expertise. I will reserve sharing any personal thoughts on the matter until you either (a) participate or (b) decline to participate, in which case you and I can have a discussion on your talkpage. Doug Mehus T·C 01:07, 24 January 2020 (UTC)Template:Z48

email

Just wondering if you had any thoughts on the recent email I sent you. Regards, Cinderella157 (talk) 23:49, 24 January 2020 (UTC)

Not seen it yet. Will go look-see. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 03:39, 25 January 2020 (UTC)

gmail Cinderella157 (talk) 03:53, 25 January 2020 (UTC)

@Cinderella157: On JOBTITLES? — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 04:04, 25 January 2020 (UTC)

Yes Cinderella157 (talk) 04:16, 25 January 2020 (UTC)

Hopefully I addressed it all (I tried to keep is brief for once!). If not, lemme know. I'm about due for naptime, though. :-) — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 04:21, 25 January 2020 (UTC)

Flyer22 Reborn and WanderingWanda

You speak wisdom. I have lost good friends because they have hitched their wagons to the TERF wars. This is a uniquely divisive issue. Guy (help!) 00:12, 25 January 2020 (UTC)

@JzG: I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, so it's all around me. Can be painful to see/hear. This and various other instances of the left tearing itself apart, and in parts tearing itself farther off from the center, are much of why I quit Facebook, Twitter, and other general social media. I was in danger of losing dozens of friends over numerous doctrinal/factional disputes (and would have lost some no matter which position I took on any of them), so it was better to just abandon the whole affair. Happily, it also netted me a lot more free time! — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 03:38, 25 January 2020 (UTC)

WP:MEDMOS

Unresolved – Go fix the WP:FOO shortcuts to MOS:FOO ones, to match practice at other MoS pages. This only applies to the MoS section there; like WP:SAL, part of that page is also a content guideline that should not have MOS: shortcuts.

You had previously asked that protection be lowered on WP:MEDMOS which was not done at that time. I have just unprotected the page and so if you have routine update edits to make you should now be able to do so. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 06:42, 25 January 2020 (UTC)

Thanks. I don't remember what it was, but maybe it'll come back to me. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 12:17, 25 January 2020 (UTC)

Now I remember. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 06:53, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

A cookie for you!

SMcCandlish, thank you for this edit and edit summary where you note that <center></center> hasn't existed since the 1990s. I guess I'm still using outdated tags. lmao :P Doug Mehus T·C 01:12, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Thankee. WP:LINT, WP:HTML5, and WP:CHECKWIKI may be of interest. If you'd like to help with cleanup, see Misplaced Pages:Linter#User CSS tool: lint.css for a handy utility to install in a few seconds. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 01:44, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Infobox Nationality

The RFC look like it is headed for no-consensus. I started writing this in the discussion section:

Pius Fasinu and Viet Pham are two examples I just ran across, while fixing other things, that misuse |nationality=. In the first case, there are no sources that discuss his birth or nationality. He went to college in Nigeria, then South Africa, then worked in the US. He was probably born in Nigeria, but to say his nationality is Nigerian-American is unsubstantiated. Viet Pham says his nationality is Vietnamese, but he was born in Malaysia and lived in the US since age 5. He is probably an American. |nationality= is rarely used with sourced information. There are usually sources for a person's birthplace. When nationality is used, it is usually wrong or WP:OR (derived from birth place).

Which got me thinking... while it safe to say where a person was born (with a source), why should we permit nationality to be used without a source. If we can't expect a reader to infer nationality from birthplace, why should we allow an editor to infer nationality from birthplace and put it in the nationality field. So instead of saying don't use it when it is redundant with birthplace, shouldn't we just say don't use it without a source. This would disallow its use in most cases, except when it is discussed in the article (usually when it is different than birthplace). Your thoughts? MB 03:11, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Two examples of obvious nonsense which can simply be fixed doesn't equate to anything like "When nationality is used, it is usually wrong or WP:OR". If we have so few sources on someone that no consensus exists between them on what the person's nationality is even in a general sense, then that person probably is not notable and shouldn't have an article here. No one said anything about permitting anything to be added without a source. You seem to be mixing some basically unrelated concepts like "Do we have a reliable source for this claim?" (which is about inclusion in an article anywhere, and has nothing to do with infoboxes in particular) and "is it sensible to use a particular infobox parameter?" which is going to have more to do with context than with anything else. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 17:05, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Those were two more egregious examples that certainly can be fixed by just removing the field. But the common case is Joe Politician is born in Columbus, and |nationality= is filled out with American, or Andre Author is born in Paris, and nationality is filled out with French. While there is usually a source for the place of birth, there usually isn't for nationality - it's just inferred by the editor (a form of OR). Isn't this another reason to discourage using the parameter in the infobox. I'm trying to say that if we emphasize and enforce existing policy on sourcing, nationality can be removed from most infoboxes today anyway on that basis. Or is it OK to make assumptions about nationality from birthplace and use the field in that way? Fields in infoboxes should be concrete and not based on interpretation - which is why I don't think it should be used if all we really have sourced is birth place. And if existing policy on sourcing/OR suggests |nationality= should rarely be used, we should state it more clearly. MB 03:51, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

Then the template documentation should be updated with an instruction to not add things for this parameter (or for |citizenship=) without reliable sources. The problem is lazy editor behavior, not the template. That said, "nationality" has multiple meanings, and is clearly the easiest to source. (And is very, very easy in some cases; e.g., it is not possible in most US jurisdictions for someone who is not at least a legal permanent resident, and usually a citizen in particular, to hold elected public office). I think there's been some confusion here though, in all this discussion of "can be inferred from birthplace". It wasn't about "can be inferred by editors from birthplace, and filled in as nationality". It was about "can be inferred from birthplace by the reader, whose common sense we need not try to contradict unless sources tell us the obvious inference is wrong". By way of analogy: in almost all cases, the reader can infer that a biography subject has a nose (or did while living). We do not need a parameter stating that they have a nose, nor do we need to state anywhere that they have/had a nose, nor address the question at all, except in the rare case that someone was born noseless or lost their nose through some kind of medical issue, violent incident, etc. Rather (though not perfectly) similarly, if someone was born in France and is notable for "stuff" in France, and lives and raises their family in France, we need not state that their nationality is French. If we're going to do it anwyay, then yes we should have a source somewhere that says they're a French singer or French botanist or French serial killer or whatever. In most cases it should not take longer that 30 seconds to find one via Google, and only a couple of minutes to properly format it as a source citation. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 04:51, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

PS: I just remembered an NAC I did in 2017 that gets to pretty much the same stuff, and my take on it hasn't changed (not so much my personal views, but my assessment of the community's and its lack of patience in continuing to dwell on and squabble about such matters): permalink to discussion and closure The article text (including lead and i-box) still comply with it, with almost surprises me. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 08:34, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

OK, what about this twist. Jack Edmonds lead says he is American, where he was born and lived/worked for 35 years. But the WD short description says he is Canadian, where he lived the next 50 years. Hard to say both in 40 characters (while keeping the more notable stuff). At least no one has used |nationality= in the infobox yet. MB 03:53, 14 February 2020 (UTC)

Probably best to do something like "an American-born foo working in Canada since YYYY". — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 07:17, 14 February 2020 (UTC)

Want to do some clerking at MfD, SMcC?

Hey SMcC,

I don't know how often you usually assess the consensus and close RMs or XfDs (probably more the former), but as an experienced editor, would you mind clerking the old business at MfD that can be closed as anything other than delete? It's been fairly neglected by the administrators, and we've got old business piling up for nearly two weeks in some cases.

I would, but am involved in all of them, and I'd to see my closes go to DRV by an opposing editor and be overturned or relisted on that basis.

Comment: I've requested closure on one of the MfDs over a week ago, and yet it sits, and sits...

Thanks,
--Doug Mehus T·C 01:23, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

Not my usual thing, but I've been uninvolved in MfD lately, so I guess I can take a look at it. Most days I'm backlogged myself, on one cleanup job or another. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 01:38, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

Yeah...I know you don't usually close XfDs, but honestly, I see you being excellent at it because of your knowledge and application of our policies. You can (usually) accurately assess and apply our policies correctly and see who is just vaguely pointing at policy shortcuts. ;-) Doug Mehus T·C 01:48, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

So one hopes. I'm in middle of patching up a pool-league article right now, though. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 02:12, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

Okay, no worries. Maybe admins just don't likely to touch userbox and userspace deletion requests because they're somewhat controversial.

Anywhoo...I'm sooo upset with ArbCom today. Doug Mehus T·C 02:52, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

I'm not sure "today" belongs in that sentence, ha ha. Seriously, I have not been paying attention to that WP:DRAMA firehose lately, so I'm not sure what pooch has been screwed lately. To badly mix some metaphors. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 07:22, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

I did one of the MfDs (the "toy portals" essay); that was pretty cut-and-dry from a policy reasoning standpoint, even if the headcount was split. I'm not touching the Bryan.Wade one, since opinions are very divided (i.e., an NAC would likely be controversial). I tend to agree that there's a commingling of ANI conduct stuff in there, while the actual deletion case appears to be IAR-only, with a tinge of IDONTLIKEIT and SURMOUNTABLE problems, but I don't care enough to comment (at MfD; I think I would at ANI, on WP:SPA, WP:NOTHERE, WP:NOTWEBHOST, WP:OWN grounds). I !voted in the BNP one, which was also split and about which I feel strongly (so, controversial + supervote if I closed it). John Eben/Books is nearly a 50/50 split, and I don't know about about "WP Books" to weigh the arguments well (it's a feature I've totally ignored, other than noticing that its existence has badly polluted Amazon, by leading to a firehose of bogus "books" for sale that are simply WP content with covers on them). If anything I'd be biased in a delete direction because of that. Gabbie Hanna: I can't close that, since the only valid result is history merge but only an admin can perform that action; I !voted instead. Sebby Frazer would have to close as delete, but only an admin can do that, and it appears to qualify for CSD anyway. What's with these weird names? I half expect the next one to be "Pooki Frufru". Anyway, I think that's the entire backlog, so there wasn't much for me to do. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 07:17, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

I'm on a short break now, demmit

Been meaning to watch that new-ish Terminator movie (crappy as the reviews say it is). WP has sucked out all the blood it's going to get from me today. PS: Actually, I have a lot of Things 'n' Stuff going on until ca. 3 February, so I'm not sure how much I'll be checking in. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 08:24, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

Wow, what a strange Terminator flick, and that's saying a lot given what several of the intermediary sequels have tried. Had its moments as an action flick, and some of the curveball ideas were "interesting", but I tend to agree with the criticism cited toward the bottom of our own article, Terminator: Dark Fate. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 07:43, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

Yeah, as a result of that movie I am thinking of initiating my personal Skynet Activation Protocol and bringing civilization to a close........ William Harris talk 06:31, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

I kinda knew it was over when they cancelled that badass TV series without even resolving the plot. Lena Headey and Summer Glau in one show? Day-um. At least Picard is back. And The Expanse gets at least one more season. All is not lost. >;-) — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 10:49, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

Books & Bytes – Issue 37

Hiding the projectspam. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 22:15, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

The Misplaced Pages Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 37, November – December 2019

#1Lib1Ref
Wikimedia and Libraries User Group

Read the full newsletter

On behalf of The Misplaced Pages Library team --MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 07:10, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

Template:R from subsidiary

Done

@SMcCandlish:

In an unrelated RfD discussion, I noticed you created the {{R from subsidiary}} template redirect for the overly broad {{R from subtopic}}. It's already got 50 built-in transclusions, and, in the spring, I would undertake a large-scale project to retag various redirects from current and former subsidiaries of notable companies with this rcat. We've got literally thousands of potential redirects that could be appropriately tagged with this redirect. In short, it's wasted as a redirect, and with the dab talk page header now finalized, I was wondering if you wanted to create this rcat? It's certainly within your level of expertise (i.e., you could probably do it blindfolded)

We'd have to let the creators of various rcat tagging scripts like Archer, Capricorn, and Sagitarrius (are there any others?) to add this rcat to the script, but that's not overly problematic.

What do you think?

Cheers,
--Doug Mehus T·C 16:58, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

I'm all for it, but don't want to deal with it all myself. I pay no attention to any of those software tools, so you already have a better handle on who to tell about it. I can certainly create the Category:Redirects from subsidiaries subdirectory (and we need a lot of other split-offs of Category:Redirects from subtopics and a few other excessively vague ones). If you want to deal with talking to the tool authors, let me know and I'll go do the subcat. PS: You need not wait for a subcat. while rcat tagging; I regularly apply the more-specific rcat names (redirects) to the applicable redirects, on the expectation that they'll eventually fork off and instantly populate the applicable subcats). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 22:14, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

+1. Sounds good; I'll take care out of the outreach to the script creators. And, there's no rush since we have no deadlines...can work on it over the next few months amongst other things either us might be doing or editing. Doug Mehus T·C 22:51, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

@Dmehus: I'm done with template, documentation, category, yadda yadda. Kinda got sidetracked for a while; there's a whole lot of mess in rcat space. I'm not done with CfD/CfM and TfD/TfM on that stuff yet, but am running out of steam for the day. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 12:39, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

PS: There's also a new {{R from subdivision}} (from neighborhood, from borough, and various other redirs) and category. Also, {{R from subsidiary}} has various redirs now. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 10:52, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

Disambiguation link notification for February 5

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Ooh...potential WikiGnoming activity...

Unresolved – Do some of this when I'm bored?

@SMcCandlish:

I stumbled upon Category:Editnotices whose targets are redirects and there are ~100 pages whose pages have been moved, but the editnotices are still targeted to the redirect page. Seems like a great, and sort of fun, WikiGnoming activity for a template editor such as yourself. I'd do it, but I'm not a template editor. Not sure if that's really your thing, though. ;-)

Cheers,
--Doug Mehus T·C 22:30, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

Argh. I would've hoped some bot fixed that kind of stuff. I'll consider it, but it's a lot of work for low benefit (the page names may be wrong, but the redirs still get there), and it's been my experience that a lot of editnotices (especially in mainspace) are PoV-pushing crap that needs to be deleted anyway. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 07:20, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

I'm going to pass for the non, Dmehus. Working on some other project (more fun than WP is sometimes). I'll let it sit here with {{Unresolved}} on it, in case I get inspired to work on it some, but it might be a long time. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 07:46, 18 February 2020 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages talk:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Kudpung/Proposed decision

Hello SmCCandlish. I'm Cameron11598 and I'm one of the Arbitration Committee Clerks I hatted your section on the Kidpung Proposed Decision talk page as it didn't pertain to the proposed decision. Note this page is not for re-litigating your point of view, but is to ask for tweaks and changes to posted proposed decisions. This phase is not for the introduction of additional evidence. Please note this was done as a clerk action and should not be reverted without the permission of an Arbcom Clerk or a member of Arbcom. Feel free to reach out to myself or any of the other clerks. Additionally you can contact us at clerks-lwikimedia.org --Cameron₁₁₅₉₈ 01:49, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

@Cameron11598: If the workshop phase is closed, does that mean the workshop talk page is also closed? That was my assumption, and is why I moved to the final talk page. I found it disconcerting that the workshop was closed while the "desysop" option under proposed remedies was completely devoid of any Arb comments, pro or con. I did not participate in the case at all, so I was not "relitigating" anything, just providing some rationales for "no" on the open question of desysopping, and also indicating support for another proposal, about user-talk behavior, since the final draft has not been posted. It would be good if there were a clearer indication of where to comment on what the final draft should say, if the workshop page is closed but the final draft is blank or incomplete. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 07:17, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

Your Venn diagram is broken

is not an anti-X sentiment to wonder whether someone identifying as X is bringing an anti-Y viewpoint that is demonstrably common among those identifying as X.

Some gay women may be misandrists, just as some Southerners might be racist, some tobacco smokers might be fat, and some Wikipedians might be crazy. According to your argument, it is “demonstrably common” that crazy people edit Misplaced Pages, fat people smoke cigarettes, people from the South are racist, and gay women hate men. Your claim is demonstrably false. Might as well claim that Jews are greedy and black people are thieves while you are at it. “All gay women hate men” is a stereotype, and is logically fallacious. Is there a good reason I need to tell you this? Viriditas (talk) 02:22, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

@Viriditas: But this isn't about "gay women", it's about lesbian feminist activists, who are an affinity group with a socio-political viewpoint, whose well-documented history (both as that slice in particular and as the broader feminist activism group) includes a good deal of anti-male messaging, which began seriously, turned satirical, then humorous, and in some subsections (especially TERFism) has turned serious again (nastily so). See thread below for details and some easily findable sources. I applaud you for focusing on reason and fallacies, but I'm not making the argument you thought I was, and your analogies are not actually analogous. It isn't besmirchment-by-stereotype to wonder whether someone from the Tea Party/alt-right movement – a cis-hetero and overwhelmingly white socio-political viewpoint and affinity group – shares the well-documented anti-feminist-leaning, anti-minority-leaning, and very firmly anti-gay, anti-trans, and anti-immigrant viewpoints common to participants in alt-right activism. It may not be a great idea to publicly air such a question on Misplaced Pages about another editor, but doing so doesn't make one a cis-hating, het-hating, white-hating bigot. PS: Since I actually confused GW's complaint and related backstory with someone else's in the evidence/workshop stuff, in this case it isn't even a X/Y Venn diagram involving lesbian feminism, but simply feminism. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 07:08, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for the reply. My time is limited (and I’m assuming, so is yours), so I’ll keep it short and sweet. You are welcome to disagree with my reply and adhere to a vastly different opinion. I will not try to deplatform you for it. :-)

1. Feminism is human rights. There’s no debate.

2. Treat people as individuals, not groups. We are not talking about organized groups of lesbian feminist activists who hate men. We are talking about individual Wikipedians who have their own thoughts and minds of their own. Anything less, is a stereotype. Thanks. Viriditas (talk) 07:23, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

I don't disagree with the spirit of either point, but have quibbles with their on-site implementation. One point 1, "feminism" has splintered repeatedly, and doesn't just mean one very specific doctrine. For this question, that mightn't've mattered even a few years ago, but the recent-ish TERF fork is deeply divisive, with both sides convinced they are making a "human rights" argument (one for broad acceptance and tolerance of apparently innate differences, one for protection from infiltration and subversion by members of the dominant patriarchal class). Only one of them can be right. On Facebook or whatever, I have no problem vocally siding with the former, but WP isn't the place to do that. It's not even the place to take up the more general proposition in point no. 1, though we can take some measures, like excluding typical far-right sources. as unreliable because they ignoring basic standards of integrity and fact-checking; and we can cite lots of high-quality sources coming to the conclusion in your point no. 1. We are not bound to give an UNDUE level of weight to right-wingnut material, including anti-feminism, but nor are we in a position to treat feminism (under one definition or another) as excempt from WP:GREATWRONGS and WP:NOT#ADVOCACY (and the community doesn't always fail in this regard; it's just that the level of activistic disruption has to get very, very high for the community do anything about it if the messaging is left-of-center, while it will crack down almost instantly on right-of-center PoV pushing).

On point no. 2, this is much like "address content not contributor"; it's ideal behavior, but failure to do it 100% of the time shouldn't result in desysopping. Ask any Republicans (in the US sense), libertarians, other right-of-center editors, or even centrist Christians who are not extremists, just not secular leftists, if they feel that your principle no. 2 has been extended to them consistently by other editors, and I bet the answer will uniformly be "no". Most of our editors are urban/suburban, at least middle-class, progressive, secular, rationalistic, neophilic, tolerant (except of intolerance :-) people, and it is easy for us to forget that the vast majority of the world's population are rural, pauperized, traditionalist/conservative, religious, driven by reactive emotion and cultural "truths", neophobic, and xenophobic. They're always going to find that our material contradicts their views, on a wide range of subjects (and not just because reliable sources have a tendency to do so). We have a lot of systemic biases even after DUE/FRINGE considerations, so it is natural for some socio-political friction to arise. People don't need to be punished/restricted for it unless they persist in it and will not learn to, as you say, treat people as individuals, not groups.
— SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 08:14, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

Denouement of that ArbCom thread

Since I was asked for sources, explanations, etc. from some of you, I'll ping you here, as the original thread was hatted as not the right kind of discussion for the talk page of that phase of an RFARB. So much for WP:NOT#BUREAUCRACY.

@GorillaWarfare and Amorymeltzer: First, apologies to GorillaWarfare for the mis-identication ; I must have confused details in one evidence/workshop thread with those from another. Sorry about that. Anyway, I didn't say anything about queer people as a class (which includes me, BTW), nor say the other things either of you suggest I did (including "generalizing for an entire group" , which is in essence what I'm objecting to in the first place myself). Please read people's actual words without imagining what they might have meant if you rearranged the words and cut bits of them out to stick with other words, or if they said something different because someone else whom you ideologically oppose wrote something in their place to offend you. This kind of willful mis-spinning to create a spectre of X-phobia to attack and to demonize someone with is precisely what I was talking about in the original thread. I don't want be right about Misplaced Pages having a disturbing trend of people trying to "manufacture enemies" over interpretational and doctrinal-wording questions, without even asking whether one's interpretation bears any relation to actual intent and meaning. Anyway, I'm happy that Lourdes got it, though.

Sources: Spend a minute on Google and you can find more material on anti-male messaging in feminist and lesbian activism than you'll need, including its serious origins in revolutionary first-wave feminism, its use as satire (against men, and first-wave feminists, and "polite" proto- and quasi-feminists) in second-wave messaging, and now outright humor in third-wave/millennial feminism, yet also a renewed actual serious form in trans-exclusionary radical feminism (presently a hotbed of dispute on Misplaced Pages, and not going away any time soon).

I'll collect some immediate finds and why I think what they're telling us matters here:

A good overview is probably Jillian Horowitz's piece in Digital America ; it's worth re-quoting its own pull quote: "Many feminists ... have re-deployed misandry alternately as an elaborate joke, a rhetorical weapon, a model for resistance to patriarchy, and as a survival strategy. Particularly on the Internet, they have done so with all of the inventiveness and strength that man-hating requires." That last bit is tongue-in-cheek of course. Some of the rhetorical/resistance material is less so (e.g. here, in Slate). Another Slate editorial, by Lena Wilson (self-described as a millennial cis-lesbian), ties the anti-male (and anti-transwoman) stances to second-wave feminism ("sex-segregated activism and spaces" ... "these second-wave practices come from lesbian feminists, women who were determined to separate themselves from men romantically, historically, and politically. To many of them, that meant (and still means) defying medical and social abuse against those with vaginas, fighting against male violence, and re-centering women in all narratives.").

Scholarly material often focuses on ethnic-minority-specific misandry concerns ; these seems to be the only context in which the exact words misandry/misandrist have much acceptance in that register, due to baggage the terms have accreted. But the more general notion appears pretty often in feminism and gender-studies material, including critiques of modern feminism. A controversial one was Janet Halley's Split Decisions. I'm not finding full free text of it, being a 2006 book from Princeton U. Pr., but this review covers the gist , and curiously enough relates to TERF vs. trans-inclusion concerns (see reviewer's footnote: CEDAW "should centre on gender not 'women'."), which are deeply tied to the matter, at least inasmuch as WP in 2020 is apt to have internal issues relating to anti-male PoV or perceptions thereof. WP will be wrestling with that for a while, and the heat is enough that RFARB is probably imminent. The intersection of feminism and misandry (as concept more than practice) has received plenty of mainstream media attention, e.g. in Time and with counter-pieces like this one . A good point in the latter: "Misandry has gone mainstream, and unfortunately the irony seems to be lost on men." While it's a shame that's true, it mostly is, and that has implications in the WP environment. I'm not going to trawl through newsy publications or the blogosphere for more like this; that pair is a fully illustrative example.

Interestingly, a Journal of Lesbian Studies piece as far back as 2007 remarks on "the strongly anti-male stance of Lesbian Feminism", in a piece on the eroding border between "butch" lesbianism and trans-masculinity (F-to-M), years before the breakout of the TERFwar. This journal in particular is a ripe field for harvesting references to both broad social perception of anti-male stances (especially in second-wave feminism) and narrow feminist and lesbian messaging that explicitly fits the description (albeit often said to be satiric). However, it's almost all paywalled. (I don't presently have WP:LIBRARY-provided access methods through any of those journal walls; forgot to renew them). "Women's Histories of AIDS", a well-known piece by Nancy E. Stoller , reprinted since 1995 in half a dozen feminism/gender-studies and AIDS-related anthologies, also suggests there's a generational divide on the matter, between second- and third-wave feminists (specifically lesbian ones in this piece's exact context): "The younger generation of lesbian AIDS activists carries a different psychology, culture, politics, and sexuality from those who came to the movement in the early eighties. These activists are connected to the older women by the term 'lesbian' and by some similarities of sexual practice. Many, however, see their elders as sexually repressed, conservative, and somewhat anti-male." See below for more about a possible "wave split". And feminists have written before about institutions moving away from "women's studies" to "gender studies" from 1970s onward (i.e. shortly after the establishment of such programs) not primarily for trans inclusion but for distancing from already common public association of radical feminism with man-hating. Bell Hooks's Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (2000) doesn't mince words about it: "When contemporary feminist movement first began there was a fierce anti-male faction." While this is a summary work, not an in-depth history, the follow-on material is correct that moving away from this reactive position to a more nuanced philosophy of resistance to patriarchal social structure was an actual doctrinal struggle within the movement and one that did not have a unanimous result, nor perfectly consistent results even among those largely making that viewpoint transition.

There is of course the really obvious false-equivalence matter: in a male-dominated and still too LGBT-hostile culture, over-generalized anti-male commentary (and especially "make a point" usages that are intended to provoke reaction and thought) aren't directly comparable to an inverse use of misogynist messaging as a dominance mechanism. And not even all sources we'd think should get this do get it; cf. this 2016 piece in Psychology Today which seems almost stubbornly clueless. But this brings me back to the point I led to in the second bullet in the original post: Supposing that everyday permissiveness toward anti-male (like anti-white, anti-Western, anti-any-dominant-group) sentiment, for false-equivalence reasons, should translate into on-Misplaced Pages permissiveness regarding internal behavior and content-bias evaluation is itself a false equivalence of a different sort, of equating how matters are argued out there in wild 'n' wooly land, with how they can permissibly be discussed in a collegial environment.

Daring to even suggest that anti-male sentiment (serious or satirical) and concerns regarding it can be a factor in on-site behavior, and in our analyses of editorial and sourcing biases, seems to raise umbrage simply because the terms misandry/misandrist tend to be associated with "manosphere" echo chambers , at least by people who follow online trends and wallow in social media. The fact that an extreme of misogynist-leaning "men's rights advocates" likes to use the terms doesn't rob them of plain-English meaning (especially since they came into any currency to begin with in feminist writing in the early 1970s; the notion was popularized by Joanna Russ to parody "polite" first-wave feminists and their sensibilities ). Nor does that recent connection to online sources of the proverbial "male tears" indicate anything negative about people willing to discuss such matters on more sensible terms. (Some of the academic material is also clear to distinguish between the crazy-MRA scene on Reddit and 4chan one the one hand, and on the other, more rationale men's-issues concerns that co-evolved with mainstream feminism, as a pro-feminist men’s liberation movement in the 1960s–1970s.) That the MRA crowd may exaggerate out of all proportion, and obsess over and verbally weaponize, some concerns doesn't mean the concerns have zero basis and no implication for WP:NPOV or inter-editor behavior on this site (especially when use of anti-man messaging is explicitly being spun as a patriarchy-fighting tool on the other side).

WP isn't Facebook, and our output (and internal discourse about it) is necessarily as meta as we can muster about the world we're editorially observing. WP's editorship is surely and rightly dominated by sex/gender-egalitarians, but we still have to separate our causes from our writing about causes and examining of how we're writing about causes. Feminists in particular are in a position to be especially mindful of straw-man/equivocation/guilt-by-association fallacies, being damned tired of having to defend feminism as not meaning "female-supremacism"; so please don't try to suggest that someone raising concerns about anti-male sentiment as an influencing factor is somehow a "masculist" and a "misogynist". Cf. previous material on falsely labeling people "transphobic" simply because they don't buy into non-neutrally using invented recently coined pseudo-pronouns in WP's own voice.

This isn't the time or place to get into it in detail (I'm sure it'll be its own RfArb soon enough!), but all of this is tightly bound up with trans-exclusionary vs. -inclusionary feminism today. The TERF debate has given the matter a whole new set of legs, since the root of TERFism is anti-male sentiment in first-wave revolutionaryism and especially in second-wave separatism (on two levels, even: against transwomen for "being men" and against transmen for "abandoning womanhood" – remarkably similar to "separate but equal" and "race traitor" lingo, and to "Christendom versus heathens" and "apostasy" long before that; it's all highly ideological). Given that the "TERFwars" are already rolling over WP in waves of PoV-pushing and ugly battlegrounding, it's essentially inherent in the very observation of it that the underlying overgeneralized male-critical perspective is by very definition a factor in it. Analogy: if there were a wave of emotive promotion of creationism washing over the 'pedia, it would be obvious that faith-based reasoning was part of it. Observing that connection is not equivalent, either, to saying that everyone espousing religious faith is a creationism PoV pusher either, just like observing the (sometimes actually serious) anti-male views of TERFs and some other feminist camps is no way a suggestion that all feminists or all lesbians are anti-male. The mischaracterizations of what I said, like this RfArb itself, and the overall debate that spawned it are rife with affirmation of the consequent.

That's actually enough material with which to write an article on feminism and anti-male messages (especially if replacing Hooks with a more in-depth history of feminism). Or, rather, one-third of an article, the rest being about patriarchal attempts to dismiss feminism in general as "man-hating", plus the recent Internet-enabled MRA "myth of misandry" and its relationship to incels and other online misogyny). But, we already have a page at Misandry, and it is not exactly ideal. I'm not sure the title is either given the baggage of the word. But, I would rather light my own hair on fire than try starting or overhauling any article in this issue-space, due to all the drama surrounding it.

I'll repeat that Kudpung probably shouldn't've wondered aloud whether something like a casually or actively anti-male position was part of the subcultural background of another editor in a particular instance, but that it's not really plausible that Kudpung hasn't learned from this. ArbCom (and desysopping) aren't a punishment/vengeance mechanism, but preventative. Is Kudpung really likely to do it again? Unless there's some other and much more objective reason to desysop Kudpung (wheelwarring, abuse of tools to push a viewpoint, etc.), then that case should close without a desysop. The emptiness, pro or con, of the "Comment by Arbitrators" section under "Kudpung desysopped" in "Proposed remedies" on the workshop page is reason for concern about the outcome; we usually have a much clearer idea where a case is going by now. (And I didn't post to the workshop talk page because the workshop has been closed since 4 February.) — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 06:31, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

PS, @Chris.sherlock: The only parts of this you got correct were "Kudpung was disrespectful to deceased editor Brian Boulton", "FAC is a ... clique", "Kudpung has been unfairly labelled a misogynist", and "Kudpung is being “railroaded'". All the other material in your "summary" is distortion, which appears intentional as an attempt at argument to ridicule. See what I said up top about people not reading what others actually wrote while instead taking little parts of what they wrote and combining that with extraneous stuff to manufacture a transparently fake bogeyman. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 06:31, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

You’ll have to forgive me but there was so much material you wrote that I was struggling to follow your argument. I believe you would have been better if you had participated in the workshop phase though. - Chris.sherlock (talk) 08:01, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

@Chris.sherlock: I'm sure that's true; I didn't realize the case was going on, due to a general avoidance of dramaboards lately. I had perhaps unwisely trusted that ArbCom would be wrestling with things like grossly uncivil behavior, en masse, in various hotbed topic area (like ... drum-roll ... TERF). Instead I see three back-to-back desysopping cases all of which look at least somewhat dubious and one of which has already closed in a way that almost all observers think is wrong, and which is going to cost us that long-term editor. BrownHairedGirl is someone I've had intense disagreements with in the past, including about things related to this very thread, yet I'm still hopping mad ArbCom blamed BHG one-sidedly for "portal-war" stuff and falsely "Finding of fact"-ized an abuse of admin tools when BHG simply used the tools to do what consensus – what other editors – determined should be done. That this housekeeping also happened to be in agreement with her own views on portal deletion is irrelevant and incidental; she wasn't making the delete decisions. I'm thus quite alarmed at what I see as an "admin shooting gallery" approach, exacerbated by the Arbs' dead silence on the desysop question in this particular case's workshop phase. It's like there's a big secret or something. Argh. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 08:24, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

I wasn’t following that so can’t really speak to it, but it’s highly unlikely that Kudpung will be desysopped. A few people want this, but not myself and the case was inadvertently triggered by me. - Chris.sherlock (talk) 09:58, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

I have no desire to continue a largely pointless discussion, but I would prefer if you didn't say I was willful mis-spinning to create a spectre of X-phobia to attack and to demonize someone. Your exact quote was It may not have been very politic to wonder out loud whether an editor self-identifying publicly as a cis-lesbian is in agreement with general/average cis-lesbian socio-political advocacy viewpoints. Maybe you and I have different definitions of "average" but I specifically used "general" and I find it hard to understand why you'd level that kind of accusation when that is exactly what that line is doing: claiming particular socio-political advocacy viewpoints as the general/average viewpoints for a given group. ~ Amory (u • t • c) 10:43, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

Between this thread and the one above it, I believe I've already addressed this multiple times: this has nothing to do with someone's sexual preferences. When examining the history (cf. sources already cited, and there are many, many others, and I mean reputable ones) of feminist activism, and the subset of lesbian feminist activism – as self-selecting socio-political communities with loose doctrines and shared causes and language and approaches – there is a well-documented trend of using anti-male language, originally seriously, later satirically, later still humorously, and, among TERFs, now back to seriously. I've never suggested it's a good idea to question another editor's motives/viewpoint because of identification or self-identification with feminist activism causes; I said rather the opposite. But someone shouldn't be desysopped for doing so off-the-cuff, when WP's editorial pool has an ingrained habit of wondering about viewpoint when other editors wear socio-political hearts on their sleeves. If it's good for the Republican goose it's good for the gander on the left, too. (Not that it is actually good; the point is, rather, that WPians question viewpoints and their effect on neutrality; a view that you and I may align with isn't immune.) It's a poor idea to question someone on whether they go along with every viewpoint that has a history within their social-causes affinity group, but it shouldn't be treated as a hangin' offense, absent evidence of it being defiantly habitual. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 13:22, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

Like Amory, I really do not appreciate your accusations that I willfully misinterpreted your comments. I was one of several people who understood your comment the way I did, so perhaps the issue is not with me? As for Kudpung not repeating his behavior—he has called me a man hater multiple times over the span of more than a year. It does not seem as obvious to me as it might to you that he will be stopping this behavior, especially given that he has not even addressed it, much less assured anyone it won't happen again. GorillaWarfare (talk) 17:39, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

@GorillaWarfare: And I didn't like being grotesquely and really obviously straw manned, so perhaps both of us can learn to shift our approach a little. (Though I shouldn't have to say multiple people having the same misperception doesn't transmogrify it into a correct one; that's the bandwagon fallacy. "Negativizing" by leaping, against good-faith assumption, to a conclusion that someone must be sexist or homophobic or transphobic simply for saying something disagreeable or not phrased to one's personal preferences, is at the root of this case on both sides and of a growing number of similar disputes – my central point throughout.)

On your other interactions with Kudpung: fair enough; I can hardly tell you what you experienced! But you've not diffed very much of it, beyond a strange falling-out in 2018 that dragged on a bit afterward (mostly by you, from what I've seen). Given that you misread so much of what I wrote, I had to go re-review the evidence in question, and it does not appear to be conclusive of what you want to conclude. What you take away from what people write doesn't always seem be the message they are actually sending, and you've over-staunchly demanded that your version must be true no matter how many times you're told otherwise by the writer. This is a disturbing pattern in an Arb, though I realize you're not acting as one in this case but as an aggrieved party. I hope it stops there.

I do agree that Kudpung's August 2018 outburst was exaggeratory and weird (the cause is still unclear, and your naming-related request was entirely reasonable, but there's obviously some bit of background that's missing). He appeared to have some kind of personal-conflict issue with you, even if at that time it may've been rather one-way. (The bit about bearing an eight-year grudge could seem to be projection on his part, at least until seeing your comments on his own Arb-candidacy questions page in November, over a year after the original kerfuffle had fizzled out.) But let's pore over your other diffs.

Examination of the deets:

This, whether or not AN would later decide it wasn't block-worthy, was very problematic. Kudpung did unreasonably misconstrue something as "man-hating", for unclear reasons, and it did arguably constitute a personal attack, albeit a diffuse and hand-wavy one with no certain target. He didn't use your name/username in connection with that term in his fit of inexplicable pique in 2018, but seemed to be broad-stroking about why he was pulling out of WIR, with you somehow being the last straw, though it's hard to be sure. At least here you more plausibly claimed it was an "implication" rather than an accusation. But since then you've returned to determining it to have been the latter, and claiming things like a "campaign" on his part, and so on. But that's not a consistent interpretation given Kudpung's more usual behavior (e.g. here, and years of prior participation at WIR, too). If K's outburst in reaction to you doesn't make sense in the context of his larger editing and issue-taking pattern (and it does not), that variance is not itself a pattern but an as-yet-unexplained deviation from one. Regardless, him mistaking your or another's view as "man-hating" or "misandrist" is not equivalent to him being "misogynist". That's affirmation of the consequent. It seems likely K has engaged in the same error (questions at his ArbCom candidacy page are basically making this point to him subtly). But two wrongs don't make a right. It was obviously a personal attack on your part (as various others told you in user talk and in the subsequent AN thread) for you to level "misogyny" and "misogynistic" at him over that, seemingly in tit-for-tat retaliation, or because of the actual content of the Signpost article. It's virtually indistinguishable from that other argument to emotion and appeal to motive smear tactic we've seen too much of, falsely labeling people "transphobic" for resisting neo-pronouns or some other bit of trans/NB activism dogma that the real world does not well-accept . TheSignpost article doesn't have a single misogynistic statement in it. The piece calls WMF's chief executive to task for allegedly not fulfilling the role properly, and in very particular for hiring a dubious company with goals directly antithetical to those of the organization and its constituent community. Has nothing to do with being female. It's not an idle concern. I was personally at WMF's quite private 15th anniversary party in San Francisco, and the keynote speaker (more like "main schmoozer", the number of people permitted to attend was so small) was the CEO of another such company, somewhere between Wiki-PR and Go Fish Digital in business model, though I'm forgetting the name of the company right off-hand). It was almost enough to make me resign as an editor. This was very shortly before Tretikov was out and Maher moved up , which amounted to simply a perpetuation of rather dubious business-as-usual. It was absolutely appropriate to raise this issue in Signpost, though the tone is a little weird and the focus wanders (why is travel for fundraising an issue?). But misogynistic? No. Ritchie333 already explained why in more detail here. Mentioning that someone is "proud" is descriptive and was central not just pertinent to the point K was making here (though whether he was talking about you is not only uncertain but twice denied). While the alleged personal basis behind the point (i.e., the idea that he was wronged by you in some way) appears to be specious/confused, the point in the abstract is perfectly valid: LGBT+ people are in a position to be more sensitive than average to mis-labeling, especially with pejoratives that relate to gender/sex relations and socio-political positioning. I actually made this exact same observation myself, above. Does that make me "misogynistic"? too? It's not any kind of attack on you to correctly identify you as queer in the context. But he didn't actually identify anyone, and used a link to "gay pride" not "queer". I think that's actually how I ended up mislabeling you "lesbian" (I apologize about that again). I took it at face value that he was describing you. K is within his rights to object to being misidentified as misogynist (though probably hypocritical for failing to realize he's apparently misidentified some others as misandrist for some reason). I'm pretty sure some key bit of data is missing, like a lost conversation, perhaps in e-mail. We can tell from contextual clues in at least two places that it has something to do with Megalibrarygirl's RfA and follow-on discussions about what someone else had posted as an oppose there, but I have not trawled through all of that material. K's comment "It depends which one of us is actually doubling down, doing the gaslighting ... and ... rekindling an old feud" is actually quite pertinent. K avoided you just as much as vice versa, yet showed up as his candidacy page not to ask questions but to keep insisting he must be talking about you in particular behind your back, after he twice denied it. This comes across as a belief that AGF doesn't apply to you as long as you feel you're onto something. Your filings at RFARB really are a doubling down, since they raises every specific unproven accusation anew, and still without proving any of them: misogyny, gaslighting, and grudge-bearing. Just because K did some of these things a few years ago is not a good excuse for you to do them now. Finally: I'm dead certain you know better that to speciously argue Kudpung refusing to defend himself in the RFARB is an ADMINACCT failure. He would not be the first, nor will he be the last. ADMINACCT means responding to concerns in user talk, at AN, and other venues by which a particular admin action or series thereof might be clarified, justified, improved, reversed, or whatever. This RFARB is a generalized (not administrative) behavioral examination by others, mostly dwelling on civility and faith-assumption, and isn't something for K to act upon at someone's request or otherwise respond to in an administrative capacity. In the case context, he's just a user under scrutiny (the defendant, not an officer of the court) who happens to have and might lose the administrator bit. It's a distinction similar to that applied in INVOLVED determinations, in content vs. conduct severability, etc. It is not plausible you don't already understand this as a multi-term Arb, so why on earth make such a weak "By the way, desysop him for this bogus reason, too" argument?

I have no idea what set off Kudpung in 2018, what exactly he thinks was misandry directed toward him or by whom (and it seems reasonably clear that wasn't just you in particular he had mind). But vaguely complaining about it back-when doesn't make him a misogynist or an adminship abuser. Nor does, when acting as a wiki-journalist, criticizing instead of praising WMF's exec. dir. in the wake of the organization taking on a "partner" with ties to Misplaced Pages whitewashing. We know from his longer history that he's the opposite of misogynistic (though he's self-declared as both elderly and a pedant, which may have something to do with these communication problems – he sure seems to have willfully misinterpreted some things himself). However, he's not been talking about this "misandry" stuff at all any time recently that I know of, except when repeatedly and pointedly goaded into doing so, and it doesn't relate to what the RFARB was opened about (questionably civil user-talk posts with no connection to the culture war). I think your diffs say more about your involvement in the dispute than they do about any alleged misogyny or administrative wrongs on K's part, even aside from his 2018 antics having been problematic (which in ArbCom and AE terms are actually too stale to be an actionable matter anyway, if not directly relevant to the cause of the case, and they're not).
— SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 05:24, 12 February 2020 (UTC)

Commenting here to let you know that I've read your points. But quite frankly the workshop phase of this case ended a week ago. I'm not sure if you didn't notice it until just now, but I'm not willing to effectively reopen it on your talk page by responding point-by-point—especially when I've addressed most (all?) of them on the workshop page already. GorillaWarfare (talk) 16:04, 12 February 2020 (UTC)

Fair enough. Yes, I did miss all three of these back-to-back desysopping cases. While I know the workshop is closed, it's been worth addressing this with you because a) the first of these to close has been considered a closure error by almost everyone in the community who has looked at it (generally ascribed to too many "green" Arbs in this batch), and b) you are still a sitting Arb, so having you take another look at your own evidence and interpretation is worthwhile. I'm certain you don't agree with every counterpoint I provide about, but I've also trusted you enough as an Arb to be pretty sure that you'll mull over the overall gist – that people leaping to the most negative possible interpretation of something (especially something that seems completely out-of-character), and then making loaded accusations like "misogynist", "transphobe", etc. without actual proof of it, is poisonous to civil dialogue and inter-editor relations. That Kudpung did this earlier, with "misandrist"/"man-hating", isn't a reason for others to escalate it. And the principle that we hold admins to higher standards than just-editors carries forward: we hold Arbs to higher standards than admins. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 21:41, 12 February 2020 (UTC)

New Page Reviewer newsletter February 2020

Hello SMcCandlish,

Source Guide Discussion

The first NPP source guide discussion is now underway. It covers a wide range of sources in Ghana with the goal of providing more guidance to reviewers about sources they might see when reviewing pages. Hopefully, new page reviewers will join others interested in reliable sources and those with expertise in these sources to make the discussion a success.

Redirects

New to NPP? Looking to try something a little different? Consider patrolling some redirects. Redirects are relatively easy to review, can be found easily through the New Pages Feed. You can find more information about how to patrol redirects at WP:RPATROL.

Discussions and Resources

There is an ongoing discussion around changing notifications for new editors who attempt to write articles.
A recent discussion of whether Michelin starred restraunts are notable was archived without closure.
A resource page with links pertinent for reviewers was created this month.
A proposal to increase the scope of G5 was withdrawn.

Refresher

Geographic regions, areas and places generally do not need general notability guideline type sourcing. When evaluating whether an article meets this notability guideline please also consider whether it might actually be a form of WP:SPAM for a development project (e.g. PR for a large luxury residential development) and not actually covered by the guideline.

Six Month Queue Data: Today – 7095 Low – 4991 High – 7095

To opt-out of future mailings, please remove yourself here

16:08, 13 February 2020 (UTC)

Applicability of MOS:ACCESS

SMcCandlish, was it you who recently cited the example in a discussion of MOS:ACCESS being one of the parts of the MOS that applies beyond article pages? I remember someone mentioning it in a discussion, and it being more of a foundational point about the MOS than actually about MOS:ACCESS, but, trying to remember, it struck me as consistent with the thoroughness of one of your opinions. Anyway, I'm having a bit of an issue with that precise point right now, and I went looking for but was unable to find anything explicit on it. Don't suppose you could be of any help? --Bsherr (talk) 21:53, 17 February 2020 (UTC)

@Bsherr: Possibly me, though I'm hardly the only one to have made the point. All of MoS (as contextually meaningful) applies beyond article pages, really, to the extent that the community treats it as applicable (which is very, very broadly). We regularly move project pages, categories, even templates to comply with it (or, someone could tediously argue, to comply with overall WP style, conceding that the style derives from the MoS without considering that MoS directly applies to their pet page), and so on. Sometimes people try to argue that MoS shouldn't apply to citations, yet it clearly does; our citation templates are careful to comport with it down to tiny details, and we routinely clean up citation messes to comply with MOS (e.g. titles in SCREAMING ALL CAPS; initials given as "A.B. Ceesdale" or "Ceesdale, A.B" instead of MoS-compliant "A. B. Ceesdale" or "Ceesdale, A. B."; dates in non-acceptable formats like "Aug. 23rd, 2019"; and so on. There's WP:CITEVAR leeway for using a real-world citation style that mandates something different (e.g. "Ceesdale AB"), but it's an exception we permit, not a norm, and not proof that MoS doesn't apply (any more that an exception by consensus for k.d. lang proves that MOS:CAPS and MOS:INITIALS are void). It basically comes down to this: if there's not a serious, WP:IAR-level rationale in a particular case to not follow a guideline or policy, in the actual spirit in which it was intended, even if you think you can WP:WIKILAWYER / WP:GAME your way into an excuse, a loophole, for why it might supposedly not be applicable, then just follow the rule and stop wasting other editors' time warring over trivial nit-picks. >;-) I don't put it that way to anyone's face, of course, but it's the WP:Common sense and WP:NOT#BUREAUCRACY position to take.

As for some explicit rule that MoS applies to this but not that, we don't have one. We have for long stretches had MoS stating that it applied to various things explicitly, including portals, article-category descriptive material, templates used in mainspace, and so on (without any "does not apply to" WP:CREEP in it), but people keep editwarring against it (WP:CIVILPOV very "slow editwar" stuff, where they leave it alone for 18 months then go delete it again without consensus when they hope no one will notice, e.g. when I've been away for several months and Tony1 and other MoS regulars haven't been very active). I will restore it again eventually, since how this site operates every day is overwhelming proof that MoS's broad applicability is in fact the consensus.

On accessibility in particular, ask someone why they think it is okay to do things that intentionally make it difficult for readers and editors with disabilities to access the material. Like, really make them think about and try to answer that.
— SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 07:26, 18 February 2020 (UTC)

Discussion at User:Atsme/Atsme's Law

You are invited to ~~join the discussion~~ see at Atsme's Law.

Hey SMcC,

Thought you might enjoy a good chuckle at this, and the levity brought to a recent MfD discussion.

Cheers,
Doug Mehus T·C 03:16, 18 February 2020 (UTC)

Very funny. I actually remember your "Even Atsme" comment in situ. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 07:30, 18 February 2020 (UTC)

"IVLIUS CAESAR" listed at Redirects for discussion

An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect IVLIUS CAESAR. Since you had some involvement with the IVLIUS CAESAR redirect, you might want to participate in the redirect discussion if you wish to do so. Soumyabrata (talk • subpages) 09:54, 18 February 2020 (UTC)

Soumya-8974, LOL...I never noticed that SMcC created that redirect. Interesting. Similar to Atsme's Law, named after Atsme, if SMcC created a redirect, it's got to be useful. ;-) Doug Mehus T·C 21:26, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

Nah, I really borked that one up; asleep at the switch. Should've been IVLIVS. It is kind of shocking how rarely I get an RfD notice, though, given that I've created over 11,000 redirects. I would guesstimate only 20–50 of them (I think a few were related multi-nominations) have ever been nuked, mostly from when I was green, and before the criteria were tightened. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 21:52, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

SMcCandlish Oh, did we used to not have as tight of criteria for the creation of redirects? But yeah, 11,000 redirects, it's amazing you don't get more of these notices. Oh well, I still think it's not an entirely implausible typo, so am going to stick with my "weak keep" rationale. Evidently, usage suggests you weren't alone in making that typing flub. ;-) Doug Mehus T·C 22:01, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

My desire to punish myself for mangling Latin that badly (when the entire point of the redir was to account for the exact actual Latin that might be found on a period inscription) must be mutating into a desire to burn in typo Hell with anyone else who would do it, as company. It's like Indy Jones almost dying in the IJ and the Last Crusade by forgetting that Jesus's name Latin starts with "I". — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 22:07, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

Move of Programmed I/O

I noticed your recent move of Programmed input/output to Programmed input–output. Given the ubiquity of "I/O", doesn't the previous name fall under the "expression or abbreviation widely used outside Misplaced Pages" exception at MOS:SLASH? It may be slightly less common fully written out, but parallel construction seems important here. As dominant as the abbreviated form is, I'm not sure changing the unabbreviated form is right. --Fru1tbat (talk) 14:05, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

@Fru1tbat: This ended up longer than intended; I wrote it while researching it, and it needs compression. We can have a full WP:RM discussion of the matter, of course, but I think the result can probably be predicted after a bit of digging about and remembering what arguments go over at RM. A consistent principle throughout MoS is to not do something unusual with style (and this would run counter to both MOS:DASH and and MOS:SLASH) unless independent RS are in near uniformity on a particular style for that exact case. But sources are not in near uniformity for "input/output". It's often written "input-output", "input–output", "input output", "input and output", more rarely "input - output", "input – output", "input / output", "input:output", "input : output", etc. The symbolic "I/O" is pretty close to total uniformity though; I would argue for it constituting an exception to MOS:ABBR as a result. But that doesn't "rub off" on related terms and strings. Abbreviations/symbols often have very little to do with how things are represented in plain English words. It's not the kind of "parallel construction" that really is consistently found. Otherwise we might move Base exchange to Base eXchange, and decibel to deciBel. In everyday English, foo/bar and foo–bar (or among those that don't distinguish between horizontal line chars., foo-bar) paired constructions like input and output, or cost and benefit, are directly equivalent. They're not on Misplaced Pages, where we hunt down and move "/" versions, except where they appear in proper names like titles of works. Even those, we only keep them at "/" versions if they're virtually never found in sources without the "/".

Googling , I find the no. three result, when I exclude Misplaced Pages, is this one, so that's "Input-output", "IO", and "I/O" in the same source. Shortly thereafter is the same sort of mixture of styles in another tech/sci/comp context. Lots and lots of stuff like this. In journals, too, e.g. this one with "input-output" then "input and output". There is no consistency within even the computing-related material. "Input-output" goes back a long way in this context, e.g. journal article from 1969. And it's nearly never with a "/" in combining form ("BIOS", "basic input-output system"), which leads to consistency problems, more so with English phrases that with symbolic abbreviations. Switching over to Google News , there's a wash of unrelated economics and other uses, but really quickly you find non-slash stuff and and There is no computing vs. economics split, either; you can find the slash version used in economics right near the top of the search results , this figural use is simply a metaphor for the tech sense, and there are cases where it's both at once, e.g. this one on military communications tech issues becoming logistical ones, and using the "-" spelling in this case. The usage with "/" or with "-" is also pretty common in reference to music equipment, though that overlaps so much with digital tech these days it doesn't matter, and is another descended-from-computing sense anyway.

In short, if it were hard to find "input-output" or "input–output" that would be one thing, but it's quite common, including in the writing of techies, not just people who don't know the subject. The lack of any demonstrable distinction between the "-" or "–" form and the "/" form on a topical basis means articles like Input–output model, which are WP:CONSISTENT with a zillion other X–Y articles, are a "fatal" problem for Input/output in the computing sense since the latter cannot be shown to be a consistent usage even within its own field.

This is the long and messy version of the argument I would present at RM (with more and better tech examples – these are just what I pulled up in ~2 minutes), probably also mentioning WP:SSF: that geeks prefer the "/" version isn't relevant. I'm one of them, and in off-site writing I would use "/". We have too many "I want an exception" squabbles on WP, and need to just apply the rules as consistently as possible because almost all style is arbitrary, and the value of the rules is stopping the squabbling over trivia so we can get back to work. Being a regular shepherd of MoS doesn't empower me to carve my own pet peeves into it. :-) And redirects exist for a reason.
— SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 19:39, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

I appreciate you taking the time to write that long, well-reasoned explanation. I'm not interested in opening an RM case - I don't feel anywhere near strongly enough about the style here to make an issue of it. It's less jarring the more that I look at it, anyway. :) --Fru1tbat (talk) 20:14, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

There'll be an RM eventually, because Input/output still is at that title. I thought it had already moved long ago, along with Input–output model, etc. More people watchlist that, and since you had a concern about it, that's enough to call for a fuller RM on that one. I've learned not to push RMs just because I think I know where they'll go; if there's doubt, it's better to take the RM week to discuss it. WP:NODEADLINE and all 'at. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 22:14, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

References

Lenka, Chinmoy. "Java IO: Input-output in Java with Examples". GeeksForGeeks.org. Retrieved 19 February 2020. Java brings various Streams with its I/O package that helps the user to perform all the input-output operations.
Morris, Alan S.; Langari, Reza (2012). "Input Output Interface - an overview". Measurement and Instrumentation. Retrieved 19 February 2020 – via ScienceDirect. Computer Input–Output Interface ... logic gates within the I/O interface.
Kiilerich, Alexander Holm; Mølmer, Klaus (18 September 2019). "Input-Output Theory with Quantum Pulses". Physical Review Letters. 123. American Physical Society: 123604. Retrieved 19 February 2020. ... the input and output pulses are treated as single oscillator modes that both couple to the local system in a cascaded manner.
Allen, Scott I.; Otten, Michael (28 April 1969). "The Telephone as a Computer Input-Output Terminal for Medical Information". Journal of the American Medical Association. 208 (4): 673–679. doi:10.1001/jama.1969.03160040081012. Retrieved 19 February 2020. The standard telephone is convenient, reliable, economical and effective as a computer input-output terminal. By means of dialed input and computer-driven voice output, medical application programs have been implemented in the areas of drug information retrieval therapy computation, and diagnosis assistance. Seems like it was way before its time, prefiguring 2010s doctor reliance on cell phones!
Simmons, Jake (February 19, 2020). "Hard fork on mainnet: Cardano implements OBFT". Crypto News Flash. Retrieved 19 February 2020. Cardano's OBFT hard fork, which was announced a few weeks ago for February 20, will take place as planned on February 20, as Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK) announced in a video via Twitter. Why would a super-nerdy cryptocurrency company go for "Input Output" if it were really true that the "/" spelling were considered de rigeur in tech circles? Wouldn't that kill their credibility?
MTC News Desk (18 February 2020). "Interview with Founder and CEO, Hawke Media – Erik Huberman". Martechube. Retrieved 19 February 2020. Be very careful because in technology everything is very input-output, and there's a lot of logic associated...
Thomas, Kevin (February 19, 2020). "New Trends of Artificial Neural Network Software Market Increasing Demand". Garner Insights. Retrieved 19 February 2020 – via Mathematics Market Methods. Artificial neural networks can also be thought of as learning algorithms that model the input-output relationship.
Zelaya, David; Keeley, Nicholas (13 February 2020). "The Input-Output Problem: Managing the Military's Big Data in the Age of AI (Special Series - AI and National Security)". War on the Rocks. Retrieved 19 February 2020.

Wiktionary

@Dmehus: Moving this from Misplaced Pages:Redirects for discussion/Log/2020 February 18#Homelander, since it's a bit off-topic for the venue. More precisely, I meant that we cannot trust what Wiktionary says as a basis for making decisions about what things mean to users in the aggregate, because there's a low level of integrity to the data. (It's not about whether WP:UGC policy formally applies to talk page discussions, but rather that the reasoning for the policy applies everywhere.) Wikt. is missing a tremendous amount of stuff, and much of what it does have is just someone's opinion. Wikt. does not have a real equivalent of NOR, as I learned the hard way. Someone who eventually got banned on Misplaced Pages was doing the "slow-editwar" and "civil-PoV-push" thing for years here, in a highly nationalistic reality-bending campaign about the meaning and origins of something (both in mainspace and in WP:P&G material). When stymied here, they tried to push that viewpoint into Wiktionary, largely successfully on that site. My efforts to undo this were difficult and only partial, because the kind of sourcing that Wikt. wants isn't like what WP wants. Unless a whole lot has changed since I last wallowed in policy over there, they are not generally interested in citations to things like other dictionaries, articles on usage in linguistics journals, major style and usage guides on the matter at hand, etc. They just want quotations of illustrative usage in the wild (preferably in high-reputation material), which of course can be cherry-picked like mad, quoted selectively and out-of-context, and interpretation-spun to show pretty much any meaning you want to. It's perfectly fine for a Wikt. entry to have conflicting information in it, as long as there's some faint hint of evidence of usage in that sense; it just becomes definition sense number whatever under part of speech whatever under language whatever. So, what Wikt. says really isn't evidentiary of anything, in any way that WP should ever care about, including internally. It's basically Urban Dictionary without (mostly) the toilet humor by seventh-graders, and with (mostly) better grammar and spelling, and a broader focus than teen slang and office jargon and gamer lingo.

While the "case" made didn't go well for reasons that basically boil down to stubbornness and fallacious reasoning (namely, failure to acknowledge the difference between "usually means A but in special contexts can sometimes mean B" versus "means B so must be treated as a separate category no matter what"), the sourcing method I used here is a better approach on matters like this: Use all the free, online major dictionary databases from long-term reputable publishers (and distinguish between actual publisher, like Random House or Collins, and via, like YourDictionary.Com or Dictionary.com, but be clear about both (WP:SAYWHEREYOUGOTIT is good practice even in internal discussions, not just in inserting a citation into a live article). I use this same approach to such matters and it generally works well, even if in this one case I'm not getting through. Style/usage guide citations can also help, if the term/phrase has an entry in things like Fowler's or Garner's, though modern editions are not available for free online. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 05:24, 20 February 2020 (UTC)

SMcCandlish, Yeah, I generally agree with all of that, though had no idea some editors decided to take their POV pushing to Wiktionary. Wiktionary still has a fair bit of toilet humour, though, but I guess that's what you meant by the qualified mostly. I guess, it's toilet humour that's got fairly widespread usage as opposed to a group of high schoolers who coalesce together at UrbanDictionary.com. That said, I could see UrbanDictionary.com being a source of information for creating Wiktionary entries. ;-)

As to your other point on sourcing, if you're saying what I think you're saying, I completely agree. For example, TheFreeDictionary.com, I think it's called, is published by some company called Farlex, which, at first glance, seems kind of, erm, non-reputable. However, they note the sources of all their entries are from generally reliable sources like Collins. It's sort of like the problem I see at the reliable source noticeboards and elsewhere where editors often take WP:RSP as if it's some exhaustive list of the only acceptable sources for verifiability and notability. It's not, as it's practically speaking, impossible to list every possible source. It would be nice if editors looked beyond the domain name of the source and thought about who is actually doing the publishing and also the context in which it's used. Doug Mehus T·C 22:46, 20 February 2020 (UTC)

Yeah, I never cite Farlex's own definitions (which I think they put at page top) in discussions like those, much less in articles; we have no idea where they're getting that information from. while the company isn't disreputable, they don't have any reputability as a publisher/originator of linguistic material. IIRC, they're actually a software company that makes things like dictionary apps. But the site is valuable as an aggregator of freely accessible major dictionaries. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 01:27, 21 February 2020 (UTC)

PS: RSP is primarily a list of the sources that aren't reputable. There's a strong overlap with the URL block filter, at least for online publications that show up in the negative at RSP. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 02:49, 21 February 2020 (UTC)

Wiktionary redirects

Done

@SMcCandlish:

As expected, I see you're a New Page Patrol reviewer, and was wondering if you can mark my Wiktionary soft redirects as reviewed now that the discussions have closed as "keep." Deryck Chan was the closer of the discussion, and I had to make a minor change to each after it was closed (to remove the #REDIRECT wikt:word) coding that had to be added in order to properly list at RfD (it seems to be a bug in XFDCloser). Anyway, the soft redirects are as follows:

Direct link to Page Curation Tool: Special:NewPagesFeed

Thanks,
Doug Mehus T·C 22:55, 20 February 2020 (UTC)

Thank you. Doug Mehus T·C 02:41, 21 February 2020 (UTC)

BLP question

@SMcCandlish:

Okay, so something's been bugging me...I noted that Roger Stone has his criminal convictions noted in his infobox, which, thankfully, hasn't been converted to {{Infobox criminal}} (I honestly don't know why we have two infoboxes; can the parameters not be combined into a single {{Infobox person}} template and used appropriately? Anyway...that's another matter). However, Martha Stewart's convictions on related white-collar criminal charges, which haven't been pardoned, as far as I'm able to tell, aren't noted in her infobox. So, my question is, are we giving undue weight in the former? And, if not, should we not be treating all biographies in the same fashion—that is, equally?

What is the "wiki case law" on this?

Cheers,
Doug Mehus T·C 00:31, 21 February 2020 (UTC)

I think it's an open question (or set of questions), and I have noticed this issue as well. I think we possibly should merge the template into {{infobox person}}, unless we have a strong reason to keep it separate, in which case strictly limit it so subjects who are primarily notable as criminals, like Al Capone. But see below; it might make more sense to remove parameters from {{infobox person}}. The bigger UNDUE question matters more, probably. I would bring that matter up as just a discussion at first at WT:BLP or maybe at WT:MOSBIO (since it's not only about living subjects, though the concerns are more important in such cases). Maybe notify WT:MOSINFOBOX,Template talk:Infobox person, WT:BIOGRAPHY, WT:NPOV, WP:NPOVN of the discussion. See what comes out of it. There may arise cause to eventually do an RfC on the matter (probably at WT:MOSBIO, and with notification also at such other places and at WP:VPPOL) about inserting a rule about it, when something like a consensus (or at least a clear question to !vote on) emerges. There are a lot of possible directions and outcomes here, so it's worth general discussion first. One might be not merging the templates and instead actually removing crime-related parameters from {{infobox person}}, as unhelpful (just as we removed |ethnicity= from it, and removed |religion=|denomination= from it and from all other such i-boxes except a few like {{infobox religious leader}} where they're actually important). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 01:13, 21 February 2020 (UTC)

Article improvements

February

Alte Liebe I Will Mention the Loving-kindnesses

Valentine month, thank you! --Gerda Arendt (talk) 16:42, 21 February 2020 (UTC)

Today's Alte Liebe became especially meaningful after yesterday's funeral. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 12:47, 28 February 2020 (UTC)

If I'm following correctly, it sounds like a personal-life loss, for which I offer condolences. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 03:05, 3 March 2020 (UTC)

Disambiguation link notification for February 22

Resolved – With thanks to DPL bot for the ~~botslapping of~~ reminder to SMcCandlish, the dablink has been fixed to the likely intended target. Doug Mehus T·C 15:01, 22 February 2020 (UTC)

An automated process has detected that when you recently edited Cão da Serra de Aires, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page Monforte (check to confirm | fix with Dab solver).

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FAC you may be interested in

Done

Hi Stanton. There's an FAC at Misplaced Pages:Featured article candidates/2019 Champion of Champions/archive1‎ that needs additional comments, if you get some time. Best Wishes, Lee Vilenski 15:25, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

Will do, but I'm out the gap in 2 minutes, and a quick scan shows a firehose of comments already. My "pre-review" comment would be to ensure that {{cuegloss}} is used at first occurrence of any jargon term; this is a high-profile enough event that it's apt to draw in some non-snooker-expert readers. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 18:28, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

Not a problem. My experience at FAC has been that 3 supports is not enough. I'll check through for cuegloss, but I'm usually pretty on it with that one. Thanks for taking a look. Best Wishes, Lee Vilenski 18:32, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

I think I got to it too late for much beyond nit-picky copyediting. It's quite good, especially compared to so many articles on similar events across sports generally, which tend to either be dry recitations of stats (leaning toward WP:NOT#INDISCRIMINATE problems, and at least failing to be interesting), or the other extreme, a WP:NOT#NEWS problem of overblown news journalism blather masquerading as encyclopedia material. You walked a good balance. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 19:18, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for your replies! I wasn't expecting a 30 point note, but I'll try and look through it all. A few things look like grammar issues that go over my head, and some are holdovers from WP:SNOOKER. It was a great event, with a very interesting final so it's good to see it get some eyes. Best Wishes, Lee Vilenski 20:03, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

I don't consider any of the grammar/style twiddles particularly important. It's just what came to mind. I pretended I was editing it, and just jotted down the tweaks I would make and why. The piece is so good I didn't find anything to do with/to it beyond such little tweaks. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 21:16, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

Your opinion on a matter

What would you make of this? The edit in question removed the tags that were present in the original "version C" diff, and no one apparently ever considered the content to be a significant portion of version C until after the RFC closed (it was actually part of version A, and the linked version C diff just didn't remove the content as it was already tagged).

I actually wouldn't mind hashing it out on the talk page now that I have an RFC close watching my back, but this is clearly not a content dispute so much as a troll editing in bad faith, and by sheer coincidence the admin who refused to block him back in December has since been desysopped for unrelated-but-similar behaviour...

Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 02:30, 3 March 2020 (UTC)

Not a faith-related assumption I would leap to, but the edit does seem problematic. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 02:58, 3 March 2020 (UTC)

Scottish Clan

Thanks for sorting out - I was just concerned that all those reference page numbers might be lost - hence my "attention getting" revert.

On the matter of identifying different editions versus reprints, I note what you say. However, for the casual reader this nuance of Misplaced Pages usage may not be obvious. There is a particular example of the importance of identifying the edition in Scottish history: The Making of the Crofting Community is a highly influential work by James Hunter. There are critical differences between the two editions (and there are reprints of this book as well) - university reading lists are very precise over which one they want their students to read. I tend to be someone who just goes along with Misplaced Pages practices. I am more interested in Misplaced Pages article content than exactly how it is presented. However, this is me just raising a point about maximising the value that the reader would get out of a Misplaced Pages article. If you are someone who fights all those battles about style guides, etc., you might want to bear this point in mind.ThoughtIdRetired (talk) 09:40, 15 March 2020 (UTC)

@ThoughtIdRetired: It's good that I have revert notices turned on and was awake. :-) I am sorry about that error; that was a total bone-head move (I'll have to see what regular expression I wrecked, so I don't do that again. I was pretty sure I was looking for "p." followed by any digit, and inserting a space while preserving the digit; but I seem to have overwritten the digit instead, somehow. Argh.) On the book versions thing: I used to have most of these books (before I got tired of lugging 3000+ books around when I moved! Now I fit in a small apartment again for the first time since about 1989), so I know what you mean. It would probably be entirely reasonable to remove the |orig-year=yyyy entirely, if you fear someone might seek out the old edition. I thought you were considering it important to keep the original year of publication, but it sounds like it's more important to not highlight that. (Honestly, I don't use |orig-year= most of the time, except to indicate that a book is a modern reprint of something very old, like a Victorian work, as a warning to the reader that the material is potentially obsolete). In almost 15 years here, though, I don't think I've ever seen anyone use the |edition= parameter to try to indicate the publication year, except in the odd case of a serial release that is literally subtitled something like "2020 Edition", as with things like AP Stylebook and other annual releases. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 09:51, 15 March 2020 (UTC)

Update: I pulled out those |orig-year= instances, so we're clearly and only referring to specific editions by year. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 17:07, 15 March 2020 (UTC)

An editor I was working with literally yesterday was using |volume= to indicate the date of a magazine e.g. |volume=May–June 1995. You just never know... --Izno (talk) 13:01, 15 March 2020 (UTC)

Hmm. That's weird. Even if it said something like "Our May–June 1995 Issue" on the cover, that might suggest |issue=, not |volume=. What really gets me is people who can't (or won't) understand the difference between |work= and |publisher=. It's like being unable to tell the difference between The Magical Mystery Tour and Apple Records, or to maintain the distinction between Game of Thrones and HBO. Even in a case like The New York Times and The New York Times Company, how hard is it to comprehend that a newspaper full of words you can read on paper or on the Web is not the same as a corporation full of employees and office furniture? (And not list both when the names are this redundant; same goes for |location=New York City, New York|work=The New York Times.) There seems to be some kind of general semantics fault happening, like confusing the map for the territory, the menu for the meal.

That said, a few people intentionally abuse the |publisher= parameter for what belongs in |work= to try to forcibly un-italicize names of online publications. They really need to just give it a rest. We keep RfCing and proposal-izing the question (most recently at WT:CS1, as I recall), and the answer is always the same: there's no magical difference between how to cite a publication on dead trees versus in a digital format, and when we're citing something we're citing it as a publication, by definition, whether or not the site or other digital object would normally be addressed as a publication (versus a service, application, etc.) in another context. Programmatically polluting the citation metadata just to get a personally preferred typographic look is disruptive, since it wastes other editors' time cleaning up after it and thwarts proper WP:REUSE of WP's material. We've gone to a lot of effort to make our citations work with various bibliography software packages and stuff, and it's not okay for someone to intentionally wreck this for their personal font-appearance preferences. They need to make use of WP:USERCSS instead. That's enough of a morning mini-rant. I guess I had me some good coffee!
— SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 17:07, 15 March 2020 (UTC)

Global variation of IQ scores

Hello SMcCandlish, would you be willing to make a revised proposal about the contents of this section of the race and intelligence article, that fixes whatever NPOV problems you think exist in my own proposal? At this stage it's clear that my own proposal isn't going to gain consensus, and I'm also feeling mystified about how it is possible to satisfy all the objections to it (aside from by excluding the section from the article entirely, but consensus in past discussions seemed to oppose that option).

If you want to be bold and try adding a revised version of the section back to the article, I would be fine with that also. I'll probably support whatever you write in that section. As I previously said to Sirfurboy, I think that even a poorly-written or poorly-sourced section about international IQ comparisons would be an improvement over the article not covering this topic at all. 2600:1004:B14E:63FD:A8E7:E862:289A:18DD (talk) 02:58, 16 March 2020 (UTC)

I'm inclined to leave it alone for a while. Too much attention has been drawn there, with too much heat, and in too short a space. As you suggest yourself, it has attracted filibusterers with conflicting viewpoints, so I don't think a consensus will emerge on it any time soon. Better to let the ranters lose interest and go be busybodies somewhere else, then reapproach the matter later after things have calmed down. I'm strongly reminded of the e-cigs article debates, which entrenched and got a bunch of people on both sides of it topic-banned or blocked. Don't need that kind of drama. I've also just devoted literally all day to cleanup of the main article on the coronavirus outbreak, and so I'm a bit worn out for WP stuff right now. I intended to give it about an hour but it took much longer. I won't forget about the R&I article, but it really does need to be approached with a great deal of sensitivity, and that's best done in an absence of grandstanding and finger-pointing. :-) — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 04:09, 16 March 2020 (UTC)

How long do you think it's necessary to wait? This group of editors has been dominating the article for two or three months at this point, so I don't foresee the situation changing soon.

As I previously pointed out at AE, there have also been repeated attempts at blanking other sections of the article, although Dlthewave has stopped doing that for the time being while the discussion about his latest removal is still underway. If we let this issue drop for the time being, I think the most likely result will be that the section blanking of other parts of the article resumes, and then we'll have a much more difficult situation than the current one. 2600:1004:B14E:63FD:A8E7:E862:289A:18DD (talk) 05:13, 16 March 2020 (UTC)

Well, it's unnecessary for you to wait, if you want to continue apace. It's necessary for me to wait, because I've become near-fatally allergic to WP:DRAMA. I've become a firm believer in the WP:NODEADLINE principle. Some of our articles are crap for years, and only improve after certain editors go away. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 05:50, 16 March 2020 (UTC)

I'm finding the current situation kind of exhausting, but the reason I haven't walked away from this article is that I'm predicting if I do, the section blanking will continue until the article is reduced to a 1KB stub. Perhaps that won't actually happen, though.

In any case, I'd like the next proposed revision to the "global variation" section to be made by someone other than me, so that's the other reason I was asking how long to wait. How about I ask you sometime next month if you could propose another revision? Waiting a month would also give you some time to look into whether there are any reliable sources that offer a general criticism of international IQ comparisons, rather than just sources that specifically critique Lynn and Vanhanen's work. 2600:1004:B146:AAA9:A40B:7BC6:E1EC:FA1A (talk) 11:26, 16 March 2020 (UTC)

That sounds fine, though I'm unlikely to have the the necessary access to do such research in the interim (I have a lot of unrelated project "irons in the fire", and already spend more time at this site than I should). Next month I might have time for some of this and more inclination. But I posted to the article talk page suggesting someone with full-text journal-search access should get on this. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 17:56, 16 March 2020 (UTC)

St. Patrick's Day


Pärt: The Deer's Cry

decoration + music with thanks from QAI! --Gerda Arendt (talk) 17:00, 17 March 2020 (UTC)

Hyphen after a multi-word phrase

Does the hyphen usage in "Severe acute respiratory syndrome-related coronavirus" look correct to you? It doesn't seem correct to me – I would use "SARS-related coronavirus". I don't see an answer to this question in MOS:HYPHEN. —BarrelProof (talk) 17:18, 17 March 2020 (UTC)

@BarrelProof: Different style guides treat this differently, and I don't think we've ever gotten consensus on it. One common-sense position would be to do exactly as you suggest, as simply better writing (concise, and no room for confusion). Another common-sense position is that separating out "related" with a hyphen, at bare minimum, makes is clear that a compound adjective is in play, and that readers can probably work the longer phrase out on their own. Some might suggest that the hyphen alone implies that the material in front of that word that could be interpreted as forming a complete thought necessarily is one (i.e., that "severe acute respiratory syndrome" is a unit). Thus, they would argue, forcibly hyphenating the entire thing is probably unnecessary. Some would rebut, on the basis that a non-expert reader might think that the unit is "acute respiratory syndrome", being randomly modified by "severe" (i.e. that one could replace that word at editorial whim with, e.g., "major" or "life-threatening"); or that the unit is "respiratory syndrome" modified by "severe" and "acute"; or even that the unit is just "syndrome" and the three words before it are misc. adjectives. That is, someone might suppose there there's a "syndrome-related corona virus", and this one happens to be a respiratory virus, and an severely acute one. These concerns are not entirely idle (especially given that many of our readers are kids, half-educated, or non-native English speakers, something that the privileged, degree-holding, urban, WASP techies who make up the majority of our stable editorial base conveniently forget). I would thus would normally actually either hyphenate the entire phrase, or (as you would do, and much more practically) just rewrite it, especially since linking "severe acute respiratory syndrome" itself is not an option at that spot. Various style guides that say to avoid excessively long multi-hyphen compound modifiers are not wrong to do so; but that doesn't actually equate to "just delete the hyphens", not in WP's kind of writing. Various medical and other specialized styles would not hyphenate any of this at all (even "related"), because they are hostile to hyphenation of jargon terms that doctors (etc.) already understand. But that rationale doesn't apply here. Rewriting to avoid is the better solution.

In this particular case, I think our readers are actually familiar with the exact phrase "severe acute respiratory syndrome" simply accidentally, due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and non-stop news about it. So, in this exact instance I don't think any of this matters, but I would also go with SARS-related coronavirus simply for concision.

PS: There's actually an additional argument complication: most if not all style guides say not to hyphenate inside a proper name or proper-noun phrase, and they tend to commingle those concepts (fairly, since from a English linguistics perspective they overlap so much as to be indistinguishable). The rule boils down to writing "South Korea-based" not "South-Korea-based", and they're thinking of capitalized multi-word names. But there's a discipline distinction between proper name (linguistics) AKA proper noun, versus proper name (philosophy). While philosophy is divided on the matter, and still actively publishing debates on it in phil. journals, the general gist is that a proper name does not have to be capitalized to be one, in their sense, and under some common phil. definitions "severe acute respiratory syndrome" does qualify as one, ergo some would never want to hyphenate it. This is actually a fallacy of equivocation, in which they are improperly substituting a phil. sense of "proper name" for a linguistics one, in a specifically ling. not phil. context; but it is nevertheless a common error and one that is difficult to root out of a mind in which it has taken hold. It's one of the main drivers of interminable capitalization-related rehash on Misplaced Pages, because the phil. sense of "proper name" sometimes filters down to broader public understanding of how to write (generally in an inarticulable way, a subjective sense of "rightness" that was probably absorbed somewhere between 5th grade and sophomore year at university/college and which may invoke near-buried traumatic memories of a particular instructor. >;-).
— SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 03:18, 18 March 2020 (UTC)

Thank you for the thoughtful and informative reply. As your response seems to indicate that the current title is not clearly incorrect, I won't consider this a clear call for action. Incidentally, would you consider "Severe acute respiratory syndrome" to be a proper noun? —BarrelProof (talk) 19:25, 18 March 2020 (UTC)

@BarrelProof: In the Misplaced Pages/MoS sense (that is, the linguistic and stylistic "Should this be capitalized?" sense), absolutely not. It does qualify as as a "proper name" under some definitions offered by philosophy, but that actually has no implications for such style questions, since it is not a proper-noun phrase. That is the confusion that affects so many editors (and so many specialized sources that rampantly over-capitalize along "use upper case for Important Things in This Field" lines). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 19:22, 19 March 2020 (UTC)

Thank you again. I still don't understand the syndrome proper noun issue, but I trust your judgment and will try to learn the reasoning. —BarrelProof (talk) 18:24, 20 March 2020 (UTC)

The super-simplified version is that there's a philosophy argument that any appellation that is not entirely simply descriptive is a proper name, and another (not necessarily related) argument that any appellation that is used without full understanding of its literal meaning is also a proper name. And other such propositions; entire volumes have been published about this stuff (including recently, and it's getting very cross-disciplinary, with half-baked attempts to merge philosophy, linguistics, cognitive-science, and other approaches to the questions: , , , , etc.). In the end, capitalization is largely a matter of custom, and in the linguistics of English there's a class we usually apply it to: proper nouns (which aren't the same as proper names, quite, since the latter has divergent definitions), most modifiers derive from proper nouns , plus some other things like most acronyms/initialisms even when they stand for things that are not proper nouns. It's best to just stick with Proper noun (or off-site, writing-oriented material on that subject) unless you want a bad headache. The article still has issues; a linguist would significantly rewrite it, e.g. to address noun phrases not the subset nouns per se.

But even the article's general gist can be a bit of a conceptual hassle. E.g. if " proper noun is a noun that identifies a single entity and is used to refer to that entity ... as distinguished from a common noun, which is a noun that refers to a class of entities", then how is, say, Americans a proper noun? The answer is that "entity" has a loose definition for this purpose and includes a class treated as an entity itself, while "cars" and "trees" are classes that are not so treated. You can probably see how this immediately starts to run into cognitive dissonance with the philosophy angles: isn't "severe acute respiratory syndrome" an entity in a sense, and that term used to identify and refer exclusively to it? Isn't it also evocatively/subjectively labeling, with terms like "severe", thus not limited to objectively describing? Isn't it also used by the average person without full understanding of the meaning of its constituent terms? And so on. Reach for the aspirin. And why isn't that Aspirin?

It really comes down to this as a practical matter: there's just a Gestalt in English about what qualifies as a proper noun and qualifies for capitalization. It does warp a bit on contact with specialist audiences/writers, who are apt to apply capitalization as a form of signification of contextually important concepts/terms (cf. the 8-year-long and ultimately failed battle to force capitalization of common names of species on Misplaced Pages, as in "Bald Eagle", "Mountain Lion"), a habit that is quite old more generally in the history of English (skim something like the US Declaration of Independence for example), but which has been progressively eroding since the late 19th century (formerly "Century"). Style guides that focus on academic writing, however, are remarkably consistent in what to capitalize and what not to (which is probably by MOS:CAPS can even exist). In the end, it is probably better to read things other than our own articles and guidelines on this subject, such as Chicago Manual of Style, Fowler's Modern English, etc. Some of the comprehensive (non-ESL) grammars of English, e.g. from Oxford U. Pr., probably also get into this in clearer terms than our rather palimpsestuous mess of an article at Proper noun and less messy but still flawed MoS pages, which have been cobbled together by successive waves of editors who often have no real background in the material but who aim to push as WP:TRUTH something they were taught by a schoolmarm in 1987 or whenever.
— SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 19:21, 20 March 2020 (UTC)

FYI, I submitted an RM at Talk:Severe acute respiratory syndrome-related coronavirus. —BarrelProof (talk) 20:06, 24 April 2020 (UTC)

That RM failed. Meanwhile, I was just informed about MOS:SUFFIXDASH, which seems to favor "Severe acute respiratory syndrome–related coronavirus" over "Severe acute respiratory syndrome-related coronavirus". Is that correct? —BarrelProof (talk) 17:17, 2 June 2020 (UTC)

@BarrelProof: I'm not even sure what it should be at this point; there's so much more coverage now that it probably needs to be reassessed. As for the hyphen vs. en-dash thing, that's been a moving target. We used to just use a hyphen, but I think there was move to use an en dash if either side of the punctuation was "complex" (multi-word, had its own hyphens, etc.). I have not looked into what the current version says since I became active again (nor why it says what it does, or for how long). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 18:05, 3 June 2020 (UTC)

FYI, I just started an RM about that at Talk:Severe acute respiratory syndrome-related coronavirus. —BarrelProof (talk) 01:39, 5 June 2020 (UTC)

Incidentally, for a person who cares about punctuation marks, I'm surprised you seem to use a font on your User talk page that makes a hyphen and an en-dash indistinguishable. —BarrelProof (talk) 01:42, 5 June 2020 (UTC)

@BarrelProof: I'll take a look at the RM, though I'm not sure how much to invest in this particular question. I'm not immune to the argument that a term-of-art phrase may not need hyphens when it is, by most readers, interpreted as a single unit. That sort of argument is not good when it's only specialists who recognize it as a unit, but in this case no one who did not just wake from a long coma hasn't already encountered this phrase many times over the last few months. On the font: I hadn't thought about it. Demo: - – − — (hyphen, en dash, minus, em dash). Hmm. I can can see a difference in all these characters, though only barely between en dash and mathematical minus (which isn't a real problem, since the latter serves term-juxtaposition and grammatical functions and the other is used with numbers and variables, so they can't be contextually confused). I am using a font stack, so you may not be getting my first-choice font, which is Trebuchet MS; you might instead be getting Tahoma, Verdana, or whatever your system's default sans-serif font is. If you do have Trebuchet MS, it might be a different version. I think some systems are also capable of swapping something in on-the-fly if there's a close match (e.g. a different variant of Trebuchet, if Microsoft's one is not installed). I'm looking at this in macOS 10.13.6; not sure what it'll look like in Windows or Linux even with "nominally the same" fonts installed. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 08:25, 5 June 2020 (UTC)

You're right. I see a difference too when they are placed side-by-side like that, but the difference is harder to discern than the difference when using the default that appears on Wikipages without any custom selection. And when surrounded by letters, as in the conversation above, the difference is even harder to see. —BarrelProof (talk) 19:02, 5 June 2020 (UTC)

Captions necessary for every table?

Hey SMcCandlish. I was recently taking a look at MOS:ACCESS, and more specifically MOS:DTT. As an extensive contributor to (at least) the latter, do you feel that every table on Misplaced Pages necessitates a caption? For example, I was editing Seasons (Waiting on You) earlier, and a user added captions to each table used on the article, including to denote a table under a heading marked "Accolades" that those are indeed the accolades for the song, a table under the heading "Charts" that the table denotes chart performance for the song, and that a table under the heading "Release history" that it is indeed showing a release history for the song. This is not explicitly about this user's conduct, but rather if you think this practice is always necessary, and if there are any instances where the captions are redundant. To me, it doesn't really seem like the captions are adding anything in these instances that screen readers are not already telling visually impaired readers or that they cannot already glean from the heading and the subsequent information. Thanks. Ss112 08:31, 22 March 2020 (UTC)

@Ss112: I would tend to agree; if something else in the immediate vicinity is serving the same function as the caption, the caption is superfluous and probably annoying. But, I'm not blind, and am not regularly using a screen reader (I've used a couple for testing purposes, but it's been a long time, and that was on a laptop I don't even own any longer, so I would need to start with fresh installs, etc.). It's probably better to bring this up at WT:MOSACCESS. If there's not some good reason that comes up to keep adding seemingly redundant captions, I might be in support of a clarification about this, or just tweaking the wording so no one gets the impression that it is impermissible to have a table without a caption when the table's purpose and content are already clear. Having written it, I'm mindful of WP:AJR; we need not add a bunch of blather about this just to deal with one person, especially if just tweaking the sentence a little is good enough. Terms like "usually" and "when helpful" often go a long way, though I would need to go over the line item in question to see what would work well there. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 11:03, 24 March 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for that. Also, I've sent you an email about a related matter. While I ordinarily would bring this up at somewhere like WT:MOSACCESS, I don't feel like having a back-and-forth argument over it or getting into a mud-slinging match with other users, which I know given whom has commented there that it would devolve into. Even though it's not something you came up with, would you maybe propose a change/clarification to the wording on the talk page, giving my example of the above (that we don't need redundant captions that repeat what screen readers probably already know)? If you feel it's best I do it as it's my idea, it's fine. Ss112 12:23, 24 March 2020 (UTC)

Most recently there was a thread at WP:WP ACCESS that strayed into this discussion which you might find enlightening. --Izno (talk) 14:12, 24 March 2020 (UTC)

@Ss112 and Izno: Could also bring it up as WT:MOS for a broader set of eyes and minds; it is much more watchlisted than the talk pages of either MOS:ACCESS or WP:WPACCESS. I agree with the intent/meaning of the block of material laying out draft guideline wording at the WT:WPACCESS thread, though as I'm trying to say above, it's not a good idea ("WP:MOSBLOAT", as EEng says) to inject that much verbiage into an MoS page itself, just to get at some technicality like this. It needs to be way shorter, or shoved into a footnote. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 20:18, 24 March 2020 (UTC)

"Forelithe" listed at Redirects for discussion

Moot – Speedily kept before I even got there.

A discussion is taking place as to whether the redirect Forelithe should be deleted, kept, or retargeted. It will be discussed at Misplaced Pages:Redirects for discussion/Log/2020 March 23#Forelithe until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines. Hog Farm (talk) 02:47, 23 March 2020 (UTC)

Misrepresenting sources

Done

Given your thoughts on Misplaced Pages:Frequently misinterpreted sourcing policy, you might be interested in my comment about misrepresentation of sources. --Macrakis (talk) 20:12, 3 April 2020 (UTC)

"World Café" listed at Redirects for discussion

Done

An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect World Café. Since you had some involvement with the World Café redirect, you might want to participate in the redirect discussion if you wish to do so. wbm1058 (talk) 15:04, 9 April 2020 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:Accu-Stats

Done

Template:Accu-Stats has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 08:39, 10 April 2020 (UTC)

Happy Easter

or: the resurrection of loving-kindness --Gerda Arendt (talk) 12:45, 12 April 2020 (UTC)

You too. Mine was mostly spent indoors, but that's okay. I'm a indoorsy person anyway. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 11:15, 14 April 2020 (UTC)

... today Credo, or this is the day from Psalm 118. Master of article titles, what do you think about Fanny Hensel vs. Fanny Mendelssohn? --Gerda Arendt (talk) 11:21, 28 April 2020 (UTC)

Editing news 2020 #1 – Discussion tools

In progress – I've done a couple of rounds of this, but may give it another go. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 14:49, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

Read this in another language • Subscription list

Screenshot showing what the Reply tool looks like — This early version of the Reply tool automatically signs and indents comments.

The Editing team has been working on the talk pages project. The goal of the talk pages project is to help contributors communicate on wiki more easily. This project is the result of the Talk pages consultation 2019.

Reply tool improved with edit tool buttons — In a future update, the team plans to test a tool for easily linking to another user's name, a rich-text editing option, and other tools.

The team is building a new tool for replying to comments now. This early version can sign and indent comments automatically. Please test the new Reply tool.

On 31 March 2020, the new reply tool was offered as a Beta Feature editors at four Wikipedias: Arabic, Dutch, French, and Hungarian. If your community also wants early access to the new tool, contact User:Whatamidoing (WMF).
The team is planning some upcoming changes. Please review the proposed design and share your thoughts on the talk page. The team will test features such as:
- an easy way to mention another editor ("pinging"),
- a rich-text visual editing option, and
- other features identified through user testing or recommended by editors.

To hear more about Editing Team updates, please add your name to the "Get involved" section of the project page. You can also watch these pages: the main project page, Updates, Replying, and User testing.

– PPelberg (WMF) (talk) & Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 15:45, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

FAC you may be interested in Suggestion

Hi Stanton, I hope you are well and you had a good Easter! There's a FAC currently open that you might be interested in, and I'd appreciate any comments you have. Best Wishes, Lee Vilenski 11:23, 14 April 2020 (UTC)

Will try to set aside from time for it. Things are a bit hectic right now (as my mostly-absence might indicate :-). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 11:44, 14 April 2020 (UTC)

I get it (My workload has trebled due to the situation). Thanks for thinking of me. Best Wishes, Lee Vilenski 11:51, 14 April 2020 (UTC)

You may tremble from the trebling, but tumble not from the trouble! — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 08:30, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

Note to self

Unresolved

Don't forget to deal with: Template talk:Cquote#Template-protected edit request on 19 April 2020. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 14:48, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

The RFC

Closing this, as one party has been topic-banned and shouldn't continue this discussion. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 18:20, 1 May 2020 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

While I appreciate your participation in the ongoing RFC, you haven't yet answered the question that user:Literaturegeek was, I think, intending to ask you there: whether NightHeron (or anyone else) ought to be reported at Arbitration Enforcement. (Or if you did answer it, I missed where you did.) Do you have an opinion about that?

In the discussion here you commented that improving some articles is only possible after certain editors have gone away, and that after another month I should ask you again about trying to rewrite/restore the section about international comparisons. It's been a little over a month since we discussed that, but the situation has not calmed down since then, and if anything it has escalated. While the current disputes are happening at a noticeboard instead of on the article talk page, I think it's clear that they will shift back to the talk page when the current RFC is concluded, and at this stage it's highly unlikely that any of the major parties are going to go away without some sort of administrative action.

If you think there are multiple editors behaving badly and that it's necessary to request an ArbCom case with multiple parties, I would be fine with that also. (And the parties can include me, if you think that my own behavior has been disruptive.) In this AE report several admins argued that a full case was needed, and one admin suggested a list of parties that such a case should include.

Aside from the outcome of the current RFC, I would appreciate any help you can give with resolving the longer-term issue. As an unregistered user, I'm not able make ArbCom or AE requests myself, so I have to rely on other editors taking the initiative to address issues like these. 2600:1004:B127:D823:71A5:A349:3F5C:2EA7 (talk) 19:00, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

My name was mentioned so will chip in here as my views have changed a little. I am opposed to sanctions on NightHeron right now. I have actually found, in the past 24 hours or less, that NightHeron is being more collaborative and reasonable, for example we reached agreement re. Lynn where my main point was accepted by NightHeron and I accepted one of their main points. It left me thinking that there is a chance this RfC could help lessen the drama and increased collaborative behaviour could result. I think if 2 or 3 months after the RfC closes the drama is still at a high level then there would be a good case for ArbCom. ArbCom might want to wait and see the impact that the RfC close has on the drama before deciding on a case or course of action. I intend to back away from this RfC now and don’t intend to edit this topic area as it is too toxic and don’t want to get drawn in any more than I have already. Although, I am open to being persuaded differently and I’m interested in SMcCandlish’s perspective.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 19:16, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

In reply to the entire thread: I did suggest in one of my posts there that this should go to ArbCom if there's sufficient evidence of malfeasance like meatpuppetry. I don't think that yet another RfC or community noticeboard action, right on the heels of another one, which came right after another one, and another before that, is going to resolve anything. (Though, yes, let's see if this RfC's eventual closure decision makes a difference.) We are clearly at an impasse here, where there are two camps: 1) do the encyclopedic thing, and present the topic neutrally, and with studiously, cautiously WP:DUE weight, with a lot of watchlisting, or 2) censor away the entire topic, out of misplaced political-correction impulses and argument to emotion rather than actual reason. There's only one way that can actually end. And ArbCom will know this. They will not make a content decision, but the content decision is essentially pre-made by policy, and all that is left for them to do is to remove from the subject area both a) racist far-right PoV pushers, and b) censorious ultra-leftist PoV pushers, as both of these entrenched "armies" are disruptive to the topic area and to the ability of neutrality-minded editors to manage it.

So, I don't think it's really a matter of "report to AE". That approach could be taken for some particular parties, I suppose, but it will not resolve the underlying problem, that we have some loosey-goosey DS to apply in the topic area, but insufficient guidance on the ArbCom and DS side about what is and is not going to be tolerated there and why. Ergo, any AE enforcement is at this point likely to come down to just whatever the personal socio-political opinion and feelings are of whatever admin happens to be reading and who decides to "do something". That's a rather iffy proposition. "Discretionary" admin actions only make sense on a system like this when the topic is one in which the range of that discretion has been sharply pre-defined, to circumvent PoV-laden supervoting. I think it would be better to have a new RfArb case, or at least an ARCA, to more clearly define the discretionary scope and what is sanctionable and why (with an eye to restraining the excesses of both political-wing extremes). The very fact that this controversy has raged for months, at the talk pages and in multiple noticeboards and RfCs and deletion procedures and yadda yadda, with no end in sight, and with nastiness markedly increasing (along with apparent meat puppetry, accusations of anon-IP socking by banned users, etc.), all while DS are already active in the topic, conclusively proves that the present DS regime for the topic area is failing to work at all. Only ArbCom can fix that. And this is just the latest few rounds in a dispute that's been going on since before I even got here in 2005.

I would consider myself a party in such a case, both for involvement in the recent debates, and much longer-term "encyclopedia defense" activity at this and related articles like Race (human categorization), plus my authorship of WP:Race and ethnicity, long-term shepherding of MOS:IDENTITY and MOS:WTW, and my spearheading the removal of |ethnicity= and |religion= from most biographical infoboxes, and combating racist and racialist commentary at places like Talk:Albinism in humans; among other interrelated matters. I'm not involved in this stuff daily, but I'm deeply involved in it, going back over a decade now.

I am personally just worn out when it comes to WP:DRAMA, so I will not be opening an RfArb or ARCA case myself, nor starting an AE complaint, unless something serious happens that leaves me little choice. I'll defer to Literaturegeek's boots-on-the-ground judgement about the current state of affairs with NightHeron. (That editor may make a lot of fallacious arguments and engage in too much OR nonsense, but is actually spot-on correct about a particular fraudulent researcher's lack of credibility despite his fame, and despite my belief that said researcher's viewpoint is actually correct and need not have relied on falsification at all. But he did it, and nothing in the world can ever undo that, so we should not be quoting him as an RS, and quoting him at all only with attribution and with due rebuttal from also-attributed critics.)

Finally, User:2600..., I don't think anyone is ever going to take you very seriously in this debate until you create a named account. Just make up anything, like XYZ09876ABC or MyOcelotLikesPisachios. Most editors are going to take you for either a sock of an active editor, a sock of a banned editor, or a troll if you persist in being an IP-only participant; lack of an account hampers your technical ability to edit in many ways; and in a topic like this, going by your IP address is more hazardous to privacy that not doing so (unless you are studious about VPN usage, and your VPN's outbound access point is/are nowhere near where you actually live).
— SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 11:23, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for your reply, your second from the bottom paragraph confused me.... which researcher are you referring to: Gould or Lynn?--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 11:36, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

Gould. Does the same criticism also apply to Lynn? I haven't looked into that one in detail yet. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 12:08, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

Well, I haven’t seen any evidence Lynn has ever engaged in pseudoscience or fraud but he clearly comes from the “mostly genetic” hereditarian persuasion which seems to influence him to have controversial right of centre viewpoints on this topic area e.g., with regard to immigration of unskilled/low I.Q. immigrants. His views, when cited, would need to be balanced by appropriate weight from his peers who disagree with him, assuming the RfC is over turned because at the moment essentially only one POV is allowed. I am still confused. When you wrote in the 2nd from the bottom paragraph “That editor” did you mean myself or NightHeron? It was myself, not NightHeron, who felt Gould had falsified his research. Maybe you got confused following the discussion? It is okay, I can take the criticism haha, the heated RfC is over. :-) I ask because whilst fallacious is a matter of opinion and an editor could apply that term to me I did not think my arguments were OR, quite the opposite.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 12:35, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

Yeah, that sounds pretty fringey, if that's a good encapsulation of Lynn. In fairness, most of these ideas would not have seemed fringe even a couple of generations ago. We knew a lot less about genetics, about the difficulty of quantifying or even defining "intelligence", and about the fact that the brain is tremendously more complex than previously supposed. The obvious land-mine here is in permitting reportage of what old science attempted to show under old understandings as if it's still valid science under new understanding, and trying to OR one's way into a position based on that old data and poor interpretation of it. It doesn't mean that all mention of that work must be suppressed, it simply has to be put into context. That is, the less obvious land mine is that if, as encyclopedists, we fail to do that, then we just cede control of the whole topic to fringe-"science" and racism boards all over the world. "Misplaced Pages is suppressing the truth and hiding all this old research!" We just cannot do that. We have to tackle it head on with later and more interdisciplinary material.

There's also a countervailing and very different kind of fringe belief system involved here, namely that it simply isn't possible that research will ever show an average, aggregate difference of any kind between populations (by any measure/criterion) at various narrow cognitive tests. The odds of that socio-political dogma and wish actually being true are just zero. Anyone with any understanding of genetics and biology at all knows that it cannot possibly be true. The odds against is are astronomical. So, the third land mine is how to not suppress facts about such research, while we also short-circuit the ability to weave a false "superiority" narrative out of unrelated and unimportant statistical blips. As I suggested in the RfC, the causes of these disparity results are almost always social inequalities and testing biases; that's the key point. But to the extent any of them will every prove to be actual genetic traits, they will be both statistically insignificant (more so over time as genepools mix more and more every day), and counterbalanced by essentially opposite results on different cognitive-task tests. Being, say, 0.1% better at math on average doesn't mean the same population will also be a hair better at rote memorization, at logic puzzles, at correctly rotating a complex 3D shape in their mind, at reading or speaking very quickly, at correct recall of names and faces, etc., etc., etc.). But we can never get at this stuff and write the WP article that correctly reflects that scientific mainstream view (that differences can be "measured", mostly due to non-biological biases, but are essentially meaningless), if the censorship brigade will not stop miring all attempts by anyone to work on the article at all in their constant accusatory noise.

“That editor”, in the critical part, meant NightHeron; I appear to have commingled my memories of who was making which argument. So, good on you for calling out Gould (I think anon 2600... also did so). What I was criticizing here was various fallacies that I laid out and linked to in NH's material. (Did I also do that with one your posts? I do not always pay any attention to what name is in the sig of what I'm responding to, just the arguments I'm reading.) I spent most of my time at that RfC pointing out people on both sides of the debate engaging in the same fallacies back and forth with each other, in a silly junk-waving contest. I'm not meaning to single out NightHeron, or you, or anyone else in particular, but just decry the general pointless time waste and editorial goodwill-erosion getting in the way of the proper work being done. Wading into that, pretty much the most argumentatively WP:BLUDGEONed RfC in WP history, feels rather like walking down an alley with people in multiple storeys of windows on both sides of it pissing on you from above. If I were an uninvolved admin I would have already shut that RfC down.
— SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 13:16, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

Yeah SMcCandlish, I raised that concern during the RfC that if the RfC results in a biased article which impresses no one but far left equalitarianists insisting the article focus excessively on white privilege (which is a real thing but does not seem explain everything in this topic area) and only briefly mention genetic contributions but only in the context of labelling it pseudoscience it could likely push many of our readers onto other sources of information which could include, sadly, alt-right websites and message boards where they will get exposed to truly biased racist pseudoscience and hateful content and antisemetic conspiracy theories. I would have been okay if the RfC closed saying there should be less weight given to genetic contributions and may even have supported such an RfC depending on how it was worded but the fringe designation I fear will result in a POV nightmare that only a minority of readers will take seriously. No I don’t think you did that with any of my posts, I just got confused with that second from the bottom paragraph and you have explained what you mean so the confusion is sorted out now. :-)--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 16:18, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

It's something that will have to shake out over time. I've learned the hard way to be very, very patient when it comes to cleaning up some topics (like 5–10 years patient). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 16:31, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for your detailed comments, SMcCandlish. Several other editors have also told me that I should start using a named account, but with my current setup I'm unable to use cookies, so Misplaced Pages immediately logs me out any time I try to log in. I haven't yet found a way around this. I accept that until and unless I do, I'll be unable to edit certain pages.

@Literaturegeek: Combined with the various admins who expressed this view at AE, SMcCandlish is at least the fourth person who's argued that an ArbCom case is needed here. But someone would need to take the initiative in requesting such a case, and nobody seems to want to take on that task. I also can't do it myself, because even if I were to suddenly become able edit from a named account, I think it would be a bad idea for me to make such a request as a newly registered editor. Does the discussion here affect your view about whether it would be appropriate for you to request the proposed case yourself? 2600:1004:B10F:2086:59A4:D34C:4402:41E8 (talk) 14:20, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

What's the nature of the cookie problem? I may know a workaround. If you're constrained to some kiosk-like machine at an institution, and it does no local hard drive writes at all without admin access (isn't even cacheing what it's loading in the browser), if you have access to a USB port and enough OS access to get to a drive mounted via that port, you could possibly get around that with a "portable" copy of Chrome or the like, on a thumb drive, and configured to use a user profile (which includes cookie and cache storage) on the thumb drive. If there's even less access than that, but it is a Windows machine, including an auto-executing script on the thumb might work, if the machine has not already been configured to not allow removable disks to fire up things like autorun scripts. I would need more specifics to be able to advise further or look into the matter. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 14:32, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

The device that I use to edit is technically capable of accepting cookies, but for personal reasons I can't enable them. I can't go into more detail than that in public, sorry. In order to start using a named account, I would have to find a way to stay logged in while cookies are disabled. 2600:1004:B10F:2086:59A4:D34C:4402:41E8 (talk) 14:46, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

I'm not sure what that means, but will take your word for it. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 16:31, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

2600, I do not see what value an ArbCom case will have, they will not overrule community decisions about content RFCs, they will not overrule a community review of an RfC close that says Tony was not involved and a 3 admin panel was not necessary, etc. Correct me if I am wrong in what I just wrote please SMcCandlish. Finally 2600, the RfC will be used as stronger tool against editors in that topic area. Even if ArbCom were to topic ban NightHeron which is what you desire for example, (and you risk a topic ban IP editors like yourself) it still will not change the fact that content decisions will be made with that close by Tony by other editors who share NightHeron’s viewpoint. I assume your motives are like mine and you have a strong distaste for biased presentation of academic information and pseudoscience and you are not motivated by alt-right activism but unfortunately this RfC basically shuts down contributions from editors who just want the literature presented fairly in a pro-science anti-pseudoscience fashion per WP:WEIGHT and WP:NPOV. Your only hope is if in a couple of years more sources become available regarding the RfC question and there is ongoing drama with the article then the RfC question could be proposed again. Or else wait for DNA and genetic evidence to advance to such an extent that this whole environmental vs genetic debate is resolved beyond any debate, but you could be waiting for 20 to 50 years or more for that to happen. So yeah, I just don’t see how ArbCom can help your position now this RfC is what it is, it makes it more likely you and editors with a similar POV will be sanctioned, not the other way around and it makes it much less likely the edits you want will stick. A greater number of wikipedians have stronger views on racially offensive academic research than they do for pseudoscience, so trying to persuade the community about the science and WEIGHT and NPOV may well be a waste of time, that is my optics on the matter. I would, after the community review, start backing away from the topic area, maybe not entirely, and find more productive things to do.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 16:18, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

I didn't realize the RfC had been closed. I'll have to go read that, though it doesn't sound promising, more like a supervote. Either way, an ArbCom case might not be ripe until another horrendous dispute breaks out (which may next time be over censorious suppression rather than racist OR). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 16:31, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

I've looked at it, and I don't think I agree with your summary of it. For the most part, it passes the buck and just shuts down the train wreck (in particular, it totally avoids the central matter of the entire discussion, which was direct suppression of particular researchers and their work from any considering in Misplaced Pages). So, in that I'm actually quite satisfied. Now that I know which Tony you mean, I would have expected something like this; he knows full well that no amount of noisy rabble can invalidate the central policies and pillars of Misplaced Pages for emotive and "popular" reasons. And we already knew that the position that intelligence is generally a genetic matter is fringey (i.e., does not enjoy mainstream scientific support). So, the first part of the close was inevitable and just a reaffirmation of the status quo. I have no doubt that certain censorious pseudo-liberals will attempt to use this to totally suppress encyclopedic coverage of everything contrary to that viewpoint, but that is a much easier to dispute to deal with that the broader one which has been raging on and on for months (and itself just re-inflammation of previous similar battlegrounds, as led to the original ArbCom case about this). While I expected a detailed three-admin close, this "everyone just STFU" close is actually fine. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 16:44, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

SMcCandlish, why am I not seeing the genetic contribution to I.Q. gap as fringe in the literature? Why is your take on it quite different than mine, I am genuinely interested? Like what literature are you using to determine genetic contributions to be fringe? What are your thoughts on the 2020 survey of experts published in Intelligence (journal) that found that only 16 percent of experts regarded I.Q. gaps between races to be fully explained by environmental factors, with 43 percent saying mostly genetics and 40 percent saying mostly environmental factors explain the gap. To me that clearly shows that academia is roughly split down the middle only slightly favouring environmental explainations. To be a fringe theory, and not a minority viewpoint, it has to be a theory that few if any academics would embrace it.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 16:59, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

The fringe is in a) assuming that a population result is a genetic result when social factors are almost always a better explanation, and b) leaping from a population-based difference at some narrowly-defined task to claiming a population difference in "intelligence"; and that's just for starters. All the criticism is already in the literature, and I'm not going to pore over it for the sake of a talk page thread (nor am I up to speed on all of it anyway). This is the kind of stuff that's going to come up and be hashed out in the long slow process of working on the article and getting it into proper shape. PS: your 2020 survey is not cross-disciplinary, but only involves "experts" (specialists) mostly in a particular field which has a vested interest in preferring interpretation that assume both genetic causal factors being strong and socio-cultural factors being weak, and the concept of "intelligence" being accepted as defined the way they'd like to define it. If you run this by a group dominated by anthropologists, you'll get a very different result (and the anthropologists will be able to tell the "intelligence" researchers – mostly psychologists, cognitive scientists, and ethologists – exactly how their methods and conclusions are biased, but they just won't want to hear it. And that's before social science and sociology get involved and point out additional biases. Now, the fact that psych and cog-sci people (more the former than the latter) tend almost 50/50 to go for genetic explanations that no one else buys (and after the problems with this interpretation have been spelled out in detail for decades), well, that is worth covering.

I've experienced the psych side's denialism that cultural and social factors are meaningful – first hand and in a big way. As an undergrad, I did a detailed analysis of every single question in the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator / Keirsey Temperament Sorter personality testing systems, which (in these two slightly different variants) purport to divide humans into 4-, 8-, and 16-bucket distinctions at various levels, and on which real-world companies make real-world hiring, promotion, and other decisions. Even aside from the fact that the entire mess is based on the Freudian/Jungian psychoanalysis fraud (mired in a bunch of disguised-religion "archetype" and "racial memory" mumbo-jumbo that has utterly zero scientific basis of any kind and which is quite literally biologically impossible), anyone with a cultural anthropology or sociology background can pick these tests apart down to the atomic level and show how biased they are (in different ways; those fields are not the same and do not bring an identical analysis). The questions are intentionally engineered for, or just sloppily written with the effect of, skewing the kinds of answers people will choose depending on their economic, educational, and experiential background, as well as how Westernized they are. And aside from all that, it's about like astrology in the level of self-assessment "steering" is involved (trick the subjects into re-imagining themselves better conforming to the expected traits of the bucket they're initially sorted into; upon re-taking the "test", subjects will generally more and more firmly plop into a bucket each time they take it, and worse yet may actually start adjusting their real-life behavior and viewpoint to actually conform better! I call this the "redhead syndrome"; there is zero credible evidence that red hair has anything whatsoever to do with innate personality, but many redheads by the time they reach late childhood to early adulthood exhibit exaggerated tendencies to hot-tempered behavior, simply in an effort to conform to the stereotype that is pushed onto them). It's patently, utterly bogus. The MBTI people responded to my analysis with blanket dismissiveness that amounted to "we disagree, on the basis that, uh, we just disagree." They could not refute a single line item, and produced no evidence of any kind that their dismissal had any basis, nor that any point I raised was incorrect or even inaccurate. Their idea of a defense was simply that lots of big companies and other organizations use their tests, so they must not be broken. I shit you not. Meanwhile, the KTS people simply refused to address my analysis at all. You can show these people the flaws in their method, in stark black and white, right in front of their face, and they just will not get it, and do not want to get it (because it challenges their dogmatic assumptions and threatens their credibility and livelihoods). There's a word for this: pseudoscience. It's just one example, but these are the same kinds of "researchers" who are behind a lot of primary-paper claims that get spun into race-and-intelligence claims.

All that said, I'm honestly not interested in getting into a big user-talk debate about this stuff, per WP:NOT#SOAPBOX / WP:NOT#FACEBOOK, and because the entire subject is apt to give me an ulcer or heart palpitations. With the RfC over, and various parties basically on-notice that others are poised to noticeboard them, we can hopefully expect that the article will be able to evolve more organically into something that is actually encyclopedic, albeit with probably some inevitable attempts to suppress all research results that don't agree with far-left politics. I will occasionally argue for their WP:DUE inclusion, but not without cross-disciplinary criticism and alternative interpretations than leaping to "it's genetic" and "this is intelligence". And if it's primary research, it should not be included; we need systematic review material. Even aside from DS and such, this is actually under WP:MEDRS, too, and given the sensitivity of the topic, there may be no more important article to write in a way that cannot be bent toward repugnant propaganda.
— SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 18:16, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

To me the measuring of and understanding of intelligence is the domain of Educational Psychologists, neuropsychologists, etc and so that survey asked the appropriate professionals. It is not normally within the expertise of an anthropologist to comment. Had the author included social workers, sociologists, anthropologists, etc., it would have made the survey unprofessional, compromised its integrity and meaningfulness and as a result it probably would not have then gotten through peer review. I am not saying other disciplines can’t have an opinion but it is of less value. Like a nurse can have opinions on surgical procedures but you would not include them in a survey of surgeons about surgical procedures. I guess you could do a separate survey on a specific point that a nurse could answer and similar with anthropologists and other experts could be surveyed on a perceived problem or bias of psychologists and publish it. To me that RfC should have closed saying that genetic contributions is a major minority view. We may just have to agree to disagree on this. Anyway, that RfC really educated me on this topic area, a topic area I had only a very limited knowledge of, so all is not lost. Thank you for the chat, it was fun. :-)--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 18:54, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

Well, that set of statements indicates we are never going to agree on the substantive disputes behind all of this. There is no set of people on the planet better qualified to analyze subjective cultural bias in this kind of research than cultural anthropologists. As long as people with views you espouse (and who like to capitalize their Favored Field as if It is Magically Special) continue to pretend one is being "professional" by having one's material dodge and weave away from cross-disciplinary analysis, it will continue to produce fringey results that everyone but one's echo chamber can see is fringey. Neuropsychologists (except in some narrow avenues of very recent cross-field research) and especially educational psychologists have no business commenting on genetic matters, since they lack the training. Modern physical anthropologists are generally steeped in it, especially in cross-discipline subfields like human evolutionary ecology. Your idea of what "appropriate" professionals are and what expertise is are too skewed for me to devote any more time to this conversation. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 19:23, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

I am not closed minded, please remember that I am very new to this topic area so prone to making mistakes and do not have hardened views; your last two replies, particularly this reply I am responding to has got me thinking, and you make a good point regarding psychologists not being qualified to interpret genetic information, it is indeed outside their field of expertise. Perhaps what is needed for this topic area is a survey of the views of specialist anthropologists, as I did not know, until now, that they had knowledge of genetics and intelligence. Thanks for giving me additional angles to think from for this topic area. Thank you for your time.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 19:35, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

Cf. previous comment about systematic reviews. These are the kinds of in-depth, field-wide and cross-field, truly secondary, but hardcore-scientific sources that need to be brought to bear on things like this (and more than one of them – all of them that can be found. They need to be given weight by the depth and breadth of their inquiry into the published research and other researchers' assessment of it to date (replicability, methodological flaws, etc.), the reputation of the publishing journal of the review, and the recentness of the review (e.g. if two 2010s lit. revs. conclude there is a scientific consensus against the idea, it doesn't matter if one from the 1970s suggested there was a consensus in favor of it – that means that the consensus changed, not that there is an ongoing lack of consensus). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 01:59, 22 April 2020 (UTC)

Both of you, we need to decide what we're going to do going forward. There's unlikely to be a consensus at AN to overturn TonyBallioni's closure, and nobody seems to want to request an ArbCom case, so what should happen next?

@Literaturegeek: we all seem to be in agreement that going forward, there are going to be further attempts to suppress all research results that don't agree with far-left politics (to use SMcCandlish's phrasing). While I understand that you don't enjoy being involved in these articles, please also consider the fact the fewer editors there are trying to prevent that outcome, the greater the burden there is on each one of us. It's been utterly overwhelming when I tried to prevent these attempts by myself. So if you can, I ask that you please reconsider your decision to forget about this topic area now that the RFC is over. (And this request goes for user:Insertcleverphrasehere as well.)

SMcCandlish: In our discussion on March 16, you said that after a month I could ask you again if you'd be willing to make a new proposal to restore the section about international comparisons. It's now been a month, and there's no reason to think waiting longer will produce any further resolution to the long-term conflict over these articles, so would you be willing to work on proposing a revision/restoration of the section at this point? I have found a few sources that might be useful for an updated version of that section. 2600:1004:B109:A549:E918:2939:512:DF4A (talk) 19:42, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

Look, I helped out in the RfC, but I have no desire to get involved in another contentious topic area. Sorry. — Insertcleverphrasehere _{(click me!)} 20:05, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

I see. Well, thanks for your help in the RFC, at any rate. 2600:1004:B109:A549:E918:2939:512:DF4A (talk) 20:18, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

I'll think on it, but I really need a break from this. It's been months of noticeboard strife of one kind or another, and the RfC just closed. I agree that TonyB's closure is not likely to be overturned; while it did not address everything that it could have, it does not appear to be faulty as WP would define that. So, it'll be a WP:CCC matter. The dust needs to settle a bit before people wade immediately into more mass restoration or mass deletion of material (or the people going that route are like to be the next noticeboard subjects). That's not a crosshair I need trained on my chest right now. That said, yes, I would be interested in the additional sources, but they really belong on the article's talk page. It won't do any good for two or three editors to cobble together some kind of WP:RIGHTVERSION on their own and then try to impose it. After all this drama, it's going to take a slow and open consensus-building process. And I would have a lot of reading to catch up on, anyway. I don't presently have much in the way of full-text journals access, so I'm not necessarily in the best position to be evaluating the material and the professional responses to it. Seriously, I would advise just forgetting about this for an entire month or so. Work on something else. WP:THEREISNODEADLINE. Some topics like this can take 5–10 years to clean up. So it goes. Don't double your blood pressure over it. :-) — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 01:59, 22 April 2020 (UTC)

In our previous discussion about the section on international IQ comparisons, you suggested that I look for sources that criticize the validity of these comparisons, and I did eventually find a source about that: This is a primary source that according to Google scholar has not been cited by anyone, but it's the best I could find. There really does not seem to be much literature disputing the conclusion that these comparisons are valid. (Obviously, whether or not they are valid is a completely separate question from whether the cause of the differences is genetic or environmental.)

One other source I think you'd find useful is Are We Getting Smarter? by James Flynn, especially the book's third chapter, which discusses IQ gains from the Flynn Effect in various developing countries.

After thinking about this section over the past month, I've concluded that the main problem with my earlier attempt at restoring it is that I placed too much emphasis on the nature vs. nurture question of international comparisons. I was stuck in the mindset of trying to restore something similar to the section that had been recently removed from the article, which also heavily emphasized that aspect. But most secondary sources that discuss international IQ comparisons either are silent on the nature vs. nurture question (such as Hive Mind), or devote relatively little space to it. Whenever you're ready to make a new proposal to restore that section, I suggest only including a few sentences about this aspect of the comparisons.

Lastly, I'll understand if you don't want to do this, but I would really appreciate you requesting arbitration. Not about TonyBallioni's closure of the RFC, but about the longer-term issue of BLP violations in this topic, particularly NightHeron's repeatedly stating that various living people are white supremacists without citing any sources that describe them with this label. I explained in my comment here why I consider this issue so important. It is about more than just the integrity of the encyclopedia - one person has already lost his job as a consequence of this problem, and other people's livelihoods may also be at risk.

Meisenberg's attorney has already contacted the Wikimedia Foundation legal team about what happened to him, but was told in response that it is up to the Misplaced Pages community to address this issue. When the same issue was raised before the community at Arbitration Enforcement, the report was procedurally declined because the editor being reported had not been notified of the discretionary sanctions with the correct template. So it seems clear that if the BLP issue is going to be addressed, ArbCom is the only way that will happen. 2600:1004:B151:B695:112B:2B5C:B58A:EB6D (talk) 22:54, 22 April 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for the background stuff. I don't disagree this needs to be an ArbCom case, but I'm just not in a position to do it. I have important matters to deal with IRL; to the extent that I have any time for WP at all right now, it's as stress relief, not a source of additional stress. I just don't have the mental/emotional bandwidth to take on something like this, and I'm missing too much of the background of the dispute and its spillover effects to properly construct the case anyway. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 21:15, 24 April 2020 (UTC)

It's evident from the discussion on the article's talk page that NightHeron is preparing to purge a lot of material from this article based on the RFC outcome, so I hope you can at least be part of the discussion about him doing that. 2600:1004:B11A:E74E:DD3F:340B:3C9B:851E (talk) 01:27, 27 April 2020 (UTC)

Someone is finally requesting arbitration, but ArbCom might not be willing to accept the case. I hope you'll be online again soon. Someone needs to explain to ArbCom why a case is necessary, and I think you understand the reason it's necessary better than anyone else does. 2600:1004:B156:2805:69A8:D59E:7D3B:254A (talk) 22:22, 27 April 2020 (UTC)

I have done so, in some detail (about the topic and WP's relation to it, not about specific editors who need a spanking). However, I already see a lot of hand-waving there about how a new case or clarification supposedly isn't needed, so I'm skeptical this will go anywhere. It may really come down to someone pulling a slow-editwar tactic over the next few months, and AE failing to do anything about it, before ArbCom will take a "part 2" case on this subject. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 21:45, 29 April 2020 (UTC)

Thanks. Based on the discussion here, it seems probable that I will be topic banned from this entire topic, so I hope you'll continue to make an attempt at upholding BLP policy on these articles when I'm no longer able to do so. 2600:1004:B16B:2EF7:F845:8636:E163:1E01 (talk) 00:48, 30 April 2020 (UTC)

Hadn't seen that until now. I agree with your assessment of where that is heading (though I don't necessarily disagree with what you posted that led there; it is suspicious that a supposed leftist is making arguments that fall perfectly into not actual leftism but right-wing parodies of leftism, and the editor is also citing insider right-wing "sources" that no one in their right mind would ever try to use as source on Misplaced Pages.) But it's not just that one accusatory-of-another-editor post that's led you into T-ban land, but the general WP:SPA-style approach, the canvassing for specific admins, etc. All that said, I have to be clear that I'm not "on your side" or on that of particular opponents of yours. I think it would be a good idea for quite a number of parties to take an involuntary vacation from this topic for a long time. And frankly, I'm pretty concerned about your apparent self-declared connections to persons associated with the Pioneer Fund, etc. It's not a mindset I buy into. I'm on the side of patient neutrality and rigorously applying policy to report what mainstream and current science is telling us, but not report on fringe science except inasmuch as we must to report what mainstream science has to say about it, and inasmuch as we need to cover it to address common reader questions. There is no deadline, and the article can be adjusted over time as needed in response to later research, which needs (for WP purposes) to be firmly grounded in things like systematic reviews. History of the race and intelligence controversy is a vastly better article, and the content should really be merged, mostly using the content from that article but at the older and shorter article title. I'm honestly not going to devote a lot of time and attention to this, because I've run out of patience and temper with it, but others will do so.

I think that the Race and intelligence article is likely to sway to a far-left-dominated, "try to hide anything that anyone anywhere could use in a racist argument" approach, until enough people are fed up with this censoriousness (and the way that it backfires, to cede control of the issue to far-right webboards), and we then swing it back to a more neutral position. That's just where the WP socio-political landscape is right now, and there's little anyone can do about it for probably the next several years, unless they have an amazingly high tolerance for being smeared by other editors. My own willingness to deal with that kind of stuff is at an all-time low.
— SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 04:28, 30 April 2020 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Category:Carrom people has been nominated for deletion

Category:Carrom people, which you created, has been nominated for deletion. A discussion is taking place to decide whether this proposal complies with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. Rathfelder (talk) 09:17, 22 April 2020 (UTC)

Am I allowed to give you a compliment?

I don't really know how this website works even though I've been giving it small edits for years. Anyway, am I allowed to give you a compliment on this page? Is this the proper way to do it? I wanted to compliment you for your work on the article about linguistic prescription, whatever it is you wrote on there, it's a pretty good article, I only know for sure I read your response in 2017 to a seemingly "butthurt" prescription apologist on the talk page and I very much enjoyed reading it, and I'm glad people like you are safeguarding the article from people like that, I myself did some small edits to it as well. Dapperedavid (talk) 12:28, 22 April 2020 (UTC)

@Dapperedavid: Sure. This is one of the things user talk pages are for (and it's much nicer to get a compliment than a complaint, so thank you. :-) That's not an article I regularly spend a lot of time at. My "interface" to the topic is primarily internal.

A lot of Misplaced Pages editors have a hard time compartmentalizing the ideas that WP's article content is not to be prescriptive (per WP:NPOV policy, etc.), while our internal WP:Manual of Style is, like all style guides, prescriptive in nature ("do it this way, not that way") because it is a rule set, even if it is also largely descriptive in rule-origins. That is, the MoS prescribes as "how to write Misplaced Pages" what we observe (describe) as norms of mainstream, professional, academic-leaning English, mostly via what other style guides say, which are predominantly primary sources. Simultaneously, our public-facing content about English spelling, grammar, and other "rules" (at articles like Quotation marks in English, etc.) is strictly descriptive linguistics, and based primarily on secondary sources (such as non-learner grammars of English, like Oxford's comprehensive one) and tertiary sources (e.g., mainstream dictionaries), though we may also report what various primary-source style guides say and how they conflict with each other. We don't favor one or another of them as sources for what we write about English (we don't say Chicago Manual of Style is right and AP Stylebook is wrong). Internally, we clearly do favor particular ones for how we write here (MoS is based almost exclusively on the two most recent editions each of Chicago Manual, New Hart's Rules, Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English, Garner's Modern English, and Scientific Style and Format).

Some brains just seem to melt on contact with this kind of general semantics distinction between external "rules", writing about external "rules", and internal actual rules for writing about anything, and how the derivation of the "rules" and the rules are unrelated. We thus have recurrent problems with people bringing subjective and often nationalistic prescriptivist notions (e.g. "the only correct way to use quotation marks in American English is to put terminal punctation before the closing quotation mark, no matter what"), convinced not only that they are Right, but that MoS being a prescriptive project in insisting that there be some rules we use means that their prescriptivist motivation for a particular rule must be obeyed.
— SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 16:07, 22 April 2020 (UTC)

English

Hey I'm new here Abelwe (talk) 23:42, 23 April 2020 (UTC)

@Abelwe: Did you need help with something? — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 20:58, 29 April 2020 (UTC)

Merger discussion for Robotic automation software

Done – I commented in support of the proposal. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 21:43, 29 April 2020 (UTC)

An article that you have been involved in editing—Robotic automation software—has been proposed for merging with another article. If you are interested, please participate in the merger discussion. Thank you. Stonkaments (talk) 17:16, 25 April 2020 (UTC)

Issue 38, January – April 2020

Hiding the projectspam. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 20:59, 29 April 2020 (UTC)

The Misplaced Pages Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 38, January – April 2020

New partnership
Global roundup

Read the full newsletter

On behalf of The Misplaced Pages Library team --15:58, 29 April 2020 (UTC)

Applause

On the R&I arb thing. Quality job there. Also in removing "religion=", which was always a bunch of religionist special pleading. Guy (help!) 21:53, 29 April 2020 (UTC)

It's always chapped my hide how much WP (being American-dominated) buys into the racialist thinking of American-dominated politics, statistics, sociology, even social psychology (also a major factor in the UK, Australia, France, Latin America, and several other blobs of human geography). That's the real pseudo-science, but it's likely to take a few more generations (if some damned virus doesn't kill us all first) for everyone to understand this. I tried to cover this a bit in the WP:RACIALISM essay, but it's just a surface-scratch. Entire books can (and have been) written about this stuff. Still, it's probably our most glaring WP:Systemic bias problem, even after accounting for male skew. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 22:13, 29 April 2020 (UTC)

Black-footed cat

Done

Hey SMcCandlish: are you still busy? I just put up a request at Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Cats/Assessment‎ for reassessing the black-footed cat page for at least B-class. It is currently listed as C-class, but a lot more referenced content has been added and lead revised in the past few days. But alas, the list there indicates that it often takes a looong time for anybody to react to such a request. So if not you, who do think would be a competent assessor? Stay healthy! Cheers -- BhagyaMani (talk) 20:48, 3 May 2020 (UTC)

@BhagyaMani: Done. I pored over it with a fine-toothed comb, mostly to make the citations all consistent and properly using the parameters. Fixed up some typos, punctuation, grammar glitches, and inclarities. The sourcing looks tight. At first I was concerned that the substantial lead, mostly devoid of citations, might be a problem, but everything in it appears to be in the main body with an inline citation already. This may be WP:GAN-worthy at this point. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 23:29, 5 May 2020 (UTC)

Thanks a ton for your fast reply and addressing the rating !!! This article now being B-class gives is better base for the next step: nominating it for GA. But I'll first work on it again, as I have a few more references that may be worthwhile to be included. -- BhagyaMani (talk) 07:07, 6 May 2020 (UTC)

Sounds like a plan. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 07:43, 6 May 2020 (UTC)

I nominated sand cat for GA last week, did not get a response yet, but will wait with nominating black-footed cat until this is done. -- BhagyaMani (talk) 09:45, 6 May 2020 (UTC)

Yeah, GA can take a long time, since it's dependent on someone randomly volunteering to dig deep into the article. It's best done by someone not connected to the topic (or it looks like wikiproject participants just scratching each others' backs). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 19:19, 6 May 2020 (UTC)

"Fantasy" royals

Hi - I totally understand if you are too busy in the current crisis to take any action about this but since you raised the issue on the NPOV noticeboard I hope that you consider it important enough to deal with to some extent as you are able. As I said there, it was about seven years ago that I made an effort to try to bring some sense to these sorts of "fantasies" but there are indeed a lot of amateur genealogists or monarchists or whatever they are on WP who are obsessive about these "princesses" and "dukes" of nonexistent monarchies and they all gang up and argue until they are blue in the face that the articles labeling somebody the holder of a royal title that was abolished more than a hundred years ago are correct. So I gave up, thinking "oh well, what the heck, let them live in their deluded fantasies, what does it matter really" but I don't actually think WP should be a refuge for that kind of nonsense. I am mostly a content creator, on opera and Baroque music more than anything else, and am not as familiar as you are with all these procedures of how to try to change MOS guidelines etc., I don't even know what VPPOL is, but I am more than willing to try to help in any way I can so please try to set that up Believe me, those examples I gave at NPOV noticeboard are the mere tip of the iceberg, there are zillions more. You are welcome to contact me on my talk page at any time. Best, Smeat75 (talk) 23:16, 5 May 2020 (UTC)

I just burned all my WP time for today on a C-to-B-class cleanup and assessment. I agree it needs to be done, but I don't relish the drama, and it would be time-consuming to even draft a VPPOL RfC on it. I can do it, but not immediately. I'm hoping someone else will run with it. Then again, WP:THEREISNODEADLINE, and this stuff has been ucked fup for a very long time, so another week or month or whatever won't kill anyone. Note to lurkers: This is about:
WP:NPOVN § Labeling modern descendants of nobility with theoretical titles: NPOV, BLP, NOR and other policy problems. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 23:32, 5 May 2020 (UTC)

R+I Request

There is a version of this which is just about content not content and conduct. Coming as it does on a reply to a reminder to focus on content please consider striking the conduct pieces. Barkeep49 (talk) 02:25, 6 May 2020 (UTC)

I'm not into striking; what's said is said. But, it's enough for now; as I already indicated over there, I'm going to let that aspect of this alone. I get where you're coming from, but in this particular dispute (I mean the entire months-long saga, not just today) and this sort of dispute – of two warring WP:GREATWRONGS encampments and all us other editors caught in their crossfire – it really is all about conduct, and the "content" matters cannot really be separated from that cleanly, because the content is hostage to the conduct problems. That's why it keeps going to noticeboards, and RfC, and AE, and ArbCom. But, yes, the article talk page isn't really the place for a conduct issue to be aired out. I have to say, however, that I was responding to en masse character-assassination handwaving by the other party, to whom anyone in disagreement is "against consensus" and "pushing pseudoscience", and etc. That kind of borderline personal attack on entire groups of editors is why he's apt to get topic banned eventually. Well, part of why. The civil-Pov / slow-editwar thing is another. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 06:59, 6 May 2020 (UTC)

Non-admin closure of RfC

As you are someone who has done non-admin closure of discussions and talked about it on your user page, I'm just wondering about your take on the recent non-admin closure of the RfC on Indigenous Aryans. BirdValiant (talk) 16:33, 6 May 2020 (UTC)

Not what I would have preferred (it's just going to extend the debate to another, later round of RfCing). The closer has been around for almost 2 years, which is long enough for some successful RfAs. As a "no-consensus", it's not a supervote. The support/oppose head counts were pretty close to even, after ignoring two banned users, so it was reasonable to come to a no-consensus result, especially since this this comes down to a source-interpretation debate (i.e., neither side has an overwhelming policy argument in their favor, nor a near-totality of sources). There is real-world debate about the matter, but it's pretty clear what the scientific consensus is. In a later RfC, we're just going to have to take the opposers' arguments into account and produce a clearer showing of that off-site consensus, in a way that cannot be claimed to be cherry-picking. In the interim, it's really perhaps not actually important whether the article contains the word "fringe" or not. We just do the sourcing work, and it will become clear to the reader that it's a fringey idea with only minority support in the literature. There are lots and lots of topics like this, and that's okay. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 19:17, 6 May 2020 (UTC)

'The' in article names

Done

SMc, can you, or any of the MOS savants watching this talkpage, point me to if/where in the style-book the use of 'The' in article names is discussed? In particular, the practice of distinguishing X and The X as article titles. If it helps, you can see the context of my question here although I'm not asking you to weigh in on that move request. Cheers. Abecedare (talk) 07:54, 8 May 2020 (UTC)

@Abecedare: See the "MOS:THE" internal disambiguation page; one of the things listed there is probably what you're after. Also of note is WP:THE (part of the naming conventions), since you're asking about titles in particular. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 10:12, 9 May 2020 (UTC)

Thanks SMc! WP:NCTHE is exactly wht I was looking for and I wouldn't have found it w/o your help since searching MOS pages for the word 'the' or 'article' is pointless; and checking what the shortcuts MOS:THE/WP:THE link to, is obvious only in hindsight. Cheers. Abecedare (talk) 17:19, 9 May 2020 (UTC)

You're welcome. MOS:THE didn't even mention WP:THE (WP:NCTHE); I added it as a "see also" after you asked about this. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 17:25, 9 May 2020 (UTC)

Ha. Then there is some lasting benefit to my query! Abecedare (talk) 17:39, 9 May 2020 (UTC)

(passerby) Aah, Saint McCandlish, the MOS wonk to the rescue! 😀 I actually looked into this a bit on a minor, cursory level, but didn't post here because I didn't find anything. Well done, and thanks for schooling Abecedare and I about this! North America 04:09, 13 May 2020 (UTC)

Glad to be of service. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 18:49, 13 May 2020 (UTC)

MOS:FORLANG

Done

Hi there. I've been trying to get some clarity about MOS:FORLANG and the only specific discussion I could find was here. Would you be able to comment at Talk:New Mexico#Spanish and Navajo in the lead? Cheers. Magnolia677 (talk) 21:44, 11 May 2020 (UTC)

Pinball media

Done – Looked over the nomination, and it makes sense. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 21:58, 15 May 2020 (UTC)

Category: Pinball mass media, which you created, has been nominated for speedy renaming to Category:Works about pinball. – Fayenatic London 10:55, 14 May 2020 (UTC)

In case you weren't aware...

Done

Misplaced Pages talk:WikiProject Catholicism#Post-nominals RFC, I'm about to hit the road to take care of some long-delayed stuff for the inlaws or I'd weigh in. --Ealdgyth (talk) 13:09, 15 May 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for the note. I commented there, and at WT:MOSBIO, and also notified WT:MOS and WT:MOSABBR of the RfC. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 21:59, 15 May 2020 (UTC)

May

May · Mary · Monteverdi

Thank you for article improvements in May! - DYK our list of people for whose life I'm thankful enough to improve their articles? - I have a FAC open, one of Monteverdi's exceptional works, in memory of Brian who passed me his collected sources. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 20:27, 17 May 2020 (UTC)

today a composer pictured who wrote a triple concerto for violin, harp and double bass, in honour of the composer who died and my brother who plays double bass. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 15:16, 26 May 2020 (UTC)

"A mighty fortress is our God"

Regarding the mighty fortress: I believe that the first sentence is nonsense: "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God" is one of the best known hymns by the reformer Martin Luther. No, it isn't, I guess he didn't even speak English. How could that be rephrased? "A Mighty Fortress" is also not in category 16th-century hymn, because it came into existence later. Help? - Almost all operas are by now original titles, DYK? --Gerda Arendt (talk) 21:41, 4 June 2020 (UTC)

@Gerda Arendt: Hmm. On the rephrasing, maybe something like "is an English adaptation of one of the best known ..."? I don't know the entire history of the piece, so I'm not sure what to say about categorization. On operas, I'm not sure if you mean that they've been moved to article titles that reflect what they were originally titled, or they've been moved to article titles that are later (original) inventions of translators (nor whether you prefer the status quo or some other result). Anyway, this kind of music isn't my forte; I was just commenting that we have MOS:INCIPIT for a reason, and it's not some nit-pick invented by WP:MOS, it's standard advice in most major style guides for use of a quotation, from an untitled (or lost-title) work, as a conventionalized pseudo-title for that work: give it in sentence case. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 22:26, 4 June 2020 (UTC)

Opera is easier. They - at least most - have the titles their composer gave them, so you can say Verdi composed La traviata and La forza del destino. You can't say he composed The Power of Fate, you can't say The Power of Fate was premiered (unless you speak about the first performance in English). - But for some reason, they think that for hymns they can do it, throughout the article. Your sentence is good, only: it covers the story from when the translation appeared. On the talk page (+ its archive) there are some of the longest discussions, a move request to German, and a request to split the article in two, one covering the German, another for the English, because - while other of Luther's hymns are not even common in English - this one is, and the translations have their own history. I'm tired of the topic but pretty unhappy with the present condition. I am thankful for our authors of featured articles Rossini and Wagner that they use piped links to the two operas that are still in English The Barber of Seville and The Flying Dutchman. Rossini composed Il barbiere di Siviglia, and Wagner wrote Der fliegende Holländer (even the book for it, and not in English), and same thing: all other operas by Rossini, and all other stage works by Wagner have the original titles for article titles. Just the most famous ones ... - can't find a decent expression for how unfair and even misleading that seems to me. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 06:23, 5 June 2020 (UTC)

Yeah, it does seem misleading. When it comes to this one, I would oppose a split; the translation and its history belong in a section. We wouldn't do a separate article on Der Herr der Ringe despite it being one of the most-read translations (German in this case, of course) of The Lord of the Rings; it should be covered at a translations section at the main article on the work. This is true despite controversy and re-translation, and there being a distinct history to LotR in German. It's simply not a encyclopedically stand-alone history. It's difficult to imagine a translation of anything that would be, aside from the Bible, Q'ran, etc. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 08:13, 5 June 2020 (UTC)

I disagree. There seems to be "a lot" about this English hymn, or why don't we just move, as the others? If we don't, how do you suggest to repair the wrong sentences, referring to "A mighty fortress" in the 16th to 19th centuries, when it didn't yet exist? - A fortress isn't even a Burg which would be castle. Nothing wrong with translating freely for rhyme's and metre's sake, but saying it IS the original, - I don't understand!! (But I seem to be only one, per all the former discussions.) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 09:00, 5 June 2020 (UTC)

@Gerda Arendt: To clarify, I don't mean that our article should focus on the English version, and shove the original work into a section, but the other way around. Treat the original work as the main subject, and cover the English version in a section, even if it's a long section. If you really think a split is warranted, it's not something I would fight, it's just not my default approach to such matters. When things are this closely connected, it's a better reader experience to cover them in the same place, for a more complete overview of the subject. But, of course, we split articles all the time, either when the article gets too long, or when some subtopic of it is demonstrably independently notable. If there are lots and lots of works treating "A mighty fortress is our God" independently as a work unto itself, without much of any reference to the original, then that's probably a good enough split rationale. As as aside: Some may want it at the English-language title anyway (WP:USEENGLISH), and treat the versions as "equal", as it were, though with correct choronology. A good and rather parallel example of this is "Silent Night". — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 09:53, 5 June 2020 (UTC)

I agree that "Stille Nacht" is a good example. It doesn't say once that Gruber wrote "Silent night". However, I found "A Mighty Fortress" so hopelessly misleading that it seemed easier to write a new article ;) - only that wasn't welcome. Flaws that I see:

It doesn't even come with a history section, but gets to Battle hymn right away, unsourced, followed by speculations, all under the English name.
The compositions listed are based on the German, or just the tune, - I see no vocal music there setting an English text.

I gave up. But if we are stuck with it, something should change. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 10:29, 5 June 2020 (UTC)

Comment: I'm largely an outsider to this discussion, but there does seem to be considerable muddle over what counts as a "title". The title of a book, as printed on the cover and title page, seems to be the prime exemplar of a "title", and should be presented in title case and italics. If the incipit of a hymn, poem or the like is really a "title" in the same sense as a book title, then it should also be in title case and italics. Many (if not most) relevant articles of any length appear to be inconsistent. Thus in I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, which seems to me quite comparable to A Mighty Fortress Is Our God, at present you can find both title and sentence case as well as italics and roman. Peter coxhead (talk) 09:31, 5 June 2020 (UTC)
@Peter coxhead: As I said at the other thread, I don't think the guidelines are unclear (if they are, then I'm not sure where/how they are unclear); they're just not always consistently applied in topics like this, because the subject matter is fairly obscure, and some of the articles are old and rarely updated. Yes, it can be hard to nail down exactly what constitutes a "title", but we have a rule about incipits, that distinguishes them from titles proper, so at least that part should be clear enough. PS: For short works like hymns, they should be in quotation marks, not italics, anyway. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 09:53, 5 June 2020 (UTC)
Can we perhaps say the title is "A Mighty Fortress" and the incipit "A mighty fortress is our God"? ,,, if incipit is the right word for the just the beginning, - I know it as with music, such as here. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 10:29, 5 June 2020 (UTC)
@Gerda Arendt: it's important not to confuse the name with the referent, whether the name is a title or an incipit. You wrote "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God" is one of the best known hymns by the reformer Martin Luther. No, it isn't, I guess he didn't even speak English. But the referent is the hymn, which can have multiple names, four being "A mighty fortress is our God", "A mighty fortress", "Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott" and "Ein feste Burg". Regardless of the name used to refer to the hymn, the statement as to its author remains correct, just as it would if I replaced "Martin Luther" by "Luther". Peter coxhead (talk) 10:52, 5 June 2020 (UTC)
Leaning, perhaps. English is not my first language, and "referent" is a new word for me, and I wouldn't even know how to say it in German. A hymn can have multiple names, like a person, such as Fanny Hensel vs. Fanny Mendelssohn. I still think it would be wrong to refer to her (in the article) as Hensel at age 7, while she married Mr. Hensel much later, but equally wrong to refer to her as Mendelssohn after she married. (So that's another article with a title I think is sort of wrong. No hope as long as titling articles goes by Commonname.) I feel in a similar way that the hymns should not be referred to (in the article) in English for facts happening before it even was translated. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 12:00, 5 June 2020 (UTC)

Upcoming FAC nomination for WikiProject Role-Playing Games (Hyborian War, Conan)

Hi SMcCandlish. I saw that you're a member of Wikiproject Role Playing Games. I'm about to bring the article Hyborian War up for its second FAC nom in about a week. It's a play-by-mail game set in Conan's Hyborian Age. It's being peer reviewed now after I made some needed improvements. But I'm a bit concerned that it will sit unreviewed given that it's a niche topic. Would greatly appreciate your review if you have time. Thanks for your time. Airborne84 (talk) 07:08, 31 May 2020 (UTC)

Hi SMcCandlish. I've renominated the article Hyborian War after fixes and a peer review. The new nomination is here. If you get time in the next week or two, would greatly appreciate your review. Thanks for your time. Airborne84 (talk) 02:27, 14 June 2020 (UTC)

Princess Johanna of Hesse and by Rhine

Seen this Misplaced Pages article on a toddler from a deposed grand ducal house? PAustin4thApril1980 (talk) 11:28, 31 May 2020 (UTC)

@PAustin4thApril1980: Good WP:AFD candidate. Looks like no children or other descendants of Ernest Louis, Grand Duke of Hesse should be using titles, or even mentioning any except as "what if" stuff and with a source, since that nobility was disestablished at the end of WWI during Ernest Louis's lifetime. As that article says, they converted titles to surnames after that, so Georg Donatus, Hereditary Grand Duke of Hesse should probably move to Georg Donatus von Hessen-Darmstadt (the de.wp article title) or even just Georg von Hessen-Darmstadt (following en.wp's rules about not including middle names in most cases). If kept, his short-lived daughter's article would probably be at Johanna von Hessen-Darmstadt. Ernest Louis, Grand Duke of Hesse, could presumably remain at that title, since it's better know to sources for his long life as a royal rather than his final couple of years as a private citizen. That said, I'm wondering why it's not simply Ernest Louis of Hesse, to be WP:CONSISTENT with George III of the United Kingdom, etc., etc. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 17:58, 3 June 2020 (UTC)

There are so many articles about members of deposed royal families from Germany that take their last name, translate it to their phony "title" and put a comma after their first name. I made an effort to move some of them years back to their legal untranslated names but there are editors who will fight any such move tooth and nail.Smeat75 (talk) 12:29, 5 June 2020 (UTC)

@Smeat75: Well, we have essentially unanimous consensus at the WP:NPOVN thread. And I cite that in every relevant RM. If we continue to meet with push-back from the wikiproject on royalty, this should be taken up as an RfC at WP:VPPOL that basically re-asks what was asked at NPOVN, to a broader audience. I have absolute certainty what the result will be. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 17:02, 8 June 2020 (UTC)

There was an AfD for Sophie, Princess of Prussia which was closed as "keep" but the closer noted "consensus is that GNG is met, but that it should be renamed" as Guy and I had said in the discussion, ludicrous to label a living person a Prince or Princess of Prussia, German royal titles abolished 1918, Prussia dissolved 1947. I am not going to try to move the article, I learnt not to attempt such things single handedly but would certainly support it. I don't know if this sets a precedent for dealing with her husband's article Georg Friedrich, Prince of Prussia the same way or the many many other similar ones about members of deposed German "fake royal families". I left a similar note at JxG's talk page.Smeat75 (talk) 19:19, 9 June 2020 (UTC)

Friendly reminder

Resolved

This is a friendly reminder that posting links that contain reveal non-public information (yes, I know this particular user's name was already out, but not the facebook & linkedin links, workplace information, or potential family connections) is not appropriate. If you have concerns about this material and need someone to review it, WP:ARBCOM is the proper venue. Please, do not repost this information. -- Amanda (aka DQ) 18:11, 31 May 2020 (UTC)

I sent it to ArbCom, and they have confirmed receipt of it; what happens henceforth is up to them. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 08:25, 3 June 2020 (UTC)

@Atsme and DeltaQuad:: Just FYI. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 09:57, 3 June 2020 (UTC)

Revert request

Moved to Misplaced Pages:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents § Netholic and haunting-related disruption – ... after Netoholic tried to revert-war me into silence. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 18:01, 3 June 2020 (UTC)

Please self-revert your comments made here. As per WP:APPNOTE, notifications should be neutral, and your comments added under the notification make it decidedly not. Keep the discussion in one place (the RM itself), rather than poisoning the well under a neutral notification. -- Netoholic @ 13:20, 3 June 2020 (UTC)

Nope. Your post was a WP:APPNOTE. My followup, at the guideline talk page, is a proposal to adjust the text of the guideline to prevent similar misunderstandings in the future. (I.e., it is using the talk page of the guideline to talk about the guideline). If you want to see an APPNOTE from me about the RM that inspired this proposal, there is one here. I am not alone at the article talk page in telling you that you do not understand WP:FRINGE. The RM in question was a total WP:SNOW before I arrived, so no well is or could be poisoned at this point (some kind of move is possible, but it certainly will not be to "List of haunted places"). My attempt to disengage from further circular argumentation with you at the RM was not an invitation to escalate in userspace. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 13:37, 3 June 2020 (UTC)

Then simply make it a new section header and word it as a proposal for a change. Don't poison the APPNOTE. -- Netoholic @ 13:48, 3 June 2020 (UTC)

Word your proposal in a new talk page section. An APPNOTE section is an inappropriate place to initiate a guideline change discussion. -- Netoholic @ 14:06, 3 June 2020 (UTC)

Essay on races and ethnicity

I really liked the essay. Thanks for writing it, —Paleo Neonate – 16:10, 4 June 2020 (UTC)

Glad someone actually read it. :-) — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 21:42, 4 June 2020 (UTC)

One can never be mock-alarmist enough!

But I did let out an audible Ha! at the thought of a breakroom ghost. In my foggy old pressnook, there hung a sign reading, "Those who don't believe in life after death should be here at quitting time". Thought it was just barely funny then, but looking back, it now seems rather funny (that's two degrees higher), so thanks! InedibleHulk (talk) 02:40, 5 June 2020 (UTC)

@InedibleHulk: It actually reminded me of something real-world (though trivial, except to style geeks). The New Yorker is known for a lot of style quirks, some of which are Briticisms while others are simply "deliberately conservative", like preservation of the pronunciation diaeresis (zoölogy). They say that they actually receive more letters from readers objecting to some of these things than they do about any other topic. In a self-referential piece in 2019, a New Yorker copyeditor concedes, "Many eccentricities of New Yorker style are so old and ingrained that there is no longer anyone alive who remembers the reason for them." In an older such article, she wrote that their house-style guide was being revised in 1978 by style editor Hobie Weekes (at the New Yorker for fifty years!), and then he suddenly died. "No one has had the nerve to raise the subject since." In effect, it's a journalistic haunting. That was written in 2012, and eight years later I still detect no change of any kind in their output. I don't expect that I will by 2025, either. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 08:06, 5 June 2020 (UTC)

Books & Bytes – Issue 39, May – June 2020

The Misplaced Pages Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 39, May – June 2020

Library Card Platform
New partnerships
- ProQuest
- Springer Nature
- BioOne
- CEEOL
- IWA Publishing
- ICE Publishing
Bytes in brief

Read the full newsletter

On behalf of The Misplaced Pages Library team --MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 06:13, 11 June 2020 (UTC)

Editing news 2020 #2 – Quick updates

Read this in another language • Subscription list

Mockup of the new reply feature, showing new editing tools — The new features include a toolbar. What do you think should be in the toolbar?

This edition of the Editing newsletter includes information the Misplaced Pages:Talk pages project, an effort to help contributors communicate on wiki more easily. The central project page is on MediaWiki.org.

Reply tool: This is available as a Beta Feature at the four partner wikis (Arabic, Dutch, French, and Hungarian Wikipedias). The Beta Feature will get new features soon. The new features include writing comments in a new visual editing mode and pinging other users by typing @. You can test the new features on the Beta Cluster. Some other wikis will have a chance to try the Beta Feature in the coming months.
New requirements for user signatures: Soon, users will not be able to save invalid custom signatures in Special:Preferences. This will reduce signature spoofing, prevent page corruption, and make new talk page tools more reliable. Most editors will not be affected.
New discussion tool: The Editing team is beginning work on a simpler process for starting new discussions. You can see the initial design on the project page.
Research on the use of talk pages: The Editing team worked with the Wikimedia research team to study how talk pages help editors improve articles. We learned that new editors who use talk pages make more edits to the main namespace than new editors who don't use talk pages.

– Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:11, 15 June 2020 (UTC)

Feedback request: Misplaced Pages style and naming request for comment

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Feedback request: Misplaced Pages technical issues and templates request for comment

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Feedback request: Economy, trade, and companies request for comment

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Feedback request: Misplaced Pages style and naming request for comment

Disregard – Not interested in game/"reality" shows, at all. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 08:59, 16 June 2020 (UTC)

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Feedback request: Social sciences and society Good Article nomination

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Feedback request: Misplaced Pages style and naming request for comment

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Feedback request: Social sciences and society Good Article nomination

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Feedback request: Social sciences and society Good Article nomination

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Feedback request: Language and literature Good Article nomination

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New Page Reviewer newsletter June 2020

Hello SMcCandlish,

Your help can make a difference

NPP Sorting can be a great way to find pages needing new page patrolling that match your strengths and interests. Using ORES, it divides articles into topics such as Literature or Chemistry and on Geography. Take a look and see if you can find time to patrol a couple pages a day. With over 10,000 pages in the queue, the highest it's been since ACPERM, your help could really make a difference.

Google Adds New Languages to Google Translate

In late February, Google added 5 new languages to Google Translate: Kinyarwanda, Odia (Oriya), Tatar, Turkmen and Uyghur. This expands our ability to find and evaluate sources in those languages.

Discussions and Resources

A discussion on handling new article creation by paid editors is ongoing at the Village Pump.
Also at the Village Pump is a discussion about limiting participation at Articles for Deletion discussion.
A proposed new speedy deletion criteria for certain kinds of redirects ended with no consensus.
Also ending with no change was a proposal to change how we handle certain kinds of vector images.

Six Month Queue Data: Today – 10271 Low – 4991 High – 10271

To opt-out of future mailings, please remove yourself here

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 02:52, 18 June 2020 (UTC)

Feedback request: Economy, trade, and companies request for comment

Done Your feedback is requested at Misplaced Pages:Reliable sources/Noticeboard on a request for comment. Thank you for helping out!
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June

June

Vespro della Beata Vergine

Thank you for improving articles in June. I can proudly present a FA, quite a gift after a year without, and a FL is in the making, comments welcome. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 12:46, 21 June 2020 (UTC)

New check

Done – ...ish

May I kindly ask you to take a look at Talk:Mustang#Final_draft? We kind of nuked the version you commented on. You follow the taxonomy debates more closely than I do, so checking that is important. I know formatting, linking and punctuation is also important, and hotly debated, so I want to get that right. And we probably need a source check because what cites what may have gotten mixed up in the discussion. Anyway, as you were pinged in the original debate and we now need consensus to unlock the article and fix it, your input will help. Montanabw 16:35, 21 June 2020 (UTC)

@Montanabw: I've been away for over a week. Dropped in, and commented generally in support of the direction that's going. Can copy-edit the material later if it has grammar or clarity issues. I'm more concerned with how much it drills down into nit-picky details. I think it's okay, though it's not exactly how I would have approached it. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 02:35, 4 July 2020 (UTC)

Feedback request: Language and literature Good Article nomination

Your feedback is requested at Talk:Hobbit on a Good Article nomination. Thank you for helping out!
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Now this

Not sure the ping went through, so noting here. Just spotted where a now-blocked user moved a bunch of animal breed articles back to parenthetical disambiguation from natural disambiguation. As they did it in October and I'm only catching it now, I only moved back two just in case there was some kind of consensus change. The equine ones are definitely against project consensus, the rest are not my wheelhouse but I'm glad to comment. Talk:Campine_chicken#Here_we_go_again. Montanabw 20:14, 25 June 2020 (UTC)

@Montanabw: Argh. Well, this is easy to fix with a request to mass-revert undiscussed moves, at the subsection for that at WP:RMTR. Some admin will just fix it all in one swoop. While I have the PageMover bit, and could do it myself as a technical possibility, I would run afoul of WP:INVOLVED in doing so. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 02:30, 4 July 2020 (UTC)

"Template:R from subspecies to species" listed at Redirects for discussion

Done

A discussion is taking place to address the redirect Template:R from subspecies to species. The discussion will occur at Misplaced Pages:Redirects for discussion/Log/2020 June 29#Template:R from subspecies to species until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. 1234qwer1234qwer4 (talk) 18:46, 29 June 2020 (UTC)

Feedback request: Social sciences and society Good Article nomination

Your feedback is requested at Talk:Martín Insaurralde on a Good Article nomination. Thank you for helping out!
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Possible job

Hi @SMcCandlish: How are you? How do you feel about doing a couple of small jobs? I'm reviewing two articles for GA, at the moment and thought of yourself for the WP:MOS review. I'm not the best at it and generally rely of other people, the Gnomish folk, when I write my own articles. Your input would help greatly. Your ideal for it. scope_creep 08:04, 2 July 2020 (UTC)

@Scope creep: Can you link to the GA reviews? I'm not sure I have time for this, but we'll see. This is the first time I've been on in over a week. Not sure what your schedule is for this stuff (and whether it'll align with when I might get back on). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 02:33, 4 July 2020 (UTC)

Hi @SMcCandlish:. How are you? Thanks for getting back to me. I noticed that after I posted this message and thoughts were flashing through my head, as they do now. Glad to see you back. They are at: Talk:Mitsuharu Misawa/GA1 and Talk:Manned Orbiting Laboratory/GA1 (MOL). They are quite large. scope_creep 07:23, 4 July 2020 (UTC)

Schedule wise, fairly loose. I can work on the other aspects at the moment, for at least the next two weeks. scope_creep 07:31, 4 July 2020 (UTC)

Feedback request: Language and literature Good Article nomination

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Editing news 2020 #3

Seven years ago this week, the Editing team made the visual editor available by default to all logged-in editors using the desktop site at the English Misplaced Pages. Here's what happened since its introduction:

The 50 millionth edit using the visual editor on desktop was made this year. More than 10 million edits have been made here at the English Misplaced Pages.
More than 2 million new articles have been created in the visual editor. More than 600,000 of these new articles were created during 2019.
Almost 5 million edits on the mobile site have been made with the visual editor. Most of these edits have been made since the Editing team started improving the mobile visual editor in 2018.
The proportion of all edits made using the visual editor has been increasing every year.
Editors have made more than 7 million edits in the 2017 wikitext editor, including starting 600,000 new articles in it. The 2017 wikitext editor is VisualEditor's built-in wikitext mode. You can enable it in your preferences.
On 17 November 2019, the first edit from outer space was made in the mobile visual editor.
In 2019, 35% of the edits by newcomers, and half of their first edits, were made using the visual editor. This percentage has been increasing every year since the tool became available.

Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 02:06, 3 July 2020 (UTC)

Feedback request: Biographies request for comment

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Feedback request: Language and literature Good Article nomination

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Infobox RfC

Done

I'm proposing a redesign containing visual, technical and other improvements to {{Infobox radio station}} and {{Infobox broadcast}}. The discussion is located at Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Radio Stations/2020 infobox redesign proposal. As an editor active in editing radio and/or TV station articles, or in recent changes to the templates in question, I wanted to make you aware of this proposal and kindly ask for your feedback. Raymie (t • c) 05:29, 4 July 2020 (UTC)

Feedback request: Language and literature Good Article nomination

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Nomination of Comparison of cue sports for deletion

Done – This one's an obvious keep; will probably WP:SNOWBALL.

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Comparison of cue sports is suitable for inclusion in Misplaced Pages according to Misplaced Pages's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

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

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article. REDMAN 2019 (talk) 12:28, 5 July 2020 (UTC)

Feedback request: Language and literature Good Article nomination

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Template for Deletion that looks like it could use your input

Done

I found a TFD discussion that looks right up your alley in terms of having MOS implications. Just thought you could possibly have some good input if it hasn't already shown up on your radar. Van Isaac_WS 19:57, 6 July 2020 (UTC)

Feedback request: Social sciences and society Good Article nomination

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Feedback request: Social sciences and society Good Article nomination

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Feedback request: Social sciences and society Good Article nomination

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Template:char

I was more impressed and concerned by your reference to MOS:ACCESS than any of the other "I just don't like it" bluster. One of my motivations for contributing to the development of the template was a concern that the existing markup (a fairly random collection of {{code}}, single and double straight quotes, italics, parentheses and brackets) was disabling to visitors with some sight impairment. So it really annoys me that I failed to spot the implications for screen readers.

So before I do anything about an RFC, I want to resolve this issue first. As far as I am concerned, it is a complete show-stopper: if I can't resolve it, I will vote to delete.

MOS:ACCESS gives some clues: I'm sure you have better things to do than give me a tutorial but if you could point me at something that explains how readers deal with span style tags, where I might find more detail, I would be most grateful. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 14:37, 8 July 2020 (UTC)

@John Maynard Friedman: It just shouldn't rely on color and/or font alone; if it's marked up with <kbd>...</kbd> (which indicates keystrokes or other textual input, and is more loosely spec-defined than <code>...</code>), that's a sufficient HTML/CSS handle for anyone with a screen reader to tell their software to do something specific when encountering that element. But if there's no specific element, just some CSS coloring and/or font-family on a span, all screen readers will ignore it as irrelevant visual fluff. That would mostly be a problem when the content coincides with an English word like a or I, though it would probably also affect punctuation characters. We need them to be interpreted as characters in and of themselves in these cases, not as part of the regular flow of the sentence; I think by default most screen readers would just ignore one as mis-placed punctuation (a typo), though some might even do something more wrong, e.g. misinterpret a single-quote or double-quote character being presented as a glyph, as instead indicating the beginning of a quotation. While not everyone with a screen reader will do something to distinguish <kbd> markup, at least they have the option, and it won't be dependent on using a unique-to-WP CSS class, either, so easier to deal with on their end. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 22:08, 9 July 2020 (UTC)

Thank you, that is really helpful, it gives me a good foundation for further reading. For reasons that needn't bother you, I have decided to walk away from the debate around the char template, so won't be pursuing this particular instance of the question any further. I will however refer to it elsewhere so I trust that you won't object to my copying this to info to my user page. Best wishes. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 22:28, 9 July 2020 (UTC)

Whatever you need. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 22:35, 9 July 2020 (UTC)

Feedback request: Misplaced Pages policies and guidelines request for comment

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WP:RS/N

I read your 21:48, 9 July response in WP:RS/N to the 03:59 comment. I think you might want to be made aware that you attributed the " " comment to the wrong editor. This particular statement in the tag team belongs to 01:10. Pyxis Solitary (yak). L not Q. 06:37, 10 July 2020 (UTC)

@Pyxis Solitary: I was addressing both of their back-to-back and effectively indistinguishable comments at once; I've made that clearer now. Yesterday, I also left them both (and two others, for essentially the same gender-issues WP:BATTLEGROUND behavior, over at ANI) a {{Ds/alert|gg}}, in case they're thinking of escalating it. For what I think is the first time in 7 years of Ds/alerts, I have not received a revert notice, angry response on my talk page, "go hate on SMcCandlish" canvassing at a wikiproject talk page, silly attempt to ANI me for "making threats", or any other form of indignant grandstanding in response to a DS notice, despite having left four of them back to back. I take this as a good sign that they know they're not in the right to bring this kind of behavior here, and are going to tone it down. This may be overly optimistic. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 20:26, 10 July 2020 (UTC)

I'm glad that you did not take offense at my bringing it to your attention. As for Ds/alerts, I've found that some Misplaced Pages people are quick to point fingers and attack, then bitch and moan when it boomerangs. Pyxis Solitary (yak). L not Q. 10:15, 11 July 2020 (UTC)

@Pyxis Solitary: I was definitely being over-optimistic in at least one case . It's grounds for seeking a topic- and interaction-ban at AE, but I don't have much stomach for drama right now. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 10:18, 16 July 2020 (UTC)

Comment quote: "I hope to never interact with you again." Missing obvious: "..., and again, and again, until I get the last word." Pyxis Solitary (yak). L not Q. 10:26, 16 July 2020 (UTC)

Yeah, he even doubled-down on that, getting the last word on top of his own last word: When he self-reverted that post as unlikely to be productive, he couldn't resist adding another barb in the edit summary while doing so. So, the self-RV was an obviously WP:SANCTIONGAMING (though self-sabotaging) attempt at CYA, not an actual retraction. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 10:44, 16 July 2020 (UTC)

On cite

Regarding cite, I thought it might be prudent as an aside to point out that the W3C no longer maintains an active fork of the WHATWG spec. (It does create versioned documents e.g. 5.1 5.2 etc., but these are solely for the use of baselining the document for all.) As a result of the great re-merge, it appears that the use of cite allowed by W3C has been swallowed whole and in fact that the WHATWG editor maintaining HTML has doubled-down on deprecating <cite> as an element for anything but works. Contrary to the discussion surrounding the removal of the W3C version, as there were to be some amount of discussion related to merging the differences into the WHATWG version, no amount of which I was able to find online. Just to let you know. :) --Izno (talk) 18:37, 15 July 2020 (UTC)

That's unfortunate and stupid, and is unlikely to have any real-world impact, because it's hard-coded in a lot of blog packages, webboard software, and other content-management systems for what WP would call UGC, as the element surrounding all attribution details for reply-quoted material (most often a linked username and a date, sometimes also a # URL to the original post's location, and sometimes other information like the original writer's user level/status on the system, etc.). I've also seen it used for more typical citations in more than one bibliographic software package's HTML output. So, if the isolated and unresponsive, exclusionary echo chamber at WHATWG cannot convince the producers of all this software and more to change how they use that element, the (apparently now just de facto) use of it for citation information in general is going to continue indefinitely and as the overwhelming majority usage. It's stupid for other reasons, the most obvious being that not all citations are to works (though they are on WP of course, since what we cite must be "published"), and not all cited works take italic markup, and it breaks backward/forward basic compatibility with HTML 4. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 10:15, 16 July 2020 (UTC)

@Izno: I should probably ping, since you're not likely watchlisting my jabbering page. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 10:19, 16 July 2020 (UTC)

Of course I watch your talk page :^). I think this is a case of "we want it to match the default styles" rather than "we want it to match how people are using it", which totally defeats the purpose of why we have semantic HTML and not styled HTML and also defeats the purpose of having a living specification (to wit: that it is the use that comes first, not the specification). We should propose a <work> (along with proposing some suggested classes like <work class="lesser"> just to see what would happen. I'm sure the editor's brain would explode. :^) --Izno (talk) 14:19, 16 July 2020 (UTC)

I've written to them about this problem many times over the last 6 or so years, and the one time I got any response, it was extremely testy, and was basically just a defensive rant against W3C. Probably the most childish thing I've ever received from a formal organization other than FSF (lesson: do not put people with a temperament like Stallman's in positions of authority). I noticed that a lot of people (including some other Wikipedians and colleagues I know from other circles) were regularly updating WHATWG's wiki with various implementation and spec-conflict notes, so I registered to become an editor there, and document this "spec fork" and that actual usage is mostly the broader W3C definition of this element. My registration was blockaded, presumably by the same personage who flamed at me. So, forget those people. We all just have to work around them until they are replaced. If one wanted to change this, it would probably be more constructive to contact the right people at the browser makers, and get them to pressure WHATWG from inside its own little reality tunnel. It is not really plausible that the browser makers want their software incompatible with actual dominant usage. The spec was original broad to begin with, so the change to something very narrow (and stylistically wrong and impractical anyway) is an brain-fart they should just undo. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼

2nd opinion

You're move familiar with this issue. I've only looked back the last couple days and tried to fix two recurrences, but was reverted. I'm not willing to get involved any more with it than that at this time. -- Netoholic @ 03:04, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

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