User talk:DGG

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            DO NOT ENTER NEW ITEMS HERE--use User talk:DGG

About: your eloquent summary of what does and does not improves this project

Hi DGG, or if I may be so bold, David,
You wrote at WP:AN/I Archive691: <block quote>There is more than one valid way of working here. Some people prefer to create only high quality articles, even though they may do very few of them. Some prefer to create many verifiable articles of clear notability even though they may not be of initially high quality. As this is a communal project, I think every individual person is fully entitled to do whichever they prefer, and the thing to do about people who prefer otherwise than oneself is to let them work their way, while you work yours. The only choice which is not productive is to argue about how to do it, rather than going ahead in the way that one finds suitable.</block quote> Many editors include a statement about their attitudes to editing on their user pages. I am not one of them, that is until I came across what you wrote. I would really like to include this on my user page. While I can add anything at all I like to my user page subject to WP:USER PAGE, I nevertheless ask for your permission to add the quote. OK with you? I'm fine if you decline this.
--Shirt58 (talk) 12:37, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

Of course. DGG ( talk ) 21:04, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

May I have your input, please?

It appears that a couple users are trying to implement the restriction of new articles to autoconfirmed users from the recent RfC (please refer to this bugzilla thread). I'm not certain that everything is in place to start that restriction. The closing admin specifically mentioned a few conditions. <block quote>the discussion also showed consensus for making (unspecified) improvements to the Article Wizard and giving more attention to the Articles for Creation process.</block quote> and

Almost everyone who commented on it seems to think that the Article Wizard can and should be improved. There were also repeated concerns about making sure that the Articles for Creation process gets more attention so it does not become clogged and proposed articles get the improvements they need. Participants on both sides of the discussion agreed on these points.

As you wrote the key dissenting view, would you mind looking in to this situation and then providing your input to this conversation with the WMF staff? Thank you for your consideration. Cogitating (talk) 07:51, 6 August 2011 (UTC)

I see your comment there and I agree with you, and will say as much, but I am also going to say that I do not think the WMF can or should prevent the community from doing something like this. I've consistently opposed their interference in our content beyond the minimum legal necessities, and I've opposed some of the policies resulting from it, such as the excessively stringent NFCC restrictions beyond the requirements of copyright law, and the adoption of a BLP policy that permits use to suppress unfavorable but well-sourced articles on significant subjects, and is potentially destructive of NPOV. I saw their attempt last year to impose a policy of restricting sexual images, which was only reduced to some degree of reason by a change in board membership. I see their willingness to encourage a mechanism within Wikipedia to facilitate outside censorship; again, the only thing which has kept this from being not just encouraged but required, was a change in board membership. This will be a recurrent issue. I oppose using them as a court of final appeal for issues within Wikipedia, and shall continue to do so. This far outweighs almost any individual issue. Even though we may decide wrong, at least letting the WP community decide gives freedom of action to the individual Wikipedias to have divergent policies, and thus allows experiment even in sensitive areas, which is the only way to prevent stagnation. IMO, this applies both to the board and to the programmers. I opposed the introduction by the programmers of a crude and unscientific system of article rating, and their willingness to expand it, without each time getting explicit consent of the community. It has nonetheless apparently been accepted by the community, and I am not sure it is worth the effort to involve myself in its improvement. I opposed their attempt to introduce a deficient version of vector as the default, similarly--at least then, so did much of the community, and we were at least able to get it improved significantly.

Yes, I consider the introduction of this feature a potential disaster. I expect to see the number of incoming editors fall precipitously even below its present unsatisfactory level, as soon as it is implemented, and possibly not recover even after the trial has stopped. The attraction of being able to make an article is one of the primary motivating factors for editing. It is however possible that I have misjudged, and the proven discouraging effect of the extremely negative comments that new editors encounter is even worse, and the decrease in this might counterbalance the negative effects of not being able to immediately start an article. The only effective thing I can do in this case is to try to persuade people to diminish the length of the trial, and try to find ways of working with new editors despite the constraints, and, perhaps, try to keep fewer promising articles from being rejected via the article creation process--at present, too many of the few people working there insist on a good quality, rather than just an acceptable article.

Sometimes a cause is lost. I opposed the use of BLP Prod, but it was adopted, and my experiences at prod patrol indicate it has had at most a trivial beneficial effect, as everything it properly deletes would and would have been deleted anyway. and a considerable negative one, as it leads to many deletions of articles on people who could have been sourced had anyone experienced here had the time & incentive to do it under a deadline--and it has not noticeably decreased the number of incoming unsourced BLP articles. I've given up on getting rid of it, even though it takes a good deal of my time to prevent whatever percentage of inappropriate deletions I manage, and thus has decreased my participation in other things, such as just this sort of policy discussion.

Sometimes opposition can be effective, as with patrolled changes. I certainly opposed it, and when it became clear it would be adopted supported those who successfully limited it to a trial and to a limited range of articles. The community , upon seeing among other things that those using it did not limit the trial to the intended purpose, ended up by rejecting it, at least in its present form. (The community asked the developers to improve it for another trial, and the developers, not unreasonably, were unwilling to do the amount of work involved if it was going to be to be rejected in the end, as they I think correctly foresaw it would be.) DGG ( talk ) 18:14, 6 August 2011 (UTC)

• Opinion needed: as you've been involved in the messy Avaya MfD's, do you think there's a better way to handle them? Like freezing the similar MfD's and link them to one general? I don't know. I'm just guessing, OR is the matter that each product needs to be viewed separately to see its individual notability? Thanks is advance... ~ AdvertAdam ^talk 20:04, 17 August 2011 (UTC

Chinmaya.328

Thanks for your comments on User talk:Chinmaya.328 (though I'm not certain the editor even knows of the existence of talk pages). The user's other article, Themis Medicare, reminded me exactly of your recent comments on Wales's talk page about identifying when a PR firm has written something...a list of milestones, reference to the company being first at numerous things, etc. As a side note, I don't know (and maybe you don't want to make public) how your conversations with NoRaft went, but I support the idea of working with paid editors, not just blanket forbidding them (since we can't even do that successfully anyway). I honestly don't get why Jimbo thinks that such involvement is now and has always been forbidden and everyone knows that and no one disagrees. I totally accept that he opposes it, and even accept the idea that he/WMF can make a fiat rule against it, just not his idea that there is an obvious and overwhelming consensus that agrees with him. Qwyrxian (talk) 02:35, 14 September 2011 (UTC)

Yes, I saw that one--in fact, I would have listed it for deletion except that I saw you had worked on it. It's large enough that it might be notable, but whether I feel like doing the work for an article like that depends upon the factors of how important the company is & my opinion of the editor's good faith. I've had no conversations with NoRaft. I sent him an email, suggesting he privately & confidentially tell me who he is, & what articles he had written, but had no response. I will not do something potentially problematic with someone who hides his identity from me, any more than I go down dark alleys with masked strangers. I can see his problem, though--he's promised his clients confidentiality, and by our own rules I can't insist he tell me. Therefore, I shall do as always: any article he or anyone known or unknown asks me to look at on-wiki, I will look at and give my opinion and advice, on-wiki. I'll talk with even masked strangers in bright lit public places. I do not think Jimbo's ruling has literal consensus, but is rather one of the pious statements that nobody will openly challenge, but nobody will actually follow. It is even contradicted by his own statement of our basic policy, that anyone can edit. Anonymity has its benefits, but also its problems, and can lead to such paradoxes. DGG ( talk ) 04:02, 14 September 2011 (UTC)

I'm sure I've seen you reference this essay

WP:TALKINGSOFASTNOBODYCANHEARYOU. Is my memory that faulty? I can't find it, and it's possible the syntax isn't precise. Did you use this a sort of irony? I seem to remember you used the link to represent bullying behaviors. I'm seeing one such user who seems to be wanting to turn the entire AfD process on its head by using such a technique. BusterD (talk) 11:48, 24 September 2011 (UTC)

I have sometimes used pseudo-links like these as a statement for their own sake, without writing an actual essay. I remember saying something like this, but I can't find it. I think this one was TALKINGSOMUCH... -- but I can't find it either. As for the problem, I've commented pretty extensively at AN/I: [1], and will comment at the RfC also, But please don't confuse the reasonable message, with which I am in agreement -- that Deletion Policy is overbalanced towards deletion, and one step towards rebalancing it would be to require some version of WP:BEFORE -- with the unreasonable way it is being over-expressed. DGG ( talk ) 23:23, 24 September 2011 (UTC)

Thanks, David. I was a debater in school before "talking so fast" became the current style. I feel anything which games the system deserves appropriate response in order to keep the system sound. I appreciate your valid concern about deletion procedures being over-weighted toward one outcome. Thanks for your valuable comments in those forums. Be well. BusterD (talk) 23:37, 24 September 2011 (UTC)

Ah yes, I had forgotten that context. And so was I,in college--a very valuable experience, especially in facilitating the sort of intercampus experiences only the athletic teams otherwise gave occasion for. But the stimulus is interesting: if I take a turn at NPP, the amount of junk turns me for a while into a deletionist before I catch myself and stop being so unfriendly to all the newcomers. If I take a look at AfD, the number of unwarranted nominations makes me want to give a similarly snappy and unjust response to all of them, with the less than rational thought that if I argue against all of them, maybe there's a chance the good ones will make it. Several good inclusionists have run into trouble here falling into such temptation. DGG ( talk ) 23:58, 24 September 2011 (UTC)

BLP Youtube personalities

Hey, am back with query once again, are youtube personalities notable enough to get on WP ? Please help me out over here GloZell_Green and check this message. Thanks. Rangilo Gujarati (talk) 18:12, 28 September 2011 (UTC)

it depends , as always, on references providing substantial coverage from 3rd party independent published reliable sources, print or online, but not blogs or press releases, or material derived from press releases. Almost always all material about them is on the internet in the form of blogs of some sort; the question is then what sort of blogs count as reliable for the purposes of notability. In the past, Wikipedia has been notably restrictive in this, but as more and more other responsible sources appear in this format, things are changing. There's a subsidiary question in each particular case of whether the coverage in the references is substantial, but that's essentially the same question as with references in any media, and amounts to a question of judgement. Such judgements can depend not on the merits but on what one wishes to prove, since often each position can be justified. The prevailing attitude, which to some measure I share, is extreme skepticism. I summarize it by saying that for someone to be notable, they have to have actually done something notable -- in the ordinary meaning of the word.

but this case is simple with respect to notability: the deleted article on Green had no third party sources whatsoever. I doubt anyone who understands Wikipedia would support it at an AfD unless better sources could be found. However, it was deleted via A7, and the criterion for A7 is not notability, nor is it whether the article would be accepted into Wikipedia, but some reasonable indication or claim of importance. The question is whether the claims there are such. I consider them borderline. The person certainly thinks what they've done is important. I do not, but I can recognize that a person might think so in good faith. Myself, I might or might not have A7'd. Given that I know I have a prejudice against such careers, I might have passed on it & let some other admin decide. In any case, I have a standard practice for a questioned A7 speedy like this: first I give the fairest advice I can, which in this case is that without real sources it will surely be rejected in its present form, so it would be best to submit it again once there are sources; and then, if the person still wants me to, I undelete and send it to AfD (they rarely do, if I give the advice clearly enough). It's easier than arguing. If I was right, it'll be deleted, and there will be grounds for a G4 in case of the almost inevitable re-creation. (The only problem is that sometimes it might not be a good faith article, in which case the subject deserves to be protected against the negative comments at AfD. That's not the case here--they want the publicity. The previous speedy of a much sketchier version was deleted on A7 and G11, something I also do a good deal. I might have done that here.)

The case is not helped , of course, by the comparison that's made to Jenna Marbles, which has several good third party sources, and would almost certainly pass AfD. When someone says , but X has an article, there are three possibilities. Most commonly, X is famous, and then almost always the proposed subject is hopelessly non-notable & the claim is absurd—naïve but well-meaning editors argue this a lot, often for self-published authors. Also common, is that X is in fact borderline notable at best, and quite possibly should be deleted also—spammers often use this argument & there's an obvious course to follow, which usually stops their questioning, though it will hardly satisfy them. But, rarely, it is a reasonable protest: either we are generally inconsistent in the area involved, in which case it should go to AfD, to take its chances in the coin toss, or there actually was an error in evaluating X. DGG ( talk ) 00:04, 29 September 2011 (UTC)

uw templates

FYI. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 03:21, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

I think you and I with our combined experience could go a long way to help develop this. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 05:52, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

Ping about Wikipedia talk:WikiProject user warnings/Testing

Hi! If you still have suggestions for any of the 9 listed as "in-progress" at WP:UWTEST, please drop a note on the talk page for that template. We're going to start the new test now and would rather not change the templates in the middle, but it's easy to do a new test or simply incorporate changes afterward, since all we need is a week or so of data. I'm interested to see what you'd like to do, because my feeling is "the shorter the better" on these warnings. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 18:21, 18 October 2011 (UTC)

Clarence Ridgeby Greathouse

What we ought to be doing is completely rewriting all the old article content taken from all the pre-1923 PD sources--the old Brittanica and Catholic Ency and Jewish Ency the worst; the old DNB is a little better, depending on when the article was written. The tone is generally unsuitable and the facts and interpretation often unreliable. So I freely say, though I've almost never taken a hand in it myself.

In this case, the two attribution statements gave it away, for they were quite frank about it. I would probably have deleted it had I not noticed them, without investigation. DGG ( talk ) 04:20, 3 November 2011 (UTC)

I don't have enough information to judge your assessment of the reliability of those old 19th and early 20th century encyclopedias, but since I know that you are a librarian, I will defer to your expertise. That being said, I think that we should keep articles referenced only to those sources, because there is a clear potential to expand and improve these articles. I spent some time a year or so ago working on an article about a real 19th century "character", Harry Yount. It took a lot of in-depth online searches, refining my search terms and developing techniques to separate the wheat from the chaff. But I was able to uncover lots of reliable source material in a week or two of effort. I think the same can be said of an article like this one. An editor could take this on as a personal project, as I did with Mr. Yount, and a much better article could result. If we delete the article, the chances for that outcome are greatly reduced. Cullen³²⁸ Let's discuss it 04:53, 3 November 2011 (UTC)

of course we should keep them--but we should rewrite them with modern sources added--just as you did. That one of these encyclopedias has an article is considered not just as an indication, but a definitive proof of notability , because we include everything in other general encyclopedias. It's just that they is essentially no subject whatsoever where additional knowledge, and very often more accurate knowledge, is not available--just as you found in the one you worked on. You're doing what we should all of us be doing. DGG ( talk ) 05:13, 3 November 2011 (UTC)

Thanks DGG. I'll try to be sharper about catching such attributions in the future. OlYeller21^Talktome 17:29, 3 November 2011 (UTC)

Guide to information sources

This seems a bit strange to me. The one reference that I can access does not even mention the term "Guide to information sources". Perhaps it should be moved or redirected to a more suitable article? --Crusio (talk) 06:38, 3 November 2011 (UTC)

it's an appropriate article; I'm not sure there is a really standard term. The one I used in teaching was guides to the literature. The most common beginning words of the titles of such books is however, A guide to information sources in (subject), In any case, it can be much expanded, and I will do so: I know of over a hundred, many in multiple editions. Perhaps it should be List of guides to information sources, because dozens of them are notable individually--there will be substantial reviews for most of them; or perhaps not, because there are some that should be included but may not be, and, more important, I don't immediately want to write all the articles. DGG ( talk ) 16:06, 3 November 2011 (UTC)

Testing those alternate templates you made

Hey, just a heads up we prepared the user warnings you made. See Wikipedia talk:WikiProject user warnings/Testing#Suggestions at the end. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 01:55, 4 November 2011 (UTC)

WP:UWTEST members update

Hi, you're getting this message because you signed up to receive updates at WP:UWTEST, the task force on testing of user warnings and other notifications.

Here's what we're up to lately:

• Huggle: There are tests still running in Huggle of level 1 templates, including a new template written by DGG. A full list is available here
• SDPatrolBot: There is a new test running on the talk page messages of SDPatrolBot, which warns people who remove CSD templates. (Documentation of the test is here.)
• Twinkle: We've proposed a test of AFD and PROD notifications delivered via Twinkle, which has been positively received. (See: 1, 2) This test should start this week.
• Shared and dynamic IPs: Maryana's proposal to test the effect of regularly archiving shared/dynamic IP talk pages is in its final stages. There are also two relevant bot flag requests: 1, 2
• XLinkBot: the herders of XLinkBot have approved a test of its warning messages concerning external links. Test templates are being written and help is most welcome.

Thanks for your help and support, Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 02:39, 8 November 2011 (UTC)

Novelguide

I am reaching out for help to revive the article that I wrote some time ago about an educational website - Novelguide.com. As of today, there are 549 articles here on wikipedia that site this website for its content. I used the google search box under the wikipedia search results to find this number. Thank you. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Novelguide User:AbbyWaters —Preceding undated comment added 15:33, 13 November 2011 (UTC).

Do you have 3rd party substantial references? DGG ( talk ) 18:20, 13 November 2011 (UTC)

A tool for you!

Hi DGG! I've just come across one of your edits (or that you have been patrolling new pages), and noticed that you might appreciate some help with references.

I case you're not aware, you might consider using this tool – it makes your life a whole heap easier, by filling in complete citation templates for your links. All you do is install the script:

// Add [[WP:Reflinks]] launcher in the toolbox on left
addOnloadHook(function () {
 addPortletLink(
  "p-tb",     // toolbox portlet
  "http://toolserver.org/~dispenser/cgi-bin/webreflinks.py/" + wgPageName 
   + "?client=script&citeweb=on&overwrite=&limit=30&lang=" + wgContentLanguage,
  "Reflinks"  // link label
)});

onto Special:MyPage/skin.js, then paste the bare URL between your <ref></ref> tabs, and you'll find a clickable link called Reflinks in your toolbox section of the page (probably in the left hand column). Then click that tool. It does all the rest of the work (provided that you remember to save the page! It doesn't work for everything (particularly often not for PDF documents), but for pretty much anything ending in "htm" or "html" (and with a title) it will do really, really well. You may consider taking on Category:Articles needing link rot cleanup. So long! --Sp33dyphil © • © 07:24, 20 November 2011 (UTC)

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

Quick question

I am getting the new Huggle test ready today, and I was wondering... some of the short versions have a link to the diff, while others do not. It might be interesting to test overall whether referring to the diff or pagename is better. Do you mind if I standardize them, and if I do, would rather they all include a reference to the diff or not? My instinct is to remove it and see if that has an effect. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 00:09, 22 November 2011 (UTC)

I agree--omit the diff & we'll check that later; DGG ( talk ) 01:11, 22 November 2011 (UTC)

Done. Thanks for the quick response. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 01:20, 22 November 2011 (UTC)

Notability

Hi David. I seem to recall that we may once have possibly been in disagreement over the notability of schools. Without prejudice to you opinion (and I can't really remember exactly what it was), there is a discussion taking place at this project that may be of interest. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 03:22, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

I think I've been there. There's such a simple rule to follow: high schools yes, others no, that I can't see why anyone would bother except those who really want to argue the details of sourcing for 50,000 individual articles. I can see Wikipedia as a good place for those who like to argue, and sometimes I'm one of them, but there are more interesting things to argue about--some of which even have significant consequences, and a few of which represent the highest goal of human understanding, helping development of one's ethical principles. DGG ( talk ) 03:31, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

Ah, we seem to have been in total agreement after all. I can't understand why anyone would want to drag this peren issue up again, especially so soon after the last one floundered. There is better work to be done than flushing out thousands of high school articles for deletion or even arguing about it. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 05:12, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

WP:UWTEST update

Hi DGG,

We're currently busy designing some new tests, and we need your feedback/input!

1. ImageTaggingBot - a bot that warns users who upload images but don't provide adequate source or license information (drafts here)
2. CorenSearchBot - a bot that warns users who copy-paste text from external websites or other Wikipedia articles (drafts here)

We also have a proposal to test new "accepted," "declined," and "on-hold" templates at Articles for Creation (drafts here). The discussion isn't closed yet, so please weigh in if you're interested.

Thanks for your help! Maryana (WMF) (talk) 01:25, 15 December 2011 (UTC)

Talk:Scholar Indices and Impact

Could you perhaps have a look at this article and the remarks I made at this talk page and tell me what you think? Thanks! --Guillaume2303 (talk) 22:36, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

commented there. DGG ( talk ) 20:32, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

Dan Littman

You know the guidelines better than anyone else I know when it comes to academics. Please take a looks when you can. I had just tagged for notability, original creator thinks it doesn't need it. Rather than debate, I would leave it in your experienced hands if you have the time. Dennis Brown (talk) 19:57, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

certainly notable, as is generally the case for full professors at a leading world-famous research university like NYU (I used the word "generally," which I think vague enough to accommodate the various views: there is considerable disagreement about whether it is "always the case,", ""almost always the case" or 'very often the case" -- my own view, as I think is well-known, is that it is always the case, and the problem is only in deciding which universities it applies to. However, not everyone working on these articles agrees with me, including some of my most trusted friends here, so I am not sure "always" would be the consensus position at this time. My argument is similar to that on many other topics--we have much to gain by not having debates about every one of the tens of thousands of articles involved. We hare more harmed by inappropriate promotional articles about academics --just as about everything else--than we are by slight variations in the standard of notability. Time spent at AfD on determining borderline notability is time that should be better spent in patrolling new articles (and re-patrolling the older ones). Much better to have a simple standard, and concern ourselves with content. But in any case, this particular full professor is notable, but, as is often the case, the article needs a little rewriting isn't done in quite the best way to show it, and I will either do some rewriting or at least offer some advice for doing it. I apologize for not going into the details here, but they'll be clear in the finished articles, where the citations will show him an expert in his subject. DGG ( talk ) 05:48, 24 December 2011 (UTC)

(and for over 100 earlier discussions on this & closely related issues from my talk p, see my topic archive, User talk:DGG/Academic Things and People talk ). DGG ( talk ) 05:50, 24 December 2011 (UTC)

Academy of Achievement

Hi there DGG, you were recently involved, briefly, on the discussion page about an organization called Academy of Achievement. Prior to November, it was much too promotional; at present, I think the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction, as I've explained in a note on the article's discussion page—and as I see you warned in your previous note on the same page. I think I endorse your viewpoint that an EduCap article could be created to address its controversies, but the treatment it is given here represents a clear case of coatracking.

It's worth noting that I've been engaged by the Academy to help resolve the matter; in hopes of doing so efficiently, I've prepared a proposed replacement (in my user space here) that I hope presents an acceptable compromise, or a workable starting point. Hope you can join in discussion on that Talk page. Cheers, WWB Too (talk) 18:33, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

In popular culture

The ones I chainsawed were full of things like "[Name of show] has an episode [with very similar but not identical name], an obvious shout-out", which is original research, or "[Name of show] mentioned this in very faint passing". I fail to see how one line of throwaway dialogue in a 22-minute episode warrants a relevant mention. Something more obvious, like "The creator of [show Y] cites [show X] as a primary influence" is fine on both Show Y and Show X's articles, as long as the claim is verified. But I just don't think we need every tangential little mention, especially in list form, which looks ugly. Ten Pound Hammer • ^{(What did I screw up now?)} 16:11, 29 December 2011 (UTC)

first of all, I would never say that everything in these sections was good, but you deleted the entire sections, the good and bad indiscriminately. (What I consider bad is analogies that are not documented or obvious, and of uses in non-notable works or unimportant contexts.) So are you telling me you had examined every item there and found that there was nothing useable in them according to your standards? I don't think so, because you consistently cite the worst, and use it as the justification for everything.

Second, your standard is wrong--At the very least there's certainly a general consensus that it is fully sufficient for the item to be significant in the work, not only if it is the primary theme or influence of it. But below even being important, even the little details are significant, for they are what show the cultural influence of a prior work , or natural or human-made object, or theme. This is how the cultural network is built. The significance of something is that it becomes a standard example that others will recognize. Entire art forms are constructed around this principle: parody, mash-up, collage, sampling. But even in ordinary work, its important what is shown: this is the sort of thing people study in not just literature and cultural studies, but history. There are books and articles, both scholarly and popular, written on , for example, the specific naval references in Jane Austen. or the geographic elements used by Shakespeare,the drinks people drink in a fictional work, the legendary characters or historical events they assume the audience will know about. This sort of information should be part of the content of a comprehensive encyclopedia like ours, which is not limited except by what people want to include.

Third, with respect to documentation, that something is the main theme or important or occurs in a work can be sourced from the work itself. It's one of the standard exceptions for the use of primary sources.

Finally, the wholesale elimination of the dozens of sections , some of them from major articles, in the course of a few days, done without discussion--and especially the reverts when people restored them-- were unconstructive. Even from your point of view, indiscriminate over-hasty zeal diminishes the value of what you were doing. You use the word "chainsawed." It was an accurate description, but perhaps you didn't mean to use it, for that word has the implications of vandalism. Had you instead taken out the worst of the junk, it would have been a positive contribution. DGG ( talk ) 02:26, 30 December 2011 (UTC)

Mechademia

If you have a moment, could you perhaps have a lok at this article? There are a few small problems here. There's a list of issues "sourced" to Amazon.com. There's also an extensive "reception" section with some cherry-picked quotes. And some editors (see talk) vehemently oppose inclusion of links to the journal page at Project MUSE (because that is apparently spam for a paysite, whereas the Amazon links are sources...) Thanks! --Guillaume2303 (talk) 08:26, 4 January 2012 (UTC)

I'll comment there. But it's good to see a journal article that does have reviews of the journal. DGG ( talk ) 01:53, 5 January 2012 (UTC)

Mechademia edits

You made some comments about the scholarly journal Mechademia, which deals with manga and anime. The full text and all tables of contents for Mechademia are available for free at http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mechademia/ and all articles can be downloaded for free. I added the link on the talk page, but not in the article itself. Check the link yourself and then, if you want, add it to the article. Timothy Perper (talk) 18:03, 5 January 2012 (UTC)

If you go to the page, you'll find vol 4 of Mechademia is available. That wasn't clear in what I just said -- sorry about that. Hope this is clearer. Timothy Perper (talk) 18:22, 5 January 2012 (UTC)

No, that is not the case. Only sample issues can--at present, vol.4. If you see more than that, you are working within the domain of a college or library that has a subscription. I'll forward you a screen shot if necessary. DGG ( talk ) 18:27, 5 January 2012 (UTC)

I can get the ToCs from the link I gave, not only for Vol. 4 but for the others too. Except for Vol. 4, downloading costs money, but the ToCs are on the link. Let me go back and check them all. I'll be right back. Timothy Perper (talk) 18:33, 5 January 2012 (UTC)

Yes, all the ToCs are available -- I just checked. Timothy Perper (talk) 18:36, 5 January 2012 (UTC)

Yes, that is what most journals do: the TOCs at least are readable, and there is a sample issue or volume available free. A great many, including all or most of the journal backfiles at JSTOR, have abstracts free also. A very few don't even let you see the TOC, which is f rather silly--free TOCs and abstracts help sell article access. Usually we do not give the specifics of this in the article, because it;s fairly standard and subject to change. We certainly don't let any journal doing this imply they have free access. Now, if we could persuade the publishers to make everything free except the most recent issue or two, it would be a small step forward--though that of course is not open access, which requires the final version to be free to read and otherwise use upon publication, which, from the point of view of disseminating ideas, is the only acceptable solution. I sort of know this by heart, having spent the last 10 years of my professional career on negotiating and arranging for e-journal access for a university (and have kept up since then), and been since 1999 an active advocate of true open access. DGG ( talk ) 18:27, 5 January 2012 (UTC)

True, true... I too have spent many years on the editorial boards of several scholarly journals but have mixed feelings about open access. Until we can find free money to pay the printer, journals will not be free to readers. In an ideal world -- well, in an ideal world, there would be world peace, clean air, no crime -- we don't live in an ideal world. So we have paid subscribers, who provide the cash we need to pay the printer. But I agree that ideally open and free access would be wonderful. Timothy Perper (talk) 19:10, 5 January 2012 (UTC)

I'm looking for your advice : Speedy

Hi, DGG. I came across a A7 speedy tag at James E. Wise, Jr. and declined it as the subject looked notable at a cursory glance. A7 makes no mention of notability and I don't understand why. Are we to ignore notability if the other conditions of A7 are met? I may be overlooking something basic, but I don't see the utility in deleting aticles about notable subjects because the creator requests deletion. (In this specific instance it wasn't a request so much as it was acquiescence). Anyway, thanks for your time...I hope things are well with you. Tiderolls 05:23, 13 January 2012 (UTC) I considered posting this at WT:CSD but was sure the subject had, most likely been discussed there previously and I was too lazy to search the archives. Mea culpa.

1. The rule for speedy is that the article will be deleted in the subject shows no indication of importance of significance, which I think of as meaning that nobody in good faith who understood the purpose of Wikipedia would think there should be an article. Notability is more than this. Any subject that is notable will certainly be important or significant, while a great many things that may have some good-faith importance will still not be notable. When I first came here, I asked the same question you are asking, and suggested clarifying this by saying importance or significance or notability. The answer I was given by those of more experience is that it is better to avoid using the word "notable" entirely in defining A7, because it will inevitably lead to people asking an article be deleted because of no demonstration of notability, which is asking too much--only the community can decide notability, whether passively at WP:PROD or actively at AfD. Admins have views on this that are too diverse for them alone to be trusted, and notability can in many cases be pretty nebulous. But if something is totally insignificant, we pretty much all agree, and speedy A7 is therefore limited to the types of things we all normally agree on.
2. Personally, I think we should never have ever adopted the word "notability". It operationally has a meaning peculiar to us, what is called a "term of art", meaning only the question whether there should be a separate Wikipedia article; I think we should be deciding how much coverage to give the subjects that are of different grades of importance: varying from none at all, to a complex set of related articles. But people here like what might appear to be simple yes-no distinctions——but then they find themselves quarreling endlessly about everything anywhere near what they thought was a clear the borderline.
3. As for deletion by request of the author of the article, although Wikipedia contributions are licensed irrevocably, sometime people change their mind, and it is good practice to show understanding.. Very often though it makes sense, and we don't want to embarrass people by a public discussion. If the reason is not immediately obvious to me, I ignore such requests or ask for a reason. Sometimes it's because the author realizes the difficulty of writing an adequate article, and doesn't want an inadequate one to stand. Sometimes, the author is not convinced it will hold up at AfD, and would rather avoid a very public process about it--our AfD process is apt to make a mountain out a a molehill. (In this case, guessing from the author's talk p., I think both reasons apply.)
4. As for the article in question, he's an author of multiple books that have been published by a reputable publisher and are fairly widely held in libraries-- see WorldCat Identities; if they have substantial reviews, he meets WP:AUTHOR. However, depending on the extent of the reviews, the books seem rather routine, and that publisher, while often publishing books of very high quality and significance, also sometimes publishes works of quite minor importance. If someone brought it to AfD, there are others things I'd think better worth the effort of defending. DGG ( talk ) 06:38, 13 January 2012 (UTC)

FYI: NPA

It may well be that someone has already had the courtesy of notifying you of this, but just in case. I've no idea what it is about, or whether it has significance, but I thought you ought to be aware of it.--Scott Mac 01:12, 15 January 2012 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) New link seems to be this. PamD 09:03, 15 January 2012 (UTC)

I saw it myself a little earlier this evening. KW seems to be doing his utmost to show himself in as bad a light as possible. It's perfectly consistent with his general behavior there that he didn't inform me. As far as I am concerned, I don't think what he said about me is significant enough to respond to. I took the same view as others did. If he holds a grudge, that's his lookout.

As for my position on NPA, it's been stated elsewhere: that people at a responsible public site behave like they do no longer amazes me; what continues to puzzle me is why the site tolerate them. Perhaps I have a responsibility to say this there, but people will see it here also. DGG ( talk ) 04:02, 15 January 2012 (UTC)

That, I think, is the nub of the whole arbcom case. We've managed to get some sort of American free-speech, citizen's-rights, ethos, which tolerates children being childish, and really has nothing to do with building an encyclopedia. Sadly, it is unlikely to change.--Scott Mac 04:16, 15 January 2012 (UTC)

Perhaps it's better to avoid nationalities--to many Americans like myself the offensive style here is more like British pub speech, or more exactly, the constant back and forth of insult in British comedy sketches, rather than random use of occasional bad words that characterizes American adolescents. When people work together, deliberate and repeated use of what others in the group clearly consider insult always has the implication that the others do not matter. Whether everyone considers it insult is irrelevant. DGG ( talk ) 15:45, 15 January 2012 (UTC)

Sorry, I've not made myself clear (and foolishly appeared to insult Americans). The style here is certainly British (and the whole "cunt is not sexist in Britain" meme is slight of hand, because although not generally used to refer to women in the UK, it is not a term anyone would use in any open social space - because it is clearly anti-social pubic language, only tolerated in certain - generally male - in-groups). No, my reference to the US was not that Americans are less civil, it is that there seems to me a Wikipedian reluctance to clamp down on certain types of speech. Go into most British public spaces and use the word "cunt", and you'll soon be asked to shut-up or leave. Use it in the hearing of customers in most workplaces - you'll be fired. And if in any particular sub-culture that's not the case, you won't be able to operate within any wider culture unless you learn how to adapt. Wikipedia is a wider culture. I may, inadvertently, happen to use a word that's acceptable "where I come from" - but once I am made aware of the wider cultural sensitivities, I must surely desist. The idea those involved here don't realise this is, quite frankly, not tenable.--Scott Mac 16:16, 15 January 2012 (UTC)

(talk page stalker)Very eloquently put Scott. I concur with you both. Why the site tolerates it is an enigma to me too. But it does. That said, some of the worst insults do not need the use of expletives to be gravely insulting and demeaning - but in the current investigations, that aspect of PA and incivility seems to be unimportant. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 17:15, 15 January 2012 (UTC)

(talk page stalker)Interestingly the word "cunt" appears (final para) in today's Observer newspaper (a "respectable" paper, not a scandal sheet), albeit as a quote quoted from an article in Time Out and used to illustrate incivility woman to woman (and the original speaker was perhaps using it to emphasise her "working class" credentials?) While we wait for their inevitable degeneration, we should try to maintain an even temper, although that is not always possible or even desirable. After Helena Bonham Carter, the great-granddaughter of Herbert Asquith, complained that for all her advantages and beauty directors would not hire her because she was not "trendily working class", an exasperated Kathy Burke found the effort of keeping a civil tongue in her head too much to bear. "As a lifelong member of the non-pretty working classes," she told Time Out, "I would like to say to Helena Bonham Carter: shut up you stupid cunt." Not sure if this adds anything to any discussions, but thought it noteworthy when I saw it this morning. Perhaps it does tend to illustrate that it's not a misogynistically-offensive term over here (UK), just a stronger version of "stupid cow", ie rudeness applied exclusively to a female; male equivalent probably "Stupid prick". (But I spend most of my life in a quiet village looking after an aged Mother, so am no expert on what's said in pubs, on buses or in workplaces at present!) PamD 17:56, 15 January 2012 (UTC)

The quote says it all. Burke "found the effort of keeping a civil tongue in her head too much to bear". Were User:K.Burke on Wikipedia, she would, by definition, have breached WP:CIVIL - can could be blocked. Now she might argue that User:Posh-Helena had bated her, but would we buy it?--Scott Mac 18:08, 15 January 2012 (UTC)

I was at first surprised at our emphasis on the wording: I now appreciate it as a good opportunity for discussing bad language. I agree with Scott that the way "cunt" is used in the quote above shows that the use is normally considered offensive in the UK, and that this was newsworthy as an exceptionally crude statement. Its implication depends on the circumstances--it can be used in a positive sense between lovers. But even if the word were uniformly used in the UK as a strong compliment, even among strangers or people working together in offices, referring perhaps to the excellence of women as exemplified by their sexuality, and if nobody at all in the UK, even those of a previous generation, were ever offended, it still is offensive here, because we are not writing for a UK readership only, and it is obviously perceived by many people here as a crude insult. Even were all women uniformly in the English-speaking world to think it a friendly greeting, if any substantial number of men nonetheless considered it an insult to women, it would be offensive. All of these discussions about the intrinsic nature of this word or other words is entirely irrelevant to NPA. If words are perceived by at least some reasonable people here as offensive, that is what matters. I'm Jewish. If I'm called Jewish, I normally consider it a neutral descriptor, or sometimes a word of praise. If it's used to me as an insult, it's insulting because it considers my ethnicity a fit term to be used

Kudpung refers to insult expressed in polite terms. We need to recognize this as improper also--NPA means no personal attacks, not merely no personal attacks using conventional words of insult. When terms normally considered insulting are used, it aggravates the situation; when terms often used to indicate group membership are so used, it aggravates it further. It not the intrinsic use of any particular word that is crucial to NPA--it just makes NPA easier to prove.

There's even more serious aspect: when experienced people in a group can get away with behavior newcomers can not, it implies an hierarchy, a non-welcoming attitude. a sense of exclusiveness. It's a collective version of OWNERSHIP: the longer you're here, the more you own the encyclopedia. If we do welcome newcomers, the longer a person is here, the great should be their politeness. It's the same as an expert trying for OWNership of an article: for a true expert, their edits will prove it. If those of longer standing have the ability to determine our practice, it will be because their experience enables them to best explain it. DGG ( talk ) 22:00, 15 January 2012 (UTC)

I think the missing link here is not so much NPA as "don't needlessly disrupt Wikipedia". What is a personal attack may very well depend on the intention of the writer, and his expectation of how the recipient will understand it. Thus, if we assume good faith, lots of things can be excused as having "friendly" intention, or having been misunderstood. However, it is not enough to have good intention - one also needs not to use language that may predictably give the impression of an intent to give offence (even if none is intended). To give a concrete example: a number of years ago a user was accused of a racist post (I can't remember the details). Of course there was uproar. The user then protested he had no racist intent, and indeed was himself black (sorry if that's the wrong term). The defence was accepted. However, in a virtual community no one knows you are black - so don't use the language that requires that knowledge for context, because it is likely to be misunderstood by some and thus cause disruption. Same here: how one normally uses "cunt" is immaterial, that one doesn't intend a personal attack is good, but also insufficient. If you know that a form of words is likely to be seen as uncivil - just don't use it. We are trying to communicate in a multi-cultural, non-visual community. Sure, people should assume good faith, but you should not (as far as you are able) require them to understand your ethnicity, gender, culture, local linguistic practice, religion, or sexuality in order to understand your words. You should attempt (as you are able) to use language that transcends that - ans so deliberately using language that doesn't is disruption (or even trolling).--Scott Mac 22:54, 16 January 2012 (UTC)

One of the saddest aspects gained by a reputation of of being unpleasant is that it has deterred some people from wanting to submit articles for promotion to quality status. It's already driven most people away from wanting to help the project through promotion to the use of a set of tools. This is clearly not conducive to a healthy collaboration and growth of the project. In other words, it's disruptive. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 23:36, 16 January 2012 (UTC)

"Don't needlessly disrupt Wikipedia" can apply to a great many things. In a sense, it's the basis of all offenses--contributing or commenting in such a way as to make trouble for people. It includes persistently submitting unacceptable articles, or persistent attempts to remove acceptable ones. Or copyvio, edit-warrring, or promotionalism--especially non commercial promotion of a cause. All of these take effort to deal with, and interfere with work directed to building the encyclopedia.

Anything can upset people, especially if it's connected with rejecting their work. There is no intervention, however well meant and however careful, that is truly safe--I've had people upset with approaches that essentially amount to , "let me help you make a better article"--especially with autobio, where people tend to think they have written the obviously perfect article. Whatever people take offense with, I apologize for, and apology helps, if perceived as sincere, and if it's more than "I'm sorry it had a bad effect on you" but rather along the lines of "I made an error, and I will fix it."

But the best first line towards improvement is avoiding certain comments that are known to be especially dangerous.These are the expected--any reference to age, or race, or nationality, or sex, or religion; or using words some people thing are taboo. Reflections on people's education are tricky--much more than the others, they may be an actual problem, and, in this encyclopedia, they can be connected sometimes with age and first-language; I've learned to avoid these also. But the basic rule remains, that in a very public setting, where you are interacting with a range of individuals of unknown identity and background, with extremely variable preferences and expectations for formality, and a wide range of expectations, it is necessary to be extremely careful how you say and do things. It might sound like this is asking a lot: but we're all trained in language use and interpersonal interactions from infancy, and even children are aware of the concept of hurting other people's feelings.

(There are some people who unfortunately are not, and may indefinitely require guidance; one special aspect is that people with these difficulties are often attracted to our relatively impersonal setting; though we say WP is not therapy, it can be, or at least can be a safe environment--but just as in society generally, it is very difficult to encourage these individuals while also protecting the others, and we therefore will always need mechanisms of isolation. But never punishment--having social difficulties is not anyone's fault in a moral sense (or at least so I like to say, perhaps excusing those of my own). But we are justified in asking those who can control themselves to do so, and educating those who for whatever reason have not learned the expected standard——and gently removing the others.

The excuse of intellectual brilliance does not apply here: this is a communal setting, though some people may not at first realize that. Even the best of contributors, who can not or will not avoid offending other contributors will need to find a setting where they can work without doing harm. Even those who are most readily to hurt others can very readily take offense themselves——AN/I or RfC/U are good places to observe this; I rather doubt many of those who say it does not matter to them, and that this should be an environment where everyone is expected to be tough and impervious, both taking and giving. DGG ( talk ) 02:00, 17 January 2012 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) Im confused. Accusation of rudeness may or may not be justified. Dont care. How did the "c" word come up? None of the linked diffs include it? Gaijin42 (talk) 19:25, 17 January 2012 (UTC)

the word came up because the use of it has been a prominent example in the manifold recent discussions. To say we should not insult other people by using the word does not mean we should avoid using it frankly when the word itself (or the subject) is the matter being discussed. Accusations of unjustified rudeness are rather common; I said I sometimes receive some after I've deleted an article, no matter what I've actually said. I would never support a rule that we act too strongly on even true rudeness if it's sporadic, but we should act firmly and consistently when it becomes habitual or defiant. DGG ( talk ) 01:27, 18 January 2012 (UTC)

FYI - Courtesy Notification

As a courtesy notification for your consideration, your name has been referenced by me in a recent post to User:Atama. Regards. JakeInJoisey (talk) 18:08, 17 January 2012 (UTC)

P.S. Thank you for electing to contribute your observations to the article talk page. I intend to fashion a rather in depth and carefully considered response to your observations as I believe it will be productive. However, due to time limitations and a personal desire to step back from this issue for a break and some reflective consideration, I may not post my response before the blackout. Regards. JakeInJoisey (talk) 19:18, 17 January 2012 (UTC)

FYI and consideration, I have replied to your observations posted to one of the "Swiftboating" RfCs. Regards. JakeInJoisey (talk) 16:38, 9 February 2012 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/PAGG stack

I've closed the AfD and redirected the article to The 4-Hour Body. You commented that there's a possibility for a content merge, feel free to go ahead now. Deryck C. 22:17, 17 January 2012 (UTC)

I'll take a look after the blackout. DGG ( talk ) 01:21, 18 January 2012 (UTC)

Internet service

I know you said back in December you were trying to get your Internet service worked out so you could restore User:Alden Loveshade/Anaphora Literary Press. Any luck with that? Alden Loveshade (talk) 06:05, 19 January 2012 (UTC)

Update: new user warning test results available

Hi WP:UWTEST member, we wanted to share a quick update on the status of the project. Here's the skinny:

1. We're happy to say we have a new round of testing results available! Since there are tests on several Wikipedias, we're collecting all results at the project page on Meta. We've also now got some help from Wikimedia Foundation data analyst Ryan Faulkner, and should have more test results in the coming weeks.
2. Last but not least, check out the four tests currently running at the documentation page.

Thanks for your interest, and don't hesitate to drop by the talk page if you have a suggestion or question. Maryana (WMF) (talk) 19:17, 20 January 2012 (UTC)

Obar

Dear DGG,

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

So a few things about the interviews:

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

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

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

Jonathan Obar --Jaobar (talk) 05:42, 9 February 2012 (UTC)

of course I am willing to do it, and you may use my wikiname and my real name however you please, though if others are not giving their name likewise, I am sure you will do so in such a way as not to give my comments any greater implied emphasis. I should like to speak with you first about your project in general, and will email you. DGG ( talk ) 06:14, 9 February 2012 (UTC)

Primary sources

I'm finding more and more that newbies are misunderstanding about when primary sources are acceptable, or even if they are acceptable at all.

I started a look at some policy and guideline pages, but through typical over editing (such pages are typically edited/developed due to some current event or other), the primary sources explanations seem a bit watered down and too vague.

If you wouldn't mind, would you a.) help me find any and all pages relating to primary sources, and b.) would you be willing to help write a stand alone guideline concerning them, to better help editors understand usage and so forth? - jc37 02:09, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

There is no simple guideline. partly because there is no definition of "primary sources" that applies to all types of subjects, and party because the possible uses of them in Wikipedia are very various. Attempts to write one are what have generated the present state of confusion. Just a few example example: to a historian, a newspaper is a primary source, because it is used as the data about which histories are written. To us it is a secondary source, because it's an professionally written and edited responsible covering of the events. To a biologist, a journal reporting research is a primary journal, as distinct from a journal that published review articles, but the actual primary source is the lab notebook. A historian of science studies both it and the publications as primary sources for the history. The same source can be both primary and secondary: an appellate court decision is both: it's the primary source for the wording of the decision, but it's a secondary source, and a highly reliable one, for the facts of the case and the appropriate precedents. In literature, the primary source is the work being discussed; the secondary source is the discussion, but the discussion is a primary source for the thoughts of the scholar in an biography of the scholar. For a fictional work, the work itself is, though primary, the best source for the facts of the plot, because it is more detailed and accurate than anything that may be based on it; for interpretation of motives, if not obvious, a wecondary source discussing the work must be used--but there is not clear distinction about what is sufficiently obvious. The practical distinction for Wikipedia is that primary sources which cannot be used as such except as illustrations are those that require interpretation, because we do not do interpretation, which is original research. A textbook is often given as an example of a tertiary source, being based mostly on review articles; but advanced textbooks usually discuss the actual research article themselves to a considerable extent. And some textbooks, like Knuth's books on TeX and Metafont, are actually the primary sources, because the material presented there was never discussed previously and is of his own invention--unless one wishes to consider the program coe as the primary source.

In any given situation at Wikipedia , the guideline however written will always require interpretation, and the authoritative place for interpretation is WP:RSN--even though the individual interpretations may be contradict each other; just as the authoritative determination of notability is Deletion Reviews, even though different discussions may contradict each other. An encyclopedia is not a machine-written summary, but a work of creative human judgment about what to include, how to source it, and how to present it. The concept that we just repeat what the sources say in a proportionate way is overly simplistic: it helps teach beginners the principles, but does not actually decide any non-trivial cases. The examples which makes that clearest are the unfortunate widespread use of selective quotation and cherry-icking in controversial articles. I'll get things started by copying this into an essay. DGG ( talk ) 02:39, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

Looks like a very good start.

Due to some of the issues you note, I think I'm going to ask a few others to also help. (User:Black Falcon in particular I have found is great when it comes to policy/guideline page creation/editing, as well.) - jc37 02:47, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

I suspect there will not be complete agreement; but since RS is a guideline explaining the details of the fundamental policy WP:V, the practical course will be to indicate the accepted range of variation rather than try to find an actual single wording--attempts at that are usually either vague, or do not actually have the claimed consensus, because different people go on to interpret it their own way regardless of what gets written. (yes, I propose that as a general approach to writing guidelines) DGG ( talk ) 04:20, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

Ever get around to copying this into an essay yet? : ) - jc37 14:53, 18 February 2012 (UTC)

I have just seen your extremely helpful reply above and, as I was reading it, I thought it would be well worth making into an essay. I am glad you think so too! Coming from a scientific background I had no difficulty in understanding that WP "original research" was merely a term of wikispeak and that "verifiability" is such an odd word that it could have no obvious connotation. However, it took me a long time to realise that, when people were saying "primary", "secondary" or "tertiary", they were meaning something quite unlike anything I had understood. Thincat (talk) 19:35, 23 February 2012 (UTC)

OK, I will try this weekend. But "verifiability" is a relatively straightforward concept: it means the material in the article must be able to be shown accurate by published sources. We have no way of judging what is really true , because we have no research capability, and few editors with the recognized professional standing to check submissions by academic standards. We therefore rely on outsiders to do that, in publications that have editorial supervision. Whether we "should have such editors and give them authority is a rather complicated question & I'm going to incorporate some material I wrote for Foundation-L about this problem. (My view, briefly, is that we should not do so, but rather go as far as we can the way we have been working. There is a need for an comprehensive freely available encyclopedia with proper scholarly editing, but I don't think our methods can produce one. If it is tried, it should be as a separate project, but the experience at Citizendium has been very discouraging. The most problematic questions are: who will pick the experts?, and , what if they disagree?. DGG ( talk ) 19:39, 23 February 2012 (UTC)

Open Biology

Hi

Thanks for your support on Open Biology. I have added some comments to the article's talk page and would be grateful if you could take a look and guide me. Thanks PointOfPresence (talk) 09:14, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

I added some information to show it is already actually publishing articles. What is needed now is published comments from third parties about the jhournal

On newbies and deletion

Hey David. Just saw your comments on the Village Pump thread about AfD etc. and wanted to say:

1. Thank you for the thoughtful commentary
2. I agree with you about requiring more human communication. If you want to talk about actually making that happen, then let's talk. But in the meantime we're trying to slowly but surely improve those related notifications, and your feedback on the work so far would be welcome here (See "templates tested" for a look at the different messages).

We have some very clear recommendations for next tries at new notifications for both PROD and AFD, which we will be publishing in a more succinct list soon. (Notes are on Meta, if you're interested.)

Thanks again, Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 18:38, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

yes, I'll get back there. But as you can see from the item just above,I do not have the luxury of being able to concentrate on any one thing here. sometimes everything appears equally important. And, as you can also see from the line it italics there, everything seems inter-related. We can't improve articles without more people. We can't get more people unless we fix our processes of working with articles. We can't stop to fix our processes when there are so many urgently needed specific actions such as the flood of promotionalism. So I try to work by turns everywhere. DGG ( talk ) 22:21, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

Indeed, it's our unique chicken and egg problem. :) Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 22:29, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

anyway.  Tonkie (talk) 20:55, 26 February 2012 (UTC)

Remarks about an -imho- overactive NewPagePatroller

Hi DGG,
I saw that you were involved in a Speedy Deletion Nomination (SDN) on the article about Csongor István Nagy from User Lovehongkong. The SDN came from User:DreamFieldArts, and he had also nominated my article on the former CEO of ABN AMRO where he was the main driver for the sell-off of the bank to a consortium of banks: Royal Bank of Scotland Group, Fortis and Banco Santander. This sale was one of the additional reasons why both RBS as well as Fortis collapsed at the beginning of the Banking problems - leading to the current economic downturn in the US and Europe. Although DFA did remove the SDN when I started a discussion with him I do have problems with his attitude.

I really don't think he is the right person for NPPer. In my initial mail to him (or her - didn't check) I made the comment that Rijkman Groenink might not be known in the US and he directly reacts as stung by a wasp with: The fact that you believe everyone in America is a 13 year-old girl is depressing. None the less he is on the Netherlands Wikipedia because he has some importance to it, while on the English he has none. Even if he does, (I have been proven wrong) have some significance, it is not needed. Many people have done what he has, but aren't on Wikipedia

Another problem that I do have is that he deletes comments made on his Talk page (I had to search really good to find back the Deletion request Rijman Groenink version where he made above comment, and also came later with an explination why Kevin O'Leary is notable and Rijkman Groenink wouldn't be (Kevin O'Leary is also Shark in TV program Shark Tank (see THIS version of his Talk page) (also note the difference in the entire Talk page taking into account that there are only 2 hours between those two pages)).

According to himself he hardly ever uses the SDN process, but when you look at his contributions many SDN's can be seen. And his Talk page only consists of SDN comments (there aren't that many on his Talk page as he deleted older/completed discussion threads on his Talk page. (and worse: he removes text in current threads). There is also a formal Mediation request from User: Bill shannon in regards to DFA. (ah: you are in on that as well)

But what struck me the most was his 'its my job and it will never change' statement (not sure if it is still at his current talk page - but if not you can find it HERE (comment: That's my job, and it will never change. DreamFieldArts 13:39, 26 February 2012 (UTC))

After that point in time I also can be blamed for coming close to personal attack: although I do think that it must be clear that I'm exaggerating and being sarcastic; but I started to loose my patience and could hardly believe what I was reading.

I do refer to the 5 pillars of Wiki, and especially Assume Good Faith: and also with DFA I do assume that he is just doing his best but if he truly thinks that his role as NPPer is the same as a teacher who rips up a paper made by one of his students because it is crap I really don't think he is fit for the job. If my first article had been controlled by DGA I probably would have stopped contributing anything to Wiki ever again. He even tells that he has experienced the same thing, so he knows the feeling, and in the same sentence he says it his his job to 'rip up a paper' and say that it 'is crap'.

I do appreciate that DGG is not the nicest job in the world; but I do think that a DGGer should be very aware about 'new users' (I'm not in that catagory: but as he doesn't seem to do much research when he nominates a SD - other then on articles about persons to check if they had a TV show on top of their 'main' job....); so I can hardly imagine that he checks if the user who wrote the article he norminates for SD is a new user or not.

Could you as (far more) experienced Wikipedian give him some good guidelines and tips: as said, I do assume that DGA handles in good faith: but the way he is working now is really not healthy. Thanks a lot, Tonkie (talk) 20:52, 26 February 2012 (UTC)
Ah: I see that you already contacted him and that he did extensively answered to your comments. Thanks :-)

While I was writing above letter to you I did see that you already contacted him on his role as DGGer but because above text was nearing completion I decided to post in

New Page Triage engagement strategy released

Hey guys!

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

It's awesome to finally get to start work on this! :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 02:35, 3 March 2012 (UTC)

Thanks...

...for your contribution to the article NXIVM!Chrisrus (talk) 17:10, 5 March 2012 (UTC)

Page Triage newsletter

Hey guys!

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

In addition, on Tuesday 13th March, we're holding an office hours session in #wikimedia-office on IRC at 19:00 UTC (11am Pacific time). If you can make it, please do; we'll have a lot of stuff to show you and talk about, including (hopefully) a timetable of when we're planning to do what. If you can't come, for whatever reason, let me know on my talkpage and I'm happy to send you the logs so you can get an idea of what happened :). Regards, Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 23:30, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

Thanks to everyone who attended our first office hours session; the logs can be found here, if you missed it, and we should be holding a second one on Thursday, 22 March 2012 at 18:00 UTC in #wikimedia-office. I hope to see you all there :).

In the meantime, I have greatly expanded the details available at Wikipedia:New Page Triage: there's a lot more info about precisely what we're planning. If you have ideas, and they aren't listed there, bring them up and I'll pass them on to the developers for consideration in the second sprint. And if you know anyone who might be interested in contributing, send them there too!

Regards, Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 00:17, 14 March 2012 (UTC)

Colonel Warden

Apologies if you are already aware, but I though you would like to know that Colonel Warden is the victim of a highly unjustified and unreasonable indefinite block. There is a discussion about this on the ANI board: Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents#Colonel Warden.Rangoon11 (talk) 15:02, 17 March 2012 (UTC)

he's now been unblocked by another ed., with essentially unanimous agreement; it now remains to deal with the admin doing the block. I am a little puzzled, because much though I disagree with that admin both in detail and general approach to Wikipedia, this is much weirder on several levels than anything I recall from any admin: blatant involvement; incident 8 days old; block for a reason given in deprodding when any deprod reason is acceptable; block for the reason being false when it was both technically correct and totally justified; continuing lack of understanding that it was wrong; intention of the admin to continue to pursue the grievance against the editor; continuing violation of NPA even in the discussion. DGG ( talk ) 22:10, 17 March 2012 (UTC)

Yes all very odd. And the endless comments about "deceit" on the ANI have merely served to confirm beyond any possible doubt that there is a highly personal aspect to all of this. The individual in question has obviously never heard, or at least heeded, the phrase "when you're in a hole, stop digging". Rangoon11 (talk) 00:32, 18 March 2012 (UTC)

help triage some feedback

Hey guys.

I appreciate this isn't quite what you signed up for, but I figured as people who are already pretty good at evaluating whether material is useful or not useful through Special:NewPages, you might be interested :). Over the last few months we've been developing the new Article Feedback Tool, which features a free text box. it is imperative that we work out in advance what proportion of feedback is useful or not so we can adjust the design accordingly and not overwhelm you with nonsense.

This is being done through the Feedback Evaluation System (FES), a tool that lets editors run through a stream of comments, selecting their value and viability, so we know what type of design should be promoted or avoided. We're about to start a new round of evaluations, beginning with an office hours session tomorrow at 18:00 UTC. If you'd like to help preemptively kill poor feedback, come along to #wikimedia-office and we'll show you how to use the tool. If you can't make it, send me an email at okeyeswikimedia.org or drop a note on my talkpage, and I'm happy to give you a quick walkthrough in a one-on-one session :).

All the best, Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 21:29, 20 March 2012 (UTC)

I am willing to do at least one batch, and I think I understand how to do it from the wikipage. But perhaps I need to know something that isn't obvious, so I am emailing you. I wish you hadn't tried to summarize things using graphics, but that doesn't affect the ability to do the rating, which works via checkboxes. DGG ( talk ) 21:53, 20 March 2012 (UTC)

Please help out at the Paid Editor Help page

While not a huge backlog yet, we're getting to it on the Paid Editor Help page. The sections that need replies include Colin Digiaro, Guy Bavli, Strayer University, Stevens Institute of Technology, and a general backlog in the Request Edits category. If you could help in any of these sections (primarily the first four), I would be really grateful. This notification is going out to a number of Wikiproject Cooperation members in the hopes that we can clear out all of the noted sections. And feel free to respond to a section and help out even if someone else had already responded there. The more eyes we get on a specific request, the more sure we can be on the neutrality of implementing it. Thanks! Silverseren^C 03:25, 22 March 2012 (UTC)

Thanks so much for your help. We need more members to be involved on the Paid Editor Help page if we're ever going to get that process to work. Silverseren^C 01:20, 26 March 2012 (UTC)

New page patrolling; DreamFieldArts

As per your discussion with me at 01:29, on 9 March 2012 (UTC), you said, "I am giving you a two week ban, running through March 23, from new page patrol, from page moves without clear prior consensus, and from tagging articles for deletion except in cases of clear vandalism or copyvio." I took this very seriously, as I knew I was doing something extremely wrong. Knowing the only thing I could do was to just stop new page patrolling, as that seemed to be where the problem was diverting from. As I have read from some of your discussions^{1, 2, 3}, you say that I am doing much "better at my job," and Tonkie agreed with this statement, and I felt very complacent about it. Since I am becoming better at what I am doing on here, on 00:01, 23 March 2012 (UTC) I will reclaim my position as a new page patroller. Even though I am very avid about being able to be a new page patroller again, I know I need to be careful about what I do. Now for the first few days, I will patrol lightly, until I feel that by success rate is 95% or higher. Being a new page patroller on Wikipedia is a very important job, and should be taken seriously. With out new page patrollers, there would be havoc on here. (spam, hoaxs, etc.) If you believe that I have done one thing wrong, please do not hesitate to tell me, and to handle the situation appropriately. DreamFieldArts^Talk 21:57, 22 March 2012 (UTC)

I really appreciate that you let me know, and I'll keep in touch with what you do. Remember that part of the job is to not miss the really major problems. Many promotional articles are in fact copyvios, and that's always a sound reason for deletion. A page marked as patrolled without sufficient checking is worse than not patrolling it. DGG ( talk ) 22:12, 22 March 2012 (UTC)

Education Under Fire

Hi. Is it time to reconsider a stand alone article? See Baha'i_Institute_for_Higher_Education#Education_Under_Fire probably from the "Developing a response" section. EUF is by far the primary response but there have been others. Smkolins (talk) 12:09, 26 March 2012 (UTC)

why ask for trouble? DGG ( talk ) 02:22, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

It seems to me there is an imbalance in the article - it's about BIHE yet a good half is about responding to the persecution about BIHE. And the content on the response is sufficient for it's own article. No? Smkolins (talk) 10:50, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

A.L.A. catalog

In case you didn't see this, a new article you might be interested in. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 11:06, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:Stella Parton discography

Greetings! You have been randomly selected to receive an invitation to participate in the request for comment on Talk:Stella Parton discography. Should you wish to respond to the invitation, your contribution to this discussion will be very much appreciated! If in doubt, please see suggestions for responding. If you do not wish to receive these types of notices, please remove your name from Wikipedia:Feedback request service. — RFC bot (talk) 17:51, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

Strayer University

On Talk:Strayer University, you mentioned that you wanted to make some edits to the draft version created by Hamilton83 found at User:Hamilton83/my sandbox. Were you still planning to make those changes? Would you like some time to do that, or is it okay if I move over draft into mainspace? Qwyrxian (talk) 13:17, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

I'll get there today. DGG ( talk ) 17:12, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

Not yet ready--see my comments there. DGG ( talk ) 19:19, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

Strayer University

DGG, I saw your note last week that you intended to return to the Strayer University draft this weekend: have you had a chance to look yet at my response to your questions on the Strayer University Talk page? I have made some updates to the draft based on your feedback. Let me know what you think. --Hamilton83 (talk) 17:19, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

tonight. DGG ( talk ) 18:14, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

Article Feedback Tool updates

Hey all. My regular(ish) update on what's been happening with the new Article Feedback Tool.

Hand-coding

As previously mentioned, we're doing a big round of hand-coding to finalise testing :). I've been completedly bowled over by the response: we have 20 editors participating, some old and some new, which is a new record for this activity. Many thanks to everyone who has volunteered so far!

Coding should actively start on Saturday, when I'll be distributing individualised usernames and passwords to everyone. If you haven't spoken to me but would be interested in participating, either drop me a note on my talkpage or email okeyeswikimedia.org. If you have spoken to me, I'm very sorry for the delay :(. There were some toolserver database issues beyond our control (which I think the Signpost discussed) that messed with the tool.

New designs and office hours

Our awesome designers have been making some new logos for the feedback page :) Check out the oversighter view and the monitor view to get complete coverage; all opinions, comments and suggestions are welcome on the talkpage :).

We've also been working on the Abuse Filter plugin for the tool; this will basically be the same as the existing system, only applied to comments. Because of that, we're obviously going to need slightly different filters, because different things will need to be blocked :). We're holding a special office hours session tomorrow at 22:00 UTC to discuss it. If you're a regex nut, existing abuse filter writer, or simply interested in the feedback tool and have suggestions, please do come along :).

I'm pretty sure that's it; if I've missed anything or you have any additional queries, don't hesitate to contact me! Thanks, Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 14:48, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

List of Golden Plate Awardees Article

Hi DGG. I received your message about recommending the Golden Plate list article for deletion. Please tell me what the G11 criterion is upon which you rely. Before posting the article, I researched Lists policies, which appeared consistent with this article. So I need to see specifically what you are referring to. ThanksCoaster92 (talk) 03:38, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

I consider it promotional for the A of A. This is to some extent a holistic judgement, requiring looking at the overall effect of the article. Remember, I did not nominate it for speedy, but left it for the community. They will either agree with me, or they won't, and that will decide the issue. While we're talking about it , have you any COI with this organization? DGG ( talk ) 03:46, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

Lists of self-publishing companies

Inan effort to improve sourcing in our articles, me and a couple other editors have created two lists of self-publishing companies:

• List of self-publishing companies in article space for notable self-publishing houses
• WP:List of self-publishing companies in Wikipedia space for notable and non-notable self-publishing houses

It's our hope that by maintaining such lists, it will be easier for editors to identify self-published books. In a discussion at the Wikipedia:WikiProject Wikipedia reliability talk page, The Blade of the Northern Lights said that you and another editor know vanity publishers very well.[2] If you can provide any assistance with these two lists, it would be greatly appreciated. A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 23:49, 26 April 2012 (UTC)

a very useful project--it makes sense to have both lists, & I will add to the WP list as I see them, I shall check them both; because these can be considered potentially derogatory listings, they must have good references. It may be necessary to qualify the statements in some cases. DGG ( talk ) 01:40, 27 April 2012 (UTC)

Quest, that is an excellent idea; DGG, that is an excellent caveat. BTW, Cambridge Scholars Publishing wants to publish the proceedings of your last faculty meeting/conference/Jane Austen Book Club. You'll get a letter on really nice looking letterhead in the next week or two. Quest, this goes for you as well. And for everyone, really. Drmies (talk) 04:11, 28 April 2012 (UTC)

National Youth Strings Academy

COuld you look at the contributors to that article, and block or ask for name changes or protect or whatever? I'm plum out of time today but people editing the National Youth Strings Academy (NYSA) page with NYSA in their usernames seems like a problem. Note though, that i haven't looked closely enough to see if its good faith, bad result, or simply promotion. Also, if it's now good enough, feel free to take off my prod. TY. Qwyrxian (talk) 03:20, 27 April 2012 (UTC)

I don't see they understand about usernames, so I tried to explain it to them--on the articvle talk p, & their individual ones also. There is currently no usable sources for notability in the article, but given the very distinguished sponsorship, it needs a further search. I'll look at it again tomorrow. DGG ( talk ) 03:33, 27 April 2012 (UTC)

Article Feedback Tool office hours

Hey DGG; just a quick note to let you know that we'll be holding an Office Hours session at 18:00 UTC (don't worry, I got the time right ;p) on 4th May in #wikimedia-office. This is to show off the almost-finished feedback page and prep it for a more public release; I'm incredibly happy to have got to this point :). Hope to see you there! Regards, Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 03:58, 30 April 2012 (UTC)

Tropes in Agatha Christie's novels

Hi. Glad the article has been, for now, restored to its former glory. I was thinking about AFDing it as it was worthless as a stub. Unfortunately, while I read almost all her mysteries I don't have most of the actual paperbacks I bought or collected aeons ago. I do have a couple or so paperbacks and I'll do my best. Yours, Quis separabit? 16:55, 30 April 2012 (UTC)

I finally found the old paperbacks; there were more than I thought. Is it ISBN#s and page numbers you're needing? Yours, Quis separabit? 20:07, 11 June 2012 (UTC)

Self-publishing

Hi, we are still hoping you would make some suggestions on Talk:List_of_self-publishing_companies#evidence. Your help will be appreciated. History2007 (talk) 02:32, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

haven't forgotten: I will get there tomorrow or this weekend. DGG ( talk ) 05:19, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

Stevens Institute of Technology page

Hi DGG, I saw that my original note on your talk page was archived, so I'm adding this to make sure it doesn't get lost from your radar as there is clearly a lot of incoming requests on your page! This is the link to the latest correspondence, ready for your review. Talk:Stevens Institute of Technology#Updating_page_along_guidelines_for_college_and_university_articles

Thank you! QueenCity11 (talk) 14:36, 10 May 2012 (UTC)

haven't forgotten: I will get there tomorrow or this weekend. DGG ( talk ) 05:18, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

Great, thank you! QueenCity11 (talk) 21:51, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

"I haven't forgotten. I'll get there soon. DGG ( talk ) 19:18, 15 May 2012 (UTC)

Thank you for the update - very much appreciated! QueenCity11 (talk) 20:00, 17 May 2012 (UTC)

I still haven't forgotten. Some discussions this last week were rather long to deal with, & I'm a little behind. DGG ( talk ) 03:48, 22 May 2012 (UTC)

No problem - I appreciate that you have been keeping me posted. Yesterday I spent some time updating dead reference links since Stevens switched over to a new website. Thank you again. QueenCity11 (talk) 13:15, 22 May 2012 (UTC)

Hi DGG -- Just wanted to check if you have a sense of when you may be able to review. I am getting pressed for an update and want to report back with the latest. Thank you again! QueenCity11 (talk) 16:22, 13 June 2012 (UTC)

I shall try to get to it this evening. DGG ( talk ) 16:25, 13 June 2012 (UTC)

Hi - Just wanted to check if you think you'll be able to review soon. I appreciate all the help and guidance you have provided thus far. If you would prefer that I look for help from another editor at this point, that is fine - please just let me know. Thank you! QueenCity11 (talk) 11:55, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

A cute kitten for you sir!

Just wanna thank you sir for being unbiased and allowing my page (List of telenovelas of GMA Network) to exist. Again, thank you, sir and God bless:)

Doubledutch781 (talk) 02:40, 15 May 2012 (UTC)

Boundary 2

Hi, could you perhaps have a look at this article? Some editors are trying to insert what I think is unsourced and unwarranted assertions, but perhaps I'm wrong. The journal is also included in many databases that, I think, would not include it if it weren't peer-reviewed, although I admit that the journal website doesn't say so explicitly. Your opinion would be welcome. Thanks! --Guillaume2303 (talk) 13:33, 16 May 2012 (UTC)

A Duke University Press humanities journal of extremely high reputation, from the most important US publisher of such journals. As it contains invited manuscripts only, it does not do peer review of submissions. I do not know to what degree the invited material is reviewed and edited--I imagine by the editors themselves, rather than invited peers of the authors. Humanities journals have various variant of editorial control, and this is a not uncommon method . The proper term I think is "Peer review or the equivalent editorial control" DGG ( talk ) 18:12, 17 May 2012 (UTC)

But what do you think of the remark "It is thus a closed, in-house journal. The interests and networks of the editorial board determine what ends up in the issue." that several editors insist on including? That sounds rather negative to me, but each time that I remove it, somebody puts it back. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 18:53, 17 May 2012 (UTC)

Sorry, just stumbling across this string. How about: "Article selections and other content choices are made by the editorial board." This reminds me of COI issues where bias content needs to be corrected rather than omitted. User:Corporate Minion 03:16, 18 May 2012 (UTC)

I know of no journal where "the interests and networks of the editorial board " or even just the editor in chief do not in considerable part determine the contents. The problem is that saying this so directly can easily be misinterpreted by those who have an overly simplistic view of the objectivity of academic journals & my preliminary thought is that King's wording is a good one. DGG ( talk ) 05:12, 18 May 2012 (UTC)

Good point and good suggestion (thanks King!), I have made this change, let's hope it sticks. Thanks! --Guillaume2303 (talk) 16:45, 18 May 2012 (UTC)

Wikimania

Hi DGG. I'm going to try to make it to your session at Wikimania. If Jimmy sticks around after the plenary session and isn't barraged I might see if I can get his feedback on what a paid editor would need to do to not just be tolerated, but seen as an asset to Wikipedia. The unconference would be a good time to meet up. At some point much further down the line I would like to get some form of independent review/assessment on our McKinsey efforts from an uninvolved editor, just to make sure we've all done a great job serving the reader. User:King4057 (COI Disclosure on User Page) 17:49, 22 May 2012 (UTC)

There seems to be a trend

I'm not saying that you meant what you said, but there appears to be a trend. Northamerica basically said the same thing as you did at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Gabriel Pizza which I didn't even nominate for deletion. Uncle G acted like I didn't follow WP:BEFORE at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Neurathian bootstrap just because I didn't know that it had other names. Kvng said at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Compojure that I didn't consider merging the non-notable article even though I did. Haus said at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/E&BV Subdivision that he found sources in the same amount of time that it took me to nominate the article for deletion. I said that I don't think those sources show notability and another editor agreed with me. So annoying. SL93 (talk) 14:59, 20 May 2012 (UTC)

I decide on the merits of an article by my own judgment. I then look at what other people said, to see if there is an argument that might convince me otherwise. Similarly, sometimes people who in a particular case think as I do use similar arguments as mine. (And why ever would I give an argument if I did not intend to convince others to agree with it?) Uncle G and I think alike for many articles, but not always, and I have differed from him at times in every possible direction. In that first article you mention my judgment was a little different from both of them. In the others I have not yet commented.

But both of us are of the opinion that some degree of consideration for the essential parts of WP:Before is part of WP:Deletion Policy. We've both been here long enough not to judge an article's possibilities on the basis of what is in the present version, and we both define "sourceable" as meaning able to be sourced, and "verifiable" as able to be verified. Both of us are know the limitations of the Googles well enough to be fairly sophisticated at searching them, & we are both aware there are other sources also. We don't expect others to be as thorough as we would--if everyone was, we'd have no need to even comment, because many articles would never get nominated for deletion. We do hope for a moderate degree of inventiveness & imagination, for most of the people here are rather good at those two mental characteristics. We do expect people will not try to judge notability in fields were they wouldn't be able to find sources if they existed.

Northamerica similarly, though he & I share the same view only sometimes, not all that often, and I have a good deal less experience and knowledge of his level of working. When multiple people say the same thing, they might even do so because it is the obviously correct answer.

Words like "substantial" in substantial coverage are not sharply true or false, and the interpretation depends on the circumstances. In fields or geographic areas where the press coverage of everyone of any degree of notability is extensive, it's reasonable to look for more substance than in those fields and places which attract much less attention. (I'm not sure how far Uncle G and Northamerica agree with me on that--I seem to feel much more strongly in requiring full coverage in some subject areas than they do.)

I see you say you follow WP:BEFORE--I am glad you accept that principle, and urge you to say explicitly what you have or have not searched, and what options you have considered. If I nominate or comment on an article & think that while merging or redirection might seem plausible they should not be so treated, I generally say so, and give the reason. DGG ( talk ) 16:25, 20 May 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the advice. I will do that so people don't start assuming things. SL93 (talk) 19:40, 20 May 2012 (UTC)

New Page Triage/New Pages Feed

Hey all :). A notification that the prototype for the New Pages Feed is now live on enwiki! We had to briefly take it down after an unfortunate bug started showing up, but it's now live and we will continue developing it on-site.

The page can be found at Special:NewPagesFeed. Please, please, please test it and tell us what you think! Note that as a prototype it will inevitably have bugs - if you find one not already mentioned at the talkpage, bring it up and I'm happy to carry it through to the devs. The same is true of any additions you can think of to the software, or any questions you might have - let me know and I'll respond.

Thanks! Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 13:12, 22 May 2012 (UTC)

very nice for general purposes, and will certainly improve accuracy if inexperienced users get this by default. For quickly scanning to pick up problems, I find it unusable. The old format works very well for me when I use it for that purpose, & I hope we can figure out how to maintain both. DGG ( talk ) 21:12, 22 May 2012 (UTC)

Metatextbook of Medicine‎‎

David, I should perhaps have noted this on the talk page, but there is something weird with the review in the Deutsches Ärtzeblatt: it is written by the person who set up this "metatextbook" (see bottom of the huge linked page). So I don't think that it is really a review and certainly not independent. Perhaps too complicated for CSD... Should I take it to AfD? --Guillaume2303 (talk) 16:29, 22 May 2012 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Proposal to stop placeholder stubs being created without a sourced fact

Please comment.♦ Dr. Blofeld 06:33, 23 May 2012 (UTC)

Hello

I'm looking forward to seeing you at Wikimania Takes Manhattan - I will also be in DC. --David Shankbone 03:57, 25 May 2012 (UTC)

Geo Swan's article

The point is that this article is a textbook BLP1E, and Geo Swan has gotten flak specifically for having this type of article in userspace and in mainspace; regardless of whether it belongs in userspace or not, I'm not going to enable someone to restore an article when I would immediately send it to AFD. "If I did that, and the article stays in the same form, it will be very rapidly deleted, which is not what you desire" — and this article cannot help being in the form of a BLP1E unless Geo Swan find persistent coverage, of which I've heard nothing from him/her. Nyttend (talk) 12:11, 26 May 2012 (UTC)

Looking at a later comment on your talk p., it appears there was a misunderstanding. Geo asked you to at least mail it to him, & he (and I) thought you were refusing to do that also. But you explained you had not noticed that part, & would mail it. I think that resolves the immediate issue.

More generally, I am not sure of the advice I gave above, which you quoted. It is my intention if the person insists further to restore the article and fix it myself. In fact, when I re-read the source this morning, I may do that even if not requested. (This is part of the general problem more often seen at BLP PROD: if there is an unsatisfactory article, and we know we can fix it by a careful sourcing or rewrite,rather than delete it, should we do so? I think what we should best do in such circumstances is to try as much as reasonable to get the ed to do it themselves, and that is what I was trying to do above.)

the more general issue, that we may not use our authority to delete under the speedy criteria or after an explicit consensus, to delete otherwise, remains. I admit I have violated it on rare occasions, in the spirit of IAR. But using IAR for a single-handed deletion is a very dangerous thing, and perhaps we should all stop doing it. Otherwise it is all too easy for someone to make a case that we are acting on our own prejudices and private interpretations, and perhaps sometimes they will be right.

Additionally, I would never refuse to restore an article if another admin or equally trusted user asked me. Perhaps I defer to other admins too much, or you too little. After all, I could have said, you are being unreasonable, and restored it myself. The definition of wheel warring permits it. (Perhaps we define it incorrectly, and it gives an undue 2nd mover advantage, but that's a very complicated question.) DGG ( talk ) 20:22, 26 May 2012 (UTC)

This is an interesting discussion between two respected colleagues. Please understand the importance of common ground. While mostly we simply observe, without comment, we generally benefit by considering the agreement you reach. Best regards to you both. My76Strat (talk) 00:23, 27 May 2012 (UTC)

I think it goes without saying that most of the time admins will decide the same: if it were otherwise, we'd have immensely more conflict than now. There will also be a grey zone where doing a particular thing, is not clearly right or wrong. We say doubtful matters should involve the community, but then the question becomes which matters are doubtful enough to involve the community? In the boundary zone, the decisions are necessarily going to vary from one individual to another. This is beneficial, not harmful. An admin might choose to do only the utterly obvious, but the other matters need to be dealt with also. Discussing the items in the boundary zone is one of the ways by which consensus can change. DGG ( talk ) 00:45, 27 May 2012 (UTC)

WikiProject NIH

Greetings DGG. I was looking at WikiProject NIH and it appears to be pretty inactive. Since you and one other are the only apparently active members I wanted to ask. Kumioko (talk) 01:58, 27 May 2012 (UTC)

the articles there certainly still need work: classic promotional institutional pages, in many cases, (much probably copied, and needs ref to the sources, though it US-PD) and overly brief summaries in others. Perhaps if its just the two of us we could simply divide them up. DGG ( talk ) 02:27, 27 May 2012 (UTC)

I would certainly be glad to help out. I looked through some of them and your right theres definately some work to be done. I also noticed there seemed to be some that weren't tagged yet. I was also wondering if you think it would be ok if I did a couple things.

1. I would like to add the project to the Joint projects list of WPUS. The articles are already covered by both projects so it might help them a little and slightly increase the visibility of the NIH project.
2. I would like to expand the title on the template to spell out Institutes of Health. Of course I would leave the existing one as a redirect. I have had a couple folks ask me what it meant already (along with WikiProject SIA and AAA) so it might help a little.
3. There are several articles that aren't tagged yet that I would like to add to the project if you think that's ok. Kumioko (talk) 02:39, 27 May 2012 (UTC)

seems reasonable--just go ahead. I will look at some of the more extensive articles and do some trimming. (and some splitting--they include the bios of the Directors of the various institutes, but these people are sufficiently notable that they should be covered separately). I suggest you copy this discussion onto the talk p. of the project. I appreciate it very much that you're getting this re-started--I confess I had entirely forgotten that I meant to work on this. DGG ( talk ) 06:05, 27 May 2012 (UTC)

I moved the template to {{WikiProject National Institutes of Health}} and updated the template example on the project page. I will add it to the WPUS Joint prokects list shortly. Kumioko (talk) 15:25, 29 May 2012 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:Donald Tsang

Greetings! You have been randomly selected to receive an invitation to participate in the request for comment on Talk:Donald Tsang. Should you wish to respond to the invitation, your contribution to this discussion will be very much appreciated! If in doubt, please see suggestions for responding. If you do not wish to receive these types of notices, please remove your name from Wikipedia:Feedback request service. — RFC bot (talk) 21:15, 28 May 2012 (UTC)

Ambassadors

Could you show me where it says ambassadors are automatically notable because. Bgwhite (talk) 07:40, 30 May 2012 (UTC)

(talk page stalker)I'll be interested in that ... I PRODded someone recently who was ambassador to several countries but didn't seem to pass WP:DIPLOMAT,which seems to say that being an ambassador per se is not enough for notability. He was unPRODded after more content was added, don't know whether it's the person you're concerned with or not (current Thai ambassador to US I seem to remember). PamD 11:54, 30 May 2012 (UTC)

Ah, found him, Chaiyong Satjipanon, and I see Bgwhite has been there recently too. PamD 12:04, 30 May 2012 (UTC)

All that is needed to remove a prod is a disagreement that it should be deleted without a community discussion. Prods are for deletions that nobody is expected to contest. The way I judge it, is that it's the highest level of the profession. If you want to go by GNG, I would not rule it out without looking for sources in the country the person is accredited to as well as that which he comes from. In the past we've made the distinction between ambassadors who are notable, and consuls, who are not usually. As always, the community will either agree with me, or not. DGG ( talk ) 16:12, 30 May 2012 (UTC)

I deProded Chaiyong Satjipanon because being the ambassador to six nations, including the United States, would appear to be notable. I also found some Thai refs.

The one I did prod was an ambassador to Uganda and was a career civil servant. I highly respect DGG's opinions and have many written down as reference. However, deProdding with the edit summary saying "Ambassadors are notable" is misleading. Ambassadors are not automatically notable, especially where the majority of ambassadors for the U.S are political appointments who donated the most to a campaign. I have no problem with stating in the edit summary that you believe this person is notable, but don't say "Ambassadors are notable" as it sounds like Wikipedia policy. Bgwhite (talk) 00:15, 31 May 2012 (UTC)

What I say in an edit summary when I deprod is the reason i deprodded. it is not intended as a statement of policy. I consider ambassadors notable; I can't say consensus would support this 100% of the time, for consensus at AfD can depend on how carefully the matter is researched & argued—and on who happens to show up. I see no reason why an ambassador to the US should be more notable than an ambassador from the US -- or indeed any pair of countries. Checking, it seems about half the US ambassadors are career civil servants; the others are political or civic or business figures who are often even more notable for their outside careers. DGG ( talk ) 00:39, 31 May 2012 (UTC)

Taxatio Ecclesiastica

Thought you might want to expand Taxatio Ecclesiastica.♦ Dr. Blofeld 11:55, 30 May 2012 (UTC)

System of Systems Integration

DGG, I noticed that System of Systems Integration (talk · contribs) (the article creator) removed the prods you put on System of Systems Integration and Network Integration Evaluation, and thought you might like to know that I bundled them together and sent them over to AFD. Dori ☾Talk ⁘ Contribs☽ 04:42, 31 May 2012 (UTC)

Yes, it will be better to discuss them together. I was perhaps too optimistic in thinking the prod would stick. New low in organizational gibberish. DGG ( talk ) 04:45, 31 May 2012 (UTC)

System of Systems Integration is cut and paste copy (down to the typo in "fi elding") of its cited source at http://www.bctmod.army.mil/SoSI/sosi.html. Possibly not copyvio as US army, but certainly plagiarism. PamD 07:21, 31 May 2012 (UTC)

certainly plagiarism, yes, but also certainly US-PD. Otherwise I would have simply speedy deleted it. I commend the US for its US-PD policy, but it does cause difficulties with material like this. Perhaps we should have a rule that copy of the official source for an organization whether or not PD & whether or not acceptable licensing permission is given is evidence of promotionalism sufficient for deletion. (As you can see, this sort of material is getting me rather frustrated.) DGG ( talk ) 07:54, 31 May 2012 (UTC)

Possible misunderstanding

To clarify, it was said by implication that this book [3] is a reliable source that mentions The Body Electric. I think this book is clearly not reliable and thus has no bearing. My comment is not about The Body Electric itself. IRWolfie- (talk) 10:02, 31 May 2012 (UTC)

The question is not whether the book is scientifically reliable; the question is whether the cite in it that the b.e. is a " time-honored classic" shows notability; reliable in this sense means editorially discriminating in some sensible manner between different books, and it does: it is one of the 2 listed. The book is independent, published by a division of Harpers and is in 300 libraries. I agree it is fringe science at best, but it's notable fringe science. DGG ( talk ) 18:08, 31 May 2012 (UTC)

Talk:List of professional sports leagues

An interesting question has been raised that you might be interested in. Since you have participated in similar discussions and arguably more experience in this particular policy question, you might have some insight that would be helpful. Dennis Brown - 2¢ © 21:49, 3 June 2012 (UTC)

Malls

Since you're in the malls wikiproject, I'd like you to weigh in here. Ten Pound Hammer • ^{(What did I screw up now?)} 11:23, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

Article Feedback Tool, Version 5

Hey all :)

Just a quick update on what we've been working on:

• The centralised feedback page is now live! Feel free to use it and all other feedback pages; there's no prohibition on playing around, dealing with the comments or letting others know about it, although the full release comes much later. Let me know if you find any bugs; we know it's a bit odd in Monobook, but that should be fixed in our deployment this week.
• On Thursday, 7th June we'll be holding an office hours session at 20:00 UTC in #wikimedia-office. We'll be discussing all the latest developments, as well as what's coming up next; hope to see you all there!
• Those of you who hand-coded feedback; I believe I contacted you all about t-shirts. If I didn't, drop me a line and I'll get it sorted out :).

Thanks! Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 22:53, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

Nomination of Akhtaboot for deletion

Hi, you have nominated Akhtaboot article for deletion. We have previously worked together on improving the article so that it won't be deleted. Can you please let me know what I have done wrong and how can I improve it? --Article123456 (talk) 07:20, 7 June 2012 (UTC)

If there are any references from 2012, please add them. Then it's up to the community to make the decision DGG ( talk ) 18:02, 7 June 2012 (UTC)

As part of Akhtaboot's expansion, it has participated in many job fairs in Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates in 2012:

• Tawdheef Abu Dhabi Job Fair - United Arab Emirates(If you look at the bottom of the page, Akhtaboot has been their online recruitment partner): http://www.tawdheef.ae/
• Al Sharjah National Career Exhibition - United Arab Emirates (If you look at the bottom of the page, Akhtaboot has been their online recruitment partner): http://www.nationalcareer.ae/
• College of Business Job Fair - Jeddah, Saudi Arabia: http://www.ameinfo.com/294402.html
• AUD job fair (please search for the word "Akhtaboot" in the article: http://www.aud.edu/student_services/career_fair.asp

Many universities also chose Akhtaboot to power the career's section of their website with Akhtaboot Microsite solution (a whitelabel of Akhtaboot.com:

• King Fahd University for Petroleum and Minerals: http://kfupm.akhtaboot.com , http://www.menafn.com/menafn/1093487940/Akhtaboot-Cares-Initiative-Partners-with-Middlesex-University-Dubai
• Middlesex University Dubai: http://mdx.akhtaboot.com
• British Uni in Dubai: http://buid.akhtaboot.com , http://www.albawaba.com/business/pr/akhtaboot-career-buid-427030

And many others, do you think the above can be included in the article and is it worthy enough?--Article123456 (talk) 13:21, 10 June 2012 (UTC)

Add these to the article, and see what people think. DGG ( talk ) 19:06, 10 June 2012 (UTC)

Pusat Tingkatan Enam Meragang

Two years ago our school relocated to a new campus. We are a government school located in Brunei (SE Asia). As the person in charge of IT and all things online at our school I temporarily created a new wiki page for our new campus - a new name and location etc. - Shortly after this it was deleted by you and the reason A7 was given. I've been a little busy lately but others have since asked me why we no longer have a wikipedia presence. I would like to complete our wiki page and maintain it as we did our old one. Please tell me what I need to do to get off the restricted list and back up and running. I cannot create a new site because our name is now held in limbo. Your help is appreciated. Our old page was [Tingkatan Enam Berakas] and our new name is [Tingkatan Enam Meragang].Cikgubrian (talk) 12:45, 7 June 2012 (UTC)

This was back in 2009. The best way to deal with this is to move the old article, update it, and give a cross reference, all of which I can do. . But I cannot do this unless I have some actual information . The article said merely "Scheduled to open in March 2009, PTEM will accommodate staff and students from Pusat Tingkatan Enam Berakas as they make way for a new secondary school to take over their campus in Lambak Kiri. As details are finalised and made available more information will be posted."

Please provide some information on the talk page of the old article. Include the web site, etc., so I can verify. You also should provide references providing substantial coverage from 3rd party independent published reliable sources, print or online, but not blogs or press releases, or material derived from press releases. Any language will do. I will deal with inserting it correctly. I gather the old pictures are no longer applicable, so you will need to upload one or two new ones with a free license. And see WP:COI and WP:OWN--anyone can edit the p., not just you. DGG ( talk ) 17:34, 7 June 2012 (UTC)

Congratulations

		100000 Edits
		Congratulations on reaching 100000 edits. You have achieved a milestone that very few editors have been able to accomplish. The Wikipedia Community thanks you for your continuing efforts. Keep up the good work!

If you like you can add this userbox to your collection.

This user has been awarded with the 100000 Edits award.

```Buster Seven Talk 13:17, 7 June 2012 (UTC)

unfortunately, not as impressive as it might seem, considering that 10 or 20% of them are just to correct my own typos. DGG ( talk ) 03:43, 9 June 2012 (UTC)

Thank you!

For cleaning up City University of Seattle! Your editing expertise is much appreciated and respected by this lowly Huggle jockey. Cheers! Jim1138 (talk) 00:12, 9 June 2012 (UTC)

I have just begun. DGG ( talk ) 03:43, 9 June 2012 (UTC)

Nicely said...

Your comments in the AfD for Orville (cat). LadyofShalott 04:40, 11 June 2012 (UTC)

thanks. DGG ( talk ) 14:14, 11 June 2012 (UTC)

• I responded there with a question that is only partly rhetorical as it's really not clear to me what you're suggesting we do to decide such matters. You seem to be proposing that we restrict comment to editors who have some specific power of discernment but what does this mean in practise? Please elaborate. Warden (talk) 15:30, 11 June 2012 (UTC)

I am undecided about that we should do in such matters in general. There can be no fixed boundaries for this, as it is not quantifiable. It has to be by the general judgment of the people who care here, which in practice gives great weight to the opposite extremes of sensationalism and snobbery. My only real concern is that we seem to have a bias to including disgusting events, and excluding political ones--by own bias is just the opposite. I'd accept the disgusting if we could get the political. I'd accept any lower level, in fact, if we could get the political. DGG ( talk ) 16:55, 11 June 2012 (UTC)

• There seem to be lots of articles about political campaigns, elections and demonstrations - what is currently excluded? I would like to see much of that content excluded or constrained as, by its nature, it tends to be too provisional. There not much point in covering a campaign in a speculative way when the eventual result will make much of the speculation worthless. The case of Orville seems different in that its nature seems quite settled and so we are able to write in a reasonably factual way. Its disgusting nature is a matter of style and taste and I fancy I could cover it in a suitably po-faced way. Note that it was I that started the article about The Great Cat Massacre. My tongue was firmly in my cheek but it still seems good to include such topics. Warden (talk) 09:51, 12 June 2012 (UTC)

• I have always admired your great skill with these topics. People will always disagree about individual cases. To me, the GCM has clear very high notability because of the book, without any irony. I differentiate between history and current gossip. As for politics, tho it is not an exact analogy, I am thinking about the quite successful campaigns to remove articles related to Gitmo, and also articles about small splinter parties, left and right--not of trivial events in political campaigns, where I more or less agree with you about the tendency for overemphasis. DGG ( talk ) 23:56, 12 June 2012 (UTC)

Notification of nomination for deletion of Night flight in the UK

This is to inform you that this article has been nominated for deletion at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Night flight in the UK. - Ahunt (talk) 23:01, 11 June 2012 (UTC)

Hundred Years' War Articles (four)

These articles have either NO references or very few. Much has gone completely unreferenced for YEARS. It looks like pure copyvio almost throughout the articles. Though tags have been placed on them, the tags are simply updated so they do not look as if the articles have been unreference for as long. Attempts to change material and/or add references based on citable material is vehemently fought by a few who, unfortunately do not use that same energy to comply with the guidelines. The template will, on a particular day have England the victor, on another, will have France the victor. Would you please look at these four articles? They need, I think, your unique expertise. Thank you. Hundred Years' War, Hundred Years' War (1337–1360), Hundred Years' War (1369–1389), Hundred Years' War (1415–1453).Mugginsx (talk) 16:24, 14 June 2012 (UTC)

I am making some comments on the general article. My interpretation of the writing is that if the material was plagiarized, it was plagiarized from some rather dull textbooks, and probably outdated ones at that. DGG ( talk ) 18:21, 14 June 2012 (UTC)

Thank you for commenting there. I did want to correct the idea that I was advocating using old sources and chronicles exclusively. I am well aware of the problems inherent in using those sources. I do think they should be mentioned within the format you recommended as does Norman F. Cantor, Pulitzer Prize winner Barbara Tuchman and other well known authors. The fact is that the editors there have made absolutely no effort for years to use in-line citations and that is required on En-Wikipedia. Because I was and am presently committed to other articles and cannot spend the time on the Hundred Years War articles at this time, I thought perhaps I would give a suggestion for those resources on-line with the presumption that they knew what to do with them and how to use them. Another (minor) thing I wanted to correct was that I am a woman editor. Thankyou again. Mugginsx (talk) 11:25, 15 June 2012 (UTC)

commented again there. DGG ( talk ) 18:32, 15 June 2012 (UTC)

Assistance with Bloomberg Law

Hi-there. Recently, I've been working to improve the Bloomberg Law article which currently lacks any citation or substantial information. I do some work for Bloomberg and don't want my conflict of interest to interfere with Wiki guidelines, so I have been in talks with Bearian about a draft of the article I proposed. Unfortunately, he doesn't have the bandwidth at this time to help implement that changes and recommended I talk with you. Would you mind taking a look and if seen as appropriate, implement the changes into the current article? My draft can be found here. I truly appreciate your help! --RivBitz (talk) 18:01, 14 June 2012 (UTC)

Glad you asked. Your article is an improvement, though I would have used more of the existing comment and references. But it is promotional. You should replace most of the repeated mentions of the name with a phrase such as "the service' or "it". You use too much PR jargon, such as "real-time" and "all-inclusive predictable pricing model" You have an uncited, though certainly plausible, opinion about the motives of the company-- And it is not reasonable to end with a sentence praising the firm. You might in fact want to look for other opinions on that sponsorship--I would be surprised if someone didn't consider it a potential threat to a free resource, by making it dependent upon a commercial competitor. .

In the other direction, like the earlier article, it is insufficiently detailed. The service consists of a complex of components that needs fuller description--such as geographic and chronological scope. There is no information about financial results, or market share or penetrance. And it is usual to give some information about costs, though not of course detailed pricing. Is it in fact affordable for solo attorneys? Is it found in law schools? Are there academic rates? Is it intended ' exclusively for "lawyers and legal professionals." I am aware that comp-anies often consider some of this proprietary information, but the expectation of an encyclopedia is that it will provide whatever can be publicly sourced, and such things are probably mentioned in the articles about it. DGG ( talk ) 18:42, 14 June 2012 (UTC)

Hi there, I've taken some time to work through the edits you gave me to the draft of Bloomberg Law. I tried to implement them all as you prescribed, but much of the proprietary information is not available through public source, so I was not able to add it. If you or anyone is able to find information to elaborate on these details such as academic rates, pricing details in public sources, I'd be happy to see them added. Let me know what you think of the new draft. Again, I really appreciate your help. User:RivBitz/Bloomberg_Law_Sandbox --RivBitz (talk) 19:01, 6 July 2012 (UTC)

Hi. Was just checking in to see if you had a chance to read over the new version of the draft I shared. Thanks!--RivBitz (talk) 18:30, 3 August 2012 (UTC)

Question about Wikimania Takes Manhattan

Hi DGG! Sorry if you're not the right guy to talk to, but you're one of only two–three people from the list of organizers that I recognized. I asked a question here but it doesn't seem like the page is updated often by organizers, but an answer would be great. Thanks in advance, Ynhockey <sup>(Talk)</sup> 00:49, 15 June 2012 (UTC)

the person to ask is User:Pharos. But as I understand it, the Wiki World's Fair on July 7th will be the principal event, as many people apparently will be there for that day only. DGG ( talk ) 01:12, 15 June 2012 (UTC)

Journal titles

Hi, I got a question about journal titles for Russian journals that don't have an English edition (or an "official" English title on their homepage or cover or anything like that). I'm not really sure how to answer this and your input would be appreciated. The editor (Solus Ipse) had translated the titles themselves and I somehow think that this may not be the right way to go. Thanks! --Guillaume2303 (talk) 07:49, 17 June 2012 (UTC)

There's a general rule here: if there is no common english title for a subject we use the one in the language of the subject. But in this case there I see there in fact is an English title. DGG ( talk ) 18:20, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

Authority Control Integration

Hi, I've been researching the intersection of Wikipedia and Authority Control, and have just recently made a Village Pump Proposal to create a bot to expand the usage of a template. I've identified you as someone in the sphere of interest to this project and would appreciate your input at the Village Pump. Thanks, Maximiliankleinoclc (talk) 18:38, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

commented at User talk:Maximiliankleinoclc/Authority control integration DGG ( talk ) 19:15, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

Mail

Hi DGG

Not sure if you saw it, but I sent you an email. Spartaz <sup>Humbug!</sup> 15:20, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

AFT5 release coming up - help us design a banner!

Hey all :). First-off, thanks to everyone for all their help so far; we're coming up to a much wider deployment :). Starting at the end of this month, and scaling up until 3 July, AFT5 will begin appearing on 10 percent of articles. For this release we plan on sending out a CentralNotice that every editor will see - and for this, we need your help :). We've got plans, we know how long it's going to run for, where it's going to run...but not what it says. If you've got ideas for banners, give this page a read and submit your suggestion! Many thanks, Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 16:28, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

curiously enough, and rather to my surprise, at the last training session we held in NYC (for a group of junior college instructors), many of the participants were of the opinion that the presence of the article feedback request decreased the confidence they felt in the quality of Wikipedia. I am however not sure of which version they had in mind. DGG ( talk ) 00:04, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

CYGNSS

Hi DGG,

Thank you for reviewing my recent article stub with Nouniquenames. I've been trying to understand what the difference is between 3rd party coverage, and press releases. Could you point me to the Wikipedia guideline (if one exists) that explains this?

Thanks, DavidDavidch12 (talk) 02:35, 22 June 2012 (UTC)

I provided about 7 sources over on Noun's Talk page. Looks like most of them just came out over the last couple days. User:King4057 13:26, 22 June 2012 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) WP:RS is the guideline on reliable sources. That is likely the best place to start. Dennis Brown - 2¢ © 20:50, 24 June 2012 (UTC)

Talk:Hundred Years' War

I have answered you on Talk:Hundred Years' War. Mugginsx (talk) 18:16, 22 June 2012 (UTC)

Regarding the Stevens Institute of Technology

Was this ever completed? Silverseren<sup>C</sup> 21:20, 22 June 2012 (UTC)

It will be this weekend. I know I've said it before two or three times, but I'm feeling embarrassed enough to actually do it, instead of trying to learn something I haven't done before (last week, the new version of the New Pages list, this week, AfC.) DGG ( talk ) 21:28, 22 June 2012 (UTC)

Hey, i've been procrastinating plenty myself. How long has it been since I helped out at PAIDHELP? I spent yesterday working on Man With A Mission and trying to decipher horribly machine translated Japanese news sources. So, yeah. But i've pledged to work through the PAIDHELP page today and get everything done. Silverseren<sup>C</sup> 21:43, 22 June 2012 (UTC)

Neocleous's introduction to Cyprus law

Do you think this can be salvaged? The article is written by an SPA and is horribly spammy, but that could be fixed if the book is notable. Worldcat shows only one library holding, but Dennis Campbell, Introduction to Cyprus Law ISBN 9783902046215, which is presumably the "widely acclaimed" first edition referred to, is in 33 libraries. How would you assess it against WP:BK? JohnCD (talk) 17:01, 23 June 2012 (UTC)

For a book on the law system of a very small European nation, I would not expect to find much in WorldCat. And it fact, it seems the only comprehensive substantial English language book on the general subject listed there. Books dealing with particular branches, have 19, 6, 2, and 1 copies in WorldCat DGG ( talk ) 17:21, 23 June 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for your help

DGG, thanks for your help on the McKinsey & Company page. I laughed in the talk page when I read your comment, " "a 1993 Fortune profile" -- surely there's something more recent. " -- in fact the firm goes to great lengths indeed to hide compensation, so these figures and citations had to be carefully sleuthed. :) My[2011] (talk) | 20:04, 23 June 2012 (UTC)

I sort of realized that, but someone should have commented in print on this in the last 20 years. I have seen similar situations here quite dificult to handle, because we can not editorially comment. If one knows that an article is well written and researched, missing information is significant; but for a WP article neither part of that can be assumed. DGG ( talk ) 21:40, 24 June 2012 (UTC)

Personal life of Jennifer Lopez

Hey, could you do me a favor? Most of the information on Personal life of Jennifer Lopez, which was deleted a couple of days ago, was not present on the main article and I would like to restore it and userfy it into my userspace. Could you do that for me? I have no intentions in creating the article again, I just think some useful information may be put back into the main article. I'd really appreciate the help. Thanks. —Hahc21 03:53, 24 June 2012 (UTC)

It would be better if you asked BWilkins first--I suggest you tell him that you will keep it only for a week or two, and will get consensus for any additions. DGG ( talk ) 20:09, 24 June 2012 (UTC)

Double AfD closures

Greetings DGG. Why are the following AfDs closed twice? [4][5][6]? Regards. – Kosm1fent 07:58, 24 June 2012 (UTC)

apparently I was working too late at night. I've removed my closes as redundant--and I note that I agreed completely with the other admin. DGG ( talk ) 17:43, 25 June 2012 (UTC)

Thanks! :) – Kosm1fent 17:47, 25 June 2012 (UTC)

Indexing of surnames beginning with "Mac" or "Mc"

Hi DGG, if you don't mind putting your librarian's hat on for a few minutes, I would welcome your thoughts at User talk:BrownHairedGirl#Mac.2FMc_curiosity, on the indexing of surnames beginning with "Mac" or "Mc". --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 15:26, 25 June 2012 (UTC)

Your comment at WT:RFA

I've been piled up at work, and just now catching up on an excellent discussion at WT:RFA – far better than the usual "the sky is falling, what are we to do".

I did want to quibble with one observation you made; I'll do it here because no one seems to expand on your thought, so I don't see much need to insert it into the thread. Plus I'll use it as a point of departure to make another point, which I may add to the thread, after I've finished reading it.

You remarked, "I typically decline about 1/3 of the Speedy deletions I see, but some admins close essentially everything, Either I or they must be doing it wrong." I say, "not necessarily". To make an extreme example, suppose there are 1000 xSDs, with 100 of them badly tagged. If some new admins poke around, and delete 700 "easy" ones, that leaves 300 left of which 1/3 ought to be declined. So it is possible both can be right. Now, I'm not saying that 100% closers are always right, but we'd have to check some of the close lists to be sure. Which brings me to my pother point. When I was a new admin, I half expected someone would be assigned to follow me around for some time, just to make sure I was understanding the rules correctly. Either that didn't happen, or they were very, very quiet. (I'm even more surprised it isn't SOP at OTRS, but that’s a different issue.) I think we should have a more formal review system for new admins. I know there's the ability to check with someone else, but I'd like to see something more formal.

Having made my point, I'm not sure it belongs on the thread at this time, because my suggestion isn't going to help the problems that are being discussed at the moment, so maybe I'll think some more on it, and formalize a proposal later. Maybe after getting some thoughts from people like you.--SPhilbrick(Talk) 22:26, 25 June 2012 (UTC)

You are quite correct--I was oversimplifying. Sensible new admins do only the ones that are totally obvious while they are starting--it must be very discouraging to have people revert your first admin actions, and I've seen that happen. And it is true that I will make a point of checking speedy nominations others have thought it wise to pass by, and AfDs that people don't seem to want to close; I know some others do just the same, which is how we keep long lags from developing. But I had in mind also a few long term admins who actually do decide almost all equivocal cases as delete. To expand on what you have said , in a direction of my own,

I have occasionally checked a new admins deletions if I think from the RfA there is likely to be some problems, and I suppose others do similarly. But I do not know if any people systematically reviews the admin logs the way people do new pages--if anyone does, I've noticed no sign of it. The only thing I've seen checked systematically is the very long-standing page protections. It might be a good thing to do. The AfD closes are very visible, the prods have been checked by several people before they get to the top of the list, but speedies and blocks and unblocka and protections and unprotections don't get looked at, unless someone suspects a problem. I have sometimes thought of doing it, but I have always stopped, because, to be frank about it, I don't want to see the errors. I can't pass over a clear error I do see, and I am fully aware that some admins use the tools beyond the proper limits. Some of these are my friends, & I can mention it to them from time to time quietly. But for obvious reasons most of the ones I would disagree with are by people I often disagree with, with whom relations are often not all that friendly. I don't want to spend all my time quarreling and navigating sticky situations; though I may get the errors corrected, it is not likely to improve mutual relations. (I am also aware that I too make both errors and borderline interpretations, & I suppose I even sometimes interpret things the way I would like them to be, & if I have any enemies here, I do not really want to encourage them to audit me with the utmost possible rigidity. I expect I could be able to very well support my interpretations, but as Samuel Johnson put it, nobody however conscious of their innocence wants to every day have to defend themselves on a capital charge before a jury.

When I started here, I wondered how a system with a thousand equally powerful admins who could all revert each other could possibly exist. I soon learnt the subtleties of wheel warring--there were some major arb com cases on it during my first year here which pretty much defined the limits. But more important, I also learned that even the more quarrelsome spirits here understood the virtues of mutual forbearance--and that even the most self-sufficient people do not really want to look publicly foolish. Our balance is I think over-inclined to protecting the guilty if they are popular enough, but it is not as bad as it could be, or as it often is in human societies. DGG ( talk ) 03:25, 26 June 2012 (UTC)

I smiled at your closing comment. I had the same, thought, although for the project as a whole, rather than just the admin function. I'm more recent to the project because, when I first heard about it, a few years before actually joining, I thought about the model and decided it couldn't possibly work. Oddly, I still feel that way, intellectually. If there were no such thing as Wikipedia, and I heard a proposal to create, my instinct is that it will fail miserably. I actually can't quite put my finger on why it hasn't failed.SPhilbrick(Talk) 12:52, 26 June 2012 (UTC)

User talk:Dennis Brown/CSD

I know you didn't think it was necessary, but I did agree to it and will comply fully. In one month, I will be at 3 months and will have fulfilled my obligation, assuming my own criteria is met, that two admins sign off at that time (I would ask you and Boing! since you've been involved.) I have Sections 4, 5 and 6 ready to review, which should be easy and fast to do in the different format, where I give the opinion, then later on, I give the actual result below it. Only a cursory comment is required on each section if there aren't any errors noted. This assumes you have a little time (Boing has been tied). If you don't have the time, that is fine as well as this is a lower priority than your regular rounds, to be sure. It has been a burden, but a promise is a promise. Dennis Brown - 2¢ © 15:48, 27 June 2012 (UTC)

done. DGG ( talk ) 00:16, 28 June 2012 (UTC)

I noticed your two notes. I've left responses there. Dennis Brown - 2¢ © 02:01, 28 June 2012 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Level one user warnings

You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Level one user warnings. (This invitation sent because you signed up as a member of WP:UWTEST) Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 18:19, 27 June 2012 (UTC)Template:Z48 Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 18:19, 27 June 2012 (UTC)

authority control

• Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Authority Control Integration

I'm surprised that you didn't comment. Uncle G (talk) 00:32, 29 June 2012 (UTC)

• • I had done so, at Wikipedia talk:Authority control integration proposal. I didn't think I was needed beyond that, though I did just now add my name at the just-started RfC, Wikipedia:Authority control integration proposal/RFC DGG ( talk ) 00:42, 29 June 2012 (UTC)

Wikimedia New York City Annual Meeting Sat Jun 30

Join us at Jefferson Market Library on Saturday starting at 1pm for our annual meeting and elections, details at Wikipedia:Meetup/NYC!--Pharos (talk) 17:27, 29 June 2012 (UTC)

CSD film

I understand a film can not qualify for CSD, or a book or a school. It seems this area is grey because it is not about a film but instead the concept of a film. I don't see what the author can do in seven days that will change the fact the film is said to be scheduled for release in 2014. It seems a hoax could survive as long as the prankster fabled it around a book or a film, with a future release date no less. IMO StringdaBrokeda (talk) 23:02, 29 June 2012 (UTC)

Even more than a film not qualifying for CSD, a concept for a film, or a concept of any sort, does not qualify for CSD--it's much too uncertain a thing to be unquestionable.. Nor does it qualify for an undoubted hoax, because an undoubted hoax is something that can be seen to be a hoax on the face of it. There have been enough disputes over the application of NOT CRYSTAL to keep that criterion out of CSD territory. If you really want to argue for this, draw up a proposal for WT:CSD, but I think you will find it difficult to word one that will unambiguously apply and not give false positives. And let's avoid WP:BEANS. I don't see that we need worry that something like this would survive, because 7 days will get rid of it. DGG ( talk ) 23:16, 29 June 2012 (UTC)

No I tend to agree with the clarification given. I simply needed the additional perspective. Thank you. StringdaBrokeda (talk) 23:34, 29 June 2012 (UTC)

User talk:Materialscientist#Impact factors and infoboxes

David, could you perhaps give your opinion on this issue? Thanks! --Guillaume2303 (talk) 09:58, 29 June 2012 (UTC)

• I moved this down, perhaps you didn't see it... :-) --Guillaume2303 (talk) 07:52, 1 July 2012 (UTC)
  • I have now commented. DGG ( talk ) 16:59, 1 July 2012 (UTC)
    • Thanks!! --Guillaume2303 (talk) 20:36, 1 July 2012 (UTC)

Q. E. the journal

Well here it is [7]]. Originally, I was intereted in the topic. Then I discovered that this journal is an English version of a Russian journal. I think journals like this are very intereting because there is a collaboration between publishers operating in different countries. In this case it is a collaboration between U.S., U.K., and Russian publishers. I'd say it is obviously an effort to disseminate the science available in a given country. In this case of course it is Russian science. But more than that it seems that maybe the science community in Russia is a close-knit community. For example, the editor in chief hails from the Lebedev Physics Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The Russian publisher is Turpion, a notable publisher in the science disciplines. In addition, this particular journal was founded by a Russian (Soviet) Nobel Prize laureate about 40 years ago. Also, two authors of the journal Physics Uspekhi (published by Turpion) are 2010 Nobel Prize winners (see web page] ---- Steve Quinn (talk) 03:33, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

I don't think it could really be considered the English edition of the Russian journal, but rather the English translation' of the Russian journal. The entire responsibility for scientific content is in the hands of the Russian editorial board. Turpion is not a Russian company, but a UK company [8] formed in order to provide translated versions of Russian journals, or, more exactly,continue the English translations of Russian journals earlier translated by a number of different enterprises, commercial and non-commercial. These translations mostly began at the end of the 1950s and the early 60s (after Sputnik), when it was realized that Russian-language science in many fields in the physical sciences was fully competitive with science outside the USSR (and in some fields of applied mathematics arguably in advance), and the Soviet government had a policy of requiring all or most publications to be in Russian. They were of very great importance in the 60s, and published both by scientific societies, such as the AIP , and specialized branches of commercial publishers such as Consultants Bureau, I think independent at first but later an imprint of Plenum. Their importance gradually declined, both because it became more acceptable to publish in English and because the collapse of the USSR greatly impaired the financial condition of Russian science , but many are still published and in some fields still quite important.

I think the entry must be the Russian title--as with Physics Uspeki which is actually and correctly a redirect to Uspekhi Fizicheskikh Nauk, and the article should cover both the Russian original and the translation. DGG ( talk ) 20:11, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

Hello

Hi, DGG. I was just wondering if you ever saw this. It's from June 1st, and it's been over a month, so I thought I'd check up on it. =) - Zhou Yu (talk) 02:31, 9 July 2012 (UTC)

CityU of Seattle

Hi DGG, thank you for your message on my page. Sorry that I have corrected the article about CityU befor I've read your advice. I appreciate that you insist on beeing neutral in the tone of an article. But when the Swiss authorities have accused the headmaster of the CityU of fraud than I am not sure how you could say what happened without using the appropriate expressions, in this case "allegations" and "fraud". The article is (as I have written) not about a subsidiary. So for a reader it is of minor interest to read something about the Swiss branch, but if you want to inform you about the reputation of something or someone, than it's quite intersting to read about allegations of fraud. And I have of course read the Wikipedia policies about neutrality. They say that while neutral terms are generally preferable, this must be balanced against clarity. And ok, I don't think that the expression "allegations of fraud" is per se not neutral, but even if that should be the case and the term is not neutral, in my opinion it's the most clear description of what happened. This is, not just a university program that became unstable.Please tell me what you think about that, kind regards, saintcyr. PS: I think it doesn't matter whether someone has a personal involvement with the issue he's describing as long as his point of view is candid and based on facts. I think some of the best articles here are written by people with a personal involvement with the issue they are describing. But though you seem to think otherwise I can assure you I have no personal involvement in the CityU. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Saintcyr1 (talk • contribs) 22:51, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

The matter must be included, but it can be done a little more subtly than you did it, as I shall demonstrate there. Among the techniques for doing this is use the word once in the article as a quotation; it need not be repeated. (And we'd need the quote not just in English translation, but in the original language used.) And it certainly must not be used in the section heading.: we do not make moral judgements, and through things are reported as there are, summaries must ber as absolutely neutral as possible. that goes for edit summaries also: loaded words should never be used there. And we consider the very word "allegations" to be non-neutral. And the entire section should be summarized, to avoid disproportionate weight. If negative information is reported disproportionately or loaded words used more than necessary, it gives the impression of holding a grudge, not of NPOV writing. It is my responsibility to prevent anyone from using Wikipedia for such a purpose, just as it is to prevent it being used to cover-up serious matters. DGG ( talk ) 23:09, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

Thank you for clarifying your point of view, but I still disagree with you on that. So I have opened a discussion on the matter on the CityU talk page. Saintcyr1 (talk —Preceding undated comment added 04:46, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

DGG's a tenured and well-respected administrator with a reputation for even-handedness and an excellent grasp of our policies. You would save everyone's time if you just took his advice on how to present such a controversy without disputing it. Jclemens (talk) 05:12, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

I've commenting further, on the article talk p., Talk:City University of Seattle. I've tried to explain the standard WP policy, and also my general approach to this particular type of problems. DGG ( talk ) 18:39, 12 July 2012 (UTC)

"What DGG says"

David, that was great. Thanks! Drmies (talk) 20:03, 14 July 2012 (UTC)

An academic

• Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons/Noticeboard#Oktay Sinanoğlu
• Oktay Sinanoğlu (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

For you and your talk page watchers. Uncle G (talk) 11:23, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

• I can & will deal with this in the usual way, by writing a straightforward bio. I apologize for not getting to this earlier, but I still chasing all the threads here after being at Wikimania. Attendance there, as at any conference, inhibits for a short while the actual work at hand. It does, however, clarify many general matters. DGG ( talk ) 01:18, 20 July 2012 (UTC)
  • Having more than one sentence would be good, and my offer on the noticeboard extends to your talk page stalkers too. [...] Uncle G (talk) 09:46, 20 July 2012 (UTC)
    • Just to clarify things, I intend to work on the article page, just as I have already corrected an error there. If you regard this as wrong, tell me, and I'll work on other topics. . I have never done article work on talk pages or told others to--I know it has become a frequent practice, but to me the spirit of Wikipedia is live editing. Those who can not be trusted to edit live should not be editing at all. DGG ( talk ) 15:45, 20 July 2012 (UTC)
      • I'm telling them that they aren't excluded if they want to help. Your talk page watchers cannot necessarily edit through full protection as you did. ☺ Uncle G (talk) 16:11, 20 July 2012 (UTC)
        • My misunderstanding. If nobody gets to it before me, I'll see what I can do. (Personally, some of the people you only warned I would have blocked, but it does no harm to wait until they continue. Another question: what's your opinion on revdel for many(most) of the existing edits? DGG ( talk ) 19:40, 20 July 2012 (UTC)
          • There are less problematic revisions in the history. This one may possibly have factual errors, but it isn't an attack piece. However, the very next edit is an editor in Istanbul reverting to a preferred version undoing two years' worth of edits including copyediting for correct English and insertion of source citations. As bobrayner noted on the BLP noticeboard, some of the problems in this article go back all of the way to the first revision. If you're willing to start from scratch, with none of the prior content used, as I suspect you are, I am happy to revision delete the whole history up to the 7 word stub under criterion #2 and exchange full protection for blocking of individuals. Let me know if the Istanbul IP addresses or Fightingagainstlies start edit warring with bad biographical content again. Uncle G (talk) 11:06, 21 July 2012 (UTC)

Graduate Library School, University of Chicago, 1928-1989.

Hi David, this article could use some help from you. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 17:32, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

It will get it, but not immediately. DGG ( talk ) 01:19, 20 July 2012 (UTC)

WP:CP question

Hi, I didn't get a chance to say hello at Wikimania, but I did attend your interesting talk.

However, I'm writing about a different issue; I'm trying to help clean up WP:CP. I see Richard F. Edlich is listed, as a result of an edit you made in May. However, you didn't identify the possible source. I ran it through User:CorenSearchBot/manual, which isn't definitive, but it passed. I agree with you that the article needs cleanup, but at the moment, I'm narrowly focused on copyvio issues, so wondering if you recall which section troubled you, so I could zero in on it.--SPhilbrick(Talk) 14:15, 21 July 2012 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) Well for starters, see [9]. I suspect this is one of those annoying cases, where bits are lifted from a variety of sources. This may also be a likely candidate for other bits, but it's behind a pay wall. Voceditenore (talk) 16:03, 21 July 2012 (UTC)

I'm not yet seeing it. A Duplication Detector for the article, and the book turns up a couple four word phrases:

• cornstarch on medical gloves
• food and drug administration

but nothing longer. The word "potentiated " jumped out at me, but it isn't in the book. Maybe it is in the article behind the paywall. I'll see if I can get someone to check.--SPhilbrick(Talk) 18:57, 21 July 2012 (UTC)

As the result of talks with a number of paid editors at Wikimania, and exchanges of views with others working on the problem of promotionalism, I am increasingly paying attention to promotional editing. The entire article is written in the style of a press release, and that sort of thing is almost always copied or closely paraphrased from previous press releases. If not copyvio it needs almost as much rewriting as if it were, but finding copyvio is the convenient shortcut to deal with articles like this. Checking carefully the site of the university & affiliated organizations is a the way I usually go about it: much is often in non-googleable internal pages. But I think he is certainly notable, so it's worth some effort. I probably should have done it myself, but there is so much that the work needs to be distributed, What particularly struck me was such hyped phrases as "first physician to do gastroscopy at the University of Minnesota Hospitals." -- what would be notable, of course, would be "first physician to do gastroscopy" in the US. Or a instance where he was not the writer of the petition, but one of the 12 to sign a joint petition. The claims may be valid, or they may exaggerations. Such is the manner of press releases for physicians. The key reference, (1) refers to many of these as being collaborative efforts. I'll follow it up.

There's an interesting paradox. The easiest way for someone to get a good article is to have someone write a poor one, and have us fix it. DGG ( talk ) 19:48, 21 July 2012 (UTC)

  DGG ( talk ) 19:48, 21 July 2012 (UTC)

I'm officially discouraged; no substantial overlap in may of the sources, but a fair amount with the one Voceditenore identified. And I agree with your paradox, one of my pet peeves is an editor who starts a piece of crap, then expects others to clean it up.--SPhilbrick(Talk) 20:01, 21 July 2012 (UTC)

What I am especially concerned by , are the paid editors who start a piece of crap which is nonetheless presumably the best they can do for the money and with their usually very limited experience, and then we volunteers rescue it. Especially if we entirely rewrite, they have been paid for bad work , but have caused us to do good unpaid work, often on something that might be technically notable , but would not otherwise have been covered. The only reason I am willing to work extensively on this is that he is quite notable, & we ought to cover him.

What you have found demonstrates the limit of the comparison approach to copyvio. I may not search further either--it needs so much rewriting that any copyvio will be removed in the process. I may get to it in the coming week. DGG ( talk ) 20:56, 21 July 2012 (UTC)

Deletion review response thank you / Tutoring newbies on how to do online research

I left a thank you for your response — and unrelated question(s) — here. Another thing that maybe we agree on is the importance of knowing how to do research. I really like Wikipedia's Search Engine usage guidelines and tutorial, and have tried to link to them from Wikipedia:Article titles — because I think it's important to research usage when deciding the best article title, best category title, or the most appropriate term to use — but my attempts to link to this have been repeatedly reverted by people who think they own anything related to the MoS. Likewise, for the same reason, I have been unable to add links from Wikipedia:Article titles to the regional MoS guides. The article on category naming conventions also does not explain how to search existing categories or link to the above article on how to use search engines to research the best category title, either. Maybe you have some advice or ideas on this? LittleBen (talk) 13:51, 22 July 2012 (UTC)

I discovered in my first year here that there were some parts of Wikipedia where despite my interest in the subject, for one or another reason I was unlikely to be very effective. Prominent among these were the MOS and categorization. I am a little concerned with article titles, and in that field, fundamentally I disagree with you -- I think the best article title should be the clearest and fairest, and counting ghits or the equivalent is usually irrelevant. And to the extent I understand categorization debates the problem there is often finding a sufficiently clear wording to encompass the desired set of article. I think the MOS is a little more rational than it was 4 years ago; if I were doing it, I'd limit to to pure matters of style, which does not include choice between article titles, just such matters as whether to use singular or plurals. But in questions like this , your opinion is as valid as mine, and there is no point in arguing the issue here--neither of us is "right". DGG ( talk ) 23:56, 22 July 2012 (UTC)

My main question was aimed at getting your opinion on "Tutoring newbies on how to do online research". You don't seem to have answered this, but maybe this is something that Kudpung is more interested in than you are. My comment on article titles was related to this: there seem to be many people creating new articles without adequately researching if there is an existing article on the subject already. Part of the problem is that Wikipedia Search, by default, only shows if there is an article title that is an exact match to the search term; it does not show if there is a category that matches the search term. If it did, it would be far easier to find related material. It is difficult to work out how to search categories. Terminology (e.g. article titles and category titles) is often inconsistent for this reason. Just one example: There are Web browser engine and List of web browser engines articles, but there are nine Comparison of layout engines (XXX) articles, and the category is Category:Layout engines. I don't understand your reference to counting ghits, and don't understand how my viewpoint disagrees with yours. LittleBen (talk) 02:25, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

Incidentally, I got another response on the Deletion review thread that pointed me to a discussion here that may interest you. LittleBen (talk) 02:23, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

I apologize for not covering everything. The WP search function is not the problem; if it does not find an article, it suggests searching for the term. Perhaps the page could be revised to suggest that first, rather than as an alternative to making an article. I think there has been some previous debate on whether it should initially search for the term rather than the article. I also have seen it said that by the standards of other search engines, it could use some sophistication. About 1/3 of people come here from Google etc., and though those search engines rank article titles at the top, they also include articles with the term anywhere. But the Google search engine is, deliberately, getting dumber and dumber; it is no longer possible to use the "+" character as an intersection, and Google Scholar has removed the limit to subject field possibility in advanced search.

Many apparently duplicate articles are created deliberately as a POV fork, others in the mistaken belief that WP includes essays on very specific term-paper type topics. Many are simply naive, as when someone submits a two sentence article on something where we have extensive coverage.

I think teaching people to search properly is a part of research, but the main result of its failure is not the duplicate articles, but the unreferenced articles. Way back when Google was new and exciting, we librarians used to impress the students by showing we could use it more effectively than they could. (The secret is partially cleverness and experience in selecting search terms, but mainly just persistence--something like 90% of users stop at the first page of results--I will if necessary scan through even a few thousand. I have found that people learn by experience better than didactic instruction, provided they are alert enough to pay attention to what experience shows them. Certainly we should do a better job teaching beginners, but the way I think works best is to show them one at a time how to do better. A person learns best when one individual person shows them how to fix their errors and misconceptions, and this is not done by templates. Besides Kudpung & myself, very few NPPatrollers or even admins take the trouble and patience. It's too much for a few people--we need everyone who is able to do it. We progress not by discussing how to work, but by working. DGG ( talk ) 03:38, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

I agree that we progress not by discussing how to work, but by working. You seem to be better at that (more productive) than I am ;-) But sometimes it's more scalable if we offer others the opportunity of learning how to do the work (not specifically thinking of Tom Sawyer ;-). Thanks and best regards. LittleBen (talk) 04:23, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

Thanks

I really appreciate your help and kind words about the edits going on at Bibi Aisha. I'd just gotten to that page on a Wikipedia ramble and knew it couldn't stand as it was. Anyway, it has been YEARS since I got involved in anything with Wikipedia in depth. You taking the time to give me an "atta girl/boy" has pushed me to get back at it under my actual username. Thanks so much. 98.94.58.75 (talk) 02:55, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

AFT5 newsletter

Hey again all :). So, some big news, some small news, some good news, some bad news!

On the "big news" front; we've now deployed AFT5 on to 10 percent of articles, This is pretty awesome :). On the "bad news", however, it looks like we're having to stop at 10 percent until around September - there are scaling issues that make it dangerous to deploy wider. Happily, our awesome features engineering team is looking into them as we speak, and I'm optimistic that the issues will be resolved.

For both "small" and "good" news; we've got another office hours session. This one is tomorrow, at 22:00 UTC in #wikimedia-office <sup>connect</sup> - I appreciate it's a bit late for Europeans, but I wanted to juggle it so US east coasters could attend if they wanted :). Hope to see you all there!

FYI

[10] As suggested. :) I think our next step is making sure that the code is correct, and then we can start implementing. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 17:48, 26 July 2012 (UTC)

Agreed. It was suggested by several people at Wikimania that we quickly make similar changes in level 4 and 4im, and then consider whether to combine levels--that part would need an rfc. The easiest way to go now would probably be to go to three levels, by combining 2/3 , to avoid having to rewrite the level 1 warnings. DGG ( talk ) 21:54, 26 July 2012 (UTC)

COI+ certification proposal

I've thought of an idea that might break our current logjam with paid editing. I'd love your sincere feedback and opinion.

• WP:COI certification

Feel free to circulate this to anyone you think should know about it, but please recognize that it hasn't agreed upon by either PR organizations or WikiProjects or the wider community. It's also just a draft, so any/many changes can still be made. Thanks and cheers, Ocaasi EdwardsBot (talk) 15:00, 28 July 2012 (UTC)

I've commented there. I disagree with the key part of the approach. All editors should edit directly and take responsibility for their edits. Otherwise, the certification idea has some possibilities. DGG ( talk ) 19:22, 28 July 2012 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Original Barnstar
	Thank you for your help with the Stevens Institute of Technology article. Another editor came in at the end when you get tied up, but your feedback throughout was critical to the structuring of the page. I learned a lot about proper writing and editing from your feedback, and I really appreciate your help and guidance. QueenCity11 (talk) 21:15, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Defender of the Wiki Barnstar
	For your ongoing work at deleting spam and resumes. Bearian (talk) 18:57, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Civility Barnstar
	For your comments at Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/Incidents#User:Geo_Swan_and_AfDs. Bearian (talk) 00:20, 20 August 2012 (UTC)

City University of Seattle

This article has come up at OTRS and I'm trying to get a handle on its current state. I see that some sourced negative statements were removed (diff) and then some unsourced positive statements too. (diff). I trust that this article has gotten the attention it needed and is under watchful eyes, but could you help me to understand why it was appropriate to remove all of the negative content as well? I briefly looked at the [German] sources and 3 of them looked initially ok while 3 clearly did not. Just looking for a little guidance if you get a minute. Cheers! Ocaasi <sup>t | c</sup> 23:05, 20 August 2012 (UTC)

I've neglected following up this one. I'll email you about it in a few minutes, as some of it is indeed on OTRS, and I need to give an opinion about individual motives. DGG ( talk ) 23:28, 20 August 2012 (UTC)

tomorrow, actually--it's a little complicated. DGG ( talk ) 09:17, 21 August 2012 (UTC)

Message left in your future archive

Visiting your talk page just now and admiring the layout of your archive list, I was surprised to see that the archive for August 2013 had become a bluelink. That is because Ariiise (talk) has left a message there asking how to get at his declined AfC submission to edit it. I have answered him on his talk page (copyvio so can't restore, will email if required) and thought about restoring the pattern by deleting your Aug 13 archive, but will leave you to do that if you choose.

It's a defect of the AfC system that where a submission is rejected, tagged as copyvio and deleted, the submitter is given the standard template that says "If you would like to continue working on the submission, you can find it at <redlink>." Also, if the AfC template is the first item on a new talk page, it should be preceded by {{welcome}} or some similar welcome message. I will suggest that, if I can find the right place.

My reason for visiting your archive was to look again at this, as I am drafting an AfD for that article. I will write about that separately. Regards, JohnCD (talk) 09:31, 21 August 2012 (UTC)

It is indeed a defect, one that shows the hasty and inadequate programming of the system. Once I realized it, I have been manually changing the notice on the user talk pages I deal with to eliminate that nonsensical advice, and to say directly why the article was unacceptable. I have earlier today left a long comment dealing with this and other defects in the AfC system at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Articles for creation. The responses, as best I can make out, seem to indicate the maintainers are aware of the problem and intend to fix it. I;m not so sure they are aware of the importance other problems. DGG ( talk ) 09:40, 21 August 2012 (UTC)

Page Curation update

Hey all :). We've just deployed another set of features for Page Curation. They include flyouts from the icons in Special:NewPagesFeed, showing who reviewed an article and when, a listing of this in the "info" flyout, and a general re-jigging of the info flyout - we've also fixed the weird bug with page_titles_having_underscores_instead_of_spaces in messages sent to talkpages, and introduced CSD logging! As always, these features will need some work - but any feedback would be most welcome.==

the early CSD logging was interesting, because of the high proportion of errors, a much higher proportion that I normally spot at NPP. This may be just my impression, because it put all of them in one place. If so, it will be very useful in following up the errors to teach the patrollers. The key need is not necessarily to make patrol easier, but to make finding errors at patrol easier, because new patrollers generally need educating. Do you think it would be possibleto get a list of those who patrol for the first time? DGG ( talk ) 23:14, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

We did this a couple of years ago (and repeatedly monitored it ever since) and at that time it clearly demonstrated that a vast amount of new page patrolling is being carried out by very young and/or very new, inexperienced users. Although this appears to still be very much the case, the Foundation appears to have ruled this out as a possible cause for low quality patrolling. Special:NewPagesFeed is an excellent piece of software but it's not going to be a silver bullet. That said, this tool may help. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 18:07, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

remind me, where did the WMF publish the analysis of NPP you refer to? Perhaps they mean that a great deal of bad patrolling is done by more experienced people also--which is certainly true. But i've found it easier to teach the new people, who are usually very glad to learn. DGG ( talk ) 19:34, 18 September 2012 (UTC)

Apologies for the late reply. I can't remember where the report was published. The survey was launched as a community project but Foundation adopted it and published the report. If I remember rightly (maybe wrongly), it appeared that the majority of patrollers were in their 40s, had PhDs, and had been on Wiki for at least 6 years - or something vaguely to that effect. Oliver can give you a link to the report because I believe he wrote it himself. Perhaps the responses were inaccurate, because those of us who had done over a year of research found that like all other maintenance areas, NPP was a magnet to new and/or younger users. It seems to have improved lately, but I'm only working from the prototype and not from the old yellow highlighted page. I assume those who are working from the beta are more clued up with page patrolling. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 15:48, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

==Speedy Deletion

This page should not be speedily deleted because... (the exception to A7 is educational institutions which it is; also other language schools are listed in wikipedia such as Mackdonald Language Academy which has no content at all other than "Mackdonald Language Academy is a language school in Kilkenny, Ireland." ACUPARI also have no references and there are many schools like that and I can provide other examples as well. Moreover, unlike some language school it is not an orphan such as EasyMandarin or such as Empik, Emanci Language Institute, Keary Portuguese School, etc. Hong Kong Institute of Languages has a box saying it is an orphan and this article appears to be written like an advertisement. Please help to improve it by rewriting promotional content from a neutral point of view, so I would also like to be able to list the school and if there is some problem fix the content so that it is a neutral point of view. I would like some time to be able to create references, etc so please restore my page so I can do that such as for example the school has participated with the Russian government in programs in Italy and also as taking part in other government programs in foreign countries, and the school was involved in implementing government programs in countries in Europe. The school also regularly participates in seminars and conferences and has won the Dante Alighieri prize, etc. user jeonjubibimbap(talk)

whether institutions called schools that are not actually degree-granting or certificate-granting schools can be speedy deleted by a7 is a matter of some difficulty. The problem is determining exactly the nature of the institution, because names do not always clearly define this. I have speedy-deleted tutoring institutes via a7; some few of them are notable, but if there's no indication of this, the assumption is fairly safe that they are not. Something called a "language school" can be of many different types--in most cases it's primarily a tutoring institute.

The article in question here was Ruslanguage. From the article, it offers ""Intensive, part time, evening and individual courses are offered as well as corporate language training. " I do not consider this a school in the sense of a7, and iI deleted it according. Were it a school that primarily ran group classes or offered a certificate I would instead have used Prod. . If you think you can show it's notable, write an article with some references in user space, and I will move it back to mainspace. DGG ( talk ) 23:08, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

And I thank you for listing the other problems you found. If they are as weak articles as you indicate, they won't be here much longer. DGG ( talk ) 23:16, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

Thank you for responding to my questions. I will write an article with some references and include notable people in my user space. My intention for pointing out other articles was not to criticize them but merely to find a good language school that I could model my page after as I thought since those schools were already on wikipedia and some for quite a while, it meant they had acceptable pages. Thanks again for your help in what makes an acceptable article and I appreciate the time you spent on my article as well as the time you spent on wikipedia. Now that I've starting creating and modifying articles, etc. I am starting to understand a bit of all the hard work that goes on to make wikipedia. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jeonjubibimbap (talk • contribs) 06:29, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

Library portal

I just accepted the AfC submission for the Library portal article now in mainspace. Since I noticed in the past that you're a librarian, posting this article here for your perusal, if you have the time or interest in checking it out, improving it, making any corrections, etc. Regards, Northamerica1000<sup>(talk)</sup> 05:17, 15 September 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for referring this to me. As you realised, this required subject knowledge. It's a valid topic, but even after your cleanup, still needed extensive further editing for conciseness and removal or original research; there were obvious indications of the origin of this as an essay or term paper. I did one round; I will do another later. DGG ( talk ) 07:25, 15 September 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for checking it out, and for the improvements. Northamerica1000<sup>(talk)</sup> 08:32, 15 September 2012 (UTC)

Essay about Wikipedia

Hi DGG. I checked out your user page mini-essays - very interesting. Would you be available to talk about Wikipedia some time? I am writing about the philosophy and sociology of Wikipedia. 109.145.120.77 (talk) 07:22, 16 September 2012 (UTC)

certainly. Please make an account, activate yoiur email from preferences, and email me from the email user link in the toolbox on the right. DGG ( talk ) 15:00, 16 September 2012 (UTC)

Thanks - I created the account and set up email. I will mail shortly. Hestiaea (talk) 15:14, 16 September 2012 (UTC)

Iwill get back to you, probably next week. things are a little busy. DGG ( talk ) 19:31, 18 September 2012 (UTC)

Bibliography of Encyclopedias

You are invited to join in a discussion at User talk:Dr. Blofeld#Bibliography of encyclopedias over my plans to develop a comprehensive set of bibliographies of encyclopedias and dictionaries by topic. I hope you see the potential of such a project and understand that while highly ambitious it will be drawn up gradually over time.♦ Dr. Blofeld 19:58, 19 September 2012 (UTC)

PC

FYI. And FWIW, on a slightly different note regarding NPP, although I am not entirely in favour of creating a right for NPP, I fear that the question may become inevitable when the NewPagesFeed is finally released for general use and has been monitored for a while. The reviewer right (whatever that will be) could be a possible guideline, and might incorporate both if need arises. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 03:32, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

As I expect and hope & will try to get such an interpretation of PC that the reviewer right will be almost unused because almost nothing will be subject to PC, one could argue that it might as well serve some potentially useful purpose. I agree that if it is based on mainspace edits it might serve for both. But I think the priority is to get AfC and moves from user or other space into a single queue along with New pages. At the moment I'm working mainly on the afc part because the majority of advice being given people is inadequate, when not plain wrong. I think that proportionately more errors are made there than at NPP. DGG ( talk ) 13:17, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

That's possible. I don't work at AfC but the articles I come across through other lonks demonstrate that a lot are not being accurately closed and/or with inadequate advice to the creators. I dn't know what kind of a percentage this represents. AfC seems to me to be a necessary process but unnecessarily complicated; I could well envisage a single queue where unpublished IP creations could pass through the same interface as the New Page Feed. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 15:29, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

Page Curation newsletter

Hey DGG. This will be, if not our final newsletter, one of the final ones :). After months of churning away at this project, our final version (apart from a few tweaks and bugfixes) is now live. Changes between this and the last release include deletion tag logging, a centralised log, and fixes to things like edit summaries.

Hopefully you like what we've done with the place; suggestions for future work on it, complaints and bugs to the usual address :). We'll be holding a couple of office hours sessions, which I hope you'll all attend. Many thanks, Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 10:54, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

Your thoughts

Hi.

Per my recent comments at user talk:Jimbo Wales, I'm considering starting a discussion to create a new Wikimedia Wiki solely for persons (BLPs). The basic definition would be that a person is included if they are/were a human being who was alive at some point upon the earth. This would also include categories and templates which specifically deal with persons.

Some things I've already considered:

• We'd need a follow up RfC to consider how to handle people of legend and/or antiquity.
• We'd need to define the difference between a group of individual persons and the group as an entity: e.g. Members of the Beatles. And the "entity" the Beatles.

What would you see as the negatives and positives of doing this? - jc37 00:02, 28 September 2012 (UTC)

---

there is no more reason for doing this for BLPs as for any other subject. If anything, there's less, because of the implication for fairness and undue weight & our other BLP considerations--and, carried to the extent you suggest, for privacy. (Though I suppose this could be alleviated by removing any article the subject objected to, or even requiring their consent--but this raises the problemsof NPOV, as subjects would only want to stay in if the article were favorable). I have supported a Wikipedia Two - an encyclopedia supplement where the standard of notability is much relaxed, but which will be different from Wikia by still requiring WP:Verifiability, and NPOV. It would include the lower levels of barely notable articles in Wikipedia, and the upper levels of a good deal of what we do not let in. But even notability would be relaxed, not eliminated. For people, since this is your example, it would include such as college athletes and political candidates and vice-presidents of notable companies. It would, in return, apply a higher standard for those in the main Wikipedia. DGG ( talk ) 00:14, 28 September 2012 (UTC)

Motivations for doing this split aside, what would you see as the positive or negative effects if this was indeed implemented? - jc37 00:26, 28 September 2012 (UTC)

I thought it was clear from what I said. I used "reason" not to mean motivation but to mean rationale or justification. To expand, we did this , the negatives are so destructive that they overwhelm any positives: First, there is the opportunity for violations of privacy, undue emphasis on the negative, and unfairness--all of which can be counterbalanced only by abandoning NPOV and letting individuals approve their own articles. We would have either an attack site, or personal advertisements, not an encyclopedia. The justification for some standards of notability include having articles limited to what people are interested enough in to keep neutral. We have enough problems of this sort already, and extreme difficulty in handling them. We should not try to do what we cannot control. NPOV is more important than inclusiveness. The advantage for the existing encyclopedia would be having a place to put the barely notable, but there would be just as many arguments over whether people pass the line wherever it was located. The advantage for the world in general would be provision of information, counterbalanced by the fact that it would be unreliable. The additional argument is that there is no reason for doing this for people as distinct from other subjects--if we were to reduce the notability standard to zero it should be in another field where the loss of NPOV would not be as important to individuals. A much more rational approach is more realistic and more inclusive standards based on observable facts, not details of sourcing. And even for this, the limiting factor is RS and NPOV and V. Some think even our current standards so low they make these a danger; I don't agree that they have a general case, but they have had one in more than a few specific instances. DGG ( talk ) 01:22, 28 September 2012 (UTC) .

---

I think I may have miscommunicated something here. When I was speaking of the criteria, I meant criteria for what should be split from here, not what would be the criteria for inclusion of new information. Sorry for the confusion. Of course NPOV/V/NOR would apply. And also with BLP in place, the inclusion criteria of information would be at least as stringent as it is here on en.wp.

What I'm asking for are your thoughts on the effects of the split. Sorry for the confusion. - jc37 01:43, 28 September 2012 (UTC)

Yes indeed, I totally misunderstood!

What you are suggesting is to remove BLPs from WP and move them to a co-ordinate project. I've read the relevant section of Jimbo's talk p., which is talking about the difficulty with admin and editor recruitment and retention. I do not see the connection with your proposal, and at that point you do not explain the suggested benefits. Myself, I see none at all. I don't even see the possibility of avoiding damage to individuals. I deal with school articles, where individuals can be damaged just as much on articles not avowedly about people. (and, as we know, therefore the special BLP guidelines apply to all articles whether or not primarily about an individual). and I deal with many promotional articles, where it;'s become routine for the PR editor to write an article about both the company and the person, sometimes with almost complete duplication of content. Remove the one on the person, and there is still the promotionalism. Or take articles on bands: though I do not work there, I know our current N:MUSIC rules says to cover the musician in the band article if they were only in one band, so with this as an example, I don't see the point about groups of people being any different from people. I can't say I see any specific harm, except the artificial split where people tend to look for both sorts of topic. I know I do, and I know that in working here i work on articles in the same way regardless of the type of subject. There is an advantage in having one big encyclopedia. DGG ( talk ) 03:01, 28 September 2012 (UTC)

Well, I've done a fair amount of reading of the reasons behind SUL, and I think we may see more splitting, not less. Right now, the goals are to clean up the other projects (there's a lot of left over messes at meta, for example). But once that is done....

See, the idea is that all the same-language projects should be more interconnected. After all, all it takes to wikilink to en.wiki is wp:.

All the rest of your concerns can easily be dealt with in the new project's own policies/guidelines.

As for blp information that's in articles, I think much of that is due to mergist/notability sentiments ("the person isn't notable of their own accord, so let's put the info in another article" aka BHTT/BTTH). And with a separate wiki, I think we'll see more of that there, than here. And of course we would still have WP:BLP here.

As you may have guessed, I've literally spent years thinking about this. But I am just one person. And I'm a firm believer in many eyes. the more people looking over something, the better : ) - jc37 04:20, 28 September 2012 (UTC)

The reasons for SUL are pretty obvious, to encourage people to work cross project. (It had the downside of preventing us from requiring roman alphabet usernames, but that's a relatively minor consideration.) The other en projects are a problem. I agree they should be more connected, but what they need most is to be of higher quality. I have never understood the reason for the distinction between Wikibooks and Wikiversity--and to be the intuitive meaning of the names is the opposite of the actual only: to me __university implies the project with the more advanced material. Wikinews needs a clearer role--it is more of a newsmagazine than a newspaper, because for actually breaking events, Wikipedia does it better because of our much higher participation. Wikiquote has a special niche, but there is nothing there which could not be integrated here. The distinction between Wiktionary and Wikipedia strikes me as artificial: words have meanings, and meanings are suitable subjects for articles--we should be able to write a valid article for every word in Wiktionary. Wikisource has a role, overlapping non-WMF projects, but it needs to be integrated with discussions of the works included. If anyone wants to combine any of these, I'll support it.

But I still do not see the basic reason why you should want to separate the information on people: you have not yet given anything which I would consider a reason or an advantage. If we start doing that, perhaps we should separate the information on places, and the information of works of art, and the information on products, and the information on companies, and on sports, and on chemicals, and biological organisms, and medicine, & so on until we have an encyclopedia of only very general articles on very general topics -- which I suppose would amount to an encyclopedia on philosophy. I don't see a reason. It defies the very concept of an encyclopedia, to encompass all of knowledge.

---

(edit conflict)As a pure coincidence, schools, colleges, bios (especially the sport ones that are allowed to be 'notable' based on a single listing on a club website, where notable academics have to fight for their existence on Wikipedia), and rappers, are the bane of my work here too. My private thought for a long time has been that all those one-line, one-ref sport bios should be split off to a WikiSport site. Corporate spam masquerading as articles also makes me furious, especially when it written by paid-for PR people or even our own editors. We as volunteers should not be providing fee help for adverts.

However, such splits will never happen, and there is no technical argument for them. Moreover, keeping everything in one place will at least help ensure that whatever criteria we do have are upheld and maintained by a diversity of experienced editors and admins. What needs to be done are three things:

• Bring the different BLP notability standards into alignment.
• Insist that NPP is wholly carried out by suitably experienced editors.
• Provide a proper landing page for newly registered users that clearly and concisely tells them what we want or can accept here. Unfortunately, the Article creation Work Flow that was promised by the Foundation over a year ago has been shelved as being of little priority. The last news several weeks ago was that it is being 'revisited'. I can't really understand why such as project is of such low priority because it would largely resolve all these issues in one sweep - including editor retention..

The problem is that once the Foundation adopts (or even usurps) a community driven project, although the volunteers are allowed to voice their opinions, they have very little real say in how the program advances. This is particularly true with the issues surrounding the NewPagesFeed, and the community's NPP Survey that was designed to shed some light on the actual quality of page patrolling. Among the tens of thousands of regular editors are many competent professional computer programmers, and it does not help community relations when the Foundation claims, as it did yesterday, that the only 'proper' devs are those who are salaried by the WMF. IMHO, those paid individuals might well be highly skilled coders, but they may have very little actual experience of editing and policies and knowledge of the true needs of both editors and readers. We've seen this with all the fuss, time, and funds dedicated to AfT - the results of which have not in any way contributed to an improvement in the current issues. All it does is feed the minds of the stats obsessed. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 04:03, 28 September 2012 (UTC)

I have my own wishlist also. It is different from yours, though there are some overlaps. At this point, I'm concerned more about process than content. I would enforce WP:NPA as the first step: we need good people who combine writing and subject ability with the qualities necessary to work in our cooperative environment--the place for even the most knowledgable people if they want to work otherwise is elsewhere. . I would require notifying people of things that affect their work. I would require explanations. I would require personal messages, not templates. I would require if I could some way of showing that someone read an article before commenting on it. and, as something actually feasible, I would devote WMF funding to making all available sources available to Wikipedia editors in all languages, as the most critical use of their surpluses. (& as a practical matter, if the WMF won't do it--as I doubt they will, for they seem indifferent or unaware of the method of Wikipedia, which is to have sourced encyclopedic content--I intend to help raise the money elsewhere) Most radically, I would ban promotional editors even at the cost of giving up anonymity, for I se no other practical way for continuing to enforce NPOV. As that's not very likely, I'd instead enforce higher standards on the articles they are most likely to write about, standards that few of those currently here have any likelihood of meeting. And I'd no longer fix their articles, but treat them like we do copyvio & work of banned editors, as things to be done over by someone else.

In terms of content, most of the things I would improve coverage on are those in which I am interested, and most I would restrict those I do not care about. I can give good reasons, but such an exact match makes me aware of my need to examine my motivations. I would start, as I've often said, by discarding the GNG as obsolete, being suited only to the state of the internet 10 years ago & the limited research abilities of most of then active Wikipedians. I would then as much as possible establish abstract quantifiable standards. I've said enough elsewhere of what I would like them to be, but I'd accept almost everything as better than a process where the actual distinction depends upon quibbles of what we want to consider a RS.

Ideally, I'd rework the concept of "article" into re-assemblable chunks of information, thus eliminating the concept of notability entirely, for there would be no distinction between articles and subarticles. We have not yet realized the possibilities provided by our being hypertext, not paper. I'd see us expand into a fully semantic wiki, with multiple displayable versions (the problem here is that this requires a manner of writing that few here have mastered).

And I'd hold at all costs to our principles, such as freedom from censorship, and verifiability, and covering all of human knowledge. I wouldn't compromise these, any more than I would compromise the ultimate purpose of an educated public. I'd encourage derivatives, including peer-reviewed expert derivatives--I'd refound Citizendium the way it should have been done, as an expertly reviewed revision of Wikipedia articles. I see WP not as an end in itself, but a demonstration for what can be done by free culture. As the truly fundamental concept, I believe in developing human freedom and capabilities. DGG ( talk ) 08:14, 28 September 2012 (UTC)

and now it's time to go to bed again, but I'm glad I woke up to respond to this. I'm human, and if I do more, it will have to be tomorrow. ` DGG ( talk ) 08:14, 28 September 2012 (UTC)

Google scholar anomality

Hi DGG. In a past deletion debate one year ago which I found mightily suspicious (the submitter and the very last voter turned out to be single purpose-accounts in hindsight) you argued from your professional experience that worldcat holdings of about 100 and 2-3 reviews two years after publication would be normal. I took a look again and Duchesne's 2011 book "The uniqueness of Western civilization" has risen since from 60 to 160 university holdings and, according to his homepage, received 10 reviews by now (leaving out his reply to Elvin and amazon). I noticed Brill has published a paperback version this year, so they seem to consider the book a sales success. However, on Google Scholar the book still is listed as cited by none, even though many of the reviews can be retrieved via its database. Frankly, I cannot make sense of this. Do you have any idea and do you think his WP bio has reached the threshold of notability by now? Gun Powder Ma (talk) 10:26, 28 September 2012 (UTC)

GS citations are erratic, and their standards change, and nobody knows what they are. In the humanities, citations of a book are slow to develop as compared to journals. First, the book will only be cited by those at libraries who have the book, while a few of his articles are in widely held journals. Second, there is the time factor: a 2011 book will show up in a library about 2 - 12 months after publication, a journal shows up immediately after publication. And in the humanities, if someone reading a work decides to use it in an article, they would typically write the article in the next 2 - 12 months , and it would take in the humanities somewhere from 9 to 24 months before it was published. If the citation was to be in a book, of course it would take at least double that time at each stage and sometimes much longer.

Additionally, his writings are from a definite pov, not widely popular at present in the academic world. A very few people will write using his work to support theirs; more will use it as something to refute. But the key qy. is whether he is well known enough that anyone would want to specifically write to refute him, or whether they will just include him among the other theorists they are refuting the next time they write on the general subject. .

As for actual notability , you will have noticed that at the AfD I made no keep or delete comment. I limited myself to critiquing the bad arguments,particularly those from BG. I consider it borderline by my own standard for notability as an academic: whether a person is a full professor at a research university or of equivalent quality. The usual requirement for getting there in the humanities is at least two books from major scholarly presses. Brill is in most fields a minor press, except for near eastern studies, religion, and related subjects; and UNB is a good but not superlative university. Of his journal articles, some of them are in important journals--but most are in a few journals of a rather specialized nature. The publications list should have included only peer reviewed journal articles, not book chapters. What also influenced me is that the article was written in the typical way to make slightly important subjects look more so: material on the importance of his student work, on the importance of his advisors, of those he has debated with, of those who replied to him, What influences me now much more is that too much of the article is a close paraphrase of his web page, which I carelessly did not think to look at during the discussion. if I had, I would said delete.

If you want to try it again, rewrite it from scratch. But I do not think there is enough new information; even if BG stays away from WP the result might be the same, and another delete decision will make it much harder in the future. What is needed is another book--it would be much safer. DGG ( talk ) 18:29, 28 September 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for your opinion. Best Gun Powder Ma (talk) 20:02, 28 September 2012 (UTC)

COI and notability

At a current AfD, I made a suggestio [11]n that I would like to expand here:

A year ago my usual position on promotional articles about subjects of borderline notability was that I would want to accept the article, and then rewrite it to remove the irrelevant material, emphasize (or sometimes add) whatever was really important,& keep only the good references. I have come to feel differently. The reason is my increasing sense of desperation from working at AfC and NPP. When it was a trickle, we could deal with it, but not now. The greatly increased use of Wikipedia for PR, is of course due to the public perception of Wikipedia's significance. I don't see how we can avoid being a target, but we can alter our response.

I can not justify it by the formal WP rules, but the article on a person or firm of borderline notability that is here only as a result of a PR effort does not arouse my sympathies, and I judge it somewhat more strictly. I think many of us do. I now do pay attention to the origin and motivation of the article, & I also pay attention to the quality of the PR work--when it a great effort to magnify things, it increases my degree of skepticism. How we interpret our rules will always depend on common sense, otherwise known as IAR, and perhaps that informal interpretation is the best guide when the situation is otherwise ambiguous. We could think of it as self-defense. Because of the nature of the work I do here, I've thought about this for some months, and I've figured out how to express my feeling in an actual proposal:

I suggest a formal guideline that articles written with COI must show clear and unambiguous notability . (Because we cannot always tell whether something is PR, it would necessarily apply to those jobs of PR so poorly done that we could tell; this is most of them, and even forcing an improvement in quality would be of considerable help to the encyclopedia) I can see how it would be abused, by leading to an increased use of I Think It's Notable/Not Notable as an argument. I can see how it would be misused to delete articles by good-faith contributors who are merely copying what they think the correct style here. I can see the danger in discarding articles that are merely poorly written--unlike some other WPs that can require quality writing, we have an important role for editors with an imperfect knowledge of our language. We'd probably need some subtler wording, and it would fortunately all depend in practice on what people think at AfD, not the views of a single administrator. I've heard it suggested we counter promotionalism by omitting BLPs, and articles about companies & organizations, which is a throwing out the essential content along with the junk. More realistically, I've heard it suggested that we omit non-famous BLPs & companies & organizations. Mine is a lesser move in the same direction.

Opinions and suggested modification requested before I actually propose it. DGG ( talk ) 20:33, 28 September 2012 (UTC)

• I agree. A recent DRV (Bianca Jade) made me formulate the thought that one way to meet the flood of PR is to be much tougher-minded about the words significant and independent in the GNG; but I agree that, if the definitions can be got right, a higher formal notability standard for PR-driven efforts is desirable. I presume you are thinking of the AfD level: should there be a higher A7 bar for PR entries, as well? JohnCD (talk) 23:03, 28 September 2012 (UTC)

Yes, it was that one which started me thinking. I think for a change like this, it would be better to trust the community, than individual administrators, since it's a matter of interpretation. . Since the community has gradually been using higher standards for these promotional articles at AfD, this will give a smooth transition. Perhaps the real value of my suggested change is to make it easier to explain and support the decisions that are already being made. At CSD, we already have G11, which gives a good deal of flexibility. (And in deciding whether to use G11, I do take into account to some degree the likelihood of rewriting into an article that would pass AfD--certainly I myself am not going to go to the trouble of rewriting one unless I'm very sure it will!) And opinion at WT:CSD has always been against linking A7 to "notability"--I questioned that when I first came here, but people with more experienced explained to me how any connection would cause confusion and erratic single-handed deletions. DGG ( talk ) 23:17, 28 September 2012 (UTC)

A kitten for you!

Great stuff on your user page! I've never really seen another user go so in-depth into his philosophies and thoughts on WP as yours does. :)

Arjun G. Menon (talk · mail) 11:50, 5 October 2012 (UTC)

Mood for a Day

Well the article obviously is unnecessary and uninformative so at least put up a discussion about it's deletion.

Thomson Reuters Web of Knowledge

Could you have a look at the discussion here and tell me what you think the proper title should be? I was pretty much convinced that I was right, until this editor brought up the Microsoft argument. So now I don't know any more... Although, if it's a stone rule that we should put the company name in front of the product name, would that also mean that Nature would have to become Nature Publishing Group Nature? :-) Seriously, your informed opinion is welcome. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 17:44, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

Academic Journals are sui generis . I think WP naming conventions tend to lack rationality. I rarely engage in these debates because I disagree with some of the fundamental rules, like never disambiguating names until there is a conflict. DGG ( talk ) 01:37, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

Talkback

Hello, DGG. You have new messages at Huon's talk page.
Message added 02:09, 12 October 2012 (UTC). You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

Page Curation newsletter - closing up!

Hey all :).

We're (very shortly) closing down this development cycle for Page Curation. It's genuinely been a pleasure to talk with you all and build software that is so close to my own heart, and also so effective. The current backlog is 9 days, and I've never seen it that low before.

However! Closing up shop does not mean not making any improvements. First-off, this is your last chance to give us a poke about unresolved bugs or report new ones on the talkpage. If something's going wrong, we want to know about it :). Second, we'll hopefully be taking another pass over the software next year. If you've got ideas for features Page Curation doesn't currently have, stick them here.

Again, it's been an honour. Thanks :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 11:59, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

The Wikipedia Library

I assume you already know about The Wikipedia Library effort, but given your interest in getting editors access to these resources, I wanted to make sure you've seen this. Brianwc (talk) 21:29, 20 October 2012 (UTC)

Unrelated

By the way, there's complex issue of COI and COATRACK at Retail loss prevention (see history and talk page.) Maybe you care to take a look at that too. Tijfo098 (talk) 22:16, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

yes indeed; a classic conflict of an industry white-washer and a consumer pov pusher. The whole thing needs to be redone; a small amount of the text in the various versions will be helpful. DGG ( talk ) 03:29, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Original Barnstar
	Hey David! This barnstar isn't for anything specific, it's just to say that I appreciate your hard work, thoughtful approach, and consistent sincerity all over Wikipedia in general, and with the education program in particular. Sage Ross (WMF) (talk) 14:28, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

Just so you know...

Regarding this, when the tag was applied the page was pretty much a straight copy from the source, with a few phrases changed out, and had been pretty much for its entire history. User:Rjensen deserves a Barnstar (which I will give him presently) for completely rewriting the article, which is of course an even better solution than deletion. Since your edit comment implied that the tag was improperly placed, I just wanted to assure you that it wasn't at the time I placed it, its just that intervening work made it so. Again, you did the right thing in declining the deletion request at the time you did, and Rjensen did some awesome work here, I just wanted to make sure you didn't think that I was tagging articles for deletion without carefully checking them. I had, it is just that the state of the article changed drastically from when I tagged it. The ideal result, altogether, if you ask me. --Jayron32 13:03, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

thanks for letting me know. My apologies. I've run into this before, and I should be more careful checking the history. But when the article is improved, the tag should really have been removed also. I think some people do not realize that anyone can remove a speedy except the guy who first submitted the article)--some people think it takes an admin. Quite the opposite--since anyone can do it, it makes excellent practice for people who wqnt to become admins to build up a record of good decisions. DGG ( talk ) 17:54, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

Hey, this entire sequence got me thinking about some stuff, and I started a thread at WP:VPP that you may find interesting or have some insight on. Penny for your thoughts... --Jayron32 18:59, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

Robert Peernock

Ten months ago you declined a prod on this article. I am not disagreeing with your prod however I, stumbling upon the article, found it to have been since its origins based not on the BLP itself but as an article of undue weight that subscribes the man involved as a whistle blower and victim of conspiracy. These are the claims of Peernock himself from his own website, http://www.freerobertpeernock.com, when the reality is that he is a man who was convicted of murdering his wife and attempting to murder his daughters that has claimed they were framed. No one would, neutrally, rate him as a whistleblower or activist. The only whistle he has blown is that there is a conspiracy involving the prosecution, the judge, the jury, his own attorney, his daughter and a "judge's accomplice" who he claims murdered his wife for the judges benefit.

I am rather rusty with procedure, having been absent from wikipedia for a while due to real life situations, but I was hoping you could give some guidance on what to do in this article. It is tilted from its very beginning and I'm not too sure the notability of the book outweighs the individual himself. Many many convicted murderers claim of a far reaching conspiracy, wikipedia should not be a part of their whitewashing. –– Lid<sup>(Talk)</sup> 04:56, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

Looking more carefully than I did at first, I agree with you that the article should be deleted. What convinced me is checking the book about him, which was what I based my keep on: it is in only 41 libraries. Checking the author, he's a moderately notable minor crime writer with 5 books, his best known ones are in 600 & 400 libraries, so there will surely be reviews to show his notability. This offers a quick solution without the need for afd; I can easily do it tomorrow: writing a short article about the author, anthony Flacco, and list his books. This article can then be redirected there, which will at least give some identifying information here if anyone looks him up. OK? DGG ( talk ) 05:10, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

I'm not sure a redirect would be appropriate, Peernock's life and biography is in no way tied to the life of Anthony Flacco. A redirect would not make much sense as those searching for Peernock, if there are any, are unlikely to be searching for the life of an author who subsequently wrote about the case. Also here's a link I forgot to include previously http://articles.latimes.com/1991-10-24/local/me-242_1_man-convicted-of-killing-wife –– Lid<sup>(Talk)</sup> 06:16, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

To follow up will you be doing what you have suggested as an option? –– Lid<sup>(Talk)</sup> 07:05, 30 October 2012 (UTC)

Journal of Population Economics and Les Halpin

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

Can't Resubmit for Approval

I submitted an article for creation and it was denied. I added references and cited sources, but now I can't see a way to resubmit for approval. It can be found here - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_creation/Paul_T._Entrekin Can you help with this? Thanks CleverOgre (talk) 20:14, 2 November 2012 (UTC)

I will get there tomorrow. DGG ( talk ) 04:12, 3 November 2012 (UTC)

I am working on it. DGG ( talk ) 19:13, 4 November 2012 (UTC)

Thanks! CleverOgre (talk) 21:09, 5 November 2012 (UTC) I have updated the Ref tags as requested. CleverOgre (talk) 16:55, 6 November 2012 (UTC)

Rumi's Kimia

Hello DGG, I removed your prod from the above article as it has previously been listed at articles for deletion. Thank you. Rotten regard Softnow 19:56,

A barnstar for you!

	The Original Barnstar
	For you extra work on Lutsk National Technical University, rather than just deleting it. Mdann52 (talk) 15:22, 7 November 2012 (UTC)

This is not a newsletter

This is just a tribute.

Anyway. You're getting this note because you've participated in discussion and/or asked for updates to either the Article Feedback Tool or Page Curation. This isn't about either of those things, I'm afraid ;p. We've recently started working on yet another project: Echo, a notifications system to augment the watchlist. There's not much information at the moment, because we're still working out the scope and the concepts, but if you're interested in further updates you can sign up here.

In addition, we'll be holding an office hours session at 21:00 UTC on Wednesday, 14 November in #wikimedia-office - hope to see you all there :). I appreciate it's an annoying time for non-Europeans: if you're interested in chatting about the project but can't make it, give me a shout and I can set up another session if there's enough interest in one particular timezone or a skype call if there isn't. Thanks! Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 10:54, 10 November 2012 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Margaret E Lyttle

You recently moved Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Margaret E Lyttle to the mainspace. However, it was a straight copyright violation from here. Please check AfC submissions for copyright problems before moving them to the main namespace. Fram (talk) 09:35, 12 November 2012 (UTC)

The same applies to Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/KGiSL Institute of Technology, which you also recently moved but also was a copyright violation, this time from [12]. Fram (talk) 09:50, 12 November 2012 (UTC)

And also Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Paul B. Wiegmann, a copy from here. Fram (talk) 09:57, 12 November 2012 (UTC)

• Lyttle was indeed very careless of me--it should have been obvious to me from the nature of the content that it must have been copied from somewhere, & the place was pretty obvious also. I must have been working too rapidly last night trying to clean AfC. I exemplified the very problem I have often complained of, people working there too quickly to do things properly.
• Wiegmann I should have look more carefully--all of it except the awards list is indeed copyvio. G11 was correct.

KIGSL I looked for copyvio, as it is common on such articles, but I apparently missed that subpage. But not all the article was copyvio from that source, as I know because I rewrote some of it myself. So the section could have been removed, and I think G11 is therefore not really correct. But I probably shouldn't have accepted it in any case, for it needed more work than it was worth

I agree with you that copyvio is a really major problem there; I've deleted a few dozen such myself. We sometimes take somewhat different approaches to dealing with it, but I care about it as much as you. Perhaps a way can be found to do automated checks at the time the article is listed--an edit filter type of approach would be desirable. BTW, did you find these by looking at the recently accepted articles ? I've just started doing that myself. DGG ( talk ) 18:29, 12 November 2012 (UTC)

Yes, I only looked at the recently accepted ones. Perhaps I shoukld go through some older ones as well and do more spotchecks. Copyvio is a pain in the ass, and not always easy to find, but it seems that recently too many of them have slipped through the AfC. Perhaps it's just the luck of the draw, perhaps it's more systematical, I don't know... 07:52, 13 November 2012 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) CorenSearchBot is very good at picking up and tagging copyvio, but at the moment it only scans newly created articles in main space. It might be worth inquiring if the AFC pages could be added to the search. Voceditenore (talk) 09:04, 13 November 2012 (UTC)

Hello DGG. Some discussions regarding these types of matters are occurring at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Articles for creation:

• Updating the Reviewer instructions with links to copyvio detectors
• Copyright violations

— Northamerica1000<sup>(talk)</sup> 00:38, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

Request for observation

Would you be so kind as to keep an eye on Great Commission church movement for page blanking and if possible facilitate a conversation that would help engage editors in the consensus process? Also, if you have any ideas on how I might look at this situation differently or engage other editors in a different process, I am open to suggestions. It would be greatly appreciated. :) ClaudeReigns (talk) 10:42, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

I apologize, but I am only able to makea general comment, and I just did that DGG ( talk ) 17:32, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

Arbcom elections

Sooo, think you might be interested? : ) - jc37 21:07, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

I am trying to think of something at WP I would like even less, but I can't think of anything. DGG ( talk ) 01:02, 15 November 2012 (UTC)

Rofl. Understood, and fair enough : ) - jc37 01:12, 15 November 2012 (UTC)

While I have no doubt DGG could do the job and do it better than most, we need him to stay right where he is, helping content contributors and adding a little sanity in a variety of boards and discussions when needed. Arbs have to restrict what they do outside of ArbCom to stay "uninvolved", and I think that would probably drive DGG mad. In my opinion, what he does now is more important than an Arb role anyway. Dennis Brown - 2¢ © Join WER 18:34, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

AFT5 newsletter

Hey all :). A couple of quick updates (one small, one large)

First, we're continuing to work on some ways to increase the quality of feedback and make it easier to eliminate and deal with non-useful feedback: hopefully I'll have more news for you on this soon :).

Second, we're looking at ways to increase the actual number of users patrolling and take off some of the workload from you lot. Part of this is increasing the prominence of the feedback page, which we're going to try to do with a link at the top of each article to the relevant page. This should be deployed on Tuesday (touch wood!) and we'll be closely monitoring what happens. Let me know if you have any questions or issues :). Thanks, Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 14:29, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

Discussion about copyvio detection at WikiProject articles for creation (on my talk page)

Hi DGG. I'm interested in obtaining your input at a discussion occurring at my talk page at: Advice on recently edited article: Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Christopher J. Howell. Please respond at your convenience, and thank you for your consideration. Northamerica1000<sup>(talk)</sup> 14:51, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

Talkback

Hello, DGG. You have new messages at Riley Huntley's talk page.
Message added 00:32, 17 November 2012 (UTC). You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

-- Cheers, Riley Huntley 00:32, 17 November 2012 (UTC)

re: Leonid Raikhman

Not sure, but I looked over the art on pl wiki, and I am not 100% convinced of notability. Certainly should get a proper AfD, however, at the very least. --<sub>Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here</sub> 06:21, 19 November 2012 (UTC)

If you translate, I can use the refs to show notability. Lt Gen in any army is notable, and the corresponding ranks in the NKVD also. He engaged in various actions political oppression as a tool of the party till the WWII, and the took a leaning role in Katyn, about which there has been the usual argument over just how leading a role--one of the books seems to refer to his organizing -- which apparently made his name in the NKVD, for he went on to the destruction of other ethnic minorities before & after the was. I gather from a Google "translation" of the Polish he was a Jew, and one of those arrested at the time of the Doctor's Plot, which was of course aborted by the death of Stalin; freed soon afterwards, but soon rearrested possibly as being implicated in Beria's methods. See also the part about his wife--this was a famous NKVD success. DGG ( talk ) 12:22, 19 November 2012 (UTC)

I did some c/e and now I agree he is notable, which the stub implies (general, recipient of awards). In the future, please share such requests for assistance to WT:POLAND, which may generate more attention than on my talk page (our project is actually active :) ). --<sub>Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here</sub> 18:34, 19 November 2012 (UTC)

You have a point, but when I know some individual who could do something well, I tend to ask them. DGG ( talk ) 19:09, 19 November 2012 (UTC)

I'll probably end up doing it from WT:POLAND anyway, but your post would help to make the page look more alive. --<sub>Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here</sub> 21:03, 19 November 2012 (UTC)

AfC copyvio detection relative to adminship consideration

After consideration, contributors to WikiProject Articles for creation should have fair warning about copyvio detection relative to consideration for adminship, so I've posted a comment there regarding this matter. If you're interested in providing any opinion regarding this matter, please feel free at any time to comment at my talk page, or at the above-linked discussion. Should the AfC process be started over from scratch, as you suggested on my talk page? Northamerica1000<sup>(talk)</sup> 17:14, 19 November 2012 (UTC)

well, not exactly from scratch. We can use the knowledge we've gained. The principal information is that all new articles coming into WP ,. whether directly submitted, submitted thru an afc process, or through move of userspace pages to mainspace, must flow through one common process. 6 months ago I would have hesitated to suggest NP, but the excellent work done of developing WP:NPP and the page curation process makes this a practical suggestion. I was just as dubious about NPP at first as I was about AfC, and all I can say is that skepticism shouldn't discourage experiment, because some will work out. Our editing environment is unique, so we have little precedents. (Someone is very likely to say there is no way to get the moves or the afc moves into NPP, but they just mean they haven't done it. or haven't figured out how. Programmers are not magicians, but they should be up to this.) DGG ( talk ) 00:05, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

Teahouse

Hey, DGG! Thanks for keeping me straight on the Teahouse; I didn't think of OTRS. Anyway, just a suggestion: we've found that a lot of people who come to the Teahouse don't know about watchlists, or to keep an eye on the questions page, so they lose track and don't see that their question has been answered. So, the nebulous "we" like to push using talkbacks when we answer questions on the Teahouse; we even have our own template for the purpose at WP:Teahouse/Teahouse_talkback, if you prefer that over the normal one. Not always necessary, depending on who's doing the asking; it's probably fine to assume that Knight of Truth, who looks to have been around a while, knows enough to not need it. But for others, like Mrnit, it might help. Thanks again! Writ Keeper ⚇♔ 16:55, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

and thanks for the hint--I will probably do a few more in the future, so I'll use it, because I did wonder about that problem, but, just as you did, I guessed KofT would look again. DGG ( talk ) 17:58, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

LeafChat and other IRC clients

You are invited to join the discussion at User talk:Tothwolf#LeafChat. Tothwolf (talk) 23:10, 20 November 2012 (UTC)Template:Z48

in praise of hard industries

Hello,

My proposed article on "In praise of hard industries" was rejected. I have looked over the guidelines again, and I think my proposed article was too in-depth. I would like to try again, as I think this book was important for many policymakers and other thinkers at the time. (Looking inside the cover, it was recommended by the New York Times, J.K. Galbraith, Clyde Prestowitz, and Ralph Nader, among others. I checked before submitting, and the book's author, Eamonn Fingleton, has a wikipedia page). Anyway, I will pare down my description of the book and try again. If it is still not acceptable, more feedback would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for your help. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Hubbert545 (talk • contribs) 07:27, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

After I looked at your article, I followed up last night by working on the article for Eamonn Fingleton (the author), and made some changes to improve the presentation. I reorganized it a little to provide easy places for writing a separate section of that article on each of his three books; I was going to suggest this to you today, but you got here first.:) That's the simplest way to start, and a redirect can be made from the book title. (They could probably also be made into separate articles,, depending on the reviews--the actual criterion for articles on books WP:NBOOK is not hard to meet if there are substantial reviews--you can try that if you like, but a section is easier & can be expanded into an article later). You are quite right that the problem--both in the article on the author and in the one on the book--is excessive detail about the author's ideas. The articles must say what they are, which usually takes about one paragraph. Some complicated books need more, but when a book is devoted to the explanation of a particular proposition, one is usually enough--the article is about the book, not about the subject on which the book was written.

List all substantial published reviews, giving full bibliographic details. The easiest way to handle them is by footnotes. It's OK to quote a few words from the review as part of the footnote--the shorter, the more impact it has. If the book was on any major best seller list, give an exact reference., including the number of weeks it was on the list. If the book won a major award, mention that also. But blurbs on the book jacket or on amazon are not reviews. People write them for their friends, & always try to say something nice--therefore they're not considered reliable publications. If the books were the subject of a substantial critical essay by a notable expert in an important magazine, that's of course something worth mentioning. (If you ave trouble finding some of this, any librarian can help.) I'll be glad to help you further if you ask me. DGG ( talk ) 18:28, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

And I just want to mention that the fact that an author is notable does not mean all of their books are necessarily notable. This only applies to famous authors, like Dickens or Faulkner. We call that principle WP:NOT INHERITED.

WorldCat & AfD

DGG, I noticed you often cite WorldCat in AfDs. I was wondering how do you determine notability using WorldCat. Is there a guideline? For example you said Don Bendell "Write Westerns, none of which have more that 240 copies in libraries.[13]" Is 240 low, medium, high? (BTW it looks like he actually has 429 libraries for Strongheart). I have no idea how to judge WorldCat library holdings in relation to what is notable. To me even 240 libraries seems like a lot. -- Green Cardamom (talk) 19:52, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

It depends on the date, the subject, and the nature of the work. Popular fiction would be expected to have very high figures. Recondite non-fiction, otherwise. Recent books in high demand would be expect to have more; older popular and children's fiction, less. There's also a strong anglocentric bias: for other countries, only their national and major university libraries are included. These's also a US bias: British libraries are considerably less comprehensively covered; even Canada and Australia, a little less than the US. Genre fiction has a particular problem: libraries tend to buy one, & if its popular, they buy all the others. The best way is to compare with similar authors from similar periods. I'll do a more exact analysis tonight, since it is borderline. I may have considerably affected by the low quality otherwise. DGG ( talk ) 20:27, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

I withdrew the afd: the high productivity over time implies he was a successful novelist, and therefore notable.Thanks indeed for asking me to revisit the discussion--this was one of my errors, and I would much rather people told me about them than they go uncorrected. . DGG ( talk ) 01:49, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

Review

Hi DGG,

On 12 Nov you reviewed and declined an article. You also provided some helpful and constructive feedback for this first time submiter. I have taken your suggestions, reworked the article and provided references and third party notation. If you have a few minutes I would ask that you take a look at the changes and let me know if the article is ready to be re-submitted. The article is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mejbp/sandbox Thank you for your input. Mejbp (talk) 22:15, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

I will look tomorrow. But first, try to remove any sentences or words that aren't needed, and anything that sounds bureaucratic, such as "furtherance" or "entities". I've looked at the fundamental documents the article is based on, and they say every things at least twice; Don't imitate them. DGG ( talk ) 04:54, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Original Barnstar
	Thank you for supporting the page I have been working on! Connor.burgin (talk) 22:51, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

Hello. You have a new message at ɱ's talk page. ɱ (talk) 16:54, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

Hello. You have a new message at Neurofreak's talk page. --ɱ (talk) 17:16, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

SPUR (magazine)

Hi DGG, I'd value your advice on the notability of this publication. I've twice tagged it for notability and better references, my rationale being that this doesn't meet the criteria of WP:PERIODICAL. I don't know if guidelines for student publications are less stringent, and I'd prefer not to edit war over templates. Your thoughts welcome. Thanks, 99.0.80.70 (talk) 16:04, 23 November 2012 (UTC)