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Pages recently put under extended confirmed protection (37 out of 8223 total) () WATCH Page Protected Expiry Type Summary Admin Draft:Shubham Rameshwar Kakde 2024-08-11 06:15 2025-08-11 06:15 create Repeatedly recreated Johnuniq Narayana Guru 2024-08-11 04:27 indefinite edit Arbitration enforcement Johnuniq User talk:Yamla/talk/talk 2024-08-11 01:17 indefinite create Repeatedly recreated Ad Orientem User talk:RickinBaltimore 2024-08-11 00:17 indefinite move Persistent vandalism; requested at WP:RfPP Isabelle Belato Draft talk:Farlight 84 2024-08-10 21:28 indefinite create Repeatedly recreated Ad Orientem Al-Tabin school attack 2024-08-10 13:36 indefinite edit,move Contentious topic restriction: Per RFPP and ARBPIA Daniel Case Wikipedia talk:…/talk 2024-08-09 23:34 indefinite create LTA target Ad Orientem Wikipedia talk:… 2024-08-09 23:19 indefinite create Repeatedly recreated: LTA Ad Orientem 1999 East Timorese crisis 2024-08-09 23:18 2025-05-14 00:00 edit,move Persistent sock puppetry; requested at WP:RfPP Isabelle Belato Template:Category link if exists 2024-08-09 18:00 indefinite edit,move High-risk template or module: 3481 transclusions (more info) MusikBot II Taxila Business School 2024-08-09 17:05 indefinite create Repeatedly recreated Justlettersandnumbers Draft:Sabit Yeasin 2024-08-09 16:16 indefinite create Repeatedly recreated BusterD Draft:Hahaha 2024-08-09 16:10 indefinite create Repeatedly recreated BusterD Israel Olympic football team 2024-08-09 15:16 2024-11-09 15:16 edit,move Arbitration enforcement; requested at WP:RfPP Isabelle Belato Israeli incursions in Tulkarm 2024-08-09 14:14 indefinite edit,move Arbitration enforcement; requested at WP:RfPP Isabelle Belato MrBeast 2024-08-09 14:01 2024-11-09 14:01 edit Persistent violations of the biographies of living persons policy from (auto)confirmed accounts; requested at WP:RfPP Isabelle Belato Draft:Battle of Height 383 2024-08-09 04:51 indefinite edit,move persistent readdition of page to categories no matter how many times it's removed on WP:DRAFTNOCAT grounds, by an editor who's already been told to stop it Bearcat Lipetsk air base 2024-08-09 04:35 2024-09-09 04:34 edit move protection was not needed here Red-tailed hawk Hawkesbury, Ontario 2024-08-09 00:37 2024-08-16 00:37 edit,move Persistent vandalism Anachronist Baalveer 2024-08-09 00:14 2024-11-09 00:14 edit,move Persistent disruptive editing: Disruption resumed as soon as the prior protection lifted. Anachronist Category:Wikipedia sockpuppets of Piermark 2024-08-08 20:39 indefinite edit,move Persistent sockpuppetry Ohnoitsjamie Special military operation 2024-08-08 18:19 indefinite edit,move WP:GS/RUSUKR Muboshgu Template:Election box gain with party link no swing 2024-08-08 18:00 indefinite edit,move High-risk template or module: 2503 transclusions (more info) MusikBot II Template:Proper name 2024-08-08 18:00 indefinite edit,move High-risk template or module: 2518 transclusions (more info) MusikBot II Template:Disestablishment category in country by decade/core 2024-08-08 18:00 indefinite edit,move High-risk template or module: 2586 transclusions (more info) MusikBot II Palestine at the 2024 Summer Olympics 2024-08-08 12:46 2024-09-08 12:46 edit,move Arbitration enforcement; requested at WP:RfPP Isabelle Belato Kursk 2024-08-08 12:39 2025-02-08 12:39 edit,move Arbitration enforcement; requested at WP:RfPP Isabelle Belato User talk:194.28.84.109 2024-08-08 08:08 2024-11-08 08:08 create Repeatedly recreated 331dot PhonePe 2024-08-07 22:02 indefinite edit Persistent sock puppetry, block evasion and WP:UPE The Wordsmith Steve Shapiro 2024-08-07 21:43 indefinite create Repeatedly recreated: WP:UPE target - approved draft required Ponyo Sudzha 2024-08-07 18:17 2024-08-14 18:17 edit,move Persistent disruptive editing from (auto)confirmed accounts Less Unless Hollywood Creative Alliance 2024-08-07 17:33 2024-08-21 17:33 edit,move Persistent disruptive editing: Discussed at WP:ANI Cullen328 Misandry 2024-08-07 17:28 indefinite edit Contentious topic restriction: WP:CT/GG -- requested at WP:RFPP Favonian Buuhoodle 2024-08-07 14:51 2026-08-07 14:51 edit Persistent disruptive editing: Regular semi-protection ineffective, persistent block evasion and additions of poorly sourced material. Yamaguchi先生 Case Oh 2024-08-07 12:01 indefinite create Repeatedly recreated BusterD Draft:Muhammad Hassaan 2024-08-07 11:59 indefinite create Repeatedly recreated BusterD Draft:Titan Cameraman 2024-08-07 10:52 indefinite create Repeatedly recreated BusterD

Help cleaning up bot-mangled citations

This came up last month, but there hasn't been much movement on it since, and I'm not sure where else I can raise a signal about it. Use of the ReferenceExpander bot without manually checking its output has led to references being contracted instead. For example, the bot sometimes follows a link that now redirects to a new, uninformative place, but since the link technically "works" the auto-generated citation omits the archive-URL and creates a footnote that is nicely templated but completely useless. It also removes all sorts of ancillary information included in manually-formatted citations, like quotations. If multiple citations were gathered into the same footnote, it creates a replacement based on only the first of them. It can see a citation to a chapter in an edited collection and replace the authors' names with the editors of the volume. It can see a URL for a news story and create a {{cite web}} footnote that omits the byline which had been manually included. A list of potentially affected pages is available here.

It's frankly a slog to deal with, and there doesn't seem to be any other option than manually looking at each item.

(Per the big orange box, I have notified the editor whose actions prompted all this, but they are both retired and indeffed.) XOR'easter (talk) 02:13, 18 May 2023 (UTC)

Hey @XOR'easter sorry. I was going to try working through at least a few of these a bit at a time, but I've been busy with a lot of other stuff. Is anyone here interested in gathering together a crew to tackle some of these as a group? It feels pretty daunting for just a few people. –jacobolus (t) 02:43, 18 May 2023 (UTC)

I can help. --JBL (talk) 18:35, 18 May 2023 (UTC)

I started reviewing the list, and fyi, in the 1853 or so citations affected here [1], I noticed https urls were occasionally converted to http. Beccaynr (talk) 03:08, 18 May 2023 (UTC)

Wow, I hadn't even thought to check for that. XOR'easter (talk) 04:46, 18 May 2023 (UTC)

Have you asked the WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors for help? They are also having a copy-editing drive this month, and maybe something like this could be added to that project. Beccaynr (talk) 05:05, 18 May 2023 (UTC)

I did ask, as it happens; apparently it's not in their wheelhouse. XOR'easter (talk) 16:44, 18 May 2023 (UTC)

WikiFaerie are not as well-organized, so I am not sure how to conduct outreach, but I will try to work through the list you have developed when possible. Thank you for calling attention to this. Beccaynr (talk) 17:48, 18 May 2023 (UTC)

@XOR'easter: Perhaps WP:WikiProject Citation cleanup? Not the most active of projects, I think, though. AddWittyNameHere 21:41, 18 May 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for the suggestion; I've commented over there.

What gets me is that these are not all obscure pages. DNA, for example, is a Featured Article with almost 2,000 watchers, and yet nobody seems to have noticed when citations were modified to have a last name "Bank", first name "RCSB Protein Data". XOR'easter (talk) 00:10, 19 May 2023 (UTC)

There are so many bots and bot-like gnomes running around making so many hundreds of thousands of minor cleanups to citations on articles, 99% of which are fine, that it makes it very tiresome to consistently check all edits appearing on one's watchlist and notice the thousands of edits that fall into the 1% of cases where the software totally screws up the citation. And yet, these supposed cleanups happen so often and so repetitively to the same articles that it seems that, eventually, all citations will be garbaged by bots. —David Eppstein (talk) 22:44, 19 May 2023 (UTC)

I've been very slowly working my way through one of the more severely damaged articles, Falun Gong (a CTOP I've never edited before). Out of the numerous affected references, I have yet to see the ReferenceExpander script suggest a correct citation. 04:43, 20 May 2023 (UTC) Updating to add that I have now found a correct citation produced by this tool, giving a success rate in my sample around 10%. Even ignoring the information lost from the manually formatted references that are not converted into the cite templates, I'm seeing the tool assign incorrect titles and incorrect dates, leave out authors when a byline is clearly evident at the top of the article, confuse archives with live urls, and associated basic errors.

At this point I'm extremely suspect of any edits performed using this script, since its parsing both of the existing reference and of retrieved webpages is, in the general case, objectively inadequate. It might be faster to batch undo as many of these edits as is technically feasible, and I'm sadly wondering if we should formally encourage the maintainer to disable the script pending improvement. Courtesy ping User:BrandonXLF. Folly Mox (talk) 03:29, 20 May 2023 (UTC)

Yesterday I found that the ReferenceExpander script also removed Template:pd-notice from every article it had touched in Category:Human trafficking by country, which all incorporate text in the public domain in the US. Not sure how big a problem regarding copyright and attribution that is, but it's definitely an unwanted behaviour. The query User:XOR'easter and them ran back in April returned over 2600 rows. It's dog's work fixing these, but if people could just scroll around a bit and find a couple articles that interest them, we could repair the damage a lot quicklier. The bottom tables, where the script has added in byte size, seem to be pretty low hanging fruit, since action is not always needed. Folly Mox (talk) 13:57, 22 May 2023 (UTC)

Seconding this: it's very much at the stage where having a bunch of people click on five random links and fix or mark as ok the obvious easy ones would be a huge help. --JBL (talk) 18:34, 22 May 2023 (UTC)

I've come across ReferenceExpander in a few of the articles I watch and similarly find it to have an extraordinarily low rate of success. If it's to remain available its users must not only check the output very carefully indeed but also actually understand how our citation templates work. XAM2175 ^(T) 16:54, 22 May 2023 (UTC)

I finally found one that wasn't a problem! This edit to Penguin looks fine. XOR'easter (talk) 15:00, 23 May 2023 (UTC)

Nope. Both citations had archive URLs that were deleted by the script leaving only a dead URL in the new cite, and in the first one the script also commits the grossly stupid error of cramming two different corporate publishers into a single set of |first= and |last= fields. XAM2175 ^(T) 15:19, 23 May 2023 (UTC)

Wow. OK, back to 0% success in those I've examined, then. XOR'easter (talk) 16:15, 23 May 2023 (UTC)

I started checking History of Wikipedia and just had to give up. Lost content restored up through line 108, but I need to lie down now. XOR'easter (talk) 23:00, 23 May 2023 (UTC)

Fair. I've definitely had two or three repairs that took me multiple hours of work and required a break or a night's sleep. For a single diff. Smh. Folly Mox (talk) 03:55, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

It has to get easier after Zionism, right? Right? XOR'easter (talk) 18:55, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

I've mostly been backing out of the articles where the size has been reduced by multiple kilobytes unless I have a whole day available to devote to reference repair, and I appreciate that you've been tackling the top of the list while I've been scrolling arbitrarily and repairing whatever.

Perhaps the most egregious behaviour I saw yesterday was at Mead, where ReferenceExpander took a properly formatted book citation, already in a template, and discarded the page= parameter. I cannot pretend to understand why this functionality would be programmed in. Folly Mox (talk) 12:13, 25 May 2023 (UTC)

Having been on Sub-Saharan Africa for the past few days, I can safely say: Prolly not. ~Judy _{(job requests)} 15:40, 26 May 2023 (UTC)

I am having to take Left-libertarianism in tiny morsels. XOR'easter (talk) 19:18, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

I discovered while workin' on Hilaree Nelson (which XOR'easter beat me to fixin' with their rollback powers, haha) that this script's also a real problem when an article has a web page title and a news headline that don't match up, and given its propensity for getting rid of author names, it can really bungle a citation to where it takes a few second looks to make sure you've got it right when handling them manually. ~Judy _{(job requests)} 20:16, 7 June 2023 (UTC)

I checked several diffs; will try to check more later. The edit to Toki Pona seems to have been good, as far as how it formatted the reference, although the entire reference was subsequently removed for being a random youtube video. -sche (talk) 19:25, 26 May 2023 (UTC)

Here's an odd one: as far as I can tell, everything here was fine except that it dropped a space which was present between two of the words in the title, smooshing them together. (Am I missing any other issues?) I'm surprised a script that causes as many problems as have been discussed here, and as many different kinds of problems, doesn't seem(?) to have been disabled yet. -sche (talk) 22:23, 26 May 2023 (UTC)

Would it be improper (or even possible) to propose that it be disabled by community consensus? XAM2175 ^(T) 22:47, 26 May 2023 (UTC)

Is there a bot? Philoserf (talk · contribs) is indefinitely blocked. Is any other user running User:BrandonXLF/ReferenceExpander in a problematic way? If ReferenceExpander is thought to have problems, BrandonXLF can be asked for a fix but there would need to be a list of, say, five examples of a problem with a brief explanation. If the script produces more problems than it solves, it could easily be disabled. Johnuniq (talk) 01:17, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

There are definitely other users running it, but not on anywhere near the same scale. Their edits typically have the same kinds of issues, but they are more likely to self-censor the most egregious ones. In my opinion the script creates a lot of big problems and doesn't really solve anything at all. YMMV. –jacobolus (t) 04:06, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

The script seems to run as intended if the source is the New York Times or if it has a doi number. I've also seen it take a bare url reference and create a citation that was pretty good except for one field filled out naively but not incorrectly. For online news sources, it tends not to make things worse, although it sometimes does.

Edits from users other than Philoserf are consistently less worse, because they look at the proposed output and choose not to apply the obviously incorrect updates, but the script has so many problems (way more than five) and gets so many different things wrong and discards so much information present in existing citations that I would never feel comfortable not double checking an edit made using it.

Having looked briefly at the code, I think the bugs might actually be upstream in dependency libraries, but disabling the interface is probably the safest move. BrandonXLF has added a warning that editors are responsible for edits made using the script, but has otherwise been silent on the issue. I suppose we could take it to MfD. Folly Mox (talk) 11:08, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

I went ahead and nominated it. — SamX [talk · contribs] 20:04, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

• More than 450 edits have been checked, reverted, or repaired; that's still less than 20% of the total. Let me again suggest to people who like gnoming that a lot of this is pretty straightforward (one or two references per edit to check to make sure no information was lost) and that's just a matter of hands on deck. --JBL (talk) 17:46, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

  People will want to click through to the target page to ensure the script hasn't – for example – credited editors as authors or put the name of the author or website into the title= parameter. I usually go in with the goal of making the citation reasonably complete, since I'm checking it anyway, which often involves adding parameters like author and publication date, but the tactic of making sure the reference is not worse than before the script touched it is also viable. It is indeed reasonably straightforward, and one hardly ever needs to assess source quality, relevance, or whether it supports the prose. It's easy enough that it's what I've been doing when my brain is done for the day. There's just a lot. Folly Mox (talk) 08:46, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

  Is there any reason to retain the other 1800+ edits while they're being checked? I'm not familiar with this tool at all, but it sounds as if the bot's edits are detrimental, and the project would be better off if we just reverted en masse. Is that correct, or is it better to check before reverting the bot? Nyttend (talk) 21:08, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

  @Nyttend: I'm not a technically apt editor and I haven't done as much repairing as some others so I might not be the best person to answer this question, but I'll share my two cents here anyway. It's impossible to revert many of the edits using Undo, Twinkle, etc. because most were several months ago, and multiple edits to many of the pages have occurred since then. A minority of the citations, particularly to the New York Times, were actually improved by ReferenceExpander. Some of them aren't too bad, and only require something straightforward like adding |archive-url=, |archive-date=, and url-status= to the citation templates or correcting the author paramaters. Some of them are in pretty bad shape, but were already poorly formatted before ReferenceExpander and require quite a bit more work. Most of them can be manually reverted by copying and pasting the wikitext of the citations from the pre-ReferenceExpander revision, although creating a new citation template from scratch is often an improvement over the old revision. There are enough weird behaviors and edge cases that simply reverting them all with a bot or script probably wouldn't be a good option IMO, but others may disagree with me on that point. — SamX [talk · contribs] 04:32, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

  User:Nyttend, when I come across edits that are the most recent revision during the cleanup, typically I'll straight revert them (sometimes I'll improve them; it depends on how sleepy and grumpy I'm feeling), and I see other editors contributing to this task doing the same, but usually there are intervening edits. If we had a query of all the ReferenceExpander edits where they were the most recent revision, I feel it would be safe to bulk revert the lot and then go back and unrevert any that were genuine improvements, which do occur.

  Based on my experience with the cleanup, possibly between 10 and 20 per cent of ReferenceExpander edits are net-zero or net-positive, to give a very rough estimate. We've been prioritising the more damaged articles, but the edits which increase the byte size are usually much less worse. The issue, for my brain anyway, is that they're still mostly incomplete and naive, so if I'm in there anyway I'll try to leave it better than ReferenceExpander found it. Folly Mox (talk) 20:37, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

Also it might be good to run the same query for older edits. I think the ReferenceExpander script has been around for a while and I would expect it probably had roughly similar behavior through its life. There are probably at least some older ones that should be checked/fixed (though hopefully not nearly so many). –jacobolus (t) 04:56, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

Sounds like a good idea. If we do that, I think we should also run a query if the script is deleted or disabled after the MFD is closed. — SamX [talk · contribs] 18:59, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

It is probably safest to check every edit ever committed using this tool. Something that worries me is that the entire core functionality seems to hinge on a function in mediawiki's own Citoid.js library, and I happened upon some citations earlier today or yesterday, not created by ReferenceExpander, that had publication dates in the author-first= field. I'm not sure how many scripts will take anything other than a bare URL as input before creating a citation, which is by far the biggest problem with the ReferenceExpander edits, but once this cleanup is a bit more buttoned up it might be wise to find out which team is responsible for maintaining Citoid.js and see if we can't get them to implement some improvements and add warning messages to editors that the output may not be correct and double checking should be performed. Folly Mox (talk) 20:44, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

For those keeping score at home, we recently passed 25% completion (by number of edits): about 650 out of 2500 have been checked or corrected. The most recent one I fixed was a real doozie. --JBL (talk) 00:27, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

I've seen that same failure mode before. I can't put my finger on where exactly it was, but it definitely did show up in one of the other articles I've fixed. XOR'easter (talk) 15:22, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

Ah, it was in Ballistic movement [2]. XOR'easter (talk) 19:03, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

And it's the same replacement chosen for the two (otherwise unrelated) references! So bizarre. --JBL (talk) 19:22, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

Neither of the references prior to Philoserf's ReferenceExpander edits contained a URL, so it might have something to do with their device's behaviour when it's asked to fetch a URL but only given numeric input data. Just a hunch.

I repaired one which I cannot for the life of me track down, where the author fields had been populated |first=Not |last=Anonymous, which is client-side behaviour when redirecting to an unencrypted address on a certain browser, so the "leave SMS voice" thing may have the same tenor as an error message. Folly Mox (talk) 08:02, 3 June 2023 (UTC)

Oh, it was Huldar saga. And it was |first=Not |title=Anonymous. And it was the source that says "unpublished" "do not cite". Good times. Folly Mox (talk) 08:11, 3 June 2023 (UTC)

And it was my saltiest edit summary ever. Not super proud of that. Oops. Anyway we're almost to 800 matches for Template:y on the cleanup page. Folly Mox (talk) 09:01, 3 June 2023 (UTC)

Looks like we crossed 1000 some time today. One thing this is bringing home for me is that there are a lot of poor citations in this encyclopedia. But honestly the people who drop a bare url that points somewhere relevant inside ref tags are doing a lot more good than the people who formatted obviously ridiculous references using this tool (even when the formatting was not itself bad). --JBL (talk) 21:38, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

Half-way done. JBL (talk) 17:38, 9 June 2023 (UTC)

I don't know what happened on Michael Faraday; usually it screws up because an old URL redirects to a useless place, like a "search this site" page, but the given URL still works in this case [3]. And Gilded Age provides an example of how even when the bot script infernal contraption makes the article bigger, it can lead to lost information [4]. The article cited different pages from the same book, ReferenceExpander converted those manual footnotes to (badly formatted) templates, and then reFill blindly merged them because ReferenceExpander had omitted the page numbers. XOR'easter (talk) 22:14, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

The more I learn about the whole infrastructure in play here the more concerned I become. The actual Zotero hooks, which will convert DOIs and PMIDs etc into perfectly formatted citations via Citoid, are extremely reliable. I'm not sure where in the stack the "google books" processor is, but it consistently throws out page numbers, never identifies editors, and discards chapter contributions. I hope it's somewhere in a mediawiki library so it can be improved instead of rewritten from scratch to avoid the current serious bugs.

I contacted one of the maintainers of ReFill about some improvements that could be made downstream of Citoid, but they've got too much going on to invest more deeply in maintaining other people's code. Someone commented at the MfD that they could likely improve on ReferenceExpander's code, and as much as I've enjoyed the silly bursts of absurdity during this long cleanup effort, it can't feel good for BrandonXLF when most of the errors we're describing – outside of the fundamental design flaw of overwriting existing references – are not even his fault, except insofar as he trusted Citoid to parse pages intelligently, which does happen in some cases.

I think my eventual point is that although we're dealing with the fallout of an overlap of some serious mistrusts, script-assisted referencing is not going to become less popular because of one tool, and we really need to commit to the followthrough of improving its reliability as far up the stack as we have access to, so this dark portent can be averted. Folly Mox (talk) 00:03, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

Trying to handle DOIs, news websites, books, etc., all in the same script is biting off an awful lot, maybe more than any single script can actually chew. I think the balance might tip back to the positive if the scope of the tool were less ambitious. XOR'easter (talk) 05:26, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

I think the main thing is that any script author should before releasing their script gather a wide variety of test cases and make sure that they aren't making disimprovements to any of them, and when told about bugs should add additional test cases. For something that is going to run across thousands of pages, the standard has to be very high. Even 1% mistakes is not good enough. But in this case, we are talking about a script that is making something like 75% mistakes, 25% cosmetic changes without significant benefit, and 0% substantial improvements. That should never get past the testing phase. –jacobolus (t) 05:57, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

At detailed logarithmic timeline, it replaced a template that someone had done correctly with a different template that it populated incorrectly, replacing the author's name (Christopher Kemp) with #author.fullName} [5]. There are currently 26 examples of #author.fullName} in articles; I wonder how many this program is responsible for. XOR'easter (talk) 20:55, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

OK, heat pump is not on the list of ReferenceExpander-affected pages, and the errant #author.fullName} was apparently inserted in this edit. So, in this case, it looks like some routine which is upstream from ReferenceExpander and which the citation tool in the Visual Editor also relies upon failed. XOR'easter (talk) 21:03, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

Yeah that's what I'm trying to say: apart from URLs garbled by escaping special characters, and apart from overwriting existing references with worse ones, every error – filling author fields with "Contact Us", parsing the root of a usurped domain, not finding authors with a byline at the top of the page, identifying editors as authors – everything, is attributable to Citoid and whatever is upstream of it. The visual editor's automated references and ReFill at least rely on the exact same library. I don't see Citation bot making the same mistakes, but there's a lot that does depend and will continue to depend on Citoid, which is turning out to be not particularly reliable in many cases.

I said in the MfD that the way forward for not wrecking citations is to start out by calling getCitoidRef on the input, but it doesn't have a hook for arbitrary text, so it's a pretty big step to get to a script that never disimproves existing references.

Throwing up warnings all over the place to instill a culture of double-checking when it comes to script-assisted referencing is a step we can take, but people have a tendency to trust code. Someone said somewhere there's a general issue of ownership with Citoid, which is a pretty big problem since there's so much work that apparently needs to be done with it. Folly Mox (talk) 00:08, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

Here's Reflinks (an predecessor to ReFill) filling an author field with "Comments have been closed on this article." Worse still, the IP editor who accepted that garbage is the one who put the bare URL into the article in the first place.

I'm beginning to feel that all forms of script-assisted referencing should be restricted to trusted users only, if not dumped entirely, on the grounds that bare URLs that might one day be expanded correctly are preferable to bare URLs being "filled" badly today. XAM2175 ^(T) 01:11, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

On The Language Myth, something took the name and date from the top post in a comment section and made it the author name for a citation [6].

I'm so tired. XOR'easter (talk) 01:23, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

Making URL-based script-assisted referencing an approval-based permission is something I would support as an intermediate step. I'm not sure how that could be implemented technically, and there's a reasonable plurality of people who will argue that increasing any barriers to referencing will result in fewer references, but I believe the current state of the field is that a fair amount of the time a bare URL is better than whatever the tools turn it into, because at least it's not wrong. Folly Mox (talk) 05:29, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

Another option could be to whitelist domains where the URL parser understands how to retrieve most of the information correctly, and have the tools throw an error like Sorry, we don't understand links from that domain yet for websites not on the list. Folly Mox (talk) 03:56, 8 June 2023 (UTC)

It seems to do a more-or-less okay job with large academic publisher websites where there's some kind of machine-readable structured metadata available. –jacobolus (t) 04:18, 8 June 2023 (UTC)

Funnily, I have a pending task to fix mangled cites from Singapore-based sources. – robertsky (talk) 20:28, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

They're everywhere. I was as Help talk:Citation Style 1 yesterday asking about whether they would be able to make the citation templates throw errors for things like numeric strings or full sentences in last1= fields, and even the most obvious clear error category still listed as maintenance rather than error, Category:CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list‎, has a population, at time of this edit, like this:
Category:CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list‎ (58,211)

There has been some commentary at the MfD that the reference filling scripts used to be even more inaccurate, so it's probably safe to assume that for every ReferenceExpander– / Philoserf-related citation mangle, there are a half dozen more lying around undiscovered.

String parsing for citation parameters across the set of all web pages with arbitrary formatting is never going to yield perfect results, so the culture of trusting the code output without double-checking really has to go away. Folly Mox (talk) 14:53, 7 June 2023 (UTC)

Huh I guess the function that displays category populations doesn't respond intuitively to subst. When I made the above post the category I mentioned contained 1688 pages. Now it's increased to 1691. The points remain valid, I think. Folly Mox (talk) 23:10, 7 June 2023 (UTC)

Unblock appeal by HugoAcosta9

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

HugoAcosta9 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log) is requesting to have their indefinite block lifted. He was initially blocked [7] for disruption surrounding AfDs and personal attacks, and then engaged in sockpuppetry and block evasion after being indefinitely blocked. That said, there was certainly a fair amount of constructive editing before things came to that point as well, and there is at least some support for the position that HugoAcosta9 did have a point about what was going on, even if it wasn't expressed in an appropriate way. Given the various factors involved here, I think it should be discussed by the community whether this editor should be unblocked, and if so what, if any, restrictions should be applied. Quoted text of the appeal follows below. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 01:12, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

I am writing to request an appeal of my block that was imposed in October of 2022. I was wrong and had been uploading disruptive edits, including personal attacks, disruption at AfDs - doubles down at thread brought by user to ANI. This behavior ultimately led to my block from Wikipedia. I acknowledge that I was frequently advised to stop, but I chose to ignore the warnings and continued my actions, which resulted in my block. At that time, I frequently added disruptive edits to discussions, including sockpuppettering six months ago despite editors' instructions that I do not do so. I disregarded their warnings and persisted in my irresponsible behavior. After I was blocked, instead of taking time off to do other things, I was deceitful and frequently engaged in Wikipedia:Sockpuppetry, originally using the IPs. I also utilized a wide range of various IP addresses. In December 2022, I was not aware that I had engaged in sockpuppetry and believed that I was able to request a standard offer (SO) in good faith. I now understand that my actions were inappropriate and have since learned more about Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. While I recognize that this does not excuse my behavior, it does help explain why I have kept coming back to the site. I want to emphasize that I did not have any malicious intent and did not intend to violate any of Wikipedia's rules. I am a passionate supporter of Wikipedia and deeply regret any harm that my actions may have caused to the community. Since my account was banned, I have taken steps to educate myself about Wikipedia's policies and guidelines, and I have stayed away from the site for over six months. I am eager to return to the community and make meaningful contributions. And for over six months, I have been editing at Spanish Wikipedia, making positive contributions like creating new articles. I feel that it could benefit my contributions to Wikipedia, especially with football articles. I realize that my past behavior was unacceptable and violated Wikipedia's policies. However, I am deeply remorseful for my actions and am committed to making positive contributions to the community. I want to prove that I can continue to contribute to Wikipedia in a responsible and productive manner. HugoAcosta9 (talk) 22:14, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

• For ease, copying my Undeniably involved comment, I do somewhat agree with @Nfitz: above that "the AFD system completely failed", which was a big part of what led to Hugo's frustration. I was the closer of some of the original AfDs and ultimately ended up agreeing with them being relisted/restored once the full picture became more clear. Courtesy links: Wikipedia:Deletion review/Log/2022 October 19, Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/IncidentArchive1112#Concerns_about_articles_nominated_for_deletion. I'm not going to take action and have not reviewed the Spanish edits they refer to above, but I do thank them for their clear & direct request above. comment from their Talk. Star Mississippi 01:36, 2 June 2023 (UTC)
• I remember the ANI thread that led to their block. The OP was upset that a number of their articles had been nominated for deletion and started throwing around personal attacks, accusations of racism, etc. That's not good of course, but later in the thread there was a clear consensus that the deletion nominations were inappropriate - so inappropriate, in fact, that the editor who initiated them was topic-banned from AfD. It's understandable that someone might become frustrated after being carpet-bombed with meritless AfDs, and aside from this incident the editor's history seems mostly uneventful and productive. I would support an unblock assuming that there is no evidence of recent block evasion. Spicy (talk) 01:56, 2 June 2023 (UTC)
• I'm all in favour of giving them a chance. I think some of those deleted Liga articles may still be under my user name. Nfitz (talk) 19:52, 3 June 2023 (UTC)
• Support this seems to have gotten ignored among the other drama. I support the unblock, with no editing restrictions. The unblock request statement and rationale aren't perfect, but it is good enough for a second chance. Walt Yoder (talk) 17:04, 4 June 2023 (UTC)
• Support ah yeah, I remember that messy thread. HugoAcosta9's anger, although problematic, was very understandable. I'm fine with a second chance. LEPRICAVARK (talk) 22:09, 6 June 2023 (UTC)
• Support – I did check some of his contributions in the Spanish Wikipedia and he has been quite productive there; I expect that he will continue being productive here as well. –FlyingAce^✈hello 04:12, 7 June 2023 (UTC)

  in which case, I'm also happy to support this request. Star Mississippi 12:45, 7 June 2023 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

User:BigHaz redux

I'd like to re-introduce a discussion around the unusual behavior of admin User:BigHaz. Whatever their situation – a long hiatus with barely any activity for 5 years, and then suddenly performing numerous unilateral speedy deletions with poor justification – I feel their actions fall short of proper admin behavior and merit more investigation.

The previous discussion from 5 May 2023 can be found here where Liz first brought up an issue: Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/Archive352#User:BigHaz. In retrospect, I do not believe Liz's posting was an "overreaction," as the user's actions have continued a pattern of poor judgment and problematic interactions with other users. Pinging previous folks in that conversation as a courtesy: Ingenuity, Beyond My Ken, Enterprisey.

I don't remember encountering BigHaz in the past. But what I found unusual was that an article I created in 2019 was just tagged for speedy deletion (WP:A7) by Thewritestuff92, an editor with barely 200 lifetime edits [8]. The CSD/A7 tagging was that user's first edit of 2023. Less than 15 minutes later, it gets deleted immediately by BigHaz.

To recap, we have this odd situation:

• Thewritestuff92's first edit since November 2022 was to tag Christianné Allen with CSD/A7 at 19:50 local time.

  There is substantial WP:RS coverage of her as Rudy Giuliani’s former communications director (see Google News search), so the proper process would be WP:AFD and not CSD.

• Thewritestuff92 leaves a note about the CSD/A7 on my talk page at 19:53 local time.
• Ten minutes later, at 20:03, BigHaz deletes it.

  Any decent admin should see that it's not a proper CSD/A7 situation, and should go through a regular AfD process.

• There are also at least three other issues with this admin's deletion actions in the last 24 hours.
  • User_talk:BigHaz#R3_deletion with J947
  • User_talk:BigHaz#Role_of_the_Chinese_Communist_Party_in_lawmaking with Pppery
  • User_talk:BigHaz#10_000_BC with Pppery

I'm concerned that even when it was pointed out by J947 that the CSD criteria clearly says, "Speedy deletion is intended to reduce the time spent on deletion discussions for pages or media with no practical chance of surviving discussion" [9], BigHaz dismissed this [10], and has kept performing dubious deletions.

In that earlier May conversation, BigHaz admitted they may be out of touch with the current norms. To wit: And [I] don't know what admin standards are any more: You may be right in this claim. When last I dealt with admin-related matters, there was a general sense that it was a good idea that people were doing them. It appears that I am now trespassing on a little fiefdom where good faith is not to be assumed. If this is the case, I'll happily perform other actions in the future. [11]

I am therefore formally asking BigHaz for the time being, please refrain from acting on CSD deletions, and to use your own words: "perform other actions in the future."

I welcome BigHaz's response and others to add any additional context. - Fuzheado | Talk 01:59, 3 June 2023 (UTC)

To respond to the accusations being made in the order in which they were raised:

1. The article cited was not written in a way which made it anything other than promotional. If the subject was in fact notable, I'm happy to accept that I made a mistake. I'm human, after all, and I assume everyone else around here is as well. The fact that it was deleted ten minutes after being tagged for speedy deletion is, quite simply, a function of what speedy deletion is. Had it been tagged in some other way, the process would have taken longer, as we know.

2. Regarding my interactions with J947, the other user is well aware of the process to contest a speedy deletion tag and (for reasons I don't claim to understand, but which probably make sense to them) opted not to in this instance.

3. Regarding my interaction with Pppery, I'm presently discussing the issue with that user on my Talk page. They have raised (somewhat belligerently, but so be it) cogent points, and I'm happy to take the relevant action if that's the best outcome.

4. To the concern about "dubious deletions", I would respond that any and every page could be seen as a "dubious deletion" in some respect - some for more cogent reasons than others, but there's usually going to be someone who doesn't like something being deleted. Following J947's comments, I haven't deleted anything dealing with redirects, for example.

5. My response in May has been taken out of context. The allegation, largely, was that by handling the PROD process the way that I was demonstrated a level of dangerous incompetence. My response was that I was labouring under the misapprehension that we assumed that we were all "pulling in the same direction", so to speak. I'm happy to reiterate that point now, as it appears that there is a willingness to fly off the handle when someone does something remotely different to what you expect (even to the extent of J947's willingness to ignore processes in the interests of making a point). BigHaz - Schreit mich an 02:14, 3 June 2023 (UTC)

As a further point, CSD is by definition "unilateral". I fail to see why that should be a criticism. BigHaz - Schreit mich an 02:15, 3 June 2023 (UTC)

And one final PS (apologies, I know this is rather poor form), I am moving back into a situation at work where I'll be very much busier for a few months, so depending on how long "the time being" is, you may get your wish without needing to make a big thing of it. BigHaz - Schreit mich an 02:18, 3 June 2023 (UTC)

There is definitely someone being belligerent on your talk page, but it’s not Pppery. 100.36.106.199 (talk) 12:05, 3 June 2023 (UTC)

Do we need IP addresses throwing in comments? BigHaz - Schreit mich an 13:02, 3 June 2023 (UTC)

More than we need administrators who refuse to take any kind of negative feedback. I mean, I haven't deleted any Wikipedia articles on questionable grounds this week! 100.36.106.199 (talk) 14:16, 3 June 2023 (UTC)

So asking someone who says "You shouldn't have deleted article xyz" to explain why I shouldn't have done so is "refus[ing] to take negative feedback"? Righto. BigHaz - Schreit mich an 23:41, 3 June 2023 (UTC)

Yes, that is probably what I mean, and not at all a continued demonstration of your unwillingness to take criticism seriously. Oy vey. --100.36.106.199 (talk) 01:52, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

Ad hominem is fun, isn't it? BigHaz - Schreit mich an 05:03, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

Ad hominem <-- please read it. 100.36.106.199 (talk) 19:34, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

I mean for crying out loud, there is definitely one ad hom comment in this discussion; it was Do we need IP addresses throwing in comments? 100.36.106.199 (talk) 19:35, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

• BigHaz - with regards to the article itself, if you thought it was promotional (FWIW, I do not), the correct criterion for deletion would have been WP:G11. Now, in your point 1 above, you are talking about notability. An WP:A7 deletion is obviously tangentially related to notability, but it is much stricter than that - admins do not have discretion to delete articles purely because they believe the subject is not notable. To be eligible for A7, an article must fail to indicate why its subject is important or significant in some way. Your mileage may vary, but I would consider the following sentence a claim of significance: "She served as Director of Communication for Rudy Giuliani." As such, the article was not eligible for A7 deletion; it should have gone to AfD to allow other editors to look for additional sources, weigh notability, etc. Based on this deletion, and on your response above, I would advise you to spend some time getting reacquainted with our deletion processes before taking admin actions in this area. I haven't looked at the other aspects of this report. Girth Summit _(blether) 12:09, 3 June 2023 (UTC)

  My apologies for misspeaking in that instance. The article was, as you rightly point out, tagged A7. When I saw the article and the tag, my conclusion was that simply serving in a position for a notable person does not make a person notable. I have, in the past, worked in the office of a person who held a very senior political role here in Australia. That doesn't give me sufficient (or indeed any, really) notability for an article here. A relative has held the position of Director-General for a government department in Queensland. He doesn't rise to the level of notability as a result of that, despite the fact that he reported on a daily basis to ministers who were themselves notable. And so it goes.

  As mentioned above, I'm moving back into a "busy phase" at work, so my ability to interact with Wikipedia beyond the superficial will be reduced once again. At some point in the next 12 months, I may end up with another few weeks where I can attempt to make myself useful. I will need to reconsider my default idea that Wikipedia is a place to do that. BigHaz - Schreit mich an 13:01, 3 June 2023 (UTC)

  You are again talking about notability; the question is not whether or not the person is notable, A7 requires there to be no claim of significance or importance, which is a lower threshold than notability. I don't think that there are many people who would agree with the notion that holding that role is not a CCoS, especially when the article had three sources, each discussing the subject in significant depth. I am not saying that you cannot be useful here, just that your understanding of our deletion processes seems to be at odds with current practices. Girth Summit _(blether) 13:10, 3 June 2023 (UTC)

  Replace "notable" with whatever other adjective suits if it matters. As mentioned on my talk page in response, I still remain unconvinced that "worked for a person who is himself highly notable" amounts to a claim of anything much other than having a job, but there you are. Perhaps my relative's career does add up to an article - not that I intend to write it. BigHaz - Schreit mich an 23:44, 3 June 2023 (UTC)

  BigHaz, the point is that the determination of notability in this case should have been made through a community discussion at AfD, not unilaterally by an administrator who is out of touch with current norms and practices. Please be more cautious in the future. Cullen328 (talk) 23:59, 3 June 2023 (UTC)

  Point taken. The point I've been trying to make throughout has been that the determination appeared pretty clear-cut, which was (and, unless I'm radically mistaken, still is) the point of CSD tags. Had it not done so, I would have removed the tag, as you can see that I have done on a number of other occasions. BigHaz - Schreit mich an 01:10, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

• User:BigHaz clearly doesn't understand CSD criteria. Their understanding of A7 is so far off the mark. And they keep trying to dig themselves out of the hole but they're making it worse. Now they're pulling the "I'm too busy to respond" gag until criticism dies down so they don't have to explain themselves. Clear violation of WP:ADMINACCT. Maybe we need to reconsider their use of the tools.--v/r - TP 11:16, 7 June 2023 (UTC)

Unblock/Unban request from User:Greenock125

Greenock125 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · page moves · block user · block log)

• Carrying request over from UTRS appeal #73557. Yamla found no evidence of recent socking.

I believe this block is no longer necessary because I understand why I was blocked. I broke copyright rules by copying text directly from websites and evading my block after it was imposed by abusing multiple accounts, creating another account, and using multiple IP addresses. I admit continuing to keep editing in 2022, I should not have done that and fully apologize for my actions. I promise this will never happen again, make productive contributions, and abide by all Wikipedia polices.

What is copyright? It allows the owner the exclusive rights to use their work. When someone creates an original work, fixed in a tangible medium, they automatically own copyright to the work. How is Wikipedia licenced? All content published on Wikipedia is licensed by the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC BY-SA) and the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). Why is copyrighted content not allowed on Wikipedia? The database servers for Wikipedia are found in the United States, which means any copyright content published on Wikipedia would infringe US copyright law. Under what circumstances can we use copyrighted content? To get permission to use copyrighted content you need to contact the owner of the content which is the original author.

How do you intend to avoid violating the copyright policy in the future? To avoid violating the copyright policy in the future I would make sure to use my own words and not copy text directly from websites.

--Carried over by -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 15:59, 22 May 2023 (UTC)

@Greenock125: If you are unbanned what do you plan on working on? -- Shadow of the Starlit Sock 02:28, 23 May 2023 (UTC)

• If I was unbanned from Wikipedia I would be mainly working on music articles but also I would edit movie and sports articles.

-- Carried over by -- X750. Spin a yarn? _{Articles I've screwed over?} 09:15, 23 May 2023 (UTC)

@Greenock125: Your November, 2020 block also mentions "no communication" as a rationale for the block. Why do you think the blocking admin felt the need to note that in your block rationale, and how do you plan to address that particular problem if unblocked? --Jayron32 18:18, 23 May 2023 (UTC)

Carried over from user talk-"When I was blocked in November 2020, I was asked to answer questions in my own words about copyright to establish if I should be unblocked, but I violated copyright in giving my answers. I should not have done this. If I am unblocked, I will make sure to answer any questions or concerns on my talk page when I receive them, Greenock125 (talk) 4:03 pm, Today (UTC−4)"-- -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 20:35, 23 May 2023 (UTC)

@Greenock125: How specifically did you violate copyright policies? -- Shadow of the Starlit Sock 20:37, 23 May 2023 (UTC)

Carried over from user talk. "When I was answering questions on Copyright, I copied text from the Copyright article and used it in my answers, I should not have done that and answered in my own words. Greenock125 (talk) 20:44, 23 May 2023 (UTC)" -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 20:46, 23 May 2023 (UTC) -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 20:46, 23 May 2023 (UTC)

Greenock125, you answered "Under what circumstances can we use copyrighted content?" incorrectly. You appear to have missed all of WP:FAIRUSE. Would you like to comment on this? --Yamla (talk) 21:07, 23 May 2023 (UTC)

Copied over. Not sure if it was meant to answer Yamla's question. ':Also I would avoid copyright violations by avoiding long quotations from sources when creating any articles [12]. Greenock125 (talk) 21:04, 23 May 2023 (UTC)" -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 21:20, 23 May 2023 (UTC) -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 21:20, 23 May 2023 (UTC)

Ummm, I am not be an admin, but I don't think the user grasps how to avoid copyright. – Callmemirela 🍁 04:28, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

Carried over from user's talk. ":You can use copyrighted content if it is Non-free content and is fair use in US copyright law and complies with the criteria for Non-free content. Greenock125 (talk) 21:19, 23 May 2023 (UTC)

You are allowed to use Non-free content in articles only if the usage of the content is considered in United States copyright law and complies with the criteria for Non-free content. Greenock125 (talk) 09:38, 24 May 2023 (UTC)" -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 09:51, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

-- Deepfriedokra (talk) 09:51, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

[[Yo|Greenock125}} Can you be more specific/clear, please?-- Deepfriedokra (talk) 09:53, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

carried over "When creating music articles, I am allowed to use brief quotations of copyrighted text as extensive use of copyrighted quotation text is prohibited. Any changes to quotation text in articles must be marked clearly (e.g. [...]). Greenock125 (talk) 6:10 am, Today (UTC−4)

" -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 10:17, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

My two cents? Have them summarize an article quelconque. Because you can use long quotation as long it's relevant to the content itself; say it's an actor summarizing their feelings for the role, a review for a film or politicians' words after a shooting, just as long as it's not the only content, quotation marks are clear and a source follows the quote. – Callmemirela 🍁 15:04, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

• CCI on this editor: Wikipedia:Contributor copyright investigations/Greenock125. I'm ambivalent to this appeal. Moneytrees🏝️(Talk) 17:39, 24 May 2023 (UTC)
• I also am not supportive of an unblock at this time. I asked a pretty straightforward question above, and instead got an answer to a question I asked nothing about. I asked about lack of communication, and got some rambling reply about copyright. That doesn't make me feel like letting this editor back in the fold would be productive at this time. --Jayron32 15:38, 25 May 2023 (UTC)

  (Carried over from user talk)

  If I am unblocked and unbanned, I will tackle the lack of communication by stopping any editing, and when an editor comes into my talk page with a concern, question, or warning, I will comment on it, I will not ignore it and make sure I acknowledged that I have read it. Greenock125 (talk) 15:59, 25 May 2023 (UTC)

  -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 16:57, 25 May 2023 (UTC)

  See, I hope that their desired meaning was something like "when someone queries their edits on their talk page, they won't keep editing but will respond to the message"...but I don't know that's what they were going for, which isn't ideal for a communication-linked block. I'm neutral on a general unblock, or supportive if someone wants to try something like a mainspace restriction. Nosebagbear (talk) 10:23, 7 June 2023 (UTC)

"Discussion tools will start its final test and graduate from Beta Features. Please opt-in now."

Does anyone know if this means that the old discussion system (manually editing and adding comments) will go away? If so, I'm really not happy about that. -- Rockstone^{Send me a message!} 23:34, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

I don't think so; the visual editor is not in Beta and is still optional. Guess VPT would be a better forum to discuss this, though. –FlyingAce^✈hello 00:48, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

No. You can still edit sections with DT turned on. But yes, wrong forum to ask in. IznoPublic (talk) 13:41, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

It's definitely not going away.

What's going to happen in this last stage (assuming the test results come back favorably – I don't think the data analysis is done yet) is that the appearance of talk pages will change. There's a separate Phab task about making it work on this page, but this magic link will give you an idea of what it looks like. The key point for folks to know is that if you don't like it, you will be able to turn it off at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing-discussion (last item, about discussion activity). We all know it often takes a week or two to get used to a visual change, but if you're just done with visual changes for the year, then you could opt-in to the Beta Feature now and then turn off the pref, and then the deployment won't affect your account anyway.

The one thing I'll add here is that I think RFC closers in particular will find this feature useful. It adds an item under each ==Level 2 section heading== that says when the most recent comment was, how many comments were made, and how many different individuals participated in the conversation. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:00, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

I currently use the reply functionality, but have problems with the new page layout. Will setting Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing-discussion still allow the use of the reply function as it currently stands? -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 16:59, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

Of course. There are half a dozen separate controls in that section of prefs. You can turn on the Reply tool, turn off the New Topic tool, turn on automatic subscriptions, turn off the new page layout – any combination you want. The last one in the section is the one for the new page layout. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:00, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

Whatamidoing - I looked at the example you posted and also at mw:Talk_pages_project/Usability/Analysis#Feature_overview. I was going to post at mw:Talk:Talk pages project/Usability, but it looks like no one has edited there in months.

Setting aside my (mild) concerns about presentation and what not (I think several people made some interesting points on that talk page), I'm concerned about "Breadcrumbs" - I really really think it's a bad idea to list the username of the most recent poster at the top of a page. I think there are more than a just few WP:BEANS reasons for not doing this.

It's also bad because we already can easily check this in a page's page history - and getting people to be used to checking there, is better than having this at the top. Sorry for the bluntness, but we want better editors - not lazy editors. And this will likely cause very bad wiki-habits.

Besides that major concern, there seems like a LOT of extra spacing, which is going to increase page length. And on high traffic pages, I don't think that that is a great idea. - jc37 18:06, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

If you don't like it, then turn it off.

I think the little line at the top will be handy on low-traffic pages. Specifically, it'll make it faster to identify when nobody's posted a new comment for years. That adds almost no space, as it replaces the line that says "From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia". The height of the "topic container" is the same height as two lines of text, so the pages will be longer.

(It's easy to force a username out of the list; just break the signature (e.g., add a space in the "(UTC)" timestamp) or add a new signed comment to the page. You could also remove the comment, if it's a purely disruptive comment. Unlike the mobile site, it's reading the comments on the page, not the actions in history.) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:00, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

The problem has nothing to do with me or my preferences.

Putting a username at the top of a page is a really bad idea. I'd like to avoid spelling out the various (presumably obvious) reasons why. - jc37 22:07, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

Whatamidoing - To clarify, you can still place a timestamp at the top, which achieves your stated goal concerning "low-traffic pages", without having the username listed there. As you note, it should be easy for the programmers to separate it out. - jc37 07:33, 7 June 2023 (UTC)

I remember when someone made a WP:POINT some years ago about the mobile site displaying the name of the most recent editor to an article by creating an inappropriately named account, and I remember being disappointed when the oversighters said that they were not explicitly authorized to hide usernames in their policy and therefore they wouldn't. But: while it is possible to cause a problem this way, this has not been a significant problem in practice.

Displaying anything involves risks. In my experience, the section heading is far more likely to have unwanted content that usernames. And, again, such problems are easily and completely fixable by just editing the page. Treat unwanted content exactly like it is unwanted content, and fix it with the editing button Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:57, 8 June 2023 (UTC)

I understand. But there is no benefit to adding the username. Your goal is achieved through adding just the time stamp. Similar to WP:5TILDES.

Why create potential problems when we don't have to, and for no benefit. - jc37 02:06, 8 June 2023 (UTC)

Apologies if my questions have already been answered somewhere, but I'm really struggling to see the benefit of listing the username of the last editor of a page on the mobile site, either for articles or for talk pages. Where did this idea come from? Was it a feature requested by the community somewhere? I also can't imagine making a null edit to a page just to get rid of an offensive username – that would likely be seen as disruptive, and it's not currently part of our workflow at all. – bradv 02:11, 8 June 2023 (UTC)

The idea of listing the most recent editor on the mobile site was, I believe, to help readers understand that Wikipedia is written by individuals. It's been there for years. (Also, a null edit wouldn't change the name shown; it'd have to be a dummy edit, because the mobile platform responds to the most recent name in the history, and a null edit doesn't get recorded in the history.)

On talk pages, the goal is to help editors see what they need to know to decide what they want to do on that page. I expected editors to respond differently to "Latest comment: 6 hours ago by Newbie in topic Help needed" than they do to "Latest comment: 6 hours ago by ExperiencedAdmin in topic Help needed". Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:47, 8 June 2023 (UTC)

If you remove the username, you remove that difference.

And I would guess that no one has tracked site vandalism (among many other things) associated with that change on mobile - there's really no way to do so. So we might be having an upswing of nonsense, simply because someone didn't think about the repercussions and thought "the risk is worth it", and none of us would know why... - jc37 01:47, 9 June 2023 (UTC)

I suppose I get the idea behind showing this information, but in my mind it fundamentally contravenes the egalitarian nature of Wikipedia. We're writing this encyclopedia based on consensus and reliable sources, not by experienced editors throwing their weight around. What I add to an article should be subject to the exact same scrutiny as a brand new editor, or someone with a million edits. And I believe that philosophy should be reflected in the user interface design.

This also means we should get rid of the hats and edit count that shows up when viewing a diff on mobile, but I suppose that's a different battle. And forgive me if this is not the right place for this conversation, but I don't have the foggiest who to talk to about this sort of thing. – bradv 02:28, 9 June 2023 (UTC)

It sounds like two different things have been confused here.

1. Mobile view tag: For articles. At the bottom of the page. Has been in place for 10 years.
2. DiscussionTools tag: For talk pages. At the top of the page. Is new.

I'm talking about the new thing at the top of talk pages. Yes, I personally agree that edits to articles would ideally be treated equally regardless of experience, but that's not quite as true for discussions. Sometimes, seeing that an experienced editor has posted could mean that you can move on to other work. Being able to quickly see that a newbie posted the last comment on the page means you know that you need to look at it, because they're probably posting because they need help. Behaving differently is efficient for editors, who don't necessarily feel like they have a lot of time to spare for duplicating each other's work. And in more awkward cases, I realistically expect it to occasionally be used for "ugh, that editor again – I should {move on | see if it's time for another trip to ANI | leave a note at FTN | check my blood pressure before reading it}" situations.

If you want to remove the usernames from talk pages, I think the use case you need to write begins something like this: "If an editor is subject to a IBAN, it would be really bad for that IBANned editor to easily be able to see, at a glance, at the top of the talk page, that the most recent comment on that talk page was posted by the person they're not allowed to interact with, because ________".

If you can think of something that goes in the blank that doesn't sound like "they might be less likely to violate their IBAN if they have this information readily available to them", then I'm willing to present your use case to the Editing team. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:08, 9 June 2023 (UTC)

Bullying by User:Annabais

The user Annabais (talk · contribs) is supposedly a new wikipedian and is misusing wikipedia policies like adding unecessary info and violating WP:TVPLOT. On reverting those edits on article Ghum Hai Kisikey Pyaar Meiin, the user has stormed my talk page with rude messages and accused me of dictating while i have not done so.. [13] Imsaneikigai (talk) 19:05, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

@Imsaneikigai: I have blocked Annabais (talk · contribs) from the article Ghum Hai Kisikey Pyaar Meiin and advised them about civility etc. Hopefully they'll re-evaluate their mainspace and talkpage conduct. For future reference, WP:ANI rather than WP:AN is the proper venue for such reports. Abecedare (talk) 19:44, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

Thankyou so much for your prompt reply and action. I will take care of the directions and will report to WP:ANI for any such reports. Thanks once again Imsaneikigai (talk) 19:50, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

Unblock

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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I got blocked for ghkkpm wiki page for unnecessary accusations. Please don't allow some dictator editor on wiki who uses their power for others harrasment. Annabais (talk) 05:32, 7 June 2023 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Note from WMF Trust and Safety regarding emergency@

As of June 2023, it has come to our attention that some messages sent to emergency@ wound up in our spam folder. This seems to be a backend issue with our email provider and we are currently reviewing the problem. If you do not receive a response to your message within 1 hour, please send a note to cawikimedia.org. Thank you. Best, JKoerner (WMF) (talk) 15:59, 7 June 2023 (UTC)

Urgent Request for Assistance with Changing a Wikipedia Page Name or Reviewing a Discussion

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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Dear Wikipedia Administrator, I hope this message finds you well. I am reaching out to you today to kindly ask for your assistance regarding an important matter. It concerns the renaming of a specific Wikipedia page that, in my opinion, requires immediate updating. I wanted to ask if you could change the page names from Operation Valuable to 1949 Anglo–American invasion of Communist Albania because as you can see in the discussion here, many didn't contribute and I have also given sources that consider this an invasion if you wish you can watch the whole thing here.Talk:Operation Valuable Best regards NormalguyfromUK (talk) 19:25, 7 June 2023 (UTC)

Firstly, this isn't 'urgent'. If you can't come to agreement, see WP:RM#CM for how to ask for external input. AndyTheGrump (talk) 19:34, 7 June 2023 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

CSD backlog

There's a bit of a backlog at CAT:CSD. Mostly user pages that are in non-English, that are blatant promotion or otherwise gibberish, and there's lots of them, spotted by Veracious. Some hands on deck would be welcome. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 11:15, 8 June 2023 (UTC)

Looks like it's all cleaned up. RickinBaltimore (talk) 11:59, 8 June 2023 (UTC)

Unblock request for Djm-leighpark

Djm-leighpark (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log) has requested a standard offer. They were blocked in April 2022 for this reason: Disruptive editing: perennial disruption, WP:BATTLEGROUND and WP:CIR (both language and policy). The following is their unblock request:

My editing merited a block because I was incorrect to challenge an administrator as I did following block following the 16 April 2022 ANI; even if I felt convinced I had due cause. The fact this arose out of harassment by a block-evading sock is in many ways irrelevant - I accept I needed to maintain better control even in this and other difficult situations and I had overly-harassed the sock myself in that case before the sockpuppetry was known. I acknowledge with shame some of my earlier interactions with administrators (and others) in some pressure situations: most especially in some cases where I was totally wrong. I also need to avoid the use of slang, as identified in of one (or more) of my blocks. I will focus in the future to ensure problems are raised calmly through the proper channels and processes and avoid BATTLEGROUND and CIR.

For constructive edits on the English Wikipedia I would expect to be improving a range of articles though I regard my particular areas of interest are Irish Railway History, some biographies (mostly non-blp e.g. engineers and whatever the BBC news website throws up), local/Irish settlement articles, and local/Irish river systems. In particular I am keen to improve article sourcing and have been accumulating books and and identifying books online for this purpose. I would resume doing anti-vandal work etc. Regardless of the outcome of this appeal I (as DeirgeDel) expect to continue activity on Wikidata, Commons, enWQ and gaWP but would likely avoid :simpleWP as too difficult!

If possible I would like to request a Standard Offer please.

Thankyou in anticipation and feel free to ask any specific questions. -- Djm-leighpark(DeirgeDel) ^t_a^c 00:24, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

My alternate accounts :DeirgeDel, Bigdelboy, Djm-mobile, DeirgeBot

— Ingenuity (talk • contribs) 16:53, 8 June 2023 (UTC)

For more context, this thread is the background behind the block. — Ingenuity (talk • contribs) 16:55, 8 June 2023 (UTC)

• DeirgeDel (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log)
• Bigdelboy (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log)
• Djm-mobile (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log)
• DeirgeBot (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log)

Socks/alts. Secretlondon (talk) 14:24, 9 June 2023 (UTC)

• Comment. The problem wasn't "challenging an administrator"; people do that all the time. The problem was a long history of bizarre behavior that invoked CIR concerns. If Djm did return, if anything, I'd suggest avoiding anti-vandal work or collaboration involving other people at all given past problems with over-the-top and hard to understand communication... although I'm honestly not sold their content contributions are always a net positive, either. I'd suggest that if allowed back, at a minimum, Djm restrict himself to no new articles and to uncontroversial type things like finding references for trains & railways. SnowFire (talk) 00:13, 10 June 2023 (UTC)

Could someone take over?

Would some kind colleague with copyvio experience/expertise care to take over the discussion with CompulsiveResearcher relating to the copyvio in this page – the user is clearly dissatisfied with my attempts to explain the nature of the problem and establish whether it is wider than this one article. Many thanks, Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 21:33, 8 June 2023 (UTC)

The user was dissatisfied w/ the picking at a couple of compound sentences and the way the other admin decided to make things personal on the article's talk page. The user believes in succinct language and in flow, but was planning on bringing the prose up to the admin's standard, ideally w/o compromising language quality. The user made no changes to the mainspace while waiting hours for the admin to share. The user is uncomfortable w/ the bad faith accusations on the user's talk page and the article's talk page that came about. The user was ready to play at fixing the problem in userspace, where the draft had been grown initially, while waiting for specifics on how to please the admin, but the admin hints at unpleasant things for the user. The user doesn't know how to address any of it now or where a safe space to ask for help is. The user's hands are tied. The user does not understand why. The user will probably go into semi-retirement again because the user feels sick. The user says bye. Compulsive Researcher (talk) 22:04, 8 June 2023 (UTC)

Justlettersandnumbers did not make things personal; they're reasonably concerned that you don't understand copyright and have copied passages wholesale into other articles. Wikipedia:Copyrights is a core policy with legal implications. Your responses on the question of copyright so far don't inspire confidence. Mackensen (talk) 11:35, 9 June 2023 (UTC)

Thank you for your reply. I keep asking for specific help and I'm not seeing it. I will try again and perhaps go to the Teahouse or WIR for advice next...

Consider a sentence like: "Kennedy was President of the United States from 1961 to 1963". Could an article us it or lose it?

The close paraphrasing guideline's substantial similarity section reads: 'The US Copyright Office states that, "Copyright law does not protect names, titles, or short phrases or expressions... The Copyright Office cannot register claims to exclusive rights in brief combinations of words ... To be protected by copyright, a work must contain a certain minimum amount of authorship ... Names, titles, and other short phrases do not meet these requirements."' So, a simple sentence that amounts to job title + verb + employer = not protected by US copyright.

So one may legally write "Kennedy was President of the United States from 1961 to 1963". Or one may not and the individual or organization who published that first owns the copyright and similar or identical statements are violations of that copyright. And it seems like one legally may do so about Flora Warren Seymour.

Or please point me to a policy that contradicts the Copyright Office and supersedes Wikipedia's substantive similarity stance and I will take that into account.

Thank you. Compulsive Researcher (talk) 13:34, 9 June 2023 (UTC)

On the subject of Wikipedia's guideline on close paraphrasing, the §Selection and arrangement section is relevant. It says in part: Although facts are not subject to copyright, a selection or arrangement of facts may be considered creative and therefore protected. In the case of the article on Flora Warren Seymour, I see at least nine sentences closely paraphrased from the American Women Historians source; all but one of those are in the same order they appear in the source. Even if each sentence would be okay individually, that doesn't necessarily mean that the total effect is – just as you couldn't defend a clearly copyright violating sentence on the grounds that each individual word could be used appropriately! Caeciliusinhorto-public (talk) 15:23, 9 June 2023 (UTC)

Regarding "make things personal": I wrote "make things personal on the article's talk page". I want to clarify that I don't mean personal attacks. On the article's talk page, I asked about the article. The reply included a comment about how many of my 11k edits violated copyright. That is a personal and is appropriate for my talk page, not the article's. I still don't have answers on the article's talk page, last I checked. I still want to focus on the copyright, but I think I've been blocked for writing about that in response to you here, so I will zip for now. Thank you. Compulsive Researcher (talk) 14:38, 9 June 2023 (UTC)

• Interested in wikilawyering more than addressing the issue. As such I've p-blocked from mainspace until the copyright issues are sorted. They're welcome to contribute elsewhere in the interim, ideally to cleanup. Star Mississippi 13:40, 9 June 2023 (UTC)

  I don't see where I was asked to do anything or answer anything on this thread, so I'm confused about where I fell short to the point of being blocked. I was not trying to wikilawyer or avoid an issue. No one addressed the alleged copyright violation as the first admin asked.

  What am I blocked for? What did I do wrong? I am told I am confused on the issue of copyright. I addressed that with my interpretation and asked for clarification. And I was blocked.

  What cleanup outside of the mainspace is to be done and is ideal? Compulsive Researcher (talk) 14:36, 9 June 2023 (UTC)

  You say I was not trying to wikilawyer or avoid an issue. on the heels of Or please point me to a policy that contradicts the Copyright Office. That is wikilawyering. Telling an admin to stay out of your userspace is not collaborative nor is it a path to resolving the issues raised, which @Justlettersandnumbers was doing. Star Mississippi 14:41, 9 June 2023 (UTC)

  Thank you for replying and promptly.

  I do not know what is wanted here. And that's OK.

  I would like to clarify didn't so much tell the admin to stay out of my userspace. I asked the admin to have future communications made by a different party. That's because we were getting nowhere good fast and I wanted to deescalate things. It did. A block and a visit to AN aren't ideal, but I didn't try to shut down conversation, and I'm not now.

  Regarding "point me to..." I use that sort of phrasing all the time because I do not know all of the policies, guidelines, rules. Like saying "am I wrong?" or "change my mind". If that is wikilawyering, OK. I will assume someone will point out when contradictory info exists.

  Again: What cleanup outside of the mainspace is to be done and is ideal? Compulsive Researcher (talk) 15:12, 9 June 2023 (UTC)

  To be honest, announcing that you're not wikilawyering and then saying I would like to clarify didn't so much tell the admin to stay out of my userspace. I asked the admin to have future communications made by a different party, a distinction without a difference, is wikilawyering. — Trey Maturin™ 15:40, 9 June 2023 (UTC)

  OK. We can agree to disagree on interpretation of my intent and whether asking for someone else is the same as telling the first party to go away. Compulsive Researcher (talk) 17:02, 9 June 2023 (UTC)

  Looking at this guy's record, he (or she) looks like a steady productive, largely peaceable editor for whom things suddenly took a wrong turn. Someone we'd like to keep working. I'm just wondering if there's a way we can turn this around and keep him working? I'm not saying anyone has done anything wrong in dealing with Compulsive Researcher, just that we've come to a bad outcome. --A. B. ^{(talk • contribs • global count)} 00:14, 10 June 2023 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject on open proxies/Requests is stalled

There are untouched reports of proxies here since April 20; the last proxy checker action appears to be May 6. ☆ Bri (talk) 15:01, 9 June 2023 (UTC)