User talk:Iridescent

An administrator "assuming good faith" with an editor with whom they have disagreed.

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Infobox & Wikidata

At VPP, CFCF raised the example of Gout where it works well/as it supposed to. I actually tested it and found it worked *exactly* how I feared it would. I posted my results there but I think it got lost in the mass of replies below the actual voting. Pasted with some additions here for your perusal.

"So what actually happens when I remove Field = Rheumatology by editing the Gout article in the template section on wikipedia - because I have left it (field) blank, the infobox pulls the 'Specialty' from Gout at wikidata and populates it accordingly. You can see from the switch (in the infobox) from Rheumatology (wikipedia) to rheumatology (wikidata). However Gout's specialty field at wikidata is sourced to wikipedia, and the wikipedia article does not actually state in the article that Gout is in the Rheumatology field. Except in the infobox. Which is unsourced (unreferenced). (it probably doesnt need to be as its a sky is blue issue - for doctors anyway). In this case not an issue, but it clearly demonstrates the problem with the process. On a BLP this would be madness."

(I just checked, and someone has added a reference on wikidata since I did my test, so it is at least sourced there now to somewhere other than back to wikipedia)

The problem I have currently, is that the above example actually deliberately violates Wikipedia's policies on sourcing and verifiability. By automation. If I hadnt known what I was doing in advance this is what happens when I find dodgy info in an infobox.

1. Click edit

2. Remove info from parameter.

3. Save and sip Tea.

Now here is what I would need to do with wikidata adding content.

1. Click edit.

2. Remove info.

3. See info is still in infobox after saving.

4. Click edit again and check info is not there.

5. Go to template page to try and work out what the hell is going on.

6. See template is pulling data from Wikidata, but no explanation as to why or how to fix/prevent it.

7. Go to wikidata and attempt to change/remove info.

8. Get reverted by wikidata gnome who says it 'isnt wikipedia'.

9. Get bored of arguing, go back to article, remove infobox.

10. Pour away tea and open the rum. Only in death does duty end (talk) 16:24, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

{{{name}}}
{{{fullname}}}
{{{other name}}}
{{{native_name}}}
{{{caption}}}
{{{name}}} {{{map caption}}}
OS grid reference	{{{osgridref}}}
OS grid reference	{{{osgraw}}}
Location	{{{location}}}
Country	{{{country}}}
Denomination	{{{denomination}}}
Previous denomination	{{{previous denomination}}}
Tradition	{{{tradition}}}
Churchmanship	{{{churchmanship}}}
Membership	{{{membership}}}
Weekly attendance	{{{attendance}}}
Website	{{{website}}}
History
Former name(s)	{{{former names}}}
Authorising papal bull	{{{bull date}}}
Founded	{{{founded date}}}
Founder(s)	{{{founder}}}
Dedication	{{{dedication}}}
Dedicated	{{{dedicated date}}}
Earlier dedication	{{{earlydedication}}}
Other dedication	{{{otherdedication}}}
Consecrated	{{{consecrated date}}}
Cult(s) present	{{{cult}}}
Relics held	{{{relics}}}
Events	{{{events}}}
Past bishop(s)	{{{past bishop}}}
Associated people	{{{people}}}
Architecture
Status	{{{status}}}
Functional status	{{{functional status}}}
Heritage designation	{{{heritage designation}}}
Designated	{{{designated date}}}
Previous cathedrals	{{{previous cathedrals}}}
Architect(s)	{{{architect}}}
Architectural type	{{{architectural type}}}
Style	{{{style}}}
Years built	{{{years built}}}
Groundbreaking	{{{groundbreaking}}}
Completed	{{{completed date}}}
Construction cost	{{{construction cost}}}
Closed	{{{closed date}}}
Demolished	{{{demolished date}}}
Specifications
Capacity	{{{capacity}}}
Length	{{{length}}}
Nave length	{{{length nave}}}
Choir length	{{{length choir}}}
Width	{{{width}}}
Nave width	{{{width nave}}}
Width across transepts	{{{width transepts}}}
Height	{{{height}}}
Nave height	{{{height nave}}}
Choir height	{{{height choir}}}
Diameter	{{{diameter}}}
Other dimensions	{{{other dimensions}}}
Number of floors	{{{floor count}}}
Floor area	{{{floor area}}}
Number of domes	{{{dome quantity}}}
Dome height (outer)	{{{dome height outer}}}
Dome height (inner)	{{{dome height inner}}}
Dome diameter (outer)	{{{dome dia outer}}}
Dome diameter (inner)	{{{dome dia inner}}}
Number of towers	{{{tower quantity}}}
Tower height	{{{tower height}}}
Number of spires	{{{spire quantity}}}
Spire height	{{{spire height}}}
Materials	{{{materials}}}
Bells	{{{bells}}} ({{{bells hung}}})
Tenor bell weight	{{{bell weight}}}
Administration
Parish	{{{parish}}}
Deanery	{{{deanery}}}
Archdeaconry	{{{archdeaconry}}}
Episcopal area	{{{episcopalarea}}}
Archdiocese	{{{archdiocese}}}
Metropolis	{{{metropolis}}}
Diocese	{{{diocese}}} (since {{{diocese start}}})
Province	{{{province}}}
Presbytery	{{{presbytery}}}
Synod	{{{synod}}}
Circuit	{{{circuit}}}
District	{{{district}}}
Division	{{{division}}}
Subdivision	{{{subdivision}}}
Clergy
Archbishop	{{{archbishop}}}
Bishop(s)	{{{bishop}}}
Auxiliary Bishop(s)	{{{auxiliary bishop}}}
Abbot	{{{abbot}}}
Prior	{{{prior}}}
Subprior	{{{subprior}}}
Provost and rector	{{{provost-rector}}}
Exarch(s)	{{{exarch}}}
Provost	{{{provost}}}
Vice-provost	{{{viceprovost}}}
Rector	{{{rector}}}
Vicar(s)	{{{vicar}}}
Dean	{{{dean}}}
Subdean	{{{subdean}}}
Archpriest	{{{archpriest}}}
Precentor	{{{precentor}}}
Succentor	{{{succentor}}}
Chancellor	{{{chancellor}}}
Canon Chancellor	{{{canonchancellor}}}
Canon(s)	{{{canon}}}
Canon Pastor	{{{canonpastor}}}
Canon Missioner	{{{canonmissioner}}}
Canon Treasurer	{{{canontreasurer}}}
Prebendary	{{{prebendary}}}
Priest in charge	{{{priestincharge}}}
Priest(s)	{{{priest}}}
Assistant priest	{{{asstpriest}}}
Honorary priest(s)	{{{honpriest}}}
Curate(s)	{{{curate}}}
Asst Curate(s)	{{{asstcurate}}}
NSM(s)	{{{nonstipendiaryminister}}}
Minister(s)	{{{minister}}}
Assistant	{{{assistant}}}
Senior pastor(s)	{{{seniorpastor}}}
Pastor(s)	{{{pastor}}}
Chaplain(s)	{{{chaplain}}}
Archdeacon	{{{archdeacon}}}
Deacon(s)	{{{deacon}}}
Deaconess(es)	{{{deaconess}}}
Laity
Reader(s)	{{{reader}}}
Student intern	{{{student intern}}}
Organist/Director of music	{{{organistdom}}}
Director of music	{{{director}}}
Organist(s)	{{{organist}}}
Organ scholar	{{{organscholar}}}
Chapter clerk	{{{chapterclerk}}}
Lay member(s) of chapter	{{{laychapter}}}
Session clerk	{{{sessionclerk}}}
Treasurer	{{{treasurer}}}
Churchwarden(s)	{{{warden}}}
Verger	{{{verger}}}
Business manager	{{{businessmgr}}}
Liturgy coordinator	{{{liturgycoord}}}
Religious education coordinator	{{{reledu}}}
RCIA coordinator	{{{rcia}}}
Youth ministry coordinator	{{{youthmin}}}
Flower guild	{{{flowerguild}}}
Music group(s)	{{{musicgroup}}}
Parish administrator	{{{parishadmin}}}
Servers' guild	{{{serversguild}}}
[[File:{{{logo}}}|{{{logosize}}}px | link={{{logolink}}} | alt={{{logoalt}}}]]

break

I agree, which is why I support making importing from Wikidata opt-in only; Wikidata's information integrity is even worse than Wikipedia's, and there's no obvious way to see duff edits being made in Wikidata which filter through onto Wikipedia. (Even if you're willing to see your watchlist degenerate into incomprehensible gray goo, selecting "show Wikidata edits" just fills your watchlist with unhelpful comments like (A Wikidata item has been linked to this page.) which isn't any actual help; I do get the feeling the Wikidata people don't appreciate that their pet project is utterly incomprehensible to outsiders.)

Quite aside from the issues with Wikidata's dubious approach to referencing, there's also the bloat issue. There are some infoboxes like {{infobox protein}} which only have a limited number of fields and in which it's uncontroversial that all the fields should be populated if the data is available, and there certainly should be a means by which people can decide to activate automated importing in those cases. There are also a lot of infoboxes like {{infobox church}} which have an absolute bucketload of fields, most of which can very easily be sourced-and-referenced but which would make the infobox longer than most articles if they were filled in in full (see right).

User:Dank is the person you need to convince of this, as he's the one closing the RFC; on this page I can assure you that with a few exceptions, you're very much preaching to the converted if you're against the "Wikidata will solve every problem" cult. ‑ Iridescent 16:56, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

My gods, that's a monstrosity of an infobox! Ealdgyth - Talk 17:06, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

It's by no means alone. ‑ Iridescent 17:21, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

Lumme - they're even worse than that monstrosity at Winston Churchill! (No-one has ever been able to explain the sense in adding "Preceded by" and "Succeeded by" for each and every cabinet position, which makes the whole thing an unwieldy mess!) - SchroCat (talk) 17:24, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

Inspired by your comment, SchroCat, I have trimmed the Churchillian infobox, which still leaves it gargantuan. Kablammo (talk) 18:28, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

In some defence of {{infobox church}}, some of the fields are mutually exclusive (nothing which has the Churchmanship field completed is likely to hold any relics, for instance) and some of the fields like "demolished date" will obviously be blank in many cases, but it still doesn't explain why we'd ever need an entry in flowerguild = or organscholar =. Take it up with these people; I dare say you'll see a few names you recognise. ‑ Iridescent 17:29, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

User:Only in death (great username btw), add anything you like to the RfC. I have no problem with long comments. The deadline on the RfC is in about 3.5 hrs. - Dank (push to talk) 17:30, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

By an odd coincidence, I'm about to start work on making a Wikidata-enabled version of {{Infobox church}}. The RfC is predicated on the wrong premise, of course. The real question is no longer about how the infobox designers should decide to pull data from Wikidata, but about how we can devolve the decision to editors at the article level. I'm currently trying a solution where each article with an infobox can implement a whitelist and a blacklist, so that the information is only fetched from Wikidata for whitelisted fields, but fields that are blacklisted are never displayed for that article. We'll see if editors are interested in taking control of those decisions for themselves. --RexxS (talk) 18:21, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

It's more that there are two different issues which have become entangled. "Is Wikidata reliable enough that en-wiki should consider importing data from it without manually checking each instance?" and "What is the best mechanism for importing data from it?". The two questions are hopelessly entangled—if one doesn't accept that Wikidata is accurate, that has a major impact on which mechanism ought to be used. (If one concedes that Wikidata is untrustworthy, then the default position pretty much has to be opt-in; this is a separate issue from "do we want every field autopopulated?".) Plus, of course, there's the way Wikidata sources information from other Wikipedias which may be in disagreement with this one—to pick a not-at-all-random example, if you flip through the various language versions of President of Brazil you'll see there's no agreement between the various languages about who holds this post, so how do we decide which is the correct version to use? ‑ Iridescent 18:34, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

The first question has to be answered affirmatively before we even start to think about the second. If data from Wikidata is less reliable than our present article, then we shouldn't be importing it. I understand the result of Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Wikidata Phase 2 to mean that editors were content to import data from Wikidata within infoboxes, but you may be right that it's time to ask the question again. I've made a demo tool that allows anyone to see what data and references are available on Wikidata by pasting {{#invoke:Sandbox/RexxS/WdRefs|seeRefs}} into any article and previewing it. That might help folks decide whether the Wikidata information is suitable for inclusion in the article.

As for President of Brazil, if we're thinking about importing data from Wikidata, then we don't have to worry about how other Wikipedias treat a subject. On Wikidata, President of Brazil (Q5176750) shows: officeholder (P1308) as Michel Temer (Q463533) (start date = 17 April 2016); and five others with different start and finish dates. If we want to use Dilma Rousseff in our article President of Brazil instead, then it's simple to supply her name in the infobox ourselves. A local value will always override anything from Wikidata - at least in any infobox that I've had anything to do with. That keeps the decision in the hands of the article editors, and that's how it should be IMHO. --RexxS (talk) 19:57, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

Unreferenced statement added by a driveby IP; as I've pointed out on the RFC, even the man himself scrupulously avoids referring to himself as "President". When Sarah talks about the problem of Wikidata combining oversimplification of complex issues and a failure to check potentially problematic statements, this is a textbook example. ‑ Iridescent 20:07, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

I quite like the "(Tag: new editor changing statement)" auto-generated edit summary. It didn't take more than a few seconds to correct the Wikidata entry for President of Brazil (Q5176750), and one of the results of regularly importing data from Wikidata would be that we would have noticed any drive-by edit to Wikidata immediately, rather than months later. What Sarah hasn't got to grips with yet is that the type of problems potentially besetting her from Wikidata are identical to the problems she gets from Wikipedia editors. The only difference between "genre" being adding from Wikidata and being added by Wikipedia editors, is that it is trivial to stop it from Wikidata, and often difficult to revert stubborn Wikipedia editors. Wikidata doesn't edit-war with you. --RexxS (talk) 20:48, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

Hmm. I think Temer is the president of Brazil right now (he holds the office, even if it is only on a temporary basis), and I can find plenty of reliable sources that will refer to him as the interim or acting president of Brazil, if not the president (without any qualifier). So why did you remove his name, or at least not fix what appears to have been broken? The reason there's not a lot of edit warring at Wikidata is that there aren't enough people working there to care. But there will be, and then we will have epic battles that will affect not just one project but dozens. Mark my word. Risker (talk) 20:58, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

The reason I reverted, Risker (nice to hear from you btw!), was that the drive-by IP had overwritten the entry for Dilma Rousseff, rather than adding an entry for Temer. I made no arguments about who should properly be referred to as President currently (although the official Brazillian government website shows this: http://www.biblioteca.presidencia.gov.br/presidencia if folks want to argue about it). I merely restored an entry that had been deleted out-of-process. If you - or anybody else - care to add an entry for Temer to President of Brazil (Q5176750), that's fine, but please don't remove other accurate entries in doing so. Cheers --RexxS (talk) 21:10, 14 June 2016 (UTC) Update: I've added Michel Temer (Q463533) along with the correct start date and a reference. All's well? --RexxS (talk) 21:21, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

On Brazil, I'd consider "Acting President" to effectively be a regency rather than a transfer of office, but I concede it's not something about which I care a great deal. On Wikidata, I'm more inclined to side with Risker on this one—at the moment Wikidata is calm because it's something of a backwater, but once it becomes widely known that changes there will affect multiple-language Wikipedias, it will become a venue for huge editwars in which the warring parties don't even speak the same language so are literally incapable of discussing the matter and coming to a consensus. Sure, one can make the entries appear on your Wikipedia watchlist, but if you're not in the know then both the summary and the diff itself for an edit like Created claim: Property:P2604: 170941; ‎Created claim: Property:P2605: 7385 (the most recent Wikidata edit on my watchlist) may as well be a string of random characters. Yes, I do appreciate that Wikipedia itself is subject to editwarring, but Wikipedia pages tend to be watched more often, and even when they're not then serious problems are much more likely to be spotted and fixed by random visitors. This edit remained live and unfixed on Wikidata for over two years despite being in the high-profile description / en spot which is automatically shown in search results and the mobile site. ‑ Iridescent 14:40, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

Well, Risker seems to be admonishing me for removing Michel Temer, without understanding that I was actually fixing the problem that the IP had wiped out all trace of Dilma Rousseff from the record and nobody was showing as President of Brasil between 2011 and 2016. Surely you can't be on her side in thinking that's a good idea?

I don't think there's any disagreement that Wikidata has very few active editors to curate 18,000,000 items of data. The result is that vandalism is hard to spot and slow to be corrected. I suppose the question becomes "should we care?". The answer, IMHO, is "yes" mainly because of all the other small language Wikipedias that could potentially expand their coverage of many topics (or at least get a stub to start with), if only Wikidata could provide reasonably reliable data. At present, it's not an assumption we can make, sadly. The only way that I can see of improving that position is to engage the efforts of the editors of the largest Wikipedias to help watch over corresponding topics in Wikidata. I can't see that being a popular option, of course, because of the general parochialism of so many editors here. --RexxS (talk) 16:08, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

Not at all; I agree with you that we shouldn't be overwriting Rousseff with Temer since the situation is complex and she's still theoretically the office holder. (Note my comments on the RFC.) Regarding Wikidata, I'm not sure you'll ever be able to persuade the editors of the big Wikipedias to take an active interest. Along with Commons it's acquired a reputation, rightly or wrongly, as having taken over from Wikiversity and Simple English Wikipedia as en-wiki's dumping ground for problematic editors; the only way you'll overcome the "why the hell should I want to get involved with that pack of weirdos?" factor is if, as with Commons, you can make Wikidata so essential to the functioning of the other projects that even people who strongly oppose its very existence have no real alternative but to engage with it. ‑ Iridescent 16:30, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

But that's only if you can overcome the flaws in its very existence. WD is founded as a suppository repository suppository of base gobbets of "information" that it disseminates. This only works when the world can be pigeon-holed into neat boxes. Unfortunately that means some of these factoids—in many cases the banalest droplets of data—are ripped from their context and therefore people's understanding.

It's an even bigger problem when third parties try and use the data, and do so poorly. For example, the Google boxes for both the actors John Barrymore and Bernard Lee both have definitive information about their birth where there is no such clarity in real life (Barrymore's dates are uncertain and there are two possible locations for Lee's place of birth), and the sources are split in their opinions. Not Google, based on their use of WD: they "know" which one it is, and have stripped out the real-life uncertainty. That's only one of the problems of a computerised fact-stripping: WD mistakes data for knowledge and facts for understanding, without ever understanding the difference. It is the triumph of factoids over understanding, and a horrible, horrible concept. – SchroCat (talk) 16:45, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

Wikidata gives dates of birth for John Barrymore (Q95034) as 14 and 15 February 1882 (Gregorian), as does our article. It's not reasonable to blame a sister project for the misuse of its information by a third-party, even if that party is Google. The actual problem with Barrymore's entry in WD is that there is only one good reference supplied in the whole page, and what is needed is to supply references for all of the information there. John Barrymore is a Featured Article on en-wp, but only 1 in 10 of the different language Wikipedias have an article on him. I want my friends who work on the Welsh Wikipedia to have the tools to get started on adding all of those missing articles: if we could generate a set of key facts and a list of decent references, we'd be well on our way. If that information were available on Wikidata, I could do that for them, and I find it disappointing that more editors here don't share my passion for spreading our knowledge to other Wikipedias. --RexxS (talk) 19:40, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

And that's the problem right there. We can control what we put into articles and to some extent what goes into the abyss of WD. That's our responsibility and we manage it fairly well. With WD that responsibility is abrogated, which is something I'm not happy with. It's great to point the finger at the company that's largely funded WD, but if the a main funder of the project is using the data so poorly as to provide misleading information, it's something that leaves me extremely uncomfortable. You've raised the second major, major problem I have with WD, which is the utterly unsourced nature of what - 80, 90% of the information? (Are there any figures for the percentage of information that is unsourced in WD? And I don't mean that contains a dubious reference to Wikipedia, I mean an actual reference) And its proposed to fill in empty fields in IBs (or generate new articles) with these oceans of unsourced facts crap? You may be happy to fill shedloads of articles with unsourced nonsense rex, but it leaves me deeply concerned and reaching for the vandalism button to revert them all. – SchroCat (talk) 20:16, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

The signpost op-ed has some numbers. Only in death does duty end (talk) 21:37, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

Ouch.... And people think that it's sufficient to use that to generate non-existent articles, or to populate empty idiotbox fields? Please tell me that only the data that is supported by citations from external sources are to be used (unless common sense makes an unexpected but timely intervention and ensures this doesn't happen). Thanks OiD. – SchroCat (talk) 21:50, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

See my above testing with Gout (which thankfully now on Wikidata has a source that isnt Wikipedia). A wikidata enabled template just imports whatever fields are populated at Wikidata. (When the fields are removed here) To prevent a wikidata template from importing info from wikidata, you need to put the field in but leave it blank. As far as I am aware there is no way to tell a template here to only import wikidata if the info at wikidata is sourced to a third party. And even then it could be sourced to literally anything and it would still import it. Only in death does duty end (talk) 21:54, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

A wikidata enabled template just imports whatever fields are populated at Wikidata - a ridiculous generalisation that's like seeing an Appaloosa and claiming "all horses are spotted". Template:Infobox medical condition (new) does that because its users requested it to work that way. Template:Infobox book/Wikidata/Sandbox doesn't do that because the request was for an infobox that didn't autopopulate without the editor at the article specifically enabling it. Take any book article and preview {{Infobox book/Wikidata/Sandbox}} in it. Then come back here and try to tell me "A wikidata enabled template just imports whatever fields are populated at Wikidata ... To prevent a wikidata template from importing info from wikidata, you need to put the field in but leave it blank." --RexxS (talk) 22:54, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

I will stick with using actual live examples rather than your sandbox thanks. Only in death does duty end (talk) 23:03, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

@SchroCat: Where do you get the disinformation about Google being the major funder of Wikidata? The first year grant was 50% from Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, 25% from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and 25% from Google. Since the first year, it's been funded by WMF. If you want to know what references are available in Wikidata for an article, preview {{#invoke:Sandbox/RexxS/WdRefs|seeRefs}} in it. I made the tool for folks to check in the hope that some will be responsible enough to actually try to improve the referencing. I can see that narrow parochialism wins out every time. --RexxS (talk) 22:54, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

What a bloody farce it all is. We all sweat blood to get articles to the highest standards possible, including hours of endless research into topics. We endlessly debate the smallest changes in punctuation and minor word alterations to ensure the meanings of our texts are clear, and the source reviews we have check minute details to ensure that what we write is adequately covered in sources. Now some bright spark has thought it would be a "good idea" to drop referenced, unverified and probably incorrect bollocks into articles with no verification process? What an utter clusterfuck! If enforced idiotbox data population is the order of the day, it automatically downgrades every graded article we have back to zero, because unreferenced and unverified information in an article is the quickest way to FAR, FLRC and GAR. At least drive-by IP vandals can only cock up one article at a time, not the few million that WD vandalism will affect! – SchroCat (talk) 23:01, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

"narrow parochialism"? No, rex. It's about having standards and adhering to them. And just because some people don't bow down at your altar of WD, it's not a sign of narrow parochialism, just a different way of looking at something. – SchroCat (talk) 23:07, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

And yet the vast majority of the sourcing on Wikidata that you're whining about is imported from English Wikipedia. The very same pieces of information that you're so proud of when viewed on Wikipedia become "unverified and probably incorrect bollocks" when seen on Wikidata. So which is it? I have no great love of Wikidata, so you can cut the ad hominems. My interest is solely how we can leverage it to improve other Wikipedia projects, as well as this one. You really make my case about parochialism for me. --RexxS (talk) 23:12, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

Break 2

Oh FFS, I'm guilty of "narrow parochialism", and having concerns about standards in Wikipedia is "whining", and yet I can cut the ad hominem comments? It comes as no surprise to see you revert to your usual 'style' once again rex. There is no "narrow parochialism" here, despite your oft-repeated PA: I'm not accusing foreign language wikis of providing dross which we here should guard against (you've erroneously leapt to that conclusion all on your own). I'm concerned about erroneous data from all wikis, including en, which we are going to rehash across the entire project and which is then repeated on third the party sites that don't even care about getting nuanced or confused details right, as long as they can shove some factoid in their 'one-size-fits-all' field. Try replying without the snide insults this time rex – they say much more about you than your targets. – SchroCat (talk) 05:46, 16 June 2016 (UTC)

OK, you're both talking past each other. Quick refocusing:

• SchroCat, RexxS makes a valid point that most of the unsourced data on Wikidata is actually sourced from somewhere and has just become detached from its source, and the issue is instilling a better culture of sourcing on Wikidata rather than jettisoning it altogether;
• RexxS (implicitly) makes an even more valid point that given that this is a WMF pet project, it's not going away so it's up to the individual Wikipedias to reach a modus vivendi with it, in the same way en-wiki has reached a grudging acceptance of Commons parking their tanks on the lawn. (It also occurs to me that it makes it considerably more difficult to set up a Wikipedia fork; whether you see that as a positive or a negative is up to you.);
• SchroCat also has a perfectly valid point; the intersection of "Assume good faith", "You can't copyright a fact" and "All language Wikipedias are equal" at Wikidata has unintentionally created a culture of poor sourcing in which the audit trails on sourcing and citation have become severely attenuated, and unlike Commons (or even the backwaters like Wikisource and Wikiquote) Wikidata doesn't have the culture of admins and gnomes to cope with the volume data they've absorbed, and it's not "parochialism" to point out that the big Wikipedias are likely to be better at spotting and fixing errors on-site than if they're exported elsewhere. (I'd add that, because of its radically different structure and steep learning curve, Wikidata doesn't even have the last-resort fallback which Wikivoyage, Wikispecies et al have, of being able to post begging letters at noticeboards on the big Wikipedias asking editors to temporarily move across to help clear up a backlog.)

All of this could do with some actual numbers. I'm not going to spend time writing up a grant application myself, but I could certainly make a case that it would be worthwhile if the WMF diverted a fraction of the funds they spend flying the party faithful to an annual knees-up, or producing site-wide banners inviting all-comers to suggest the best way to get rid of people to whom Jimbo's taken a dislike, on some actual figures for Wikidata's accuracy. I'd suggest a genuinely random sample of 10,000 Wikidata entries and 10,000 Wikipedia pages, and checking every claimed fact against reality. If the Wikidata model is working as its proponents claim, it should have an accuracy rate well above en-wiki's, and some actual data to that effect would go a long way towards silencing its critics. If Wikidata's accuracy comes out below en-wiki's, then per my comments somewhere near the top of this monster thread that's a powerful case for the "opt-in only" position. At the moment, from that RFC it's obvious there's a clear split between "Wikidata is unsalvageably bad" and "Wikidata is a miracle cure", and neither faction has much data to back their position up. ‑ Iridescent 13:45, 16 June 2016 (UTC)

Also, pinging Jayen466 to this discussion given that he's the one responsible for popularising the "Wikidata is inherently unreliable" concept. ‑ Iridescent 13:55, 16 June 2016 (UTC)

Iridescent, The problem is that "most of the unsourced data on Wikidata is actually sourced from somewhere" is way too vague to allow data dumping onto the various wikis. Don't forget many of the articles that could be infected by this data will be BLPs. We hold a high line to BLPs, and insist on sourcing even when we happen to 'know' that something is true. One of my utter bugbears is the addition of unsourced data onto any article, and it's second nature to me to insist on any addition to articles to be reliably sourced. WP:CIRCULAR is there for a very good reason ("Do not use articles from Wikipedia (whether this English Wikipedia or Wikipedias in other languages) as sources") and is another long step away from the accusations of parochialism - narrow or broad! - SchroCat (talk) 14:02, 16 June 2016 (UTC)

Sure, but the information that's sourced to Wikipedia could presumably in every case be sourced to whatever source that Wikipedia used, and the issue is that whoever initially imported it to Wikidata couldn't be fagged, rather than that the source doesn't exist. "Sourced to Wikipedia" isn't something you ever want to hear in an ideal world, but it's not necessarily the Mark of Cain some of the Wikipedia Review crowd make it out to be. ‑ Iridescent 15:58, 16 June 2016 (UTC)

But how—in the worst case BLP argument—do you ensure that the piece of WD that is imported across is one where there is a piece of 'separated' sourcing, as opposed to an unsourced piece, or a piece of vandalism (either on WD, or on some source article). That's a fairly big risk some people want to take based on way too little information. It may not be the mark of Cain, but it's a dramatic step backwards in terms of quality, verifiability and basic standards of sourcing. I really don't know what the rush is here. Getting WD up to scratch is a good way to start before we start dumping what I suspect is a lot of crap into a lot of places. SchroCat (talk) 16:27, 16 June 2016 (UTC)

The rush here is that a number of people with influence on the WMF operate businesses which are predicated on the ability to distil Wikipedia articles to a series of data points, and that the dead hand of the Knowledge Engine hasn't yet released its grip. I really don't think that's unduly cynical—regardless of the ultimate quality of the product, I don't think it's really in dispute that the reason it was rushed through was that Jimmy and pals are looking ahead to a day when Wikipedia can be written by source-analysing algorithms and editors can be dispensed with altogether. ‑ Iridescent 16:33, 16 June 2016 (UTC)

@RexxS, isn't an infobox that didn't autopopulate without the editor at the article specifically enabling it the very embodiment of what's being described at the RFC as "opt-in"? ‑ Iridescent 15:59, 16 June 2016 (UTC)

Not exactly. What the "opt-in" proponents have been asking for is an infobox where the editor has to write |isbn=FETCH_WIKIDATA or something like that in every field where they wanted to fetch the value from Wikidata, and then check that the result is sensible. Who is going to do that in an existing box when there's already a locally supplied value there? So it reduces the incentive to make use of Wikidata on the English Wikipedia. Also, if someone later adds, say, a value for date of publication to the Wikidata entry for the book, an editor on en-wp still has to enable it by adding |pub_date=FETCH_WIKIDATA to the article infobox, even though they have seen on their watchlist that the new value has been written to Wikidata and is sensible. It also means - if you take them at their word - that folks like Mike Peel will by told by some wikicop that they have just reverted all his changes to {{Infobox telescope}} because it's "opt-out".

If we replaced {{Infobox book}} by {{Infobox book/Wikidata/Sandbox}}, there would be no change in how the article displayed. In that sense, it's "opt-in". They would have to add |fetchwikidata=<list of fields to be imported from Wikidata> to enable the named fields. But if someone wanted to create a new article on a book that already has an entry on Wikidata, they could use {{Infobox book/Wikidata/Sandbox}} with |fetchwikidata=ALL and it would autopopulate with the values available on Wikidata - in other words it behaves as "opt-out". In addition, if Sarah wants to make sure that "Genre" never gets displayed in a particular article (perhaps because it's agreed that genre is not well-defined for that book), she can add the parameter |suppressfields=genre to the infobox and it will never display Genre, even if somebody specifically writes it into the infobox locally. By having both a blacklist and a whitelist (which can be a list of fields to fetch from Wikidata or "ALL" for all fields), we can be much smarter about how we decide to get our information from Wikidata. I've written a new Lua Module with the calls that should allow any infobox be modified for use as "opt-in" or "opt-out", or any desired combination, and also go some way to solving the problem of having to leave html comments telling editors not add "genre", or whatever.

I've created the tools (I hope) that will allow each side to have the Wikidata-aware infobox that they have asked for, but I'm faced at every turn by the "Little Englanders" who will make the point over and again that Wikidata doesn't offer much to a well-developed Wikipedia like the English one (which I don't dispute), but go deaf when I ask them to consider how much benefit the smaller language Wikipedias could make of using what may be developed here. --RexxS (talk) 19:00, 16 June 2016 (UTC)

But again, I think you're talking past each other. As I read the above, Wikidata will generate a lot of work for little gain on English Wikipedia (and ditto for the other well-developed projects like German and Polish), but will hugely benefit the smaller projects by allowing them to fill in gaps automagically. However, there's certainly a case to be made that that is just a variation of the "the primary purpose of Wikipedia is to be as machine readable as possible" argument. This is a view that does still have strong support in certain circles, particularly among the Silicon Valley types who control the WMF. However, as Lila Tretikov has recently illustrated fairly spectacularly, it's a deeply unpopular view among the editor base on which the big Wikipedias rely. (A disconnect and lack of understanding between a foundation that's increasingly run by people connected with Silicon Valley, and the volunteer community of editors who worry that [it] may reflect a change in the WMF's focus from user-generated content to one led by automated data results, to quote our own article on the issue.)

Playing devil's advocate, I could make a perfectly valid and probably just as widely-supported case that the WMF should be actively closing down the smaller Wikipedias, or at least cutting them loose to sink or swim, and that the "little England" (and little Spanish, French, German) mentality that Wikipedia should be focusing on getting the widely-read projects in order is the correct one. (If the Siegenthaler controversy had taken place on Old Gothic Wikipedia nobody would ever have given a damn.) Why should donor funds continue to be spent on hosting and actively supporting projects whose recent changes feeds look like this, and which are clearly moribund? (The only three Wikipedias ever to be booted off the servers by the WMF are Klingon, Toki Pona and Siberian, all three of which are constructed languages which have never had a native speaker.) Sure, this WMF-created script can write articles from Wikidata and could inflate any given Wikipedia by a million new articles, but that would just leave a million new unwatched pages ready to degenerate into "Kyle is teh gay" and SEO spam.

TL;DR summary: The RFCs aren't asking the right questions, which should actually begin with "Does English Wikipedia have a duty of care to other language projects and to non-WMF commercial websites who reuse our data, or is our primary purpose still the English-language, non-machine, reader?", since the answer to that question will shape the answers to everything else. The only person who's really asked this question at a high level is Doc James, and look what happened to him. ‑ Iridescent 14:55, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

Aside: you need to maintain the indentation level on the otherwise blank lines if you want to be kind to screen readers (as we should).

Anyway, there's a lot of non-moribund small Wikis that could make use of some automation to help broaden their coverage. I'm sure you wouldn't want to tell my pal Robin that he'd be better off abandoning the Welsh Wikipedia, even though its recent changes look like this. I'm no advocate of automatically creating millions of unwatched articles as spam magnets (although Magnus's Reasonator makes a great starting point for any keen editor wanting to get started on a new article), but there's a case for creating list articles on current topics - Rihanna discography comes to mind - via a central database, rather than having to keep fans editors busy on each Wikipedia updating their articles every time a new album comes out. That's likely to be my next project.

You're right about the primacy of the question about En-wp's duty towards other Wikipedias, but I honestly believe in wmf:Vision and I take seriously the idea of "every single human", so the question is already answered for me. I know that others won't agree with me, but that's one topic where I don't share the fashionably cynical attitude. Cheers --RexxS (talk) 16:35, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

Data≠knowledge. There's nothing cynical about that rex, it's as bald a statement of truth as facts≠knowledge. And when that data (or those "facts") come from sub-standard or misleading sources, that's doubly the case.

Can I ask what will happen on one of the data dumps is there are two variables on WD for one field?? This must have been considered already, so how is it proposed to deal with it? – SchroCat (talk) 16:50, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

Languages by number of native speakers

(edit conflict) Sure, I believe in the principle of "every single person on the world is given access" mantra, but I think there's a perfectly reasonable case to be made that duplicating Wikipedia 293 times is not the best way to go about it. For better or worse, a dozen or so languages are dominant and are becoming ever more so. One could certainly argue that "that girl in Africa who can save the lives of hundreds of thousands of people around her, but only if she's empowered with the knowledge to do so" is considerably better served if we teach her English, French or Arabic and thus give her access to the versions of Wikipedia in which the facts have at least a fighting chance of being comprehensive, reliably sourced and fact-checked and whatever she's looking up probably has an article (and also give her access to the sources, which are much more likely to be written in one of those languages than in her own), than by giving her a Wikipedia in her own language which consists of 5000–10,000 articles, most of which are unsourced and unmaintained stubs. And at least those are languages which actually have speakers; I fail to see why a penny of donor money should be spent on ensuring Wikipedia is available in Old Church Slavonic, Classical Chinese or Gothic. Yes, "focus on languages which are widely spoken" is cultural imperialism, but that ship sailed a century ago; regardless of whether one likes it or not, "English, Spanish, French, Chinese and Arabic are the world's lingua francas" is just a statement of fact.

Welsh Wikipedia isn't really a good example to use, since it can be reasonably assumed that every Welsh speaker over the age of five is also going to speak fluent English or Spanish, and will be used to flipping over to the English version of something if the Welsh version is unsatisfactory, so the grey-goo issue is a lot less pressing given that readers can easily copy references across from en-wiki. Welsh and Irish Wikipedias are also something of an outrider, as they have Robin and Alison keeping them in line; I suspect that Scots Wikipedia, Norfuk Wikkapedya and the like are far more representative of "minority language/dialect delete as appropriate in a place where everyone speaks English". ‑ Iridescent 17:22, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

@SchroCat: Yes, we all accept those truisms, but the data needs to used to help build articles, not as a substitute for article-building, and that's where I object to your mis-characterisation of my work. Again, let me remind you that the data which you describe as "from sub-standard or misleading sources" comes overwhelmingly from English Wikipedia and its peers. You should be directing your ire at the very articles you're worried about "contaminating", because that's where the data is coming from. Now if you want to complain about the poor quality of Wikidata references, that's up to you. I'll merely observe that I've been editing Wikidata to add references; I originated the idea of making an [edit Wikidata] link in Wikidata-aware infoboxes to encourage other editors do the same; and I've created a tool to allow Wikipedia editors to preview the data and associated references available in Wikidata, in the hope that they'll spend a few minutes there improving the entries. You've made 81 edits to Wikidata. I'm sincerely pleased you added a reference for Bernard Lee's place of birth and I don't want to do anything to discourage you, but you are obviously well-aware of how much work is still needed to bring up those references to scratch. I wish I could convince you that complaining about it isn't the solution.

@Iridescent: But teaching the girl in Africa to read English and providing her with a decent quality article in her own language aren't mutually exclusive options. It's not as though I could make any impact on teaching an African to read English, anyway. Most of the cost of providing that article doesn't come from donor's money anyway; it's the cost of time and effort by many volunteers who write, translate or adapt the articles. That's a reason why I'm part of WikiProject Medicine Foundation which has a goal of providing good quality medical articles in as many languages as possible. Although I won't be asking for them in Old Church Slavonic, Classical Chinese, Gothic, or even Valerian. --RexxS (talk) 18:53, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

"You should be directing your ire at the very articles you're worried about "contaminating", because that's where the data is coming from": as far as I understand it WD harvests data from idiotboxes, where no references are held if the information is also held in the article body. My "ire" (actually despair) is directed towards the sub-standard method of factoid-gathering, and the misguided concept that somehow data=knowledge. Again, I'll ask: Can I ask what will happen on one of the smaller wikis when in one of the data dumps, there are two variables on WD for one field? – SchroCat (talk) 19:08, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

That, at least, can be answered definitively, as mediawiki:Extension:ArticlePlaceholder has started to go live on some smaller Wikipedias. This is what is currently output for John Barrymore on Haitian Wikipedia. ‑ Iridescent 19:16, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

Urgh.... I'm underwhelmed by the brave new dawn. I largely wrote the Barrymore FA, and I think I've just lost some of my understanding of him based on that! I see no knowledge there at all, just a series of random pieces of information that will leave Haitians going "huh?" That's an even bigger embarrassment than I feared it would be! – SchroCat (talk) 21:14, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

break 3

To be fair, those Wikidata-generated placeholder pages intentionally look like that, to make it clear they're autogenerated lists of factoids rather than anything human-written. It does serve its basic purpose, in that a Haitian coming across a mention of Barrymore somewhere and wanting to know who he was can at least find out the absolute basics, which is all these placeholder-pages are supposed to do. If bot-written articles ever get authorised, they will look more like this. (If you think that's bad, wait until this goes live; unless I'm seriously misunderstanding the proposal, this is possibly the stupidest idea I've ever seen from the WMF, as well as having the lamest name ever.) ‑ Iridescent 21:23, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

It depends what the basic purpose is, I suppose, but that doesn't provide knowledge or understanding as far as I'm concerned and is another example of the woefully misbegotten concept that factoids and the same as knowledge. It is also going to leave Haitians more confused than having no article. I suspect any non-Enlish speaking Haitian will ignore it and shove one of the written articles through Google translate, if they actually want knowledge or understanding. As to the "reasonator" version, it's disheartening to see that although they get both dates of birth lower down the page, the "lead" gives just the one. So there is a basic error of fact in the opening line, which is a concern. Still at least the lead tells us he is an "actor, stage actor and film actor", just so there is no doubt. (I'm mystified by the gallery too: I'm not sure why half those images are there, yet many of the related ones we have on Commons are not showing: most odd.) my eyes glazed over when I started to read "StrepHit": maybe I'll try again in the morning if I can raise my spirits to do so... – SchroCat (talk) 21:43, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

I've no idea where Reasonator is getting the images from—File:Louisa Lane Drew c1840-48.png appears on Barrymore's entry, for instance, but isn't in use on any page related to him on any project as far as I can see. Magnus Manske wrote the script, if you care enough to ask.

If I'm understanding StrepHit correctly, if you give it a subject it will scrape the internet looking for mentions of that subject, and parse whatever it finds into Wikipedia-formatted text complete with references. Anyone who thinks this is a good idea is presumably not familiar with the contents of the internet. Plus I need to repeat that I don't think I could come up with a worse name than "StrepHit" if I tried; it sounds like a battlefield medication for scarlet fever. ‑ Iridescent 21:55, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

At least Louisa Lane Drew is related: there's a pic of Robert Morley in there, which is odd, as I think they only appeared together in one 1938 film! – SchroCat (talk) 22:08, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

Am I to understand that we are going to have articles including BLPs compiled by a machine from information found anywhere on the Internet? Presumably this is at an early discussion stage given the number of issues this raises, including how the program will determine which webpages are reliable sources (and which ones are gossip rags, attack pages, or for that matter outdated mirrors of Wikipedia), and whether an actual person will review the material before it goes live. Is there somewhere this is being discussed? Newyorkbrad (talk) 22:01, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

Meta:Grants:IEG/StrepHit: Wikidata Statements Validation via References. To judge by meta:Grants:IEG/StrepHit: Wikidata Statements Validation via References/Timeline#Biographies, the plan appears to be to create a list of "approved biographical sources" which will then be data-mined, although since the whole thing is written in purest techie gibberish (After inspecting the set of verb lemmas, we found lots of noise, mainly caused by the default tokenization logic of the POS-tagging library we used. Therefore, we implemented our own tokenizer, to be leveraged by all modules) it's difficult to be sure. This is probably the wrong attitude to take, but I suspect if you point Greg towards that page and give it a couple of weeks he'll come back with an in-depth analysis of all its pros and cons which will be much easier to read than the proposal itself. ‑ Iridescent 22:09, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

Thanks. There already is a thread about StrepHit underway in Another Place, although so far they've only gotten as far as making fun of the name.

As I think about it, I suppose that to a very limited extent, this type of automated article-starting has assisted in creating one type of articles—that being (US) federal judges' biographies that originated with material taken from the Biographical Directory of Federal Judges. The "articles" so generated are initially hyper-choppy sub-stubs, but they are something; and they do have the advantage that the editor looking to write the real article is starting with some basic information rather than a completely blank page, which probably makes the real article more likely to be written. But the FJC database is organized in fields that are pretty much the same for every entry, and includes only basic information; I'm not sure to what extent that will extrapolate to many other sources. Newyorkbrad (talk) 22:20, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

If you really have an urge to dredge up ancient history, there was an attempt to do something similar once before, using a bot to create auto-generated stub biographies from the persondata on German Wikipedia where an article existed there but not here. It was not universally welcomed, and virtually everything created via the process ended up being deleted. ‑ Iridescent 22:25, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

(edit conflict) That's the bit I'm interested in, Brad. Getting a start on an article is the single best use of any of the databases we have access to. It's true that not all databases as as well-organised as the FJC, but there's the challenge: to create a system that can deal with a multitude of different collections of information and provide the aspiring article writer with a decent enough start for them to actually write something more than a bare collection of facts. It's easy for the snobs to sneer at stubs and start-class articles, but every article had to start somewhere. Of course, the obvious elephant-in-the-room is the lack of cast-iron reliable sourcing, unless the database itself can be considered a RS. That's one of the the reasons why I regard Wikidata as a failing project now - it needed to have sourcing "baked-in" from the very start. I could write Lua modules to import information from Wikidata only when it is referenced to something better than "imported from the English Wikipedia", but we'd end up with very little to import. If someone can come up with some good idea for attaching references to all of those unsourced statements, I might be prepared to change my mind, but I'm not expecting that any time soon. The best I have to offer right now is to use Wikidata in infoboxes wherever possible and try to encourage editors to see the associated Wikidata entry as part of the article, so that improving the quality of the Wikidata would be seen as improving the quality of the article, but that would require a real cultural shift. If we insisted that the Wikidata corresponding to an article had the be the same quality as that of the English Wikipedia article in order for it to become an FA, we'd soon have the badge-collectors falling over themselves to improve the referencing. One can only dream ... --RexxS (talk) 22:47, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

"All unsourced statements are deleted after six months"; I'm sure a bot could be written to do that (since, unlike on Wikipedia, on Wikidata it's always clear what fact a source is intended to support). Yes, people would scream blue murder at the start when the database size suddenly shrinks by 75%, but the culture there could do with some shock treatment, and unless it shakes off its reputation as Wikipedia's idiot stepchild SchroCat's attitude is always going to be the prevailing one. ‑ Iridescent 22:55, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

"Snobs"? "Badge collectors"? And you're trying to win people over to your side by insulting swathes of editors who spend their time trying to improve the encyclopaedia? Stacking barbed wire comments around things does not build bridges rex and isn't going to help people have the open minds you want them to. – SchroCat (talk) 08:15, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

Exactly. You take the attitude that only you are trying to improve the encyclopedia, and can't accept that others might be trying to do the same in another way. Unlike you, I'm prepared to accept that different people can make improvements that aren't just related to increasing the number of stars on their user page. You want to build bridges? Start by acknowledging that the contributions of others aren't automatically inferior to your own. --RexxS (talk) 11:47, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

Exactly what, rex? I'm afraid you have totally misrepresented my viewpoint there. I have never said that you are not trying to improve the encyclopaedia (show me the diff where I have clearly said that). You can also dig out the diff where I've expressed the opinion that the contributions to others are inferior to mine while you're about it (it's not what I believe, so good luck looking). It may help to try and find some common ground rather than drive people apart, which is what you're doing here, or to try and focus on your own arguments, rather than try and badly double guess my thoughts on my fellow editors. My view is—has always been—a lot less divisive than you are being here. Yes, disseminating knowledge is what we are about, but my view on what constitutes knowledge (and even better, understanding) differ considerably from the factoid driven approach. Go ahead, sneer at the people who enjoy writing articles, but it reflects rather badly on you rather than them I think, and is unlikely to win many over to your line of thinking. – SchroCat (talk) 12:08, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

break 4

Yeah, I have to agree with SchroCat there. I personally don't particularly like the badge collecting mentality on Wikipedia—I think the badges-and-barnstars culture can sometimes deflect editors away from what's necessary in favour of what will give them shiny barnstars or a higher placement on WP:WBE—but I recognise that this is a minority view and I don't see what's to be gained by denigrating those who don't subscribe to it. On a skim of the 23 signatories to the statement that "infoboxes are integral to the encyclopaedia" on the assumption that those are likely to be Wikidata's core supporters, and disregarding the six who are indefblocked and/or have blanked their user pages, 13 of 17 have some kind of high-score-table or row of shiny topicons on their user page. The MMORPG mentality is so heavily embedded in Wikipedia that you're never going to shift it, and sniping at those who participate in it is just going to alienate the people whom you need to convince that Wikidata isn't some kind of hostile force parking its tanks on Wikipedia's lawn. ‑ Iridescent 10:11, 18 June 2016 (UTC)
Note: intervening comments have separated this reply from the comment being replied to; the statement to which I'm agreeing is the one beginning ""Snobs"? "Badge collectors"?", not the later comment, regarding which I don't agree with SchroCat. I believe there are many circumstances when the factoid-driven approach is the correct one, most obviously languages where there's unlikely to be much interest in a topic and thus doing a full translation is not a good use of time, but where we still want to cater for those few people who do have an interest. (As a concrete example, very few Haitians are likely to ever want to read about Adam Gilchrist, and translating this 8500-word article into Haitian is not going to be a sensible use of anyone's time, but having the auto-generated entry means that some Haitian who sees a reference to him somewhere can at least find out at a glance that it's an Aussie cricketer who's being discussed. And yes, I know I'm picking on the Haitians here, but that's because Haitian is similar enough to languages I at least vaguely understand that I can tell at a glance what the information being imported actually says.) ‑ Iridescent 15:31, 19 June 2016 (UTC)

Actually Iridescent my last comment was more about the approach than anything, but as you've raised it, let me explain my problems with what we've classed as the "the factoid-driven approach" (and I'm working in the (possibly mistaken) assumption that we're both coming from the same point in describing the "the factoid-driven approach"). Let us take our non-English-speaking Haitian who has come across their entry for John Barrymore. They learn "John Barrymore" is an American male Homo sapiens who was an actor who lived between February 1882 and May 1942. They learn he was related to others called Barrymore (no information on who or what they were, and no links to other articles). That's pretty much it. Can you see my problem with "the factoid-driven approach"?

Was he a good actor? Well received? Awards? Action? Shakespearean? Comedian? Tragic? Light entertainment? Musical? (Dancer? Singer?) Lead actor? Bit part player? Impact on the craft of acting? An acting legacy? Changed the approach to acting somehow? Happy life or tragic? Teetotal or alcoholic? Any thoughts on what his relations did (Antecedent, contemporary and modern)? Opinions of others who worked with him?

There are a few thousand other points that we should cover to get close to proper knowledge or understanding, but you get where I'm going, right? The poor bloody Haitian has a name, some other names and some dates. He has some "data" that the world's most popular encyclopaedia promises him ... but fuck all in the way of knowledge or understanding about what the topic "John Barrymore" is all about. There's a shed load of money being shovelled about by people whose intelligence is far greater than mine, I'm sure, but to no useful end. I fully agree that the best thing we can do is to teach 'the girl In middle Africa' how to speak good English/French/Arabic/etc, (or even, if Jimbo Wales could persuade the funders to engage brains before throwing away their money to work on a way of translating the articles in an efficient way). But WikiData has sad and pathetic aims: it reminds me of the proverbial school report for under achievers: sets themselves low targets that they fail to achieve.

The differences between you and I are not that great; those between you, I and people like rex are slightly wider, but the aims are not that different, just the approach, and what is considered "useful" information. Cheers – SchroCat (talk) 21:47, 19 June 2016 (UTC)

By "the factoid driven approach" I'm using "factoid" in the British "information presented in an extremely condensed format" rather than the American "unreliable statement which has become widely accepted owing to repetition" sense.

A lot of readers of any article are going to be people who've seen or heard something mentioned somewhere and want to know what's being talked about, but don't want to read a full article on the topic. Take this article; my reaction on reading that (and I suspect the reaction of every other person reading it except the most diehard chin-strokers) was "who the fuck are Robert Morris, Charlotte Posenenske and Rasheed Araeen and why is the self-proclaimed most popular modern art gallery in the world boasting about having a collection of works by these people I've never heard of?", and skimming the lead paragraph of each article makes it clear that these are modern minimalist sculptors, which is all I want to know and it saves me reading the full biographies of people in whom I have no interest. (If you want an example closer to home, every biography ever written of Drew Barrymore will mention within the first couple of paragraphs that she's John's granddaughter; I assume that a Freddy Got Fingered fan looking her up and wondering why one grandparent is mentioned when the other three aren't only wants to know "he was a big-shot actor in the early 20th century" and doesn't want to read all 8500 words of his bio.) Since the proportion of people browsing Wikipedia on phones ("this painting by Henry Clarence Whaite is nice, but I've never heard of him, who was he?") is only going to rise, the need to get Wikipedia articles into a format such that reading only the lead section will give you all the basics you need to know is going to get ever more pressing.

While I disagree with the infoboxers about the best format to present information, I do agree with them about the basic principle; we should aspire to a situation where a reader can find out the basic facts about any given topic within 30 seconds. The dispute between myself and the QAI infobox-obssessives isn't over the principle of the factoid approach, but over how the factoids should be presented; the QAI-ers think that everything can be and should be distilled into a little box at the side of the page, and I think that on complex topics that can lead to oversimplification and to giving undue weight to those facts which are selected to go into the box, and that often a well-written lead paragraph is going to be more effective than trying to cram everything into a box. (There's also a separate issue on arts-and-architecture articles, in that in these cases a large lead image is going to be of far more use to the reader so they can see at a glance what's being described, and it's not a good use of space to have an box of text squatting on the most valuable piece of space on any given article.)

I'm by no means saying that those autogenerated entries are good, but that they're better than nothing. Something like the Haitian entry on William Etty may seem virtually useless to us, but I strongly suspect it's quite literally the only Haitian-language text on Etty that's ever been published anywhere, and it means that a Haitian seeing him mentioned somewhere can at least find out "he was an early 19th-century painter from York" which will hopefully at least give some context to whatever they're reading. Yes, Haitian is a really bad example for me to be using, as Haitian readers are invariably going to understand French so will just read that instead, but it's handy to use as one can puzzle out whether the facts it's pulling from Wikidata are actually accurate.

Despite appearances, I'm actually a strong supporter of the principle of Wikidata—I just think the way it's been implemented with its cavalier attitude towards sourcing and its domination by a small clique with a strong "you're not one of us, turn round and go back the way you came" mentality is atrocious and has poisoned the well against anyone who wants to make it into a viable project. Likewise, I do actually believe in the principle of infoboxes—as RexxS once pointed out to me, my "articles should have infoboxes by default and the burden of demonstrating that any given infobox is a net negative should be on whoever wants to remove it" position is actually harder-line than his own—but I can also see that there are going to be numerous cases when trying to summarise a complex story into a small set of facts and figures is going to actively mislead readers. ‑ Iridescent 09:47, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

Hi Iridescent, As I said before, there are many points on which we agree (the presentation of information in a small box just isn't good enough in many cases and the benefits of a good opening paragraph to cover the main points of why we've got an article on an individual are just two of them).

Where we largely differ is, I think in the value of what is presented in the WD articles. Etty, for example, is nearly worthless (as is Barrymore, as below). Although our Haitian learns he's a British painter of the 19th century, s/he is still not much further forward. We're back to the same sort of list I identified about Barrymore (Was he a good painter? Well received? Awards? Genre? Style? Realist? Impressionist? Portraits? Landscapes? Impact on the art? Legacy? Opinions of others? Even—and this is a fundamental for an artist—show me some examples of his work!) You're working on the assumption that "early 19th-century painter from York" will answer the questions of the Haitian: I work from a slightly different perspective in wanting to give more information than just the insufficient barest of bones.

To make the same point on Barrymore: ("every biography ever written of Drew Barrymore will mention within the first couple of paragraphs that she's John's granddaughter ... [the fan] only wants to know "he was a big-shot actor in the early 20th century"). While I freely admit the Drew fan (assuming it is a Drew fan that's looking) may not want to read all 8500 words of John's .en bio, the poor-bloody Haitian doesn't actually learn that Barrymore was even a "big-shot actor", just that he was an actor and no other real information (they may actually end up even more confused because the page that's there doesn't even list Drew as a relative, just her father, in an unlinked single mention). The classification of "big-shot" is something you've attributed, not what WD shows (we're back to the point that the information of Good actor? Well received? Awards? Action? Shakespearean? etc is needed for understanding – even the tiny amount of "lead actor" to classify him as "big-shot") These WD sorts of pages are largely pointless except to confirm that something existed. The Haitian wanting to see who Barrymore was, will do the sensible thing and either look toward the French version, or stick one of the other language versions into Google Translate and get enough information from the prose of the lead to at least gain the knowledge and understanding that the Haitian page doesn't provide them.

Of much more use to the Haitian would be a page titled "John Barrymore" and a set of links that show:

• Show Google translation of .en Wiki version (8,500 words; FA-rated)
• Show Google translation of .fr Wiki version (100 words; stub-rated)
• Show Google translation of .de Wiki version (770 words; ??-rated)
• Show Google translation of .es Wiki version (450 words; ??-rated)

At least give the reader who wants to learn something the tools to actually find information. There is more information in the lead of the .en article than in the others, but if there are after information (and what WD provides is so limp it almost doesn't pass as "information" in any real practical sense) then giving them the chance to actually find something in one of the better populated articles makes more sense. (Sure add the links onto the page where the pointless WD exists if you want, but make the access to some proper information a priority for the reader).

Another possibility would be to auto-translate the leads of one of the wikis into the other languages (pick the longest lead as being more likely to contain the most information), but that's too haphazard and still retains the same problems of a lack of sourcing, although an argument of pasting a sign along the lines of "translated from xxx wiki, where the sources are maintained" could be made.

Personally I'd be with you in deleting all the unsourced information from WD and forcing it to adopt a culture of sourcing as a basic standard. Without that, it'll always be seen as being potentially deeply flawed. – SchroCat (talk) 13:43, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

Sorry for the numerous walls of text on this, but it's a thorny problem with many facets to it (awful mixed metaphors there). Unless there is something outlandish in any response I promise I won't clutter your talk any further! Cheers – SchroCat (talk) 14:14, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

Yeah, but Google Translate will only get you so far; they support 103 languages, but there are 293 Wikipedias. There are quite a few major languages which Google can't handle—how do we best serve something like Burmese (33 million speakers, so hardly an obscure dialect only spoken by a gaggle of enthusiasts), Akan (11 million speakers), Fula (24 million) and so on? The likelihood of anyone ever writing a non-stub article on the Barrymores and Ettys of the world is minimal, so at least the autogenerated boxes will give them something to fill in the very basic background. Plus of course there's a vocal minority (almost exclusively in the US, but the US has disproportionate influence on Wikipedia) of Free Culture libertarian nutcases who see Google as part of the global conspiracy to build the New World Order and would do their best to derail the slightest attempt to cooperate with them. (Just watchlist Jimmy Wales's talkpage for a couple of weeks and you'll see them in action.)

Per my comments near the top of this thread, I think Wikipedia would do a much better job of getting towards the "a world where every single human has access to the sum of human knowledge" ideal by admitting that cultural imperialism is here to stay, focusing on the dozen-or-so languages which are going to dominate the world, and diverting the money which currently goes on various pet projects and on free holidays (sorry, "travel scholarships") for the cronies of people in authority towards providing free language lessons for anyone who wants them. (The Googles and Microsofts would likely be happy to loosen the purse strings for this, as every extra English, French, Arabic etc speaker in the world is one more person to read the adverts they host.) However, this is unlikely to happen as long as Jimbo remains at the top, since it goes against his world domination fantasies. ‑ Iridescent 15:44, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

break 5

• Personally I am just working on a one-button script that removes any data on a BLP sourced to wikidata. Only in death does duty end (talk) 10:23, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

• That wouldn't work either, unless we go the French route and ban the use of Wikidata altogether. Some of what's in WD is perfectly acceptably sourced, or has been imported from perfectly acceptably sourced articles on other Wikipedias. What's needed is to remove all unsourced data from WD, and a mechanism for automatically displaying the citation to the original source on any WD-generated statement on Wikipedia; the burden of proof should be on Wikidata for every statement they make, rather than expecting us to verify every statement they make for which they can't be bothered to find a source. (I could make a decent case that the best thing to do with WD is to scrub the database completely and rebuild it from scratch, but such a decision would need to come from the top and as long as the WMF remains controlled by big Silicon Valley donors and Jimmy Wales's cronies, that's not going to happen.) ‑ Iridescent 10:39, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

It works for BLP's as the BLP policy supersede's the general sourcing policies. Anything unsourced or poorly sourced can be removed per the BLP policy. It doesnt work elsewhere as the general sourcing/reliable sources etc only say information may be removed. As wikidata itself an unreliable source, and the majority of the data there is not sourced reliably or to other wiki-projects, it fails all of the criteria for use in a BLP. Only in death does duty end (talk) 11:02, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

What would probably work better is something that would highlight the unreferenced WD statements and add a massive "this might not be true" Scarlet Letter marker to every unsourced statement. If the unreferenced statements just disappear, most readers won't even realise the problem exists; heavily-read pages filling up with unsightly tags will probably do a better job of getting people to actually fix the issues. ‑ Iridescent 11:05, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

The main problem with this is Wikidata is being used to populate infoboxs. And it is really just too big a hassle to attempt to highlight whats wrong with an infobox - and as far as I know no one ever tries. They delete the faulty content from the infobox or the box itself. As the current process to prevent wikidata importing info is to leave a blank field (rather than delete the field) there really are limited options in dealing with it. Only in death does duty end (talk) 11:20, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

That's simple enough—any item in an infobox sourced to an unsourced Wikidata statement is displayed in an intentionally clashing bolded green on red or something equally horrible, together with an unremovable [potentially untrue fact] marker linking to instructions on how to add a source to Wikidata, until either it's deleted or a source is provided. If we deliberately made articles containing unsourced statements look like shit, people would start fixing them pretty quickly. ‑ Iridescent 15:55, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

Ha, well I will try that next time and don my flameproof longjohns. Only in death does duty end (talk) 16:11, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

It would probably need a WMF diktat to make it stick (and probably ought to be hardwired into MediaWiki rather that trying to do it in wikitext markup for each infobox), but if it's established both that there are genuine concerns for the data integrity of Wikidata, and that despite these concerns en-wikipedia is going to continue importing from Wikidata, then some variation of this might be worth considering. Paging SlimVirgin, who seems to be the person who currently has the most to say on the topic, to see what she thinks. ‑ Iridescent 16:17, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

If you really want to force the issue, then set the software to automatically {{noindex}} any mainspace article containing an unsourced statement from Wikidata. ‑ Iridescent 16:25, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

I was hoping for a |Wikidata=no parameter at article level, so that we could switch off the retrieval from Wikidata. SarahSV ^(talk) 23:00, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

For those interested, my (probably naïve and underinformed) suggestion is here. Newyorkbrad (talk) 16:36, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

Note for once the bot archives the thread Brad's linking to and the link breaks; the proposal is to have Wikidata export onto talkpages rather than article space.

I can see an obvious drawback to that proposal, in that the articles where importing from Wikidata is likely to have most utility are going to be articles on obscure topics which likely don't have many watchers. If new information about John Major comes to light it doesn't really matter if Wikidata picks it up or not, as someone will add it within minutes to the article if it's appropriate, but if Wikidata picks up new information about Almeric Paget it could take years for the same data to find its way into Wikipedia without an automated process. Thus, these obscure topics are where Wikidata has most value. However, a bot post to Talk:John Major will probably be read and reacted to appropriately within a few hours at most, but a bot post to Talk:Almeric Paget might literally go for a decade before anyone actually sees and actions it. ‑ Iridescent 16:50, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

Natalia Fedner

Hi, a page titled Natalia Fedner was deleted on June 8 for sourcing authority. Since the page was created there have been more high authority mentions on Entertainment Tonight, Complex Magazine and Racked. Would it be possible to continue editing the page to meet notability guidelines? Thank you DarrenDorsey (talk) 11:56, 23 June 2016 (UTC)

✓ Done. In its present state she has almost no chance of surviving articles for deletion—she needs sources which are about her, rather than articles on other topics which happen to mention her in passing; at present the only information which is adequately sourced is the list of people who've worn her clothes, and "celebrity bought my product" doesn't confer notability in itself. Paging Drmies for info, as the original nominator for deletion. ‑ Iridescent 15:11, 23 June 2016 (UTC)

• Thanks. Yes, it needs more, but I won't rush to nominate it again. Drmies (talk) 01:15, 24 June 2016 (U

• Thank you. Will edit with additional sourcing asap. DarrenDorsey (talk) 12:58, 24 June 2016 (UTC)

Made Man (website)

I saw that you recently deleted the page entitled Made Man (website). I understand that you cited two reasons for deleting it: 1. no indication of importance. To this I would respond that the website Made Man receives over 4 million views per month, and is a subsection of a larger company entitled Defy Media, which runs Smosh and Honest Trailers. 2. Unambiguous advertising. To this I would respond that there were mere facts posted on the site, but if you thought the language may have been promotional, there is ample opportunity to change that language to become more objective. Ljeome (talk) 18:37, 23 June 2016 (UTC)ljeome

Ljeome, the deleted article contained no indication of notability (which has a specific meaning on Wikipedia—you need to indicate why significant reliable sources consider the topic important), and of the five "sources" four were press releases and the fifth was this. If you really insist I can undelete it and move it into userspace for you to work on it, but I'll warn you that it's absolutely certain to be deleted if recreated as a Wikipedia article in anything like this form. Wikipedia isn't a directory, a hosting service or an advertising portal; if something isn't the subject of non-trivial coverage in multiple, independent, reliable sources, it doesn't get a Wikipedia article. Also bear in mind that Wikipedia articles have to be neutral, and if you're covering positive commentary about a topic you also have to give appropriate weight to negative commentary. ‑ Iridescent 19:23, 24 June 2016 (UTC)

Please undelete Poligon or move it to my userspace

Please, can you undelete the Poligon article or move it to my userspace so that it could be further improved? Mitar (talk) 06:05, 26 June 2016 (UTC)

Hey Iridescent—the user asked on IRC, so I userfied it for them. — Earwig ^talk 06:52, 26 June 2016 (UTC)

No problem—per my comments on DGG's talk, I've no problem with it being undeleted, but I don't think it has a chance of surviving as a standalone article unless sources are provided to demonstrate actual notability rather than just the fact that it exists. "The first and largest coworking space in Slovenia" is tenuous at best; as you'll see from the slew of redlinks and non-links on Coworking, even for the coworking heartlands of California and London we tend not to have stand-alone articles on the individual projects, and what articles there are tends to be spam like Parisoma which would be very unlikely to survive AFD. ‑ Iridescent 08:35, 26 June 2016 (UTC)

…and promptly recreated in mainspace under a different name. I won't renominate it myself, but be aware that Wikipedia tends to take a very dim view of people who try to use us as a spam portal. ‑ Iridescent 08:17, 27 June 2016 (UTC)

That moment where you're checking your watchlist and you think "Whoa, me?"

That. It was easily 50/50... Glad we're making a start on resolving this particular issue. Cheers, The Rambling Man (talk) 20:10, 19 June 2016 (UTC)

The more I think about it, the more I'm coming to feel that deprecating the Main Page and replacing it with www.wikipedia.org is starting to look like the most sensible option. Adding up the total editor time wasted in pointless discussions about TFA, OTD, ITN, DYK and TFP must be at "if all this effort had been directed towards something more useful we'd have cities on the moon" levels by now. Google has had a blank main page for well over a decade and they appear to be surviving. ‑ Iridescent 20:20, 19 June 2016 (UTC)

Indeed, retro-engineering it back to something useful would be just fine for me. Ironically though, worst thing about Wikipedia (beyond the idiots and trolls) is the search feature. Unless you get the subject title bang on, forget it. Google solved that problem way back. Nice doing business with you. Bon Sunday. The Rambling Man (talk) 20:38, 19 June 2016 (UTC)

Now, let's be fair. Special:Search is much improved since User:^demon & co. re-wrote the whole thing. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:24, 28 June 2016 (UTC)

Some of us love working on such a cutting edge internet project. Zoom!! Martinevans123 (talk) 21:07, 19 June 2016 (UTC)

Main Page and pageviews discussion

Question: The info must exist as to how many pageviews the search page vs the main page gets. If the search page significantly outnumbers the main page, why spend all the time and efford on the main page? DYK is clearly a credit-seeking process, but I dont follow ITN so dont know if it is a similar process there. Effort vs reward should surely carry large weight. Not to mention the take up of administrative time that could be better spent. (Not to mention Fram and TRM would get a break from fixing constant errors that will cease to exist) Only in death does duty end (talk) 09:20, 27 June 2016 (UTC)

The search-only page probably doesn't get that many views; it's only displayed if you enter "Wikipedia" in the address bar without specifying a language.

The Main Page gets about 18 million hits per day, but that's an artefact of the fact that typing "Wikipedia" into a search engine or clicking the logo on any page takes you there, rather than that people are actually interested in it. The most prominent item on the Main Page—TFA—generally gets around 20,000–30,000 views per day*, while when it comes to DYK getting more than 25,000 views is considered so extraordinary there's a special page dedicated to articles which have managed it. This implies that at most about 1%–2% of visitors to the main page are actually looking at the content of the main page.

If I were the WMF, I'd replace the main page with this proposed redesign by Guy Macon for a week and see what happens. That would still allow all the TFA, TFL, OTD, DYK, ITN clutter to continue as normal but it would only be shown to people who wanted to see it. My prediction would be no impact at all on readership numbers, and that while it would cause howls of protest from the MMORPG-ers who treat getting on the main page as the winning of Wikipedia Points, we wouldn't get a single complaint from any actual readers—the general public really could not give a shit "that while Inger Hanmann created enamels for the Copenhagen Airport, her daughter Charlotte made processed photographs of the urban environment?". ‑ Iridescent 10:10, 27 June 2016 (UTC)

*There are some TFAs that get page views in six figures, but those are few and far between and often the result either of the topic being heavily covered in the news on that day or of Google Doodles, meaning the traffic will be coming direct from searches and won't be an artefact of being displayed on the main page. Other than Nick Drake (run on the day of the SOPA blackout, when the main page was itself the subject of significant news coverage so more people than usual were looking at it) and the April Fools TFAs, the only TFAs in the entire history of Wikipedia to get more than 200,000 views which didn't relate to a current news story or that day's Google Doodle were Emma Watson, Lynching of Jesse Washington, D. B. Cooper, Daniel Lambert and Gropecunt Lane; you can literally count them on the fingers of one hand. All of those except Watson were unusually interesting stories, which probably got more traffic from "hey, look at this" on Twitter and Reddit than they did from the MP itself.

I would be ecstatic to avoid main page day with any FAs I'd worked on. And I only use DYK as a way to get more eyes on an article (like GAN or FAC)... I long ago quit being excited about things I worked on appearing on the main page. All it generally means is a bunch of crap and bs. Ealdgyth - Talk 15:53, 27 June 2016 (UTC)

I think we should do something along the lines of [ http://www.arngren.net/ ] or possibly [ http://heaven.internetarchaeology.org/heaven.html#bottom] (note: you have to use the up and down arrows -- no newfangled "scroll bars" here!). It's clearly what a lot of people want our main page to look like... :(

Would anyone be interested in creating an RfC at (possibly at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)?) proposing that we replace the current main page with User:Guy Macon/Simple Main Page for 1% (randomly chosen) of our visitors for a week, followed by 10% of our visitors for a week if there are no obvious problems? The statistics on that would give us a solid answer to the question "does all of this DYK, OTD, etc. material really need to clutter the main page, or would having it as subpages linked from the main page work just as well?" Such an RfC would have to address the fact that Wikipedia:Perennial proposals#Redesign the main page claims that the idea of redesigning the main page has been "rejected by the community several times in the past" --Guy Macon (talk) 18:19, 27 June 2016 (UTC)

I think it would be well worth considering, although you'd almost certainly have to fight off an organized attempt to block it by certain elements (particularly at DYK and TFP) who see mainpage appearances as some kind of affirmation of their identity. Before this goes any further, paging our friendly neighborhood Community Liaison (Product Development), Wikimedia Foundation to ask if this is a change which would be blocked by the WMF before ever reaching the A/B test, since there's no point going any further if it will be strangled in the cradle. ‑ Iridescent 22:49, 27 June 2016 (UTC)

Let me see who's made it home from Wikimania. Changing a page that gets millions of hits might be Kind Of a Big Deal. At minimum, Ops' Performance team (that's User:Krinkle and friends) would have to agree that the servers probably wouldn't fall over. We'd also have to find out whether the infrastructure currently exists for this (I'm not certain that it does). I don't know if any other teams would have a reason to care. I'll find out. Ping me in a couple of days if you haven't heard from me by then. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:24, 28 June 2016 (UTC)

In the meantime, I would very much appreciate it if other editors would review my "list of links and a searchbox" proposal to make sure that I chose the right links. Also, can the wording be improved? I wouldn't want anyone to reject the basic concept because of a poor choice on my part. Please post any comments on User talk:Guy Macon/Simple Main Page. Thanks! --Guy Macon (talk) 08:01, 28 June 2016 (UTC)

Per this thread, it looks like the point may be moot, since it appears that this design—which somehow has achieved the difficult feat of being more cluttered and ugly than the existing design—is going to be imposed by fiat regardless of whether anyone actually wants it. ‑ Iridescent 09:26, 28 June 2016 (UTC)

Hello, I wanted to provide some context that may benefit this endeavor. The Wikipedia.org portal sees about 14 million page views a day. Less than the Main_Page on the English Wikipedia, but the portal is not language-specific. ~90% of visits to the portal are direct. I've also shared this thread with the Discovery department to make them aware. Hope that helps. CKoerner (WMF) (talk) 17:00, 28 June 2016 (UTC)

CKoerner (WMF), thanks for that; I wasn't aware there was any way to count its views (and certainly wasn't aware its views were so high). I do think a full-scale A/B test of a minimal mainpage design would be a worthwhile exercise—the working assumption of most main page redesign proposals has always been that all the clutter on the existing main page needs to be included on any proposed redesign, and thus the proposals are just differing opinions on how a series of cluttered boxes should be arranged. If there's not in fact a need for it all to be included, it radically affects how discussions about Wikipedia's look and feel ought to proceed.

In an ideal world, I'd love to see a cookie-controlled main page where readers (not just logged-in editors) choose which elements to display on the main page. People with no interest in any "Today's Featured Whatever" could restrict the page to a google.com style blank page with a searchbar; people with an interest in general knowledge could leave the page at default settings and it would look like it does now; people with a strong interest in trains could set it to show today's featured train, and so on. This would allow people to customise the main page to show information in which they're actually interested, rather than information in which the small cliques who control the assorted corners of the main page feel they ought to be interested, it would put an end to the constant "the main page has a systemic bias towards/against (insert country)" complaints since readers in New Zealand, South Africa and all the other countries which argue (with some justification) that they're underrepresented could choose to be shown Portal:New Zealand/Selected article, Portal:South Africa/Selected article etc instead of the vanilla Featured Article, and it would revive the generally moribund Wikipedia Portals since it would provide a strong incentive for portals to provide interesting content and to update themselves regularly. By looking at who chose to show/hide which elements, it would also make it possible for the first time to measure which aspects of Wikipedia are actually of interest to readers beyond a crude pageview count, and save people wasting time on things which the readers don't want. I appreciate this would be a major cultural change and would generate an not insignificant extra server load, but it's not insurmountable, and I do think a drastic reconsideration of the purpose of the main page makes more sense than the tinkering with formatting seen at Wikipedia:Main page redesign proposals and Wikipedia:Main Page alternatives. ‑ Iridescent 23:04, 28 June 2016 (UTC)

We seem to be talking about two different pages. Chris is working with the Discovery team on the 'main page' for www.wikipedia.org, not for the Main Page at en.wikipedia.org. One of the changes that Discovery has already made to the www. page is making the search box bigger, which is right in line with what you want to do here. Their next proposal seems to be making it simpler. And, importantly, they just ran an A/B test that showed (for www., which of course might not be the same results as for en.) that simpler = measurably more interaction.

So I have asked around a couple of times this week, and the story seems to be that Ops would have to agree to an A/B test, that Discovery might have the tools to do an A/B test on different designs for the Main Page here, and that Reading may be interested. It's easy to figure out which Ops people to talk to: questions about performance issues go to the Performance team. For Discovery, I think you want to start with Deskana. So far, I'm interpreting Reading's interest as "please send us a copy of the results" rather than "we'd like to work on this", but I'm only guessing, so I may be wrong. In the meantime, Deskana is probably the next person to talk to. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:58, 2 July 2016 (UTC)

Whatamidoing (WMF), I wasn't clear; my first paragraph above was about the www.wikipedia.org portal, and the second was a more general musing about the feasibility of a preference-controlled main page. I agree entirely that simpler will lead to more and better interaction—there's a reason the websites of the Amazons and eBays of the world, whose business models depend on getting the balance between "getting people where they want to go" and "showing people stuff in which they might be interested" correct, have spent the last decade getting steadily less cluttered.

I don't know how official Talk:Main Page#The new Main Page is, but given the "this is going to happen regardless of how many objections and how little support it has" statement I assume it must be endorsed by SF, in which case presumably the point is moot at least for en-wikipedia, if there's an agreement that "keep everything that's already there and add even more clutter to it" is the way to go. ‑ Iridescent 08:23, 2 July 2016 (UTC)

The new main page czar[1] did say "your proposal has not gained any significant traction ... if you actually were to get a 1000 signatures, no doubt it would seriously be considered", so I say we should test that assertion by putting together a proposal for the one-week one-percent of users test of my proposed page and see if we can get those thousand signatures supporting running the test. --Guy Macon (talk) 17:48, 3 July 2016 (UTC)

I'd support that (again with the "if the WMF devs are willing" proviso; if you go to the trouble of rounding up a huge group, and are then told it's not possible for technical reasons, you're just going to annoy a huge bunch of people). As a variation on a theme someone's raised on the proposal talkpage, it might make more sense to make the change for 100% of users on a smaller wiki for a month and see if the number of readers varies wildly in either direction. That way, one doesn't have to mess around with A/B analysis, but can just look at whether the number of pageviews falls/rises when the new-look page is put in place and when it goes back to the old version. The obvious testbeds would be something like Welsh, Irish or Gaelic, where the reader numbers are high enough not to be impacted by "both the regular readers are on vacation" issues, and where every editor can reasonably be assumed to speak fluent idiomatic English so can shout at the devs if something goes wrong without having to rely on translators.

To get the change made here, the route I'd take would be to canvass the opinions of as many well-regarded editors as you can think of before then. People are far more likely to be swayed by support or opposition from the Newyorkbrads and Slimvirgins of the world than they are by the pondlife who hang round Jimbo's talkpage and will oppose anything on general principle, so if they're going to oppose you want to hear their reasons beforehand so you can try to address their concerns. (You're not going to get 1000 supports, so don't set that as a marker since it just gives ammunition to those who want to block the proposal who'll be able to say you failed to meet your own promises. The only times in Wikipedia history that 1000 people have supported anything have all been massively-publicized major votes.)

Of course, with my cynical hat on, given that the new self-appointed Pope of the Main Page has redefined "consensus" as "anything one person wants to do provided they have the moral strength not to allow anyone else's opinion to sway their purpose", you could just unilaterally change it to whatever the hell you want. Given that he's about to redesign the sixth most viewed page on the entire internet based on a "consensus" of himself and a driveby support from an IP, he can hardly complain. ‑ Iridescent 18:16, 3 July 2016 (UTC)

So I finally managed to get the right questions and the right people in the same place at the same time, and the answer is disappointing. The short story is that the tools to do this properly don't exist, and creating them would require a significant investment of dev time, which is not likely to be forthcoming any time soon.

The fact that these tools don't exist has already caused problems for other projects, so that investment may happen in the future. However, given that the fiscal year began seven days ago, and given the "that's an #Epic task" reactions, I do not expect work on this to start for at least another year, if then.

There might be ways to fake parts of this (e.g., post an alternative for a couple of minutes per hour, and use redirects to track click-through rates), but the data might not be usable, especially if you're looking for a small change.

I'm sorry about this. Personally, I wish that we could run this test. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 04:05, 8 July 2016 (UTC)

Per my comments in the #Gadget help? section below (which I've moved up and attached to this thread, as it's all regarding the same issue), I think the way to go regarding testing would probably be to persuade one of the smaller wikipedias to serve a s guinea-pig for a month, and see what impact it has on reader numbers.

Part of the issue at play here, I think, is a fundamental divide regarding the purpose of the Main Page. There are some people who see its purpose as helping people find what they're looking for as quickly and easily as possible, and others who see it as a mechanism to teach readers about what Wikipedia does and how it does it. The two positions aren't really compatible, and websites with far greater resources than Wikipedia have struggled to square the circle of combining "second-guessing what the reader is looking for" and "making the reader aware of what else is on offer". It doesn't help that (as with other discussions regarding Wikipedia's appearance, from the Manual of Style to Visual Editor) the main page redesign proposals have historically attracted some of Wikipedia's most vocal assholes, so a lot of people who probably have something useful to contribute won't go near them. ‑ Iridescent 15:08, 8 July 2016 (UTC)

Neutral notification if anyone is still following this thread

Draft talk:Main Page#RfC: Main page update ‑ Iridescent 17:22, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

Gadget help?

At [2] it was opined that "2135 gadget users seem to think the new page is a good idea." I would like to explore the possibility of making my proposal at User:Guy Macon/Simple Main Page into a gadget. I an completely unfamiliar with this area of Wikipedia and don't even know whether I am suggesting something stupid. Needless to say, I want to do everything right as far as getting approval/consensus for such a gadget. Ping User:SMcCandlish: got any advice for me on this?

A bit of background: I have years of programming experience, but it is 99% in the following areas: [A] Tiny embedded assembly language programs that run on microcontrollers with 256 bytes of RAM total. [B] managing teams of engineers and developers creating hardware and programs in C or C++ to test aircraft components. So far I have avoided anything resembling a Wikipedia bot, gadget, template, etc. as being completely outside of my field of expertise. I think it may be time for me to change that. --Guy Macon (talk) 02:04, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

Don't take "2135 gadget users" as some kind of demonstration of mass appeal; that's just more Edokter bullshit. The nature of Wikipedia means that there will always be some users who will test any gadget (some of whom then abandon their accounts or get blocked with the gadget still switched on, leading to that account being permanently shown as using the gadget). When you actually look at the data Edokter's gadget is one of the least popular gadgets on Wikipedis, despite his putting it into Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets and thus showing it as an option to every single user on Wikipedia.

I don't really know a great deal about the technicalities and procedures of the gadget namespace. I'm not sure I've ever installed a gadget in my life, and I've certainly never edited one—I try to keep my settings as near to the default as possible, to ensure that whatever I'm seeing is what the readers will see. MZMcBride always seems to know about things like this. Per my comments in the earlier thread, it would probably make sense to to speak to WhatamIdoing and/or Deskana about what the WMF's take will be since there's no point working on something that they'll veto.

On a purely practical note, making your version into a workable gadget would probably be more complicated than Edokter's version. Edokter's version may superficially look different, but is in practice just an extremely clunky reskin without any significant content change, whereas yours is a set of links to allow the individual elements to be viewed separately. WP:TFA, WP:ITN and all the other elements aren't designed with readers viewing them separately in mind, and you'd need either to create stand-alone pages, or have a mechanism for making the links point to {{Wikipedia:Today's featured article/{{#time:F j, Y}} etc, neither of which will be a superficial matter and both of which would add an extra layer of complexity.

Given that it's looking obvious that there's little support for clearing away the clutter altogether and you'll probably at a minimum need to keep TFA transcluded—and that getting rid of the other elements while keeping TFA will lead to increased prominence for TFA and in turn prompt a furious blowback from FA editors—it's possibly not worth the effort tilting at this particular windmill. I do think the suggestion on the talkpage of rolling your design out to the smaller Wikipedias as a way of reducing the backlogs on their Main Pages, which can then in turn act as a testbed as to whether readers (as opposed to editors) will be actively hostile to the change, is a good one. ‑ Iridescent 07:43, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

@Guy Macon: Maybe try simple.wp: first? I dunno, though; the "we did this at the Foo-language Wikipedia, so en.wiki should do it too" argument is not always persuasive. There have been a few cases (mostly from de.wiki), but this argument often falls on deaf ears, and en.wiki has a long history of leading, not following. As for the ping to an advice request: I'm not a gadget developer yet, so I'm not sure I'd have anything to suggest, on the tech side. Regarding the general idea, I haven't really been clear in my mind on whether the Simple Main Page thing is proposed as a demo of what content would be available there, to be styled later, or is meant to represent the finished product more literally, nor whether it's meant as an alternative (kind of a portal-in-a-gadget) or a replacement. If it's meant to represent the final product (whether portal or replacement), I think it's too austere, but I can see a lot of users, especially mobile ones appreciating the "leanified" content structure of the page (i.e., from a function not just form perspective, though the form in the broad sense has much to do with why it could be helpful, even if the style, at the detail level, is more like a 1996 website). As for overall improving the Main Page in general, I'll paraphrase-by-screenshot what George Carlin said about US state mottoes: "Somewhere between 'Live Free or Die!'[3] and 'Famous Potatoes'[4], the truth lies. Probably, it's a little closer to 'Famous Potatoes'."  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  14:50, 7 July 2016 (UTC)

I got up enough of a head of steam to finally write up some thoughts

You might conceivably be interested in my latest maundering in user space. Yngvadottir (talk) 20:43, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

On the specific issue of Drmies I probably shouldn't comment, since I don't believe I'm currently on his Christmas card list.

I've been annoying the deletion tag-bombers recently by going through CAT:CSD and de-tagging those which don't actually qualify for WP:CSD#A7 (which is actually extremely specific as to when it can be used) before the usual suspects can run their "delete all" userscript (I've been deleting all those which do deserve it, don't get me wrong). While it's fairly well known that I'm no fan of shitty stubs and think most of the South Street, Bromley—style hyperstubs would be more usefully merged into lists, it's easy to forget that almost every good article began its existence as a bad article. Wikipedia's "create enough sewage to fertilise the flowers" may be (deservedly) derided as an academic approach, but in getting coverage for topics which wouldn't be covered in a traditional encyclopedia it works considerably better than any other approach. Paging SV, Blofeld and OR (no, the other one), all of whom may have something to say either here or at User talk:Yngvadottir/A Case Study.

I may be being unfair on Wikipediocracy—I haven't had many dealings with this incarnation—but I'm not sure this is negative enough for them to be interested. The impression I get is that while the old WR certainly had its share of creepy weirdos and semicoherent bores with severe cases of verbal diarrhoea, it also generally took a "what are the problems with Wikipedia and is it possible to fix them?" tone (neatly summarised by Greg's old I really loved the original idea behind Wikipedia userpage), whereas in its WPO incarnation it does a better job of keeping out the creepy weirdos, but seems to approach everything with the base assumption "Wikipedia is inherently evil and anyone trying to fix it is part of the problem". ‑ Iridescent 21:32, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

Actually, paging User:Pigsonthewing as well. While I disagree profoundly with him on many things, there's probably nobody more experienced with the kind of situation you describe. ‑ Iridescent 22:12, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

This reminds me of an episode of the old "Wikipedia Weekly" podcast, in which a group of editors created a new article in real-time, and the new article was tagged for either CSD or AfD (I forget which) while the first draft was still being written. I've addressed a couple of actual or suggested instances of newbie-unfriendliness this week, ranging from this absolutely awful block to this question. Was this club (of Wikipedians who aren't driven away early in their careers) always this hard to get into?

Yngvadottir, if you ever need a copy of any deleted material for a reason such as adding info from an old version to a current article, please feel free to ask me (or I'm sure any of dozens of other people).

Iridescent, on a completely separate note (and so feel free to subthread this), I've been unhappy all month about the way the disagreement between you and Drmies about the User000name block played out, or rather didn't play out as the conversation moved on. When I read the AN thread between the two of you, my impression was that Drmies decided to use a standard block rationale, rather than give the deeply problematic editor more attention; and he just chose the closest one he could locate on the menu. Regards, Newyorkbrad (talk) 22:29, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

can't we all just...get along? Writ Keeper ⚇♔ 22:49, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

I've been saying since the dawn of time that New Page Patrol causes more problems than it solves, as it's populated by MMORPG types who see it as a point of principle to tag things for deletion within seconds of creation. Sure, this is perfectly acceptable for attack pages and obviously unsalvageable spam, but Category:Candidates for speedy deletion as importance or significance not asserted is usually full to the brim of pages on people and companies which are almost certainly significant in Wikipedia's terms, but get deleted before anyone has the chance to flesh them out—and then people complain that Wikipedia's coverage of current businesses is poor! A lot of the problem is a single overly-persistent regular who has extremely poor judgement but considers himself untouchable; I'd estimate that at least 50% of the deletion requests I decline were tagged by him.

He just chose the closest one he could locate on the menu doesn't wash; he specifically gave "User is not here to edit Wikipedia" as his blocking rationale in the ANI discussion. While the individual problems listed under WP:NOTHERE can on occasion be rationales for blocking, the relevant one in this case, "Users who, based on substantial Wikipedia-related evidence, seem to want editing rights only to legitimize a soapbox or other personal stance", doesn't apply since aside from his userpage and (arguably) a single edit to Kike none of his other activity appeared related to any agenda. (A user may have extreme or even criminal views or lifestyle in some areas, or be repugnant to other users, and yet be here to "build an encyclopedia", to quote verbatim from WP:NOTHERE; I'm aware of at least one outright Nazi who's among Wikipedia's most active editors.) Don't get me wrong, User000name appeared to be an utterly charmless character, but indefblocks on the grounds of an admin personally disliking an editor can end in a lot of unnecessary hassle (I'm sure I don't need to give examples), particularly when they come from arbs and are thus effectively unappealable. ‑ Iridescent 23:07, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

• I am mobile so I can't indent nicely. I don't mind anyone disagreeing with me. I do mind a charge of dishonesty or favoritism (you just repeated it), so yeah, we're going elsewhere for Hanukkah. My block was obviously not an ArbCom block and if you think that I somehow got the Cloak of Untouchability when I got on that mailing list you're wrong. Sorry for butting in. Drmies (talk) 21:56, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

A very fast note while gobbling breakfast, because I don't think I'll be able to get online from work today. Someone else has now started this discussion: Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#Notability guidelines and policy for eSports; I was pinged, which was very kind, passing along notification. According to Wikipedia Review, this link says that the article they were writing in realtime for the podcast got deleted; I can't verify because I never did replace the dead speakers on this computer. Regarding the case study, I reminded myself that there's also a response from the organizer of the series of meetups to someone else making the point that new editors at these editathons need to be told about our requirements, at Wikipedia talk:Meetup/Regina/ArtAndFeminism 2016/University of Regina, and at least two relevant sections at Wikipedia talk:Meetup/ArtAndFeminism. I've been trying very hard not to name and shame—Kobnach just told me politely that the piece seems wishy-washy—but I will say that I'm very disturbed by some stuff there. (There were also apparently issues of plagiarism with some articles, as there often are with new editors.) @Newyorkbrad: thanks for the kind offer; unfortunately without the admin glasses I generally don't know there is deleted history, and when I do thanks to there being a notice about deletion, I can't evaluate it, so that's that I'm afraid; I have to leave that stuff to those of you who do have them. And now I have to dash, sorry. Yngvadottir (talk) 04:47, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

Break: editathons, New Page Patrol, and userpages

Don't believe everything you read on Wikipedia Review; the article in question was Frog Legs Rag, and while it was indeed tagged for deletion within 30 seconds of its creation it was never actually deleted In fact, WR is right and I'm wrong; it was indeed deleted, by the admin who's probably the single worst offender for bulk-deleting-without-bothering-to-check, as part of this bulk deletion. Although it survived deletion I'm not sure it's a great advert for the Wikipedia model, given that it took 100+ edits by some of Wikipedia's most experienced editors working flat-out over a three-day period (plus additional edits to upload the sheet music to Wikisource, the cover art to Commons, and performing, recording and uploading a recording of the music in question) to create a 317-word stub which averages four page views per day (most of which will be search engine crawlers) and hasn't had a non-trivial edit made to it for five years.

I've never been entirely convinced of the utility of editathons. I completely understand the principle, but I'm not convinced they really serve their stated purpose. None of the people who sign up for the day ever seem to stick around afterwards; if we want a mechanism for raising awareness of "anyone can edit", for recruiting new editors and for getting new editors up Wikipedia's initially-steep learning curve, I personally think it would be a more productive use of resources to concentrate on formal "this is how you do a, this is how you do b, this is how you do c, don't do d or e and here's why" lessons and getting them publicly disseminated. The existing approach of encouraging editors who don't really understand Wikipedia policies and practices to either edit existing articles and annoy the people who are trying to keep said articles in decent shape, or creating new articles without understanding what Wikipedia's looking for thus demoralising the new editors when their efforts are deleted, doesn't seem to be particularly productive. Someone will no doubt pop up with a counter-example, but I can't think of a single editor recruited during an editathon who stuck around for more than a few days afterwards. ‑ Iridescent 09:41, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

There is currently a CSD:A7 issue at ANI. Article inappropriately tagged (should be PROD or AFD as it does assert significance) - article creator removed tag and edit warred with tagger claiming it was vandalism. I see a lot of these (inappropriate tags), but what worries me is since it seems to be a widespread misunderstanding, how many are actually Speedy-del without anyone realising it was incorrectly tagged? Only in death does duty end (talk) 10:47, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

Lots. If it's incorrectly tagged but has no chance of surviving AFD, I'll IAR and delete them anyway, but at least I always look; there are plenty of admins who just run a bulk delete script over the categories. If you want to run a breaching experiment, find something obviously notable and put a backdated PROD template on it so it immediately goes into CAT:EX, with a completely nonsensical rationale, and see if it gets deleted. ‑ Iridescent 12:08, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

(Back from work, still awake, trying to prioritize.) That's quite a case study in itself about the rag article, and I had no idea there even were admins who bulk deleted speedy categories like that. That's clearly an unusual example, but what a collaborative effort.

I have to share one sequence of edits from the meetup project talk page: [5]; [6]; [7]. I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

I'm deeply cynical about editathons, and the one acquaintance who went to one reported something worse than I'd imagined: that it was almost entirely a lecture about the gender gap from the angle of the WMF's theory of the natural lifestyle of the editor, i.e., hope that the gap can be fixed when the long-standing editors have shuffled off. And that even less editing got done than I'd imagined. But editors I respect a lot are involved in them, not just WMF hacks. Maybe it's my teaching reflexes, but it seems so obvious to me that the organizers should help the new editors to succeed in adding content, and that means explaining things, and either preparing a list of sources in advance or being ready to spring in and add some; and that it's a crying waste of people who turn up because they're interested in contributing to the project; it's cruel; it wastes potentially useful material (crowdsourcing is our strength, not an awkward messiness to be circumvented by only permitting new articles from people we know, on subjects we know)—and it's a stupid waste to hold these things in libraries and museums and not have the articles make use of the sources available there. Is everyone now thinking of a library as a place with Wifi and a meeting room, even people who organize and run encyclopedia editathons? You know, I'm almost angry enough to run an unsanctioned editathon and show them how. I'd have to wear a bag over my head or something because people upload pics of everything all over the Internet, and I'd have to take time off, and I haven't yet thought of a good location, but yeesh.

New Page Patrol is a knotty problem. The rolling list of new pages is awe-inspiring, and will always include an utterly unpredictable mix of:

• erudite topics incomprehensible to non-specialists
• perfectly reasonable article starts on a topic the particular patroller knows nothing whatsoever about
• mass creations where all that shows in the new pages feed is the top of the infobox and there could be anything inside
• utter silliness
• ads
• things where there will be disagreement as to notability
• woeful fragments from those who hit "save" when they have little more than a title—some of whom have very bad internet connections
• appalling English (problem now officially made 10 times worse by WMF "content translation" tool, which evinces deep contempt for what we do; but it would be a problem even without the WMF, and of course a small minority of articles are created here not in English at all)
• articles requiring emergency deletion for good reasons—I had no idea how many of these there are until I became an admin and took a good look.

—I've said before that I was shocked and saddened by the breaching experiment that drove off the experienced NPP. I don't like the shooting gallery stuff either, but the encyclopedia does need a watch kept for the bad stuff. Also if, as I contend, we are now attracting a lot of editors who are not very familiar with encyclopedias in general, we shouldn't be surprised we also get editors who are unclear on the purpose of NPP. I recently had a new article of mine tagged as "insufficient footnotes", which is pretty much the opposite of what I would have expected. The tagger was a new patroller who, from the conversation I had with them on their talk page, hadn't realized it's the yellow-highlighted articles that should be the highest priority on patrol, not the unmarked ones created by editors with the autopatrolled right, and appeared to think it was a comment field—tag all the new articles with the most appropriate tag. They hadn't fully realized the tags implied criticism.

I have one suggested solution. Refocus on why we're here: to create an encyclopedia. A new article is a potentially useful gift. We are headed down the path towards what they do over at de.wikipedia, where their pages on what you should put in a new article include the admonition to think long and hard about how much of other editors' time you will be using up on the evaluation of any new article you are thinking of writing. I did it once and it was a grim experience, not 100% because of my German. We're also collectively giving a lot of mixed messages about what we're about, from the dangerous myth (again, WMF-promoted) that just about all the important stuff has been written about, through the obsession about minutiae (MOS, citation formatting, avoidance of red links(!); those appear from the outside to be the main concerns in many GA and FA reviews, which is horrifying), to the tectonic battles about what topics are (especially) worthy, including the tunnel vision about women's biographies. What should matter is writing and improving writing. That's the only thread of coherence around here, after all.

And then we can have the conversation about varying views of notability. It's overdue, because of course hundreds of thousands of people from all over the globe, with massively varying backgrounds, levels of education, and life goals are going to disagree about what should be in an almost infinitely expandable reference work. Unconscious or otherwise entrenched bias is actually a big concern of mine. It's just that absent the context of us all working together to write an encyclopedia, it's just politics and encounter groups, and that is the rest of the Internet.

Didn't there use to be an entry at WP:NOT about "not an experiment in creating a eutopia"?

And that brings me to avowedly Nazi editors, and you and Drmies (whom I greatly respect and have bothered with several e-mails, though I'm afraid he's pissed off at me right now). There are a lot of opinions I disapprove of; but I try to be brave enough to defend people's right to have them. If we want to be the encyclopedia anyone can edit—and I believe quite strongly in that, maybe except for illiterates and the dangerously insane—we need to be inclusive of an unimaginable range of opinions, just as we need to try very hard to include people of all social classes, and the WMF should be testing for accessibility to the handicapped as a matter of course. What matters is their editing. Also, there's the big consideration that people can change. Many people go through several political positions and several religions in a lifetime. In some cases in a year or two. I probably agree with Jimbo Wales about fewer things than I have fingers. But I think he was right to crack down on userboxen and decree that they should take the form "This editor is a — or is interested in — ". It's divisive to have editors proclaiming their affiliations and waving their banners. (It can also have a chilling effect on other editors, as obvious in this case and that may be what Drmies meant If we go back to what I think is actually policy imposed by Jimbo at the time, we'll hurt sweet people like Hafspajen a bit, but I think they'll understand. And we'll be able to focus on editing. Yngvadottir (talk) 19:22, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

I'm not sure anyone does still bulk-delete pages—remember I was gone for five years, a lot has changed in that time, and what is and isn't considered acceptable conduct from admins is certainly included in those changes.

Regarding editathons being almost entirely a lecture about the gender gap from the angle of the WMF's theory of the natural lifestyle of the editor, this is WMF policy, and it's actually the Andy Mabbetts of the world who still think the purpose of Wikipedia training is to teach people how to edit Wikipedia rather than to recruit an online army to right the world's wrongs who are now the voices in the wilderness. You can get your own WMF-approved Systemic Bias Kit here, should you so desire.

New Page Patrol in my opinion has never recovered from the WP:NEWT campaign of organised harassment. (Yes, that's what it was; "breaching experiment" gives too much credit. They intentionally tried to create articles which didn't technically meet deletion criteria and hid the sources within wiki-markup or in foreign-language text to make it impossible for any reasonable reader to find them without unreasonable effort, and then publicly humiliated whoever happened to fall for it; as far as I'm concerned every person involved should have been indefblocked as trolls.) It's suffering particularly badly as one of its most active participants has severe competence issues, which is rubbing off onto enthusiastic newcomers who see him in action and have no reason not to assume that plastering maintenance tags over anything you haven't heard of isn't what's being asked of them.

Regarding new pages, what would probably be the sensible course of action in an era where the number of articles keeps rising but the number of patrollers keeps falling, is to strip regular editors of the ability to create pages, with all new pages automatically created into a noindexed draftspace and a restricted group of people with at least a vague degree of clue (1000 edits/90 days?) having to manually approve them and move them into article space. Yes, it would be Sangerification and the WMF would probably block it as a matter of principle, but the crapflood is reaching the point where the nature of the disease requires so sharp a remedy.

You'd be surprised just how many reviewers do think GA/FA reviewing is purely a matter of MOS compliance, and will overlook any issues with the actual quality. Not wanting to name-and-shame, but consider this GA review from only a week ago as a particularly egregious example. I see someone has now taken that one to GAR, at least.

The old "multiple independent reliable sources" criterion may be a poor one for notability, but it's the best we've got. It's very hard to predict what readers actually want to read, rather than what we think they ought to be reading; as I've mentioned before, of everything I've written Tarrare consistently gets the most pageviews, and it's hard to even imagine a topic more obscure. Even monumentally dull articles like Quainton Road railway station consistently get around 30 readers per day—coincidentally, almost exactly the same pageview level as Cats That Look Like Hitler, the starting of which is surely my finest accomplishment. If you want a rather snarky aside, 30 pageviews a day is exactly 30 time as many as the first example I picked at random from Keilana's much-publicised drive to create the articles she thinks editors ought to be writing rather than the ones they actually write. Looking at other examples from that list, it doesn't seem like I've inadvertently cherry-picked a particularly low-traffic one, either.

If I had my way userpages would be deprecated altogether, or reduced to a minimal "My name is xxxx, I live in yyyy, I am interested in zzzz"; I don't really see why anyone should have a userpage longer than User:Newyorkbrad as an upper limit. I have absolutely no issue with someone declaring themselves a racist, a Stalinist, an ISIS-sympathiser etc on their userpage provided they do so neutrally—as long as they're not proselytising I view it as commendable honesty that they're noting the fields in which they won't have a neutral point of view. That's not the case here though; this userpage was undoubtedly unacceptable and I've no issue at all with it being deleted, but the correct response to an otherwise-reasonable editor whose userpage you consider unacceptable is to ask them if they're willing to blank it and if they decline to take the userpage to MFD, not to haul the editor to ANI, round up an angry mob of the usual suspects who just like saying support block as it makes them feel important, and then enact an out-of-process block on the editor in question. (The editor in question has now rendered the question moot by using the Deplorable Word in his block appeal, but the underlying principle stands.) ‑ Iridescent 20:35, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

Well of course I have an extremely long user page :-) I think I still disagree with you regarding acceptable user page statements: it can very easily have a chilling effect or, conversely, produce an invidious assumption of bias, and it's very important to me that there be no pressure on editors to reveal identifying information. Plus, just as I like user names (the IP editor last known to me as 75 proposed assigning them on registration and was surprised by my shocked reaction), I like seeing people's creative formatting of their user pages, with pictures and so on. I believe that degree of acceptance of the conventions of what's now called "social media" puts us at ease and helps us remember folks' handles. If I were Editor:XA409 I'd have difficulty remembering my own nick and would give up on remembering others', and I'd feel less welcome partly because people would have less of an opportunity to form a mental picture of me as an individual. I suspect folks also find it easier to remember who I am because they can associate me with that bizarre user page, although I haven't got the reaction I expected from adding a photo of myself '-) I was creeped out by "Wikilove" initially, but when I started receiving such gifts I rapidly changed my mind. And with that I must hit the sack. Apologies for long-windedness. And P.S.: Please, please don't give me a still lower opinion of the WMF. I keep trying to remember they mean well. Yngvadottir (talk) 20:58, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

Although, I can flip that around and say that users' increasing familiarity with social media has acculturated them to an environment of ultra-minimal user customisation (the closest thing to a "userpage" you'll get on Twitter, Facebook etc or on a phpBB forum is the ability to choose a background image and a profile photo, and maybe a couple of very basic facts about yourself), and that Wikipedia's fancy userpages are a throwback to Wikipedia's creation during the era of Myspace, Bebo and LiveJournal and actually makes the site look something of an outdated relic. (See also this thread for more of my views on unnecessary clutter.) Remember, an ever-increasing number of readers and editors are using the mobile site (particularly since the software is too stupid to understand the concept of "screen size" and assumes everything running iOS or Android is a phone, so even if someone's editing on a 13-inch iPad Pro with a larger screen than many laptops, it'll still serve up the mobile site), and all those userpages people spend so much time carefully laying out and formatting are unreadable crap in mobile view. I don't really object to WikiLove, which is just a blinged-up version of barnstars; compared to some of the WMF's batty "editor engagement" schemes like MoodBar, AFT or whatever the hell this is, it's benign and easily ignored by those who don't care to get involved (and don't get me started on the "thank" button). ‑ Iridescent 22:26, 1 July 2016 (UTC)
So reassuring to hear that the WMF plans to be "smart but human". I can sleep safely in my bed, knowing that Jimmy Wales is keeping Wikipedia free from both superintelligent robots and talking dogs.

Sidetrack: pageviews and biscuits

Okay - that page analysis is scary. That's much worse than Miss Meyers, who is the perennial example of a "too short FA". As for userpages - mine is mainly a "what I should be working on" or "what I've worked on" - with only a bit of editorializing on non-Wikipedia subjects. Ealdgyth - Talk 22:18, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

I think my personal least read is Glass Age Development Committee, which as far as I can tell has only ever once had views in double figures. I've always felt that there's probably a genuinely interesting story to be written there, if only I (or someone) could be bothered to actually dig it out. ‑ Iridescent 22:26, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

Dramatist Studio of Sweden. There may be one that's even less popular. Increasingly, my articles don't even get their talk pages created. However, at least they rarely get AfD'd, especially since my AfD success percentage is way below what's required at RfA these days. On the other hand, I got to create Autocunnilingus and Techno Viking (for which there was at least one vid on YouTube about how awful it was Wikipedia didn't have an article). So it evens out. Yngvadottir (talk) 16:08, 3 July 2016 (UTC)

In early 2008 comments made by singer and actress Madonna brought the link between biscuits and sexual activity into question, in which she blamed then-husband Guy Ritchie's lack of interest in sex on overconsumption of biscuits.

Biscuits and human sexuality

I'm still smarting over Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Biscuits and human sexuality (if you'll forgive a moment of WP:ABF, one of the most blatant "I don't care what the consensus is, I don't like it" closes in Wiki-history). Even the obscurest articles can take off if something happens to give them critical mass—Broadwater Farm was for years an article so obscure that Wikipedia Review used it as one of their go-to examples of a pointless Wikipedia page, until it suddenly found itself the focus of the world's media four years after I wrote it. Actually, Ordish-Lefeuvre system beats Glass Age for lack of readers. (Astoundingly, more than 20 people per day manage to end up at Candaules, King of Lydia, Shews his Wife by Stealth to Gyges, One of his Ministers, as She Goes to Bed somehow.) ‑ Iridescent 16:25, 3 July 2016 (UTC)

Sporfle. (Geographic bias! If it had been cookies it would have been kept!) Yngvadottir (talk) 17:17, 3 July 2016 (UTC)

A pornographic image made up of Oreos, Custard creams and Bourbons

Biscuit≠cookie; biscuits can be sweet or savoury, cookies are always sweet. If it had been kept it would have been expanded with a long aside about the curious history of the Graham cracker (lest we forget, originally invented as a medication to suppress the desire to masturbate), so it needed the broader term. Of course, this does provide me with a pretext to haul the finest image in the whole of Commons's fine collection out of retirement. ‑ Iridescent 17:28, 3 July 2016 (UTC)

Ah, I see; my food knowledge is not very extensive. That's a very special image, but I can't help regretting the waste of all those lovely biccies, especially the bourbons. Yngvadottir (talk) 04:37, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

What I find hilarious is that at least two Wikipedias are using it as a straightforward illustration on their Oral sex page.

That uploader has a much more interesting upload history than the usual "here are 200 photos of my garden shed" Commons contributor. The images all look like photographs at first glance, but when you zoom in they're all made of something peculiar.

String

Nails

Candlewax

Plasticene

More at www.mondongo.tv

At some point I'm going to translate es:Mondongo (artistas) just to give a pretext to get one of these onto the Main Page. Plasticene Red Riding Hood is particularly disturbing if you click onto her face in full resolution. ‑ Iridescent 16:08, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

<g> I found enough sources! Yngvadottir (talk) 18:48, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

All five images at roughly {{TFAIMAGE}} size

The biscuit one works pretty much perfectly at mainpage size (see right); there's enough detail to see that something is going on and that it's not a straightforward photo, but not enough detail actually to make out the biscuits. I'd confidently predict that at either DYK or TFA it would make the all-time top ten for pageviews. If nothing else, it would be worth it for the comedy value of the angsty shouting match between the Gormanistas and the WP:NOTCENSORED True Believers. ‑ Iridescent 15:50, 5 July 2016 (UTC)

Doitdoitdoitdoit!

Heh. I saw your ping the other day, way up at the top of this thread, but have fallen behind on WP. Now I finally start catching up and find that biscuit picture again. As a thread on this talkpage gets longer, the probability of seeing that image approaches 1... ;) Opabinia regalis (talk) 18:09, 5 July 2016 (UTC)

Tomb of Liliana Crociati de Szaszak

Since at virtually any point in the last two years there's been at least one work of 19th-century pornography under discussion on this page at any given time, nobody can really claim to be horrified at seeing Naughty Bits here.

I did a bit of digging but can't find anything that will push Mondongo over en-wiki's notability bar, but my Spanish is not great. I'll keep digging.

There's obviously something in the air in Buenos Aires when it comes to images. To go back to one of my other regular hobby-horses of bizarre grave markers, my all-time champion for the coveted "what the fuck was the funeral director thinking?" award is Argentinian, and it's a matter of great sorrow that the works of Xul Solar are all still in copyright (Google them). ‑ Iridescent 18:20, 5 July 2016 (UTC)

I really think I have enough at this point, including 2 major Spanish-language newspaper articles (from different years) and an AP article. Here's a useful summary of the purposes of the Seria Negra, which would enable proposing that as the DYK image:

En la serie Negra optaron por bajar modelos de Internet y reproducirlos con galletitas vulgares, que en sus tonalidades van del beige al chocolate, que no sólo apelan al consumo sino también a la monocromía, a lo vacuo, al porno del todo por dos pesos, a la deserotización, a lo mecánico y rutinario. A la aldea global masificada en el sexo virtual.

However, annoyingly, I can't substantiate their having works in the permanent collections at the Tate Modern and MOMA, only participation in exhibitions. Anyway, I have a long bookmarked list now.Yngvadottir (talk) 20:31, 5 July 2016 (UTC)

I can find out for Tate Modern. (I'd be surprised if they didn't, given that any artist from the last 50 years whose work is relatively cheap is likely to be represented in either Tate Modern or Tate Liverpool. The combination of Blair pissing money into it when it was being built, and Cameron slashing their budget to the bone, means Tate Modern and Liverpool have a vast amount of space and not a great deal to put in it other than the relatively small collection they inherited from the old Tate Gallery, and will consequently buy any old tat provided it's cheap.) ‑ Iridescent 20:40, 5 July 2016 (UTC)

Good—I thought as much but couldn't find them listed. Mondongo (collective) is started, but has umpteen things that need to be added, including the English source that is half the footnotes in the Spanish article. And the Commons category needs creating before it can be added to both. However, I must now go to bed. Yngvadottir (talk) 06:43, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

Commons:Category:Mondongo (collective) created—I've created it under that clunky name despite Category:Mondongo being a redlink since Commons has quite a few pictures of the soup which will obviously be the primary usage if anyone creates a separate category for them. Maybe it ought really to be at Category:Mondongo (grupo de artistas), but if es-wiki can't be bothered to create a category themselves I don't see why we should pander to them. (I note in passing that some po-faced Commons admin who apparently doesn't understand the concept of "list artworks under their titles" has moved File:Blonde teenie sucking.jpg to File:Cookies and biscuits are used to make this sexually graphic image.jpg— maybe I should move File:The Scream.jpg to File:Pastels overlaid with oil paint are used to make this image of three men on a bridge, one of whom appears distressed.jpg.) ‑ Iridescent 08:08, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

I think I'm done. What's missing is the claim about the permanent collection. You may want to swap in Little Red Riding Hood as a replacement for Fogwell as lead image or make more sweeping changes. Taringa! unfortunately is a social media platform, so I tried to minimize my use of that fine source (and did not add the years of birth of the 3 founders from it). It's an orphan, but I imagine we have an article on food art or épater les bourgeois where it can be linked. There are only 2 red links, a low number for stuff I do. If you want to nominate it for DYK, feel free, but I don't participate there any more so I will pretend not to notice. I added the Commons category to the Spanish article, so maybe somebody over there will wake up and add a pic; for some reason the only one from the set that I see being used there is the Fogwell portrait at es:Quilmes. Oh, and pinging Xanthomelanoussprog, who may want to get in on this. Yngvadottir (talk) 20:10, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

• Ping response. It was Eid al-Fitr today; the streets were full of Muslims in holiday mood, and after 7 years the Chilcot Report is published. Hmm… lXanthomelanoussprog (talk) 21:22, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

I bought a Japanese cloisonné vase the other day, thinking it was Chinese. Anyway, it has mica flakes incorporated in the enamel- which makes me think that the Mondongo portraits of Juan Carlos et al is glass painted with lacquer and not mica-pigmented. Xanthomelanoussprog (talk) 22:17, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

I'll see what I can do if I can find anything else to add, although looks like an excellent job so far. I may not get round to it for a couple of days as my availability will be patchy. ‑ Iridescent 11:08, 7 July 2016 (UTC)

DYK

Now at DYK, if anyone wants to nip over and review it. If you've never done one before, reviewing is very easy. If anyone can suggest a better hook, do feel free—I've unsurprisingly gone with That Image, as I think I know Wikipedia's core readership (teenage boys, basement-dwelling nerds, and people who prowl the internet looking for a pretext to feel outraged) well enough to know which of the five options is likely to generate the most interest. The article is good enough even in this unfinished state that I suspect at least some of the people who only visit it in the hope of seeing boobies will stick around to find out more about modern Latin American art. (Whether this happens is measurable; see if pages like Centro Cultural Recoleta have a detectable rise in views on the day.) ‑ Iridescent 17:24, 10 July 2016 (UTC)

Comments at CheckingFax RfA

It seems that "I won't be commenting further" is too difficult to follow. If you really want to continue down this rabbit-hole, you might want to take this thread from two months ago, nominating an obvious copyright violation at GA last week, or the false claim in the nomination statement to have "taken an article to FA" (every edit to the article in question) as further jumping-off points. If you feel the need to discuss it further, there are 61,790,951 places other than my talk page on which to do so. I note in passing that if my oppose and every oppose citing me had switched to support, the RFA would be at 11 supports vs 18 opposes, and would still have tanked. ‑ Iridescent 17:35, 2 July 2016 (UTC)

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

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I was rather disappointed in your oppose comment here. It would have been helpful if your comment had actually explained what had happened rather than an editorialization with no summary of the facts. As far as I can tell, the question at at the Carey Grant page had to do with access dates for books in a Google Books citation templates, and whether or not to use a certain type of quotation template. As far as the ANI dispute, it seems to center around a citation template which was changed to "Last name, firstname; Lastname, firstname" from "Lastname, firstname and Lastname, firstname". It seems to me that this was blown way out of proportion. Am I missing something? II | (t - c) 06:24, 2 July 2016 (UTC)

The whole point of an RFA comment, on either side of the line, is "editorialization", since one is expressing one's personal opinion, not cited facts. I included links to both Talk:Cary Grant and the ANI thread precisely so people could make up their own minds; those who disagree are, I presume, perfectly capable of typing "Support, I do not agree with the concerns raised".

It's precisely because the issues were trivial that they're problematic; someone standing up for deeply held principles is understandable, and won't necessarily be grounds for opposing provided the candidate indicates that they're aware of the issues about which they hold strong views and knows when to step back. On the other hand, someone with a very recent history of escalation and heel-digging over petty disputes (and petty disputes in which their position is squarely against Wikipedia policy—regardless of how much I personally dislike it, WP:CITEVAR is very well established) is problematic. I'd recommend reading this thread to get more of the background, as it gives a good taste of the "but I like it better my way!" mentality at play here. There's also the question of omission; that this set of disputes are so recent he can't have forgotten them, so their not being mentioned either implies that he doesn't consider them important, or that he's intentionally hoping to hide them. (I'd personally consider filing an RFA with a contentious ANI thread in the very recent past as prima facie evidence of poor judgement, regardless of who was in the right.)

Given that the RFA in question is now closed, I see no reason to put the boot in to someone who's already on the floor—RFanything is an unpleasant experience at the best of times, particularly when you get more opposition than you expected—so won't be commenting further. ‑ Iridescent 08:09, 2 July 2016 (UTC)

You are of course free to editorialize - I'm not saying don't provide your opinion - but I am free to be disappointed at those who editorialize without providing a minimum set of facts upfront to place that editorialization in context. Particularly when you're the first !vote which puts you into a position of influence. You did a bit better job here, but I still don't think the picture is entirely clear. CheckingFax owned up to making some mistakes in [[Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/IncidentArchive926#Comments_by_Checkingfax|his comment at WP:ANI. Basically, J Milliburn was mostly using the (according to Template:Cite journal) not recommended authors parameter, and it ended up getting converted to the more standard version (altho he also had errors like: "*{{cite journal | author=Cochrane, Alasdair, Siobhan O'Sullivan and Robert Garner" - authors in an author parameter). I'm somewhat sympathetic to David Eppstein (talk · contribs)'s (who I have a ton of respect for) comments about metadata, and another comment pointing out that WP:CITEVAR encourages fixing broken citation templates (see Wikipedia:Citing_sources#Generally_considered_helpful). I can see how CheckingFax could have discussed it more clearly, but I think it's unrealistic to expect admins to be completely perfect. I didn't see much to support the characterization of the ANI dispute as resulting in CF "almost being blocked for edit-warring". Probably the best ultimate resolution is to improve the templates to make their output more customizable. II | (t - c) 17:12, 2 July 2016 (UTC)

User:ImperfectlyInformed, that's how RFA works, it's not your call on what people give as the reason for opposing. The fact that so many opposes were given and it swiftly aborted tells me that there was probably a good reason behind why so many people opposed.♦ Dr. Blofeld 08:40, 2 July 2016 (UTC)

Dr. Blofeld (talk · contribs), on Wikipedia we generally like to make judgments based on substance rather than surface level metrics such as number of !votes, whether we're in AfD or RfA. So I hope you take a look and make a judgment on your own rather than taking the word of people, many of whom cited Iridiscent's comments (or the one person who erroneously cited Newyorkbrad, who didn't even !vote). Wikipedia is frequently criticized for its hostile environment. It's up to all of us to figure out how to make the Wikipedia community sustainable. One of the things about User:CheckingFax is that he clearly makes an effort to be welcoming and help out new (and existing) users, and he doesn't lose his cool even if he doesn't always communicate perfectly. II | (t - c) 17:12, 2 July 2016 (UTC)

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

Nemessis

Hello,

Previously you deleted the Nemessis page under A7. It appears the user recreated it with the same content? I retagged this for speedy deletion, please let me know if this does not qualify or if I should use a different process this time around? Dane2007 (talk) 02:17, 3 July 2016 (UTC)

WP:G4 only applies to pages that were deleted "via its most recent deletion discussion", and not to speedy-deletions, so just consider its recreation as an unorthodox way of requesting WP:REFUND. I've undeleted the history of the original, to ensure the existing article is correctly attributed in the unlikely event that it's kept. ‑ Iridescent 15:01, 3 July 2016 (UTC)

Thank you!! I appreciate the additional information :).Dane2007 (talk) 19:48, 3 July 2016 (UTC)

Non free image question

Dear Wikipedia administrator Iridescent, A while ago I put a logo on the my pet monster cartoon article from this website http://www.toonarific.com/show_pics.php?show_id=2533, and it is also the opening scene. Every TV show article on Wikipedia has the opening scene in the info box so this one should be added too. Also the image is not copyrighted. Can I put the image back up?— Preceding unsigned comment added by Davidgoodheart (talk • contribs)

Davidgoodheart, of course the image is copyrighted; see the big notice at the bottom of the page you link that says "Copyright 1998 Toonarific Cartoons"?

We can only accept copyrighted content under very limited circumstances; see Wikipedia:Non-free content criteria#Policy for the details. Basically, you need to explain where you got it, why it's necessary that we include it, and where and how you intend to use it. The best place to ask would probably be Wikipedia:Teahouse/Questions; I have no involvement with television articles. ‑ Iridescent 19:47, 5 July 2016 (UTC)

Why do you think I am removing !votes?

I am moving long discussions to the talk page. I don't understand.—^cyberpower_Chat:Online 14:20, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

Kraftlos and MSJapan's votes were caught up accidentally. HighInBC ^{Need help? {{ping|HighInBC}}} 14:21, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

(edit conflict) You do realise this is a wiki and everyone can see you removing the votes, right? Just count the totals before and after your edit. ‑ Iridescent 14:25, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

(edit conflict)Indeed. I didn't realize I moved them with the discussion until it was pointed out to me. Sorry.—^cyberpower_Chat:Online 14:27, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

And I wasn't counting the totals.

What Xeno said here. Even disregarding removing the oppose votes, you're not being helpful, you're being disruptive; there's a difference between clerking inappropriate comments and blanket censorship of dissenting opinions, and you're squarely on the wrong side of it (and I say that as someone in the support column). Unless and until RFA becomes like an Arbcom election with just "yes" or "no", people have a right to make reasonable responses about any comment they deem fit. ‑ Iridescent 14:31, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

My apologies. I was simply moving the discussions which seemed to have been getting long to the talk page. It wasn't my intention to be disruptive.—^cyberpower_Chat:Online 14:33, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

Henley & Partners page deletion

Hi, you deleted my page "Henley & Partners" on 23 June for unambiguous advertising. I would really like to have another go at editing the content so that it no longer reads like an advertisement. Is there anyway that you might restore the content to my talk page so that I can keep working on it? I would also apreciate any feedback and tips on how to make the content read better.

Thank you

Mara.ispas (talk) 12:52, 7 July 2016 (UTC)

Wikipedia isn't an advertising portal. A Wikipedia article needs to demonstrate that multiple, independent, non-trivial reliable sources consider the topic significant, and to give a neutral summary of the topic. Other than a short "History" section, the article I deleted consisted of a lengthy and irrelevant list of publications, some puffery about a non-notable award, more puffery about "social responsibility", and a note about how great the current Chairman is. If you want, I can undelete the page to your userspace so you can work on it, but I'll warn you it will need a complete root-and-branch rebuilding to be appropriate for Wikipedia. ‑ Iridescent 13:01, 7 July 2016 (UTC)

Thank you for your feedback, I will definitely spend more time on it before I attempt to move it into the live space again. Please may you go ahead and un-delete the page to my userspace.

Mara.ispas (talk) 13:57, 7 July 2016 (UTC)

Restored to User:Mara.ispas/Henley & Partners. ‑ Iridescent 14:49, 8 July 2016 (UTC)

Thank you! I have worked on it some more, and made quite a few changes as per your feedback. I would really appreciate it if you would be able to take a look and see if I am on the right track, and which areas still need improving on?

Mara.ispas (talk) 07:34, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

That's looking a lot better, and is probably ready to be moved back into article space. One thing which does strike me is the lack of negative commentary; has this company genuinely never received any criticism from politicians or the media? ‑ Iridescent 07:50, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

Thank you! I have now added a "Criticism" section in the article — do you think this would be suitable? Mara.ispas (talk) 12:11, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

Decline of CSD for Subhan Sahib

Hi, I noticed that you declined the CSD for Subhan Sahib with the reason being 'Seriously? How do you get "no assertion of notability" from this?'. I was wondering, why? Did you not notice that virtually the entire article is a copy and paste from Asaf Ali, an entirely different person. Only the first line and infobox actually relate to Subhan Sahib, and certainly do not indicate any notability. The article was also previously deleted for being a copy and paste. May I suggest that you reconsider your decline and instead delete the article. Thank-you David.moreno72 (talk) 06:02, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

It doesn't matter; The criterion does not apply to any article that makes any credible claim of significance or importance even if the claim is not supported by a reliable source or does not qualify on Wikipedia's notability guidelines, and Indian independence activist, Freedom fighter, Bus Owner, Agency for various Products, Owner of Bharatha Matha Rice Mill is undoubtedly a claim of significance. WP:CSD#A7 is intentionally very specific and extremely inflexible, and is intended as a mechanism to allow us to delete articles by people writing about their friends and family, not as a means for getting rid of poorly-written or inaccurate content; this is clearly someone trying to create a new article by copying the format of an existing article, rather than an attempt at deception.

Wikipedia's bureaucracy may be frustrating, but it exists for a reason—slapping speedy-deletion tags on new material contributed in good faith just because the creator is new to Wikipedia and doesn't yet understand the rules is a hostile act which just drives away potential contributors. Remove whatever material is inappropriate from the article and (if necessary) nominate what's left for deletion via WP:PROD or WP:AFD as appropriate. ‑ Iridescent 06:20, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for your comments, it's always good to get feedback from highly experienced administrators. I have done what you suggested and removed the inappropriate material and added a WP:PROD tag. Again, thanks for your comments. Cheers David.moreno72 (talk) 06:46, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

I've restored the legitimate content you've removed, and speedy-declined your WP:BLPPROD; given that the man died in 1987, this is obviously not a BLP. ‑ Iridescent 06:58, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

Sitush, you know more about this kind of thing than me; do you think this one is salvageable? ‑ Iridescent 06:59, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

Since Sitush is only editing sporadically I'll chime in. I doubt this is salvageable, there are many many people who were peripherally involved and arrested during the Quit India movement, most of whom don't have anything written about them (including a few on my family tree) except in the records of the local police station that made the arrests. In this case, the grandson of the subject seems to be keen on getting his name on blogs and records and that's about all the evidence there is to it. As for the rice mill, any rice or flour trader is known as a rice mill in Tamil Nadu and these are small mom and pop shops, not a mill of the General Mills kind. The only stuff I could find in Tamil is related to another Subhan Sahib who happens to be a son of Tipu Sultan. cheers. —SpacemanSpiff 08:03, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

I agree about the rice mill (and I strongly suspect the "bus company" translates as "owned a battered van which ferried people to and from the railway station"). I'll give it a few days to see if anyone can add to it—the online documentation of Quit India is not great (and spread across a dozen languages), and it's perfectly possible that someone will dig up an old press cutting regarding his having done something particularly noteworthy. ‑ Iridescent 08:19, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

OK, if it were going to be improved the improvement would at least have started by now. Deleted. ‑ Iridescent 08:54, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

Institute of Food Research

Hello Iridescent,

The page titled Institute of Food Research was deleted a few weeks ago citing G11: Unambiguous advertising or promotion. Whilst the language may have been promotional, I think that there should be an opportunity to address this as I believe the Institute of Food Research meets the definition of notability as there are many independent reliable sources from which a more neutral article could be produced. Thank you — Preceding unsigned comment added by Hhu362n (talk • contribs) 12:29, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

The topic is undoubtedly notable, but the page I deleted was to all extents and purposes a press release (right down to describing the subject as "we"), and I'm not going to restore it (feel free to try your arm at WP:REFUND if you disagree). If you can write a neutral article on the topic based on reliable sources, feel free. ‑ Iridescent 14:34, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

help desk

Your comment makes no sense in the context of that thread. If one can construe that thread as somehow having something to do with you then they could construe it as having something to do with absolutely anything at all...please go read the thread carefully and reexamine your assertion about it (as you were not assuming good faith and just trying to find some cover for criticizing me in an irrelevant way)..68.48.241.158 (talk) 14:49, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

Why yes, you're clearly here to write articles, not to argue. As you've just been told on your talkpage, if you have something useful to add to articles Wikipedia will welcome you, but if you just want to push a personal agenda about why you think 1⁄7 of active editors being admins is too low a ratio to anyone who'll listen, Wikipedia is probably not the place for you. Sure, there are people who dedicate a great deal of attention to reforming (or radically restructuring) Wikipedia's creaking governance structure, but they're either long-term participants in Wikipedia or long-term observers of Wikipedia, who can explain why they feel that the current system isn't working, explain how they think a proposed change would function better and how to mitigate any potential downsides to change, and (crucially) judge a conversation well enough to understand when to withdraw.

I've wasted more than enough time responding to your mixture of ill-informed conspiracy theories and bizarre proposals, and am not going to engage with you any further. If you do want to complain about how the Wikipedia admins were all mean to you, without stopping to consider why you get blocked so regularly, I believe that WikiProject Editor Retention and Wikipediocracy are the traditional venues. (Be aware that any attempt to complain that myself, HighInBC and The Blade of the Northern Lights are in any kind of conspiracy will likely get you laughed out of either of them.) ‑ Iridescent 16:26, 13 July 2016 (UTC)

WPO tends to have *less* patience with editors like that. Only in death does duty end (talk) 16:40, 13 July 2016 (UTC)

a simple apology would have sufficed..as your comment in that thread is exactly what I describe, as any reasonable person can discover..and is again indicative of poor admin behavior that I've continuously run into...your link to fancy data about my contributions is meaningless too as I largely change articles indirectly via talk discussion in a collaborative way...but I'm fine with not directly engaging with you too...68.48.241.158 (talk) 17:50, 13 July 2016 (UTC)

Userfied copy of deleted FCCLA article

Can I ask for a userfied copied of the article you deleted for FCCLA. Between FCCLA and Family, Career and Community Leaders of America, there are about 400 articles linking in, overwhelmingly from high school articles where there is a local chapter. It should be simple to expand it to meet notability standards, but it would be easier if I can have a copy of what was deleted. Per this source, the organization has 200,000 members in 6,500 chapters nationwide, and sources should be available. Alansohn (talk) 20:25, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

Restored to mainspace for what that's worth—move it to userspace if you don't plan to work on it fairly soon, as there's no way it will survive another deletion request in this state. At all of two sentences long, there's not a great deal to work with. An article also existed at Family, Career and Community Leaders of America which I'm not restoring, as it was a cut-and-paste copyright violation of their website. ‑ Iridescent 16:00, 13 July 2016 (UTC)

Deletion of VITA Zahnfabrik on 23 June

Hello, you deleted the page "VITA_Zahnfabrik" on 23 June for unambiguous advertising. In the meantime I have an english translation of the original german article which I published in the german wikipedia on 5 June without any negative responses. Would you please restore the old article, so that I can apply the changes?

Thank you Dinkelberger (talk) 15:02, 15 July 2016 (UTC)

userfied by me. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 15:19, 15 July 2016 (UTC)

The ed17

He was never an "enemy", just someone acting in flagrant disregard to the community, using the main page as a playground. And I thought that before I was told about his little Prince joke. Thanks for closing the discussion. As I said, if nothing else, it just means more scrutiny of his errant behaviour henceforth. The Rambling Man (talk) 19:11, 18 July 2016 (UTC)

I was thinking as much of your spat with NYB as with Ed himself. You do sometimes give the impression of treating minor comments with which you disagree as being worthy of full-scale handbaggings; I know WP:ERRORS and WP:ITN (and the MP in general) attract more than their fair share of self-important windbags who gravitate there because no other place on Wikipedia will put up with their incompetence (and I'm sure you know the two people I particularly have in mind), but I do sometimes get the feeling you've been immersed in the corrosive culture over there for so long that you assume anyone making any comment is doing so out of either malice or stupidity. ‑ Iridescent 19:18, 18 July 2016 (UTC)

No, Brad is a force unto himself, floating around making threats of this and that, and in this particular case, advocating that editors contravene a behavioural guideline, and threatening to do it himself, twice. I find it incredibly distasteful for people like him who actually make no effort to improve Wikipedia and simply rest on former Arbcom laurels, attempting to dictate from some kind of ivory tower. If these dictatorial individuals actually worked on making Wikipedia a higher quality place, I'd have time for them. As it happens, and as I object to admins purposely acting against guidelines, I won't take it lying down. There is a corrosive culture, and some of it is driven from those who believe somehow that they are super users. It ain't so. The Rambling Man (talk) 19:27, 18 July 2016 (UTC)

As Brad will probably pop up to confirm, I've regularly made much the same allegation about him in the past (IIRC the exact phrase was "self-appointed Cicero of the wiki"). My view has mellowed over the years; I do see some value in there being people with extensive interest in Wikipedia and its internal structure and squabbles, but who are so uninvested in the actual content that they can offer observations from positions of relative neutrality (cf Jimmy Wales, Greg Kohs, that nutty Offwiki guy a couple of years back…). I certainly don't like his habit of occasionally popping up to deliver his personal opinions as if they'd been handed to him on stone tablets and aren't open to debate, but he's hardly alone in that and he's certainly not the worst offender for it, either. ‑ Iridescent 19:37, 18 July 2016 (UTC)

Don't disagree with most of what you've written, but I'm not interested in self-appointed uber-users who don't actively improve the content, just sit back and comment on it while the rest of us put in the hard work, and who somehow believe they can float in and attempt to lecture on things about which they aren't really competent to lecture. Particularly when they are substantially biased in what they do. But hey ho. Just wanted you to know that Ed wasn't the enemy, just a moderately clueless admin using the main page as a sandbox, to which I strenuously object. The Rambling Man (talk) 19:58, 18 July 2016 (UTC)

He's by no means the worst offender for a moderately clueless admin using the main page as a sandbox, given how recently this wretched episode took place. (Although, I'm not sure he realises how close he came to being desysopped for the purple thing; I've seen people indefblocked for less.) The problem with the MP, and all the elements which make it up, is that because of its high profile people tend to feel the urge to try to improve it. (If I had my way, ITN and DYK would be deprecated altogether—in terms of effort expended vs utility to readers, they must have the worst cost-benefit ratio of any page on Wikipedia with the possible exception of ANI.) ‑ Iridescent 20:06, 18 July 2016 (UTC)

Of course, not wanting to "take it lying down" does not give TRM a license to be vehemently vitriolic, especially when he's already been admonished by Arbcom for "incivility and using inflammatory language." I'm frankly surprised that you (Iridescent) didn't call TRM out for gross incivility in your close. Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 01:21, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

I've just re-checked every single comment TRM made in that thread to see if I'd missed something, and I can't see anything that could remotely be considered "gross incivility". Neither the comment that you call out as "invective" (Once again you appear to be ignorant of guidelines, specifically in this case one which has had the precise effect the guideline intends to mitigate. The fun and games you had with ITN (purple?!) combined with a distinct lack of awareness on behavioural guidelines leads to one inevitable conculusion: You don't seem fit to be an admin I'm afraid. But that's for the next visit here I suspect.) and "a drive-by personal attack" (Unfortunately there's a level of WP:COMPETENCE to which a number of those who regularly contribute at ITN fail to meet. Some of the opinions voiced here are clear indicators of such shortcomings. It's not worth a breath discussing it with the because they can't hear you I'm afraid.) is something any neutral observer would consider "gross incivility", and I can't see any other comment from him in that thread that rises above the level of "snappy". ‑ Iridescent 08:08, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

Attacking someone personally ("competence," etc) isn't a personal attack or incivil in your book? Right. Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 15:50, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

Not in these circumstances; since this thread was about a competence issue. As best I can see, there's a virtually unanimous consensus that your actions regarding ITN demonstrated a lack of competence. That isn't a personal attack. Everyone has some areas in which they're not competent, the key to getting along on Wikipedia is the self-awareness to know when you're out of your depth in a given area, and the willingness to listen to people when they're telling you you're doing something wrong. ‑ Iridescent 16:03, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

AN closure

Thank you for your closure of the thread regarding The ed17 at AN. The thread appears to have caused Ed to actually take some notice of the criticism he was getting, which multiple quiet words failed to do, and so from that point of view I regard it as successful. However the thread did rather degenerate into various slanging matches (if you figure out how to stop this I reckon you could make your fortune) and so I'd probably have closed it with a similar message to yours if I weren't involved in it. Thryduulf (talk) 20:45, 18 July 2016 (UTC)

Hello, and welcome to AN! I hope you like the place and decide to stay. (While AN is necessary, it suffers even more than ANI from the fact that it concentrates Wikipedia's biggest egos into a relatively small space.).

In all seriousness, I don't think The Ed is acting out any kind of malice or even incompetence (except for the Prince thing); I get the feeling he genuinely didn't understand that ITN is intended to demonstrate that Wikipedia covers current events as well as hurricanes and Victorian cricketers, not as a news ticker, so he was arguing at cross-purposes to everyone else. (We really ought to rename In The News to something more accurate like "Articles on current events", since I think it confuses every single reader as well.) ‑ Iridescent 20:56, 18 July 2016 (UTC)

Such a view has me wondering what prompted "... admin status isn't a licence to ignore any rules you feel are beneath you" then, as it seems to assume a solid metric ton of bad faith on my part. ;-) Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 01:21, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

Ed, even if one accepted that your motives for all the actions raised in Thryduulf's initial post were absolutely pure and that you genuinely believed that everybody correcting you was misreading Wikipedia's rules, and that your correction of TRM's spelling was a good-faith effort to improve the readability of the page and not an obvious attempt to needle him (neither you nor NYB corrected anyone else), there's no explanation for the purple incident other than "taking admin status as a licence to ignore the rules". ‑ Iridescent 08:22, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

Note that I corrected two people's spelling there, and I don't needle people. On Prince, you should specify that in your close. That's a large tarring brush to refer to just one admin action. Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 15:49, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

Prince is one relatively minor issue, and we don't haul out the heavy artillery for a single piece of vandalism (even though an admin ought to know better). The issue is a consistent effort over time to overrule Wikipedia consensus despite you repeatedly being asked not to; the diffs are all at the start of the thread. ‑ Iridescent 16:04, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

Any evidence that our genuine readers are confused, or is it just the editing gang, a few million versus probably a couple of hundred? Always interesting to me, particularly as an ERRORS admin too, we seldom get genuine complaints about so-called errors, most of them come from the nit-picky editor community, and most of them come from a tiny sliver who even know ERRORS exists. Is there any third-party evidence that suggests the current main page is factually inaccurate, that it regularly posts errors, that readers don't get it? A genuine question. The Rambling Man (talk) 21:12, 18 July 2016 (UTC)

Implicitly yes; given the fairly regular flow of IPs asking variations of "why haven't you mentioned (current news story)?" (the reason you don't see them at WP:ERRORS is that they usually wind up at Talk:Main Page), it's obvious that at least some readers consider ITN to be a news ticker. Realistically, why wouldn't they assume it's a news ticker, since it looks like a news ticker, it's in exactly the place Yahoo, AOL, BBC and other portal-to-subsections type top-level pages keep their news ticker, it's full of what look like news headlines and it says "In The News" in big bold letters at the top? ‑ Iridescent 08:22, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

I've seen this traffic, too. And it's a reasonable misunderstanding. The ITN criteria are as tangled as they are in part because actually we don't really know what the damn thing is for. --Dweller (talk) Become old fashioned! 09:14, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

Indeed: direct readers to articles that have been substantially updated to reflect recent or current events of wide interest means whatever one wants it to mean. Per my comments a few threads up, I think the time has come for a radical rethink of whether the elements of the MP, and in particular ITN, are actually worth the candle. When ITN (then called "Breaking News") started in the wake of 9/11, Wikipedia was a brand-new site and it was understandable that we wanted to point out that we had articles on September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack, 2001 U.S. Attack on Afghanistan and 2001 anthrax attack to readers who might not know that Wikipedia hosts articles on current events as well as the more traditional topics.* Nowadays, everyone knows what Wikipedia covers and how it works, and knows perfectly well that if they want to read Wikipedia's 2016 Turkish coup d'état attempt article they type "Turkish coup" into the search box, so the supposed purpose of ITN is pretty much redundant; however, our current affairs coverage is too patchy to convert ITN into a true news ticker. ‑ Iridescent 09:40, 19 July 2016 (UTC)
*Those who hark back to the days of Larry Sanger as some kind of golden age would do well to note just how shitty Wikipedia was when he was in charge. The 9/11 article read—in full—On the morning of September 11, 2001, what might well be the most devastating terrorist attack in the history of the world occurred concurrently in New York City, Washington, D.C. and near Pittsburgh. Four passengers jets were hijacked and then deliberately crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Both towers of the World Trade Center subsequently collapsed and part of the Pentagon was destroyed in the ensuing fire. Casualties are expected to be in the thousands: 266 passengers; about 5000 people, including hundreds of firefighters who had rushed in, at the World Trade Center; and 125 at the Pentagon. Some passengers on the doomed flights were able to make phone calls reporting on events on board. They reported that there were more than one hijacker on each plane, and that they took control of the planes using box-cutter knives. It appears that the passengers on the fourth jet tried to overpower the hijackers and that the plane crashed in a sparsely populated area as a result, thereby missing its intended target which may have been the White House. The attack had immediate and deep global political effects and economic effects; as well as an international outpouring of memorials and services. The massive undertaking of rescue and recovery, and providing assistance to the survivors and victims, is ongoing. There will be a great need for donations for a long time. Though no group has claimed responsibility, the US government immediately launched a full-scale response, stating its intentions to go to war against those responsible. On October 7, a coalition led by the United States launched an attack in Afghanistan. See 2001 U.S. Attack on Afghanistan. Following the attack, the United States has been on heightened alert for new terrorist attacks. In late September, cases of anthrax started breaking out, evidently due to terrorism. See 2001 anthrax attack., and at no point contained anything as prosaic as even a single reference. ‑ Iridescent 09:40, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

Octaviano Tenorio

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

---

Hi Iridiscent

Please may I ask you to reconsider your closure of Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Octaviano Tenorio?

It seems to me to be more a supervote than an attempt to weigh the arguments made against policy.

Two points stand out:

1. Your dismissal of the argument that the sources are not independent is cogently argued. However, that argument belonged as a contribution to the AFD rather than a closure rationale, because I am unaware of any policy basis for requiring that policy be interpreted in the way you did. That was a matter for the consensus of the discussion, which the closer should have weighed rather than overridden.
2. Your assertion atht "Wikipedia's practice has always been that regardless of the neutrality of sources, if a major religion considers a topic notable there's a prima facie presumption of notability" is again unfounded in policy. That may be your assessment of the practice, but as you know there is a limited number of topic-specific notability guidelines, each of which has been through many, lengthy debates. Given that such notabilty guidelines are so controversial, it seems to me to be very undesirable to pronounce the existence of an unwritten guideline. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 13:48, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

Meh I would have closed it the same way. Demands for 'policy backed reasons' to 'keep' an article at AFD have no weight where the subject is borderline notable, as the GNG is a guideline not a policy. Policy-based arguments are for when an article actually violates any of wikipedia's policies (WP:V, WP:BLP etc). If an article does not violate a policy, no policy can be produced as a reason to 'keep'. Its essentially stonewalling to demand something that is neither required not possible to produce.

That AFD came down to one argument 'Does this person satisfy GNG?'. With the rationale that the sources used, as owned by the LDS, are not independant of the subject. The subject is a person, not the Church of LDS. Plenty of people refuted that the subject was independant of the paper, but that the paper would not be independant of the LDS. So once that argument has been set aside there was little left in the delete arsenal. A delete vote on a faulty premise is low-weight. On a related note, there are more than a few unwritten guidelines regarding deletion, schools are notable, bishops etc. If you want to argue that these 'unwritten' guidelines hold no weight, I look forward to your nomination of the many school, bishop etc articles at AFD. Good luck with that. Only in death does duty end (talk) 14:24, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

(edit conflict) I don't consider it a supervote—I have no connection whatsoever to either Utah or the Mormons, have never heard of the man before this, and (given that at least half the threads on this page at any given time are people complaining that I'm too eager to delete) am hardly an every-grain-of-sand-on-the-beach inclusionist. I don't see how any neutral observer could have closed that AFD as anything other than either "no consensus" or "weak keep", since there is patently no consensus either way, but the "keep" arguments are stronger. (If you want a thought experiment, would you condone the deletion of Sarah Smeyers and Nele Lijnen because they're sourced only to sources connected to the Belgian government? There are considerably more Mormons than there are Belgians.) If you disagree with the closure, you know where to find WP:Deletion review. ‑ Iridescent 14:35, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

Your thinking, as stated by, 'but I consider the primary argument around the definition of "independent source" to be a fundamental misunderstanding of what we mean by "independent of the article subject"' is incorrect. Please review WP:BASIC, the prime consideration for notability. "People are presumed notable if they have received significant coverage in multiple published secondary sources that are reliable, intellectually independent of each other, and independent of the subject." According to your thinking, we can now accept PR blurbs from companies trumpeting their hires as proof of notability. That being said, I cannot argue that "no consensus" is an invalid outcome. --NeilN ^{talk to me} 14:37, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

Funnily enough, NeilN, I'm aware of what our policies say; I'm not aware that "NeilN has made up his own definition of independence which this doesn't meet" is currently among them. For the second time, if you disagree with the close DRV is thataway; I imagine the reason you and BHG are here rather than there is because you know perfectly well what the result of a DRV will be. ‑ Iridescent 14:41, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

I said the outcome is defensible. And while you may be aware of what out policies say, it seems in this case, it's "Iridescent has decided what they mean". Fair enough. --NeilN ^{talk to me} 14:50, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

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

Iridiscent, you were quite entitled to refuse to discuss the closure. But your comment I imagine the reason you and BHG are here rather than there is because you know perfectly well what the result of a DRV will be is rather nasty.

As I'm sure you know, the WP:DELREVD is very clear "Before listing a review request, please: 1/ Discuss the matter with the closing administrator and try to resolve it with him or her first.".

So even if I was minded to go straight to DRV rather than having the courtesy to try a discussion with the closer, the lack of prior approach would be clear procedural grounds to speedy-close the DRV.

Approaching you first is evidence of nothing other than following the proper procedure. I'm pretty sure you know that. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 16:34, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

AGF has a limit; I've known you long enough that I don't doubt your good faith, but equally I'm able to read, and I can see the "keepist conspiracy" thread on your talkpage as well as anyone.

I also don't think for one moment that you actually believe "a source is unreliable if it's associated with the organisation from which the article subject derives their notability", which is the key argument being pushed by those wanting to delete in this case. Not wanting to state the bloody obvious, but if you do get consensus for this I could delete about 50% of the Oireachtas in one sweep under WP:BLPPROD. ‑ Iridescent 17:07, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

Sigh. Did you actually read the discussion before you closed it?

The issue here is not reliability; it is independence. It is perfectly possible for a paper to publish only stories which are accurate and reliable, but to

1. focus on its own team, spotlighting people who are part of the organisation which owns them, and ignoring others.
2. publish nothing which might be "unhelpful" to their team

Point #1 is the issue here. The stories published may be accurate; that's not the issue. The point is that if the only paper which which writes about someone is the paper owned by their own team, then we effectively have a case of promotion rather than of notability.

Note that this not the same as the example of The Spectator. The Spec is indeed pro-Conservative, but is not actually owned by the Conservative Party, but despite its partisanship it publishes plenty of tirades against the party. A better comparator would be a paper which was actually owned by a party.

As to the Oireachtas refs ... are you serious? Sure, plenty of those articles are stubs refed only to the Oireachtas database, and their notability is not established. But Irish politicians get a lot of media coverage, which will (hopefully) be added as the articles are expanded. That's why we have WP:NPOL: not because pols are somehow "worthy" of coverage, but because it is pretty much guaranteed that the sources exist, if+when someone does their homework in the newspaper archives. So AFDs would be a waste of everyone's time. (Look! we found the sources which everyone except the nominator said were bound to exist for this topic! Whoopee!). By contrast, most of the keepists in the Tenorio debate agreed that the independent sources do not exist.

Anyway, I'm saddened that you rushed to such a strange close. I thought someone might do a my-opinion-over-the balance-of-the-arguments close, but I never thought it would be you :( That saddens me much more than the AFD outcome. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 18:06, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

• I'd like to echo BHG's concerns with the close. I'd go so far to say your close was uninformed at best, and a biased supervote at worst. Three reasons why:

1. You essentially unilaterally created a SNG that doesn't exist. There is no SNG in writing that says that all Mormon leaders are automatically notable. A majority of participants in the discussion said that there either wasn't and/or shouldn't be said SNG. There was also an attempt by the creator of the Tenorio article to try and institute said SNG here; there is a solid consensus against instituting said SNG
2. Your close, and in particular your comments above, indicate a lack of understanding of the difference between reliability and independence. We've never argued that Deseret News is unreliable, and we never needed to. We were arguing that Deseret News was not independent from the organization from which Tenorio draws his notability. A solid majority of the participants in the. A side discussion on the indepedence was started by somebody else here; a majority of participants there also agree that Deseret News is not independent of Mormon leaders.
3. You essentially bought in to Carrite's ridiculous claim of harassment (as you continue to do in your comment above), while not only failing to research if it had any merit (Carrite has in fact been baiting me by going around refactoring my comments), but mentioning it in your close, as if closing it as if it was some sort of justified punishment of me and other deletionists. At the same time, you ignored the misbehavior by the keepists, who subjected BHG and I to a bevy of low-level attacks, insinuations of bigotry, and misconstructions of nearly everything we said.

I haven't decided if I'm going to do nothing, relist or DRV yet, but I am greatly displeased with your no consensus close and even more so not only with your rationale, but your comments above. pbp 01:16, 20 July 2016 (UTC)

• You suggested you'd like my opinion. My personal view about the article is an unqualified keep: We've always kept LDS people at this level, on about the same basis we've kept RC bishops. And for religious figures I try to be inclusive in the case of doubt, to avoid the possibility of bias. For any borderline case I can fairly construct a good argument in either direction on their basis of the qualifying adjectives in WP:GNG, which often allow for a wide range of interpretation, because sources do not fall into two neat categories of RS for N and non-RS for N. In such cases, one is basically using the established guidelines not to decide on whether to keep the article, but on justifying the holistic decision on whether one thinks we should or should not keep the article. As for how I would close, I of course do not follow my personal view on sourcing. The people at the AfD, most of them very experienced at WP, had very different views of how to interpret the requirements. The most realistic close in a case like this is non-consensus, if only because its the easiest to defend. I might have considered closing at keep, because I think a centrist view of the sources is that they are sufficiently reliable for the purpose--except because of my own known tendencies in interpretation, it might look like a supervote.

On the basis of experience at Del Rev, NC closes are very rarely overturned unless they are grossly mistaken and against a rational view of the discussion, and I'd almost never advise extending the argument about one there: it's not worth the trouble. If one thinks it should have been delete,its much easier to renominate for deletion. Here, as usual, I'd suggest waiting at least a month or two so animosities can decrease, and tso there will be a better chance of involving other people in the discussion.

Iridescent, that was a magnificiently worded close. But had I seen the discussion, I would have done it a little differently. Any time after the first day or two, I would have made a technical non-consensus close, on the basis that the argument had been productive of so much inappropriate discussion that it would be better started over. This is admittedly IAR, but I've done it a few times in similar circumstances. DGG ( talk ) 03:17, 20 July 2016 (UTC)

Brilliant and well-done

Per [8] and the above, um, discussion, I wanted to say THANK YOU and BRAVO! Very well-done and well-reasoned close. Montanabw^(talk) 22:27, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

Deletion review for Octaviano Tenorio

An editor has asked for a deletion review of Octaviano Tenorio. Because you closed the deletion discussion for this page, speedily deleted it, or otherwise were interested in the page, you might want to participate in the deletion review. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 18:46, 20 July 2016 (UTC)

To return or not to return?

I want to stay away from ITN seriously. However, I read The Rambling Man's rationale for opposing the posting of Betsy Bloomingdale's death. Why should "quality" equal to a lot of content or something? I just had an urge to rebut his argument by "supporting" the posting because... I don't like equating article quality with something unimportant that we omitted or overlooked. --George Ho (talk) 03:47, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

You obviously didn't read my weak oppose. Or at least you didn't understand it. I said that there was a 36-year gap in the article which meant I felt it lacked comprehensive coverage of her life. That's what I said. It would surprise no-one to see you at ITN after declaring you would never come back. Sorry to use up your talkpage, Iridescent, for such trivialities. The Rambling Man (talk) 08:09, 22 July 2016 (UTC)