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• Welcome to my talk page. If you just want to make a short comment why not put it in my guestbook. If you want to add something to one of the existing topics go ahead, Or click here to start a new topic.

New pages

Hi WSC. With my concerns for BLP, I've been working a lot from the bottom of the backlog of new pages. I suppose I'm right in thinking that any pages over 30 days old just get kept as de facto unproblematic. It takes me a whole day to clear just one whole day's backlog, even when working quickly, and bordering on drive-by, and rescuing whatever I can. The backlog contains thousands of articles, and they are of course the ones that most new page patrollers probably did not know what to do with. Most of these pages appear to be BLP, - mainly minor film starts, Indian academics, and footballers, and then there is the sundry assortment of non notable firms. Is there, or has there been any incentive to get more, more experienced patrollers to work on this backlog? --Kudpung (talk) 07:37, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

Hi Kudpung, welcome to one of my favourite places on Wikipedia, though I've not been active there much myself of late, and I suspect some of the regulars have moved on. Yes if an article isn't marked as patrolled within 30 days it is automatically marked as such. Normally the length of the queue hovers between three and four weeks, and if it reaches 30 days, by the time it does so the vast majority of new articles have been deleted or marked as patrolled - with perhaps a hundred a day for the end of the queue. Looking at the current end of the queue I'd say that we have more like 200 a day and I believe this is unusually high, I've had a bit of a trawl and I think it is the usual end of the queue mix of the obscure and the abstruse, with few that clearly don't belong here though many might be of marginal notability. One possible response is to focus on the stuff that interests you - if you see someone whose articles are clearly worth patrolling, or clearly worth prodding it is possible to filter by username and look at their other new articles. If you see someone who has clearly mastered the art of writing new articles that belong here then it is possible to nominate them at Wikipedia:Requests for permissions/Autopatrolled - that takes a little longer tan just patrolling their latest articles, but all their subsequent articles will be automatically marked as patrolled. The other possibility is to raise your concern at at the village pump, as I have just done . ϢereSpielChequers 14:51, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

It seems to have met with some rapid replies - perhaps the next step is to get a consensus on an RfC. One editor has suggested making a automated log of all the pages that slip unchecked through the 30 day deadline. Not a bad idea either.--Kudpung (talk) 20:05, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

New pages

Hi. Surely breeding cats is even more boring than NPP ;) I've whacked off a couple of thousand from the bottom of the list (phew!) over the last three days, so by today by my time zone (GMT+7) we now have nothing older than 16 Oct. If that two/three days gets filled up again quite quickly, then I most certainly press for the notion of an extension, but perhaps also to mass canvas all the members of the NPP project to rally together, although of course nobody likes working with the hard stuff in the bottom of the barrel when the low hanging fruit comes in every 5 seconds. --Kudpung (talk) 08:10, 13 October 2010 (UTC)

If in your timezone the oldest is the 16th Oct then we are I suspect rather more than 7 hours apart :). But seriously congrats on gaining us that safety margin, I think the end of the queue is a more challenging place to be than the front, very few articles there are going to be obvious candidates either for deletion or patrolling. So for those who specialise in it it is a more interesting place. Though personally I haven't had the heart to go there since I realised that developers regard extending the queue as easy but undesirable as the deadline encourages us to work harder.

I think that it would be a mistake to only argue for an extension when the backlog is currently at 30 days, better to say the queue length is known to oscillate and has frequently been at over 30 days in the past. Extending it by putting a hidden category on articles that are still unpatrolled at 30 days is simply closing a loophole. ϢereSpielChequers 08:27, 13 October 2010 (UTC)

It's been an interesting empirical exercise; First for me personally because judging by the feedback, my error rate is well below 1% - and I think you caught most of those ;) - but it has also shown that they fall mainly into 3 categories: newbies in GF who don't know any better; SUA who are trying to promote their book or their band; and hard nosed paid corporate spammers who know all the tricks in the trade. I feel sorry for the occasional school teachers who have done a lot of hard work on a kindergarten in Upper Knowwhere, and the kids who's spent hours on the graphics for their favourite comics, but that's the way it goes. If you look at this, you'll see that I've been working through several different times zones (you are the only other editor I now who never seems to sleep), and because I've had only two or three edit conflicts in all that time , I'm not sure that there are very many people working at the bottom of the deep end. What I am now convinced of is that we need far stronger (but friendly) messages on the edit page reminding newcomers of a few basic rules before they press the save button, and to suggest even more loudly that they prepare stuff in their sandbox first. We also need to come up with a solution soon for revising the sticky prod - I've only been able to use it about four times, which makes it all but useless. We have to box for your (our) earlier ideas for a catalogue of links that should be forbidden. We also need to shorten that 10 days to 7. It's 10 days at the moment because that's how I closed the consensus at the RfC. There was no real consensus, so I took the average of all the different suggestions and used that. No one complained objected. --Kudpung (talk) 09:20, 13 October 2010 (UTC)

Remember certain types of articles won't make it to the back of the queue, as they will have been deleted or patrolled. I really wouldn't expect to see many attack pages or legitimate sticky prod candidates for example. Perhaps occasionally there will be an hour when the front of the queue is unattended and some crap gets to sit until it gets to the end of the queue, but I suspect that is rare, did you notice any such batches? As for the ten days for the sticky prod, why change something people seem prepared to live with? I suspect that a high proportion of the ones that are worth salvaging get rescued, but shortening the queue would be needlessly aggravating to some rescuers who are doing good work. I probably don't come across the spammers as much as you do because I rarely look at articles on companies, but I largely agree with you as to the provenance of many of our borderline articles. I think we do have several difficult areas re sticky prods:

1. I've deflagged three Autopatrolled editors who were creating uBLPs, but we need to watch out for this as they bypass NPP (I've requested a report, but it is a tricky area and it really needs a database report to spot these).
2. I suspect some patrollers are marking uBLPs as patrolled without even tagging them as uBLPs let alone sticky prodding them. This part of a broader issue that people are inconsistent as to what it means to mark a new article as patrolled. In the past I've suggested a two option process - a "not vandalism" tag and a "ready for mainspace" tag. Currently I believe we have some patrollers marking articles as patrolled because the subject is worthy of a article even if the current stub is a good faith but unsourced effort.
3. I also think we need to stop marking articles as patrolled when they've been tagged for deletion, but instead have a separate colour for articles that have been tagged for deletion. That way when a newbie removes a deletion tag the article would revert to unpatrolled, and patrollers could choose to ignore articles that were currently tagged for deletion (It would also save patrollers the click needed to mark such articles as patrolled).
4. Currently the handling of Myspace and similar sourced articles is wildly inconsistent, and a lot of the articles tagged as unreferenced BLPs would be better tagged as selfpublished and refimproveBLP. If that was done then I suspect that a lot of the remaining newly tagged unreferenced BLPs would get sticky prodded, but at the moment they are buried in the category unreferenced BLPs. I think we should re-open this in say January as by then there will have been a decent interval since the last RFC. I think the main concerns people had were in keeping the test a clear one and not suddenly creating a backlog with a thousand articles all being BLP prodded at the same time. I'm fairly confident that if we can address the backlog issue we can get consensus to broaden sticky prod, but my instinct is to do this incrementally - identify how many articles are affected, attempt to clear or make manageable the backlog in each case and then ask for the sticky prod to be extended. For example I think Linkedin is quite rare as a self published source, and MySpace rather less so, but getting a listing of these two, Utube and facebook would be the logical next step. ϢereSpielChequers 15:58, 13 October 2010 (UTC)

Bureaucrat-ship?

My personal interactions with you and my analysis of your presence on our project makes me believe you might be an appropriate choice for becoming a bureaucrat. Ergo, leaving this note... Sincere regards. Wifione _....... ^{Leave a message} 11:41, 8 November 2010 (UTC)

Thanks Wifione, that is very flattering. But I doubt that >85% of the community would hold the same view as you. I've seen two very well qualified candidates be rejected at RFB in the last year, and I can think of many reasons why some people would oppose me.

1. There are people who opposed my RFA because of my lack of audited content, and I think that the vandalfighting and gnomish work such as typo fixing that dominates my contributions is even less valued now than it was in the past.
2. I've expressed views in several contentious subjects over the years and it would only take one or two of those who held the opposite opinion to me over each of those to torpedo an RFB.
3. I've argued on more than one occasion that a possible reform to RFA would either be to reduce the status of admins by upbundling the most important part of their role to the crats; Or to empower the crats to appoint probationary admins. I suspect that some people would consider it inappropriate for me to argue for an increase in crats power immediately before running as a crat myself.
4. My !voting pattern at RFA doesn't always follow consensus, there are things that I'm more tolerant of than some, as evidenced by my supports for many candidates who've failed to achieve consensus, and there have been opposes I've made to successful candidates because I'm more cautious than most !voters about appointing admins who might be over enthusiastic with the deletion button. I believe that I understand the difference between my views on an RFA and the consensus of the discussion, but some RFA regulars might take some convincing.
5. I've been saying for years that RFA is broken, and collating evidence of that. I suspect this would count for me if I ran for crat after it was fixed or when the number of active admins finally drops to a point where everyone accepts we have a problem. But if I ran now then some people would be concerned that as a crat I might be tempted to address the problem I perceive there to be at RFA by being overly lenient with marginal candidates.
6. RFBs can easily get mired into arguments about whether we need another crat and if so whether this candidate is the best candidate available as opposed to the best candidate running. Since even I would concede that there are better potential candidates out there I can pretty much guarantee opposes on those grounds.

ϢereSpielChequers 15:27, 8 November 2010 (UTC)

You discredit yourself too much. Believe in the value that even opposing editors would put in your contributions. Irrespective, it is better to have tried and lost than not to have tried at all. Apply once... let's see what gives. Wifione _....... ^{Leave a message} 17:06, 8 November 2010 (UTC)

I'll give it some thought, I have a suspicion that it wouldn't last the whole 7 days, but in case it did I'd need a week when I could be sure of a lot of time online, and that may not come up for a little while. ϢereSpielChequers 00:08, 9 November 2010 (UTC)

I'd be surprised to see a successful RfB in the foreseeable future. I think your last point is especially valid. I think if anybody stood at RfB right now, the "we don't need any more 'crats" camp is easily large enough to produce 15% opposition even before anybody opposed because "that WSC guy looks shifty, we don't want him as a 'crat". ;) I expect that either the workload of 'crats will greatly increase or the number of active 'crats will plummet before we get another successful RfB unless the candidate is a bot expert. Now, if we can get people to realise that having only a few hundred active admins really is a problem, my faith in the !voting community might be restored. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 19:16, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

I've currently got several spinning plates in real life and on other wikimedia projects and I definitely won't be running this month or probably this year. But I am considering it for some time in the future. ϢereSpielChequers 00:29, 12 November 2010 (UTC)

30-day unpatrolled New Pages

Hi WSC. Remember the earlier discussions we had about this? Well, I keep having a stab at these but I'm fighting a losing battle, I was about to attack yesterday's 93 pages, fetched a coffee, and when I sat down at my desk they had all suddenly fallen off the cliff already. The very fact that they haven't been patrolled, is because the front-end NP patrollers find them either too difficult or that they take to much time to resolve. The fact that these articles are allowed to escape does not mean they are any less dangerous than the spams, scams, hoaxes, and attacks that are speedily deleted within minutes. They nearly all have something seriously wrong with them. I know you've got a lot of plates spinning at the moment, but what can I do to sort this mess out without spending hours every day doing a drop in the ocean on the list? I fully understood when you suggested that extending the time limit might just make people even more complacent. Do they get at least an automatic 'unpatrolled' cat added to them so that we can track them? Perhaps they should go automatically into some kind of incubator, and there should be a project created similar to a uBLP backlog project that can deal with them If you think it's a good idea, I'd go ahead and create it. My personal motivation is due to all the BLPs bunkered in there. --Kudpung (talk) 08:44, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

Hi Kudpung. I gave up on the back of the patrol queue when my suggestion was declined, I'm a volunteer and I really don't appreciate it when people think it isn't worth automating things because volunteers should work harder instead. I suppose we could simply create a hidden category for them and manually add it, but unless it was automated it would it be worthwhile? Alternatively there is the new unreviewed article template and the needs expert attention template. You could add these to some you are unsure of. ϢereSpielChequers 08:56, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the quick reply. Thing is, the way I work, it would take just as long to manually add one of those tags as any of the other maintenance or AfD tags I add, so that also defeats the effort I’m personally prepared to put in on the list itself. (Like you, I have a couple of other plates spinning, as well as having practically taken over the schools project for the time being). I really think the answer is to have a bot add an invisible cat '30-days unpatroled' to any that fall off the cliff (some days it's not 93, it's as many as 250). Best would be simply to send them to an incubator, with a bot applied message to the authors - a kind of long term PROD, if you like. Then I would be happy to get a project up and running to take care of them, much in the same way as the uBLP people are doing, - and being very good at it. Please don't think I'm trying to involve you in yet another project, just using you as a sounding board really, so if you think I'm barking up the wrong tree, be brutal, but there’s little point in us insisting on all the strictness of BLP, for example, if 30 or 40 are allowed to get away with murder every day! BTW, did you get the mail I sent a couple of days ago?--Kudpung (talk) 09:53, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

Got the mail thanks, but have some real life stuff on and probably won't reply for days. I think there are several possible solutions to the 30 day problem:

1. Lower our guard and mark stuff as patrolled if it is probably OK
2. Enlist more help such as by getting this into the backlog drive
3. Get a bot to add a hidden cat

My preference is for number 3, but we need a bot writer. I agree that manual tagging/hidden category adding only works where you are reasonably confident that someone sensible will be interested in the tag. For example uBLPs of Heavy metal musicians I just put {{HMM}} on the talkpage and know I can forget them. ϢereSpielChequers 10:49, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

OK. I've taken this a stage further. Let's see what he comes up with. He worked on the BLPPROD template. Kudpung (talk) 03:29, 5 December 2010 (UTC)

I still can't work out why Rd232's proposal to automatically tag them all as {{new unreviewed article}} received so little support. It would have sorted them into a category that identifies the problem and already exists. Alzarian16 (talk) 16:49, 5 December 2010 (UTC)

It has the disadvantage of being yet another template, I'd much prefer that we replace templates with hidden categories, especially ones like this that are meant for regulars to remove. But yes I'd agree, better this than nothing. ϢereSpielChequers 16:54, 5 December 2010 (UTC)

There is no need for the template to display anything, if it's a "regulars only" cat it is adding. Rich Farmbrough, 19:35, 14 December 2010 (UTC).

(this talk of hidden categories > templates reminds me of Erik9bot, which of course added a Erik9bot-specific hidden category to pages, which then got converted to a more generic category after Erik9 was blocked, which then got converted to the normal templates (if I'm correct)) - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 19:39, 14 December 2010 (UTC)

It would be interesting to do a survey as to which "cleanup" tags are most frequently removed or the reason for them dealt with by newbies and IPs. My suspicion is that orphan and deadend would both be better done as bot reports or hidden categories. ϢereSpielChequers 23:19, 14 December 2010 (UTC)

I think this needs to be one of the major clean up campaigns for 2011. The first and most important move is to start tagging them in an invisible category. This needs no great discussion and can be done quickly. At least we will have them on our radar and we can look at them to see what kind of general condition they represent.

What we actually do with them is probably likely to be the result of long discussion.

Now that we've been able to get input from more people, I suggest that in deference to WSC it might possibly be a good idea now to copy and continue this thread to the WP:NPP talk page, or make sub page for it there. Kudpung (talk) 00:32, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

Musical Group BLPs

I've tried and failed to count the Musical group UBLPs, as the Category:Musical groups tree also includes "members of musical groups", so it's very hard to split them out without either changing the cat tree, or manually adding individual cats to AWB or similar. From a scan of the list, it doesn't seem like it is that significant though, maybe 100 at most. Cheers, The-Pope (talk) 16:40, 9 December 2010 (UTC)

OK thanks for looking, 100 = 0.5% which makes sense to me, and I agree it is only worth doing if there is an easy way to identify them. ϢereSpielChequers 16:57, 9 December 2010 (UTC)

NPP backlog

Hi WSP. Please do consider continuing to chime in here occasionally. At the moment there seems to be only me and SnottyWong running the show. Although we are making very good progress, you know how much I value your opinions. Cheers, --Kudpung (talk) 05:05, 12 January 2011 (UTC)

Hi Kudpung, I may not be around much for the next ten days, but the topic is still dear to me. ϢereSpielChequers 20:40, 12 January 2011 (UTC)

NPP

Just a quick update for you. We obtained temporary approval for the bot for a trial run for 50 unpatrolled pages. Everything we planned seems to have gone well, pages are tagged, cats are created and maintained, the special log page is working. All we need now is final approval for the bot, then I'll let the folks at the BLP task force know, so that they can pick out the uBLP from the list, and work on them. The pages are not all BLP, so I'll be needing some suggestions on how to broadcast this new Wikipedia feature - perhaps a template message delivered by a bot to all projects? Signpost ? - I could do a short article for that. --Kudpung (talk) 05:34, 18 January 2011 (UTC)

BTW:On the first couple of bot runs, even on a conservative estimate, a massive 18,000 pages per year are slipping unpatrolled into the encyclopedia.--Kudpung (talk) 07:08, 18 January 2011 (UTC)

Just another update: The full approval for the bot has been accorded, and the cat and report page are being added to daily. At a conservative guess, I think it will have listed a minimum of 18,000 pages by the end of the year. There is strangely however, a lot of resistance to the project I have boxed through with SnottyWong's help for all the bot design and programming. I am positively amazed that there are so many editors, including sysops and crats, who think this is not an issue for concern. There are even people who think that new page patrolling is not strictly necessary. I think it's one of the most fundamental functions - probably even more important than RCP. For example, It's one of the first barriers against attack pages. --Kudpung (talk) 06:16, 20 January 2011 (UTC)

Thanks...

For having written User:WereSpielChequers/Newbie treatment at NPP - I wonder why you never pointed me to it before ;) Kudpung (talk) 08:06, 2 February 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for reminding me of that, NEWT wound up so contentious that I never finished it. But I've made a few changes now, and may finish it sometime. ϢereSpielChequers 13:06, 2 February 2011 (UTC)

Talkback

{{talkback}} Curiouser and curiouser. Kudpung (talk) 08:48, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

BPLPROD

Hi, My RfA, as I guessed it would, has sparked of some minor comments in various quarters about BLPROD. Do you think the time is ripe now to start a review of its performance? A review would need to come first before trying to get anything changed. If you think it's time, we would need to get some stats (I have a shopping list) - who is good at extrapolating such data? --Kudpung (talk) 06:49, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

Sorry but the sun is shining outside and I have some real life commitments for the next few days. I will try to make time but may not be able to for a week or more. ϢereSpielChequers 14:29, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

CSD school

Hi,

Picking up on Epeefleche's recent comments, the original discussion in February (here) and knowing that you have strong opinions on this topic, I was wondering what the best practice was to help someone improve their practical interpretation of the CSD guidelines. I could, say, easily forswear any use of A1/A3 for six months while I think about it, however it can also be argued that if I am to improve my practical interpretation then it would be a good idea to show my use of these CSD categories appropriately. Is there an existing consensus about the best approach to improvement? Thanks Fæ (talk) 13:34, 18 March 2011 (UTC)

Hi Fæ,I don't think it would be a good idea to forswear use of a particular CSD category as they all have their value. But a promise never to tag A1 or A3 in the first ten minutes might be helpful. I'm very cautious both with CSD tagging and deletion, I suspect I'm rather more cautious than the majority of the community. Mostly I use CSD to deal with bad faith edits, author requests for deletion and articles that effectively assert non-notability. I decline a sizable minority of tags that are incorrect, and there are loads of quite legitimate A7 tags that I leave because in my view speedy shouldn't mean instant when it comes to goodfaith articles. There are a whole set of essays and at least one survey on my userpage. You might also look at wp:NEWT when a bunch of us created alt accounts that then submitted articles, we had enough not deleted to rebut the original press criticism that any new article was guaranteed to be deleted. But a lot were tagged, so it did yield an interesting list of incorrect tags. ϢereSpielChequers 15:30, 18 March 2011 (UTC)

Thanks, when things are quieter I'll take time to ponder the essays and absorb them properly. In the meantime I'll think about adding a commitment about it to my talk page (though I don't plan say anything about commitments in my RFA as I probably should be judged on my edit history rather than promises about the future). Cheers Fæ (talk) 15:35, 18 March 2011 (UTC)

I think that commitments can play a part in RFA. In my first RFA I shifted my settings from a default to minor edits to the reverse, other people have amended signatures and created alt accounts. A promise not to tag A1 and A3 articles in their first ten minutes is in my mind a credible RFA commitment - we had another candidate recently who had been tagging G10s as A7s and that wasn't something you could fix that quickly - they'd have needed a b period of editing where they'd demonstrated better tagging. ϢereSpielChequers 15:49, 18 March 2011 (UTC)

I have made a commitment on my talk page, let me know if you spot any wording improvements that could be made. If asked another question I'll bring it up but otherwise I'll just point to it in discussion away from RFA. I would hope that if this is considered a good thing, then it will be mentioned by someone else spontaneously anyway. Cheers Fæ (talk) 16:05, 18 March 2011 (UTC)

New Pages and New Users

I've recently been doing some thinking (and a great deal of consultation with Philippe and James at the WMF's community department) on how to keep new users around and participating, particularly in light of Sue's March update. One of the things we'd like to test is whether the reception they get when they make their first article is key. In a lot of cases, people don't stay around; their article is deleted and that's that. By the time any contact is made, in other words, it's often too late.

What we're thinking of doing is running a project to gather data on if this occurs, how often it occurs, and so on, and in the mean time try to save as many pages (and new contributors) as possible. Basically, involved users would go through the deletion logs and through Special:NewPages looking for new articles which are at risk of being deleted, but could have something made of them - in other words, non-notable pages that are potentially notable, or spammy pages that could be rewritten in more neutral language. This would be entirely based on the judgment of the user reviewing pages - no finnicky CSD standards. These pages would be incubated instead of deleted, and the creator contacted and shepherded through how to turn the article into something useful. If they respond and it goes well, we have a decent article and maybe a new long-term editor. If they don't respond, the draft can be deleted after a certain period of time.

I know this isn't necessarily your standard fare, but with your involvement in WP:NEWT I thought it might be up your alley. If you're interested, read Wikipedia:Wiki Guides/New pages, sign up and get involved; questions can be dropped on the talkpage or directed at me. Ironholds (talk) 01:38, 23 March 2011 (UTC)

Hi Ironholds, this is worthy and useful, but you are probably looking in the wrong place. I'd start at Cat:speedy looking through the articles tagged for speedy deletion. I visit there quite frequently and almost always find incorrect tags to decline. I'm not keen on incubation as I believe the best place to develop articles is in mainspace. Also the main benefit is probably not the newbie you save from biting - you have to be very quick to do that. I think the main benefit is in retraining the tagger before they bite another hundred newbies because they think that "Professors aren't notable" or some similar misconception. ϢereSpielChequers 17:26, 23 March 2011 (UTC)

question about CSD F8

Hey, I hope you don't mind, but I picked you at random from active editors who discuss CSD policy.

I was wondering about this one: File:VolkerkartevonMittel-undSudosteuropa.jpg. It's marked as an F8 speedy, but the EN wiki upload history is not present in its Commons doppelganger. Per the upload history is not necessary if the file's license does not require it, although it is still recommended, I'm thinking it's acceptable to go ahead and delete it. Do you agree, or do you think there's a better way to handle this?

Thanks much, --JaGa^talk 01:48, 26 March 2011 (UTC)

Hi JaGa, to be honest I haven't a clue. Though I'm active in speedy deletion I have never got involved in File work, I'm vaguely aware that files here get deleted after moving to Commons, as that's how I first discovered Commons years ago. Perhaps one of my Talkpage Stalkers can help us out, if not I'd suggest a post at wt:speedy. As a guess I'd hope the answer was something along the lines of it depends on the copyright, so if the photographer had loaded it to wikipedia but the commons upload was from Flikr we should in my view prefer the direct release info from the original creator - but please don't treat me as an admin when it comes to file work. ϢereSpielChequers 08:38, 26 March 2011 (UTC)

Reviewing

I noticed you mentioned on WT:RFA that you are interested in reviewing deleted contributions/tagging. Would you mind taking a look at mine? (Not all, obviously, since there are at least 2000! ;) ) Thanks! Reaper Eternal (talk) 00:28, 9 April 2011 (UTC)

Yes of course, it may not be for a couple of days though. ϢereSpielChequers 08:47, 9 April 2011 (UTC)

If you get a spare minute, would you mind having a quick look over mine as well. Like Reaper I've got quite a few, but I'd really appreciate it if you could take a quick look :) Acather96 (talk) 09:16, 9 April 2011 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) I don't think you guys need to feel too guilty about your previous patrolling. If you feel you'd like a review, it means however that you are still unsure of what to do in some cases. IMO, the best thing to do is to read these pages, preferably in this order: WP:NPP, WP:DELETION, WP:CSD, WP:10CSD, and WP:A7M. At the risk of introducing more instruction creep, we've recently updated and improved the page at WP:NPP - You may even wish to make your own suggestions for improvement, and you'll be in a position to help other patrollers. Keep up the good work! --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 11:15, 9 April 2011 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) @Acather96: Since WSC indicated that he is busy, I would offer to do it instead. Just drop me a note :-) Regards SoWhy 18:05, 9 April 2011 (UTC)

Thanks WereSpielChequers! I do not mind waiting. @Kudpung: I have read those and other essays on CSD. And yes, in some cases I am uncertain as to whether I truly got it right. One commonly confusing thing for me is a page consisting solely of "Jason is pure awesomeness!!!!!!!!!! :D" Thanks anyway! Reaper Eternal (talk) 18:09, 9 April 2011 (UTC)

'Awsome' is a very American expression. You'll have to ask a fellow countryperson on that - WSC and I are both Brits ;) Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 00:26, 10 April 2011 (UTC)

Example

I must have put 20 or so of these (or similar) custom messages over the last 24 hours. Perhaps we should modify the current template to something like it.

Hi WereSpielChequers. Thank you for patrolling new pages. Patrolling is an essential function at Wikipedia, not only to prevent the wrong kind of pages staying online, but also to do some basic research and tag them for attention. The article you tagged CSD-A7 at XXXXXX was clearly an attack page and should have been blanked and tagged CSD-G10 for very fast deletion - attack pages raise a red alert on administrator's control panels. There is currently a drive to improve the quality of patrolling - you can help! Please read these pages, preferably in this order: WP:NPP (recently updated), WP:DELETION, WP:CSD, WP:10CSD, WP:FIELD, and WP:A7M, and if there's anything that is not clear, don't hesitate to ask me on my talk page. You may even wish to make your own suggestions for improvement of the NPP page. Happy editing! --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 09:35, 11 April 2011 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) I occasionally see these too when I go to unpatrolled pages and have to immediately replace them with {{db-g10}}. A warning notice would be nice, since it indicates that the user is not reading the articles. Reaper Eternal (talk) 10:37, 11 April 2011 (UTC)

20 in 24 hours is a lot, was that 20 different patrollers?. I have come across quite a few over the years but nothing approaching that. As for the template I'd be cautious about as it gives a string of things to read for one simple message. Whether its a template or a personal note I prefer things clear and simple with one link to a list of things for further reading. Of course the difficult thing about being clear and simple re this message is that you can't say why it was an attack page unless you send an email. ϢereSpielChequers 11:56, 11 April 2011 (UTC)

Let's not forget that most of the patrolling work I'm doing is patrolling the patrollers - not to scold them, but just to see how we can improve the system and educate the patrollers in the nicest possible way. I agree that it's a lot to read. perhaps just the link to the NPP page would suffice. Anyway, a certain VP poll seems to be heading for consensus so there may be some major changes on the way. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 12:29, 11 April 2011 (UTC)

AFD check in the CSD template idea

I noticed your positive comments on my AFD check idea, and was wondering what you thought the next step should be; should it be proposed someplace with more traffic, should I give it more time there, or try to find someone skilled with templates who could put together some code for it? Any suggestions you could provide would be appreciated. Thanks, Monty₈₄₅ 02:51, 14 April 2011 (UTC)

I suggest putting a note at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals) with a link to the discussion. ϢereSpielChequers 07:06, 14 April 2011 (UTC)

de.Wiki

Hi. I've had a closer look at the German site this morning. I'm not sure about this because I can't go all the way to creating a new page just to test things, but it appears that they even allow IP to create pages, and as with en.Wiki ther appears to be no prevention in the software for the creation of articles without refs. Nevertheless, everything there seems to be far more user friendly, sort of a mini version of the Wizard, with short, quickly readable instructions, and the occasional graphic. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 07:39, 16 June 2011 (UTC)

Thanks Kudpung, I've had a look and you are right they definitely allow IPs to create pages. But they do have some sort of flagged revisions or pending changes system protecting the whole wiki from vandalism, so I guess with that sort of technological advantage over EN wiki they can afford to lower their guard re IP editing. I took a testpage as far as preview without being prompted for a source and I didn't want to go further without having a DE article I'm prepared to save. But there are bound to be DE editors at Wikimania in a few weeks time so I'll get one of them to show me how this prompt for a reference process works (if that is it still is or ever was there). ϢereSpielChequers 08:09, 16 June 2011 (UTC)

Delyth Morgan

Hi Man I thought you would bring your experience to bear on the Delyth Morgan page because I cant - I'm her ex-brother in law. It reads like crap and has been drafted by SAdrienneM who is Delyth's elder sister. I have tagged the page but it needs an independant perspective. I hope you can spare the time. Mark^Dask 22:07, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

Thanks Were the job's been done by no less than Jimbo himself.. Mark^Dask 11:33, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

Glad to hear that, doubt Jimbo watchlists here but much thanks if he does, and sorry I wasn't on EN wiki at the time. ϢereSpielChequers 15:01, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

Losing new editors

Hi WSC. I do hope the outreach initiative to modernise our instructional pages expands to do something about our other walls of text - looks like we've lost another editor - not that I'm blaming anyone on the admin team at all. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 07:15, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

Hmm...I just saw this. It's very disappointing, and all too common. I hope this changes soon. Steven Zhang ^{The clock is ticking....} 07:30, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

Biting newbies is common, but I'm not convinced this particular scenario is all that common. Leaning over backwards I can see how that could have been a goodfaith editor who just made too many mistakes. An edit summary of "removing this photo, will replace it with a better one" would I think have resulted in very different treatment (actually attempting to replace one image with another would of course have been treated quite differently). Much as I regret the decline in the number of editors I wouldn't prioritise those who make repeated and unexplained attempts to remove content then get snarky when they are stopped. I don't see that WYSIWYG editing would prevent this, but perhaps it would be helpful to have an edit filter that spotted newbies who repeat the same edit without an edit summary and prompted them with a phrase like "it seems that another editor disagrees with your actions and is reverting you, please could you give an edit summary explaining why you think your edit would improve Wikipedia" ϢereSpielChequers 07:45, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

Or someone could have cropped Driscoll out so the WP picture focuses on the article subject (good for WP and I'd assume fine with Dcharris). :-) Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 07:52, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

Excellent idea, still possible to do that and drop a note on the talkpage explaining what you've done. ϢereSpielChequers 09:42, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

To clarify

I was not saying "Nobody listens to DGG"; you either did not read my comment, or did not understand what I was replying to - despite yourself saying that it was perfectly comprehensible. My comment that nobody was listening to DGG was in response to Slowking's comment that "i note DGG, that noone is listening to you". I'm glad that you normally listen to DGG; I'm sure you enjoy doing so. Perhaps if you could try listening to Slowking and I a bit more to avoid incorrectly characterising me as a "hardcore deletionist"? Ironholds (talk) 11:24, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

Hi Ironholds, in my comment I was mainly concerned about your opening sentence. I think there is a bit more nuance to "It is in English, if you want an ambiguity in it clarified then I'd suggest a polite note to Slowking on his talkpage rather than such hyperbole." than simply interpreting that as me describing something as "perfectly comprehensible". As for whether in my eyes you are or were a hardcore deletionist, or whether I think in such simplistic terms, please remember that I consider myself a hardcore deletionist when it comes to unsourced articles about alleged pornstars, prostitutes and mafiosi. Assuming we are both going to be at the London meetup on sunday week, perhaps we should discuss these issues there over a beer? ϢereSpielChequers 10:04, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

What do assumptions make one out to be, again? I won't be going to the meetup no, which (from the attendees point of view) will at least make it quieter. There's absolutely no need to discuss it over a beer - you misrepresented what I was saying, presumably through not reading what I was replying to, I have come here to clarify, please either apologise or at least recognise that what you stated was inaccurate. Ironholds (talk) 13:40, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

Template:AnonymousWelcome

Hi, WSC. I deeply regret opening this can of worms. I find the template very useful and wish someone had left something like it on my talk page back in 2004 or so. If you insist on starting a TfD (your prerogative, of course), I'd be grateful for a link on my talk page if it's not too much trouble. Rivertorch (talk) 09:04, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

Hi Rivertorch, 2004 is impressive, you've been editing way longer than I have. Please remember I'm not trying to delete the templates that welcome IPs and gently encourage them to create accounts. Wikipedia:Templates_for_discussion#Template:AnonymousWelcome is just an attempt to delete a welcome template that in my view is unwelcoming and that implies that IP editing is somehow deprecated. ϢereSpielChequers 09:39, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

NPP

Hi WSC. There are new messages at meta.wikimedia.org NPP. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 02:06, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

FYI

FYI Agathoclea (talk) 17:32, 10 July 2011 (UTC)

Thanks Agathoclea, much obliged. ϢereSpielChequers 19:22, 14 July 2011 (UTC)

Mandatory sources for all new articles

FYI in case you missed it. I have made a suggestion there that you might want to express your opinion on. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 04:58, 11 July 2011 (UTC)

It got me thinking. User:WereSpielChequers/Newpage proposal ϢereSpielChequers 15:17, 12 July 2011 (UTC)

Re VPR proposal

As an aside, I tried, without success to review the discussion about the origin of the sticky prod. I went to Wikipedia talk:Proposed deletion of biographies of living people then to the Archive, saw multiple mentions that this page is about implementation, for policy go other there. but there is a link to here, so I gave up.

I can accept that unsourced BLP's create a legal risk. Arguably, that risk exceeds the risk associated with generation of crap. However, if it is truly the case we get so many unsourced new articles that it would overwhelm the resources to source them, then we should admit we have a problem requiring resolution, not a problem that should be ignored.--SPhilbrickT 20:50, 11 July 2011 (UTC)

The more I think about it, the more I'm troubled by your comment. I may post about this at the VPR page, but I'd like to get a better understanding of your rationale, so I can put my thoughts together coherently.

If we have a BLPProd team, presumably formed because unsourced BLP's are high risk, why would they stop working on BLP's and start working on something else? If they are mindless reviewing a category, is would be trivial to create a cat for BLP stickies and Other stickies.--SPhilbrickT 20:58, 11 July 2011 (UTC)

The BLPprod was a response to the deletion spree of early 2010 when some admins argued that unsourced BLPs were high risk and should be purged. The people rescuing BLPprods aren't mindlessly reviewing a category, they are referencing a large proportion of those BLPprods. But the tenday cycle means that the normal process of Wikiprojects and others referencing articles doesn't have time to kick in, and so a small group of editors take on the whole load. ϢereSpielChequers 21:43, 11 July 2011 (UTC)

Keeping new editors

I've put a comment on your new essay. I hope it's not TLDR ;) Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 13:35, 13 July 2011 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/July 2011/Op-ed

Hello

I am not sure that you are intrested, but I make some analisys for pl.wiki here you have data.

Quick and dirty translation:

PUA = RfA

tak = yes

nie = no

udane = accepted

nieudane = not accepted

page 5 = at what try candidate was accepted

page 7 = percent of accepted candidates

page 9 = how many RfA in one year

page 11 = how many votes (average)

page 16 = number of edits in moment of get admin (limit "you can start RfA" - 1000 edits)

page 18 = number of days from registration account to get a admin

page 20 = year of creation of account

Data are from September 2010, but you can just check what are main diffrence between en.wiki and pl.wiki

If you want more information please write to me on pl:USER:PMG.

PMG (talk) 11:34, 22 August 2011 (UTC)

Requesting your input

Your opinion is valued and would be appreciated here as your time permits. Thanks - My76Strat (talk) 10:06, 25 August 2011 (UTC)

Tipu's Tiger

Thank you for sending Tipu's Tiger material to India. Bishdatta handed the material to me when she returned from Haifa. That along with other resources I have are available for Wikipedians to physically access in India. Thanks once again. AshLin (talk) 04:25, 26 August 2011 (UTC)

You're very welcome. I'm hoping to get a lot more photos on common from the Indian section of the V&A shortly. ϢereSpielChequers 10:22, 29 August 2011 (UTC)

Abdul Qadeer Khan

Hi WereSpielChequers,

I think wikipedia is a fantastic project. I spend quite some time reading and writing here. I am running into a new kind of problem at this moment. I found a page that I would like to edit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdul_Qadeer_Khan. The page is incoherent and rife with linguistic errors. I think most people agree that it is a very important page. The cause of the poor quality is twofold: -largely written by people with poor mastery of English. -an editing war over content see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Abdul_Qadeer_Khan The page even contains this comment: Clearly it is a page of fierce controversy and active editing.

Before I start to clean this page up, I want to have some kind of reassurement that the page will not be messed up again after my back. Is that possible? I would find it unsatisfactory if I remove linguistic errors and try to make the page more balanced and the balance is removed by someone else.

Doctor Ruud (talk) 11:46, 28 August 2011 (UTC)

Hi Doctor Ruud, in my experience typos and so forth can be fixed on even the most contentious pages. But on contentious pages sometime uncontentious improvements can get caught up in the wider controversy. So I would suggest proceeding with caution and trying to engage with people on the talkpage and work with them to achieve consensus. Alternatively if you don't want the risk of having your work compromised by subsequent editing then I would suggest picking a less contentious topic. However I do hope you do some cleanup there, I have made a few tweaks - there were a couple of minor errors there such as understating the weight difference between U235 and U238 and even suggesting that all reactors require enriched fuel (though as enrichment becomes more efficient I think that even CANDU's might be taking advantage of it). I accept that my own edits may be lost in subsequent editing, but that I'm afraid is the risk we all take here. ϢereSpielChequers 10:22, 29 August 2011 (UTC)

Future of the Earth

Hello WereSpielChequers,

I just wanted to say thank you for your review of the Future of the Earth article. Although the article didn't receive any support, I still plan to try and address all of the points you raised. I didn't include anything about a closer encounter of a stellar object with the Earth because of the minute odds; essentially I was just including those events that have a likelihood of 1% or greater. This ruled out a gamma ray burst, for example. Regards, RJH (talk) 16:55, 30 August 2011 (UTC)

Hi RJHall, You're very welcome, it was an interesting and thought provoking read. Sorry to hear it got closed before you had time to resolve my queries. That's a fair point,re 1% risks, was that filter mentioned in the article? If not perhaps you could have a section on other risks reckoned to be less than one percent probability. ϢereSpielChequers 17:04, 2 September 2011 (UTC)

A beer for you!

Some refreshment for you... Marek.69 talk 19:33, 8 September 2011 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:WP Future

Template:WP Future has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) - talk 15:24, 14 September 2011 (UTC)

m:Wikimania project domain

Hi, I do not mind your proposal and have a counter proposal (sort of) if you'd like to look. :) -- とある白い猫 ^chi? 14:03, 16 September 2011 (UTC)

Talkback

{{talkback}} hey, i'm testing twinkle talkback for the first time, so if it's messy, i apologize in advance... — alf.laylah.wa.laylah (talk) 18:18, 18 September 2011 (UTC)

oh my, it seems to actually work, how fun... — alf.laylah.wa.laylah (talk) 18:19, 18 September 2011 (UTC)

Thanks, replied on your talkpage. ϢereSpielChequers 18:47, 18 September 2011 (UTC)

Adding you to my recall list

Hi. It's recently been pointed out [1] to me that there is a slight flaw in my recall criteria. The criteria is fairly simple - if three or more of the people on the list ask me to hand back the tools I will. Sadly a number of memebers of the list are now so inactive as to make my criteria almost un-enforceable - not a good thing. I'd like to add yourself to the list as I trust you to be impartial. Please let me know if you're happy with that or not - or feel free to edit User:Pedro/Recall and either add or remove yourself from the hidden list. Best. Pedro :  Chat  09:10, 20 September 2011 (UTC)

Hi Pedro, I've accepted though with quite a large twinge of conscience that I've never got around to completing a recall criteria form myself. Though I kind of assume that if I needed to go the next London wikimeet would tell me. I did look around when I first became an admin and yours was the criteria I chose to base mine on, if I ever get round to it, would you be OK to be on the list? ϢereSpielChequers 09:33, 20 September 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for adding your name. I'd be equally honoured to be on yours. I sort of choose the format as it seemed fairly simple and with no wiggle room which keeps it "honest" if you see what I mean. One of these days I am going to force some time away from work and the family and attend a London wiki-meet - promise!! Pedro :  Chat  09:36, 20 September 2011 (UTC)

That would be good, it would be great to meet you in person after all these years! As an alternative why not come along to one of the London GLAM events, one of our regulars took his kids to either a V&A or a British Museum event. ϢereSpielChequers 09:51, 20 September 2011 (UTC)

.....a good thought, although I'm not sure my three year old would be quite up for it....and then there's the issue of persuading Mrs Pedro that she needs to come too, to help me out. :) Pedro :  Chat  09:57, 20 September 2011 (UTC)

I think my sister was three when her query "what do plataps" got a fulsome response from an expert friend of our Australian relatives. But yes I see the issue, kids come first at that age. I'm sure we'll still be drinking in the Oak when you are wondering what to do with yourself when she has a sleepover with friends. ϢereSpielChequers 21:30, 21 September 2011 (UTC)

Oh, please don't start me down that line. I feel old enough already :) Pedro :  Chat  21:48, 21 September 2011 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) - and when my 10 year old grandson asked me recently "So what's all this stuff you do on Wikipedia then?"... --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 09:02, 22 September 2011 (UTC)

okay I feel a tad younger again! I was trying to explain to my five year old the other day that when daddy was growing up we had the choice of three TV channels, and that was it. He couldn't quite get the concept! Pedro :  Chat  11:01, 22 September 2011 (UTC)

You're lucky - when grand-père was little it was Muffin the Mule on Childrens' Hour, then the only channel closed down again until about 7pm! Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 15:17, 22 September 2011 (UTC)

And if you tell them how t' telly used to be Black and White they just say theirs is Silver. ϢereSpielChequers 18:31, 22 September 2011 (UTC)

feedback request

Hi WSC. If you have a moment could you please check this out. More info on its tp. Cheers. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 10:05, 25 September 2011 (UTC)

Talkback

{{talkback}}

Thanks replied there. ϢereSpielChequers 11:07, 3 October 2011 (UTC)

James Brown (journalist)

Hello! Where is you take infomation about percon and reliable source?--Many baks (talk) 16:17, 29 September 2011 (UTC)

Hi Many Baks, We accept lots of different things as wp:Reliable Sources. Books, Magazine and Newspaper articles about him would be fine. The important thing is that they need to be independent of him and to have a proper fact checking process in place. Hope that helps. ϢereSpielChequers 16:24, 29 September 2011 (UTC)

re: your message

Hi WereSpielChequers, I've left a reply to your message on my talk page -- Marek.69 ^talk 15:22, 30 September 2011 (UTC)

Naughty words

Kudpung tells me that you have a bot which crawls articles looking for certain keywords that might indicate vandalism. I'm working on a bot that will decline AfC submissions that satisfy one of the quick-fail criteria, but I want it to skip over submissions that might be attack pages. I've created a rudimentary list of bad words to check for, but I was wondering if I could take a look at your list, as apparently I'm not as imaginative as some of our AfC contributors when it comes to being vulgar. Cheers. —SW— ^comment 14:42, 5 October 2011 (UTC)

Hi Snottywong, yes I do, but it focusses on a small subset, and on words where the false positive rate is so high that it needs manual perusing. I'm not sure there are words available that we can guarantee won't be used in legit articles - if there were someone would name a rock group after them and several other groups would include the word in their song titles. But if there are any User:Lupin/badwords would be a good place to look, though I would suggest you think of a high risk prompt attention group rather than a decline AFCs bot. Afterall if we could write a decline AFC bot we could also write a speedy deletion bot, and I'm not aware of many of those that have had sufficient accuracy to be released. ϢereSpielChequers 15:22, 5 October 2011 (UTC)

I think the list you linked to above will be quite adequate. My first priority is to ensure that the bot doesn't decline submissions that might be high-risk, instead leaving them for a human to review. It may be possible in the future to have the bot flag the submission as "possible high risk" so that human reviewers can prioritize it. Thanks for the help! —SW— ^gossip 16:42, 5 October 2011 (UTC)

AOR

I suppose I ought to tell you that you've been on my list ever since I got the mop. It's a pretty eclectic list and in fact I didn't tell any of them :) --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 06:14, 7 October 2011 (UTC)

Heads up

Just a quick note that the templates we're going to test starting this week are up:

1. {{uw-test1-rand}}
2. {{uw-delete1-rand}}
3. {{uw-npov1-rand}}
4. {{uw-unsor1-rand}}
5. {{uw-error1-rand}}
6. {{uw-blank1-rand}}
7. {{uw-spam1-rand}}
8. {{uw-bio1-rand}}
9. {{uw-attack1-rand}}

We let Addshore know that we've got another test scheduled, and folks are concurrently working on analyzing the last round of level 1 testing. Based on last time's volume, we'll probably get statistically significant amounts of template application in a week. If you have any questions or comments about the templates, I'm watching their talk pages naturally. :) Thanks, Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 23:26, 10 October 2011 (UTC)

Question

Hi WSC. Have you heard anything from Boing! said Zebedee? He hasn't made an edit in almost 3 months. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 09:38, 14 October 2011 (UTC)

No, have you emailed him? ϢereSpielChequers 00:23, 15 October 2011 (UTC)

Yes, but there will probably be no answer. Apparently he has told another user that he will be out of Internet touch for quite some time. I don't think now that there is any immediate cause for concern - if he's in Thailand, he should know how to contact me if he needs to. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 03:06, 15 October 2011 (UTC)

Dawn Gibbons

I wanted let you know that I mentioned our February, 2011 discussion regarding the edits of User:Tdawngibbons to the Dawn Gibbons article in a discussion with User:Edison regarding the recent edits of User:Dawn Gibbons to the same article just in case the two incidents are related. --TommyBoy (talk) 03:40, 22 October 2011 (UTC)

New Page Patrol survey

New page patrol – Survey Invitation Hello WereSpielChequers! The WMF is currently developing new tools to make new page patrolling much easier. Whether you  have patrolled many pages or only a few, we now need to  know about your experience. The survey takes only 6 minutes, and the information you provide will not be shared with third parties other than to assist us in analyzing the results of the survey; the WMF will not use the information to identify you. If this invitation  also appears on other accounts you  may  have, please complete the  survey  once only.  If this has been sent to you in error and you have never patrolled new pages, please ignore it. Please click HERE to take part. Many thanks in advance for providing this essential feedback. You are receiving this invitation because you  have patrolled new pages. For more information, please see NPP Survey. Global message delivery 13:51, 26 October 2011 (UTC)

Article Feedback Tool

Hey WSC; thanks for coming to Office Hours yesterday - Fabrice appreciated your comments :). The full logs can be found here; we're thinking of holding another session quite soon. Would you like me to drop you a note when I have the specifics? In the meantime, you can read about the new ideas here, and if you have any suggestions or comments, drop them on the talkpage. Thanks, Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 19:50, 28 October 2011 (UTC)

I appreciate that, as this talkpage indicates, you're rather busy :). At the moment we're in the early stages - I'm planning on writing a brief newspost of sorts say, once every week or two weeks to explain what we're doing and what's still in discussion, so people can jump in at points that interest them without feeling obligated to do everything else to. Would that sound like something you'd like to receive? Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 21:54, 31 October 2011 (UTC)

Or not? Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 18:21, 3 November 2011 (UTC)

Hi, yes happy to be circulated. What media are you using? ϢereSpielChequers 21:28, 3 November 2011 (UTC)

For the newsletter? Probably just a talkpage note :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 22:26, 4 November 2011 (UTC)

Good. I much prefer it when newsletters and so forth are done on wiki rather than in blogs etc. ϢereSpielChequers 12:15, 7 November 2011 (UTC)

• I'm keeping things on-wiki as much as possible. Discussion will be here, not mediawiki.org, comms will be by talkpages, so on, so forth. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 22:58, 8 November 2011 (UTC)

Article Feedback Tool - Newsletter 1

Hey, guys and girls! You're receiving this because you signed up (or manually requested) the Article Feedback Tool Version 5 Newsletter. This is for people who care about making the AFT a better feature, but don't necessarily want to have to participate in every discussion. Instead, I'll be sending a newsletter around twice a month talking about what's been decided and what's still up for discussion - that way, if you're interested in specific features or ideas, you'll know when to jump in :). If you know anyone who fits into this category (or you're a talkpage watcher who does) please sign up here to receive more updates in the future.

First off, editors have already been picking at the basic design, and I've forwarded their suggestions to the devs. Those ideas which are worthy of further investigation (or being programmed into the software) are listed in the status box at the top of the talkpage. Community suggestions that the devs like include:

• Allowing for up and down-voting of comments to indicate priority (suggested by User:Bensin)
• Having comments link to the version of the article (as well as the article) that they refer to (suggested by User:RJHall)
• Including the AFT box as a hidden drop-down from a "feedback" button on section headings (suggested by User:Utar)

So already there's been some great ideas - I was in a meeting yesterday in which they confirmed that the developers are actively looking at how to include Utar's suggestion pretty quickly. There are still a lot of open issues, however; most pressing this week is what level of access IPs should have to submitted comments? The Foundation's plan calls for IP addresses to be only allowed to read the comments, but not to vote on or comment on their priority - this is intended to reduce gaming - but editors may have different opinions. If you like this level of access, want something more open, or want something more closed, please drop a note here.

Hope to see you all on the talkpage soon, with any developments, ideas or suggestions you may have. All the best, Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 19:22, 8 November 2011 (UTC)

• Oh - and the next Office Hours session will be held on Thursday at 19:00 UTC in #wikimedia-office. Give me a poke if you can't make it but want me to send you the logs when they're released - we'll be holding sessions timed for East Coast editors and Australasian/Asian editors next week. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 22:57, 8 November 2011 (UTC)

Consider yourself poked. If I could have I would have joined in though I'm not that keen on IRC office hours as in my experience the longer and more thoughtful the comment the more likely it is that the discussion has already moved on (providing its chaired you can have public meetings with scores or even hundreds of people - but on IRC a dozen people can be typing at once). However I'm already double booked that evening. ϢereSpielChequers 09:14, 9 November 2011 (UTC)

That's definitely a problem with IRC, yeah; it's one of the reasons I'm trying to hold so much of the discussion on talkpages (that and transparency) where I see you're contributing pretty well. So, no pressure; enjoy your existing commitments :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 01:44, 10 November 2011 (UTC)

• There's another session at 22:00 UTC this evening, if you can attend; logs from the last session can be found here. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 05:23, 18 November 2011 (UTC)

Signpost opinion piece

Hi there. I noticed that you had a lot to say in response to the opinion piece I wrote and was wondering if you'd be willing to write a rebuttal to my piece, talking about the successes that have been made in uBLP, or on other matters in which you disagreed with my piece. The Signpost has never had a rebuttal before, but I trust that you would be able to pull it off quite nicely if you wanted to, and as the coordinator for the Opinion desk, I am committed to taking the desk in new directions. One of the executive edits has expressed interest in the possibility of this piece as well, so don't worry about it not getting run, if you write it, we'll run it.

If you were interested in writing on something else instead, I'd also be more than happy to run an opinion piece by you on another topic.

Sven Manguard Wha? 14:49, 14 November 2011 (UTC)

Thanks Sven, I would love to write an opinion piece on this or on something else. But it won't be this week, it probably won't be this month and it may not be this year. ϢereSpielChequers 15:17, 14 November 2011 (UTC)

It never occurred to me that you'd have it ready for this week, I should have made that more explicit. Whenever you're ready, the doors are open. I will say though, that the window on doing a rebuttal is pretty small. Had I contacted you when I first thought of the idea (while my piece was still running) we might have pulled it off. Alas though, I suppose I dodged a bullet. Sven Manguard Wha? 15:20, 14 November 2011 (UTC)

RevDel

If you are about, do you (or perhaps a lurker) mind dealing with this? I'd rather general defamation was not left in my user page history but don't like using admin tools on my user pages. Cheers --Fæ (talk) 23:14, 16 November 2011 (UTC)

Y Done Talk page stalker: --joe decker^{talk to me} 23:26, 16 November 2011 (UTC)

Thanks Joe, I'm currently on a public WiFi where I'd rather not risk logging into Wikipedia. 120.61.159.240 (talk) 17:58, 17 November 2011 (UTC)

Hope you are having fun, glad you did not get caught with travel problems (let's quickly forget the trauma of travel paperwork). --Fæ (talk) 22:45, 17 November 2011 (UTC)

Yes its been an amazing few days - just about to head for the airport. ϢereSpellCheckers 03:10, 22 November 2011 (UTC)

Hello from India

Hi there WereSpielChequers,

It was great meeting you at WikiConference 2011 - an absolute pleasure. Looking forward to more collaborations with WMF UK in GLAM in future. AshLin (talk) 09:15, 22 November 2011 (UTC)

Hi Ashlin, the pleasure was mutual. I'm now back home in a cold, grey and wet London and the delights of Mumbai seem half a world away. But I shall never forget my brief time in India and the many wonderful and inspiring people I met. Absolutely we must get some future GLAM collaborations going, so far we've mostly prioritised the institutions and curators within those institutions who want to collaborate with us and objects that are "interesting" in the UK. But I think now would be a good time to go to our GLAM contacts in London with a request from our colleagues in India that we do a Tipu's Tiger style collaboration on an object of their choice. Would one of these be of particular interest to Indian Wikimedians? ϢereSpielChequers 08:44, 24 November 2011 (UTC)

Incidentally it would be really nice to get a translation of the inscription on File:Parshvanatha at V&A inscription.jpg. At present I don't even know what script it is - not Hindi I think but not otherwise sure. ϢereSpielChequers 18:29, 24 November 2011 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

The Technical Barnstar

This barnstar is for you for your work with the Death anomalies table and all the other awesome stuff you do. It is also a suggestion/request for another similar tool; I think it would be great to have something like the death anomalies table for coordinates in articles. So a list of articles that have coordinates in one wiki but not in another, so they can be copied over. This is something I have wanted for a long time, and for a wizard like you it is something that I think wouldn't be too hard to make. Another little thing that would be nice with regards to that is reports for coordinates that differ more than two degrees in different languages (because that is probably an indicator that one (or both) is incorrect). I have a feeling you may be the right man to get something like this done. *crossing fingers* ;-) Jon Harald Søby (talk) 03:16, 24 November 2011 (UTC)

Thanks Jon Harold. I came up with the idea for the Death anomalies project but needed a programmer to code it. I think the coding needed for your idea would be very similar. If anything it would be simpler in that we don't need to worry about finding the equivalent of en:Category:Deaths by year in each language, or face anomalies due to the different policies that different languages of Wikipedia have as to how old someone needs to be before we assume they are dead. I'll flesh the idea out on meta and talk to Merlissimo about it. In the meantime I was wondering with your language skills do you think you could find us more "deaths by year" categories for meta:Death anomalies table? We currently only have 83 languages where we've found the category, and though I know that Dutch and I think Portuguese don't have a compatible category system that still leaves nearly 200 language versions of Wikipedia that we could add to the table. Also there are only 14 languages currently extracting a report, if you know anyone who might be interested it would be great to see Swahili as our first African language extracting a Death anomaly report. ϢereSpielChequers 10:47, 24 November 2011 (UTC)

You're welcome! I added some more categories here. I'll see what I can do about Swahili; I agree it would be cool to have that as the first African language. As for other languages, I don't really think there are many more languages that have categorisations by year at all, either because they don't think it's necessary, or because they are just not developed enough to have a proper categorisation system at all (proper categorisation is not usually what comes first for new writers...).

About a similar coordinates project, I don't know what's better – a table like death anomalies would be handy, but I've thought some more about it, and maybe it would be more suitable as a toolserver tool; that way one can show in a table the values from different projects, and it could generate a template based on that information (since the templates may have different syntax on different projects). Do you have any thoughts on that? Jon Harald Søby (talk) 02:34, 29 November 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for doing those, yes I appreciate that small wikis aren't going to implement categories until they are ready. As for whether it would be better on the Toolserver I don't know, but User:Merlissimo will. ϢereSpielChequers 16:00, 24 December 2011 (UTC)

Article Feedback Tool newsletter

Hey, all! A quick update on how version 5 of the Article Feedback Tool is developing.

So, we're just wrapping up the first round of user contributions. A big thank you to everyone who has contributed ideas (a full list of which can be found at the top of the page); thanks almost entirely to contributions by editors, the tool looks totally different to how it did two months ago when we were starting out. Big ideas that have made it in include a comment voting system, courtesy of User:Bensin, an idea for a more available way of deploying the feedback box, suggested by User:Utar, and the eventual integration of both oversight and the existing spam filtering tools into the new version, courtesy of..well, everyone, really :).

For now, the devs are building the first prototypes, and all the features specifications have been finalised. That doesn't mean you can't help out, however; we'll have a big pile of shiny prototypes to play around with quite soon. If you're interested in testing those, we'll be unveiling it all at this week's office hours session, which will be held on Friday 2 December at 19:00 UTC. If you can't make it, just sign up here. After that, we have a glorious round of testing to undertake; we'll be finding out what form works the best, what wording works the best, and pretty much everything else under the sun. As part of that, we need editors - people who know just what to look for - to review some sample reader comments, and make calls on which ones are useful, which ones are spam, so on and so forth. If that's something you'd be interested in doing, drop an email to okeyes@wikimedia.org.

Thanks to everyone for their contributions so far. We're making good headway, and moving forward pretty quickly :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 16:38, 29 November 2011 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Admin functions that should only be done by admins who are legally adults

I wasn't too sure what to make of your essay when I first read it in terms of whether this is something to really be advising editors to believe (and you may very well be a minority, I could be wrong though :-)). Since this essay has been in the project space for some time and has barely been edited, I was thinking this essay belongs in the user space more so than the main project space. I have no preference for it staying in the main project space, but I was thinking this is something you should consider, moving it to your user page. Regards, — Moe ε 05:30, 1 December 2011 (UTC)

Hi Moe Epsilon, I rather prefer to believe that either I successfully summarised the relevant discussions on WT:RFA or nobody noticed it. Either way if you have specific concerns about it it has a talkpage. ϢereSpielChequers 07:24, 1 December 2011 (UTC)

193.150.26.253

Hey WSC. You beat me to blocking User:206.53.186.2 by a few seconds, but I'm just letting you know I extended the block because 31 hours didn't seem long enough given their extensive block log (I don't know if you saw their block log, but they came off a year-long block last week. All the best, HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 13:25, 2 December 2011 (UTC)

Hi Harry, No objections, I rarely block IPs and might be being cautious - its quicker to dish out a 31 hour block than to work out if they are stable and residential or a school. ϢereSpielChequers 13:29, 2 December 2011 (UTC)

RfC closures

Hi WSC. This RfC has been resolved, and needs closing before it continues as an after-debate.I've read the instructions, but I'm not sure if participants can close and archive it. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 02:48, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

Its been closed now. In such circumstances if there's any hurry and you are involved I'd suggest a a quick note at the admin's noticeboard asking for an uninvolved admin to close it. ϢereSpielChequers 18:30, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

Yes, I realise that after I posted here, and that's what I did. Thanks. BTW, any news on other stuff? --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 20:37, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:Tool apprenticeship

I just wanted to ask you a question based on your comment on that page — Why do you feel uncomfortable with the idea of unbundling some of the admin tools besides the block button? Speaking only for myself, and in a purely hypothetical light, I would love to have access to the delete button. I want to help close AfDs and do some new page patrolling work (I think I can demonstrate sound knowledge of the deletion process despite my relative lack of experience). Is there a reason you wouldn't trust non-admins with the power to delete pages? Master&Expert (Talk) 04:28, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

Hi Master & Expert. To a man with a hammer every problem is a nail. Many situations that you come across as an admin could be handled by more than one tool, but one particular one is more appropriate than another. Many areas where an admin operates will require the use of multiple tools, so unbundling one leaves other things undone. Neither of those arguments apply at wp:AIV which is one reason why I'm happy to support unbundling there, AIV is somewhere where you are only likely to need the block button. Though I suppose the ability to grant rollback would also be helpful. By contrast at Newpage patrol I do delete pages, but I also appoint Autopatrollers and block badfaith accounts, and to do either of the last two you really need to look at deleted contributions (at AIV most of the warnings will have been given for vandalism that is still available in the talkpage history, but if someone who has had multiple pages deleted you may have only seen one of them). Then there's the issue of civility or even communicativeness, if you are just reverting vandalism and blocking vandals you don't need the civility, patience, breadth of policy knowledge and ability to communicate that is required when you are deleting goodfaith contributions. My experience is that people who start with POV (especially fan pov), copypastitis and especially a lack of understanding of our notability rules are actually all goodfaith editors who in many cases are willing to learn the ways of the wiki. Whilst the vandals and attack page creators that come back are most likely to do so after a cleanstart if at all. So to give someone the delete button I want to see an understanding of when to delete and when not to, some reliably sourced content contributions, the policy knowledge and communication skills to handle random queries from stray newbies and the diplomacy needed to handle explain to someone that their bio of a mafiosi is most welcome, but they need to add a reliable source for us not to delete it on sight. If someone has all those skills then they'd have had to have done something pretty egregious in the last 12 months for me not to support their RFA. But for vandalwhacking I just want to know that someone has learned the difference between vandalism and goodfaith editing (I'd prefer not to unbundle the block button with the ability to block experienced users, just IPs and editors with <100 edits. Longterm disruptive editors, personal attacks, and the other reasons why we occasionally block regulars are best handled by more experienced admins, if anything I'd upbundle that to the crats). ϢereSpielChequers 09:44, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

Thank you for your very thorough response. I understand your points, but that still doesn't change the fact that I am really only interested in the delete button. I don't like personalizing this, but have you ever gotten the impression that I would be unfit to handle all the things that come with having access to the delete button — or adminship, for that matter? I mean, I'm not really interested in anything other than the deletion process. As it currently stands, I'm just not really sure I'd want the extra hassle the full admin toolset would bring; administrators are commonly asked to intervene in disputes, and are typically looked up to by Wikipedia's newcomers. I don't know if I'd fit the bill for an ideal administrator. Personally, I don't see admins any differently than non-admins; I'm one of the very few who truly considers it no big deal. And even if I did want adminship, I'm terrified of requesting for it. I have a bad feeling that the community does not have as much confidence in my judgment as I'd like to think. I highly doubt I would ever pass at RfA, even if I had a higher edit count. If you want more insight into why I feel this way, check out my ongoing editor review. Master&Expert (Talk) 16:36, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

i concur entirely (again). You should turn this into an essay! Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 10:42, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

Hi Master&Expert, I can't think of anyone who I've opposed at RFA but who at the time I would have trusted with the deletion button. Though there have been editors who I've opposed at RFA but would have happily given the block button to. So I'm not saying I don't trust you with the deletion button, just that if you were to get it you might as well get the rest. As for your concerns about people asking you to do other adminny things, I've bee an admin for nearly three years and I've only had a handful of such requests, some I've read the relevant instructions and actioned, others I've declined and steered them to admins who use that part of the toolset. It really isn't a big deal - almost all the request I get to use the tools are because I've signed up as an admin who does such actions or people know I'm active in that area.

Though I've done a few nominations I try not to think of fellow editors just in terms of whether I would or wouldn't support them at RFA. I haven't done an RFA level review let alone a nominator level one on you and wouldn't be able to I suspect this side of Christmas, as I've got a few spinning plates and also some urgent real life stuff to attend to. But I don't recall anything that would dispose me to oppose you. You've certainly been part of the community for a long while; One DYK would not be enough to impress a few percent of !voters who expect some audited content - though it should mean you easily meet my criteria of having added reliably sourced info. So unless you get a GA or do a lot of adding referenced content you are unlikely to get higher than 90%. But if you are working in deletion I would expect you are often checking to see if there are sources for something, prodding or tagging the ones you can't source for deletion and adding sources to others.

RFA may seem a risky place for those active in deletion, but actually its reputation on that score is far worse than the reality. There are broadly four sorts of deletion taggers who have difficulties at RFA:

1. The overconfident who answer questions without rereading the relevant policy, and then reading the policy again if they haven't spotted the trick part of the question.
2. The overly deletionist whose speed of tagging or attempts to delete easily sourced articles imply they will be too heavy with the deletion button
3. Those whose lack of content creation means it is difficult to judge that they know what should be added to the pedia or to be confident that they can empathise with the article creators whose work they can delete.
4. The overly inclusionist who try to rescue articles on non-notable subjects using weak or unreliable sources.

You'll probably know if you are in one or more of those groups, the fourth is rare and the first hard to predict, but nudge me in the new year and I can check your contributions then. ϢereSpielChequers 08:37, 7 December 2011 (UTC)

Hey, thanks for your reply! I'm now beginning to give more consideration into RfA than I had before. I may apply in a few months time, provided I'm up to it by then. I've been there many times before, and I know what the !voters expect. I'm not planning to be the "perfect admin candidate", I just want to help out any way I can. Master&Expert (Talk) 10:01, 7 December 2011 (UTC)

Talkback

Hello, WereSpielChequers. You have new messages at Dipankan001's talk page.
Message added 09:25, 8 December 2011 (UTC). You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

That's me! ^{Have doubt?} Track me! 09:25, 8 December 2011 (UTC)

So I just found it.Its here:[2].Read it carefully and you'll find it.That's me! Have doubt? Track me! 08:43, 10 December 2011 (UTC)

Hi, 6-12 is realistic and somewhat less than >12. ϢereSpielChequers 10:56, 10 December 2011 (UTC)

19th Century Ministers

If only they would stop adding vanity articles to Wikipedia. I edit conflicted declining the speedy delete for exactly the same reason as you. --GraemeL ^(talk) 23:08, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

And more usefully you added an inline cite, thanks for that. Speedy deletion errors never cease to amaze me, I only need two more to have declined speedies on every member of Liverpool's most famous popular music quartet. ϢereSpielChequers 23:13, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

성씨

There is an article called 성씨, should the name be changed.Msruzicka (talk) 23:19, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) The basic criterion is whether or not the page name is a likely search term for a user of the English Wikipedia. Even the use of non-English redirects has been the subject of lengthy debates. This guideline will explain things: Wikipedia:Article titles#English-language titles. More specifically in the case of 성씨, the questions are: Is this a relevant article for the English Wikipedia? Should it perhaps be merged to Korean name if it provides useful additional content and deleted per WP:CSD A10 or some other relevant criterion? --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 02:39, 12 December 2011 (UTC)

Non Latin words are OK for redirects as they may be of use to some people. But article names do need to be in the Latin script, I see that it is indeed now a redirect. ϢereSpielChequers 16:52, 15 December 2011 (UTC)

Office Hours

Hey WereSpielChequers; another Article Feedback Tool office hours session! This is going to be immediately after we start trialing the software publicly, so it's a pretty important one. If any of you want to attend, it will be held in #wikimedia-office on Friday 16th December at 19:00 UTC. As always, if you can't attend, drop me a line and I'm happy to link you to the logs when we're done. Thanks, Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 22:31, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

Seasons greetings

Howdy WereSpielChequers, thanks for your message. Happy winter Solstice to you too! Salvio ^{Let's talk about it!} 09:45, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

I would like to add my greetings also and to say thanks for the time you took to create the "Solstice template". As you may have seen I am using it as my greeting and everyone seems to enjoy it. Cheers and have a superb 2012. MarnetteD | Talk 23:55, 22 December 2011 (UTC)

Hehe, thanks! And a Merry Christmas to you, too. I think I'll have the words "for all the work you've been doing on the death anomalies" on my tombstone. Lugnuts (talk) 09:44, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

Excellent idea! My will merely specifies that I should arrive late, halfway through the playing of thus Sprach Zarathustra. Incidentally you may notice that ES wiki has been brought back into the match process. Last time we took them out because they were creating false positives by having former football clubs listed as dead, including their currently living players, hopefully they are back in because of a tidy up but your opinion would be welcome. ϢereSpielChequers 12:26, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

Sent you an email :)

Merry Christmas too. Kind regards. Wifione ^Message 17:41, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

replied. ϢereSpielChequers 13:41, 24 December 2011 (UTC)

Best wishes

	Bet you wish you were here!
	Warmest greetings from the Land of Smiles, and let's keep smiling together throughout the coming new year. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 23:23, 24 December 2011 (UTC)

I recommend a 1998 CNDP with your pud!

Cheers mate. I'm on the Angialis today. BTW I'm drafting an essay on simplifying the wiki, should be up early in the New Year. ϢereSpielChequers 16:15, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

Nicholas Michaletos

Hi WereSpielChequers, while I agree that many awards count as an assertion of importance, I'm not convinced the bare phrase "awarded" does. This could mean he got a high school swimming certificate, which clearly would be an assertion of importance. Without a specific award being mentioned, this appears to me not to be a credible assertion of importance. However, I do appreciate that others could take a different view on this and I appreciate the notification you left on my talk page. I'll keep the page on my watchlist. Best, Sparthorse (talk) 21:05, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

Hi Sparthorse, I take awarded as meaning award winning, and lighting designers sound to me the sort of profession that you need to to put a movie together..... Award winning plumber or taxi driver would I would treat differently, so I don't treat all award winning claims as a credible assertion of importance. In any event if like that one an article already has a BLPprod I would be inclined to let that run its course unless it is an invalid tag or it very clearly meets a CSD criteria - I have deleted several BLPprodded articles per G10. ϢereSpielChequers 23:38, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

New year wishes

A very happy new year to you ! Shyamal (talk) 04:23, 30 December 2011 (UTC)

Thanks and a Happy New Year to you and yours. ϢereSpielChequers 14:46, 31 December 2011 (UTC)

CSD testing: experiment?

Isn't this similar to the experiment you took part in a year or two ago? Is it a good idea? --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 19:16, 30 December 2011 (UTC)

Not that similar, we did a mystery shopping exercise, this is a training exercise where the relevant accounts are publicly declared as created for a training exercise. As to whether it is a good idea, I think it replicates work that Balloonman did, not sure from the two examples I looked at how useful it will be. What do you think of it as a training exercise - I think your expertise is a lot more relevant than mine there. Incidentally you might be interested to read User:WereSpielChequers/typo study, feedback would be welcome. ϢereSpielChequers 22:26, 30 December 2011 (UTC)

Like you, I'm not sure if it would contribute much more to the research that has already been done. That said, if the accounts are fully declared, I think it's probably harmless, but I would prefer to see the experiment as a more officially recognised and collaborative exercise. On alt accounts, I personally only have one, (declared to arb), which I never edit from except to remind myself what the Wiki looks like to someone who doesn't have the admin buttons, and what warnings look like when generated on non autoconfirmed users' talk pages. I've read through your typo study, but it's a bit above my head. I only correct typos when I'm reading the 'pedia for myself or reviewing articles - or my own, of which there are many due to my special keyboard. I can't use AWB - shame it's not ported for Mac, it seems that a significantly high proportion of experienced editors (elitists - ::wink::) here use Mac - was there ever any research done into the use of platforms by regular active users? --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 04:19, 31 December 2011 (UTC)

Hi Kudpung, to me that's the beauty of the crowdsourcing model, there are a bunch of us who hunt down typos and there are others who care about colour schemes or punctuation. What I was trying to do with that analysis was to gently point out that if you want to measure the level of typos in Wikipedia then it helps if you are looking at the current version and that what you are measuring are typos. Perhaps I was overly polite.

As for operating system, wikipedia is a child of the open source movement so we shouldn't be surprised at there being a disproportionate number of Linux users. I'm not sure what the Mac connection is, maybe it is a geek thing? I think I tried to get some O/S questions into the annual survey but I don't remember if I succeeded. ϢereSpielChequers 11:08, 31 December 2011 (UTC)

I'm not sure about this, but I would assume that anything that works on Linux would probably work on Mac as they both have a Unix core. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 14:40, 31 December 2011 (UTC)

Just to round this off: I feel very sure that there is a much higher use of Mac and Linux among Wikipedians than the global average. However, rather than reflect on the reasons why (although one could make some academic guesses), it would be a good idea to find out if this is true, and if it is, consider properly porting things like AWB to Mac rather than recommending using unstable, slow, and bulky Windoze emulators such as Wine to do it. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 06:38, 3 January 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the rply

Thanks for the quick response you replied to me on Meta-Wiki and I have signed your guestbook also. Kindly regards. --Katarighe (Talk · Contributions · E-mail) 21:44, 30 December 2011 (UTC)

Deleted

why was my thing deleted about haypi kingdom? thanks p.s. i dont know if this is where i contact you at or not :)

Faust22 (talk) 00:20, 31 December 2011 (UTC)

Hi Faust22, yes this is the right place to contact me. The page I deleted on the Haypi kingdom just consisted of the word ass which isn't a particularly promising start to an encyclopaedia article.. ϢereSpielChequers 00:25, 31 December 2011 (UTC)

Article Feedback Tool - notes and office hours

Hey guys! Another month, another newsletter.

First off - the first bits of AFT5 are now deployed. As of early last week, the various different designs are deployed on 0.1 percent of articles, for a certain "bucket" of randomly-assigned readers. With the data flooding in from these, we were able to generate a big pool of comments for editors to categorise as "useful" or "not useful". This information will be used to work out which form is the "best" form, producing the most useful feedback and the least junk. Hopefully we'll have the data for you by the end of the week; I can't thank the editors who volunteered to hand-code enough; we wouldn't be where we are now without you.

All this useful information means we can move on to finalising the tool, and so we're holding an extra-important office hours session on Friday, 6th January at 19:00 UTC in #wikimedia-office. If you can't make it, drop me a note and I'll be happy to provide logs so you can see what went on - if you can make it, but will turn up late, bear in mind that I'll be hanging around until 23:00 UTC to deal with latecomers :).

Things we'll be discussing include:

• The design of the feedback page, which will display all the feedback gathered through whichever form comes out on top.
• An expansion of the pool of articles which have AFT5 displayed, from 0.1 percent to 0.3 (which is what we were going to do initially anyway)
• An upcoming Request for Comment that will cover (amongst other things) who can access various features in the tool, such as the "hide" button.

If you can't make it to the session, all this stuff will be displayed on the talkpage soon after, so no worries ;). Hope to see you all there! Thanks, Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 04:49, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

2011 RfAs

Looks like my prognosis 8 months ago (47) wasn't far off the mark. The year closed with only 52. Have you got any ideas for research that can estimate just when the number of active admins will really fall below a level that can sensibly cope with the tasks and backlogs? AFAICS, the only serious backlogs at the moment are at files for deletion, and some old articles lurking in the oubliette at AfD. (they are generally the ones that are just too long and complex for anyone - including me - to want to spend an hour or two on each one). I don't generally favour unbundling, but there could be a possible call for a 'File Admin' that I might support. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 06:46, 3 January 2012 (UTC)

The pattern is a drop of a third each year in the number of successful RFAs. We had 75 the year before, I was predicting 50 last year and we slightly exceeded that, I expect about 3 dozen this coming year. I don't know when the number of active admins will fall to the point where our hands are forced, partly because we don't know how many people are really active as admins as opposed to an hour here and there. One bit of good news is that the number of "active" admins has actually stabilised and currently wanders between 725 and 750, almost certainly a side effect of the desysopping of completely inactive ones with people returning to EN wiki sufficiently often to retain the mop. Not that I wish to denigrate those who give us an hour a month of their time. But we know that the vast majority of admin work is done by a small minority of very active admins, we just don't know how many of them there are, how fast they are slipping away and whether there is another method of recruiting them other than giving the bit to active non-admins. As for where I expect to see the problem hit, it will be at either WP:AIV or cat:speedy. All of the other areas are ones we can live with permanent backlogs or where we can catch up when it is evening in North America, but if we have vandals or attack page creators on a spree and no-one to block them then even a 30 minute gap is a serious problem. Unbundling the block button would avert that crisis, and if we proposed unbundling it for IPs and accounts with less than a hundred edits then I think we could keep things going for years.

On a broader and less optimistic note, I don' know how RFA can be repaired to the point where all clueful, civil, longterm contributors can become admins. So we can't have the sort of self governing community we had in our golden age, and I don't know how else we could structure ourselves in a way that makes sense for a volunteer self governing community. ϢereSpielChequers 11:35, 3 January 2012 (UTC)

Sorry, yes you're right - deletion was not part of your suggestion and I now understand and accept that it's not a good idea. Perhaps a solution for adminship would be a secret ballot à la artbcom, with noms bundled on a quarterly basis. Dunno - just fielding an idea. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 08:43, 4 January 2012 (UTC)

Well yes, there's some truth in the time zone thing. There were times over the holiday period (especially while the USA was asleep) where I felt I was the only admin lurking at NPP. Virtually every new page I clicked on had to be deleted, and some that had already been CSDd had been hanging around for several hours, not to mention the G10s and G3s that had simply been tagged as A7 or G1. I am warming to your idea of a right to delete attack pages and block -100 vandals but how can we be sure if those editrs will use the tools sensibly if they haven gone through hell-week first? There may be some sense in introducing a right for NPP after all, but all research in that area and the survey seems to have been shelved in favour of prioritising development of the AFT. On the other note, maybe the curent arbcom case may be a lesson to some to buck their udeas up about their participation at RfA. There's a bit of slightly more positive/objective talk at WT:RfA today.Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 12:18, 3 January 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, I wasn't proposing to unbundle the deletion button, but blocking of vandals and creators of attack pages is actually uncontentious, deleting page and blocking vested contributors are the contentious areas and I wouldn't suggest unbundling either of them. I may check out wt:rfa but I have some real life things to do, the AFT is a problem, both because it takes us in the wrong direction and because it takes resources that could be put to good use. I might file an RFC on it..... ϢereSpielChequers 12:40, 3 January 2012 (UTC)

Equal treatment

Of the 120 or so primary schools that were suddenly mass proposed for deletion over the holiday period, roughly half are being redirected and half are being deleted, and some are apparently being deleted without properly evaluating the consensus. Not only is it contrary to any effort to adhere to consistency in the way policies, guidelines, or precedents are applied throughout the encyclopedia, but such arbitrary voting and closing by those who are not aware of the policies, guidelines, and precedents, does not accord equal debate treatment for similar or near identical articles. The situation is now getting ridiculous and a ruling is urgently required one way or another that we can all follow and save unnecessary bureaucracy. Personally, I very strongly support the redirection of nn schools and its clearly established precedent, but if policy does get changed, I'd kowtow to whichever way the cookie crumbles. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 08:45, 4 January 2012 (UTC)

Hi having just returned from a Governor's meeting I feel a hint of COI here, but suggest you take it to deletion review. MHO if the choice is between deletion and redirect then it would help if the school name includes the name of the locale, otherwise you risk a misleading redirect. ϢereSpielChequers 13:54, 4 January 2012 (UTC)

My only interest is in following the precedent we have. Although I coordinate the schools project, I don't really care what happens to the school articles as long as we have a clear guideline to act on. That said, it's a paradox that near identical articles get closed differently at AfD depending on who turns up to vote. There have indeed also been some odd readings of consensus too - objectively construed. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 15:51, 4 January 2012 (UTC)

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Delete revision history

Hello! Today I was editing a page on Wikipedia. I closed the browsers window as usual and then opened it again when I felt like to edit the page again. When I was done I checked the revision history of that page and I could see an Ip-adress, my Ip-adress, I werent logged in the second time! I have been searching and reading all around wikipedia, how to delete revision history on an article because I dont want my Ip visible when I have an account. It seems that admins have a tool for this and could you help me with this, please? Best regards EN — Preceding unsigned comment added by Expertnature (talk • contribs) 19:30, 6 January 2012 (UTC)

Sure. You have two people working on it, just tell them the page and it is done. ϢereSpielChequers 19:42, 6 January 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the fast answer, this concern my swedish wikipedia, where can I find those two persons

Thanks! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Expertnature (talk • contribs) 20:17, 6 January 2012 (UTC)

OK the Swedish Wikipedia means you need a Swedish Wikipedia admin. Try asking here. Good luck ϢereSpielChequers 20:35, 6 January 2012 (UTC)

Deleted user page?

Hi, you moved, restored, and deleted the userpage for User talk:Betty Logan back in 2010, a number of times. There's a query as to whether this account is a sock, or at least an alt account. Is there anything we should know about the user page, which remains uncreated? Tony (talk) 01:46, 8 January 2012 (UTC)

Hi Tony, it was an attack created by User:Neytiriblueyavatar and had not been edited by Betty Logan. ϢereSpielChequers 10:46, 8 January 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, WSC. Tony (talk) 12:01, 8 January 2012 (UTC)

FAC

Hey WSC, thanks as always for your insightful edits and reviews! I've replied to your comments at the article's FAC. Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 09:29, 9 January 2012 (UTC)

Article Feedback Tool - things to do

Hey guys! A couple of highly important things to do over the next few weeks:

• We've opened a Request for Comment on several of the most important aspects of the tool, including who should be able to hide inappropriate comments. It will remain open until 20 January; I encourage everyone with an interest to take part :).
• A second round of feedback categorisation will take place in a few weeks, so we can properly evaluate which design works the best and keeps all the junk out :P. All volunteers are welcome and desired; there may be foundation swag in it for you!

Regards, Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 18:54, 9 January 2012 (UTC)

Advice neeeded

Sorry to bother you again with this school AfD stuff. This situation is getting worse. Something needs to be done urgently, but I don't particularly wish for my talk page to become the venue for the inevitable dramafest, and we need to know where best to take it. Please see this thread and this thread. Thanks in advance your advice. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 05:00, 10 January 2012 (UTC)

Hi Kudpung, unless I've misread that 151 AFDs is a very different scale to the 60,000 uBLPs that were threatened in the events of two years ago. Also taking articles to AFD is less contentious than deleting them out of process. I'm not sure what would make a primary school notable enough for an article. Obviously some will be because of celebrity intake, and others because of architectural merit. If you have an institution with 700 kids plus staff then it would be likely over time to meet the GNG. That said there are plenty of settlements that would currently be hard to delete but IMHO would be less notable than a surviving Victorian Primary school. If there are nominations that are troutworthy then I'd go to the nominators talkpage. If however they are nominating a stream of articles that invariably get deleted then your only real option is an RFC to broaden wp:School.

BTW. If you want a change of pace from that I've jotted a few thoughts down here, I'm not happy with the way I've structured it and I'm sure my grammar will make you wince, so feel free to reshape it. If you find bits you disagree with then hopefully I'll see you on the talkpage. ϢereSpielChequers 23:51, 10 January 2012 (UTC)

I think the current issue is not so much one of whether primary schools are notable, rather than what to actually do with the ones that clearly aren't. Obviously there are some borderline cases which can naturally be intelligently debated at AfD. What we are looking at however, is a mass nomination at AfD at the rate of one or two per minute without any consideration for whether they might be notable or not, and it appears that is is simply being done from going through lists in categories. The scale of this operation is indeed not akin to BLP, but unlike BLP, schools articles are rarely toxic, and where other generally accepted mechanism exist for their treatment, sending them to AfD is more an expression of the nominators' POV against school notability in general, besides which, the number of editors with a knowledge of policies and guidelines for schools is far too low to assure consistency of voting and closure. The number of users with that knowledge and/or who can close such a quantity of AfD is even lower, and it is time consuming, and wasteful to resources. Although I am a coordinator and perhaps the most active member of the schools project, I have more pressing engagements such as RfA and NPP - and reading your essay ;) Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 06:24, 11 January 2012 (UTC)

Well if some of the articles nominated are notable then as I suggested you could take this up with the nominator. ϢereSpielChequers 12:08, 11 January 2012 (UTC)

DYK nomination of Stipple engraving

Hi, I reviewed your DYK nomination of this article and I wonder if you need to do a quid pro quo . . . also I see a problem with the hook and the relevant sentence in the article. Letting you know. Yngvadottir (talk) 07:26, 11 January 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. It isn't a self nom so quid pro quo doesn't apply. ϢereSpielChequers 12:09, 11 January 2012 (UTC)

Yes, I rechecked the rules and saw that. I've taken Johnbod's comments and improvements to the article on board (this is not an area I know much about), asked him to reference the key sentence, and put up an ALT3 hook. Could you please add him to the credits if you know how? I don't, and he's distinctly improved the article's coverage. Yngvadottir (talk) 16:49, 11 January 2012 (UTC)

DYK for Stipple engraving

Casliber (talk · contribs) 00:05, 14 January 2012 (UTC)

Copyvio/RevDel??

The next step? I caught a case of copyvio and reverted that. But how to get the copyvio striked out? Involved article: Gor_Mahia_F.C. Night of the Big Wind _talk 17:13, 15 January 2012 (UTC)

I declined the CSD as it is an article created in 2006 with 144 edits from multiple editors. So it should be easy to find a pre-copyvio version and revert to that. Remember G12 is only for articles where there isn't a pre copyvio version that one can revert to - otherwise you allow vandals to delete any article simply by adding a copyvio to it with one account and a G12 tag with another. ϢereSpielChequers 14:38, 17 January 2012 (UTC)

Discussions - other Wikis

Hi WSC. Do you happen to know if it is permitted to invite users of projects on other Wikipedias to comment on our RfCs? Such as for example the wording of the {{Please see}} invite template that we put on project talk pages..Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 10:49, 17 January 2012 (UTC)

Apart from asking people to comment on templates targetted at visitors to here from their language, I'm not sure when this would involve approaching people with relevant interest as opposed to people who might have a similar view to yourself. So I'd sugget proceed with caution and only if you can justify the relevance and neutrality of the invitation. ϢereSpielChequers 14:38, 17 January 2012 (UTC)

Article Feedback Tool

Hey guys; apologies for the belated nature of this notification; as you can probably imagine, the whole blackout thing kinda messed with our timetables :P. Just a quick reminder that we've got an office hours session tomorrow at 19:00 in #wikimedia-office, where we'll be discussing the results of the hand-coding and previewing some new changes. Hope to see you there :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 21:42, 19 January 2012 (UTC)

Peer review

Mr Chequers, would you mind taking a look here? -- Marek.69 ^talk 22:40, 20 January 2012 (UTC)

OK will do. ϢereSpielChequers 22:45, 20 January 2012 (UTC)

Thank you WereSpielChequers for your copy edit of the Pope John Paul II article. :-)

Kind Regards -- Marek.69 ^talk 20:34, 21 January 2012 (UTC)

Prognosis

Hi WSC. This month will close with only 1 new admin. I'm going to hazard a guess that this year will end with only 25 - 35 successful elections. Recent discussions around the site seem to uphold the general view that incivility is a normal and accepted form of interaction so I'll probably retire from my efforts to reform RfA, at least until the number of active admins drops below the waterline and the backlogs build up, and something is done about NPP (we now only have an average of 5 patrollers on duty at any one time, and still with the associated problems of competency). I'll support any proposals for unbundling on the lines you have suggested - but no further extensions to user rights to admin tools. Making NPP a user right may attract more competent people to the system even if they are only looking for trophies. I would support that too, especially if it gave them the rights for some summary deletions (hoax, attack, vandalism) and blocks for persistent vandalism.Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 03:41, 23 January 2012 (UTC)

Hi Kudpung, yes the long-term trend is for a drop of one third each year in new admins, so I'm expecting 30-36 new ones this year, any more than that would imply that things were capable of improvement, any less and the inevitable moves a little closer. As for unbundling deletion and NPP problems generally, my fear is that deletion is the area with most mistakes. I recently came across an article deleted G12 rather than be restored to its pre copyvio version. Two patrollers tagged it and an admin deleted it - I'd been ignoring copyvio and assumed that those who dealt with it knew what they were doing but that was troubling. If that was typical and not a freak combination of errors it means that a vandal can get pretty much any page deleted simply by adding copyvio to the current version. So I'm loathe to unbundle deletion, and even if we unbundled the deleting of pages for particular reasons I'd worry that people would stretch those reasons to other articles "that would probably have been deleted anyway when a full admin came by". When we cease to have enough active admins to maintain 24/7 cover at AIV then I believe I can get consensus to unbundle block for IP and editors with <100 edits, I'd prefer a proper reform and a longterm solution but that would keep us going for years..

As for civility, we have an important Arbcom case in its latter stages and I want to see what comes out of that. Most people here are very polite and are here to build a pedia, as someone who usually manages to lose their incivilities at the preview stage I think I'm quite mainstream in this. Yes we have people who we need to read the rules to, and perhaps some of us need to spend more time gently doing so at the early stages. I was really quite surprised in one recent RFC that I was the only person who could certify that they had gone to the editor and tried to resolve things earlier.

On a broader note there is a massive amount of instability in the project. The greying of the pedia, the increased importance of GLAMs, our new found lobbying power, the current face offs between the Foundation and the community over money and censorship, and the possibility that WYSIWYG editing could unleash a new generation of editors. Any one of those could be the catalyst for major change, the combination of them all is pretty much a guarantee of it. Whether that change is for the better or the worst is to some extent up to us. But if by late next year we are talking about a new generation of active editors then I think that RFA reform will be much more saleable. We already have the phenomenon of one wikigeneration dominating adminship and a disconnect between the admin generation who've been editing since 05/06 and the current generation of editors most of whom started editing after 07. The declining rate of recruiting people into the core that has thus far stymied reform, but the arrival of a whole new wave of active editors rejuvenating various parts of the pedia would bring forward the inevitable stage where a new generation wants to take over. ϢereSpielChequers 09:53, 23 January 2012 (UTC)

A beer for you!

I'm signing off for a while. Too many stale projects I keep badgering people about. You know how to get me if you need. Keep the wheels turning, mate! Best wishes, Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 09:28, 23 January 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the beer, and just in time for breakfast as well! Sorry if you are feeling jaded, I can understand the stale projects business, I've got a heavy week in real life, but lets talk next week.ϢereSpielChequers 09:53, 23 January 2012 (UTC)

office hours

Another notification, guys; Article Feedback Tool office hours on Friday at 19:00 UTC in #wikimedia-office :). If you can't attend, drop me a note and I'll send you the logs when we're done. We're also thinking of moving it to thursday at a later time: say, 22:00 UTC. Speak up if that'd appeal more :) Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 16:14, 26 January 2012 (UTC)

Invitation !!

Mumbai Photowalk II

Greetings from the Mumbai Wiki Community, We are organising a Photowalk for images/videos/audios related to Mumbai and Mumbaikars. Sign-up and other event details: Wikipedia Takes Mumbai II Recognition: Certificates will be awarded to prize winners. Best images will be featured in the respective article page on Wikipedia. Upload: Files have to be uploaded to Wikimedia commons through the photowalk portal using a customised version of the commons upload wizard. Or if you choose to upload directly to commons, the category "WTM" has to be added to the files. Venue: Oval Maidan (Forte,Mumbai) Date  : 28 January 2012 Time : 8am till 2pm followed by upload of images All files should be uploaders own work. Copyright expired and PD/CC images of others are not eligible. We invite you all to participate in the event. Please spread the word among your friends and share our Facebook group: -- Nikita (talk)

Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Fæ

A request for comments has been opened on administrator User:Fæ. You are being notified due to your prior participation in ANI, RfA, or RfC discussions regarding this user. Thank you, MadmanBot (talk) 19:33, 28 January 2012 (UTC)

Talkback

Hello, WereSpielChequers. You have new messages at BigDwiki's talk page.
Message added 23:21, 28 January 2012 (UTC). You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

BigDwiki (talk) 23:21, 28 January 2012 (UTC)

Mrtk56

hi its mrtk56. and by the way did i mintion <redacted> — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mrtk56 (talk • contribs) 01:20, 29 January 2012 (UTC)

Hi Mrtk56, nice to see you around. ϢereSpielChequers 15:46, 29 January 2012 (UTC)

Alert message on biography page

Hello,

I am trying to get rid of the alert on top of Regan Cameron's page. I have added verifiable citations where it was asked and yet the alert is still there. What else can be done to remove this?

Thank you — Preceding unsigned comment added by 53025fp (talk • contribs)

Hi 53025fp, I'm afraid it is a manual process and can take a bit of time. But having looked at the first link it does look overly similar to the source; Please remember that we write our own words - citations are to show where we found facts, not where we copied sentences from. Also I'm not sure that all of the sources that the article currently uses are ones that we would count as reliable. If in doubt ask yourself whether the source you are citing is has a factchecking process behind it. ϢereSpielChequers 17:37, 31 January 2012 (UTC)

Hi, thanks for the welcome

Thanks for the kind welcome WSC, and for righting my attempt at righting. This is a fun and scary place, and it's good to know there are folks out there sweeping up the dust bunnies.

I've been sucked into this for one specific reason: to fix a page that is hopelessly awry. Hopefully I'll succeed without too much ado, but if not I might come begging for some hand-holding...

All the best JFdove (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 06:56, 1 February 2012 (UTC).

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WikiProject Article Rescue Squadron Newsletter

Article Rescue Squadron Newsletter Volume I, Issue III February 2012 Front cover | Feature | News and announcements | Humor | Want ads To contribute to the next newsletter, please visit the Newsletter draft page. ARS Members automatically receive this newsletter. To opt out, please remove your name from the recipients list.

Battle of Radzymin (1920)

Thanks for dropping by. Regarding your copyedit, I have one minor question. I was under the impression that proper names of military units are capitalised in English. Hence my use of 21st Wilno Rifles Regiment and not regiment. It's not an ordinary noun but rather part of a proper name of that unit, much like the word "corporation" is part of the proper name of Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. //Halibutt 10:39, 7 February 2012 (UTC)

Hi Halibutt, as a non-military person I'm happy to defer to your specialist knowledge in that area. ϢereSpielChequers 16:21, 7 February 2012 (UTC)

WP:AN and WP:ANI

Hey WCS, I noted this edit[3] and wanted to make sure you were aware of that the discussion had moved to here---Balloonman ^{Poppa Balloon} 23:30, 9 February 2012 (UTC)

User:WereSpielChequers/WikiGenerations

Hi WSC, I noticed your comment on Jimmy's talk page pointing to your by-generation stats for admins and I had a quick thought. If you were looking for more stats to see if there were any interesting correlations that could be drawn, it would be interesting to know how many admins by year are still admins, and the year they started editing might make an interesting addition. Btw, it would be nice to see you at the Coventry meetup a week on Sunday if you can make it up here. :) Best, HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 03:53, 11 February 2012 (UTC)

Hi HJ, yes, but it really needs programs to collect the data. The way I originally built it is too labour intensive to use that to update or expand it. Not sure about Coventry, I'm going to the London meetup this Sunday but will be doing other things the following weekend. ϢereSpielChequers 10:27, 11 February 2012 (UTC)

Ad hominem and Delicious Carbuncle

WereSpielChequers, in my opinion, your comment implying Delicious Carbuncle is motivated by homophobia in engaging in dispute resolution ("But running an RFC on a gay editor whilst simultaneously campaigning against them on a site that allows Homophobia, and doing so after you've posted their phone number seems to me in breach of our policies on Outing and Canvassing.") I have listed in this section in relation to the Fae RfC constitute an ad hominem attack. Since ad hominem arguments attack the character of the person (in an attempt to damage the credibility of their message), I believe such debate tactics violate WP:NPA. Also, an ad hominem argument is a logical fallacy, and thus provides little help in addressing the validity of the issues raised in the statement of dispute. Please refrain from ad hominem arguments in the future. Thank you. Cla68 (talk) 11:27, 11 February 2012 (UTC)

I have raised the issue of this "warning", which Cla68 is spamming to multiple editors, at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard#Cla68 now posting "warnings" to editors. Please feel free to comment on this issue on that page. Prioryman (talk) 11:13, 11 February 2012 (UTC)

Hi Cla68 welcome to my talkpage. I disagree with your interpretation of my statement. I mentioned two policies that I considered to have been breached, Outing and Canvassing. The Outing breach seemed to me quite clear, the phone number, real name and postal address had been acquired by sleuthing rather than by it being published on wiki. As for the reference to the subject of the request for comment being Gay, and the relevance of the site where this took place being rather more tolerant of Homophobia than we are, well one of the things that differentiates canvassing from publicising is the neutrality of the audience. Asking a bunch of editors who are interested in Martial Arts whether they think that a particular Martial Arts competition is notable or even genuine can be done within the rules and spirit of our canvassing policy; Asking a bunch of editors who've argued for deletion in a similar debate would not. Criticising a Gay Wikipedian and telling people you are going to launch a request for comment on him on a site whose community includes Homophobes is IMHO encouraging a non-neutral audience to participate in a discussion, and therefore a breach of our rules on canvassing. From my experience of that site I'd be suspicious of any intervention on this site that was planned there, but one this struck me as more egregious because some of them would be more prejudiced against Gay Wikipedian admins than they would be against someone who was only one or two of those things. Hope that clears things up for you. Feedback welcome from you and others, I don't remember ever previously being accused of making a personal attack on this site, I do take your criticism seriously and I'd be interested in your view on this as well as the views of others. ϢereSpielChequers 16:55, 11 February 2012 (UTC)

Wong Kim Ark FAC

Hi. An article I've worked on heavily — United States v. Wong Kim Ark — is being considered for possible promotion to Featured Article. The discussion has kind-of stagnated and would benefit from additional input. If you have the time and interest, I'd be grateful if you could take a good look at the article, then go to its FAC page and give whatever feedback you believe is appropriate. Thanks. — Richwales 05:44, 13 February 2012 (UTC)

Hi. Just following up on the above request. Have you ever worked with the Featured Article Candidacy (FAC) process before? In case you haven't, the FA criteria can be found here. Thanks again. — Richwales 01:11, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

Hi RichWales, yes I've reviewed a few articles at FAC - I assumed that was why you approached me. I've been busy in real life and have so far struggled to fit in more than a superficial read through. American legal cases aren't my normal reading material so I haven't yet decided whether or not to write an FAC review. But it is obviously at or about the quality standard for FA with respect to those criteria that I feel competent to give an opinion on. ϢereSpielChequers 01:19, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

Understood. My main worry has been that I don't want anyone deciding to "archive" (close as unsuccessful) because of inactivity — hence my desire to keep some level of activity happening. — Richwales 01:30, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

MSU Interview

Dear WereSpielChequers,

My name is Jonathan Obar user:Jaobar, I'm a professor in the College of Communication Arts and Sciences at Michigan State University and a Teaching Fellow with the Wikimedia Foundation's Education Program. This semester I've been running a little experiment at MSU, a class where we teach students about becoming Wikipedia administrators. Not a lot is known about your community, and our students (who are fascinated by wiki-culture by the way!) want to learn how you do what you do, and why you do it. A while back I proposed this idea (the class) to the community HERE, where it was met mainly with positive feedback. Anyhow, I'd like my students to speak with a few administrators to get a sense of admin experiences, training, motivations, likes, dislikes, etc. We were wondering if you'd be interested in speaking with one of our students.

So a few things about the interviews:

• Interviews will last between 15 and 30 minutes.
• Interviews can be conducted over skype (preferred), IRC or email. (You choose the form of communication based upon your comfort level, time, etc.)
• All interviews will be completely anonymous, meaning that you (real name and/or pseudonym) will never be identified in any of our materials, unless you give the interviewer permission to do so.
• All interviews will be completely voluntary. You are under no obligation to say yes to an interview, and can say no and stop or leave the interview at any time.
• The entire interview process is being overseen by MSU's institutional review board (ethics review). This means that all questions have been approved by the university and all students have been trained how to conduct interviews ethically and properly.

Bottom line is that we really need your help, and would really appreciate the opportunity to speak with you. If interested, please send me an email at obar@msu.edu (to maintain anonymity) and I will add your name to my offline contact list. If you feel comfortable doing so, you can post your name HERE instead.

If you have questions or concerns at any time, feel free to email me at obar@msu.edu. I will be more than happy to speak with you.

Thanks in advance for your help. We have a lot to learn from you.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Obar --Jaobar (talk) 07:26, 12 February 2012 (UTC) Young June Sah --Yjune.sah (talk) 22:07, 15 February 2012 (UTC)

WP:AN

Hi WSC. Sorry for the revert, but it looks like some weird caching or edit conflicting was going on and you replied to a very old version of the page, wiping out some newer content. 28bytes (talk) 09:20, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

Weird indeed, it may just be caching, but with that page at 365k it may be beyond my technology to participate there. It took me a while just to deal with edit conflicts and the very long wait for the edit to save may mean I take that noticeboard off my watchlist until I can upgrade my kit. ϢereSpielChequers 11:35, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

Wikimania Panel

I've been thinking about going to Wikimania and to that end, I was considering putting a submission in to do a panel about the featured article process. But I see you've already got one. If I do go, would you be interested in having me as a panelist? Raul654 (talk) 20:40, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

Absolutely delighted and honoured, though as you may have noticed our panel is supposed to be about the synergy between FA and GLAM rather than broadly about FA - so I'm hoping that things like the recent discussions about FA governance will be out of the panel's scope. I've been discussing it with Johnbod and we agreed that we needed a panel containing:

1. An FA writer who has been involved in GLAM events
2. Ditto but active in a language other than English
3. A DC GLAM person ideally with some experience of us and our FA work
4. Your good self or one of your current and former delegates.

We have the first two and have asked a DC contact with help re the third, and I was supposed to send you an invite. My apologies for not getting round to inviting you before you spotted that the Panel was being proposed. ϢereSpielChequers 20:59, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

You do know that I was one of the participants in the Wikipedia/GLAM discussions in Denver and that I administer Wikipedia's museum-l mailing list, right? Raul654 (talk) 21:00, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

I didn't even know there was a Museums mailing list, that sounds like it might have quite a bit of overlap with http://lists.wikimedia.ch/listinfo/cultural-partners. My own GLAM involvements have been fairly UK focussed, though I attended Mumbai and the last three wikimanias. John was at GLAM camp Amsterdam and the Dusseldorf event, Do you think you could find us a suitable person from a DC museum for the fourth slot on the panel? ϢereSpielChequers 23:34, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

Do you want a museum employee, or a Wikipedian who has worked with a museum? If it's the latter, Dominic (the in-house Wikipedian at the National Archives) would be the obvious choice. Raul654 (talk) 00:59, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

Ideally a museum employee. I'd really like to get the perspective of a GLAM person who isn't a Wikimedian but who has been involved in collaborations with us. ϢereSpielChequers 11:56, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the message

I'm not too worried about the oppose although I do think they have a valid point when it comes to user pages - not enough of a valid point that I think user pages should be compulsory for admins but enough of a point that I think it's a valid reason to oppose. I'd probably find an oppose based on just that a little odd but they do give other reasons which are also valid, even if in my opinion they've based it on a misreading of my contributions. Then again if there weren't differences of opinion between candidates and !votes there would be no need for RfA (and the world would be a better place - shame it's a pipe dream). My knowledge of other languages (other than computer languages) is limited to me being reasonably confident I wouldn't die in a French speaking country - although I would have a very bland diet - so hardly worth adding. Dpmuk (talk) 23:15, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

I can order a beer in several European languages but that's my limit as well. Good luck ϢereSpielChequers 11:58, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

BLPPROD

Hello, you removed my BLPPROD tag, WP:BLPPROD clearly states the BLP deletion template may be removed only after the biography contains a reliable source that supports at least one statement made about the person in the article. The sources provided were not realiable on Emy Samir Ghanem so next time you plan removing the tag make sure you do it correctly. JayJay^{Talk to me} 20:29, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

Hi JayJay, when we designed the BLPprod we had to compromise and that made it complicated, sorry about that and no you aren't the first to be caught out by that. It only takes a poor source to prevent a BLPprod, but if a BLPprod is valid then you need a reliable source to remove it. ϢereSpielChequers 20:34, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

Arghh this makes me confused. The article needs to be deleted, nomination? JayJay^{Talk to me} 20:39, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

Sorry about the confusion, as one of those who designed the BLPprod I can't say I'm particularly proud of it. But we are unlikely to get consensus either to scrap it or widen it. I'm not seeing a particular need for the article to be deleted, is there something negative in it that I missed? My Arabic isn't up to checking for potential sources, but if you have a look and it turns out she was in minor roles then you could prod or AFD it. Alternatively if you project tag and categorise it you will sometimes find that there will be someone who knows that genre who will come round and prod or AFD the unnotables. ϢereSpielChequers 20:49, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

Maybe not deleted, but needs to be cleaned up a bit JayJay^{Talk to me} 20:55, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

Well we can agree on that. Now would you mind removing your BLPprod, but please don't just hit undo as you'd take out some other changes. ϢereSpielChequers 21:02, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

Hegazawy has removed all the tags and what not so you can just remove it JayJay^{Talk to me} 21:05, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

Nevermind JayJay^{Talk to me} 21:12, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

And it seems they've added what looks like a reliable source:) ϢereSpielChequers 21:14, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

Special report

Thanks for the look-through, I should be able to finish it soon. ResMar 16:31, 19 February 2012 (UTC)

You're welcome. My own views both of the nature of the NPP problem and of the patrollers are very different to those in your article. I've made one point on the talkpage, and I may make more. ϢereSpielChequers 18:29, 19 February 2012 (UTC)

Well that's understandable I suppose; personally I have no opinion, and didn't even know this was a problem until I came up and went through the literature, so to speak. ResMar 18:46, 19 February 2012 (UTC)

OK two things you might want to look at The last few months have been marked by a degradation of the process. and Coupled by a need to "get it right the first time," I'm not convinced that NPP is any worse now than it has been for years - back in 2009 we often had the queue run to thirty days and some articles reach the end of the queue unpatrolled. So there has been a shortage of patrollers for years. We've reduced that by running drives to appoint Autopatrollers, and there are other ideas that would help. But many of them require changes to be made by the Foundation. ϢereSpielChequers 19:09, 19 February 2012 (UTC)

Campaign for "romney" neologism

Thank you for switching this article from speedy deletion to AfD, which is more appropriate. I recogonize that the article is controversial, and that there will be discussion about whether it should be deleted. However, I agree that there should be a debate about it notability, rather than just having one admin delete it because someone doesn't like the article.Debbie W. 01:02, 20 February 2012 (UTC)

You're welcome. I'm not sure that we should be deleting articles on notable events simply because we discover they have been staged for Political effect. Such a rule would take out quite a few stories, a major bridge and possibly even some wars. There is a subtle line between boosting bad news and giving a neutral presentation of it. In my view if the subject is notable before we create an article and we then create a neutrally worded article we are doing no ill service to anyone. I'm not aware of the extent of coverage this is getting on the US side of the pond, but if Romney becomes the candidate I can see this eventually getting an article. If his candidacy fails because of this then it will also merit an article. ϢereSpielChequers 10:30, 20 February 2012 (UTC)

After doing a little research, I found that people are not in agreement over whether the santorum neologism is a Google bomb or not. There is actually a discussion on the Google bomb Wiki page about whether Dan Savage's campaign is a Google bomb or a redefining of the word 'santorum'. So, I removed the statement in the campaign for "romney" neologism article comparing the growth of the santorum neologism and the romney neologism.Debbie W. 15:38, 20 February 2012 (UTC)

I nearly added the word alleged..... ϢereSpielChequers 15:40, 20 February 2012 (UTC)

Thanks

Thanks for declining deletion of Gora Chakk Wala , really thank you very much. I had created some article with same situation with much efforts but they got deleted and i was very disappointed since. So really very grateful to you. And please tell me are you an administrator? — Preceding unsigned comment added by TariButtar (talk • contribs) 02:18, 21 February 2012‎

Hi TariButtar, you're welcome, and yes I'm an administrator here. I suspect that part of your problem is that some of my colleagues don't understand Indian culture, and part is a sourcing issue. I can try to give some of our fellow editors a more global outlook, but it would help if you were to cite some reliable sources for the facts in your articles. ϢereSpielChequers 00:03, 22 February 2012 (UTC)

War of the three kingdoms

Thanks for the copy edits to Western Association (Scotland)‎ and William Govan‎. If you have time the related articles Western Remonstrance and Archibald Strachan would probably benefit from similar treatment. -- PBS (talk) 23:49, 21 February 2012 (UTC)

Happy to do so, I was eradicating a particular typo when I found those two but stayed to read the rest of the articles. My knowledge of Scottish history is woefully sketchy with a huge gap between Montrose and Darien, and one day I'd like to really learn more. ϢereSpielChequers 00:03, 22 February 2012 (UTC)

Me too! I only got involved in these because I wanted to clean up the "Others" section in List of regicides of Charles I. It had been copied with minimal alterations from David Plant's "British-civil-wars: The Regicides. The question that needed answering was "why was the Marquis of Argyll in the list?" This lead to finding out about the Scottish Restoration. This lead me to the men executed for treason at the Restoration in Scotland, and that lead to these articles to try to make sense of the politics of 1650 north of the boarder (as it was the events during 1649-1651 and their part in them that marked these men as traitors and of course it was Restoration politics that determined which of them should be hanged). I'm glad that at least one other person found them more interesting than watching paint dry! -- PBS (talk) 03:05, 22 February 2012 (UTC)

Talkback

Hello, WereSpielChequers. You have new messages at Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Campaign_for_"romney"_neologism.
Message added 14:26, 22 February 2012 (UTC). You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

v/r - TP 14:26, 22 February 2012 (UTC)

Talk Back

Hello, WereSpielChequers. You have new messages at Wikieditindia's talk page.
You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

Thank you so much for the feedback!

Hi WereSpiel. You are one of the first "celebrity wikipedians" to comment on our ideas, so it's exciting. Your reputation proceeds you, and it's a good reputation :) I'd invite you to edit the essay in ways you suggested (if you think it merits your time).

More generally, it's been suggested that we pick "one" recommendation to focus on. For me, the cosmetic changes seem more difficult (ala bikeshed). My main insight is that this is going to take serious leadership to fix. We need a "safe space" where so long as contributors follow a VERY simple unambiguous "terms of service", their contributions are never deleted. Their contributions may not be incorporated in to Wikipedia proper, but they will exist at least in that "safe space", so long as they are legal, moral, and a good-faith attempt at a positive contribution.

I recognize you as the the most 'senior' Wikipedian on site, and I ask your advice: If we were to create a "safespace", how should it be implemented? As a namespace in EnWP? As a new project under WMF? As a unaffiliated projects?

Or is the idea of a "safe space" just the wrong way to think about this? --HectorMoffet (talk) 01:55, 2 March 2012 (UTC)

Hi Hector, firstly I wouldn't describe myself as the most 'senior' Wikipedian on site, whether you measure seniority by age, tenure, Featured content or even wiki hierarchy I'm not really senior. I'm just one of over 700 admins here, and as far as audited content is concerned I'm probably not in the top 700. That said I have been heavily involved in the discussions about our deletion processes. If by legal moral and a goodfaith attempt at a positive contribution you accept that overly promotional stuff isn't considered a positive contribution, plagiarism isn't considered moral and copyvio isn't legal then you already have a safe space in your userspace. You can develop pretty much any article in your own sandbox other than an unreferenced biography of a living person. We could broaden that further by the simple expedient of allowing people a draft pace in their userspace which only they have access to but where wikimarkup works. Categories and links would need to be one way - you can link out but not inwards from the rest of the project. What I doubt would be acceptable to the community or the WMF would be an area that was reserved for logged in editors.

My own preference is to keep things simple, especially for newbies and to try to work with the grain of the community. My belief is that articles belong in Mainspace, but that we need a way to make mainspace more welcoming to goodfaith contributors (this will of course leave a gap for articles that are goodfaith but insufficiently notable). Currently the most promising development is at mediawiki:New_Page_Triage as the Foundation has assigned developers to improve the newpage patrol process and we can make quite fundamental suggestions at this stage in the process. My own preference is that all unpatrolled articles are automatically {{NOINDEX}} and that newpage patrol shifts from a binary system to triage. New pages can be tagged for deletion or marked either "goodfaith" or "ready for mainspace" and the "goodfaith" ones would then have rather longer to be improved and collaborated on before being patrolled as ready for mainspace. I suspect this would give you something fairly close to your safespace idea, but it wouldn't exclude IP editors from the process and crucially it would be less snarky in the way it treated the newbies whilst at the same time being more efficient at screening out the badfaith stuff. ϢereSpielChequers 09:37, 2 March 2012 (UTC)

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Osita Iroku

Duplicate; deleted; see Iroku (and Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Iroku). --Orange Mike | Talk 18:16, 2 March 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for telling me, I declined an A7 but have no view as to an AFD, though if the AFD is a keep I'd have thought a redirect was more apt than delete for the dupe. ϢereSpielChequers 19:43, 2 March 2012 (UTC)

New Page Triage engagement strategy released

Hey guys!

I'm dropping you a note because you filled out the New Page Patrol survey, and indicated you'd be interested in being contacted about follow-up work. This is to notify you that we've finally released both the initial documentation about the project and also the engagement strategy, which sets out how we plan to work with the community on this. Please give both a read, and leave any comments or suggestions you have on the talkpage, on my talkpage, or in my inbox - okeyeswikimedia.org.

It's awesome to finally get to start work on this! :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 02:49, 3 March 2012 (UTC)

Oops ?

Hello WereSpielChequers, First of all I appreciate the fast response to my {{Db-g7}}. But we have a problem I tagged User:Mlpearc/Menu and User talk:Mlpearc/Menu and you deleted my workshop User:Mlpearc/Workshop. A fix will be appreciated. Thanx. Mlpearc (powwow) 22:13, 4 March 2012 (UTC)

Sorry about that, I think I was checking a redirect or something. ϢereSpielChequers 22:58, 4 March 2012 (UTC)

Not a problem. Thanx. Mlpearc (powwow) 00:32, 5 March 2012 (UTC)

Request for advice

There is an old issue tangentially related to new page triage (in that I think the articles in question were from a review queue) that I'd like to ask for your advice on. The latest post I've made about this issue that I want to ask you about is here. It will take a bit of digging and clicking through links to get the full picture (best summary is here), but essentially there is a list of over 3000 articles that may (or may not) need re-reviewing after some of the reviewing the first time round was found to be not ideal (some copyvio got missed and the editor who passed these thousands of unreviewed articles said they didn't know they needed to check for copyvio). Unfortunately, since then, a combination of various factors meant not very much got done, and I get the feeling that even now getting anything else done will be very slow. My question is whether it is worth trying to get all those articles to be re-reviewed again or not, or whether it is best to trust any mistakes to be found eventually? A mid-way option would be spot-checks to see whether there is a big problem or not. For some of the articles, some of the problems will have been fixed or tagged. For others, the problems will still exist. For still others, there will not have been any problem in the first place. What would you suggest be done here? Carcharoth (talk) 01:27, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

There is a general issue here and a specific one. The general issue is how much do we expect people to check before marking an article as patrolled or a new article as reviewed? I'm not familiar with AFC, but at newpage patrol we focus on stuff you can see in the article, Wikipedia:Newpages encourages people to check for copyvio in "articles that show suspicion of text copied from other sources should be checked manually." I suspect that different patrollers operate very different standards as to how much should be checked before marking an article as patrolled. Personally I would rather that all new articles were at least checked for G10 and G3 than have some checked to a high standard and others not at all, if we can make NPP more efficient and maybe more user friendly then in my view the time to raise minimum standards is when the new higher standard is attainable. As for your specific example, do a few spot checks and see how big the problem is, if the problems are as rare as in some of our other huge backlogs like unreferenced pages then I'd be inclined not to target those pages. If the problems are more frequent then maybe it is worth targeting. ϢereSpielChequers 17:49, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the advice. Would you be able to suggest where I could ask for help in doing spot-checks on that list? Ideally (in general) there would be a way to flag what revision of an article was checked for copyvio, as if that doesn't happen then you have to assume that an article is suspect when you start work on it and it is not good when people do good-faith work on an existing article without realising that they are building on top of a copyright violation. Carcharoth (talk) 14:50, 10 March 2012 (UTC)

Page Triage newsletter

Hey guys!

Thanks to all of you who have commented on the New Page Triage talkpage. If you haven't had a chance yet, check it out; we're discussing some pretty interesting ideas, both from the Foundation and the community, and moving towards implementing quite a few of them :).

In addition, on Tuesday 13th March, we're holding an office hours session in #wikimedia-office on IRC at 19:00 UTC (11am Pacific time). If you can make it, please do; we'll have a lot of stuff to show you and talk about, including (hopefully) a timetable of when we're planning to do what. If you can't come, for whatever reason, let me know on my talkpage and I'm happy to send you the logs so you can get an idea of what happened :). Regards, Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 23:53, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

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Thanks!

... for your get-well wishes over at New Page Triage. I will get an almost-instant fix (hopefully) when my neurosurgeon can fit me in to be re-built! Surgery is the only fix; I try to avoid the morphine unless I really need it (and, regardless of pain, try to have at least one morphine-free day in every three). I have three discs in a row, in my neck (C4, C5 and C6) which are basically FUBAR, and causing some serious compression on the nerve roots :o( (This affects motor function and sensation in the whole of my left arm and hand, and the upper part of the left hand side of my back.) Neuro-chappie fixed up a similar problem on the right side of my neck a few years back, just by drilling out bits of bone to give the nerves a bit more room, with close to 100% success, but the left side of my neck needs fixes in a lot more places, so it will be a much bigger op. Eventually, at least those three discs will need to be replaced with artificial ones, but we're holding off on replacements for as long as possible as the technology is progressing so rapidly that the longer we wait, the better artificial ones we'll get. But hey! Half the discs in my neck seem to be just fine! Hehe! Pesky (talk) 11:14, 10 March 2012 (UTC)