Wikipedia:Village pump (miscellaneous)

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The miscellaneous section of the village pump is used to post messages that do not fit into any other category. Please post on the policy, technical, or proposals sections when appropriate, or at the help desk for assistance. For general knowledge questions, please use the reference desk.

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User Page Privacy Concerns

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

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I've been a bit hesitant to bring this up since it might exacerbate the issue I'm having, but when I first made my user page on Wikipedia in 2015, I included a lot of personal information about myself. Although I have long since removed the info from my user page, it still shows up in my user page history.

I was wondering if an admin could remove the earlier revisions containing my personal info, as I do have a lot of privacy concerns regarding this. Thanks!

--Dtale1984 (talk) 16:53, 12 March 2022 (UTC)

Did this, although it didn't contain a lot of private information IMO and I am hesitant to do a log redaction here. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 16:58, 12 March 2022 (UTC)

Thank you! I only needed the earliest revision to be redacted honestly but I appreciate it nonetheless. Dtale1984 (talk) 17:01, 12 March 2022 (UTC)

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

Zelensky or Zelenskyy? – feedback requested

The Ukrainian president is much in the news, and various spellings are used by reliable sources. Your feedback would be appreciated at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Ukraine#Zelensky or Zelenskyy. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 07:37, 17 March 2022 (UTC)

Where is the discussions of speedy deletion?

When I was finding the origin of speedy deletion, I found no discussions about why this has to be set up. So, where are the discussions? Wiki Emoji | Emojiwiki _Talk~~ 23:54, 17 March 2022 (UTC)

@Emojiwiki see Wikipedia:Criteria for speedy deletion, whose history goes back to 2004. Many policies, especially older ones, were not proposed to become a policy as we usually do today - but instead was documenting the community norms. CSD was spun off from the Wikipedia:Deletion policy where these exceptions to the "discuss first" practice is documented back to 2003. As to "why" because some things are so blatantly obviously bad that it would be a waste of community resources to hold a discussion - and more recently some things are so offensive that they need to be removed as quickly as possible to minimize disruption. — xaosflux ^Talk 00:02, 18 March 2022 (UTC)

Join the Community Resilience and Sustainability Conversation Hour with Maggie Dennis

You can find this message translated into additional languages on Meta-wiki.

More languages • Please help translate to other languages.

The Community Resilience and Sustainability team at the Wikimedia Foundation is hosting a conversation hour led by its Vice President Maggie Dennis.

Topics within scope for this call include Movement Strategy, Board Governance, Trust and Safety, the Universal Code of Conduct, Community Development, and Human Rights. Come with your questions and feedback, and let's talk! You can also send us your questions in advance.

The meeting will be on 24 March 2022 at 15:00 UTC (check your local time).

You can read details on Meta-wiki. Xeno (WMF) (talk) 02:48, 18 March 2022 (UTC)

This is starting in 5 minutes and can be viewed live or later on YouTube. Xeno (WMF) (talk) 14:54, 24 March 2022 (UTC)

Definition of "municipality"

Many editors, myself included, have spent a lot of time trying to make consistent the articles listing the cities, towns, villages, etc. of every state in the country (and of various other political entities around the world). One question has come up several times: how do we define "municipality"? We've settled on Lists of municipalities as a catch-all so we don't end up with separate lists for villages and cities in a state where the only legal difference is an arbitrary population cutoff. However, to that end we've been using "municipality" to mean "incorporated municipality", so as to exclude (and list separately) CDPs, civil townships, and the like. There seems to be a lot of agreement that this is good: we should list incorporated cities, towns, and villages, etc. separately from unincorporated CDPs and townships.

However, another possible definition of "municipality" is "a single administrative division having corporate status and powers of self-government or jurisdiction". One example of where this gets fuzzy is Michigan: Michigan only has two kinds of incorporated municipalities – cities and villages – but its unincorporated townships do have powers of self-government, and its unincorporated charter townships have even more self-government or jurisdiction. So should these be listed in a List of municipalities in Michigan? In other cases (see Wisconsin and South Dakota, both of which are still awaiting a merge) there is a consensus not to include civil townships, even if they have limited self-government.

As a further example, Vermont has 5 unincorporated towns, which are otherwise equivalent to the rest of the state's towns. Should these five towns be excluded from the list of municipalities because they aren't incorporated? If so, then shouldn't Michigan's townships be excluded from their list of municipalities? Is consistency even that important? Dylanvt (talk) 02:57, 19 March 2022 (UTC)

Vermont's 5 unincorporated towns had their incorporation revoked by the state (for good reason, e.g. Glastenbury, Vermont has all of 9 residents). Townships generally shouldn't be included, I'd think, although I see Michigan has lumped together multiple survey townships into an organized township. Have you considered a population criterion, e.g. incorporated and having at least 2,000 residents (or 5,000, or 1,000, or 10,000, or ...)? --R. S. Shaw (talk) 03:16, 22 March 2022 (UTC)

The idea behind these articles is to include all "municipalities" (in common language, towns and cities and villages etc.) in one place, because it's much more convenient to have them all in one place than in two or three separate articles. A cutoff wouldn't be great because some people may be looking for the smallest, rather than the largest, cities or towns in a state. There's just some grey area in several states that make 100% consistency difficult. But I don't know how much we should care about 100% consistency. Dylanvt (talk) 15:32, 23 March 2022 (UTC)

Can someone authorized to close a "withdraw" request to delete a WP article

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

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Here [1] is the withdrawn Wikipedia page deletion request. Please, close this request. Thank you - --Ooligan (talk) 00:02, 20 March 2022 (UTC)

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

Talk page button

What happened to our talk page button? It displays the text ‘Fa tiban ka ho’! I hope someone fixes this. ·~ dictátor·mundꟾ 10:56, 20 March 2022 (UTC)

@Inqilābī this sounds like a bad translation in the upstream interface translation files; they usually get updated every couple of weeks. If you use the "en - English" language setting in your preferences at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-personal you should not see bad translations here. — xaosflux ^Talk 11:07, 20 March 2022 (UTC)

I use en-GB in my preferences. Anyway, am I the only one who sees a different translation? ·~ dictátor·mundꟾ 11:10, 20 March 2022 (UTC)

My initial thoughts were the same as User:Xaosflux's, but I use en-GB and have seen no problem. Can browser language settings influence this? I am using Firefox 98.0.1, also with en-GB. Phil Bridger (talk) 11:14, 20 March 2022 (UTC)

It might be worth posting a link to this discussion at WP:VPT, as it seems to be a technical issue. Phil Bridger (talk) 11:18, 20 March 2022 (UTC)

@Inqilābī and Phil Bridger: no need to put on VPT, there is nothing we can do about this here on the English Wikipedia - it has to be fixed on translatewiki, then you have to wait for any updates to sync to mediawiki and then back to us. They usually fix those on translatewiki pretty quick, then there is about a 10 day lead time. We discourage the use of en-GB here, for many reasons - this being one of them - if you insist on using en-GB, en-CA, or other en-XX variants you should expect oddities. If something extremely vulgar or severely disruptive is in one of these, please let us know at WP:IANB or WP:AN and we can put in temporary manual overrides - but we are not going to maintain those variants in general (we had an RfC about that last year I think). Best regards, — xaosflux ^Talk 15:01, 20 March 2022 (UTC)

@Xaosflux: Thanks for the tip! I edited my preferences to use en and now I see the usual text. ·~ dictátor·mundꟾ 15:09, 20 March 2022 (UTC)

And thanks from me, as I was puzzled by this issue even though I wasn't suffering from it. I have no chauvinistic attachment to "en-GB", so have also changed my preference to "en". Phil Bridger (talk) 15:17, 20 March 2022 (UTC)

Inqilābī and Phil Bridger good to hear! For the most part en-XX variant's in the interface are not really, we've been looking for some technical solutions for a long time to avoid this - but it requires a lot of upstream work. Changing your preference will have no impact at all on the text of articles or other content pages, and you are welcome to edit articles in whatever dialect is appropriate! Best regards — xaosflux ^Talk 17:13, 20 March 2022 (UTC)

en-GB is known to suck. That's really all there is to it. casualdejekyll 12:53, 24 March 2022 (UTC)

Quarterly Community Safety survey

Apologies for cross-posting this, I wanted to make sure that as many people as possible knew this was going to happen, so people aren't surprised when it appears.

Starting the week of 28 March 2022, the Wikimedia Foundation will conduct a quarterly anonymous survey about safety perceptions among the English Wikipedia community members.

This survey responds to a Universal Code of Conduct community recommendation, and we encourage you to participate.

There are more details about the survey on the project page, and you can also leave comments.

Best regards, Community Safety Survey team –– STei (WMF) (talk) 21:25, 21 March 2022 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:BOLD, revert, discuss cycle has an RFC

Wikipedia talk:BOLD, revert, discuss cycle has an RFC for possible consensus. A discussion is taking place. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments on the discussion page. Thank you. 2601:647:5800:1A1F:2450:82EA:FC8A:4EA1 (talk) 23:54, 24 March 2022 (UTC)

“Sexual assault allegations vanished from potential Cori Bush challenger’s Wikipedia page”

Just wondering if any of you have seen this new front page article, it’s pretty concerning. https://theintercept.com/2022/03/21/missouri-senator-steven-roberts-wikipedia/ — Preceding unsigned comment added by Perfecnot (talk • contribs) 12:24, 22 March 2022 (UTC)

And this is exactly the sort of thing we'd never be able to catch once the WMF enables IP masking and adopts the UCoC (which prohibits discussing contributors' place of employment). --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 14:40, 22 March 2022 (UTC)

Targeting of Talk:Speech synthesis

Any conjectures on why Talk:Speech synthesis receives a particularly large number of drive-by additions of new sections, added by single-edit IP users, that consist of gibberish or sentence fragments in Indonesian or both? I'm particularly intrigued by the ones (in Indonesian) that translate to "salaam aleikum to all bus passengers from johor bahru to malacca will be departing soon we from larkin sentral would like to wish you a happy hari raya"[2], "Ayang beautiful there is a whatsapp from my handsome"[3], "Moskona you love but how come you're so naughty"[4], "Hi adam there's a whatsapp message coming in"[5], and "the child has a whatsapp entry from the girl"[6], covering a span of more than two months. Largoplazo (talk) 16:36, 22 March 2022 (UTC)

There could be several reasons. I believe this belongs in VPT, perhaps tagged as a security issue, as one reason could be somebody is testing the waters for wider-scale disruption, but not necessarily targeting Wikipedia exclusively. 172.254.222.178 (talk) 00:52, 23 March 2022 (UTC)

I was figuring there could be a bigger motive behind it, whether it's sending coded messages or something else, but I chose Miscellaneous because I wasn't sure of a more suitable forum. Largoplazo (talk) 01:27, 23 March 2022 (UTC)

Question for a logo in Ukraine

On this page I discovered a logo combined the coat of arms of Ukraine and four fleurs-de-lis, who know about that? --Great Brightstar (talk) 17:28, 22 March 2022 (UTC)

It is the logo of the Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine. --Jayron32 17:45, 22 March 2022 (UTC)

Opinions on the phenomenon some might call RfC-itis?

See heading. MarshallKe (talk) 00:07, 23 March 2022 (UTC)

Vexing, when it happens in situations where common sense would have served just as well, or better. Also when it involves issues affecting a minority of editors, editors already being an insignificantly small minority of daily users. 172.254.222.178 (talk) 00:59, 23 March 2022 (UTC)

Could you make a definition? As it currently stands it just seems like a vague negative term. 2601:647:5800:1A1F:4CAE:9DE2:30BC:86D9 (talk) 22:19, 23 March 2022 (UTC)

Not sure if this meets a definition, but it describes the symptoms. An editor, sometimes experienced, sometimes not, opens an RfC seemingly at odds with the expectations of other editors that were already present on the article's talk page. The editor filing usually has ignored or is unaware of WP:RFCBEFORE and WP:RFCNOT. Particularly egregious examples may have poorly worded, non-neutral questions. Depending on how contentious the underlying topic is, such an RfC will very likely have examples of WP:BLUDGEON behaviour. If editors are truly lucky, some sort of useful consensus can be achieved through this, though getting to it can be tedious. Sideswipe9th (talk) 04:06, 24 March 2022 (UTC)

Might be worth making an essay about. By the way, I started my own RFC. See above. 2601:647:5800:1A1F:25E9:7819:F430:D78 (talk) 23:07, 24 March 2022 (UTC)