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Use the closure requests noticeboard to ask an uninvolved editor to assess, summarize, and formally close a Wikipedia discussion. Do so when consensus appears unclear, it is a contentious issue, or where there are wiki-wide implications (e.g. any change to our policies or guidelines).

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There is no fixed length for a formal request for comment (RfC). Typically 7 days is a minimum, and after 30 days the discussion is ripe for closure. The best way to tell is when there is little or no activity in the discussion, or further activity is unlikely to change its result.

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Administrative discussions

User:Your Friendly Neighborhood Sociologist and User:Licks-rocks civility concerns

(Initiated 7 days ago on 17 May 2024) – This discussion just got auto-archived at ANI before anyone got around to closing it, but there was a topic ban proposal in there with a decent number of votes. Could someone take a look at this? --Licks-rocks (talk) 09:56, 25 May 2024 (UTC)

Requests for comment

RfC: Change INFOBOXUSE to recommend the use of infoboxes?

(Initiated 70 days ago on 15 March 2024) Ready to be closed. Charcoal feather (talk) 17:02, 27 April 2024 (UTC)

new closer needed
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
Before I try to close this I wanted to see if any editors believed I am WP:INVOLVED. I have no opinions on the broader topic, but I have previously participated in a single RfC on whether a specific article should include an infobox. I don't believe this makes me involved, as my participation was limited and on a very specific question, which is usually insufficient to establish an editor as involved on the broader topic, but given the strength of opinion on various sides I expect that any result will be controversial, so I wanted to raise the question here first. If editors present reasonable objections within the next few days I won't close; otherwise, unless another editor gets to it first, I will do so. BilledMammal (talk) 04:43, 13 May 2024 (UTC) I am involved in the underlying RfC, but my opinion on the issue is not particularly strong and I am putting on my closer hat now. Per WP:INVOLVED, "[i]nvolvement is construed broadly by the community". In the Rod Steiger RfC, you stated: [T]o the best of my knowledge (although I have not been involved in these discussions before) every recent RfC on including an infobox has been successful. From this it is clear that the topic is settled, and insisting on RfC's for every article risks becoming disruptive. Although the underlying RfC was on a very specific question, your statement touches on the broader question of whether editors should be allowed to contest including an infobox in a particular article, a practice that you said risks becoming disruptive because the topic is settled. That makes you involved—construing the term broadly—because answering this RfC in the affirmative would significantly shift the burden against those contesting infoboxes in future discussions. That said, if you can put aside your earlier assessment of consensus and only look at the arguments in this RfC, I don't see an issue with you closing. It wouldn't be a bad idea to disclose this at the RfC itself, and make sure that nobody there has any objections. voorts (talk/contributions) 21:43, 18 May 2024 (UTC) Pinging @BilledMammal. voorts (talk/contributions) 21:45, 18 May 2024 (UTC) if you can put aside your earlier assessment of consensus and only look at the arguments in this RfC, I don't see an issue with you closing; per WP:LOCALCON, I don't see lower level discussions as having any relevance to assessing the consensus of higher level discussions, so I can easily do so - consistent results at a lower level can indicate a WP:IDHT issue, but it can also indicate that a local consensus is out of step with broader community consensus. Either way, additional local discussions are unlikely to be productive, but a broader discussion might be. Per your suggestion I'll leave a note at the RfC, and see if there are objections presented there or here. BilledMammal (talk) 02:37, 21 May 2024 (UTC) I don’t think that !voting in an RfC necessarily equates to being too involved, but in this case, the nature of your !vote in the Steiger RfC was concerning enough to be a red flag. Is it still your contention that “every recent RfC on including an infobox has been successful. From this it is clear that the topic is settled, and insisting on RfC's for every article risks becoming disruptive”? That was wrong (and rather chilling) when you wrote it and is still wrong (and still chilling) now, as the current RfC makes rather clear. - SchroCat (talk) 03:30, 21 May 2024 (UTC) Is it still your contention that “every recent RfC on including an infobox has been successful. From this it is clear that the topic is settled, and insisting on RfC's for every article risks becoming disruptive”? No. I've only skimmed the RfC, but I see that while a majority have been successful a non-trivial number have not been - and the percentage that have not been has increased recently. BilledMammal (talk) 04:13, 21 May 2024 (UTC) Part of my problem is that you said it in the first place. It was incorrect when you first said it and it comes across as an attempt to shut down those who hold a differing opinion. As you're not an Admin, I'm also not sure that you can avoid WP:NACPIT and WP:BADNAC, both of which seem to suggest that controversial or non-obvious discussions are best left to Admins to close. - SchroCat (talk) 06:44, 21 May 2024 (UTC) In general, any concern that WP:IDHT behavior is going on could be seen as an attempt to shut down those who hold a differing opinion. I won't close this discussion, though generally I don't think that raising concerns about conduct make an editor involved regarding content. However, I reject BADNAC as an issue, both here and generally - I won't go into details in this discussion to keep matters on topic, but if you want to discuss please come to my talk page. BilledMammal (talk) 07:53, 21 May 2024 (UTC) There was no IDHT behaviour, which was the huge flaw in your comment. You presumed that "every recent RfC on including an infobox has been successful", which was the flawed basis from which to make a judgement about thinking people were being disruptive. Your opinion that there was IDHT behaviour which was disruptive is digging the hole further: stop digging is my advice, as is your rejection of WP:BADNAC ("(especially where there are several valid outcomes) or likely to be controversial"), but thank you for saying you won't be closing the discussion. - SchroCat (talk) 08:10, 21 May 2024 (UTC)

WP:RSN#RFC:_The_Anti-Defamation_League

(Initiated 48 days ago on 7 April 2024) Three related RFCs in a trench coat. I personally think the consensus is fairly clear here, but it should definitely be an admin close. Loki (talk) 14:07, 6 May 2024 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Enforcing ECR for article creators

(Initiated 47 days ago on 8 April 2024) Discussion appears to have died down almost a month after this RfC opened. Would like to see a formal close of Q1 and Q2. Awesome Aasim 00:11, 8 May 2024 (UTC)

Talk:Brothers of Italy#RfC on neo-fascism in info box 3 (Effectively option 4 from RfC2)

(Initiated 47 days ago on 8 April 2024) Clear consensus for change but not what to change to. I've handled this RfC very badly imo. User:Alexanderkowal — Preceding undated comment added 11:50, 1 May 2024 (UTC)

 Comment: The RfC tag was removed the same day it was started. This should be closed as a discussion, not an RfC. voorts (talk/contributions) 22:03, 18 May 2024 (UTC)

Talk:Mukokuseki#RfC on using the wording "stereotypically Western characteristics" in the lead

(Initiated 44 days ago on 11 April 2024) ☆SuperNinja2☆ TALK! 09:41, 21 May 2024 (UTC)

See Talk:Mukokuseki#Close Plz 5/21/2024 Orchastrattor (talk) 20:34, 21 May 2024 (UTC)

Talk:SpaceX Starship flight tests#RfC: Should we list IFT mission outcome alongside launch outcome?

(Initiated 34 days ago on 20 April 2024) An involved user has repeatedly attempted to close this after adding their arguments. It's a divisive topic and a close would stop back and forth edits. DerVolkssport11 (talk) 12:42, 22 May 2024 (UTC)

To clarify, the RfC was closed in this dif, and an IP editor unclosed it, with this statement: "involved and pushing"

In just over an hour, the above editor voiced support for the proposal.

I reclosed it, and the same IP opened the RfC again, with this message: "pushing by involved users so ask for more comments".

I reclosed once more. And then the editor who opened this requests opened it. To avoid violated WP:3RR, I have not reclosed it, instead messaging the original closer to notify them.

The proposal itself was an edit request that I rejected. The IP who made the request reopened the request, which I rejected once more. They then proceeded to open an RfC. Redacted II (talk) 12:58, 22 May 2024 (UTC)

Talk:Hunter Biden#RfC: Washington Post report concerning emails

(Initiated 31 days ago on 24 April 2024) There's been no comments in 5 days. TarnishedPath^talk 03:20, 22 May 2024 (UTC)

Deletion discussions

XFD backlog

V	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Total
CfD	0	0	11	43	54
TfD	0	0	0	2	2
MfD	0	0	0	4	4
FfD	0	0	0	2	2
RfD	0	0	5	25	30
AfD	0	0	0	3	3

Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2024 April 27#Category:Unrecognized tribes in the United States

(Initiated 48 days ago on 7 April 2024) This one has been mentioned in a news outlet, so a close would ideally make sense to the outside world. HouseBlaster (talk · he/him) 13:56, 17 May 2024 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:Stress marks in East Slavic words

(Initiated 19 days ago on 6 May 2024) * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 17:30, 19 May 2024 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Draft:Amina Hassan Sheikh

(Initiated 18 days ago on 6 May 2024) If the consensus is to do the selective histmerge I'm willing to use my own admin tools to push the button and do it. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 17:07, 24 May 2024 (UTC)

Other types of closing requests

Talk:1985_Pacific_hurricane_season#Proposed_merge_of_Hurricane_Ignacio_(1985)_into_1985_Pacific_hurricane_season

(Initiated 116 days ago on 30 January 2024) Listing multiple non-unanimous merge discussions from January that have run their course. Noah, AA^Talk 13:50, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

 Done by --Licks-rocks (talk) 10:10, 25 May 2024 (UTC)

Talk:Rupert_Sheldrake#Talkpage_"This_article_has_been_mentioned_by_a_media_organization:"_BRD

(Initiated 38 days ago on 16 April 2024) - Discussion on a talkpage template, Last comment 6 days ago, 10 comments, 4 people in discussion. Not unanimous, but perhaps there is consensus-ish or strength of argument-ish closure possible. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 07:24, 23 April 2024 (UTC)

It doesn't seem to me that there is a consensus here to do anything, with most editors couching their statements as why it might (or might not) be done rather than why it should (or should not). I will opine that I'm not aware there's any precedent to exclude {{Press}} for any reason and that it would be very unusual, but I don't think that's good enough reason to just overrule Hipal. —Compassionate727 ^(T·C) 01:01, 13 May 2024 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Move review/Log/2024 May#Multiple page move of David articles

(Initiated 24 days ago on 1 May 2024) * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 18:13, 19 May 2024 (UTC)

Talk:Press_Your_Luck_scandal#Separate_articles

(Initiated 23 days ago on 2 May 2024) Please review this discussion. --Jax 0677 (talk) 01:42, 11 May 2024 (UTC)

Talk:Agroforestry#Merge_proposal

(Initiated 22 days ago on 3 May 2024) As the proposer I presume I cannot close this. It was started more than a week ago and opinions differed somewhat. Chidgk1 (talk) 13:46, 10 May 2024 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Move review/Log/2024 May#2018–2019 Gaza border protests

(Initiated 16 days ago on 9 May 2024) * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 18:13, 19 May 2024 (UTC)

Pages recently put under extended-confirmed protection

Report

Pages recently put under extended confirmed protection (27 out of 7747 total) () WATCH Page Protected Expiry Type Summary Admin AFC Champions League -2 2024-05-25 08:37 2024-06-01 08:37 move Move warring Johnuniq Stew Peters 2024-05-25 07:24 indefinite edit,move Arbitration enforcement: WP:COVIDCT, WP:ARBPS, WP:AP2, WP:PIA, WP:ARBEE, et cetera, etc. El C Burnout Revenge 2024-05-25 04:52 2024-05-28 04:52 edit,move Addition of unsourced or poorly sourced content: straight to WP:ECP due to involvement also of several confirmed accounts El C Evil Morty 2024-05-25 02:21 indefinite create Repeatedly recreated NinjaRobotPirate Wikipedia:WikiProject Palestine 2024-05-24 22:56 indefinite edit,move Contentious topic restriction: per RFPP Daniel Case Combat Vehicle 90 2024-05-24 22:49 indefinite edit,move Community sanctions enforcement: per RFPP and WP:RUSUKR Daniel Case Dada AsTra 2024-05-24 21:55 indefinite create Repeatedly recreated Liz Ralston College 2024-05-24 21:42 2025-05-24 21:42 edit,move Persistent disruptive editing RegentsPark FC Barcelona 2024-05-24 21:23 indefinite edit Persistent sockpuppetry: request at WP:RFPP Ymblanter User talk:Favonian/Archive 58 2024-05-24 18:14 indefinite edit,move Favonian User talk:Favonian/Archive 57 2024-05-24 18:13 indefinite edit,move Favonian President of Ukraine 2024-05-24 12:26 indefinite edit,move Contentious topic restriction Lectonar User:Aviram7~alt 2024-05-24 12:18 indefinite create user request UtherSRG User talk:Aviram7~alt 2024-05-24 12:18 indefinite edit,move user request UtherSRG Wikipedia:WikiProject Israel 2024-05-23 22:04 indefinite edit,move Contentious topic restriction: per RFPP and ARBPIA Daniel Case Safia Khairi 2024-05-23 21:06 indefinite create Repeatedly recreated: per RFPP Daniel Case Conservatism in Israel 2024-05-23 20:37 indefinite edit,move Contentious topic restriction: per RFPP and ARBPIA Daniel Case Draft:Xxx 2024-05-23 20:31 indefinite create Repeatedly recreated Justlettersandnumbers Future of Honor 2024-05-23 03:55 2025-05-23 03:54 edit,move restore ECP Daniel Case Israel-related animal conspiracy theories 2024-05-23 03:51 indefinite edit,move Contentious topic restriction: per RFPP and ARBPIA Daniel Case Justin Stebbing 2024-05-22 22:39 indefinite edit,move Persistent disruptive editing: Substantive COI editing - propose changes on the talk page Anachronist Proximus Group 2024-05-22 13:44 2024-08-22 13:44 edit Persistent sock puppetry, COI editing, or both NinjaRobotPirate International Criminal Court investigation in Palestine 2024-05-22 12:55 indefinite edit,move Contentious topic restriction: WP:PIA, WP:ECR El C Draft:Zard Patton Ka Bunn 2024-05-21 20:22 2024-11-21 20:22 create Repeatedly recreated: targeted by Nauman335 socks Yamla June 2024 Ukraine peace summit 2024-05-21 18:38 indefinite edit,move Community sanctions enforcement: WP:GS/RUSUKR El C Template:English manga publisher 2024-05-21 18:00 indefinite edit,move High-risk template or module: 2500 transclusions (more info) MusikBot II Draft:S S Karthikeya 2024-05-21 13:27 2025-05-21 13:27 create Repeatedly recreated Yamla

Thousands of Portals

The purpose of this posting is to discuss portals, hundreds of portals. There is already discussion at Village pump (Proposals) (see WP:Village pump (proposals)#Hiatus on mass creation of Portals) to stop the creation of large numbers of portals by User:The Transhumanist, and the consensus is going strongly in favor of a hiatus, and there have been no new portals created since 22 February, but there has been no agreement to stop the creation of portals. The discussion at VPR appears to have slowed down, with a very clear consensus for some sort of hiatus, although it is not clear whether everyone agrees that the consensus is to stop the semi-automated creation of portals, or to stop the semi-automated creation of portals by TTH, or to stop all creation of portals by TTH (since there seems to be disagreement on what is semi-automated creation). Some editors have suggested that these portals are the equivalent of redirects by Neelix that warrant mass destruction. Anyway, proposals at VPR are just that, proposals. I am bringing the discussion here.

Perhaps I don’t understand, but User:The Transhumanist appears to be saying that we need to use portals as an experiment in navigation and in innovation. I am not sure that I understand whether, by experiment, they mean testing, a new initiative, or what, but I am not sure that I understand what is being innovated, or why it requires hundreds or thousands of portals. Robert McClenon (talk) 02:51, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

Note that the mass hiatus wasn't on me per se, but applicable in general. It applies to everyone. It's so that nobody mass creates portals for the time being. That includes me.    — The Transhumanist   05:53, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

An Example and Some Comments

One of the portals that has been proposed by User:Legacypac for deletion is Portal:English language. A look at it, with its error messages, is sadly informative. It was one of Wikipedia's earliest portals, preceding the involvement of the current portal team of TTH and a few other editors. However, the current portal team has made breaking changes to Portal:English language, apparently in order to attempt to improve the maintenance of portals. They apparently don't know how to keep our existing portals working, so what business do they have creating thousands of additional portals? We are told that the new portals are maintenance-free or nearly maintenance-free, but have the new portals been created at the cost of breaking existing portals? Robert McClenon (talk) 03:39, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

Also, TTH says, above, that there is a hiatus that applies to everyone so that nobody mass creates portals for the time being. What is meant by mass creation, as opposed to individual creation? Are they agreeing not to create any portals for the time being? How long a time? Will they defer the creation of any new portals until (and unless) there is a consensus arrived at the criteria for the creation and maintenance of new portals? Robert McClenon (talk) 03:39, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

Also, if any editor wishes to propose mass deletion of portals, similar to Neely redirects, that can be Proposal 3 (or 4). Robert McClenon (talk) 03:39, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

Further investigation found 2 of the 8 portals linked off the top of the Mainpage had similar Red Script Errors where content should be. User:Moxy has now reverted these to pre-automation status. A lot of effort goes into keeping content linked from the Mainpage error free, yet this little Portal Project group replaced featured article quality portals with automated junk. Legacypac (talk) 03:46, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

See WP:AADD#Surmountable problems. "Something broke but could be fixed" isn't a deletion rationale. Much less a deletion rationale for different pages; that's the guilt by association fallacy. Note also the ad hominem fallacy in there too, making it about specific people and getting back at them and suggesting they're too incompetent to create a new page, etc., instead of the argument focusing on content and our systems of presenting and navigating it. Tsk tsk.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  17:11, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

Proposal 1: Interim Topic-Ban on New Portals

I propose a topic-ban on the creation of portals by User:The Transhumanist for three months, to provide time for the development of new guidelines on portals, to provide time to dispose of some of the portals at MFD, and to provide time to consider whether it is necessary to mass-destroy portals. Robert McClenon (talk) 02:51, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

• Support as proposer. Robert McClenon (talk) 03:02, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support the true number of portal creations by this user appears to be around 3500 portals since July 2018 (claims this here [1]). There were less than 1700 portals prior. On their talk they said it takes them 3 mins. 3 minutes is not enough time to properly consider content or what should be included. After we get a few automated portals deleted at MFD and the VP discussion reaches some closure I feel strongly we need to delete all the automated portals as a really bad idea. The template that automates these is up for deletion at Wikipedia:Templates_for_discussion/Log/2019_February_28#Template:Basic_portal_start_page Further, even though TTH disputes semi-automated creation here he says he uses "semi-automated methods of construction" and is using a "alpha-version script in development that speeds the process further" [2] Legacypac (talk) 03:12, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
• Comment. I need to investigate this issue a little further, but I was quite concerned about this before I even saw the thread, because I discovered Portal:Ursula K. Le Guin a few months ago. I've written a considerable portion of the content about Le Guin on Wikipedia, and even I think it's too narrow a topic for a portal; and when I raised this on the talk page, Transhumanist didn't respond, though they've been active. Transhumanist has been around for a while, so if they're willing to voluntarily stop creating portals while guidelines are worked out, I don't see a need for a formal restriction. Vanamonde (Talk) 03:21, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
• Response from The Transhumanist – The proposer of the hiatus, User:UnitedStatesian, acknowledged that my efforts have been in good faith. Note also that no rules have been broken (to my knowledge) – I carefully went over the existing mass creation rule and portal scope rule before starting. I have been a participant in the hiatus of mass creation discussion, and have voluntarily ceased portal creation since Feb 21, so as not to aggravate the other participants of that discussion. (What purpose would that serve?) I wish the matter to be resolved as much as anyone else. Since scope is actively being discussed over at the portals guideline talk page, it makes little sense to create pages that might be removed shortly thereafter based on new creation criteria. I plan on participating in the discussions, perhaps continue working on (existing) portals, and I have no plans to defy the mass creation hiatus. Nor do I plan on pushing the envelope any further. The VPR community has expressed a consensus that mass creation be halted. Robert McClenon is seeking to go beyond community consensus specifically to stop me from creating any portals at all, which is not what the community decided. If editors in general are allowed to create portals, just not mass create them, as the response to UnitedStatesian's proposal has indicated, why should I be singled out here? A topic-ban would be unjustified given the circumstances, and would be punitive in nature. In such a case, I would like to know what I was being punished for. Sincerely,    — The Transhumanist   06:20, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

• @The Transhumanist: I do not share @UnitedStatesian's assumption of good faith. The evidence which I have seen points far too strongly in the other direction for me to sustain that assumption.

Please see for example MFD: Portal:University of Fort Hare. I find it impossible to believe that a remotely competent editor acting in good faith could have created that portal-to-nowhere. If there is some good faith explanation which i overlooked, then I will enjoy hearing it ... but for now, that page looks like just one of many of examples of TTH intentionally creating utterly useless portsalspam in flagrant disregard of any version of the much-hacked portal guidelines, let alone the clear community consensus for selectivity in portal creation as expressed at WP:ENDPORTALS.

As others have noted, this is not TTH's first rampage of disruption. If there really was good faith this time, then TTH needs to urgently some serious explaining of their actions, because they do not look like the good faith conduct of a competent editor. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 02:07, 16 March 2019 (UTC)

• Support, given Transhumanist's utter refusal to listen to the input at the Proposals thread during the last days, or anywhere else for that matter. Would go further and support a full, indefinite topic ban or even site ban. Every time I've encountered The Transhumanist over the years, it was invariably over some pattern of mindless mechanistic mass creation of contentless pages, which he then kept pushing aggressively and single-mindedly into everybody's face. Fut.Perf. ☼ 07:18, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

And now we need to clean this mess up. It took me far too long to find and bundle thirty pages for deletion at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Districts of India Portals compared to the 3 minutes a piece he took to create them, but better to head this off before he starts into the other 690 odd Indian districts. Legacypac (talk) 07:33, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

• Quoted Comment on scale of this issue "Since July 1st (after WP:ENDPORTALS was over), over 4500 portals, excluding redirects, have been created (quarry:query/33793); the Transhumanist created more than 3500 (quarry:query/33795); of those, at least 561 were created with a summary along the lines of Started portal, in tab batch save, after batch was inspected: image slideshow minimum 2 pics, no empty sections. No visible formatting or Lua errors upon save, but there may be intermittent errors; report such bugs at WT:WPPORTD so that they can be fixed. Thank you. (quarry:query/33794). Just a note --DannyS712 (talk) 04:42, 27 February 2019 (UTC)" (end quote) |This off a base of just under 1800 Portals existing in July 2018. Legacypac (talk) 07:49, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support. Given the history with TTH—who has been pulling this same kind of "create an unwanted megaproject, force it through without discussion, and expect the rest of us to waste our time maintaining it" stunt for well over a decade (anyone remember The Award Center? Wikipedia:WikiProject Outlines? The Admin School?) and always tries the same "well, it wasn't explicitly banned so I assumed it was what you wanted" defense when called out on it, I'd strongly support a full and permanent topic ban and wouldn't be opposed to a site ban; anyone who's been here for as long as TTH and still can't see the issue with Portal:Yogurts, Portal:Rutland or Portal:A Flock of Seagulls is someone who's either being intentionally disruptive or is wilfully refusing to abide by Wikipedia's norms. ‑ Iridescent 08:26, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support temporary topic ban as a first step. We can look at a site ban if he ignores the topic ban. PhilKnight (talk) 08:32, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support A topic ban is necessary while the issue is discussed and mass deletion considered. Adding thousands of inadequate and unmaintainable pages is not helpful. Johnuniq (talk) 09:39, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support A generally-accepted principle of Wikipedia editing is that people who add content, and especially established editors, help to maintain it. Even assuming the best about Transhumanist here, I can't see how they can possibly do this with all these obscure portals. A ban on creating more of them has to be the first step. Nick-D (talk) 10:07, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
• Reluctantly Support We need time to curate and prune the low-quality portals, otherwise someone will panic and start deleting portals outright. 1:1 (topic to portal) parity is a nice goal, but it isn't readily achievable without the content to fill those portals.--Auric talk 11:33, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support: TTH's approach seems rather cavalier at the moment. A change, as they say, is as good as a test. ——SerialNumber54129 11:58, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose/Wait Let's see if he complies with the eventual results of the discussion at VPP. If he voluntarily agrees to stop, based on community input, then sanctions are not necessary. This seems like overkill right now. First, let the community guidelines pass, THEN let him violate those before we rush to ban. --Jayron32 12:13, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
• Massive Oppose - why the rush to ban? - the idea that giving a TBAN is the only appropriate means is bonkers - there are ongoing discussions. Currently you are trying to TBAN someone who hasn't broken policy. Let's get the agreements in, see if they stop and only then make any action Nosebagbear (talk) 12:18, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
• Comment: Isn't this all very similar to the mass creation of "Outline of" articles by The Transhumanist that met with the same kind of opposition (and tanked an RFA) 10 years ago? If so, then I'd say a topic ban might be in order.--Atlan (talk) 13:37, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

• Yes, it is. UnitedStatesian (talk) 03:26, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

• Support this or a complete topic ban from portals or if this continues simply a complete ban. His latest reply here shows such a complete WP:IDHT attitude, with utterly founded claims about the need to have thousands of portals to be able to find and fix issues (even though many of the now reported issues appear in portals from months ago already), and on the other hand that they have now trouble finding and fixing flaws: "With Legacypac and others actively nominating the new portals for deletion at MfD, our opportunities for improving them and discovering and fixing design flaws are diminishing quickly.", even though perhaps 2 or 3% of the new portals have been nominated, and more than enough similar problematic ones remain to work on (e.g. the inclusion of a DYK which links to red herring on the Portal:Forage fish...). Statements like "Legacypac's approach is to recommend deletion of the new type of portal due to design flaws such as this. " shows a thorough lack of understanding of why these MfDs are made and why so many people support them. The designs flaws are just a small part of the reason for deletion, the lack of interest in, maintenance of, and contents for many of these portals are much more important. Fram (talk) 14:11, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
  • The MfDs are potentially a prelude to an RfC, which may accelerate the process of deletion. With that in mind, the potential shrinkage is worrisome. I'm so tired, I forgot to mention it above.    — The Transhumanist   14:42, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

The MfDs, which impact a tiny portion of these creations but a decent sample of various types of topics, are very useful for finding out what the community finds acceptable or desirable. The MfDs are consensus building (something you forgot/ignored). Soon we will be able to craft acceptance and deletion criteria based on the MfD results. That's how notability and other guidelines get developed, precedent. Legacypac (talk) 15:23, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

• Unnecessary Yes, they need to stop, but they have already agreed to do so (see above: [I] have voluntarily ceased portal creation since Feb 21, so as not to aggravate the other participants of that discussion), and they are unlikely to kneecap themselves by continuing under the massive scrutiny now present. Let's be civil and spare them the block log entry. Current discussion should drive the portal thing towards some practical steps that will likely include the deletion of most of the offending portals, and some agreed-on guideline that prevents mass creation from occurring again. Let's focus on that. --Elmidae (talk · contribs) 14:44, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support – The unilateral creation of thousands of portals must stop. This has been driven largely by one editor, who has made the creation and preservation of portals his or her singular objective. We've seen since the portals RfC that this user will stop at nothing to continue the march of portals...regardless of community concerns, and regardless of Wikipedia policies and guidelines. Removing him or her from the portal topic area is the only way to prevent further disruption. RGloucester — ☎ 15:09, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support - as a first step. Beyond My Ken (talk) 18:42, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
• Unnecessary per Elmidae. Enterprisey (talk!) 19:31, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
• Unnecessary at this time as the editor has already agreed to stop and discussions are ongoing. Jonathunder (talk) 22:45, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support Although TTH seerms to be acting in good faith he just don't know when to stop, so the community has to do it for them. Miniapolis 23:50, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
• Reluctant support TT was one of the first users that was ever nice to me, many years ago, so I'd really rather not, but this is way out of line. Personally tripling the number of portals, a WP feature that almost nobody uses, and with apparenrly very little consideration to what subjects actualy merit a portal is grossly iresponsible. I get that they were upset at the proposed removal of portals, but this is a ridiculous overreaction that benefits nobody, and if they can't see that then a formal restriction is necessary. Beeblebrox (talk) 18:20, 2 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support per User:Fram, and I assume it would also cover conversions of "old-style" Portals to the problematic one-page versions, as well as adding portal links to any article in the mainspace, and all other Portal-related editing. WP:IDHT is spot on: in all of these Portal-related discussions, TTH has again shown what is to me a shocking failure of self-examination: no "Gee, this is another case where a broad swath of the community seems to have a major issue with my behavior, and thus should cause me to step back and assess whether there is 1) anything that, in retrospect, I should I have done differently, and 2) anything I can do now to a) try to mitigate the damage and/or b) regain the communitity's good favor." TTH's factual statement that "I have not created any new Portals since Feb. 21" is meaningless as a commitment to future behavior. UnitedStatesian (talk) 03:24, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
• Unnecessary As mentioned above, moving to preemptively TBAN an editor who has already agreed to stop while discussion is underway serves no purpose here. If they choose to ignore the community consensus, then we can discuss further preventative measures, but doing so now is premature. As an aside, most of those red errors that are being reported are simple fixes, so anyone who finds one can post a note on WT:WPPORT for one of our editors to fix, or simply add |broken=yes to the {{Portal maintenance status}} template at the top of the page. — AfroThundr ^{(u · t · c)} 06:11, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support. Portals have not been working for for 13 years. A pause of 3 months is more than reasonable. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 04:47, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
• Mass portal creation should be consider foul of Wikipedia:MEATBOT. Before continuing, I suggest seeking approval at an RfC, followed by the standard Bot approval process. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 04:59, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support This is a long-term problem with TTH. It used to be "Outline" pages, & maybe still is. He is always polite & cheery, but completely ignores all criticism and pushes on with his agenda, as his rather scary newsletters show. Johnbod (talk) 15:50, 7 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support. Sensible proposal. Agree with UnitedStatesian that this should also cover conversions of old-style portals. feminist (talk) 05:04, 8 March 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose TTH has agreed to stop for now, he doesn't need a formal ban when he's already doing it voluntarily. SemiHypercube 17:01, 8 March 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose Per Elmidae, the user has agreed to stop and has not formally violated policies. We don't need more portals and this behavior needs to stop, but it seems that this has already been achieved for now while discussion is ongoing. — MarkH21 (talk) 08:12, 12 March 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose - Uneccessary, as The Transhumanist has already ceased such activities (i.e. I have ... voluntarily ceased portal creation since Feb 21 ... I have no plans to defy the mass creation hiatus [that has already been established].). — Godsy ^(TALK_CONT) 00:04, 13 March 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose. This is circular reasoning. "I don't think we should have these portals, and others disagree, so I want to punish/shame my principal opponent in hopes of winning." This is several forms of red herring fallacy all at once (including argumentum ad baculum, appeal to spite, poisoning the well, and traitorous critic). If consensus firmly decides we don't want these portals, and then if an editor were to defy that decision and create a bunch more portals of exactly the sort we decided were unwanted, only then would a topic-ban of any kind be warranted.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  16:54, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
• Strong support this and any other restraint on TTH, up to and including perma-siteban. After stumbling on some micro-portals and MFDing them, I spent a lot of time in September last year discussing these issue ubsuccessfully with the Portals project (see e.g. WT:WikiProject_Portals/Archive 7#Portal_Wish_List, WT:WikiProject_Portals/Archive 7#BrownHairedGirl's_agenda, more at WT:WikiProject Portals/Archive 8)

It was absolutely clear throughout those discussions that TTH had no regard to the balance of opinion in last years RFC, and repeatedly personalised all reasoned criticism of his conduct as "bias", "personal attack" or "bullying"

There were a few other voices in those discussions who urged restraint, such as @Bermicourt, but TTH took no notice of any of it. So all that's happening now was flagged well in advance, and TTH paid no heed until a community outcry. TTH is now pledging restraint, but made similar promises back in September which were ignored when when the heat was off. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 07:16, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

• Strong oppose. Respectfully to supporters, this idea of a TB that targets a single editor for something that several of us have been involved with comes off as witch-hunty and scapegoaty. I know that's not what it is; however, that is how it seems – at least to me. Paine Ellsworth, ed.  ^put'r there  09:30, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
  • That's a really weird oppose, @Paine Ellsworth. If you know it's not actually witch-hunty and scapegoaty, what's the problem? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 09:48, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
    • uhm, I "know" because I really do want to AGF; the problem is that I can't stand by and watch forty lashes given to someone when I helped tie him to the whipping post, so to speak. Hold us all responsible if you want, but don't single just one of us out for something several of us helped do. Hope that's a bit clearer. Thank you for asking, because I do sometimes have difficulty expressing myself adequately with the written word. Paine Ellsworth, ed.  ^put'r there  10:15, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
      • @Paine Ellsworth: thanks for the reply. Can you explain more about what you mean by helped tie him to the whipping post, so to speak?

I am puzzled by it, because while I was aware that a few others WP:WPPORT supported auto-portals, I was not specifically aware that anyone had encouraged @The Transhumanist's mass-creation sprees of micro-portals and nano-portals.

For example, did you or others support the this creation of over 40 portals per hour?

Did you or others support or encourage the creation of Portal:University of Fort Hare (I have now nominated it at MFD: Portal:University of Fort Hare), which was literally a portal to nowhere?

I ask this, because it seems to me that there is in fact massive gap between the culpability of a) those WP:WPPORT members who supported creating far more more portals than the community supports; and b) TTH, who repeatedly rapid-created created portals which unavoidably meet WP:P2.

That's why I think it's fair to single out TTH. But if I have misunderstood the gap in responsibility, please correct me. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 01:25, 16 March 2019 (UTC)

Responsibility begins with the discussion that saved the portals. It gave the impression that not only was portalspace worth saving, it was worth improving. Then there were those of us who joined the portals project to help when we can, and we did. Perhaps the nom should be held responsible for comparing TTH's actions with the Neelix redirect fiasco? Incomparable, because Neelix created all those filthy dirty redirects all alone, with no help from any members of WikiProject Redirect. TTH had help creating all those filthy dirty portals, though, and with spreading their application. This is outrageously overkill. TTH has ceased making portals all on their own. The nom knows this and yet still had to suggest a topic ban. Why? In my own crummy way of expressing myself with words: pffft! Paine Ellsworth, ed.  ^put'r there  12:57, 16 March 2019 (UTC)

• Oppose per Elmidae, SMcCandlish and Jonathunder. The user has already voluntarily ceased creating new portals since February 21. There's no need for "the beatings to continue until morale improves". North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 01:39, 16 March 2019 (UTC)

Northamerican1000 should also be banned from creating more portals. Creating automated navbox portals that overlap existing portal topics is not cool. Legacypac (talk) 01:46, 16 March 2019 (UTC)

You need to stop scolding everybody who has ever created a portal. I have breached no policies. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 02:18, 16 March 2019 (UTC)

Au contraire: North, you need to desist from defending this flood of portalspam. Consensus is now clear that it has gone way too far, and a year ago at WP:ENDPORTALS was very clear that a significant minority of editors supported deleting all portals, while many more supported a purge., Instead you and some others went a spree in the opposite direction. That was at best reckless; at worst, it was wilful disregard of consensus WP:CONSENSUS. And WP:CONSENSUS is core policy, so don't push your luck. The guideline WP:DE is also relevant. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 02:27, 16 March 2019 (UTC)

The handful of portals I have created is certainly not a spree. Tired of this typecasting and WP:ASPERSIONS against any and all portal content creators. Does nothing to improve the encyclopedia. My !vote is regarding the matter at hand regarding TTH; that's it. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 02:32, 16 March 2019 (UTC)

Tired of you defending the indefensible, and then claiming victimhood when challenged. Portals are not content, they are a navigational device ... and defending a spammer does nothing to improve the encyclopedia. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 02:46, 16 March 2019 (UTC)

• Oppose TTH stopped created portals when asked and has not resumed since. A topic ban is not needed to stop disruption and imposing one about three weeks after they stopped would be punitive in the extreme. I am though deeply troubled by the personal attacks from some very experienced editors above. Thryduulf (talk) 11:52, 16 March 2019 (UTC)

Proposal 2 - Indefinite ban on page creation

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Helpful comments above lead me to these numerous Drafts by User:The Transhumanist (ranging from 1 to 12 years old) => Wikipedia:WikiProject_Outlines#Outline_starts:. This is an obsession with mass creation of content no one wants. He has been creating hundreds of useless pages for years and at least 3500 useless automated Portals in the last few months. He has used up his allotment of lifetime page creations on Wikipedia and has a maintenance job to do now on his creations. He should also be working on removal of these useless pages. Therefore I propose a TBAN on page creations in all namespaces, and a TBAN on moves of pages into Mainspace or Portalspace (to prevent the moving of presetup but now empty existing drafts into mainspace), with the following exceptions: Starting an XfD (so he can assist in cleaning yup his mess) and talkpages of other users (for vandal warning etc so he can maintain quality on his creations) and talkpages in general of any existing page. TBAN may be appealed to AN which would want to approve a specific plan for the types of pages he wants to create.

• Support as proposer Legacypac (talk) 10:44, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose in current form - a TBAN on page creations in all namespaces is too drastic, give how many other namespaces that cuts off. I can understand prohibition on mainspace, portalspace, wikipedia space, or even userspace. But TTH not being able to start talk pages? To upload files? To start community books? That's unnecessary. --DannyS712 (talk) 10:57, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

  I explicitly exempted talkpages of users but modified so all talkpages could be allowed. If he wants to create 500 books he should get permission. If there is a desire to create articles, he could ask for a relaxation, going through AfC for example, but with a preapproved plan. Legacypac (talk) 11:06, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

• Oppose This seems overbroad, locking down the English Wikipedia over one user. --Auric talk 11:20, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

  Umm, this user has a long history of mass page creations. When people object he says no one told him he could not do it. A restriction would not prevent him from creating pages, it would just require him to get the plan preapproved. I don't know what crazy idea he might try next, so block everything except what he gets the community to agree to first. Legacypac (talk) 11:26, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

  The problem isn’t page creation, it’s MASS page creation (usually using automated tools). Essentially, TTH routinely sacrifices quality for the sake of volume. It is the focus on volume that needs addressing. Blueboar (talk) 12:20, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

  Yes MASS creation. We don't know what he will MASS create next, so let him propose what he wants to create BEFORE he creates it. If his idea is reasonable, great, but if not we save a ton of work and drama. Legacypac (talk) 12:24, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

  So why does the original proposal not ban him from mass creation? --Izno (talk) 13:07, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

  Because 3500 pages [3] is not Mass Creation according to his post near the top of the VPP thread: "Please clarify what you mean by "mass creation"; the figure provided above is less than 10 new pages per day per editor, which has never been considered mass creation by any WP standard. Also, please clarify what you mean by "semi-automated", since all software programs, including Wikipedia's internal text editor, may be considered semi-automated. Thank you. — The Transhumanist 19:25, 26 February 2019 (UTC)"[4] Legacypac (talk) 13:16, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

• Oppose - the problem is limited to the Portal: namespace; there is no evidence provided that there is a problem in any other namespace (I disagree with the foregone conclusion presented about outlines). This is overreaching by a wide margin. Ivanvector (^Talk/_Edits) 13:33, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

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

Proposal 3: Relax tagging and notification requirements for Grouped Portal MfDs

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Creating group MfDs for portals is almost as hard as creating one of these portals. If you use twinkle it creates a bunch of redundent discussion pages and floods the creator's talkpage with templates. TheTranshuminist is insisting every page in a group nomination be tagged for deletion [5]. He is technically correct, but this generates a lot of extra work for no real benefit. Notifying the creator with the first nom in the group should be sufficient. It is not like there are tons of editors with a vested interest in an a given district of India portal. I expect there will be a few more group nominations so addressing this will speed this up. Legacypac (talk) 18:06, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

Well, there is no notification requirement that I'm aware of , so I think you can consider that relaxed. Tagging however, is usually considered a hard-and-fast requirement. It isn't exactly fair to discuss deleting a page while not giving any indication to users watching that page. Beeblebrox (talk) 18:13, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

But in this particular case, there is no realistic expectation that there are any page watchers to begin with, other than the single individual who created them all. Fut.Perf. ☼ 18:19, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

Perhaps any change to the requirements should wait until until it has been agreed which topics merit a portal. There is no urgent need to carry out a mass deletion before deciding what to keep. Certes (talk) 18:22, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

Grouped MfDs create precedent and help us create policy based on the result. For example if 20+ District of India portals are deleted at MfD a precident against creation of 690 more such portals has been established. Similarly an effort to create portals on all the counties in the US or regional districts in Canada would be easier to shut down.

Given how we found two recently automated now broken portals linked off the Mainpage, is the creator even watching them?

The Neelix situation creates precedent for this relaxation. We went even further there and dispensed with discussion. Legacypac (talk) 18:28, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for the clarification. Grouping portals which are clearly going to stand or fall together, such as districts of India, makes sense. Certes (talk) 18:38, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

Oppose. Tagging is a requirement, notification is not. And I just completed tagging on all of the Districts of India that are in the bundled nom. Assuming the current crop of MfD's close as delete, the solution is to propose a temporary speedy deletion criterion X3. UnitedStatesian (talk) 00:47, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

Those portals aren't representative, they're fringe cases. The set of new portals include a wide range of scope, for example, and many had additional work done on them.    — The Transhumanist   01:45, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

What do you mean by "fringe cases" and "representative"? They seem very representative to me. UnitedStatesian (talk) 03:58, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

Oppose – Any readers of a page that's up for deletion has a right to know that the page may go bye bye, and that's why the deletion policy requires notice. There's no need to create a separate MfD page for each page being nominated for deletion. Posting a notice on each page that leads directly to the same discussion is easy.    — The Transhumanist   01:45, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

• Oppose - As User:UnitedStatesian says, we need X3. Robert McClenon (talk) 04:11, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
• The is no need to relax anything. Mass tagging and mass notification is no great issue. If the consensus is that they should all be deleted, Feds them all through mfd in one list. Ask The Transhumanist to tag and notify. I trust that he will cooperate. Stop the panic. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 11:27, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

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

Concerning further proposals

The proper venue for proposals is Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals).    — The Transhumanist   01:49, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

AN is a perfectly good place for many kinds of proposal. With over 300,000 edits and many years here you should know better. Legacypac (talk) 03:51, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

AN is not the proper place for a proposal on regulating content (referring to portals loosely as content). The way forward does not require administrative action, TTH will respect consensus. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 12:18, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

@SmokeyJoe, I admire your AGF, but I think it is wildly misplaced.

This whole drama arose because after a far-from-unanimous RFC consensus not to actually delete the whole portal namespace, TTH chose to invert the meaning of that consensus to "create thousands of crappy new semi-automated microportals at a rate of up 40 per hour" ... and then go batshit raging at anyone who MFed some of the junk or pointed out that the consensus was not actually for a pressure hose of portalspam.

I don't know whether TTH has comprehension issues or just disdains the consensus, but I don't see any other explanation for the last year of TTH antics ... and either way, I see zero reason to expect that TTH will respect consensus. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 10:50, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

I’ve known TTH for a long time, although I have never worked with him. He always seemed perfectly reasonable, and really interested in a very worthwhile thing, navigation aids. There’s no problem there. I haven’t followed portal discussions closely, but I have never seen TTH rude or obstinate or disdainful. There must have been a misapprehension. I encouraged him to make auto-portals, and he did, and now he is trouble for it. I think the answer is at WT:Bots. AN should not be for making and implementing portal-specific proposals, the proposals should be directed at TTH. Follow the Bot process for any auto-portal creation. Do not create any new portals without an approved bot. That sort of thing. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 12:03, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

Wrong venue In the nutshell at the top in read mode, and again in bold and red in the edit window, the words scream This noticeboard is for issues affecting administrators generally – announcements, notifications, information, and other matters of general administrator interest.. What we have here is a big idea involving the work of everyone. At most there should be a pointer diff here at AN. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 12:02, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

As I see it the reason this ended up here is because the initial proposal was for a topic ban, which is AN material. The other related proposals were put here for convenience. At any rate it’s not grounds for a procedural close. — pythoncoder  (talk | contribs) 01:26, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

• This is absolutely the wrong venue, since this is not an "issue affecting administrators generally", it's a proposal (actually a pile of confused and confusing proposals – "I'm not getting my way in version A, so try version B. Nope? Okay, how about C? No? Then here's proposal D ...") that would affect the entire project, and is essentially a content-presentation and navigation matter, not an administrator matter of any kind. This is basically a variant of forum shopping, where instead of moving to a different venue, the idea is dressed up in a new outfit and put before the same venue over and over. The wrong venue. (And is actually regular forum-shopping, too, since we just had a big RfC about this last year.) WP:VPPOL is the place for something like this, especially since one of the various competing proposals includes making changes to WP:CSD policy, something we very, very rarely touch and only after considerable site-wide debate and a clear community consensus that it's required and will not have unintended negative consequences (every noticed that the sequence of lettered and numbered CSD criteria has gaps in it? The community has revoked several CSD criteria as going too far). CSD is pretty much our most dangerous policy.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  16:59, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

Yeah, if I were the one starting this, I would’ve put it on one of the village pumps. At any rate it’s on T:CD now so it will be seen by those who frequent the village pumps (though it won’t show up on watchlists). Also, only two out of the nine deprecated CSDs were repealed for “going too far”. 6/9 were removed because they were redundant and they were folded into other CSDs. This leaves CSD X1, the prototype for the CSD X3 proposal, which was repealed at the conclusion of the Neelix redirect cleanup. — pythoncoder  (talk | contribs) 19:24, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

Proposal 4: Provide for CSD criterion X3

I am entering and numbering this proposal in order to get it into the record, but am requesting that action on it be deferred until the current round of MFDs are decided.

As per User:UnitedStatesian, Create Criteria for Speedy Deletion criterion X3, for portals created by User:The Transhumanist between April 2018 and March 2019. Tagging the portals for speedy deletion will provide the notice to users of the portals, if there are any users of the portals. I recommend that instructions to administrators include a request to wait 24 hours before deleting a portal. This is a compromise between the usual 1 to 4 hours for speedy deletion and 7 days for XFD. The availability of Twinkle for one-click tagging will make it easy to tag the pages, while notifying the users (if there are any). Robert McClenon (talk) 04:21, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

This proposal should be posted in a wider venue, such as WP:VPR or WP:MFD. Many of those portals have been in place for months, making WP:AN too narrow a venue for them. CSD notices wouldn't be placed until after the discussion is over, and therefore would not serve to notify the users of those portals of the discussion. A notice to the discussion of this proposal, since it is a deletion discussion, should be placed on each of the portals, to allow their readers to participate in the discussion. The current round of MfDs are not a random sampling of the portals that were created, and therefore are not necessarily representative of the set. The portals themselves vary in many ways, including scope, the amount of time they've been accessed by readers, quality, number of features, picture support, volume of content, amount of work that went into them, number of editors who worked on them, length, readership, etc.    — The Transhumanist   07:09, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

How would you suggest to get a representative sample? Legacypac (talk) 07:20, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

Thank you for asking. That would be difficult now, since there are already a bunch of portals nominated for MfD. If those were included, then the sample would already be skewed. I expect a truly random sample would reveal that some portals are worth keeping and others are not. A more important question would be "How would we find the portals worth keeping? Which is very similar to the question "what should the creation criteria for portals be?", the very thing they are discussing at the portal guidelines page right now. Many of these portals may qualify under the guideline that is finally arrived upon there. For example, they are discussing scope. There are portals of subjects that fall within Vital articles Level 2, 3, 4, and 5, and there are many portals of subjects of similar scope to the subjects at those levels. And many of the portals had extra work put into them, and who knows how many had contributions by other editors besides me. Another factor is, that the quality of the navigation templates the portals are powered by differs, and some of the portals are powered by other source types, such as lists. Some have hand-crafted lists, as there are multiple slideshow templates available, one of which accepts specific article names as parameters. Another way to do that is provide a manual list in the subtopics section and power the slideshow from that. Some of the portals are of a different design than the standard base template. Some are very well focused, contextually, while others are not. For example, some of the portals have multiple excerpt slideshows to provide additional context.    — The Transhumanist   07:46, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

• Support in principle. Looking at the existing MFD discussions, TTH seems determined to drag and wikilawyer as much as possible to try to derail the discussions, even for blatantly and indefensibly inappropriate microportals like those discussed at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portals for Portland, Oregon neighborhoods; it's not a good use of anyone's time to go through the same timesink 5000+ times. (The cynic in me says that a speedy criterion wouldn't work as while the creators wouldn't be able to decline the templates themselves, TTH and Dreamy Jazz would probably just follow the tagger around removing the speedy templates from each other's creations.) In practice, it would probably be more efficient to do what we did with Neelix and have a streamlined MFD nomination process, in which "created by TTH" is considered sufficient grounds for deletion at MFD and they default to delete unless someone can make a strong argument for keep. MFD is less gameable and also gives a space for people to defend them in those rare cases where they're actually worth keeping. (Every time I look, I find that the flood of inane and pointless TTH portals has spread further than I thought; shipping containers portal, anyone?) ‑ Iridescent 08:26, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

  Dreamy Jazz seems unlikely do that, having already decided during this debate to stop donating their time to Wikipedia. Certes (talk) 18:06, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

• Comment – Another option would be to move these to draft space. The templates and lua modules could be modified so that the portals render right in that namespace (I wish I would have thought of this before). Being in draft space would give time to fix their various problems (keeping in mind that micro-scope is not fixable), and identify the ones worth keeping. I would agree not to move any of them personally, and would propose/request such moves after the new creation criteria guidelines for portals are settled upon. I would also be willing to tag those that did not meet those guidelines with CSD (as creator), saving Legacypac the trouble of nominating them at MfD (he mentioned somewhere that he thought I should help clean up this "mess"). Another benefit of this strategy is that if any of them sit in draft space too long without further development, they automatically become subject to deletion per the draft space guidelines, and those that reach that age without any edits can be deleted en masse without time-consuming effort-wasting MfD discussions. This course of action would of course need the participation of some lua programmers to add the necessary functionality to the modules, which would be a good upgrade for those, to allow for portal drafts to be created in the future.    — The Transhumanist   09:15, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

P.S. @Iridescent and Legacypac: (pinging)    — The Transhumanist   09:28, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

• Absolutely not. The problem is that hundreds of portals on obscure topics makes an unmaintainable mess. Passing it to another namespace does not solve the problem which is that the portals are not helpful and are not maintainable. Automated creation of outlines/portals/anything must stop. Johnuniq (talk) 09:36, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
• No. I tried moving one broken portal to Draft as a test and it broke even more stuff. Not worth the effort to modify everything for draft space and then let the same little group of editors release them willy nilly back into portal space. Since this group ignored their own Wikipedia:Portal/Guidelines "portals should be about broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers." why should anyone trust them to follow stricter guidelines? Legacypac (talk) 09:57, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
• Definitely not. What possible benefit would there be to cluttering up another namespace with ≈5000 pages that will never serve any useful purpose? If you want to goof around with wikicode, nobody's stopping you installing your own copy of Mediawiki; we're not your personal test site. ‑ Iridescent 15:38, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
• As a general rule, Portal pages should not be draftified. In fact, we should not usually move anything not designed to be an article to draft space. Draft portals should be in portal space, just like draft books should be in book space and draft templates in template space (pages with subpages are a pain to move, and many namespaces have special features that suggest keeping drafts in the same space if possible). If a portal is not ready for viewing by the general public, tag it with a relevant maintenance template and make sure it is not linked to from mainspace or from other portal pages.
• In the case at hand, TT's mass created portals do not seem like they will all be soon made ready for wider consumption, so deleting them seems the better option. —Kusma (t·c) 20:15, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

• Support nuking from orbit: It's the only way to be sure. ——SerialNumber54129 09:32, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support enough with the wikilawyering and obstruction. This proposal is a little too narrow though - TTH created 3500+ automated portals but others in his little team created around 1000 more. I just grouped some by User:Dreamy Jazz into Wikipedia:Miscellany_for_deletion#US_County_Portals Legacypac (talk) 09:57, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support These useless broken portals have to go. CoolSkittle (talk) 14:54, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support, too many, too quickly, not enough thought went into their creation. Nuke these, revert other portals that were better before TTH "restarted" them. Automation should help with portal maintenance, not replace portal maintenance or move the maintenance burden to navboxes or other places. —Kusma (t·c) 14:57, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support, sensible and fair way to deal with these. Johnbod (talk) 16:53, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support: MFD could never handle the overwhelming amount of unnecessary and unsustainable portals, considering the magnitude of TTH's portal creation entering the thousands. –eggofreason^talk 20:12, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support nuking. Beyond My Ken (talk) 20:30, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
• Transcluded to Wikipedia talk:Criteria for speedy deletion. {{3x|p}}ery (talk) 20:31, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support mass creation of portals on these topics isn't appropriate without wider discussion, and the automated/semi-automated method used to create them doesn't produce high quality output. Portal:Sierra County, California, for example, is about a county with a population of 3,240, and consists of the lead of the main article, a few random contextless images grabbed from that article (mostly maps or logos) and portal boilerplate. Cleaning these up will require a temporary speedy deletion criterion, I don't think MfD could handle the load. Hut 8.5 22:25, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support as proposer. I had already suggested deferring, but am satisfied that it is going ahead to mass-delete. I will add that, after a consensus is reached on whether and how to use portals, any that were deleted and are needed are available at Requests for Undeletion. Robert McClenon (talk) 01:01, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
• This mass page creation went against WP:MEATBOT and at least the spirit of WP:MASSCREATION if not the letter. An appropriate remedy for automated script and semi-automated creation is speedy deletion. Did you know they were driving for 10,000 portals at a rapid pace? It's here [6] Legacypac (talk) 04:44, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose any and all notions of creating new CSD criteria at any drama board. Discussions here are too rushed, too emotive, too reactionary. Use WT:CSD. Consider using a WT:CSD subpage RfC. Do not attempt to mandate the detail of policy from a drama board. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 04:52, 4 March 2019 (UTC) Transclusion is not good enough. The discussion needs to be searchable from WT:CSD, and the specifics of any and all new criteria need to address the Criteria for a new CSD criterion. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 04:55, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

Many editors at the Village Pump discussion, the Tban discussion above, and at MfDs also supported this. We do not need to fragment this discussion further. Legacypac (talk) 05:12, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

Proposal 1 will make this Proposal 4 moot. This Proposal 4 is not a proper CSD implementation. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 05:41, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

@SmokeyJoe: Proposal 1 is about stopping TTH from creating new portals. Proposal 4 is about deleting those he created in the last couple of months. How is P1 going to make P4 moot? —Kusma (t·c) 10:19, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

List them all in an MfD, if they must all be deleted. A CSD that enables self appointed decision makes for which should go and which might be ok, is inferior to MfD. MfD can handle a list of pages. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 11:24, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

If you want them all at MfD stop objecting to the listing of specific Portals at MfD. Legacypac (talk) 01:34, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

No. Some of the Portals I would support for deletion, and others definitely no. This makes the proposal for a CSD invalid. It fails the CSD new criterion criteria. The proposal is neither Objective or Uncontestable. It would pick up a lot of portals that should not be deleted. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 01:44, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

• Support. No care at all went into these portals, they are mindless creations with loads of errors and little actual benefit for our readers. I would also support the restoration of all pre-existing portals to the pre-transhumanist version, the new "single page" version may require less maintenance, but is way too often clearly inferior (see e.g. this, which is more like vandalism than actual improvement, and has been reversed since). Fram (talk) 10:31, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
• Comment. Anyone restoring old multi-subpage portals should bear in mind that they will require maintenance. If there is no-one willing to maintain them, they, too are likely to be MfDed. No old-style portal with a willing and active maintainer has been converted as far as I know, so I suggest that anyone restoring them should be willing to maintain them. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 16:47, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
  • No. Converting an unmaintained but well-designed portal into an unmaintained semi-automated worse portal is not the way forward. Any claims that the new portals are maintained or don't need maintaining is false, as the many problematic new portals demonstrate. Fram (talk) 17:00, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
  • Portal:Germany was converted (more than once) although it has maintainers. To make sure your portal isn't "improved", you need to put a specific template on the page, which isn't very obvious. There are old-style multi page portals that require only minimal maintenance, and where the conversion removed specific features. All those should be reverted, also to protect the subpages from overzealous deleters (the worst is deleting the /box-footer subpages; this breaks all old revisions by removing a necessary closing div). —Kusma (t·c) 17:21, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose A mass-deletion of the new generation portals. Listing them at MfD will be sufficient for any that do not meet the criteria laid out in the portal guidelines (which are still under discussion). It makes little sense to remove the whole batch because some of them are problematic. They would need to be properly triaged to ensure the good ones are not caught in the process. I would of course, help with said triage. We're not trying to create more work for the community, just preserve good content. — AfroThundr ^{(u · t · c)} 23:47, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
• Comment - You created more work for the community by creating thousands of portals, some of which do not work, and with no intention to maintain them. I see no evidence that this effort created good content that needs to be preserved. Robert McClenon (talk) 04:17, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

There is no new content in the automated portals, it's all poorly repackaged bits of existing content. Legacypac (talk) 04:40, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

All portals, old or new, good or bad, manual or automated, repackage existing content. That's their job. New content belongs in articles. Certes (talk) 11:20, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

• Strong oppose per wumbolo below: criterion P2 already covers a number of these, the rest should be discussed. I still stand by my original comment which follows this addition. Wugapodes [t^hɑk] [ˈkan.ˌʧɹɪbz] 22:37, 13 March 2019 (UTC) Original comment: Weak oppose on principle. CSD is a necessary evil, and I don't think we should be hasty to add another criterion that skips our usual consensus process. I'm fine with nuking these portals and not opposed to deleting them, any diamonds in the rough will prove their worth by being created again, but I would prefer one big MfD with the rationale "created by The Transhumanist" which allows proper determination of consensus and gives those who want to spend their time triaging a chance to do so. Wugapodes [t^hɑk] [ˈkan.ˌʧɹɪbz] 08:03, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

Building multipage MfDs like Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portals for Portland, Oregon neighborhoods is time consuming and tedious. A temporary CSD is rhe way to go. Consensus against this mess of new portals has already been established at VP, AN and in the test MfDs. Legacypac (talk) 17:20, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

• Support due to the massive amount of time it would take to put the ~4500 portals through MfD. MfD has been swamped with portal deletion requests from some time ago, and I can't see all this stuff removed via MfD in the foreseeable future (as someone said earlier, there is still a lot of Outlines left over from one of TTH's previous projects, so who knows how long it would take for MfD to delete all of this). This CSD X3 would streamline the process, and it would probably only take a few days to a week. It would help, as also mentioned earlier, to extend the criterion to the other users involved in the mass creation of these portals. Rlin8 (☎·✎·📧) 03:31, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
  • MfD has never had an issue to nominations of list of pages. 4500 separate MfD nominations would be absurd, but a list would be OK. If each is new, and has a single author, notifications of the author will be trivial. A CSD proposal shortcuts a discussion of the merits of the new portals, and pre-supposes deletion to be necessary, contrary to deletion policy. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 04:01, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

TTH demands we place notification on every portal. We can skip notifying him, but building even 20 page MfD's is very time consuming. How do you propose to discuss 4500 or even 100 assorted portals at a time? These took 3 min to make - but far more than 3 min to list, tag, discuss and vote, then delete - when you add up all the time required from various editors and Admins. The test MfDs are sufficent and the very strong opposition to this automated portal project justifies this temporary CSD. Legacypac (talk) 04:16, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

"TTH demands we place notification on every portal"? Legacypac, I have missed that post by him. If he did that, it needs to be repudiated. If these are new pages, and he is the only author, it is sufficient to notify him once. If all 4500 are essentially variations on the same thing, as long as the full set is defined, and browsable, we can discuss them all together at MfD. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 05:34, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

User:SmokeyJoe during the Portland Oregon neighborhood MFD I specifically said I was not tagging all the related portals but he insisted I tag here [7] I could not get support in the section above to relax the MfD tagging because others wanted this CSD. During the Delete Portals RFC TTH went all out insisting every portal including the community portal be tagged for deletion - then he did it himself. That brought in all kinds of casual infrequent editors who were mostly against deleting the community portal. (Even though that was Pretty much pulled out of consideration for deletion before the tagging project). That massive tagging derailed the deletion RFC. By making cleanup as hard as possible TTH is making a lot of people want to nuke everything. Legacypac (talk) 06:11, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

Legacypac's analysis is erroneous and misleading. The WP:ENDPORTALS RFC was a deletion discussion, and posting a notice on each page up for deletion is required by deletion policy. Note that the Community Portal was only mentioned twice. A portal that was the basis for about 50 oppose votes was the Current Events portal. Neither the Community Portal nor the Current Events portal were exempted in the proposal at any time. If you didn't count those, that left the count at about 150 in support of eliminating portals to about 250 against.    — The Transhumanist   07:25, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

@SmokeyJoe: (edit conflict) See the top of this section for the referred to statement, which is not exactly as he quoted. A notice posted at the top of the portals slated by this proposal would be appropriate. Legacypac has been posting notice for his multi-page nominations using the {{mfd}} template, which auto-generates a link to an mfd page of the same title as the page the template is posted on. Rather than following the template's instructions for multiple pages, he's been creating an MfD page for each, and redirecting them to the combined mfd. Then a bot automatically notifies the creator of each page (me), swamping my user talk page with redundant notifications. Thus, Legacypac believes he'll have to create thousands of mfd redirect pages, and that I somehow want 3500+ notifications on my talk page.    — The Transhumanist   07:10, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

You want us to manually tag pages for deletion that you used an automated script to create? You flooded Wikipedia with useless pages in violation of WP:MEATBOT but you are worried about having to clean up your talkpage notices? Just create an archiving system for your talkpage like we did for User:Neelix's talkpage. If you don't want notices you could start tagging pages that fail your own guidelines with "delete by author request" instead of commenting on how we will do the cleanup. Legacypac (talk) 08:37, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

TTH, if you don't want so many deletion notices on your talk page, then remember in future not to create thousands of spam pages. Please help with the cleanup, rather than complaining about it.

@Legacypac: good work MFDing the spam, but it does seem that you are using a somewhat inefficient approach to tagging. Have you tried asking at WP:BOTREQ for help? In the right hands, tools such as AWB make fast work of XfD tagging. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 12:21, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

• Support whatever course of action that will result in every portal created in this manner being deleted with the minimal of time and effort required. TTH has set up his automated tool, created a massive mess, and left it unattended for others to sort out. It should take less time to clean up this mess than it did to make it, not more. Nuke the lot and if there is anything of value lost then TTH can manually request pages to be restored one at a time at DRV. Fish+Karate 11:19, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support per Fish and karate. RGloucester — ☎ 14:20, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
• Strong oppose as written. I could support something that explicitly excluded portals which are in use and/or are being developed, but the current proposal to indiscriminately delete everything, including active portals, unless the admin chooses to notify any editors and the ones notified happen to be online in a narrow time frame is significantly overly broad. Thryduulf (talk) 01:54, 7 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support Not that portals are that bad, but I don't think we need portals on smaller subjects. (Portal:Spaghetti when we already have Portal:Pasta? Portal:Nick Jr., anyone?) Some might be worth keeping, but a lot are unneeded and unmaintainable. At least it's not a Neelix case. SemiHypercube 16:57, 8 March 2019 (UTC)
  • @SemiHypercube: "Some might be worth keeping" is actually an argument against this proposal. Thryduulf (talk) 12:08, 11 March 2019 (UTC)
    • @Thryduulf: Kind of, but that might be a reason not to just mass delete all at once. In the Neelix case there were some redirects that were actually useful, so a separate CSD criterion was used to keep some redirects at the admins' discretion, so this might be a similar case (before you say that contradicts my "it's not a Neelix case" statement, I meant that in terms of what the redirects were about) SemiHypercube 12:23, 11 March 2019 (UTC)
    • It violates points 1 and 2 of the requirements for CSD criteria: objectivity and unconestability. Unless all the portals covered should be speedily deleted then none of them should be. If you only want to delete some of them then you should be opposing this criterion (just like you should have opposed the subjective Neelix criterion). Thryduulf (talk) 12:34, 11 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support Only realistic way to deal with these. Johnbod (talk) 01:57, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

• Request the posting of a notice at the top of each of the pages being nominated here for mass deletion, as required by the Deletion Policy. This proposal is currently a gross violation of the deletion policy because it is a discussion to delete 3500+ pages, that have been created over the span of a year, that are presently being viewed hundreds of thousands of times per month (projected to millions of times over the coming year) by readers of Wikipedia. The proposal for mass deletion has been made without the required notice being posted at the top of the pages to be deleted. This is being decided by a handful of editors unbeknownst to the wider community, namely, the readership of the portals to be deleted. It may be that those reading such notices would decide that the portals should be deleted, but the point here is that you are denying them the opportunity to participate in the deletion discussion as required by the deletion policy.    — The Transhumanist   21:12, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

Request you stop wasting people's fucking time. Only in death does duty end (talk) 21:41, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

• He switched back to Outlines Special:Contributions/The_Transhumanist which are another unpopular plague for Wikipedia. The assertion that hundreds of thousands of readers a month are looking at his 3500 portals is fanciful at best and not supported by readership stats. Legacypac (talk) 21:58, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

Support opposing anything TTH says from now on. Per OiD. ——SerialNumber54129 13:30, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

Strong oppose taking ad hominem arguments into consideration. Thryduulf (talk) 13:49, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

• @Legacypac, technically he's probably telling the truth. Even obvious drivel like Portal:Coconuts averages around five views per day, thanks to webcrawlers and people who have the articles watchlisted and are wondering "what's this mystery link that's just been spammed onto the article I wrote?"; multiply that by 3500 and you have 500,000 pageviews per month right there. ‑ Iridescent 22:52, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

• Comment Neelix created about 50,000 redirects, which were reviewed by the community. The number of portals is an order of magnitude smaller. If X3 is to be introduced, it should involve a similar review process. We should certainly delete portals which have too narrow a scope or are of poor quality and cannot be improved. However, systematic deletion of all portals which qualify for consideration, purely on an ad hominem argument, would be as wrong as semi-automatic creation. Certes (talk) 10:51, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

Absolutely not. Look at the rate these were created [8] sometimes several dozen an hour, and sometimes an average of 12 seconds each. If so little thought went into creation, why make deletion so difficult? The Neelix cleanup took far too long (I was a big part of it) and we deleted the vast majority of those redirects anyway the extra hard way. As far as I could see the editors who insisted we review everything did none of the reviewing. Also, these were created in violation of WP:MEATBOT which is a blockable or at least sanctionable offense Legacypac (talk) 11:04, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

Two wrongs do not make a right - it is much more important that we get the cleanup right than it happens quickly. Whether or not TTH is blocked or otherwise sanctioned is completely irrelevant. While many (maybe even most) of the created portals should be deleted not all of them should be, and this needs human review: see requirement 2 for new CSD criteria at the top of WT:CSD. Thryduulf (talk) 12:07, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

@Thryduulf, Certes, SmokeyJoe, and Legacypac: Concerning the rate, Legacypac's observation is not accurate. What the edits he is citing do not show, is the method by which the pages were created: they were created in batches, in tabs. Before saving, all the pages/tabs were inspected. For the pages that did not pass muster, such as those that displayed errors (this did not catch all errors, because lua errors can be intermittent or turn up later due to an edit in source material being transcluded), the tabs for those were closed. In a batch of 50, 20 or 30 might survive the cull (though batch sizes varied). Some tabs got additional edits in addition to inspection, to fix errors or remove the sections the errors were in, or further development. After all the tabs in a batch were inspected and the bad ones culled, the remaining ones were saved. That's why the edits' time stamps are so close together. If you look more closely, you'll see the time gap is between the batches rather than the individual page saves. Therefore, WP:MEATBOT was not violated.    — The Transhumanist   18:55, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

He claims [9] he created 500 portals in 500 to 1000 minutes. and is using a script Wikipedia:Miscellany_for_deletion#User:The_Transhumanist/QuickPortal.js If this is not MEATBOT we should refind MEATBOT as meaningless. Legacypac (talk) 19:07, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

A minute or two per portal of the new design sounds about right. Note that the script doesn't save pages. It puts them into preview mode, so that the editor can review them and work on them further before clicking on save.    — The Transhumanist   19:39, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

@Legacypac and The Transhumanist: As I said above, the method of creation is irrelevant to this proposal, as is what (if any) sanction is appropriate. Likewise discussions of WP:MEATBOT don't affect this at all. What matters is only that these pages exist but some of them should not, this proposal needs to be rejected or modified such that it deletes only those that need deleting without also deleting those that do not. Thryduulf (talk) 20:42, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

• Procedural note I have advertised this discussion at WP:VPP and would encourage others to add links where they think interested editors might see. I think this should remain open for 30 days, as it is quite a significant policy change. GoldenRing (talk) 09:24, 13 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support now that the MfDs (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here) are closing with strong consensus around delete, it is clear this is the fastest path to improving the encyclopedia (which is what we are here for, remember?) Any argument that 3,500 more portals have to go through MfD is strictly throwing sand in the gears. It is going to be enough manual labor pulling the links to the deleted portals from all the templates and pages they have been added to. UnitedStatesian (talk) 15:15, 13 March 2019 (UTC)
  • That shows that a speedy deletion criterion is possibly warranted for some, but several comments on those discussions - including your own at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Spaghetti - indicate that this proposed criterion is too broad. Thryduulf (talk) 15:33, 13 March 2019 (UTC)
    • You misunderstand my comment at that MfD: I strongly support that portal's deletion and all the others that would be covered by this proposed criterion. UnitedStatesian (talk) 15:37, 13 March 2019 (UTC)
      • You supported the deletion of Portal:Spaghetti because the topic was covered by Portal:Pasta, even though Portal:Pasta would be deleted under this criterion? That's rather disingenuous at best and very significantly and unnecessary disruptive at worst. Portal:Pasta is an example of a portal that should not be deleted without discussion. Thryduulf (talk) 16:00, 13 March 2019 (UTC)
        • Again, you misunderstand my reasoning: I was specifically pointing out to another editor that the existence of Portal:Pasta could NOT be a reason to delete Portal:Spaghetti, since in my opinion Portal:Pasta would likely also be deleted. Instead, I think the current Wikipedia:Portal/Guidelines provide ample OTHER reasons for deleting both portals (and many, many others, of course). Hope that clarifies. UnitedStatesian (talk) 17:55, 13 March 2019 (UTC)
• Strong oppose and keep all. WP:P2 covers unnecessary portals, and there is no rationale presented other than WP:IDLI to delete a large proportion of all of them, which were all kept after a RfC in 2018. The next time content policies are created at AN by the cabal of admins, I am retiring from Wikipedia. wumbolo ^^^ 16:40, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

  @Wumbolo: Well, if it came to that, take it to WP:RFARB first. Given the past history of WP:FAITACCOMPLI and WP:LOCALCONSENSUS extremism (i.e., WP:FALSECONSENSUS) cases, I have little doubt that ArbCom would agree to take a case about a gaggle of anti-portal people WP:GAMING the consensus-formation process by inventing sweeping policy changes out of their butts in a venue few content editors pay attention to and which is clearly out-of-scope for such a decision, even if it somehow had sufficiently broad input (e.g., via WP:CENT). I'm skeptical any alleged consensus is going to come out of this discussion, anyway.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  17:33, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

• Support This is a repeat of the Neelix situation. ―Susmuffin ^Talk 00:01, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
  • @Susmuffin: The situation has similarities, but the proposed criterion is not comparable. Criterion X1 applied only to redirects created by Neelix that the reviewing administrator reasonably believed would be snow deleted if discussed at RfD (i.e. they had to evaluate each redirect), this criterion would apply to every portal created by TTH in the timeframe without any other conditions and without the need for anyone to even look at anything other than the date of creation. Thryduulf (talk) 00:13, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
    • Honestly, there are far too many portals to be deleted through the usual channels. However, an quick evaluation would be reasonable, provided we keep the portal system itself. ―Susmuffin ^Talk 00:24, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

Unlike Neelix who created some reasonable redirects along the way, these autogenerated portals are of uniformly low quality. The community has looked at representive samples across a variety of subject areas at MFD and the community has already deleted 143 of the 143 portals nominated at closed MfDs. The yet to be closed MfDs are headed to increasing that number. No one has suggested any alternative deletion criteria for X3. Legacypac (talk) 00:45, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

That nobody has suggested an alternative is irrelevant - it's not up to those who oppose this proposal to fix it, and those who support it are by-and-large ignoring the objections. The MfDs have been selected as a representative sample of those that, after review, are not worth keeping and have been reviewed by MfD participants. This does not demonstrate that deletion without review is appropriate - indeed quite the opposite. Remember there is no deadline, it is significantly more important that we get it right than we do things quickly. Thryduulf (talk) 09:59, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

• Oppose as unwarranted and dangerous (and circular reasoning). First, we do not modify CSD without a strong community (not admins' star chamber) consensus that an entire class of material is not just categorically unwanted but so unwanted that it should be deleted on sight without any further consideration. It's our most dangerous policy, and a change like this to it should be an RfC matter at WP:VPPOL. In theory, it could be at WT:CSD, except there is not yet any establishment of a consensus against these portals, and VPPOL is where that would get hashed out, since it's a project-wide question of content presentation and navigation (and maintenance, and whether tools can permissibly substitute for some manual maintenance, and ...). The cart is ahead of the horse here; we can't have a speedy deletion criterion without already having a deletion criterion to begin with.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  17:05, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose – WP:P2 covers problematic portals just fine. A concerning issue here is that some users herein appear to simply not like portals in general, and so there are several arguments above for mass deletion as per this "I don't like it" rationale. Mass deletion should be a last step, not a first step, and portals should be considered on a case-by-case basis. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 22:22, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

You created some with the same tools. One or two of your creations are now at MfD which is why you are now engaging against this solution. We will consider each of your creations at MfD. Legacypac (talk) 02:34, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

My !vote here is based upon my view of the matter at hand, and as such, it stands. Period. Regarding my portal creations, so what? You come across as having a penchant for scolding content creators on Wikipedia if you don't like the medium that is used. Please consider refraining from doing so, as it is unnecessary, and patronizing. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 01:12, 16 March 2019 (UTC)

• Oppose - this CSD seems have to no more objective criteria than "shoot unless someone defends it". For this to be justified, they'd have to explain how no-one reacting within 24 hours was sufficient reasoning. As far as the initial proposal included, it didn't contain any acceptable objective criteria for something warranting deletion on quality grounds. Far worse, it didn't contain suitable justification (whether popularity/quality) for these portals to impose such a major hindrance to Wikipedia as to warrant a process with as few eyes (per consideration) as CSD. The nominator might have had more luck with a PortalPROD mechanism. Nosebagbear (talk) 23:09, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

This CSD exactly meets each criteria for CSD's at the WP:CSD page. It is clear. It is easy to decide if the page meets the CSD. We ran 145 of these portals through MfD already and none survived. Numerous editors suggested this CSD in the Village Pump discussion. These mass created portals universally have the same flaws. Therefore this oppose rational is flawed. Legacypac (talk) 02:34, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

• Support: will allow to quickly manage the auto-created portals of zero utility. --K.e.coffman (talk) 02:23, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support enthusiastically. Taking all these portals through MFD would be a massive drain on community resources. TTH created these portals at sustained speeds of up to 40 per hour, so even the time taken to apply a CSD tag and assess it 24 hours later will require more editorial time than TTH took to create them. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 07:23, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
• Strong oppose - There are good quality portals that will be excluded, few maybe, but deserve to remain. For example Portal: Cities, Portal: Architecture.Guilherme Burn (talk) 11:40, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
  • @Guilherme Burn, maybe those are worth keeping. Or maybe not. But even if they are good, they are not worth the price of the community committing huge amounts of time to individually debating every one of the thousands of useless portals which members of the portal project have spewed out over the last year (often as drive by creations, and which project members have then piled into MFDs to keep.

If the Portals Project had exercised discretion so far, then we would be in a very different place. But it's utterly outraegous to ask the community to devote more time to assessing this spam than the Portal Project put into creating them. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 12:10, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

Could these portals be marked to be spared?Guilherme Burn (talk) 13:03, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

@Guilherme Burn: not according to the proposal as written. The only chance of saving is if an admin chooses to notify and wait 24 hours and somebody objects within those 24 hours and someone spots that CSD has been declined previously if it gets renominated. Thryduulf (talk) 14:01, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

@Guilherme Burn: Portal:Cities is totally moribund and unread, and has never had a single participant. Portal:Architecture dates from 2005 and wasn't created by TTH or this tag-team, so wouldn't be deleted regardless (although I imagine the enormous wall of pointless links which TTH's bot dumped onto the page a couple of months ago would be reverted). ‑ Iridescent 14:08, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

• Oppose per SmokeyJoe et al. Completely unnecessary to override already existing procedure. Paine Ellsworth, ed.  ^put'r there  17:12, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
  • @Paine Ellsworth: the administrative work of trawling through several thousand drive-by-created micro-portals is huge. Cleaning up this flood of portalspam through MFD requires a huge amount of editorial time, vastly more than was involved in creating the spam.

If you think that existing procedure is fine, why aren't you devoting large hunks of your time to doing the cleanup by the laborious procedure you defend? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 02:33, 16 March 2019 (UTC)

• Support and also apply it to those created by Northamerica1000, who has made such useless portals as Portal:Strawberries and Portal:Waffles. Reywas92^Talk 08:26, 16 March 2019 (UTC)
  • @Reywas92: Northamerica1000 has created only 70 pages in the portal namespace (excluding redirects) in the relevant timeperiod. In no conceivable scenario does that justify a speedy deletion criterion. Thryduulf (talk) 11:58, 16 March 2019 (UTC)

Proposal 5: Shut down or reform WikiProject Portals

I know, me proposing shutting down a WikiProject I'm in? What am I thinking?

Well, I mainly joined to make sure things would go smoothly after that RfC to delete all portals - clearly it has not. As thus, I think a solution (among the others) would be to shut down the WikiProject responsible for many of the bad portal creations. Right now it appears all its doing is creating new portals, not maintaining or improving them - which is what a WikiProject is supposed to do.

However, a less extreme solution would be to reform the project to actually maintain and improve the portals it creates, and creates portals sparingly. I'm fairly certain a task force making sure portals meet standards would be beneficial to the issue, and also making it clear that not everything needs a portal.

I'm going for the latter option to reform - however, I'm going to leave the shutdown option up in the air in case people find good reason for it to be considered.

Addendum 13:48, 15 March 2019 (UTC) - Since I forgot to clarify ( Self-trout) here's two examples of reforms I could see being useful:

• A quality scale for portals, like we use for articles - this could help with knowing which portals are good and which ones need improvement
• Dividing the Project into task forces to make sure necessary tasks for the maintenance of portals are completed, as right now they clearly are not

• Sub-reform for this would be to make a task force that deletes bad portals that don't meet quality standards and are not needed

Hopefully this can help clarify this proposal somewhat - if none of these can be done reasonably (which I doubt they can't) the shutdown option should be considered.

Kirbanzo ^{(userpage - talk - contribs)} 23:01, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

Survey on sub-proposal to shut down WikiProject Portals

• Neutral as per above. Kirbanzo ^{(userpage - talk - contribs)} 23:01, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
• Strong oppose firstly this is the wrong forum, secondly there is nothing in the nomination that explains why this is needed, or how it will result in an improvement to the encyclopaedia. Thryduulf (talk) 01:04, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

• Oppose. Abyssal (talk) 01:35, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support: might as well. --K.e.coffman (talk) 02:23, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose. There is consensus to keep the portal system but it has many faults, so a focus for improving it seems sensible. Certes (talk) 14:36, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
• Strong oppose. Not necessary and not the best way to fix Wikipedia’s portals. — pythoncoder  (talk | contribs) 19:49, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose – Would amount to throwing the baby out with the bathwater. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 01:19, 16 March 2019 (UTC)

Survey on sub-proposal to reform WikiProject Portals

• Support as proposer and per above. Kirbanzo ^{(userpage - talk - contribs)} 23:01, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose as the proposal is in the wrong forum and contains no details of what reform is being suggested, let alone how these reforms would solve the issues identified. Thryduulf (talk) 01:05, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

• This is related to the discussion as the WikiProject is headed by the user being discussed here. Kirbanzo ^{(userpage - talk - contribs)} 13:48, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
  • Wikprojects are a collection of editors, not just one person. There is no evidence presented that there is any admin action required regarding the WikiProject as a whole collectively (not that I can immediately think of what that action could look like if it were), and there isn't even consensus that admin action regarding the single editor is required. Thryduulf (talk) 13:57, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

• Fair point, but considering the discussion below it should still be considered. Kirbanzo ^{(userpage - talk - contribs)} 14:00, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

• Support. I’ve been doing some reform work of this type by creating a page to clean up some of the damage done to the older portals. WikiProject Portals has an assessment page but I’m not sure how much it gets used. — pythoncoder  (talk | contribs) 19:49, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

Discussion on proposal to reform WikiProject Portals

• Query @Kirbanzo: - do you have any early thoughts about what some good reforms would be to shift the primary focus of the project towards maintenance/improvement over creation? Nosebagbear (talk) 23:11, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

• See addendum. Kirbanzo ^{(userpage - talk - contribs)} 13:50, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

• Transcluded to Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals. {{3x|p}}ery (talk) 23:36, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
• No, do not transclude important discussions from AN to the relevant talkpage. Hold the discussion on the relevant talk page. Transclude to here is there is good reason, which there is not. Holding hte discussion here means watchlisting it doesn't work, and it wont be archived in the right place. Shutting down a WikiProject is not in scope for WP:AN. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 02:20, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
• The Portals Wikiproject members can't even come up with a proper new guideline for what topics get a portal even when faced with a village pump imposed moratorium. The discussion is all over the place with no focus. Heck they did not even follow their old guideline about picking subjects broud enough to gain reader and editor interest. The only thing they appear to agree on is MORE MORE MORE and using WP:VITAL as a to do list. Their newsletter said they are pushing to 10,000 portals (off a base of 1500 old line portals). Now the number of portals will shrink until and unless they get new guidelines passed by an RFC. Legacypac (talk) 09:57, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

• That old guideline wasn't generally followed, ever. That's because portals (except those on the main page) get about 1 to 3 percent of the amount of traffic that their corresponding root articles get. In other words, "not a lot". That's because almost all their traffic comes via WP internal links. Almost nobody googles "Portal". So, for the vast majority of topics, large numbers of readers and editors will never be forthcoming, and never were. Out of the 1500 portals, about 100 had maintainers (maintained by around 60 editors), and maybe 20% of them regularly edited the portals they maintained.

The WikiProject, and the community, need feedback in the form of hard numbers, in order to get a sense of what will even get used. How hard would it be to make a chart listing all the portals in one column, and their page views for the past month in the second column, and then sort the chart by the second column? That might provide some insight.    — The Transhumanist   11:05, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

• Sigh. :TTH, you had this data already. You know that portal pageviews are miniscule. At the RFC on deleting the portal namespace, stats were posted on pageviews, and not even all the portals linked from the front page had decent viewing rates.

Yet despite knowing all that, you personally created thousands of new portals, despite having all the evidence in front of you that they are useless.

And when I presented the evidence to you again, and asked you to desist, you were furious. Instead of assessing the issues, you posted multi-screenfull unfocused ramblings replete with shouts of "bias", "personal attack" etc.

The problem is not any shortage of information. The problem is that as @Legacypac notes above, the discussions in the WikiProject have no focus, no regard for available evidence, and no respect for community consensus.

Legacypac and usually disagree, but in this case we see exactly the same problem: a WikiProject which has a long and sustained track record of being utterly incapable of acting responsibly wrt the page within its purview.

This is not solely TTH's doing. TTH bears by far the highest responsibility because TTH has been both the most prolific creator and the most angry objector to calls for restraint, but several other regulars at WikiProject Portals have been equally unfocused and equally bonkers. For example:

• Only 15 days ago, WT:Portal/Guidelines#Portal_creation_and_deletion_criteria_proposal_5: a proposal to create portals up to VA Lelevl 5, when even VA level 4 would be about 10,000 portals.
• 17 days ago, WT:Portal/Guidelines#Portal_creation_and_deletion_criteria_proposal_1: a proposal for portals to have minimum of only 20 articles. Precisely the sort of microportal of which the community has had enough.

So the community simply cannot rely on this group to set and uphold resposnsible guidelines. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 11:53, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

@BrownHairedGirl: I make the proposal 5. And it was a proposal. I Support a reform in WikiProject Portals. My idea is the existence of approximately 1000(level 3) single page portals layout, directly linked in tree model with the main page. The role of the wikiproject should be to organize this tree and develop tools to transform all portals into single-page layout portals.Guilherme Burn (talk) 12:11, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

@Guilherme Burn, no technical diversions. My point is not about how the portals operate; it's about their scope. And 20 pages is insanely narrow. A 20-page portal is just an bloated navbox. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 12:36, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

Portal MfD Results

All Portals closed at WP:MfD during 2019

Grouped Nominations total 127 Portals:

1. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/US County Portals Deleted 64 portals
2. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Districts of India Portals Deleted 30 Portals
3. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portals for Portland, Oregon neighborhoods Deleted 23 Portals
4. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Allen Park, Michigan Deleted 6 Portals
5. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Cryptocurrency Deleted 2 Portals
6. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:North Pole Deleted 2 Portals

Individual Nominations:

1. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Circles Deleted
2. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Fruits Deleted
3. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:E (mathematical constant) Deleted
4. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Burger King Deleted
5. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Cotingas Deleted
6. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Prostitution in Canada Deleted
7. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Agoura Hills, California Deleted
8. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Urinary system Deleted
9. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:You Am I Deleted
10. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Cannabis (2nd nomination) Reverted to non-Automated version
11. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Intermodal containers Deleted
12. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Adventure travel Deleted
13. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Adam Ant Deleted
14. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Benito Juárez, Mexico City Deleted
15. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Spaghetti Deleted
16. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Wikiatlas Deleted
17. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Greek alphabet Deleted
18. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Deleted
19. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Accounting Deleted G7
20. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Lents, Portland, Oregon Deleted P2
21. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Ankaran Deleted
22. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Jiu-jitsu Deleted G8
23. Portal:University of Nebraska Speedy Deleted P1/A10 exactly the same as Portal:University of Nebraska–Lincoln also created by the TTH

Related WikiProject:

1. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:WikiProject Quantum portals Demoted

We get the message. 3% of portals, selected from the worst examples, have successfully been removed. I !voted to delete most of them myself. You are also working hard to get portal-related tools deleted while discussions on the project's future continue. However, AN is not the place to list every tiny victory in the War on Portals. This trophy cabinet is now full. Certes (talk) 13:15, 16 March 2019 (UTC)

Thousands of Autogenerated "Quantum Portals" with no human curation?

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

---

Discovered Wikipedia:WikiProject Quantum portals which I'm not sure I fully understand but looks like another big disruption brewing. Sent to Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:WikiProject Quantum portals Legacypac (talk) 04:54, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

Please note that in the case of quantum portals there would be no actual pages stored in Wikipedia, There would be a link which would create a temporary page which would exist only while it was open, and would disappear when closed, like a search result. Since they would only exist when someone actively invoked them, their existence would depend on them being seen as useful to the reader at the time. Some processing time would be necessary, currently this appears to be limited by technical constraints, and is the same as would be used for rendering an uncached article or saving an edit, so it is hard to see where massive disruption would come from. No maintenance would be required, other than occasional improvements to the script.· · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 16:09, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

Legacypac (or anyone else confused by this), see Reasonator to get an idea of what they're talking about here. They don't serve exactly the same purpose—Reasonator assembles a pseudo-article in your browser on-the-fly based on data (which has no useful purpose on en-wiki, but it has an obvious potential use in more obscure languages, since it's less prone to errors than translation software)—but the principle is the same as that being discussed here.

I personally find the idea of a "quantum portal" beyond pointless, given that barely anyone uses even the real portals (something like Portal:Fish and Portal:Trains—both major topics with a high degree of world-wide interest and well over 100,000(!) incoming direct links—average around 20 and 80 views per day respectively), but I can see that the theory behind it might make sense, especially for smaller Wikipedias where the category structure isn't as well organized and "show me a list of all the articles we currently have about trains, and all the train-related topics which other Wikipedias consider important but where we don't currently have an article" might actually be useful.

However, English Wikipedia is certainly not the appropriate testing ground for TTH to be conducting his experiments, especially given that we still haven't finished cleaning out the detritus from the previous time TTH tried to pull this "it's too late for you to stop me as I've already done it" stunt, let alone the most recent attempt with the portals. ‑ Iridescent 11:06, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

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

Wikipedia:Requests for page protection 01

Lots of pages awaiting protection for several hours now, please help out if those usually handling the requests are not available. --Denniss (talk) 16:22, 9 March 2019 (UTC)

I just took care of the backlog there. As of the time of this writing, the request for page protection queue is empty. :-) ~Oshwah~^{(talk) (contribs)} 07:33, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

WP:CLOSECHALLENGE

Hello, if don't think the closure of no consensus was a reasonable summation of RfC.4 IJV/JSG/JVP / this RfC discussion

There was 9 include, 6 exclude, 1 modify votes. No editor argued that the Morning Star isn't a reliable source and there's an RfC here which confirms that it is.

The section now only reads: Later in July, in an unprecedented move, three UK Jewish newspapers, The Jewish Chronicle, Jewish News and Jewish Telegraph, carried a joint editorial saying that a Corbyn government would be an "existential threat to Jewish life" in the UK". with one accompanying RS.

The sentence that was removed (which according the the RfC discussion appeared to provide balance) is: "The joint editorial was condemned by three Jewish groups, namely the Independent Jewish Voices, the Jewish Socialists Group and Jewish Voice for Peace, with the Jewish Socialists Group describing the editorial as "concocted hysteria". RevertBob (talk) 20:50, 10 March 2019 (UTC)

Note: Per the instructions at Closing_discussions#Challenging_other_closures I am adding a link to the challenger's efforts to discuss the issue with the closer. Alsee (talk) 11:30, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

Firstly, when you start a discussion relating to the actions of another editor, you should notify them on their talk page. Secondly, discussion points on an RfC are not votes per se. See WP:!VOTE Catfish Jim and the soapdish 08:39, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

Furthermore, no consensus appears to be an appropriate decision in this case. Catfish Jim and the soapdish 08:43, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

To summarise (please check if correct):

• !Vote 1: Exclude
• !Vote 2: Modify
• !Vote 3: Exclude
• !Vote 4: Include
• !Vote 5: Exclude
• !Vote 6: Exclude
• !Vote 7: Include
• !Vote 8: Conditional Include
• !Vote 9: Include
• !Vote 10: Include
• !Vote 11: Include
• !Vote 12: Exclude
• !Vote 13: Exclude
• !Vote 14: Weak include
• !Vote 15: Include
• !Vote 16: Include
• !Vote 17: Exclude
• !Vote 18: Exclude

I make that 7 Includes, 8 Excludes and 3 weak/conditional/modify includes.

Of these, 12, 15 and 16 are unsubstantial !votes with no contribution to debate. The rest are reasonably well-argued.

I cannot see that this is anything other than no consensus Catfish Jim and the soapdish 09:53, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

For ease of viewing, a collapsed transclusion of the RfC is below. --DannyS712 (talk) 10:05, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

RfC.4 IJV/JSG/JVP / Oryszczuk

The following discussion is an archived record of a request for comment. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion. A summary of the conclusions reached follows. There is no consensus to include this information. Best wishes, Barkeep49 (talk) 21:14, 8 February 2019 (UTC) Should this be included?Icewhiz (talk) 08:26, 17 September 2018 (UTC) Survey UNDUE. While the joint editorial was international news (e.g. Reuters, NYT, WaPo, etc.) which lasting overage, comments of these 3 fringe organizations have received scant coverage - as evident in the sources to Morning Star and Ekklesia. Oryszczuk interview at the fringe, and little read, The Canary (website) and subsequent followup (on taking a leave) in the online only Pressgazette is clearly undue.Icewhiz (talk) 09:09, 17 September 2018 (UTC) Modify One could keep the opening sentence of that edit, but remove the rest of the content. The Canary is not RS and should not be used. Bondegezou (talk) 11:02, 17 September 2018 (UTC) Remove - Sources like the Canary are totally unreliable while the inclusion of things like Ekklesia seems to border on UNDUE. Alssa1 (talk) 12:05, 17 September 2018 (UTC) include This is an alternative viewpoint form other Jews. We cannot represent Judaism as if it is unified over this. As to RS issues, I am not sure that any of these sources have been declared not RS.Slatersteven (talk) 12:32, 17 September 2018 (UTC) Exclude - Per WP:NOTOPINION; in general, we shouldn't be relaying the opinions of random commentators, academics or celebrities on political subjects unless there's good reason to think that a person is directly involved with or affected by the issue being commented on. NickCT (talk) 12:51, 17 September 2018 (UTC) Leaning towards exclude due to the unreliability of sources here, although I do think it needs to be mentioned in the article that the front page was not unanimously supported among Britain's Jewish community, and that there are left-wing & anti-Zionist groups which disagreed with the editorial. Morning Star can be used as a source for this (so long as it is properly attributed), AFAIK. Unsure about Ekklesia, and the Canary is definitely non-rs and BLOGS violation. --Bangalamania (talk) 14:06, 17 September 2018 (UTC) include - many of these sources are RS, and to exclude them would give the impression of a unanimity that does not actually exist, in violation of WP:NPOV. Also, procedurally, I would say that the formulation of the RfC mat be inadvertently biased by including reliable along with non-reliable sources in the same section. Newimpartial (talk) 15:00, 17 September 2018 (UTC) Conditional include -- this is relevant and informative, but it is an astonishing double standard if actually statistically sound and representative polling of the Jewish community as a whole is removed, yet these groups (not exactly representative) stay. That would be frankly a "dishonest" outcome.--Calthinus (talk) 15:24, 17 September 2018 (UTC) Include While I am receptive to Calthinus's points, I disagree that it's a double-standard to include reliably sourced statements rather than opinion polls. However I would suggest trimming down to material from reliable sources, including the Morning Star. Simonm223 (talk) 15:28, 17 September 2018 (UTC) Include - Views of Jewish groups should be presented for balance. Also, no evidence of sources not being RS for inaccurate r.eporting or poor fact-checking. RevertBob (talk) 15:08, 18 September 2018 (UTC) Include On NPOV grounds both sides of the Jewish community should be represented. However agree with Simonm223 & Bondegezou trim the section back. I am unaware if the Canary has been found to be RS or not. ~ BOD ~ TALK 22:51, 18 September 2018 (UTC) Exclude Markbassett (talk) 02:56, 19 September 2018 (UTC) Exclude mainly due to the borderline non-scholarly sources. GizzyCatBella (talk) 07:42, 19 September 2018 (UTC) Weak include IJV, Exclude Oryszczuk: Morning Star and Ekklessia are weak reliable sources but the three groups are notable, if not mainstream. Canary is totally not RS and the Oryszczuk interview is completely non-notable. BobFromBrockley (talk) 15:00, 19 September 2018 (UTC) Include per Newimpartial and Slatersteven. G-13114 (talk) 23:34, 22 September 2018 (UTC) Include to achieve NPOV. Deb (talk) 08:01, 5 October 2018 (UTC) Exclude. Editorials are understood as opinions; stating some less significant groups disagreed with the opinions isn't notable. --A D Monroe III(talk) 16:54, 12 October 2018 (UTC) Exclude. Where's the evidence that these editorials are long-term significant? Wait until a scholarly historian publishes a reliable secondary source that addresses these editorials as part of a discussion of this topic. Nyttend (talk) 02:07, 10 January 2019 (UTC) Discussion This RfC has been open for 1 month 28 days. We have 9 votes for including the first sentence and seven votes for excluding it, nine votes for excluding the second sentence and six votes for including it. I think therefore the fair and consensual compromise would be to reinsert the following sentence: The joint editorial was condemned by three Jewish groups, namely the Independent Jewish Voices, the Jewish Socialists Group and Jewish Voice for Peace, with the Jewish Socialists Group describing the editorial as "concocted hysteria". BobFromBrockley (talk) 12:17, 14 November 2018 (UTC) References The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

• Endorse close. Note: I think this challenge was drafted in a potentially confusing manner. An important point, which is not at all clear in the challenge, is that the challenger is seeking a mixed outcome where part of the disputed text is included and part is excluded.
  Closes are not based on a simple headcount, however based on a generous interpretation of RFC responses I see a split which can very commonly result in either no consensus or weak consensus. On examining comments by the closer after his close, I see very credible concerns regarding Undue. I would like to emphasize that the mixed outcome here was not directly addressed by the RFC and many of the RFC responses, and I'm certainly not going to fault a closer for leaning towards the more cautious "no consensus" on a questionable outcome which was inadequately addressed.
  On the other hand, it's worth noting that a no consensus outcome does allow for a new discussion to suggest a modified or compromise version. Rather than open a challenge, compromise text should have just been sought on the article talk page. In fact I suggest to RevertBob that you consider withdrawing the challenge and just open a discussion on article_talk. Trimming off the worst part of the text might quell objections, and it's possible that some other tweak to the text or sourcing might be successful. The fact that several months have passed might also provide more clear perspectives on whether the requested text is appropriate and valuable. Alsee (talk) 12:26, 11 March 2019 (UTC)
• Closer's Comment: I had not talked about my own headcount at the talk page because I wanted to get Revert Bob away from his tallying but my noting of thinking did include strength of preference as well and thus closely matches Catfish Jim's (who I also thank for notifying me of this discussion). Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 13:41, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

Hi all, thanks for all your helpful contributions here. I'll trim off the text where the source was objected and include the parts sourced from RS and see if that works. All the best. RevertBob (talk) 20:44, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

User:TenPoundHammer making uncivil remarks

User:TenPoundHammer has made multiple uncivil remarks, one being this, others which I will conjure up as I have time. This user was warned here, in addition to several other notifications that the user has removed. --Jax 0677 (talk) 12:51, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

Incidents

1. [10]
2. [11]
3. [12]
4. [13]

Warnings

1. [14]
2. [15]
3. [16]
4. [17]

--Jax 0677 (talk) 13:03, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

Discussion

Here are some recent, not-so-kind edits: [18] [19] [20] [21] [22] [23] [24]. Seems obvious that something should be done. Nihlus 13:06, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

• There a certain irony in berating an editor's poor grammar with an edit summary "learn to grammar"...more seriously, however, yes, much of that language is absolutely unnecessary. The warnings, though...might be more convincing if they didn't smack of one editor policing another. I can't honesty see how continually templating can be expected to help. But, still, it's no justofication for calling editors "dumbass"—particularly whilst acknowledging their inexperience in the same edit summary. ——SerialNumber54129 13:21, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

Ummm, Serial Number 54129, the irony was clearly intentional. Like the way my brother used to say "why don't you learn to pronunce!" if I mispronounced a word. 0;-D -- MelanieN (talk) 17:46, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

Ah! That, MelanieN, shows how much I know about irony; I thought it was like steely and bronzey...  :) ——SerialNumber54129 18:37, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

• While not an excuse for any uncivil language, the other side of it is that Jax 0667 is frequently combative and difficult to work with. (His talk page archives show example after example if warnings on stuff like this.) There’s been a lot of instances of excessive tagging, unnecessary redirect creation, and sloppy articles he’s created, where he tends to be obstinate up until the point of being blocked. He certainly tests mine, and a few more good experienced editors, patience. He’s certainly not innocent in all this. Sergecross73 msg me 16:00, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

• Reply - I have established guidelines for tagging to prevent these type of disputes. When I put {{+R}} at the top of an article, I have been asked to put {{+RS}} in the exact section. In the most recent incident, I was reverted when there was only one reference in the article, which is the purpose of {{1R}}. --Jax 0677 (talk) 16:37, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

• You don’t seem to understand how to balance the frequency of how often/when to add tags, so guidelines created by you doesn’t exactly ease my concerns. Also...the discussion you just linked to doesn’t show much support from other editors, and dates back to 2016, whereas the behavior I’ve observed has probably been over the course of 2017 and 2018. Sergecross73 msg me 17:00, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

• This is not a borderline case; this behavior is unacceptable. Edit summaries like then find sources, you fucking dipshit) (today, March 11) and just Jax 0677 (talk · contribs) being lazy as fuck again and not wanting to type out more than two characters when slathering articles in maintenance tags that they don't even need (December 11) and Use {{Blp sources}} if it's a BLP; use {{refimprove-section}} if you need just a section sourced better. USE THE FUCKING SECTIONS I'VE TOLD YOU THIS A MILLION TIMES BY NOW. (November 8) are not acceptable here. These examples are spread out in time, but that doesn’t mean rank incivility is OK as long as you don’t do it too often. All of these examples are directed at user Jax0677, but Nilhus found many others - hey dumbass, why the fuck would you do this when THEY NEVER FUCKING CHARTED THERE?!?! are you fucking dumb or what? (January 5), are you on fucking crack? (December 2), fucking noob, learn to edit (November 7), learn to fucking edit, noob (October 17), not what the tag's for, dumbass (October 31), and on and on. This is clearly a habitual thing with the Hammer, directed at both newbies and established editors. Considering that the latest one was just today, I think a short block would be preventive as well as a warning not to continue this kind of thing. It has gone on unchecked for far too long already. -- MelanieN (talk) 16:40, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

P.S. My recommendation of a "short block" was based on the fact that his block log does not show previous or recent blocks for this. I was not aware of his long history of previous complaints detailed by Iridescent below (I am not exactly a regular at this board), so consider my recommendation of a "short block" to be the minimum outcome I think should result here. -- MelanieN (talk) 17:43, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

I would really like to get TPH's side of the story first. If he apologises and shows remorse (and I think he will), I think he should be told explicitly that he is on thin ice and can be blocked for any subsequent infractions. Having a community consensus for this also stops anyone turning up hassling the blocking admin as they've got evidence that the community is behind them on it - admins swooping in to dish out civility blocks can cause a Streisand effect and increase disruption, so we need to tread carefully. This is pretty much how I read Wikipedia:No personal attacks#Consequences of personal attacks. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 17:49, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

Certainly we should hear from TPH before any action is taken. But I think it may be hard to assume good faith toward any expression of remorse, since he has been doing this so habitually for so long; did he somehow not understand that things like this are against policy? Setting aside remorse, which would almost certainly be insincere and so should not be required, a promise to reform might be accepted. BTW the problem isn't just his almost compulsive usage of "fucking" to add emphasis to his insults. Even if he swore off that word, things like "are you on crack?" and "learn to edit, noob!" and "are you dumb or what?" would still be in violation. -- MelanieN (talk) 19:34, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

Well, TPH has had his say, and has tried to justify his incivility with a "they deserved it" rationale. They're all asking for it all the time! No sign of any recognition that there is anything wrong with his approach. Thus some kind of block or ban is definitely in order. -- MelanieN (talk) 00:03, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

• I am pretty sure I have given a civility warning to TPH before, and I am absolutely certain I enacted a community-endorsed topic ban from XfD some time back. I have given TPH a heads up to not to say anything like that ever again or I will block. As I am not exactly known for civility-blocking "content creators", he'll hopefully listen to me. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 17:00, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

• I won't take action myself as it's no secret that I consider TPH an utterly toxic presence, but see here for the last time he tried the "I'm so damn important that the normal rules don't apply to me" routine he's been pulling for about a decade now. See also Wikipedia:Requests for comment/TenPoundHammer, Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive752#User:TenPoundHammer, User talk:TenPoundHammer/Archive 13#Concerns Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Archive236#XfD Topic Ban for User:TenPoundHammer, Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive661#User:TenPoundHammer, User talk:TenPoundHammer/Archive 13#Longhorns & Londonbridges, Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive767#TenPoundHammer, AfD and WP:IDONTUNDERSTANDIT, Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Archive225#Move request, Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive753#Webcomic COI, Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Archive233#Back off the Hammer, User talk:TenPoundHammer/Archive 14#WP:PROD, Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Archive221#Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Centro del Sur, Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive641#False accusationsWikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive665#Hullaballoo yet again..., Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Archive193#3RR advice, Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive684#April Fools' Day article, Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive745#TenPoundHammer's article redirections and Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive713#Disruptive CSD Tag Warring by user:TenPoundHammer if you're a real masochist for background) ‑ Iridescent 17:04, 11 March 2019 (UTC)
• If he is still conducting himself the same way that got him topic banned from deletion processes early last year (thanks Ritchie for the link), and given the extensive history wherein it is clear he will not change, I think a full community ban may be in order. --Izno (talk) 19:43, 11 March 2019 (UTC)
• Comment A large amount of this has been directed at Jax 0677 (talk · contribs), who has as much of a long-standing history of excessive overtagging, clumsy editing, wikilawyering, WP:DTTR violations, and coming up with every excuse in the book to do as little work as possible -- when only making more work in the long run because of their attempts to "help" and refusal to change their ways. I am by no means claiming innocence here. I am long since out of patience with Jax 0677 in particular, but when I see things like people putting "This is incorrect, can you fix it?" right in the middle of an article, not knowing the difference between "its" and "it's", inserting unsourced content on purpose because they don't know how to add a source instead of, you know, ASKING FOR HELP... then yeah, it's gonna trigger the fuck out of me. I don't think Wikipedia is that hard to figure out, and sometimes it just infuriates me when new editors derp things up so much. It also infuriates me when long-term editors still muck things up despite knowing better -- but I'm a long-term editor myself and I still have quite a few "flaws" that won't go away. So maybe I just need to take a breather from the place for a few days, and perhaps work out a compromise with Jax 0677 so that I am not as bothered by their editing idiosyncracies. Ten Pound Hammer • ^{(What did I screw up now?)} 22:47, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

  TenPoundHammer, if stuff like this "triggers the fuck out of [you]" and causes you to behave in this manner then perhaps the community should ensure that doesn't continue to happen. Nihlus 04:57, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

• ETA: I have left a note on Jax's talk page expressing a willingness to go one on one with them and address some concerns. Ten Pound Hammer • ^{(What did I screw up now?)} 23:00, 11 March 2019 (UTC)
• Comment - 'then find sources, you fucking dipshit' is not nice at all in an edit sum. Accepting the complaint as valid is good, the offering of advice to the complainant to resolve the complaint is not so good. Is user mediation available with a third user, that may work. Govindaharihari (talk) 07:30, 12 March 2019 (UTC)
• Comment Wikipedia is the site that anyone can edit. Many do it very well, and others do it badly. If we are to encourage the next generation of editors, we cannot afford to have experienced editors (who should know better) abusing or insulting newcomers for making simple mistakes that happen to personally irritate them. We should encourage them to do better, and experienced editors should not be abusing them for their misunderstandings, nor - and I think this is really important - should they be leaving that abuse so that it is permanently visible to everyone in article Revision Histories (like this highly visible outburst). It is the widespread and continual use by TPH of aggressive or derogatory comments that are so publicly visible to others on page histories that concern me as much as comments made to individual editors. This is a behavioural issue, and TPH seems to have difficulties when other editors damage his/her encyclopaedia (as they said: "..., but when I see things like people putting "This is incorrect, can you fix it?" right in the middle of an article, not knowing the difference between "its" and "it's", inserting unsourced content on purpose because they don't know how to add a source instead of, you know, ASKING FOR HELP... then yeah, it's gonna trigger the fuck out of me.""). It seems to have gone on for years, and with 43 uses of "fuck" across the last 5000 edit summaries over the last 12 months, I think that's probably 42 "fuck"s too many. Some of the abuse seems more akin to impotent raging at a train that passed by ages ago, such a this IP edit made in September 2018 but with general abuse levelled at the world in general some months later.) There is a level of aggression, frustration or angst here that, were TPH my child, I would say "Time out! - you've been on that game long enough. Go do something else for a while now!", and I'd hope they'd calm down and start to ameliorate their behaviour. So, I think that either a reasonable multi-month block is now in order (and would genuinely be in their best interests) or, dare I suggest it (!), a long stint of no editing or reverting content at all, but solely helping out positively at the WP:TH or WP:HD to learn how to properly engage and deal with those editors who are far less experienced than they are. If they don't then show their behaviour has changed, I might then consider supporting an indefinite block, as this website is clearly getting to them emotionally; it is hurtful to others, and they are certainly not enhancing the reputation of Wikipedia as a welcoming place for contributors. Nick Moyes (talk) 16:43, 12 March 2019 (UTC)
• Comment - I will start off by saying that I have no sympathy with either editor. Any editor who uses profanity in an edit summary should at a minimum get a short block. (Profanity in an edit summary is worse than profanity on a talk page, because it cannot be blanked and must be left standing or redacted.) At the same time, User:Jax 0677 is the one who stupidly rebuked me about the running time for an RFC, which is 30 days and not 7 days. I don't like two-way interaction bans in general, but I think that a two-way Interaction ban without the usual exceptions is in order, as is a one-week Block on TPH for profanity in edit summaries. Robert McClenon (talk) 19:38, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

• Reply - My "[rebuking] about the running time for an RFC" was an honest mistake, I fully acknowledge my error, and will allow the discussion in question to run for its 30 days. At this time, I do not agree with an interaction ban. --Jax 0677 (talk) 19:53, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

User:Jax 0677 - Apology accepted. Next time, if I try to take issue with you in a less public forum, don't demand diffs and don't make it necessary for me to make a public issue. Apology accepted. Robert McClenon (talk) 22:11, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

And we agree that profane edit summaries are intolerable and require an immediate block. Robert McClenon (talk) 22:11, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

Can we agree that it's not JUST the profanity he is getting blocked for - it's also the nasty insults that are intolerable? -- MelanieN (talk) 22:49, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

Profanity is not incivility. Profanity is a particularly effective vehicle for incivility. If you cannot imagine a way of committing suicide by admin via incivility without being profane, then you lack imagination. GMG^talk 23:29, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

@GreenMeansGo: I.... just want to see this. Maybe we need a new testwiki where editors can try out new ways of getting blocked? GoldenRing (talk) 09:10, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

Isn't that mostly how people use Twitter these days? GMG^talk 10:03, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

• I'll be blocking presently. There's a rough consensus above that this is quite over the line, and I as well concur. TPH was given the chance to defend himself, and the "he made me do it" defense is hardly a reassurance that he's going to improve his interactions with others. 1 week feels pretty good here. --Jayron32 20:03, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

Good block, but just where is this "line" he's over? Across at ANI there's a similar thread (WP:ANI#Threatened with block by edit-warring admin using "fuckoff" template) about JzG which has just gone the other way, in that "language is not a breach of CIVIL". Now I don't support that one bit (as should be clear from the links already posted), but we need to get this issue cleared up. Just what is acceptable and what isn't? Andy Dingley (talk) 00:37, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

• • I would say there is a difference between the two sets of behaviour that is more than a matter of nuance, and more than a case of A=admin B=not; describing the two as similar is not quite fair IMO. Fish+Karate 10:18, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

• There's a difference in degree, I would agree. But if we're claiming objective standards based on language, then it should matter less. In particular, we shouldn't have a different behavioural standard for admins and non-admins and if we enforce it more strictly for one group, that should be the admins.

We already have a more relaxed set of acceptable behaviour for admins and their friends. We really should not. Andy Dingley (talk) 11:28, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

I very much agree, we should not have differing standards. But in this case the degree of infraction (so to speak) was not remotely comparable. An admin speaking to people like how TPH spoke to people would not get away with a slap on the wrist, and if all TPH had done was add <!-- template:fuckoff --> to a post it would not result in a block. Fish+Karate 13:48, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

I'd already given TPH a final warning, so I was against a block unless there had been another report of incivility come in. However, as TPH has accepted the block, this point is moot. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 14:34, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

As I've pointed out several times, this is not just about language. If he said "it's a fucking beautiful day!" that would not be blockworthy. The problem is not the word, it's the personal attacks and insults directed at other editors. "Stupid dumbshit" is just as bad as "fucking dumbshit." "Learn to fucking edit, noob" is no worse than "For God's sake learn to edit, noob". Also, please note that this is not about a one-off occurrence; the block is because this kind of attack-talk is habitual with him. -- MelanieN (talk) 20:07, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

As Iridscent's diffs show, the attitude has been there since day one. That's literally ten years. And as for anyone who thinks that—finally—they might learn from the block, their response—"@Jayron32: That's fine, my plan was to take a self imposed wikibreak anyway" suggests—otherwise. ——SerialNumber54129 20:16, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

• Comment - User:MelanieN - I agree that it would be just as bad if the edit summaries were just as hostile without using profanity. It is just that profanity is an effective unimaginative way of showing anger, and of showing anger in a hostile and uncivil fashion. Robert McClenon (talk) 00:39, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

• @Robert McClenon: interestingly, see here[25]...although I admit that it probably doesn't apply in this case. ——SerialNumber54129 11:11, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

Comment. I want to underline a point other editors have already made. It's not about the so-called profanity. No one gives a fuck about that ;-) It's about showing disrespect for other editors. We should all treat other editors with respect, and should expect other editors to do the same. Paul August ☎ 01:13, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

• Comment - I'm for avoiding profanity and for showing respect. Just be nice and try not to swear. If we can do that in a supermarket or office, why not here. Anna Frodesiak (talk) 01:27, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

Talk:Aurora, Illinois shooting/Archive 2

I requested that the archive at Talk:Aurora, Illinois shooting/Archive 2 be deleted as the RFC is still active at Talk:Aurora, Illinois shooting. My request was reverted. --Jax 0677 (talk) 13:48, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

Not being an admin or particularly familiar with deletion policy which deals with this, I have no idea if the page qualifies for deletion. But regardless of what is allowed, I see zero point for wasting time on this. If the RFC has been reopened and speedy was declined, just blank the archive page like I did [26]. Eventually something is going to be added back to it, probably the RFC when it is closed again. Sorry but is there some reason we should care whether or not the history is there? I mean if the archive page already existed, I'm fairly sure that revdeleting the addition of the RFC would be considered an epic waste of time regardless of what arguments could be made under our policies and guidelines. Nil Einne (talk) 15:43, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

P.S. Remember for the automatic archiving, the existence of the page is irrelevant. All that matters for the bot is what the code tells it to do and it looks like someone already changed it, maybe you. Are you worried that people are going to manually archive to archive 2 because it exists before there is a reason to open it (probably when the RFC is archived) or something? Nil Einne (talk) 15:49, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

• Reply - @Nil Einne:, as long as things archive properly when the RFC is over, and the current RFC is not in the archives until it is closed, I really do not care. The current RFC was put back in the archive while it was in progress. --Jax 0677 (talk) 16:07, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

Mass repeated changes to category names

Hi everyone! Please see Special:Contributions/86.169.239.81. This IP user is currently changing a numerous amount of categories to change Category:Middlesex to Category:Places formerly in Middlesex. This is obviously concerning to me, given the number of edits and the fact that it's focused on just changing this category. Is this legitimate and okay? Or is something going on that requires action? Are these changes to this category expected and okay? Please let me know. Thank you! :-) ~Oshwah~^{(talk) (contribs)} 17:12, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

Hi Oshwah. I'm sorry nobody's got back to you until now. I saw this yesterday and have been pondering it. It's not vandalism, but is it the right way to approach things? It probably is. Middlesex is now a defunct county over here in England which, 50 years ago, disappeared as a functioning entity when boundary changes led to it being subsumed into the area known as Greater London. I notice that Category:Places formerly in Middlesex was created as a subcategory of Category:Middlesex, so I think the IP editor is rationalising things by saying , "well, Middlesex no longer exists, so these places once tagged as 'Middlesex' ought be categorised as 'places formerly in Middlesex'". This will remove a lot of towns from the 'Middlesex' category, and put them in 'places formerly in Middlesex'. Although I don't see approach having been applied to other old English counties which were disestablished in the 1970s, I'm minded to think it's logical and acceptable here. It's a shame the IP editor didn't pop over and explain for themselves. Hope this helps. Regards, Nick Moyes (talk) 17:25, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

Surely they should be "Places in the former county of Middlesex"? "Places formerly in Middlesex" suggests a county which continued, but where some places were moved out of it, such as by a boundary change. Andy Dingley (talk) 17:35, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

@Andy Dingley: Yes, that does actually make more sense, despite being longer. Thank you. The question is, is the removal of the old county category and its replacement the right way to go about things? To me, it seems valid, but not really necessary, though I don't feel I'm the best person to give definitive advice. Nick Moyes (talk) 21:27, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

Doing a proper WP:CFD move would automate this. Johnbod (talk) 21:31, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

User:Acharovia and WP:NOTHERE

A new user by the name of User:Acharovia has recently created an account and made two edits to Liberland (Special:Diff/887278502 & Special:Diff/887282718), a proposed micronation. These edits seem to be in self-promotion of their own made-up micronation, and the user seems intended on using Wikipedia as a place to promote their 'state'. Adog (Talk・Cont) 02:14, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

Account should be blocked for spam, user has been warned twice. --Thegooduser Life Begins With a Smile :) 🍁 02:16, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

Also a clear WP:UAA violation as promotional & shared. Cabayi (talk) 11:42, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

The user has made a grand total of four edits. I'm not seeing this as a spam situation requiring a block. I've left a note about their username on their TP; we'll see where things go from there. GoldenRing (talk) 14:42, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

Second opinion request

I revedel'd an edit and edit summary on Inshan Ishmael. Taken at face value, it was threatening, but read in context it may have been intended as a joke. For that reason, I didn't warn or block the IP who posted it, but I'd really like a second opinion of this - I don't want to underreact to threats. Thanks. Guettarda (talk) 11:19, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

Merits a warning for BLP IMO. GiantSnowman 11:27, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

Thanks Guettarda (talk) 11:39, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

Motion: Palestine-Israel articles

The Arbitration Committee has resolved by motion that:

The General 1RR prohibition of the Palestine-Israel articles arbitration case (t) (ev / t) (w / t) (pd / t) is amended to read:

Each editor is limited to one revert per page per 24 hours on any page that could be reasonably construed as being related to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Reverts made to enforce the General Prohibition are exempt from the provisions of this motion. Also, the normal exemptions apply. Editors who violate this restriction may be blocked by any uninvolved administrator, even on a first offense. This remedy may only be enforced on pages with the {{ARBPIA 1RR editnotice}} edit notice.

The community is encouraged to place the {{ARBPIA 1RR editnotice}} on any page that could be reasonably construed as being related to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

For the Arbitration Committee, Bradv🍁 02:46, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

Discuss this at: Wikipedia talk:Arbitration Committee/Noticeboard#Motion: Palestine-Israel articles

User:TorontonianOnlines

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

---

TorontonianOnlines (talk · contribs) appears to be unduly preoccupied with "Jewishness" of individuals and groups of individuals, while attempting to present an antisemitic canard as not wholly an “anti semitic canard” (2018). Today's discussion on the same page: [27]. Compare with advocating on behalf of Identity Evropa, a neo-Nazi group: White nationalist and white supremacist don't mean the same thing. Group more accurately described as WN and is referred to as such (2018).

A portion of TO's editing history appears to be dedicated to identifying various individuals as "Jewish": [28]; [29]; [30]; [31]. I thus would like to propose a topic ban from Jewish history to avoid disruption in the future. --K.e.coffman (talk) 05:45, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

• Support - yeah this looks like a WP:NOTHERE to me.Volunteer Marek (talk) 06:29, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support. In this edit they introduced content supposedly sourced to this source - which does not support the content (the source analyzes the nature of Hugo Ball's writing - Albert Boime most certainly did not say that). Furthermore, the edit URL-links to a piece on unz.com which states that is a republication of this piece in the Occidental Observer. The nature of the Occidental Observer is quite obvious. Icewhiz (talk) 07:27, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
• Why are we discussing a topic ban here, and not an indef? I've indeffed: there is only one picture here that forms from the fact that they want to label bankers as "Jewish" and that they think that labelling a Neo-nazi group as "cancer" makes one biased: they are either an anti-Semite or indistinguishable from one. Galobtter (pingó mió) 08:57, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support but prefer indef - Obviously I'd support a topic ban but indef would be best. Hard to read this editor's contributions to Jewish Bolshevism and The Daily Stormer and bankers otherwise. I mean, come on. ModerateMikayla555 (talk) 13:27, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
• I Support the indef block, especially after having examined and declined their unblock request (in which they describe various people's Jewish ethnicity as "an inconvenient truth"). Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 14:21, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support indef, per discussion above. --K.e.coffman (talk) 00:46, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

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

Wikipedia:Requests for page protection 02

I just went to Wikipedia:Requests for page protection to report List of collectables (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) (XKCD-related vandalism.[32]), and noticed that it is backlogged. --Guy Macon (talk) 10:39, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

HuffPost article on WP COI editing

Thanks to JamesG5 I bumped into this HuffPost article of yesterday (or today depending on your timezone). It is dedicated to a particular COI editor on WP:

• Ashley Feinberg (14 March 2019). "Facebook, Axios And NBC Paid This Guy To Whitewash Wikipedia Pages. And it almost always works". Huffington Post.

Does it offer ideas for anything actionable? — kashmīrī ^TALK 00:05, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

• So long as he has disclosed and not directly edited pages, there's nothing we can do. If someone wants to change the policy to be stricter and prohibit it completely, I'll be the first to support, but I don't think we have that consensus yet (though I believe we eventually will. Also, note I'm talking about PR nonsense, not Wikipedians-in-residence, which is always a sticking point.)
  I'll add that articles like this make us look ridiculous and that our official begrudging acceptance of disclosed paid editing is even more of a threat than undisclosed paid editing because it ruins our reputation when major media outlets runs stories like this.
  Finally, I'll put my 2¢ in that admins and others should not let declated paid editors do what I refer to as TOU bludgeon: declaration is the minimum required to edit. It is not a free pass to spam. WP:NOTSPAM is still local policy and if someone openly declares themselves a spammer and the content matches, they should be indefinitely blocked without warning. Native advertising is very much a thing, and just because spam doesn't look like it did in 2005 when out policies were written, doesn't mean that our policies don't apply. TonyBallioni (talk) 00:14, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

TonyBallioni I completely and passionately agree with your last paragraph. However, If a media organization wants to take issue with the calls we make on controversial topics they can and they will and we might not come out the otherside so great - they're tough areas for a reason. The fact that we have transparency means we can, if we want, revisit any of these editorial decisions. If there was no declaration those changes would be made and we wouldn't know or be any wiser and the community would have no option to re-evaluate the thinking. There are no good decisions for us to make here only least awful ones. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 00:47, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

Which headline makes us look more like fools:

1. Wikipedia blocks hundreds of 'scam' sock puppet accounts
2. Facebook, Axios And NBC Paid This Guy To Whitewash Wikipedia Pages And it almost always works

The first headline is about Orangemoody. The second one is about someone following our TOU and policies. Anyone who has ever worked a day in a marketing department can tell you which headline they'd prefer.

This is significant because we've fought for years to have our credibility accepted. I'm not saying that this is worse ethically than Orangemoody. Of course it isn't. I am saying that to the general public, this looks significantly worse. In Orangemoody, we were the heroes: fighting a bad guy scamming people out of their money. Here we are the bureaucrats that allow Big Tech to whitewash their own articles.

Regardless of what the actual impact is on individual articles, the perceived impact is worse from declared PR editing, and that in turn makes all of the featured articles on notable topics that are extremely well researched worth less to the reader.

I'm well aware that these are tough calls, but I'm saying that the community does need to consider perception here, and the perception from "white hat" editing on the outside is worse than some of our biggest sockfarms. I don't want an RfC on this now, but I do think it is something that is missing from community discussion on the topic, which is why I'm raising it. TonyBallioni (talk) 00:57, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

Not to detract from TonyBallioni's points, but just to answer one of the original questions of whether there is anything actionable, I didn't see such a thing. Problematic, sure. Actionable? Well, since the editor in question responds reasonably to comments, I don't see anything in particular right now. HuffPo also I feel is being a bit misleading. Regarding the Oppenheimer/Farrow thing, for instance, looking back, the section we had in his article was completely inappropriate for a BLP given what the sources actually stated. If what was previously written were verifiable, then those sources should have been added if the content was to stay like that. The wall-o-texts that HuffPo complains about don't seem big to me. And whether an article on a website needs to mention a criminal complaint against the founder is a completely ordinary coat rack discussion. Well, I guess CORPORATE PR PHONY WIKIPEDIA EDITOR WHITEWASHES ARTICLES is more compelling clickbait than Several companies pay Wikipedia editor to file routine boring complaints about content that arguably violates Wikipedia's own policies. Someguy1221 (talk) 01:26, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

I don't think today's headline is worse for us than Wikipedia’s Top-Secret ‘Hired Guns’ Will Make You Matter (For a Price) and at least today we can decide if the changes really were policy compliant or not. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 01:58, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

Damn, what's next? Soon they'll discover that I've been taking millions to edit Intel articles. THE JIG IS UP Drmies (talk) 02:06, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

Millions?! I only get a few rubles! You need to hook me up. PackMecEng (talk) 02:10, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

Bedoel je niet wij, goede dokter ;-). TonyBallioni (talk) 02:12, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

Nice try, Tony, but that you are me (I?) is only a rumor on Reddit, and at any rate I AM NOT SHARING THE MILLIONS I GOT FROM INTEL FOR EDITING THAT ARTICLE WITH YOU. Damn I hope that that person who exposed me AS A PAID EDITOR FOR INTEL doesn't read this. Drmies (talk) 02:14, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

• Back on point, while I agree the headline isn't great for Wikipedia, making policy in response to headlines is a slippery slope that I, for one, don't want to embark upon. Of course HuffPo is going to write the most sensational headline they can coin out of a relatively scant set of facts. I'm not really convinced that there is a lot in the story we should be worried about, which just leaves the headline. If you're looking for headlines critical of Wikipedia handling of material, there are plenty out there and they really do affect our credibility with a big section of the population; we shouldn't make policy in response to those headlines, either. GoldenRing (talk) 10:41, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

The headline itself is useless, but the rest of the text could possibly be of use for those who want to take a look at the mentioned articles. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 12:05, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

Just to make it clear, we are talking about BC1278--Ymblanter (talk) 15:21, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

And I think the question the HP asks in our language would be whether their actions are compatible with WP:CANVASSING.--Ymblanter (talk) 15:39, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

Hi. BC1278 here. Overwhelmingly, my Request Edits are made through a Request Edit flag. The format is usually very concise, as suggested by User: Spintendo, a frequent reviewer to the Request Edit queue: e.g. Talk:Pace_University#Request_Edit, Talk:Jonathan_Swan#Request_Edits. The "wall of text" complaint the author of the HuffPo column picked up on happened in an article about Noah Oppenheim during extended discussions about controversial issues with multiple RfCs. The consensus decisions ultimately reached by independent editors were not remotely like my original proposed edits, as the HuffPost author falsely implies. Instead, independent editors did their job and came to their own conclusions. One outcome of participating in a couple of these very contentious discussions was a chat last year with DGG, who advised me that he had learned over the years there's very little advantage in getting involved in debates after you've made your point once - you're not going to convince people to change their minds anyway. I have tried to adopt his style since. The HuffPost column is focused on a few high-profile media-related Wikipedia articles which involved public controversies (the author's beat), rather than how I conduct myself on Wikipedia in general. It's click bait. It is also rife with mistakes and misleading statements too numerous to explain here. I am going to ask for HuffPo for multiple corrections. For example, she ignores that I was the editor who suggested expanding into a robust paragraph, the few words mentioning the Matt Laeur firing on NBC News, despite the subject being very unflattering to them. But I wanted the NBC News article to be up to date anyway. The HuffPo author cherry picked one sentence she didn't like in my proposed edit, even though, as per a normal independent review, another editor chose to use entirely different language than anything I submitted (and I added words of encouragement, saying it was well done.) Talk:NBC_News#Expanded_info_on_Matt_Lauer Her example of alleged canvasing are notifications to editors who had already participated in extended discussions on Talk:Noah Oppenheim that more discussions were continuing in a new RfC. If she looked carefully, she would have seen that I notified (or tried to) all the recent editors, including those who opposed my proposals previously, such as User: Peter K Burian. This was my first RfC and to me, there appeared to already be consensus, when JytDog re-opened the question as a new RfC. I thought the previous editors discussing the same matter should be notified again. Today, having been through a few, I would have added all the notifications right on the RfC page, to be transparent, and let others double check I didn't mistakenly leave anyone out. Or, to be honest, I just wouldn't bother to notify anyone - at the time, I didn't know how RfC editors were even called upon.BC1278 (talk) 20:36, 15 March 2019 (UTC)BC1278

FYI, if you'd like to know what its like to field inquiries from prominent organizations, PR firms or individuals who think articles about them have problems, or want a new article, many balk when I tell them how I work - with full disclosure of COI as a paid editor and submitting all suggested edits for independent review. They don't want to take the risk of appearing in articles like the one by HuffPo. So I turn down their business, as my entire premise is that I do "white hat" work, only for those who want to follow the rules. Sometimes, a few months or a year down the road, I check to see if the articles of those who chose not to work with me nonetheless were edited or published as they wanted -- and it's usually the case they have been, but never with a public disclosure of COI or prior review. As the editing is anonymous, I can't be sure what happened, of course. I do know it will be more difficult to get subjects to publicly disclose because of this article, but it won't slow down the organizations/individuals from violating Wikipedia policy and making direct edits. Not in my experience. Only a much more radical change will solve the problem -- for example, the elimination of anonymous editing, with all user accounts requiring a LinkedIn profile. Then, COI and agenda editing will be more obvious. It would also go a long way toward solving the civility issues. But given the sanctity of anonymous editing on Wikipedia, I guess it isn't viable.BC1278 (talk) 20:36, 15 March 2019 (UTC)BC1278

Hi guy here who thinks you're right that UPE is worse. But do you understand why as a volunteer how your 700+ words are troubling and could be seen as WP:BLUDGEONing this conversation in contradiction of WP:PAYTALK. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 21:33, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

Yes. Sorry/ I re-read it a bunch of times to try to cut it. But I'm responding to a major press article that made a slew of misleading and inaccurate statements about me, personally, and that now seems to be swaying discussion on Wikipedia policy itself. For four years, I've worked to convince organizations and PR firms to abide by COI disclosure rules because that's what Wikipedia has decreed is kosher Someone from the Wikimedia Foundation needs to publicly stand up to this young media reporter who thinks UPE is more ethical than declared PE or declared COI editing. That's what this author is explicitly saying! I received calls and emails from major PR agencies all day -- if this is the new normal, they're going to direct business away from the "white hats." There are board meetings taking place next week to formalize this, affecting some of the largest corporations in the world. Unless something changes, the outcome will be a lot more business for "black hats."BC1278 (talk) 04:00, 16 March 2019 (UTC)BC1278

Lori Loughlin

I just blocked an editor for edit warring, but please see this edit. The editor was wrong to edit war, and they didn't claim a BLP exemption (though both sides seemed to be arguing that they were experts on Wikipedia's policies on reverting), but I do think their edit was the correct one: it removed material that for now is only tangentially connected to the main article/topic, the suggestion being there's even more foul play. It's sourced to TMZ, and while I'm sure there are more, and more reliable, sources, this is not where we should be going. I'm hoping some of you will keep an eye on it. BTW this entire scandal is all over the place. See, for instance, this recent revert (I won't revert the IP because their edit summary now makes some sense). So y'all keep your eyes open: if you're not familiar with 2019 college admissions bribery scandal, it's a happening thing. Drmies (talk) 01:35, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

I don't think that a block there is appropriate. The other user was edit warring also - it should have been both or neither. Additionally, Fradio71's edit was the correct one - the material wasn't appropriate for the Loughlin page, and the source was TMZ. I see Fradio started a talk page discussion in an attempt to resolve the issue (albeit after the edit war). This comment is exceptionally ironic, for a couple reasons. Mr Ernie (talk) 08:14, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

I agree both parties should have been blocked, it takes two to tango and both Fradio and Dogru144 were equally guilty, the only difference is a different user account showed up out of nowhere to make one of the reverts Dogru144 was otherwise making. Fish+Karate 10:20, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

Nick Ahlmark

Just a heads up to all admins. Yesterday, an IP blanked this article, and was reverted by a number of editors. Today, Nlahlmark (talk · contribs), who I assume is the article's subject, blanked the article several times, leading to an AfD being filed. Though I already !voted "delete", I have elected to close the AfD as "delete" per WP:IAR and WP:BLPDELETE, because all of the references in the article are dead and hence I have not been able to verify any of the information in it. I am concerned that the article was created by a single purpose account Carlsonator (talk · contribs) in 2009, and the initial revision of it looks like vandalism, or at least a WP:G10 deletion being an unsourced BLP with some questionable content.

Since closing an AfD early when you have !voted on it and citing WP:IAR can be controversial, I'm bringing discussion here to see if there is any further feedback. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 15:37, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

It seems a reasonable thing to do to me. It's not too hard to find unreliable sources about this person and his film, but I'm not seeing anything that'd meet GNG. Given that, an IAR BLPREQUESTDELETE outcome seems reasonable. GoldenRing (talk) 16:22, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

Absolutely, endorse a very sensible judgement call. Very much in line with what WP:BLPDELETE is for, the subject does not have a great claim to notability and the content of the three-sentence stub was quite minimal. Fish+Karate 16:28, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

Delete redirect page to make way for a move

Hello. I request that an Admin delete the redirect entitled "Interchange lemma" to allow for a move from "Interchange lemma for context-free languages" to "Interchange lemma" as suggested in the AfD for Interchange lemma for context-free languages (the result is keep). Thanks in advance. Steve Quinn (talk) 17:21, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

• @Steve Quinn: The place to request this is Wikipedia:Requested moves/Technical requests (WP:RM/TR). Thryduulf (talk) 18:36, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

  @Thryduulf: OK thanks. And it is done. ---Steve Quinn (talk) 19:36, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

You can also use twinkle to CSD the page in the way Legacypac (talk) 06:53, 16 March 2019 (UTC)

Please page-protect my talk page.

Hi. I'm being harassed by a vandal who has made off-wiki threats. Please page-protect my talk page, and I suppose my user page and consider block of vandal.Spoonkymonkey (talk) 02:03, 16 March 2019 (UTC)

Spoonymonkey has been posting fake claims on my talk page. 2001:1970:5457:DF00:C5EF:FD18:F858:128E (talk) 02:10, 16 March 2019 (UTC)

@Spoonkymonkey: IP blocked. Watchlisted your userpage. In cage of re-occurrence, just report at WP:ANI or to any admin active at the moment. Otherwise, best to not engage and WP:DENY. Abecedare (talk) 02:24, 16 March 2019 (UTC)

@Spoonkymonkey: I added a short term protection just so you can avoid any immediate ip hopping issues. — xaosflux ^Talk 03:31, 16 March 2019 (UTC)

This may help make the real issue a bit clearer: Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Mark Bourrie. I Heart Fossils (talk) 04:27, 16 March 2019 (UTC)