User talk:BrownHairedGirl - Misplaced Pages

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Dicklyon (talk | contribs) at 05:34, 10 October 2019 (→Portal:United States: new section). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Revision as of 05:34, 10 October 2019 by Dicklyon (talk | contribs) (→Portal:United States: new section)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)

This user talk page might be watched by friendly talk page stalkers, which means that someone other than me might reply to your query. Their input is welcome and their help with messages that I cannot reply to quickly is appreciated.

BrownHairedGirl is a Misplaced Pages adminI have been an administrator since May 2006. Administrators have access to a few technical features which help with maintenance.

I regard admin powers as a privilege to be used sparingly and judiciously, but if you require the assistance of an admin, please feel free to leave a message on my talk page.

If you want admin help, please do try to explain clearly what you want done, and why, and please do remember to include any relevant links or diffs. I'll try to either help you myself or direct you to a more experienced person if appropriate.If you leave a new message on this page, I will reply on this page unless you ask me to reply elsewhere.

click here to leave a new
message for BrownHairedGirl

BrownHairedGirl's archives

List of archives

+ Cumulative index

mankind

well you have problem with the word mankind, what about mother nature, mother earth, mother land ? they arent gender neutral. some words are used in feminine sense , some in masculine sense, so why only those that have masculine terms offend you? ah well this isnt anything to do with[REDACTED] and its all upto you, just saying its kinda biased thats all... — Preceding unsigned comment added by 103.230.105.40 (talk) 15:29, 8 September 2019 (UTC)

I don't use those terms either. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 16:06, 8 September 2019 (UTC)

Ah ok, thanks for answering, please dont mind me going off topic, take care great wikipedian :) . — Preceding unsigned comment added by 103.230.105.40 (talk) 16:12, 8 September 2019 (UTC)

Thanks! -BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 17:09, 8 September 2019 (UTC)

The gender of the word for country depends on what Indo-European language you are using. In German, after all, the word is Vaterland. There is an interesting inconsistency in Latin, which is that the word for country is patria, which of course means fatherland, but patria is a first-declension feminine noun. Robert McClenon (talk) 21:33, 14 September 2019 (UTC)

Museu Nacional

Dear Madam,

As you took the Article of Museu Nacional of Rio De Janeiro to yourself, in the way you prefer do, I retire myself from the update Service. So continue regularly seeing the news about to complement the article according. It lacks latest information like is written here https://exame.abril.com.br/brasil/incendio-no-museu-nacional-completa-um-ano/ Please use google news daily about the Museu Nacional newspapers' articles to include daily like I did to represent the project of reconstruction, donations and all material about. Good Luck in your enterprise. Just do not pu 'United States' in portal like you did, because USA is not all over the world. --SeasSoul (talk) 20:58, 11 September 2019 (UTC)

@SeasSoul, I have no idea what you are talking about, or why on earth you have chosen to accuse me of being engaged in some exercise of planting the American flag everywhere. (I'm Irish, not American).

Please can you provide a link to the page you are talking about? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 21:10, 11 September 2019 (UTC)

as told you, you have to decide, two possibilities: 1. or you continue doing the updates in the page in a thema you nothing know and i dismiss or 2. I do the updates in the best way it should be... simply like that. — Preceding unsigned comment added by SeasSoul (talk • contribs) 09:14, 12 September 2019 (UTC)

@SeasSoul, please read WP:OWN. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 09:22, 12 September 2019 (UTC)

understood, so do by yourself, good luck — Preceding unsigned comment added by SeasSoul (talk • contribs) 09:39, 12 September 2019 (UTC)

Pings

I'd appreciate it if you would not ping me after I make it clear that I'm not interested in participating in a discussion. When my explicit reason for leaving the discussion is to cool off, pinging me is just deliberately provocative. If you want the last word, fine, but don't ping me again. Wug·a·po·des 06:34, 12 September 2019 (UTC)

But as a general principle, I always try to remember to ping another editor when replying to them or mentioning, as courtesy so that they know that they have been mentioned and can choose whether or not to reply.

I will try to remember to make you an exception, but I may forget. You are of course entirely free to ignore any pings you don't want to follow. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 07:17, 12 September 2019 (UTC)

Thanks. I don't expect you to be perfect, so no worries if you forget especially given that you intend it as a courtesy. Between on and off wiki stuff, I'm rather stressed at the moment and was on the verge of saying things that I would really regret. I didn't phrase it in the kindest of ways at the MFD, but it really is best if I stay out of that discussion unless or until I calm down enough to again recognize the good faith of you and others. Sorry if my lizard brain has caused you any additional stress. Wug·a·po·des 17:42, 12 September 2019 (UTC)

Verification

Hi! How are you doing? I have uploaded an non-free screenshot for an article today. Can you verify it to confirm it has fair use rationale? Here is the image. File:Jio Saavn screenshot.jpg Lakshmisreekanth (talk) 11:27, 12 September 2019 (UTC)

Hi Lakshmisreekanth

I'm a bad person to ask, because I deal with images so rarely that I have re-read from the ground each time to refresh my memory on the policies.

So I'm sorry, but you'd do better to ask at Misplaced Pages:Media copyright questions, where you'll find editors who are familiar with the licensing issues.

Best wishes, --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 11:53, 12 September 2019 (UTC)

Thank you BrownHairedGirl! No problem. Regards! -- Lakshmisreekanth (talk) 03:32, 13 September 2019 (UTC)

Cymru Sovereign

Please note- the name of the Cymru Sovereign party is Cymru Sovereign as originally noted. Please kindly explain why this was changed without any need at all? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Richard the bread man (talk • contribs) 23:39, 14 September 2019 (UTC)

Hi Richard the bread man

As indicated in he prominent editnotice visible at the top of this page when you edit it, please link to the page which are concerned about.

I have no recollection of ever editing such a page, let alone renaming it, so I dunno why you are asking me. But if you give me the link I'll look into it. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 00:05, 15 September 2019 (UTC)

Refund request

Hi! I recently became aware that the social movements portal was deleted (when you removed links to it from a couple pages I have watchlisted). Here is a comment from the mfd: a decade of hard evidence shows Social Movements are not a broad enough topic to attract readers or maintainers. (MfD: source)

I would be very interested in seeing what the page looked like when it was deleted. I am not suggesting that I'm necessarily going to try to recreate it, since I see that there are a couple people (yourself included) who seem to think that would be a bad idea. It really strikes me as strange that a crowdsourced encyclopedia would have so much trouble maintaining a portal at a time when governments in Africa are being overthrown because of such movements (Algeria, Sudan), where millions are in the streets in HK, etc. ...

If you would be willing to refund this to my sandbox, so I can take a look at it, I would really appreciate it. I would also be interested in any comments you might have about what might make such a portal work beter (or why portals as a whole are dead, perhaps, and what would be a better (automated/wikidatian?) substitute). Thanks for your time BHG! 🌿 SashiRolls 10:32, 15 September 2019 (UTC)

Hi SashiRolls

Portal:Social movements was deleted by User:Jo-Jo Eumerus, so I think you'd better ask them. As a WP:INVOLVED admin, I think it's best that i don't use admin tools here, even for a WP:REFUND.

Personally, I am not in the slightest surprised that the portal failed. The overwhelming majority of portals have failed, because they are hard to maintain, and add no value for readers. Wise editors don't put their efforts into unread uselessness.

Web portals were a mid-1990s craze, which faded fast once Google offered powerful search and websites offered massive linking instead of just a "back to homepage" link. By the time Misplaced Pages adopted portals in 2005, they were already a redundant technology. So the more clueful editors abandoned them long ago, and the dwindling crew who tweak a small subset of the collection are bereft of any effective ideas on what to do with them. Their attempt at automation was a disaster, and since then their main concern is moaning about the deletion of junk portals which have been abandoned for a decade with almost no readers.

I thoroughly agree with what you say about how social movements are a hugely important topic area. So they need a good head article, because that's where the readers go. (After analysing hundreds of portals at MFD, the norm is that the head article is viewed somewhere between 100 and 2000 times as often as the portal).

So why not concentrate your efforts on the head article social movement? It's languishing as a C-class article which reads like a set of excerpts from a final-year secondary school testbook. It's dry as dust, and almost devoid of coverage of the explosion of social movements in the social media era. The theoretical stiff is great, but this is an encyclopedia article not a textbook, and it's missing the other components which make a well-rounded article. It would be wonderful to see you bring that article up to FA-class or even GA-class. And if you don't feel up to that, why not make a navbox? A good navbox is a zillion times more useful than any portal, because a) it displays all the links at the same time, and b) it's directly visible on every page in the set. If you make a good, comprehensive navbox with 100+ links, I can guarantee you that it will be on pages viewed by somewhere between 500 and 10,000 times as many readers as the portal. (No kidding on those numbers, BTW; that really is the scale of difference).

Hope that helps.

Best wishes, --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 11:15, 15 September 2019 (UTC)

Thanks a lot, I appreciate your response. I'll follow up with the admin who actually deleted the portal, because I remain curious. While the technology may have been rendered less useful for en.wp with all its google juice, I imagine if en.wp were ever downgraded due to new algorithmetic, the older magazine approach might come back (and for those mediawiki installations without the google juice may still be interesting).

I agree a navbox would be a good thing, but sadly the 21st century navbox was renamed then deleted (after the rename moved it off my watchlist) by determined wikipedians back in June (the argument there was that the subject area was too broad, whereas it's apparently too narrow for a portal ^^) : §. There is a list one can link to, and a new "ongoing protests" nav-box which is nowhere near as well organized as the deleted navbox was.

Thanks for your reply, I really appreciate it. I'll have a look at the social movements entry again and follow up with Jo-Jo Eumerus. Not being a specialist, I'm not sure that I know what would help an entry at that level of abstraction. 🌿 SashiRolls 12:10, 15 September 2019 (UTC)

Glad that was of some help, SashiRolls.

To be honest, even if Google died and wp's internal search was killed, I still don't see how a portal would help. The magazine-format breaks if it goes much over 20 articles per set, no matter which technology is used, so it's no use for the scale of the topic. Automation doesn't work, because Misplaced Pages's metadata is far too crude and the software to process it is far too limited, even if WikiData is used.

Even if you exercised magic to produce something stunning, you'd still have the problem that nobody reads portals. Look at the daily average pageviews for all portals. The top 11 look impressive, but are those are linked from the mainpage, which averages over 16 million daily views. Set against that, 1,304 / day views of Portal:Geography is actually absymal. Only 53 portals, on v broad topics, get over 100 view/day .. whereas the article Social_movement has a median of 737 daily views.

The alternative "mega-navbox" format pioneered by Bermicourt (see e.g. Portal:Mecklenburg-Vorpommern) scales much better, and I was quite a fan of it for a while. But in practice, readers don't seem any more attracted to it ... so I now think that it would be much better implemented as a series of interlinked navboxes. For an example I made, see Template:County Antrim constituencies and the rest of the set of 31 interlinked navboxes in Category:Ireland constituency navigational boxes. I made that set a few years back, to cover 700 years worth of constituencies across 32 counties in 8 different parliaments. I think it works pretty well, because a) it provides a lot of rich data around each title, and b) it makes each constituency only two clicks away from any other constituency.

I see what happened at WP:TFD/Template:Political protests in the 21st century, and I should have thought of that and realised it's way too broad. But please don't give up on the navbox idea; it just needs to be broken down more. Sure it would take a lot of work to implement it, but it doesn't need to be all built at once, and each chunk of it would be way more valuable than a portal which readers won't want even if it's shoved in the face of 16 million of them every day ... which Portal:Social movements never will be. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 12:49, 15 September 2019 (UTC)

Thanks again. I definitely got much more than my original investment out of this transaction. I appreciate both the nested templating example (nice work!) and the perspective! ^^ 🌿 SashiRolls 22:41, 16 September 2019 (UTC)

Nicholas Paul of Trinidad and Tobago

Good afternoon I am from Trinidad and Tobago and I am kindly informing you that the flying 200 meter men's world record havebeing broken by Nicholas Paul of Trinidad and Tobago recently can you kindly update this information on the chart please I will appreciate your effort thank you. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 138.59.24.24 (talk) 16:20, 18 September 2019 (UTC)

What chart, where> and why ask me? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 13:24, 19 September 2019 (UTC)

Please edit Antifa page

Hey, BrownHairedGirl I read your Antifa page and noticed that you said that Antifa “engage(s) in varied protest tactics, which include digital activism, property damage, physical violence, and harassment against those whom they identify as fascist, racist, or on the far-right”. I know for a fact that Antifa also targets, and threatens moderate conservatives as well. Two examples of this would be the one guy who threatened to car bomb Steven Crowder, and Andy Ngo being beaten up by a mob of Antifa Protestors. It’s important to me that the right and the left are able to both call out wrong when something is universally wrong, and the violence acted out by antifa is no worse than the horrors that the KKK did decades ago. Please make sure you note that Antifa targets moderates, not just lunatic alt right extremists do that we can all acknowledge and call out hate wherever it may lie. Thanks! — Preceding unsigned comment added by BlakeHoldt (talk • contribs) 20:37, 18 September 2019 (UTC)

Hi BlakeHoldt

I don't have an "Antifa page"
I never wrote those words.

Best wishes, --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 13:23, 19 September 2019 (UTC)

Articles for Deletion

Sorry to bother you, but I noticed you as you edited the Khan Sheilkhoun article. I want an article looked at for possible deletion as it seems of no merit, or reported on in RS, so I put the afd template up. The articles creator, without discussion, improvement of the article, or anything at all, removed it. I thought this was not allowed, but then reading the template it does say 'this may be removed if there is any objection at all to it without any reason needing to be given'. Something like that. So the creator of a worthless article has the ability to keep it there forever? Isn't that seriously leaky as a system? It seems to me to invite extreme and fringe figures to create all kinds of worthless articles and give them the ability to keep them there forever. Is there really no need for the creator of an article to provide RS discussing, in this case, his piddling extremist Party, not just a set of election results. Anybody can stand in an election, are they all worth having articles about? Bulldog Antz (talk) 13:13, 19 September 2019 (UTC)

Hi Bulldog Antz, I dunno what page you are talking about, because you overlooked the line in my big editnotice at the top of the page when you edit it: "Please help me to locate what you are referring to, by including links and diffs in your message".

Khan Sheilkhoun is a redlink, so I dunno where to look. If you give me a link, I will look into this. But without a link, I can't comment. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 13:21, 19 September 2019 (UTC)

Oh no, I mean I noticed you edited the chemical attack at Khan Sheikhoun page, and were an administrator, so I wanted to ask for some general advice about Misplaced Pages policy, in particular about 'articles for deletion'. How to keep an article for deletion template in place until concerns had been properly addressed. The page I am concerned about is Cymru Sovereign, as it looks to me like a page established by a Partys creator, without the Party being of any proven importance or interest whatever in Reliable Sources. If you have no experience with Articles for Deletion, then perhaps you could tell me an Administrator who has advice about that area, or if not, then I'm sorry to have bothered you with this. Bulldog Antz (talk) 13:36, 19 September 2019 (UTC)

Ah, thanks Bulldog Antz. That's clearer.

Basically. you seem to have gotten have confused between two different process: WP:PROD and WP:AFD.

You PRODded the page, then Richard the bread man removed the PROD tag], as he was entitled to do. See how the tag says "You may remove this message if you improve the article or otherwise object to deletion for any reason".

AFD tags can't be removed. But PROD can.

I see that you have restored the PROD tag, which you shouldn't have done, so I will revert that. If you still believe that the article should be deleted, you need to use WP:AFD. It's a bit of a daunting process at first, so take your time to read WP:AFD and also Misplaced Pages:Deletion policy.

Good luck! --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:05, 19 September 2019 (UTC)

Thank you for the advice. I'll read the policy statements as I do think the article should be deleted. Bulldog Antz (talk) 14:10, 19 September 2019 (UTC)

@Bulldog AntzGlad that was some help!

I haven't taken a view on whether the article should be deleted. I am just trying to helping you to make whatever case you want to make. So here's a few further suggestions:

If you decide to take the article to WP:AFD, install and use WP:TWINKLE. It makes the job much easier: just fill in the form and press submit. Otherwise you have to edit at least 4 pages, which is tedious and risks errors.
Before you write the AFD nomination, take a wee while to look at other AFD nominations to see some examples of how to structure them. You'll find today's nominations at WP:AFD/T
It's often easiest to daft an AFD nomination offline (i.e. in a text editor or word processor) and then paste the result into the edit window.

Hope this helps. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:21, 19 September 2019 (UTC)

Ad hominem attacks

An IP has resorted to ad hominem attacks which do not even see to be related to me at Talk:Research_and_Analysis_Wing#Addition_of_sources_and_information. Could you please look into this? --Tamravidhir (talk) 16:47, 19 September 2019 (UTC)

There are around three IP addresses involved in this. --Tamravidhir (talk) 17:02, 19 September 2019 (UTC)

~~I am pinging @Yunshui: and @Titodutta: here. --Tamravidhir (talk) 17:13, 19 September 2019 (UTC)~~

@Tamravidhir: That's nasty, PAs plus attempted outing. It doesn't matter whether or not you are any of the persons named; this is unacceptable.

Please bear with me while I figure out the next steps. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 17:18, 19 September 2019 (UTC)

I understand that it doesn't matter. But as a matter of fact, I am not. --Tamravidhir (talk) 17:20, 19 September 2019 (UTC)

@Tamravidhir: best not to go there at all. Don't give them anything either way. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 17:26, 19 September 2019 (UTC)

I shall do that. The full article here was earlier not showing up on my article earlier. I checked it on another device and it does mention the Ordnance Factory, should I include the same in the article for now or if you would be able to do it? --Tamravidhir (talk) 17:31, 19 September 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for the quick action. Regards. --Titodutta (talk) 17:49, 19 September 2019 (UTC)

Sorry, Tamravidhir, but I haven't the time or energy to get into the article content, and I don't think it would be appropriate for me to do so. But I have blocked the IP, and WP:REVDELed the edits. I fear I have not done a great job om the revdels, so I have emailed oversight to ask them to sort it out. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 18:13, 19 September 2019 (UTC)

I understand that. Thank you for the help and quick response I shall look into the edits. --Tamravidhir (talk) 18:20, 19 September 2019 (UTC)

Setting up automation

I haven't been able to figure out how to set up automation to automatically put the banner on pages related to H. P. Lovecraft, as reccommended. Can you help?--Auric talk 10:50, 21 September 2019 (UTC)

@Auric: I recommend that unless and until your ill-considered and unsupported project/taskforce actually gains enough participants to make it viable, that you desist from disruptively splatting its banner on talk pages from which it will need to be removed whenever this project/taskforce is eventually deleted.

As you know, right now it has precisely zero participants apart from yourself.

Tskforces don't need a separate banner. So if and when it does become a taskforce, then it should be included in {{WikiProject Horror}} and activated with a flag, just as is already the case with WP:HORROR's one existing taskforce, the Saw task force. The fact that the Saw task force is defunct should be taken as further evidence that you are just adding another item to the set of 3,968 defunct WikiProjects and 787 inactive WikiProjects.

You could of course ask at WP:BOTREQ. However, BOT request will be acted upon only if there is consensus for the proposed action ... so if you do ask, please make sure to that your request is clear about the lack of any consensus so far to crate this project, and to include links to:

The same applies to any AWB user you you may ask. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 11:20, 21 September 2019 (UTC)

I looked at BOTREQ, but that page seems to be for bots themselves, not bot tasks. If or when something gets approved, I'd like to be able to have this task avalible, but I don't need a seperate bot.--Auric talk 11:28, 21 September 2019 (UTC)

@Auric: The first sentence of body text of that page says "This is a page for requesting tasks to be done by bots". I don't see how that coulkd be any clearer.

Applications to authorise a proposed new bot are at WP:BRFA.

I was just scanning WP:WikiProject Council/Proposals. The lead of that page says If you do not have a group of people, then you do not have a WikiProject, even if you have created a WikiProject page. A WikiProject is the people, not the page.

Auric does not have a of group people, so Auric does not have a WikiProject. Please stop spamming the banner of this non-existent project onto talk pages. as you have been doing. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 11:35, 21 September 2019 (UTC)

You yourself pointed out that I'd only tagged 14 pages, which I'd held off of doing. But since you seemed to think this was a mark against the project, I started doing it.--Auric talk 11:42, 21 September 2019 (UTC)

@Auric: I noted all the actions you had taken. I did not ask or encourage you to add more banners. Please stop, and revert those you have added. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 11:44, 21 September 2019 (UTC)

I will, but please stop reverting mine.--Auric talk 11:47, 21 September 2019 (UTC)

Multiple category pages with link to nonexistent Template:PortalUnited States

You recently made a number of edits like this one that link to {{PortalUnited States}}, which does not exist. It is unclear to me what your intention was. I tried to change the transclusion call to {Portal:United States|History}, but I end up with a page full of errors. Can you please take a look at Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:PortalUnited States and correct your edits? Thanks. – Jonesey95 (talk) 13:51, 21 September 2019 (UTC)

@Jonesey95: I have fixed these. Cheers! bd2412 T 14:15, 21 September 2019 (UTC)
- Thanks! I had tried a colon instead of a pipe. I don't work with portals much. – Jonesey95 (talk) 14:27, 21 September 2019 (UTC)

Oops! Sorry, @Jonesey95. Thanks for the fixes, @BD2412. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:26, 21 September 2019 (UTC)

My pleasure. Cheers! bd2412 T 15:31, 21 September 2019 (UTC)

Gosport constituency

Hey BHG. Could you look at Gosport constituency please? I'm having a right old back and forth with the not very neutral "Gosport Brexit Party" account. Thanks if you can help. doktorb _words 11:00, 22 September 2019 (UTC) @doktorb: linky link, please? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 19:15, 22 September 2019 (UTC)

Advice requested

Hello, I have been thinking for awhile about how best to handle the various lists of oldest people by country/continent. Is it possible to have an RfC at the village pump about this? I long have wondered about what would be a "good" number of entries for a country/continent page, and as someone who long edited in that topic and followed it longer still, I've come to the conclusion that none of those lists has any merit. Misplaced Pages is not a directory of old people, and lists such as Oldest people, List of the verified oldest people, List of the oldest people by country, and List of the oldest living people adequately cover this topic at best, and are more likely part of the problem at worst. All of these lists were based on how the GRG did things, and while much of the overt deference to the GRG has been stripped away over the years, as have articles like List of oldest people by year of birth, List of verified supercentenarians who died in 2002, and List of supercentenarians born in Austria-Hungary, this whole topic on Misplaced Pages is still based on their cottage industry. (This dif has a good list of red links to deleted crud articles).

Whether it's 100 or 20 entries, we don't need horse-race WP:OR lists built around arbitrary age thresholds the GRG decided. Why don't old people in Latvia or Iran get lists, but old people in Denmark and Japan do? How come someone who dies at 109 in Sweden is considered so much less notable then someone from the same country at 110? And even at an age 110 threshold, are we going to eventually have a 100 strong list for every country on earth? The lists are built around age 110 because that was the target group of the GRG. They only do age 112+ validations now, so RfC's on country lists earlier this year stripped away the rule that someone needed GRG verification to be ranked, but the above fundamental problems with this whole set up remain. There is also heavy duplication of entires across lists, so that someone can be on 3, 4, or 5 lists and have an individual article. This is a maintenance nightmare.

There is also over a decade long history of repeated edit warring, sockpuppetry, the arbcom case, and endless disputes over inclusion or dates. The benefits of this information are not at all worth the overhead. An editor has also taken to adding religious nicknames to nun list entries and maiden names (often based on OR ancestry sites) to as many list entries as they can. This is pure fancruft and WP:NNPOV. When challenged about the nicknames, they said something like "Identity isn't fancruft," but they are not adding non-religious nicknames and "Big Bubba" is just as much part of someone's identity as "Sister Mary" is. There has always been an enormous amount of fancruft in this topic...

All of these lists are still primarily free webhosting of the GRG's data, and many news reports cite Misplaced Pages's lists, so there is certainly a degree of circular-reporting going on.

So in sum, ideally, I'd like to have a well-crafted RfC on doing away with such lists. Help would be much appreciated! Newshunter12 (talk) 02:08, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

Hi @Newshunter12

As I think we have discussed before, I have been concerned for a while about this, but from a different angle. The long-term problems of the appalling conduct of the GRG/WOP crew let to mind-warping battles with them. I personally did several months of tangling with Robert Young and his sidekicks plus their army of worker bees, and they were appalling people to deal with. Young couldn't even manage the technical issue of participating in a discussion: he was a rage ball jumping from issue to issue, and his posts were unreadable because he never learnt how to link to a diff, and instead splat-pasted huge multi-screenfull chunks of other discussions into his replies, while his minions with nothing to say piled into like an angry mob.

It took so many years to put an end to all that there was a lot of cleanup to do.

Both the battles and the sheer scale of the cleanup has left some good faith editors with a negative feeling about the whole topic. I fear that this has led some editors to delete encyclopedic articles simply because the GRG supported them, rather than because they fail en.wp policies. As you know, I stuck my neck out for a while to object to the systematic AFDing of articles which clearly did pass GNG, and I was horrified at the way there seemed to be a tag team which simply dismissed all evidence, and invented policy to suit their purposes.

So I am wary of any further deletions in this area. Being the oldest living person in a given country is clearly a notable attribute; even the quality newspapers pay attention to that, as they do to other cases of extreme longevity. And I am not worried about media referencing en.wp; it's a compliment, and it happens in many topic ares, though it is often unacknowledged. (My creation at List of women cabinet ministers of the Republic of Ireland is often used by old and new media, tho rarely cited)

The threshold of 100, a "century" clearly has long-term cultural significance. The centenarian concept of Centenarian has long been celebrated. And the concept of a Supercentenarian long predates the GRG; see this from Ireland in 1870 https://www.newspapers.com/image/61101720/?terms=supercentenarian

The vast bulk of the longevity cruft has been cleared out, and what we are left with is mostly lists.

Lists are one of the things that Misplaced Pages does well, and they are popular with readers. We currently have 3,513 featured lists. The longevity lists seem popular too: e.g. List of Irish supercentenarians averaged 37 views per day in Jan–Jun 2019.

Deleting these lists would in most cases remove the last trace of this info from Misplaced Pages, and I can't see any justification for that other than a residual animosity from the last antics of the GNG.

Sure there is still a set of crazed fans making mischief, but that's a conduct issue which happens in many other areas, and it's no reason to delete a topic. I also think that you are mistaken in some of your concerns, such as adding the religious name of a nun; that's what they were known as for most of their lives, so it significant data abut someone's identity. Obviously, it needs proper sourcing; but if reliably sourced, it certainly should be included.

So I think that that if there were any effort to delete these lists, I'd oppose it. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 04:59, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

Thank you for your view of this concern. I guess I won't pursue the matter any further and on a side note, I already had largely lost interest in the topic, aside from that issue, so we are unlikely to have any more friction there. For the record, I do personally have a lot of respect for nuns' religious identities, I just don't think there is anything policy-wise underpinning including those names vs. other NN. And what better way to get your mind off the troubles in portal-land would there have been then a trip to longevity-world. It's not like it would have been out of the frying pan and into the fire or something.

(p.s. How do you think the portal RfC is going so far?) Newshunter12 (talk) 05:24, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

Which portal RFC, User:Newshunter12? The one that I am discussing below, or another RFC that is idle talk, or another real RFC? If you mean the one below, see below. Robert McClenon (talk) 06:27, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

@Robert McClenon I meant the one currently at the Village Pump started by Bermicourt, that is presently slowly going off the rails. Newshunter12 (talk) 08:25, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

User:Newshunter12 Which Village Pump? Policy? Robert McClenon (talk) 09:36, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

@Robert McClenon: WP:Village_pump_(proposals)#Proposal_to_delete_Portal_space. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 09:39, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

Yuck. I hadn't seen it. I now wish that I hadn't seen it. Robert McClenon (talk) 14:59, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

OTOH

@Newshunter12 & @Robert McClenon. I think it's only fair to share with you the evidence of my wickedness. In light of this evidence, you may want to reconsider whether any dialogue with me is appropriate. I do hope you won't decide to shun me, but it's only fair that you should know about this. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 15:12, 25 September 2019 (UTC)

Well, at least that provides me with the information that I am not sure that I wanted about this Robert Young flamer. What I see is that BHG is correct that he is a flamer, and it is easy to accept that his beehive consists of appalling people. I also see that he thought he knew how Misplaced Pages is organized, while giving away the fact that he didn't know how Misplaced Pages is organized. (There is no disgrace in not knowing how Misplaced Pages is organized. But if you act like you have knowledge, you expose yourself as a fool if you are wrong.) He posted an appeal addressed to the ArbCom at WP:ANI, showing that he knows what the ArbCom is, and that he knows that there is a WP:ANI, but he doesn't know the difference that there are (and were in 2007) two ways to complain about conduct, to the community and to the ArbCom. Oh well. Sometimes flamers just burn out. I wonder whether this also applies to portalflamers. Robert McClenon (talk) 15:56, 25 September 2019 (UTC)

After a great deal of soul searching, I am willing to not drop you on the spot for your actions BHG because you managed to not fly into an uncontrollable rage at multiple editors calling you BrownEyedGirl. I am still disgusted by your actions, however. What kind of person would PROD and AFD numerous articles on very old people for lacking notability or having insufficient citations? A bully, a bigot, and maybe even a terrorist, that's who. I see you even moved on to targeting chronological lists of oldest people by country sections, like here. Over 14,000 bytes of critical content gone because of your hate and ignorance. I thought Ireland wasn't supposed to have any snakes? Clearly, St. Patrick missed one. And now you have another Robert set in your sights. The witches told Macbeth to beware Macduff, but I say unto you Robert, beware BrownHairedGirl! She even talks about stabbing people on her userpage - the reincarnation of Vlad the Impaler??? Breath Breath It's going to be alright, NH12. I don't have to run faster then BHG, just faster than the person I'm with. Newshunter12 (talk) 17:47, 25 September 2019 (UTC)

Damn. I was trying to keep the whole impaling thing a secret. Do I need to kill you, or will bribery suffice to secure your silence?

Anyway, thanks for giving me another chance. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 18:05, 25 September 2019 (UTC)

Bribery will suffice, Madame. Newshunter12 (talk) 02:35, 26 September 2019 (UTC)

Portal guideline RFCs

As you and I know, there was an RFC that was shortnamed WP:POG2019RFC to re-formalize the portal guidelines. The RFC was, as planned, closed by Legobot on or about 17 or 18 August 2019. The RFC was then moved from Village pump (policy) to Archive 153. The shortcut still works, and now takes one to Archive 153, as it should. The RFC was then listed in the requests for RFC closure, and has been waiting for RFC closure for the past two weeks. I then added a separate smaller RFC on the purposes of portals. As we know, these RFCs did not get a positive response from the portal platoon, and a quick look on my part would suggest that the result of the first one, WP:POG2019RFC, should be No Consensus, which leaves us right where we started, unless someone is willing to try again. I think that I will mention in a few places, such as the MFD talk page, neutrally, that it is waiting for closure. Should we have some plan for what to do if it is No Consensus, which will mean that there are no official Portal Guidelines? Robert McClenon (talk) 05:20, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

Hi Robert McClenon, I think that de-guidelining POG would mean that portal MFDs will have to rely on WP:COMMONSENSE, a prospect which will be deeply traumatic for some of the more excitable members of the Guild Of Defenders Of Conceptually Krazy, Abysmally Maintained, Mostly Unread, Rubbish Design, Antiquated Portals (GODOCKAMMURDAP).

MFD will be able to proceed much as before, but with less wikilawyering. They principles of broad topic, lots of readers, multiple maintainers, and active/involved WikiProject are all common sense, so we can continue to assess portals in he same way against those criteria. Those who have claim that POG supports a page which displays one topic at a time with a purge-to-see-next-random-item from an invisible list, or that 15 items is a broad topic, or a selection of 20 make a useful portal, etc, will have a very hard time defending that as common sense.

I hope that some support services will be available for GODOCKAMMURDAP. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 05:40, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

Well, there is a distinction between common sense and WP:COMMONSENSE. You will notice that in the nomination for Portal:Nintendo, I referred to the common sense of the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, which is the same as the common sense of the philosophers of the Roman Empire. French and German philosophers of the eighteenth century may or may not have used common sense. I also noted that the portal advocates didn't appear to have common sense. But the loss of the guideline won't stop the wikilawyering, because they still believe that the guideline only refers to broad areas, and they also really still believe that what is a broad subject area can be determined a priori, that is, by consulting a continental philosopher. They really apparently believe that what is a broad area can be determined abstractly by some sort of portal mysticism, because portals apparently have some mystical quality. Of course, if you read the discussion of portals in fiction, the portals really are mystical. Robert McClenon (talk) 06:24, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

WP:POG is a fraudulent guideline, and should never have been tagged as one, and should be detagged immediately. It denigrates every other policy page to have a fraudulent dream page tagged as {{guideline}}. The current "The status of this page as a policy or guideline is the subject of a current discussion" can at least be tolerated. Unfortunately, the discussion was derailed by the multiple gratuitous half-baked RfCs that some people throw into air every time a question is difficult.

It fits my old observations that led to my proposal at WT:Requests for comment/Archive 12#Too many RfCs. Require a seconder for every RfC. Regrettably, that proposal was not supported by my usually agreeing friend, User:WhatamIdoing. However, I still think I am right. Misplaced Pages culture is not very advanced when it comes to running RfCs. The difference between a successful discussion and a failed discussion is often the question posed. Can I suggest that neither of you launch another RfC on Portals without at least two people in explicit agreement on the quality of the question? Also, for the watchlisting benefits, please make it its own subpage of the most relevant page.

In the meantime, it is unpleasantly humorous to watch so many abysmal portal failures fail the hopelessly lax guideline, but at some point, as the portal MfD nominators work their way along the quality spectrum from the long poor-quality end, its going to get more interesting, and honesty about objective measures would be more honest. WP:POG does not provide meaningful objective measures of the function of a portal. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 06:08, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

@SmokeyJoe, I entirely agree about half-baked RFCs, and the end for seconders (personally, I'd say 5 co-signs). Bermicourt's VPR thread has now been turned into another badly designed one.

For the record, I have no recollection of me ever opening a portal RFC.

A to portal MFDs, I have been astonished by the length of what has turned out to be a long tail of abysmal portals. I initially thought it would be about 200, but it's already at nearly 900, and I reckon there's at lest 100 more failures to be MFDed. Thereafter we will need to start seeking consensus on criteria, which will be a nightmare because a) some of most zealous and vocal portal fans are not very bright, and are hard to reason with; b) for most of the key portal fans, their priority seems to be to be able to keep on making/maintaining pages which don't require them to engage with the much more demanding requirements of writing a actual article. So it won't be a pleasant or fruitful process. The best solution would be to move all portals to project space, where those who want to play with portals can play away to their heart's content, untroubled by us nasty people who insist on utility and quality. That may be the kindest thing to do for GODOCKAMMURDAP. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 06:38, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

You have no recollection of ever opening a portal RFC? Sorry. You started a pre-RfC userspace discussion, inviting four individuals, but not me. And I think you may have started a discussion on multiple pages, or maybe you were just there, I get confused easily by multiple parallel discussions.

I predict that the portal MFDs will continue deleting until the last 100. In the last 100, the delete !voters are likely to be so well trained that they may push to the final 10. Then I think a better discussion may start.

The pageviews count attrition, from Main page, to main page linked portals, to the next level, show a ~ thousand fold attrition, if you subtract from the baseline an estimate for web crawlers and Misplaced Pages bots. I think after the top 20-100, the reader page views are ~zero. Its all webcrawlers, bots and gnomes. One thousand fold attrition across two levels is basically proof for me that when a reader enters, they then almost always turn around and walk straight out again. This is not the Misplaced Pages they came looking for. That for sure was my experience, when I first met a Portal, when TPH nominated one. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 06:51, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

I agree with SmokeyJoe that this will very likely entail MfDing far more then 100 more portals. I also disagree with you BHG that we need to push for new guidelines after about 100 more, in the sense that we should hold off on that for as long as possible. The fewer portals there are in play, the easier new guidelines will be to enact or to eliminate portal space. Portal space has always been protected by its mass. From my understanding, no one competent outside realized what an enormous disaster it was until after TTH's spam drew attention to portal-land. So many resist eliminating portal space because of the dream that portals are this great reader asset and we have so many of these great things. Many portal fans just aren't bright enough to understand that these abandoned wrecks are helping no one or that nearly all portals are abandoned wrecks or are essentially unviewed by humans.

As unpleasant as it is, just continuing to MfD junk portals one by one is our way forward for now. Open question: is there any way to estimate the number of non-human portal views? That's a largely unused point at MfD. Also, how much does anyone want to bet that Bermicourt uses the failure of their own RfC to argue there is community consensus to keep all portals? Newshunter12 (talk) 09:06, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

I see portal fans gave been spamming keep votes that can be summed up as: WP:POG is not a guideline! Or: who says 4 views a day (and nearly five years to get one days worth of the head articles views) is low! Or for a portal abandoned for ten years: its just taking time to fill out! The backlog at MfD is attracting all kinds of disruptive keep votes not based in reality. These people deserve an ARBCOM case, and unless that happens, I think I might be done with MfD. It's just not worth my time cleaning up a mess I didn't create and that has this level of disruption. If Misplaced Pages can't eliminate portal fan nonsense, then it doesn't deserve my time and hard work any longer. Newshunter12 (talk) 17:53, 26 September 2019 (UTC)

@Newshunter12: don't panic. Without POG, we just use WP:COMMONSENSE. See e.g. my comment here. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 18:50, 26 September 2019 (UTC)

It's not that I'm panicking, BHG. I'm seeing this situation for what it is. I've been very active at MfD since early August, devoting many long hours to this clean up effort that has been repeatedly hampered by portal fan ridiculousness divorced from fact and reality. Now the disruption is going to be worse then ever, all the while admins aren't even closing many MfD's and are letting them get hijacked by unserious people. We can't just use common sense when some people clearly don't have any, but yet are allowed to do whatever they want with full weight given to their actions. A fundamental flaw in this whole system is that like American politics, anyone can participate and the unsaid truth in that country and here is that many people are just stupid. Oligarchs make all the real decisions in America, just as the children here make all the broader decisions about Portal space. Life is short, and if Misplaced Pages wants more of my finite lifespan to be spent improving it then it can't just take. It needs to give a proper volunteer setting free from people clearly with no business being involved with portals. That something as dysfunctional and abjectly failed as Portal space was not nixed from "higher up" long ago speaks very ill of this whole set-up of Misplaced Pages. We both know the facts are stark enough to warrant a nuclear option for this playground (which shouldn't have been started in 2005 to begin with). I've really enjoyed working with you on this cleanup effort, especially receiving the Barnstar of Diligence from you. You're an intelligent, articulate woman, and it's too bad this wasn't the physical world, or I'd invite you to go on a walk. I'll check back here and respond to messages, but I'll be going on a wiki-break that may not have an end point. Newshunter12 (talk) 04:07, 27 September 2019 (UTC)

New Consensus on Criteria?

User:BrownHairedGirl wrote: “I initially thought it would be about 200, but it's already at nearly 900, and I reckon there's at lest 100 more failures to be MFDed. Thereafter we will need to start seeking consensus on criteria, which will be a nightmare because a) some of most zealous and vocal portal fans are not very bright, and are hard to reason with; b) for most of the key portal fans, their priority seems to be to be able to keep on making/maintaining pages which don't require them to engage with the much more demanding requirements of writing a actual article.” Then don’t seek consensus on criteria, but continue the salami-slicing until the portal fans stop whining and start thinking, or until they actually explain what they want portals to do. I think that there may be a few hundred more portals deleted, not just 100 more, before the portal fans (and I will call them portalistas and a portal platoon) are willing to discuss. I see no value to forcing the nightmare. A nightmare occurs between waking and sleeping. Let them sleep until they wake up. I made my effort to seek consensus on criteria, which some of us thought had always been the criteria. I don’t see the need to seek consensus on criteria again any time soon. Robert McClenon (talk) 19:18, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

Seconds on RFCs?

I respectfully disagree that there should be no RFCs without a second. There is at least one situation in which RFCs are necessary, and may not get a second, and do resolve things. That is to resolve content disputes where discussion has failed because there are two opposing viewpoints, such as including a paragraph and excluding it. The neutral party may have to write the neutrally worded RFC alone, without support or opposition from the parties who otherwise would be edit-warring, and may not be able to get a second because both parties may prefer two different non-neutral RFCs. Perhaps User:SmokeyJoe is primarily referring to policy and guideline RFCs, but I don’t know a straightforward way to distinguish between a content dispute RFC and a policy and guideline RFC. The real problem has two parts. The first part is non-neutral RFCs, which are typically worded non-neutrally in order to guide the consensus toward the author’s position, but which often wind up as trainwrecks instead. The second part is very open-ended RFCs that are really Requests for Comments rather than Requests for Consensus, and that really get comments, and may work for brainstorming but do not resolve anything. Just requiring a second may not help much, and requiring multiple endorsements will make resolving content disputes harder, because it will require that the two sides canvass for endorsers before writing the RFC. I don’t see a simple answer. Robert McClenon (talk) 19:18, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

Marco Visconti

Hi there: your recent edit to Marco Visconti seems to have broken (for me, at least) some formatting in the lede section; but I am afraid I don't understand enough to fix it. Would you mind taking a look? Thanks. Zero sharp (talk) 17:19, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

@Zero sharp, a link would have helped. But done. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 18:12, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

Oh my god I am *so* sorry. I sincerely hope you're somehow able to reclaim the 11 seconds or so it must have taken you to deduce the correct article from a) the name of this section and b) the phrase "your recent edit to". Zero sharp (talk) 19:13, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

@Zero sharp: I have made about 4,000 edits so far today, and over 50,000 this month so "recent edit" doesn't narrow the field much. And a link would have taken you about 1 second to paste in.

But hey, if you like playing guessing games in communication and then getting snippy about it, be who you wanna be. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 19:59, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

October Events from Women in Red

[REDACTED]

October 2019, Volume 5, Issue 10, Numbers 107, 108, 137, 138, 139, 140

Check out what's happening in October at Women in Red...

Online events:

New: STEM / Fashion / Geofocus: landlocked countries / Stub Contest
Continuing: Suffrage / #1day1woman

Editor feedback:

Check out the conversation regarding:
Women vice Chancellors in Top 200 universities
Help us plan our future events at the Ideas Cafe
Join the conversations on our talkpage

Social media: Facebook / Instagram / Pinterest / Twitter

Stay in touch: Join WikiProject Women in Red / Opt-out of notifications

--Megalibrarygirl (talk) 17:35, 23 September 2019 (UTC) via MassMessaging

Comment on Snit and Regional English

You wrote: 'The community is not "discussing the future of portals". It's having it's time wasted by a false binary proposition which Bermicourt tabled when he was in a sulk about his rant at another MFD being rebutted.' Yes, but that may be a little confusing to an American who is not familiar with parliamentary terminology on the east side of the Atlantic. In the United Kingdom, and evidently in Ireland, to table a proposition means to put it on the speaker's table in front of the hall for consideration. In the United States, to table a motion sidetracks it, essentially moving it to a table in back of the hall. In ordinary American deliberative bodies, a motion that is tabled is postponed, and can be taken up by taking it from the table at any time. In the United States House of Representatives, tabling a bill is an alternate method of killing it. He tabled his proposition using British English or Irish English. A closure of No Consensus tables it American style. Robert McClenon (talk) 20:41, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

@Robert McClenon, "Divided by a common language", as Winston Churchill (allegedly) said, in one of the rare moments when he wasn't threatening Ireland. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 22:06, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

I have also heard that aphorism attributed to George Bernard Shaw, and he was Irish. The American parliamentary use doesn't make sense, anyway, except that it is the way we refer to a way of forgetting about something. Robert McClenon (talk) 22:58, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

I haven't yet replied to the RFC. I think it is dishonest. Robert McClenon (talk) 22:58, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

I agree, @Robert. It's the second such pseudo-RFC we have had in the last few months. Moxy did an even more transparently fake RFC a few months back. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 23:18, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

Mine was a real RFC, with a specific objective, to ratify the portal guidelines, and the responses to it were too scattered to be useful. Oh well. In 45 minutes I will watch stylized violence that has a winner and a loser, which is more than can be said for some of the stuff said about portals. Robert McClenon (talk) 23:29, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

Movement of Articles into Biology

I haven't been able to find a great discussion of where the articles from Molecular and Cellular Biology were going to be moved into (and I also don't disagree that that portal was a good candidate for deletion), but maybe some of those articles would be better served under Portal:Biochemistry ? Sorry if that was discussed on a page I can't find. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Triclops200 (talk • contribs) 18:46, 24 September 2019 (UTC)

Hi Triclops200

No articles have moved. All that has happened is that a link has on each page has been changed: a redlink has been replaced with a blue one.

Portal:Molecular and cellular biology was deleted per the discussion at WP:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Molecular and cellular biology. I suggested there replacing links to Portal:Molecular and cellular biology with Portal:Biology, and since nobody objected or offered any other suggestions, i have been doing just that. About 80% of them are now done. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 20:13, 24 September 2019 (UTC)

The Signpost: 30 September 2019

From the editors: Where do we go from here?

Special report: Post-Framgate wrapup

In the media: A net loss: Misplaced Pages attacked, closing off Russia? welcoming back Turkey?

Traffic report: Varied and intriguing entries, less Luck, and some retreads

News from the WMF: How the Wikimedia Foundation is making efforts to go green

Recent research: Misplaced Pages's role in assessing credibility of news sources; using wikis against procrastination; OpenSym 2019 report

Gallery: Finding freely licensed photo collections

On the bright side: What's making you happy this month?

In focus: Wikidata & Wikibase for national libraries: the inaugural meeting

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:06, 30 September 2019 (UTC)

Edit summary usage link

This is an odd request, but could we remove the edit summary usage link from your userpage? Or alternatively, set a date range so that it will actually finish, say the past 180 days? This could be done with a link like . Try it out at .

The reason I ask is because 1-3 times a day we get error reports about XTools erroring out, because as you have stated, you've just made too many edits for it to work! :) I suspect some of this traffic is automated, by the way. I did notice your userpage sees a lot of pageviews (largely on mobile web), even more than User:Jimbo Wales! Kind regards, — MusikAnimal 16:15, 30 September 2019 (UTC)

Hi MusikAnimal

Thanks very much for taking the time both to alert me to that, and for going the extra mile to find a solution. I thoroughly dislike having error reports triggered by issues which are fixable my a simple tweak elsewhere, and I'm sorry for the hassle caused to XTools maintainers.

So I have implemented your fix, but knocked the timespan back to 90 days. My edit count has been growing at an obscene rate in the last few months while I have been cleaning up backlinks to deleted portals, so even the 180 day period which you suggested was still counting over 250,000 edits. I Hope your error logs calm down now.

I hadn't realised that my userpage views had gone so wild taht they were even more than Jimbo's. Looking at a comparison of the two, it seems that mine have been soaring when I have been doing these huge AWB runs. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs)

No hassle :) It's just been going on for long enough that I wanted to investigate, then I saw the link on your userpage and figured that must be it. I also figured you'd appreciate having a way to see at least some edit summary usage stats! The timing sounds right, our first report was in mid-August. It is interesting that the majority of traffic is mobile web, with the desktop pageviews comparatively very low. Typically on English Misplaced Pages desktop traffic will not trail behind mobile by very much . My guess is people, or undeclared bots, are following the link at the bottom of the mobile site that indicates who last edited the page. Anyways thanks for changing the link! Best, — MusikAnimal 20:58, 30 September 2019 (UTC)

Thanks again, @MusikAnimal. I hadn't thought of that bottom-of-page link, but it explains why I have been getting a steady trickle of messages from IPs asking question about "your article on Foo". I had assumed that they were not reading the edit summary on a diff, but of course they weren't seeing the diff. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 21:04, 30 September 2019 (UTC)

Atheist portal

Hi BrownHairedGirl. Do you know why the atheistportal was deleted? Thanks Shabidoo | Talk 07:20, 1 October 2019 (UTC)

Hi Shabidoo

Portal:Atheism was deleted following a discussion at Misplaced Pages:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Atheism because, like most of the portals which existed a year ago, it was abandoned junk which nobody maintained. It therefore wasted the time of any readers lured there.

Very few portals actually add value for readers, who in most cases would be better directed to the head article. That's why hundreds of portals have been deleted in the last 6 months. This was one of those portals which added no value. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 10:17, 1 October 2019 (UTC)

Great! Thanks for the detailed answer. Cheers. Shabidoo | Talk 02:18, 2 October 2019 (UTC)

Elbe-Weser Triangle

It has a very good ratio of portal pageviews to article pageviews, 83%. Robert McClenon (talk) 22:13, 1 October 2019 (UTC)

@Robert McClenon, do you remember the page boy in Gullivers's Travels? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 22:53, 1 October 2019 (UTC)

No. Does this have something to do with a meaningless ratio? Which kingdom did Gulliver encounter the pageboy in? Robert McClenon (talk) 23:22, 1 October 2019 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – October 2019

News and updates for administrators from the past month (September 2019).

Administrator changes

Barkeep49

Beetstra • KillerChihuahua • Kusma

Arcadian • Extraordinary Machine • Xeno

JamesBWatson → JBW

Interface administrator changes

Evad37

CheckUser changes

Courcelles • SilkTork • Timotheus Canens

[REDACTED] Oversight changes

Courcelles • SilkTork • Timotheus Canens

Guideline and policy news

Following a discussion, a new criterion for speedy category renaming was added: C2F: One eponymous article, which applies if the category contains only an eponymous article or media file, provided that the category has not otherwise been emptied shortly before the nomination. The default outcome is an upmerge to the parent categories.

Technical news

As previously noted, tighter password requirements for Administrators were put in place last year. Misplaced Pages should now alert you if your password is less than 10 characters long and thus too short.

Arbitration

The 2019 CheckUser and Oversight appointment process has begun. The community consultation period will take place October 4th to 10th.
The arbitration case regarding Fram was closed. While there will be a local RfC focus on how harassment and private complaints should be handled in the future, there is currently a global community consultation on partial and temporary office actions in response to the incident. It will be open until October 30th.

Miscellaneous

The Community Tech team has been working on a system for temporarily watching pages, and welcomes feedback.

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:54, 2 October 2019 (UTC)

On v In categories

At Misplaced Pages:Categories for discussion/Log/2019 March 31#Scottish islands there was no consensus and while I favoured using "on" instead of "in" the arguments about when this is best and being arbitrary suggests actually we probably should use in. We agreed that using an "A, B or C" choice may be better as a way to standardize but because the discussion had been open for a while this indeed would have been difficult. However a few days ago I created Category:Villages on Mainland, Shetland and Griceylipper (a native Shetlander) pointed out to me that maybe it should be Category:Villages in Mainland, Shetland like Category:Villages in Unst, Category:Villages in Whalsay and Category:Villages in Yell, Shetland. Do you think I should start a new CFD for all Scottish islands with an A, B or C or should we have a wider A, B or C by including all other similar categories like Category:Isle of Man, Category:Isle of Wight, Category:Anglesey and Category:Long Island? which could probably be tagged with AWB. Crouch, Swale (talk) 11:15, 4 October 2019 (UTC)

Hi Crouch, Swale, and thanks for your message.

My first question is what's the C?

I thought that there was a binary choice between "Topic in Islandname" and "Topic on Islandname". Is there a third option? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 11:36, 4 October 2019 (UTC)

Sorry I was just using that as an expression, yes indeed its only between "on" and "in" (so should only actually be "A" or "B") but as a side note we might need to consider other landforms such as Category:Villages in Cowal. Crouch, Swale (talk) 11:42, 4 October 2019 (UTC)

Do you think we need to have a large CFD maybe with a RFC involving or should I just file a CFD for the Scottish islands to see if there's a consensus either way? Crouch, Swale (talk) 16:10, 6 October 2019 (UTC)

@Crouch, Swale: sorry for my slow reply.

I'd suggest starting with an RFC, setting out various options: standardise globally "in", standardise globally "on", standardise by region/country, or individually case-by-case.

Much less work to assemble than a mass CFD, and makes it more likely that any follow-up CFDs will be uncontroversial. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 17:16, 6 October 2019 (UTC)

Now at Misplaced Pages talk:WikiProject Islands#RFC "on" v "in" categories. Crouch, Swale (talk) 21:14, 6 October 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Dance

You might want to take a look at this portal within the next few days. It is stranger than it looks. It seems that a tangle of branches for a forest can be a hiding place for zombies that were supposed to be dead. (Maybe zombies are not well-known in Ireland. Maybe Ireland's best-known monster is a Romanian vampire written about by an Irish author.) There was a user-contributed article added on 26 July 2011 which had been deleted as per a deletion discussion on 19 July 2011. I converted the subpage to a draft and declined it. It will expire in six months unless it is tweaked in draft space. But what it illustrates is that forests of subpages, like forests in general, can have monsters hiding in them. Robert McClenon (talk) 18:16, 5 October 2019 (UTC)

Roberto Navarro page

The "He announced, during the broadcast of the 2015 presidential elections, that Daniel Scioli had won by a wide margin and became the president of Argentina without a ballotage, and that Aníbal Fernández had been elected governor of the Buenos Aires Province. The announcement was made at 5:58 p.m., two minutes before the polling places nationwide closed and started counting the votes. It turned out that Scioli got just 2.9% of advantage over Macri, heading to a ballotage, and that Aníbal Fernández lost to María Eugenia Vidal." part of the article is wrong and has been showed to be wrong. https://www.eldestapeweb.com/nota/navarro-demostro-que-es-un-invento-de-clarin-que-dijo-que-gano-scioli-el-dia-que-gano-macri-2018-4-14-23-10-0 is the reference, it's in spanish but if you can get someone to translatre it it proves that it was not like it si said in the article. Plus the source is known to be biased. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 200.82.39.233 (talk) 01:14, 6 October 2019 (UTC)

An Image

@BrownHairedGirl: Can an admin delete this image as I have uploaded a new image for the person's article (Ahmed Rajib Haider), this is my uploaded photo which is better than the old photo, so the old image should be deleted. Mark Arr (talk) 10:45, 6 October 2019 (UTC)

Hi @Mark Arr

Sorry, but no. I don't do enough work with images to assess whether deletion is appropriate. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 12:50, 6 October 2019 (UTC)

New message from Mark Schierbecker

Hello, BrownHairedGirl. You have new messages at JJMC89's talk page.
Message added 20:11, 6 October 2019 (UTC). You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

Mark Schierbecker (talk) 20:11, 6 October 2019 (UTC)

Speedy deletion nomination of Category:Czechoslovakia–Slovenia relations

A tag has been placed on Category:Czechoslovakia–Slovenia relations 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) 13:37, 7 October 2019 (UTC)

Portal links

There were portals for all 50 states. I just checked, and now there are only 36. Don't know what happened to the other 14...

Roberto221 (talk) 23:55, 8 October 2019 (UTC)

@Roberto221, they have been deleted. In the last 6 months, over 900 of the 1500 portals have been deleted. Mostly because they were were unmaintained, and/or barely read, and/or didn't have an active WikiProject to support them. Most of the US state portals are just too narrow a topic to be viable.

You seem not to have been aware of that, which is fine; my edit summary pinging was just a headsup for the future.

For future reference, if you are adding links to portal, just check that list of portals displayed is the same as the list you entered. The portal templates now display only portals which actually exist (no redlinks) ... and if they have founded a redlinked portal in the list, they add a tracking category. Those tracking categories are WP:HIDDENCATs, so you won't see them unless you have set your preferences to see them.

Hope this helps. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 00:08, 9 October 2019 (UTC)

Of portals and other matters

Hi there - I've noticed you've nominated a number of portals for deletion. May I ask what's motivating this? Tompw (talk) 16:02, 9 October 2019 (UTC)

Sure, Tompw.

Briefly: because many of them are crap. They waste the time of readers who visit them, and wastes the time of editors who link to them and and fixes such as disambiguation.

The flaws include:

limited set of topics, providing little benefit to readers who visit them.
the use of ancient content-forks, which may not reflect new developments, new information, or new interpretations. This often leads to portals asserting facts which are out-of-date or even untrue.
Fake DYKs, which have no connection to WP:DYK
A Rube Goldberg machine structure which creates huge barriers to editors who want to modify the portal
A daft magazine-style format which relies on a redundant notion of presenting excerpts of an article's lead, even though that functionality is now built in to the Wikimedia software
The failure to provide an upfront list of the topics in the portals is absurd, as is the requirement that readers have to purge the page to view another random selection from that undisclosed list.
This all makes for very low readership, creating a vicious circle: few readers view the page, so few of them see where it needs updating; few of those who do see a need for updates can figure out how to do it; few of those who understand the format will bother working a portal which is almost unviewed and basically redundant to the head article; so the rot continues, deterring readers from visiting nay portals.

Basically, portals were a 1990s technology, which became redundant when websites used Content management systems to provide good navigation and cross-linking., and google offered powerful search. Bu the time Misplaced Pages adopted portals in 2005, they were already redundant, and new technical developments on en.wp have left them even less useful. Meanwhile Misplaced Pages's ratio of active editors to articles is about a quarter of what it was at the peak in c.2007, so we don't have enough editors to maintain these baroque structures.

The community has decided not to delete all portals, since some of them are on genuinely broad topics, are well-maintained and have not-completely-trivial readership levels. So several editors are systematically reviewing and analysing portals, and bring to MFD some of the worst. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 21:30, 9 October 2019 (UTC)

A cup of tea for you!

You're fast. You added your backlink comment while I was adding my comment on systemic bias and edit-conflicted me. (It doesn't show as an edit conflict because I back out of edit conflicts.) Robert McClenon (talk) 23:19, 9 October 2019 (UTC)

Portal:United States

Don't you think most of those articles would be better off with just removing the state portal and not adding Portal:United States? Seems like just noise. Dicklyon (talk) 05:34, 10 October 2019 (UTC)