User talk:WereSpielChequers

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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.

Talkback

Hello, WereSpielChequers. You have new messages at Tim1357's talk page.
Message added 17:01, 8 August 2010 (UTC). You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

Hey WSC, just letting you know that I replied on my talk page. Cheers, Tim1357 ^talk 17:01, 8 August 2010 (UTC)

Y I replied again (although I think it's an unrelated thread). Tim1357 ^talk 17:13, 19 August 2010 (UTC)

David J Marcou

Thanks for your comment on the David J. Marcou article. I wrote the article myself and posted it on my contributions page. It clearly states the nomination for the Pulitzer. Happy Holidays to you. Sincerely, Dacorbandit (talk) 03:23, 22 December 2010 (UTC)

Could you help me ,please

Hello Were. I'm the creator of the Anabell López article.I added two news links for the biography .I like to know if these links are enough to delete the tag that is on the top of the discussion page of the article: This article must adhere to the policy on biographies of living persons Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced </wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability> must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libellous. If such material is repeatedly inserted, or if there are other concerns about the biography of a living person, please report the issue to the biographies of living persons noticeboard . If you are connected to the subject of this article and need help with issues related to it, please see this page

.Also I don't know if I put them in a correct way.Could you help me with this checking please?Thank you. Vicond2 (talk) 01:28, 16 August 2010 (UTC)

Hi Vicond, I've done a little formatting there. we put that tag on all biographies of living people, so you don't want to delete it you just need to make sure that you comply with it - though I don't see anything contentious in that article at present. There was a deletion tag on it before, but it was referenced by User:Phil Bridger. If you look at how he made it an inline cite, you could do the same with your two references if you put them immediately after the fact in the article that they support. ϢereSpielChequers 07:46, 16 August

2010 (UTC)

OK,Thank very mutch Were.I tried firstly some times to put the references in a better way by myself but I could'n attain.I have to attempt it aggain.Now, I can see the way that you make it also so I'm more chances to not fail..Also, and the best of all, I'm so happy to hear that the article haven't problems with this tag so I'm gald, very much for that.Thak you aggain.Sincerely:Vicond2 (talk) 11:56, 16 August 2010 (UTC)

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)

revdel

• what is the word should this be oversighted [1] Aisha9152 (talk) 06:34, 11 October 2010 (UTC)
  • wp:Oversight can be used in such circumstances, some editors aren't actually bothered at revealing their IP address, others are. So if an editor requests it their IP edit can be oversighted. ϢereSpielChequers 06:41, 11 October 2010 (UTC)
    • Um, so how do I request it? I hadn't realize I wasn't logged in when I'd originally replied, or that it would remain after my edit :-( Deviny (talk) 06:52, 11 October 2010 (UTC)
      • Thanks yet again! Deviny (talk) 07:22, 11 October 2010 (UTC)
        • You're welcome. I've deleted the revision so only admins can see it. If you want it oversighted so even we can't see it then just file a request at Wikipedia:Requests for oversight. ϢereSpielChequers 07:37, 11 October 2010 (UTC)
          • Yikes, that seems like a lot of trouble since admins can see all sorts of other info about me. I just didn't want it out there for any random person or bot to see. Thanks! Deviny (talk) 05:21, 12 October 2010 (UTC)

Energy sector of Ohio

Hi, could you take a long cool expert eye over this: Editing Energy sector of Ohio It's languishing at the bottom of the NP barrel, and even I can't make out whether it's about a company, or a BLP, or a big spam disguised as a BLP; Thnks.--Kudpung (talk) 15:23, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

Did you mean ‎Energy sector of Ohio? If so it looked to me an economic history of the energy sector in that state. ϢereSpielChequers 15:30, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

Yes, sorry about the link.--Kudpung (talk) 16:04, 10 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)

Recreation of an AfD by possible sock

Hi WSC, could you please check out who created this original article that was deleted yesterday. It was recreated today under the same title by a registered user who has a virgin talk page. Thanks.--Kudpung (talk) 17:08, 14 October 2010 (UTC)

Editor Trends Study

Hey WereSpielChequers. You may have seen this on one of the research lists, but I wanted to make you aware of the Editor Trends Study. This is a study that the Foundation is supporting to get a better understanding of editor patterns and how they've evolved over the past several years. The first set of analysis is very similar to your admin analysis. It would be great to get your thoughts! Howief (talk) 18:43, 20 October 2010 (UTC)

Thanks I've made a point on Meta. ϢereSpielChequers 22:23, 21 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)

A village pump thread you may be interested in

About spell checking. --Ron Ritzman (talk) 04:32, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

:en and academic advantages

Hi, in follow-up to yesterday's chat about why academics should address Wikipedia as part of their public outreach for projects, I have taken a quick peek in the normal academic databases. It is gratifying to see a wealth of recent academic papers on the impact of Wikipedia. As mentioned my experience of having to write a "public impact assessment" was as part of an AHRC project bid, so I dare-say any of those academics in the audience dealing with project funding would be familiar with this aspect of the unavoidable bureaucracy of academic life and makes a useful avenue away from the normal "why do students keep using Wikipedia?" line.

Here's a slightly random list of five short papers that popped out as possible references:

1. Wikipedia as Public Scholarship: Communicating Our Impact Online (2010) doi:10.1080/00909882.2010.490846
2. Wikipedia as participatory journalism: Reliable sources? Metrics for evaluating collaborative media as a news resource. (2004) http://jmsc.hku.hk/faculty/alih/publications/utaustin-2004-wikipedia-rc2.pdf
3. The perspectives of higher education faculty on Wikipedia (2010) doi:10.1108/02640471011051954
4. Wiki and the Agora: 'It's Organising, Jim, but Not as We Know It' (2006) http://www.jstor.org/stable/4029912
5. A Tale of Two Tasks: Editing in the Era of Digital Literacies (2009) http://www.jstor.org/stable/40344342

If one of these is not publicly available and you don't have JSTOR access, you can email me using internal email and I'll be happy to send you the pdf for research. Thanks, Fæ (talk) 09:39, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

Thanks Fae that's really helpful. ϢereSpielChequers 12:00, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

Michael Lionello Cowan

(bugging you because you're the nearest uninvolved admin who recently edited the Michael Lionello Cowan page)

The "Filmography" section is directly copypasted from the IMDB entry at http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0184605/ , and 86.176.7.179 (talk · contribs) is starting to edit war to place it back in, which I contend is a copyvio. If it is, can something be done about this? The user is clearly not listening to me, and I am not a person to edit war or anything. –MuZemike 02:29, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

I've put a note on their talkpage. If it was vandalism I'd semiprotect the page, but coopyvio doesn't seem to be one of the justifications agreed for semiprotection. ϢereSpielChequers 09:21, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

RevDel request

Would it be possible to get the past couple of edits by IP 24.99.101.174 revdeleted from The Cottage School? I believe they meet CFRD criteria #2. --Jezebel'sPonyo^{bons mots} 21:27, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

Yes of course, good spot. ϢereSpielChequers 21:33, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

Perfect, and the semi-prot should help as well. Cheers, --Jezebel'sPonyo^{bons mots} 00:07, 17 November 2010 (UTC)

Ohio House of Representatives

We seem to have a problem. See Les Brown (motivational speaker) and Les Brown (motivational speaker) in context of Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/OSUHEY/Archive; I think every one of these articles will need checking. I do not want to delete them immediately, in the hope that I can find some actual documentation-- I'm looking for an official source on just who were the members of the house from this district. If I do not find something by tomorrow, I'll take it to ANI for wider attention. -- Please give me a chance to see what if anything can be verified first. DGG ( talk ) 05:35, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

Hi DGG, I think both those articles are the same and Les Brown (motivational speaker) has a long history with many authors none of whom are blocked. But I don't really do sockpuppetry investigations - are you sure it was me you meant that message for? ϢereSpielChequers 10:11, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

just that you are one of the people who have worked on some aspect of it, and I wanted your opinion as another person dealing with this sort of problem. I'm going to AfD the article on (Motivational speaker) as I can find nothing that verifies any of the notability claims there, and some evidence that contradicts them. As for the representatives, I'm going to wait until I have a chance to find some reliable list. DGG ( talk ) 16:32, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

Sorry DGG anything I've done on that one is long forgotten, I might categorise an article like that but it isn't really related to any of the topics that I care about. ϢereSpielChequers 15:01, 30 November 2010 (UTC)

Systemic bias

Hi WSC,

Discussions on WMUK may not be following up on this area raised at GLAM-WIKI and may not be the right place for resolution anyway (as it is not a GLAM specific issue). There were some impassioned views raised during that far to brief session (I would have liked to have got around to discussing solutions) and I have wondered if something like an RFC to test the consensus for an anonymous but controlled mailshot to all active Wikipedians on all Wikipedias might be the right way to see if we can at least run a scientific survey of opinions, perceived systemic bias issues and assess the self-identification of editors for their cultural background, sex, sexuality, primary language etc. I wouldn't want to go off half cocked and would appreciate some advice on whether this has been covered before or in a particular forum. As someone who does not declare even their sex in the Wikipedia preferences, I am acutely aware that statistics regularly bandied about such as "80% of active Wikipedians are men" may not be as clear-cut as they sound. Thanks, Fæ (talk) 11:33, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

Hi Fae, I think that we have too many different mutually confirming indicators to hope that the gender skew is incorrect. I agree that the best place to discuss it is not at UK level, the Strategy wiki is almost moribund but it is the right place, there was also a survey done there that you might want to look at. ϢereSpielChequers 02:35, 30 November 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the pointers. I'll ponder the history here and then decide if any action is realistic. Fæ (talk) 07:41, 30 November 2010 (UTC)

The most recent data appears to be the April 2009 survey with a sample of 130,000 people (respectable). If this topic gets discussed again, I think this is the source data to reference and contradicts some of the figures quoted at the GLAM-WIKI conference. Key points:

• 200 countries in sample
• 10 to 85 years old respondents
• Average age is 26 (25% of the respondents are younger than 18) readers and contributors are on average in their mid-twenties, and predominantly male (75%)
• Women, with a share of 25% in all respondents, are 32% of all readers and 13% of all contributors

It seems slightly odd that the survey is not now on a firm annual basis considering how much interest there would be in such data supporting internet usage research. I shall tuck this in my "keep pondering" pile and mentally separate out the complaint raised about the bias against non-English sources (and articles which entirely rely on non-English sources) as the issue only weakly relates to the survey and in my opinion such cases have probably resulted from misunderstanding (or not reading) the existing guidelines. Fæ (talk) 11:34, 30 November 2010 (UTC)

We've had a number of discussions about potential surveys, but I think more focus was on lapsed editors than on understanding our bias. I read this as a two stage failure - for some reason men are twice as likely to read Wikipedia and among our readers men are more than twice as likely to edit. My belief based on my RFA experience among other things is that we don't have a significant gender bias within the community beyond those two failure points - at RFA for example I believe that women do better than men. I haven't a clue why male readers are so much more likely to edit than female readers, but I suspect part of the reason why we have more male readers than female is that we have better coverage of some of the classic boyish subjects like milhist. Perhaps we need to get better coverage of topics like Chelsea Flower Show? Alternatively this might be a suitable opportunity to use that much maligned research method the focus group, the best people to tell us why women don't read Wikipedia would be a group of female Internet users who don't use Wikipedia and the best people to tell us why women don't edit would be a group of women readers who don't edit; That wouldn't give us a statistical picture, but it would give us the questions to ask to run a survey to derive that statistical picture. ϢereSpielChequers 14:59, 30 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)

Mail

{{You've got mail}} Fæ (talk) 22:11, 8 December 2010 (UTC)

Replied :) ϢereSpielChequers 23:00, 8 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)

CW RfC

If you would like to list the diffs that you believe to be invalid with a brief description of why, I will take a look through them and strike or amend them in the RfC if I agree. You can list them here if you like. Thanks. SnottyWong ^converse 00:08, 11 December 2010 (UTC)

Thanks, apart from the one I just gave you from the 6th Nov there are several I explained in Wikipedia:Requests for_comment/Colonel_Warden#Outside view_by_WereSpielChequers, and one more I've just spotted. you described this as removed refimprove tag. But actually the article had two refimprove tags and he removed one duplicate and left the other... I don't think anyone would argue that an article should have two refimprove tags at the same time. ϢereSpielChequers 00:31, 11 December 2010 (UTC)

Also as I pointed out in one of my posts on the talkpage I would be happy to see "removed prod without explanation" simply replaced with "Whilst removing a prod" as that would clarify that the declining of prods is not an issue as far as your evidence is concerned - though I believe Jack Merridew intends to make the number of prods declined an issue. ϢereSpielChequers 00:46, 11 December 2010 (UTC)

• I took a look at your objections, and made a few minor changes to the Cause of Concern section. I'll try to briefly explain below what I did and why I didn't change everything you mentioned:

From your Outside View

1. Removed {{deadend}} from article with 1 link. - I didn't change my description here. The article clearly suffered from a lack of outgoing links, and CW didn't improve that situation. He also removed a wikify and catimprove tag in the same edit, and didn't fix those problems either. If it were just the deadend tag I'd probably concede, but when you combine it with the others it becomes difficult for me to AGF.
2. Removed {{inuniverse}} tag from Transformers article. - I didn't change my description for this either, same reasoning as above. Whether the article is excessively in-universe is debatable, but the debate is not black and white. CW also removed plot and cleanup tags from this article in the same edit. He made no relevant improvements (and by "relevant", I mean relevant to the tags that he removed).
3. Removed {{cleanup}} tag from Amish furniture. - Again, I didn't change my description for the same reason. CW also removed the {{unreferenced}} tag in the same edit, and the article has zero references. Even if the cleanup tag is debatable, his behavior clearly shows that he is just removing all cleanup tags on these articles. I can't look at these diffs and truly believe that he is actually considering each tag separately before he deletes them all.

From your comments on the RfC talk page

1. Nov 6th diff, where CW made subsequent edits to improve the article. - You're correct that CW made a subsequent edit which improved the article. However, the improvement that was made was not related to the cleanup tags that he deleted, so the point is moot. However, I have amended the description in the RfC nonetheless.

From your user talk page (above)

1. Removed duplicate refimprove tag. - I'm not buying this one, and made no changes to the description. The second refimprove tag was pretty clearly intended to be a "section" tag, even though whoever put it there omitted the "section" argument in the template. I think the other dozen or so diffs in the RfC show that CW has gotten in the habit of removing all of the cleanup tags from the top of the article. I find it extremely difficult to believe that he deleted this one because he thought it was a duplicate. Even if that is the case, the expert cleanup tag wasn't duplicated, why was that removed as well? Why were the seven {{citation needed}} tags removed?
2. Removed prod without explanation wording. - I struck the "without explanation" from each instance where it occurred.

Again, I believe that the overall point I'm trying to make is that CW's editing behavior shows a clear pattern of removing all of the cleanup tags on an article, regardless of whether or not they are appropriate. It's unhelpful and irrelevant to cherry-pick one of the three cleanup tags CW removed in one edit and show how if you stretch AGF to the breaking point, you can make an argument where that particular tag's presence on the article is borderline debatable. In any case, these are all the changes I'm willing to make to the Cause of Concern. SnottyWong ^speak 17:57, 13 December 2010 (UTC)

I've replied largely on the RFC as that is still running. However to be specific, if you want to file an RFC on someone you need to focus on problematic edits, including legit or even borderline ones in your evidence weakens your case. As for why someone left an article with two refimprove tags, the reason isn't important, removing one of the two is a legit edit - I'd have done that without thinking. Criticising someone for not working out what someone else meant to do is unreasonable - if an article contains duplicate tags that is a clear error and removing one of them is a good edit. ϢereSpielChequers 00:04, 14 December 2010 (UTC)

Fadhila El Farouk

I hadn't changed the caps because there are at least two other spellings I found--without the "El", and without the "h". Oh, also "Al." Difficult. I don't want the article to be thrown away, but it's very difficult to find sources in English, and the creator/subject is not being very constructive. Your help is appreciated. Drmies (talk) 00:41, 11 December 2010 (UTC)

• I give up. I tried every permutation, every spelling, in Google Books and Google News and Google Web. I can't find anything besides a couple of blogs and one newspaper article of doubtful notability. Do you have any Arab-speaking wiki partners? Drmies (talk) 01:02, 11 December 2010 (UTC)
  • I'm afraid I don't. But I project tagged it to both feminism and Algeria so if we do have someone this might attract them. The awkward thing now is that with two reliable sources someone is almost certain to decline the BLPprod, but I'm still uncomfortable about the article. ϢereSpielChequers 01:13, 11 December 2010 (UTC)
    • Yup, I agree. And I saw the tag, thanks. Any Arab speakers in the ARS? I would feel much more comfortable if I could even verify the publication of those books, but the English titles deliver nothing, and I don't know what the Arab, French, or Spanish titles are. I hope the creator stops messing around with tags and provides some of that information. BTW, the author's website is not yet up--and its placeholding message does not give me much hope. Also, it appears that the first novel was self-published--don't remember where I read that. Maybe in that interview. Thanks for trying, Drmies (talk) 01:22, 11 December 2010 (UTC)

Thanks

At last someone is checking apart from self http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donny_Siregar I despair regularly http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk%3ASam_Bio&action=historysubmit&diff=402802233&oldid=402670937 and http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Orthis_Kurni&action=historysubmit&diff=402774426&oldid=402287827 it is really great to have a sysop prepared to have a look - may your christmas be a good one SatuSuro 03:37, 17 December 2010 (UTC)

Hi Satusuro, and seasons greetings to you too. I suspect the problem we have here is a communication one across languages. EN Wiki's requirement for referencing is much more stringent than many other language versions, and I don't think the message has yet got through to some editors whose English may not be that strong. Where their home language is obvious from their area of interest I would suggest trying to find a currently active editor who understand the relevant language and ask them to talk to them on their home wiki. WikiProjects and Userboxes are two good ways to find people. ϢereSpielChequers 11:16, 17 December 2010 (UTC)

I would only wish - nah they ignore the messages either in english or indonesian (which I send to them on their talk pages) and they simply go merrily along as if nothing was bothering them - problem is how many... oh dear dare i say it - how many delete messages on their talk pages or how many unreferenced new bio stubs are considered reasonable before asking for some action from a third party to act in an administrative way (as i seem in the the main challenger to their additions)? SatuSuro 12:18, 17 December 2010 (UTC)

I wish we had a partial block tool that could prevent users from creating new pages without stopping them editing other pages. I think most people get the message after a bunch of their articles get deleted. ϢereSpielChequers 12:22, 17 December 2010 (UTC)

wow that would work for a whole range of current sins on this thing (wp en) if they had a tool like that - unfortunately for soccer tragics in some countries - nothing does anything short of being blocked - then they simply come back in a sock anyways - but at least not to the extent like australias greatest export to clog some poor contaminated centimetre or two of the wikimedia servers hard drives - the he who should not be mentioned SatuSuro 12:29, 17 December 2010 (UTC)

Talkback

Hello, WereSpielChequers. You have new messages at Wikipedia talk:New pages patrol.
Message added 02:39, 29 December 2010 (UTC). You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

Notability of Lynn Gilderdale

I wrote most of the Lynn Gilderdale Wikipedia page.

Lynn may not have been particularly notable personally, but she was the focus of a major news story in the UK in Jan 2010 (which had been ongoing since 2008 [corrected]) in which her mother (Kay Gilderdale) was tried for assisting her suicide. This came after Lynn had been suffering from one of the all-time worst cases of ME (known as CFS in the USA) for 17 years. Besides being a major story in itself, it was a major contributor to the assisted suicide debate in the UK in 2010.

Perhaps this could be made clearer in a section at the bottom of the article; however, there are lots of Wikipedia entries about news stories involving people who were not otherwise notable. IndigoJo (talk) 22:06, 9 January 2011 (UTC)

Hi IndigJo, I'm not particularly hardline on this, but you might want to read WP:BIO1E. Sometimes it is better to write an article on a notable event rather than on a person who is only known for that event. ϢereSpielChequers 14:08, 12 January 2011 (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)

Talkback

Hello, WereSpielChequers. You have new messages at User talk:Kudpung/RfA criteria.
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Southern Cherokee Nation of kentucky

Hi - a question if I may. The article of this title is up for discussion Here. I voted to keep, and so did a second person who is not registered. A third person who voted to delete says unregistered users can't vote, (see FYI at end of that page). Is that true? If unregistered users do in fact have a vote I would majorly appreciate it if you could say so on that page. Thanks whichever way. Mark^Dask 21:57, 16 January 2011 (UTC)

Not true, thanks for raising this. I've replied in the AFD. ϢereSpielChequers 17:02, 25 January 2011 (UTC)

Martine Clémenceau

Hello. About the Martine Clémenceau article, I made it as a translation of the article in French. Joined the translate there are two references to links. Now I wrote another three links with more information. There is not too much information in English. Greetings. Xarucoponce (talk) 01:26, 17 January 2011 (UTC) (PS: I don't speak English, sorry if you don't understand)

Bonjour Xarucoponce and welcome to the English Wikipedia. ϢereSpielChequers 08:46, 24 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)

Not an attack

Perhaps this is indeed not an attack, but the page appeared to be saying "hey, look at the censorship in Egypt!" (attacking Egypt's actions), based on the premise of a single site (twitter) being blocked. I've not used G10 in this manner before. I took the page to AfD. — Timneu22 · talk 17:20, 27 January 2011 (UTC)

By all means take this sort of thing to AFD, but please don't use such bitey templates on goodfaith contributors. I've deleted unsourced articles on alleged mafiosi and pornstars with a tailored far more friendly message than you gave that editor. ϢereSpielChequers 17:35, 27 January 2011 (UTC)

Death Anomalies

Was just having a look at Wikipedia:Database reports/Living people on EN wiki who are dead on other wikis, and have a few queries, which I thought you might be able to help with.

1. How up to date is the report? IE how likely is it that the problem will have been already fixed?
2. If there is a source on the other language, I'll move it across and update the category, but if there is no source and I can't find one? What then? Should I be updating the other wikipedia - I don't feel confident on that.

I'll do my best, moving through languages given my level of comprehension. I can cope with most Latin and Greek based languages (low level qualifications and a bit of thinking) but I'm not sure how I'd cope with Eastern languages or Cyrillic. Worm 09:39, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

Hi Worm and welcome to the death anomalies project!

Normally it is updated daily. But unusually the bot hasn't run for two days. If I fix one from the very top of the list I sometimes remove it from there as you can get multiple people looking there, but rarely from elsewhere, however I may do so till the bot returns.

If there is no source and I can't find one then I sometimes amend the foreign language article, but only if looking at the other edits I'm confident it is vandalism or a mistake, or I've got a source indicating that the individual was alive after the purported date of death. Many of the ones currently left are ones I've looked at, seen that the person is old enough for it to probably be true and left for a proper sourcing attempt. ϢereSpielChequers 10:01, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

Right, I might remove any I've managed to deal with, just to help me keep track. One example is Abdul Ghani Beradar, who was arrested last January and has been the subject of much speculation since - unlikely he died in 2007... so I'm happy to edit that one. But what about Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, who was "killed" in 2009. I agree it's a reliable source for that too, but en.wikipedia has "proof" he's still alive in the form of a youtube video, is the associated presstv article enough information to alter the russian wikipedia? Worm 10:09, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

Youtube videos sound a bit doubtful to me. If there are secondary sources reporting it then it could be that that is the "official channel" of the organisation and counts as a primary source. But I'd hope that a journalist would have looked into it. I'm loathe to amend other languages unless I have a reliable source or I'm very sure of myself. For example if someone creates an article and puts a different death date in the article and the category then I'm happy to assume that one is in error. ϢereSpielChequers 10:27, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

So I guess we're going to always have issues then. I wouldn't be happy removing the source from our article, nor adding it to the other. I also can't seem to find any further sources. Ah well, I'll do what I can - every little helps! Worm 10:31, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

Interestingly I was looking at that page yesterday. The Russian article is sparse on sources and the controversy about the death is not mentioned compared to the sources in the English version which include pressTV as well as youtube. The death category should be removed on the basis of the controversy and looking at the sources that report his death they appear just as speculative (based rumours of a secret burial) as the report of him being alive (based on lobbyist claims). Perhaps the starting point should be raising the question (in English if needed) on the :ru talk page? Fæ (talk) 10:37, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

That would make sense, or you could ask an EN wiki editor who is active on RU wiki. ϢereSpielChequers 10:45, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

Note added to the :en talk page. Fæ (talk) 11:13, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

Yes it is the classic many eyes scenario. Sometimes when I get a build up in a particular language I put a not on the relevant wiki project and ask for help. I'm also hoping to enlist an editor who has access to JSTOR et al. When we launched this we had 650 anomalies, we've since had various other languages added and a lot of work elsewhere - there was a big rush of Swedes when they had a categorisation blitz. So the total anomalies would probably be much more than a thousand if there hadn't been this project, but the residue are hard to fix. Though usually there are a dozen new ones a week that are easy to do. One thing it highlights is that different projects have taken different decisions as to how old you need to be to be assumed dead, or how long you need to be missing for. Lord Lucan for example. ϢereSpielChequers 10:45, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

Perhaps the bot could go that one step further and automatically add a note to talk pages for articles with this inter-wiki dead/alive problem? If a notice appeared on one of my favourite topics with "The Spanish wiki article for this person categorizes him as dead" I would certainly want to scrutinise their sources and copy them into the English article if they looked credible or double check for better English sources. Even if this only happened on the English side it would result in far less dependence on specialist backlog initiatives for this tricky area. Fæ (talk) 11:08, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

That's not a half bad idea, I'd certainly support it. It might only help a little bit due to the fact that many of these are not watched, but it's not a lot more work for a bot and would help a bit Worm 11:19, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

The risk of this project is that we are using other Wikipedias to indicate that there is a problem, but we don't want people to use those Wikipedias as a source. I'm concerned that if we send such a complex message to lots of pages some people will simply use the other language wiki as a source. I think a safer option would be to notify the relevant wikiproject of any articles that have been on the report for more than a fortnight. We did something like this with the unreferenced BLP project, and my experience is that most bios are of interest to at least two projects, one geographic and the other occupational. That would require a bot request, but there have been precedents for that, Tim1357 has something similar and might be persuaded to do this. It would also need someone to trawl the talkpages and make sure the article were project tagged for relevant projects, but I could easily do that - I project tagged much larger numbers of articles for the uBLP project. ϢereSpielChequers 13:30, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

Sounds like some good ideas to move it forward. Personally, due to my lack of language skills I find researching these to an appropriate level hard work and they are probably better handled by folks that have an appropriate level of multi-language ability. Flagging for attention in some form in the specific non-English Wikipedia is far more likely to find people with those appropriate skills and who will probably enjoy fixing the issue (and make me feel less guilty for not fixing it). Fæ (talk) 13:58, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

I was thinking more along the lines of notifying wikiprojects like Tennis, New York etc, that would just take a bot that could run on EN wiki. Notifying different language versions of Wikipedia would require a different bot request on each language, or someone on that project to request a report. One possibility would be to expand the existing reports to show anomalies both ways, but I'd be loathe to do this to the EN wiki report for more than DE and the other four languages that are working on the their reports. My preference instead is to publicise this and try and recruit more languages - hence this submission. ϢereSpielChequers 14:14, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

Cool. Remote presenting sounds interesting. If things go in that direction, perhaps a few of the London based folks could get in a conference room as a remote-but-live audience for a couple of presentations... Fæ (talk) 14:57, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

I had a go at this alive-or-dead project when WSC first launched it. However, although I can read most western European Germanic and Romance languages with reasonable fluency, I more or less gave up after understanding that we cannot use the other language Wikis to update the DoB/DoD of en.Wiki BIOs - It was taking too much time away from other BLP related projects that I am involved with, and produced a very low return on results to find other sources, even after scouring web pages in all the other languages I can read. Nevertheless, I'm quite happy to chime in on some particularly difficult sources in my repertoire of other languages, including Thai, (which I have done before for the uBLP backlog project). Just ask on my tp. Kudpung (talk) 07:34, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

Thanks Kudpung, I only do a few of these myself, but among other ones I fix I tend to do the removal of intrawiki links when we have, as in lastnights example two different people, one with articles on five projects and one just on one project. All six articles need amending to avoid the bots reinstating the wiki links. Would you mind running your I over the list every few weeks, I'm sure we'll have some awkward ones in your languages with that sort of interval. ϢereSpielChequers 13:19, 2 February 2011 (UTC)

AFDs and redactions

I rather got on my high-horse at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Friends of the Five Creeks. Perhaps you can take a peek and tell me if my intuition has gone astray in this case of interpretation of WP:REDACT? Fæ (talk) 15:01, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

I think you were right about redact, but a little too confrontational about the way you handled it. Sometimes a note to somebodies talkpage can achieve things less contentiously - after all the person who you disagreed with may not have been aware of redact, and also redact is phrased as guidance. In this case once they were aware of the issue they seem happy to follow redact guidelines. ϢereSpielChequers 13:13, 2 February 2011 (UTC)

As it happens, I did write on the nominator's talk page diff as you suggest, they even thanked me for being so civil. Unfortunately they continued to refuse to follow the guidelines until three days after I resorted to taking the passive approach of striking my opinion from the AfD. The discussion at WT:AFD has been quite encouraging in supporting my interpretation of the guidelines. I agree that my tone should have been friendlier in the AfD thread and I'll try harder on that score. To be honest I'm still quite taken aback by having two admins insisting that WP:TALK does not apply to AfDs. Fæ (talk) 13:45, 2 February 2011 (UTC)

Please, do consider the deletion of Bato of Dalmatia

I understand such requests can be barely a routine for you but do read the discussion section of the page I requested for speedy deletion. Maybe at first glance you saw word differences between the article and you stepped back; yes they aren't physically the same at least, but they bear the same content for a singular historical figure I have worked on. This is Bato of Dardania, son of Longarus and the sources tell about only one figure which is misnamed. Even Longarus is doubled !!!

do read this [[2]] and probably you will understand! With all due respect, Empathictrust (talk) 19:42, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

OK I saw Longarus of the Delmatae and also that the article had been changed to become more of a duplicate. Is this a case of one person having two spellings of their name or just a modern typo? ϢereSpielChequers 20:45, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

New York lawyers

Hi WSC. I'm in a bit of a quandry. User talk:Processadmirer has been creating dozens of short articles in Good Faith on New York lawyers, for which often the only ref appears to be an extract from the US equivalent of a bar register. My first thought is that being a lawyer and/or a judge does not automatically confer notability. Do we have a guideline on this? Perhaps you could have a look at these articles and give me your personal opinion. thanks. Kudpung (talk) 07:42, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

Hi Kudpung. processadmirer seems to be on judges now, WP:JUDGE failed to get consensus, so I'd suggest raising this on WT:notability. I'm aware that plenty of lawyers are notable and I suspect that many judges aren't. So I would take being a judge as an assertion of importance but not simply being a lawyer. ϢereSpielChequers 10:05, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

(2p worth) I have had a few tussles on interpreting notability for some lawyer articles. They tend to be easy to cite as every case has public documents associated with it and many cases will be reported in the press. The confusion is that the lawyer may be mentioned in these documents rather tangentially, unless the case is top-notch notable lawyers involved are not automatically notable (note, in cases such as Enron there may be vast arrays of lawyers, they may not all be notable). American lawyers tend to advertise themselves in a way that the UK tends not to, consequently filtering out press releases and pseudo-news items might also be an issue. I have also noticed definite COI on some of these articles and boiling the sources down to decide if any of them are more than tangential fluff is awfully time consuming. Fæ (talk) 10:16, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

Trying to improve RfA

It really is a waste of time, isn't it? -- Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 11:27, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

It's frustrating and progress is glacial. But the situation is such that change is inevitable, the only real questions are what that change will be and when will it happen. Other projects have run out of admins before, and it is not unusual on other Wikis, on Wikia it happens often enough that they have well established procedures to deal with it there. When we hit a point where EN wiki has insufficient admins to govern itself then either the community will reform or the foundation will step in as they recently did with the Aceh wiki. I suspect the most likely change is that we will eventually hit some sort of tipping point and appoint loads of poorly scrutinised admins in response. I would prefer that we steer gently away from that by appointing enough well scrutinised admins to stabilise the admin corps, but I'm not optimistic. My only reassurance is that talking to Wikipedians on other projects, I believe we could run Wikipedia with significantly fewer active admins than we currently believe we have. Though I don't like the implications for the status of our ever decreasing number of active admins. People who think that adminship should not be a big deal need to remember that it only avoids becoming a big deal if it is the norm for clueful longterm civil contributors, the scarcer our admins, the bigger a deal it is to be an admin. I also worry that our definition of an active admin is so low that we might run out of admins who actually do admin stuff rather sooner than we expect. There are many possible scenarios for RFA in the next few years, simply extrapolating the trends of 40% fewer successful RFAs each year, a 20% annual resignation/departure of active admins and a 1% monthly decline in active admins is one scenario that we know cannot continue indefinitely. ϢereSpielChequers 12:16, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

I think the priorities are wrong. For a whle we were all getting close to agreeing that the silly, multiple, pile-on, and trick questions, and the pile-on opposes due to a single, old miscarriage of tagging, were parts of the reason why the established, reasonably clueful editors are not coming forward, and something needed to be changed. Suddenly we are told the discussion is wearing thin, and that we are acting like children in a school yard. So the topic hastily gets changed to how we are hurting the feelings of our tender teenage candidates by telling them to go away and come back later. That's the perennial cyclic pitch of the very special talk page that RfA is. we need to get our priorities right and either focus on one thing at a time, or split the talk page up into talk pages for each major issue to be discussed. Words of wisdom:

...if anything, fixing one problem would break the tradition that nothing changes at RFA and make it easier to fix other problems.

— WereSpielChequers

Kudpung (talk) 12:45, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

The thing that makes fixing RFA so challenging is, yes, the community. We can't force anyone to do anything they don't want to do. We can't force them to stop being so brutal at RFA, we can't stop the silly questions, look at User:Keepscases contributions, all they are is silly questions on RFA's, no content work, and people have cheered him/her on for it. The thing stopping us from fixing RFA is us ourselves. Tofutwitch11 ^(TALK) 13:55, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

Interesting replies, folks. I pretty much agree with WSC 100% here. Things will change, but not until a crisis is actually upon us, and I think there's pretty much zero chance of change happening any way other than by Foundation intervention. The problem is simply that management by community cannot work beyond a certain size, when there are too many people to ever get a consensus in any one direction - there are good reasons why most of the world's successful organizations are managed hierarchically. I am very impressed by how well community consensus has worked for many things round here, and it's fine as long as no real change is needed, but it's become moribund. I agree partly with Kudpung's suggestions, and I think the recent discussions have helped to tone down some of the excessive questions. But people's memories are short, and I think it's only temporary - I've been following RfA for a couple of years now, including the many talk page discussions, and I think it's cyclical but still on a general downward trend. (I really do like User:Kudpung/RfA criteria though - it's objective and factual without attacking anyone. Maybe if it's maintained and publicized at WT:RfA at intervals, it might help to lengthen memories?). But generally, I don't think RfA can be properly fixed without changes to the rules, and the community is incapable of that. Anyway, thanks for listening - I think I'm going to back away from WT:RfA and any thoughts of trying to help fix things, and just leave well alone until the inevitable happens. -- Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 15:03, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

I think it is possible to have different discussions going at the same time if they are in different sections, but yes there is a risk that people can distract attention from one proposal by restarting an old debate in a section about something else. I think the best response to that is to put in a section heading where the tread of discussion splits off. An alternative idea is to start an RFC about a particular major change and publicise it at the village pump. As for the problems of the question section, I don't fully share your concern about in silly questions, as I don't remember an RFA that they have altered. Trick questions and the general over emphasis of policy questions as opposed to looking at the candidate has certainly been a problem, but it is the sort of problem that WT:RFA discussion can affect, and looking at the current RFAs I think there has been some diminution of the question sections. As for opposes due to a single old miscarriage of tagging I'm afraid I have to disagree with you, my experience is that opposes for tagging errors have to be evidenced by multiple recent examples to have weight in RFA. As for userboxes there seems to be an issue about atheists and occasionally people with views on wikipolitics. Living in London it is easy to forget that large parts of the world are very intolerant of atheism, and I'd suggest that prospective admins cull their userboxes. Reform has been discussed for a longtime Wikipedia talk:Requests for adminship/Reform, but big changes like unbundling rollback have succeeded in the past. I think at some point I might write up my preferred solution for RFA. ϢereSpielChequers 16:22, 1 February 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)

The Contribution Team cordially invites you to Imperial College London

All Hail The Muffin Nor does it taste nice... 13:46, 5 February 2011 (UTC)

RevDel request

Hey there, I got you from Category:Wikipedia administrators willing to handle RevisionDelete requests and it looks like you are active. Anyway, I just removed a copyvio from The Emperor of Nihon-Ja (this edit) and I'm under the impression that the old revisions of the article need to be RevDel'd to remove the copyvio from the article history. Just as an FYI, the copyvio was added in this edit by an IP whom I've now warned (though I doubt it will do any good, they haven't edited in months). Cheers, Jenks24 16:40, 8 February 2011 (UTC)

Hi Jenks24, indeed I am an admin who will act on revdel requests, though to be honest thus far I've only actioned ones involving personal data or attacks, this is the first copyvio one I've got involved in. I've had a look but I think this falls foul of "Blatant copyright violations that can be redacted without removing attribution to non-infringing contributors. If redacting a revision would remove any contributor's attribution, this criterion can not be used." In order to revdel all the copyvio versions I would have to remove text from a dozen intervening contributors. ϢereSpielChequers 20:12, 9 February 2011 (UTC)

Hmmm ok that seems to make sense, but it has left me genuinely confused. See this archived request of User:Courcelles where he RevDel'd the article's history, even though there was more than one editor. Could you please explain to me what is different about these two situations? Cheers, Jenks24 (talk) 07:02, 10 February 2011 (UTC)

Well comparing the two edit histories the other example had only four contributors other than the editor who did the copyvio, and judging from the edit summaries one could argue that they weren't really contributing content - just tagging or using AWB. For example I do a lot of categorisation using hotcat and I wouldn't be fussed if one of those edits disappeared that way. But the Emperor had a dozen contributors. ϢereSpielChequers 11:46, 10 February 2011 (UTC)

Ah ok then. Thanks for clearing that up for me. Much appreciated. Jenks24 (talk) 12:34, 10 February 2011 (UTC)

You Got Mail!

 Done

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Ping

Hi, I emailed you. Tony (talk) 12:08, 10 February 2011 (UTC)

Trout

Whack! You've been whacked with a wet trout. Don't take this too seriously. Someone just wants to let you know that you did something silly.

You forgot to sign your post here. --Perseus8235 16:16, 10 February 2011 (UTC)

Notice of request for deletion of editor WereSpielChequers :)

WereSpielChequers, the editor you are, has been nominated for deletion. We appreciate your contributions. However, an editor does not feel that you satisfy Wikipedia's criteria for inclusion and has explained why in the nomination space. Your opinions on yourself are welcome; please participate in the discussion by adding your comments at User:GlassCobra/Editor for deletion#WereSpielChequers and please be sure to sign your comments with four tildes (~~~~). You are free to edit during the discussion but should not remove the nomination (unless you wish not to participate); such removal will not end the deletion discussion (actually it will). Thank you, and have a good sense of humor :). --Perseus8235 16:17, 10 February 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for the trout, just in time for supper and the right size for my frying pan. I wonder if my impending possible deletion will be mentioned at this Sunday's London meetup? ϢereSpielChequers 16:50, 10 February 2011 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/The Boy in the Oak

Hi WSC. I'm between a rock and a hard place: This was closed as keep, mainly because only 2 people !voted, and they both !voted 'keep'. I seem to recall that putting a CSD on an article that has been kept previously at AfD is not possible - but I can't find the policy. What are the other options? WP:DRV, or another AfD? I don't really want to hurt anyone's feelings by slapping a {{Delrev}} template on it. --Kudpung (talk) 04:57, 11 February 2011 (UTC)

Hi Kudpung, I think this is a great example of what can happen when the nominator fails to follow wp:Before. The article does indeed have a "Complete lack of any reliable sources", but that doesn't tell us whether such are available or not. If somebody now attempts to source it then four possibilities arise:

1. This may for all I know be a highly notable book that definitely deserves an article and a sentenced reference to its commercial success or prizes won leaves the article improved and sourced.
2. You could draw a blank and quite legitimately start a new AFD "The previous AFD closed as Keep but no attempt had been made to source it. I have now attempted to source it using x, y and z. I can now confirm that the book existed but notability would appear to be lacking."
3. Of course it is possible that sufficient sources exist to establish it as a book of borderline notability......
4. And searching for sources could expose it as a complete hoax worthy of {{db-hoax}}.

Hope that helps, and I have to say that I agree with the close. ϢereSpielChequers 08:57, 11 February 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for that explanation. You didn't mention if there is a policy that strictly dissalows a later CSD of a article that has been kept at AfD. I think there is not, but it will help my projects for work on the Wikipedia to know. Cheers, and thanks again for your patience with my questions. Kudpung (talk) 01:49, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

Well you can't speedy per A7, or anything that would have been covered by the deletion debate. Technically If a page has survived a prior deletion discussion, it should not be speedy deleted except for newly discovered copyright violations (my emphasis). Should not is not the same as may not, and in the case of an article that had only a limited discussion and only one editor I would probably delete per {{G7}} if the author requested, and I would certainly delete a blatant hoax or attack page if that was revealed by an attempt to source it. ϢereSpielChequers 08:25, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

Well, the article in question, which was a totally unreferenced one-liner, has now been deleted - partly, I believe, due to a (perfectly civil and friendly) comment I made to the closing sysop. I'll bravely carry the can if there's any fallout, but there probably won't be. Thanks again for your opinion. Kudpung (talk) 10:22, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

Unreferenced is not a good reason to delete, nor is brevity. I'd support changing policy to make unreferenced a deletion reason, but only if we made it clear in the article creation process that new articles required a third party reference. ϢereSpielChequers 11:15, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

Yes, I fully realise that. The irony is, that if it had been PRODed, it would have been gone by now with nary a ripple. Kudpung (talk) 13:01, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

Editbox toolbar

When, and why, was this change made to this new toolbar? To be frank, it sucks, and I'd like the old one back. Is there some centralized discussion on this issue? Thanks, in advance, for your time. ---RepublicanJacobite_{The'FortyFive'} 14:46, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

Hi, I suspect this depends on the skin you use. The default recently changed to vector which is allegedly newbie friendly, but serious editors can revert to monobook in their user preferences ϢereSpielChequers 14:56, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

Let me check on that... Thanks. ---RepublicanJacobite_{The'FortyFive'} 15:03, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

Hmm... I am in monobook. So, I am not sure what the story is here... ---RepublicanJacobite_{The'FortyFive'} 15:09, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

I have the same problem since about an hour ago. I use Monobok and have not changed any settings for a very long time. It's only the edit mode that reverts to the strange skin with a very limited set of editing tools. I thought at first it was a js problem, but it happens in all browsers. Looks very much to me like a server problem. Kudpung (talk) 15:13, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

There are a couple of threads regarding the issue at WP:VPT. I was able to solve the problem on my end by going to My Preferences → Editing → Beta Features → unclick "Enable enhanced editing toolbar". Jezebel'sPonyo^{bons mots} 15:18, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

Yes! I found said discussion and came back here to post a notice about it. I followed the same instructions and everything is back in order. Cheers! ---RepublicanJacobite_{The'FortyFive'} 15:26, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

I spent part of today at Imperial college London showing interested people how to edit Wikipedia. A session largely ruined by whatever software change had mucked the site up, I thought it was a problem with the netbook I was editing from but it seems to be broader than that. ϢereSpielChequers 19:24, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

You have the second attempt at 1.17 deployment to thank for all the wonderful little surprises on en.wiki today. --Jezebel'sPonyo^{bons mots} 19:28, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

Bot

I have looked over the code, at glance (aka haven't tested it yet, and that's usually when issues are found) it looks all good. I should get around to testing it and (if it all works) deployment. -- DQ (t) (e) 18:51, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Thanks DeltaQuad, can you tell me what the new bot will be called? As I may have some new queries to add. ϢereSpielChequers 19:02, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

It will just be added onto User:DeltaQuadBot. I will get to some work after dinner and hopefully all up later tomorrow. -- DQ (t) (e) 01:08, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

 Done First bot run complete. Will be set on a weekly cycle soon. Please let me know you have seen this message since I see you can get burried here. :P -- DQ (t) (e) 00:23, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

Hi Thanks I really appreciate that, I've fixed a few dozen of the articles on that list, but it looks like Olaf didn't update the code after he made some of his fixes at User:Botlaf/Improvements, so some of the searches have a very high proportion of records that should have been filtered out. I think one issue that Olaf had was that his bot was doing a case sensitive search against the safe phrases, another issue which he may not have ever fixed was that the bot was thrown by square brackets and was unable to exclude articles where the safe phrase was in an internal link. ϢereSpielChequers 21:08, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

RfA

WereSpielChequers, I'm considering nominating myself for RfA (again). I read the article on Signpost that you contributed and you seem to be well thought of in the community and an expert of RfA (obviously or you wouldn't have been asked to comment). I'm not asking for your support or nomination, but would you mind terribly looking over my contributions and seeing if anything stands out to you that would suggest I should just stay away from RfA for a little while longer? I've edited off and on for a couple years now, mostly off but I go through spurts of a lot of activity. I'd like to help out with the RfA and AfD process. My largest concern is the effect the WP:DRV I started yesterday might have on an RfA although (and perhaps because) I still agree with my reasons for doing it. If you'd just give me a "you might have a shot" or a "you might just want to avoid that", I'd greatly appreciate it.--v/r - TP 19:12, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Hi TParis, and congratulations for being bold. I normally hold these sort of discussions by email, both because one can be franker in criticism in private and because lots of on wiki discussion about an RFA can lead to some people thinking it has been canvassed. I don't have time to look at your edits today or probably this weekend, would it be OK if I got back to you next week? ϢereSpielChequers 19:24, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Absolutely, I'm in no rush and your opinion could end up saving me time (and personally) in the long run. For the record, I did have a username change, my old RfA is under my old username, TParis00ap--v/r - TP 19:29, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Hi. Hoping this doesn't sound pushy, but you haven't forgotten about me, have you?  :)--v/r - TP 01:40, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Certainly not, but I'm afraid events and a PC crash are distracting me. This could be a few more days. Sorry ϢereSpielChequers 09:45, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Ohh no problem at all. I'm in no rush, I just didn't want to get buried in your talk page ;). Thanks in advanced and good luck with your PC. If it's any consolation, I've been having PC issues too. Trying to set up a media center for my TV with an old computer from my garage. After buying 2 graphics cards, and a DVI -> HDMI adapter, two sticks of ram, 3 failed hard drives, and a shorted out modem, I finally gave up last night.--v/r - TP 14:15, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

I gave up on getting my ubuntu desktop to show a certain TV program and used my netbook, forgetting that my home wireless had gone fut so my netbook uses a mobile broadband with only 2gb a month.... ϢereSpielChequers 16:57, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

You don't seem to have email enabled, would you mind emailing me? ϢereSpielChequers 22:24, 27 February 2011 (UTC)

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Coincidence

I've just noticed your reasons at 'Bureaucrat-ship?' above. It's almost identical to why I've procrastinated from RfA in spite of being badgered many times. Oh well, you'll be able to pray for my soul this week ;) --Kudpung (talk) 05:26, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

If so remember it is an open book exam and even if you think you've spotted the trick part of the question it is worth rereading the relevant policy. Except for a certain type of totally irrelevant question where I'm waiting for someone to reply "I'm sorry I can't answer that because according to my hair stylist people of my star sign should avoid the number 6 this week. But my favourite colour is yellow if that helps". However a more chocolatey answer would probably work better. ϢereSpielChequers 14:04, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

:) BTW, thanks for chiming in on Snotty's tp about the NPP backlog glitch. Looks as if one editor is clicking 'Mark this page as patrolled' a tad too fast. Suggestions as to how to handle this diplomatically would be most appreciated. --Kudpung (talk) 15:07, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

G10 G12

Yes i did mean G12, I must have click attack page by mistake. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Gabriele449 (talk • contribs) 22:31, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

Hi Gabriele, I was rather thinking it was that sort of accident, I mean it was a violent film but clearly fictional. Easily done but rather unfortunate as a newby was involved. May I suggest remedying it by striking your comment on the authors page. If you put <s> in front of your comment and </s> afterwards that will strike it out. PS I know this sounds like a silly lo-tech workaround, but would you mind signing your comments on talkpages with ~~~~ Thanks, and welcome to Wikipedia! ϢereSpielChequers 22:55, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

Talkback

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

John, King, FAC

Thanks for the edit summary that caught my eye: [3] It looks like a mistake, but I queried Hawkeye7 to check. Best, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:13, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

No problem, I'd spent so long reviewing Bad King John that I would have been miffed if I couldn't save the review somewhere. By the way, I sometimes read an FA candidate and don't spot anything worth querying, would my saying that in an FAC be helpful or would that just look like a drive by? ϢereSpielChequers 13:00, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

That sort of feedback from experienced reviewers is helpful and welcome; it gives other reviewers an incentive to dive in for a closer look, and gives delegates some info that helps us decide whether other reviewers are holding off because they see a lot of problems and are hesitant to dive in, and helps us decide timing on closing. Please do ! ("Drive by" commentary is not a problem; "Drive by" Support from inexperienced reviewers who don't seem to have engaged WP:WIAFA is the issue.) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:47, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Somalian Chubby, etc.

I too want to dismiss the stuff submitted by Amarenna123 (talk · contribs) and Abdirrashid (talk · contribs) as hoax but, irritatingly, this video and several others from the same source exist. Are they also hoax? But until the guy can actually submit coherent, referenced articles, then block is definitely the best action. — [[::User:RHaworth|RHaworth]] (talk · contribs) 01:13, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

It was the chubby tribe who accounted for 98 million of the population of Somalia, 1 million of Bulgaria and nearly as many Hungarians that did it for me. I won't be as rude as the guy who commented on the youtube link, but for my money that is as blatant a hoax as the WWII bomber "found" on the moon. ϢereSpielChequers 01:22, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

Thanks!

Hi WSC! I'm not sending out thankspam, but I would like to personally thank you for the mentoring that you didn't realise you were giving me on Wikipedia policies over the past 14 months, and for being the first to put the adminship flea in my ear. What I learned on this RfA will also go towards continuing to mentor others, especially the younger editors, and participating in the campaign to make RfA a more appealing prospect for users who also need the tools, but who are too afraid to come forward. I look forward to working together with you as a fellow admin. Regards, --Kudpung (talk) 12:06, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

Thanks Kudpung, welcome to the madhouse! BTW if you are ever in London on a second Sunday do please join us for a beer. ϢereSpielChequers 18:30, 2 March 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)

L. Ron Hubbard

Due to concerns expressed by reviewers about the length of the L. Ron Hubbard article, I have reduced the size of the article by about 20%. Could you please confirm on Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/L. Ron Hubbard/archive2 that you are happy with the updated version? I would appreciate it if you could do this ASAP as the FAC review needs to be concluded very soon. Helatrobus (talk) 04:39, 5 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 till after the 9th. ϢereSpielChequers 14:28, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

Don't worry, the FAC has now concluded successfully. Thank you for your participation in the review. You might like to know that the article is currently being considered as a candidate for the day's featured article on March 13, 2011, on the centenary of Hubbard's birth - see Wikipedia:Today's featured article/requests#March 13. Helatrobus (talk) 02:09, 8 March 2011 (UTC)

Slon02 RfA

Hey, WereSpielChequers. I came extremely close to holding off my support until an admin reviewed their CSD tagging, but I decided to trust Fetchcomms's outstanding nomination and assume that no CSD issues would be brought up. Unfortunately, you brought up such issues rather quickly, and I'm now inclined to move to oppose. I can't support a candidate with CSD difficulties when they intend to work there, no matter what. This is the issue I will support or oppose based on, so I just wanted to ask you how serious this candidate's issue with CSD tagging is in your opinion. Your oppose rationale makes a very strong case, yet you only weakly oppose. I don't know what to make of that; my assumption would be that your oppose is 'weak' based on their other good contributions, is that correct? Are these mistakes isolated or are they just repeated too many times? I would appreciate your thoughts on this. Regards, Swarm ^X 13:45, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

Yes. I hate opposing, especially if a candidate has their heart in the right place and is otherwise a good editor. I do hope that Slon02 responds by improving their CSD tagging, but I found those examples just by trawling their last fifty deleted contributions, if I was going to support I would have gone back further but with three different issues, two with multiple examples, I didn't see the point of checking older stuff. On the other hand none of those examples was particularly egregious, the A7s were deleted, even if not as quickly as if they'd been G10s, and the authors didn't get the same message as if they'd created G10s which can be a real issue. Weak was for various reasons including consistency - I'm not being as harsh on candidates with mistakes at deletion as I once was, if only because many of our existing admins would have been as quick if not quicker on the deletion button. So in this case weak means that if the candidate was an admin they be no worse than some we now have, but I think if they hold off and work on their CSD tagging they could be a very good admin in the future. ϢereSpielChequers 14:26, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

Alright, thanks for clearing that up. And in yet another instance where I feel bad about myself, I reluctantly oppose a great editor. Swarm ^X 15:16, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

Editcountis

Hi WereSpielChequers. With respect to File:Top Wikipedians edit distribution.svg (spotted via Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-03-06/Editcountitis), I'd suggest adding a scale on the x-axis (otherwise, the axis is meaningless), and changing the y-axis to a log scale - my bet is that you would find a power law distribution. 21:49, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

On my computers (Mac, Safari & F/fox) I can't read the captions or axis names on the graphics. --Kudpung (talk) 22:38, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

I'm going to swerve those queries in Kevin's direction as he did the charts. I agree that the scale is missing. The captions were fine in Firefox on Ubuntu, they are no longer in a gallery and I'm now on windows and chrome as I'm travelling with a netbook. ϢereSpielChequers 22:48, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

I actually tried to add an x-axis graph but I couldn't figure out how to do it. I do agree that it should be added soon. Kevin Rutherford (talk) 23:18, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

RfA

I have noticed your opposition to my RfA, and I'd like to let you know that I have made another comment on your comment there. Also, I'd like to direct you to User:Slon02/CSDlog, which includes the most recent (currently 40ish) speedy deletion tags, hence making it the most recent evidence of my ability to tag pages for speedy deletion. --Slon02 (talk) 22:24, 7 March 2011 (UTC)

Question - re Gnomish

I gnome unreferenced BLPs and provide a minimum of 2 sources before deleting the Unreferenced tag. In some cases I can provide 1 good ref - is one sound ref enuf to delete an article from the Unsourced category? Are 2 refs strictly necessary - or am I just being lazy? Mark^Dask 14:57, 8 March 2011 (UTC)

I think it depends on the amount of information you are referencing, or rather how much you are leaving unreferenced. {{RefimproveBLP}} is always an option here. I take the view that if the subject doesn't interest me and I've verified enough to reclassify the article from unreferencedBLP to refimproveBLP then I've done a worthwhile improvement to the article. If the article came from one author then in my view if part of what they wrote stacks up it is rather less likely that the rest is a malicious hoax. Remember there is a big difference between improving a faulty article that someone else has contributed and creating an article yourself. ϢereSpielChequers 15:12, 8 March 2011 (UTC)

Thanks. Mark^Dask 04:11, 9 March 2011 (UTC)

SAS 3

Hi. I reverted your edit of SAS 3, "stared" to "started". I think you are maybe a Deutschsprecher, and might not have noticed that "stared" is the past tense of "stare" (to look intently), which is what was intended. But a lot of people who are not native English speakers might go there, and also be confused, so maybe a better word would be possible? Feel free to suggest something; you might judge better than I. Maybe just "looked". Cheers, Wwheaton (talk) 21:03, 10 March 2011 (UTC)

Hi, sorry about that, I've fixed hundreds of stared/starred/started errors but on this occasion didn't twig that a machine was staring. May I suggest observing instead, it does strike me as a more machinelike thing to do. ϢereSpielChequers 21:32, 10 March 2011 (UTC)

I think telescopes do stare, but observed is less likely to be misinterpreted, so that is fine. Wwheaton (talk) 23:05, 10 March 2011 (UTC)

Monastery of St Jerome, Lisbon

I am surprised that deletion of the page is not accepted. Two reasons: a one word line that says the "Monastery of St. Jerome in Lisbon, Portugal is a monastery" does not seem to have any context whatsoever, and more importantly the External link on the page refers to the Jerónimos Monastery. If anything, shouldn't it be deleted based on db-a3 or db-a10? The stub is just a rephrasing and duplication of a valid article.Ruben JC (Zeorymer) (talk) 00:05, 13 March 2011 (UTC)

A1 is for articles without context - I was able to workout that this was about a monastery in Lisbon, so that didn't apply. A3 doesn't apply either as the article has a reference. A10 doesn't apply because even if the article is a duplicate it is a plausible redirect. But thanks for pointing out the duplication, I've now made it a redirect. ϢereSpielChequers 00:21, 13 March 2011 (UTC)

Lidman

What sort of references is this? The link leads to nothing. --LA2 (talk) 04:29, 13 March 2011 (UTC)

It was a "remember to use google translate even for references used in the Swedish Wikipedia, and don't edit too late at night" type of reference. Thanks for fixing my mistake. ϢereSpielChequers 12:58, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

Talkback

Hello, WereSpielChequers. You have new messages at DeltaQuad's talk page.
Message added 06:01, 13 March 2011 (UTC). You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

Odd block

Hi, would you mind taking a look at User talk:Minho Kim for the details of their recent block? Unless I have misunderstood something about their history and contribution, they appear to have been blocked on the basis of being an SPA and a suspected COI/advertiser. There is a history of a prior SPI which was closed without any action 9 months ago and they did recreate the same article several times under different names but I am puzzled as to why this might be a rationale for permanent block without prior discussion in the light of the fact that I added sources to the recently re-deleted article myself which made the BLP unambiguously notable in my opinion. I'll be happy to let it go based on your opinion though I have already asked the blocking admin if they would be prepared to undelete the article or userfy a copy to my userspace. Cheers Fæ (talk) 23:13, 13 March 2011 (UTC)

Hi Fae, I don't see anything there that would merit a block without warning. I've done a few blocks without warnings myself, but they have mostly been softblocks for promotional names. ϢereSpielChequers 12:47, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

Changes made

Thank you for your review of Conservation of slow lorises. I have made changes per your requests. If there are any other issues, please let me know. – VisionHolder « talk » 03:10, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Stats question

Re. User:WereSpielChequers/RFA by month - I'd like to estimate how many admins are there, active, that became admin 6 years ago? (Lets say, prior to start of 2005)

I'm not quite sure I am reading the tables right.

I'm interested, due to the ongoing discussions at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Time limits on adminship - and I suspect you might be able to give me a fair estimate, much quicker than I could figure it out myself.

I'm wondering, if we decided to force admins >6 years to re-run, how many that would affect?

It would also help to know how many more it would likely affect, next year - ie how many still-active admins passed in 2005. Is that 221? Or am I reading it wrong?

Cheers,  Chzz  ►  20:31, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Hi Chzz, User:WereSpielChequers/RFA_by_month#Wikigenerations is looking at when our active admins started editing, so a few months ago we had 221 active admins who had started editing in 2005. Working out how long admins stay around for would need someone who can run a query, you might try CBM. If we can source it for this I'd be happy to maintain a table on my stats page . ϢereSpielChequers 22:13, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Ah, I see. No problem - I just thought you might already have the info, and thus it was worth asking. As for query - I can do that myself; I've got toolserv and basic SQL skills. Thanks for the prompt reply, no worries.  Chzz  ►  01:09, 18 March 2011 (UTC)

User:Majorly/RfA/Stats/2008, etc. Querying when someone was promoted is difficult (or impossible, for really old users). --MZMcBride (talk) 01:59, 18 March 2011 (UTC)

Yes, but, that doesn't give the info I seek.  Chzz  ►  08:27, 18 March 2011 (UTC)

Re: Speedy deletion declined: Reggie Aqui

hi WereSpielChequers, thanks for the explanantion. cheers - The Elves Of Dunsimore (talk) 01:20, 18 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)