User talk:Wnt

For comments February 2008 to December 2010 see User:Wnt/Archive/1.
For comments January 2011 to December 2013 see User:Wnt/Archive/2.

Please add new comments at the bottom, not here.

Your request for undeletion

Hello. This message is being sent to inform you that a response has been made at Wikipedia:Requests for undeletion regarding a submission you made. The thread is Ward J. M. Hagemeijer. JohnCD (talk) 09:15, 3 January 2014 (UTC)

January 2014

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• 2013 the [[La Jolla Pharmaceutical Company]] was granted [[orphan drug]] status for testing of 4-(6-(4-(piperazin-1-yl)phenyl_pyrazolo[1,5-a]pyrimidin-3-yl)quinoline hydrochloride for treatment of

Thanks, BracketBot (talk) 17:42, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

Awww hell, my source has it wrong. I wonder if the Orphan Drug status doesn't count if the official announcement fails to balance its parentheses... Wnt (talk) 18:06, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

Regardless

Regardless of the issue at hand, I have to say "Even Moses said not to muzzle the ox that treadeth the grain!" is the best allusion I have seen at Wikipedia in months. μηδείς (talk) 22:11, 7 January 2014 (UTC)

Hey, thanks! Though any truly viable analogy can be argued both ways... The rule about muzzling the ox at once expresses modern humane sentiments, yet seems rather repulsive, even before we get into the question of what they did or didn't do about the other end of the ox. It will be valuable as Refdesk respondents for us to try to strive that our digressions do more to pursue knowledge than to dump on the discussion, so we're at the right end of the metaphor. :) Wnt (talk) 22:41, 7 January 2014 (UTC)

Thanks

I wrote you a long reply and it has disappeared due to an edit conflict, so briefly...I set up the Ram site in 2001 to combat all the pernicious lies that have been spread about the case.

If you check old versions of the page you will find my corrections and the reverts they made. I didn't have an account then and don't know why I bother.

Everything about that case is lies, including the four citations at the bottom of the page now, lies.

I didn't brand Ram a murderer, the jury did that, and his conviction was held up twice on appeal and rejected by the CCRC.

The official documents on the site are far more reliable than left wing press reports, they include the Court Of Appeal transcripts.

Such is the bias of Wikipediots is that they have even removed my updates, like about Ram's recall to prison and his rearrest. He spent several more years in gaol.

These people are not interested in the truth.

Tell me by the way how this thug is "notable" while David Webb is not?

Thanks for your interest.

Thanks for your edits to The Day We Fight Back! I wouldn't have thought to include that information. All the best, Ross HillTalk to me! 06:04, 15 January 2014 (UTC)

AfC in talk space

I saw you wondering why AfC is in TalkSpace, but I didn't see that your query was answered. It actually was a clever idea, with some unfortunate consequences. The community has decided that IPs ought not to have the ability to create a new article in mainspace, which means that an AfC concept would prohibit IPs from contributing if the draft had to be in mainspace. Creating them in talk meant that IPs could contribute, as well as the minor additional benefit that it was easy to No-index.

However, this left the awkwardness that you noticed, and troubled me, there are times you want to add some comments or advice or whatever, and the "natural" place to do this is on the article talk page, except that it is already in the Talk page. The second choice might be the editor talk page, but if they are an IP, that might not work, especially if they are a dynamic IP.

This is one of the main reasons I fully supported the concept of the Draft space. It means:

• IPs can contribute
• Comments can be placed in the natural location, the talk page of the draft
• No-indexing is easy
• I hope, but do not yet know, that it will make searching easier. I field questions every day on OTRS about some article which turns out to be an AfC submission. It isn't easy to find. I hope that will be easier in the Draft space, but this is a minor point, the first three are the big ones for me.--S Philbrick(Talk) 16:53, 16 January 2014 (UTC)

I worked as a research scientist in aerospace and other government supported programs from 1956 to 1998. In that 42 year period I never heard of any government supported program that ran for anything remotely like the 23 years that the SRI program had support. At Lockheed where I was saving aircraft from wind-shear and air turbulence, we had to fight to get one year extensions. And though NASA loved the program, they simply didn't support any outside research past five years. I propose you drop the idea that that we were supported for "only" 23 yeas, shows a defect in the research. That's an absurd proposition. Knowledgeable people are stunned that the CIA supported is for two decades. Torgownik (talk) 17:29, 18 May 2014 (UTC)Russell <russ at Targ.co>

Re: the filter thing

Thanks for your help, I'll try accessing the test page you put up when I'm at school tomorrow and see if it's blocked. Getting online in school hours is pretty hit and miss, but I'll do what I can. The thing that bothers me is that this is a really common blocking system in England; I think I actually remember it from primary school so for all I know it could be stopping millions of schoolkids from accessing those articles. For the moment I've been able to find a workaround (using HTTPS instead of HTTP seems to do the trick most of the time) but I'd much rather the pages were unblocked for everyone. Aethersniper (talk) 19:06, 16 January 2014 (UTC)

Wow. That is a really, really, really dumb filter :) Wnt (talk) 19:09, 16 January 2014 (UTC)

Yeah, what makes it worse is that the pages I mentioned are blocked under "intolerance", which means that even the staff can't access it without a workaround. Also blocked are a bunch of BBC revision pages on drugs and puberty. The really scary thing is that it always blocks things that shouldn't be blocked, but when it comes to things that actually should be blocked (virus ridden websites, etc) the filter's nowhere to be found. Thanks again - Aethersniper (talk) 19:16, 16 January 2014 (UTC)

Well, unfortunately, one of the rites of passage for the intelligent modern schoolchild is to help his teachers bypass the school's censorware. Wnt (talk) 19:19, 16 January 2014 (UTC)

By the way, I just visited the test pages you posted, and there's no block on either of them. Thanks - Aethersniper (talk) 09:32, 17 January 2014 (UTC)

USA Freedom Act

I just wanted to let you know I created the article you suggested and others have been helping to improve it. I want to apologize for not acting on your suggestion earlier. I hope you don't think that I don't value your opinion-- when you take on a whole new endeavor, it takes a while to get your bearings and prioritize. Your excellent suggestion temporarily slipped through the cracks, and I deeply respect the time you took to bring that suggestion back to our attention so we could revisit it. I will continue to work on the two articles you suggested in the coming days and weeks. Thanks again for your participation at Wikipedia:Surveillance awareness day. Your contributions have 100% helped increase the likelihood that it will be a productive effort.

I look forward to further guidance from you and other main page experts about how we can improve the quality of the proposal or the proposed content items. --HectorMoffet (talk) 21:22, 18 January 2014 (UTC)

Thanks! Make sure to propose these for DYK and to reserve them specifically for February 11. Wnt (talk) 21:36, 18 January 2014 (UTC)

How's this for a hook: " ...the the proposed USA Freedom Act, which would undo much of the Patriot Act, was submitted by Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, author of the Patriot Act?" --HectorMoffet (talk) 19:46, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

Well, remember that Section 215 was "but one ring, one segment" of the Patriot Act that had provisions for anti-terrorism laws, border enforcement, money laundering, etc. I would say " ...that the proposed USA Freedom Act, which would undo certain mass surveillance provisions of the Patriot Act, was submitted by Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, author of the Patriot Act?" Wnt (talk) 19:53, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

Nominated at T:TDYK! did I do it right? --HectorMoffet (talk) 20:25, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

• Just a random comment... this really is an interesting hook. Here is how the Guardian worded it: Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner, who worked with president George W Bush to give more power to US intelligence agencies after the September 11 terrorist attacks, said the intelligence community had misused those powers by collecting telephone records on all Americans, and claimed it was time "to put their metadata program out of business". petrarchan47tc 23:38, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

Zyprexa

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Archives/Science/2013_August_3#Zyprexa_interacting_with_vitamins. "How are they supposed to use the web at all without a search engine?" Easy. You don't have to use a search engine for Wikipedia, YouTube, Armor Games, USGS, Live Quakes Map, Rival Ball, UTorrent. Right? Those are the sites I have access to. --78.156.109.166 (talk) 20:32, 21 January 2014 (UTC)

Hmmm. In a sense anything with a search is a search engine, but it's true that you can get at some things with unusual search engines. But I'm surprised all those searches work without access to Google's Javascripts. I thought YouTube was part of Google. Anyway, I suppose it depends on how you use the web - I suppose often I search for something obscure where I want every means. (I suppose PubMed also would count as an alternative search engine) Wnt (talk) 20:41, 21 January 2014 (UTC)

Can you use simple words? How to play your trivia quiz? I was thinking proper search engines.--78.156.109.166 (talk) 19:29, 25 January 2014 (UTC)

...

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Earthquakes_in_2013&action=history --78.156.109.166 (talk) 20:47, 21 January 2014 (UTC)

Look closely. See anything unusual?--78.156.109.166 (talk) 20:47, 21 January 2014 (UTC)

Not really. What?

I should add that I notice you have a strong interest in the Revelation of John, but I find the popular interpretations of it to be unnecessarily gloomy. Yes, looking over a white-knuckled standoff with the Soviet Union, it was easy for people to see a "nuclear apocalypse" coming any day. But this doesn't seem compelling on an emotional level. If God is a good parent, why would God reward children for having a tantrum by giving them all new and better toys? It seems to make more sense that first humanity should make the world as good as it can possibly be, and then, since it is imperfect, everything falls apart again (at which point things like deaths from earthquake and plague will truly stand out from the course of history), and then, having learned to do our best with it, mankind is given a new revision. I would suppose Hitler could say on Judgment Day that some little Jewish brat beat him up for his lunch money when he was in first grade. Only in a perfect world can it be apparent when evil arises without any cause whatsoever. There is many a way to read a religious text for inspiration, and for all the prophecies of doom and gloom, there should be as many for peace to break out. I can see how someone might expect a nuke over Syria, but maybe this will be the time that people, by the will of God, finally bind up oppression and war and famine and death at the banks of the Euphrates, and usher in a millennium of peace and freedom. We live in a world where childbirth can come without pain, menstruation is optional, work seems to be becoming all but unnecessary except as a demand of poorly organized society, where the bite of a poisonous snake doesn't have to be fatal ... why shouldn't people picture a world where people dance joyfully to the very gates of Eden? Wnt (talk) 04:57, 22 January 2014 (UTC)

See line number 16 counting from top of the revisions. Can you use simple words?--78.156.109.166 (talk) 19:22, 25 January 2014 (UTC)

Draft:FISA Improvements act

I want to refer you to the draft and invite your collaboration. If you wish, you can submit it to DYK. I personally am of the opinion that scheduling more than one DYK about mass surveillance on Feb 11 requires a site-wide polling. But you have a good argument that the Olympics are just as value-laden as any other social movement, and I don't want to be an impediment to you making that case.

I nominated one DYK for Feb 11, which is enough for my level of comfortability. I'm going to keep working on relevant articles, and I'll leave it to you or an RFC to nominate others for DYK on Feb 11 or not.

I'd also invite you to participate in Wikipedia:WikiProject Mass surveillance. --HectorMoffet (talk) 16:25, 24 January 2014 (UTC)

Draft:FISA Improvements act now meets minimum length requirements. If you feel it's ready for a DYK nom, move it into article space and nominate it. --HectorMoffet (talk) 13:58, 25 January 2014 (UTC)

@HectorMoffet: Here goes... [1] I'm not the greatest hook writer; someone else might have a sexier way to put it. Wnt (talk) 16:50, 26 January 2014 (UTC)

Would you set up an RFC?

There's a growing consensus that we need a sitewide RFC, asap, to discuss any plans to do something special on Feb 11. I'm hesitant to set it up myself, as my attempt to lead this didn't work out so well. Since you were one of the clearest and earliest voices calling for us to do something special, would you consider setting one up? --HectorMoffet (talk)

My position, as I'm saying on Jimbo's page,^[2] is that I don't think we need to have an RFC (provided that exceptional obstructionism doesn't require us to have one to do what everyone else does already) because I think we can do all that we practically can do about the Feb. 11 protest as individuals working together. I don't think it's likely that Wikipedians in general want to have the site come forward in favor of the USA Freedom Act instead of the FISA Improvements Act, which leaves the question of what exactly the notice could be. As I've said there, I think Wikipedia should come forward in favor of specific victims of censorship, which is ultimately the effect of surveillance that we all worry about, but in order not to come off like we're just sounding off on any political issue we feel like, we have to be able to demonstrate a very clear connection to the work we do as volunteers here. Wnt (talk) 19:59, 25 January 2014 (UTC)

Next up in the article queue

So, per your above opinion, I think Petrarchan47 is taking point on the RFC once Petra has finalized the wording.

In the mean time, I've been spending my time trying to create relevant articles that WP really should have. The two obvious omissions were USA Freedom Act and FISA Improvements Act. Now that that's done, what looks good to you?

I think Draft:Stop Watching Us is looking good, but please visit Wikipedia:WikiProject Mass surveillance and look at the drafts there or add some. I have some time on my hands, and as long as there's lots of NPOV/V/NOR sources, I can keep writing, day by day. Your input into the articles that would be good fits at WP or DYK would be most appreciated.

Keep up the good work and the good leadership! :) --HectorMoffet (talk) 21:43, 26 January 2014 (UTC)

Intelligence redirects

I was trying to follow your valiant efforts, but it seems Wikipedia:WikiProject Intelligence redirects to Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Intelligence task force -- and Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Intelligence simply redirects to Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Military history.

Just thought you should know, as those redirects might impede your efforts -- unless you might prefer to keep it as a task force off of WP:MILHIST.

Thanks for your efforts so far,

— Cirt (talk) 04:59, 27 January 2014 (UTC)

Sorry! -- there's a WP:WikiProject Intelligence Agency (which I saw you'd been at) and a Portal:Intelligence associated with it... and I must have gotten mixed up somewhere when describing links. Wnt (talk) 06:01, 27 January 2014 (UTC)

Incomplete DYK nomination

Hello! Your submission of Template:Did you know nominations/FISA Improvements Act at the Did You Know nominations page is not complete; see step 3 of the nomination procedure. If you do not want to continue with the nomination, tag the nomination page with {{db-g7}}, or ask a DYK admin. Thank you. DYKHousekeepingBot (talk) 08:31, 27 January 2014 (UTC)

Another draft for your eyes

Check out Draft:Mass surveillance in North Korea and see whatcha think. --HectorMoffet (talk) 06:29, 28 January 2014 (UTC)

Do you think Draft:Stop Watching Us has a DYK in it somewhere? --HectorMoffet (talk) 12:25, 28 January 2014 (UTC)

Thx for your suggestions on Stop Watching Us, i've tried to implement them. I'm still on-board with supplying you content for DYK-- if you have any suggests for where I should focus my efforts, I'd welcome it. --HectorMoffet (talk) 05:11, 29 January 2014 (UTC)

Article on journalism post leaks?

Is now here petrarchan47tc 07:23, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

This is an impressive set of information (really, you should have posted this to WP:WikiProject Mass Surveillance). Even so, I still wouldn't be surprised to see an article on the "Snowden effect" end up at AfD with a proposal for a forcible merge into Snowden's biography, or one about the intimidation of the Guardian likewise being shoved at that article. The thing about all this surveillance stuff is that it all ties in together - whenever I pull on any one thing, I find myself sidetracked again and again. How do we drive a stake in this thing and say here is our article?

When I think of it, the real issue I'd like to see gotten at is how secrecy is morphed into censorship. That's the story, after all, with the Guardian's hard drive or Barrett Brown's html link or federal employees told not to read Wikileaks (or even that thing with Quenton Tarantino's leaked script on Gawker). Honestly, I think a valid (though remote) analogy is the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Before this was passed, an escaped slave was the master's problem; residents of Northern states were free to treat them with kindness, and resentment of the Southern institution. But the effect of the bill was to press many Northerners to either become de facto slave-catchers, or else break the law. The situation with leaks and national security letters seems to be headed the same way, where random people are forced into complicity over somebody else's problem. And as a result, we see a transition from "this is secret and nobody better find out about it" to "YOU, peasant scum, aren't allowed to know things like this." Now to address that feeling in an article, document its roots and expressions comprehensively, is still a tough thing to plan. I'm thinking there should be something about censorship of classified information, or leaked information, or secret information, etc., but that doesn't feel precisely right either. Wnt (talk) 02:26, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

It might be easier if you didn't consider it a feeling - ie, amorphous, unobservable, unverifiable - it's simply a matter of following, and documenting, the story of classified information, leaks, retaliation and resulting suppression of information. YOU, peasant scum, aren't allowed to know things like this has, of course, always been the ideology at the top. petrarchan47tc 06:41, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

• "Society really seems to have developed an unquestioning obedience towards spooky types… Did we get to where we are today via a slippery slope that was entirely within our control to stop? Or was it a relatively instantaneous sea change that sneaked in undetected because of pervasive government secrecy?" -Edward Snowden 2010 Seemed a bit similar to your post. petrarchan47tc 11:42, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

Did I do this right?

Second attempt, at DYK nom. Look if over, if you would, and make sure it meets the standards. --HectorMoffet (talk) 18:44, 30 January 2014 (UTC)

I think the hook is OK (caveat: I think that in common usage, any "part-time informer" is indeed an informer, the necessary threshold of involvement being as low as for a traitor, I suppose, but I don't know for a fact that this is true of all English around the world). However, the section in the article was very confusing so I rewrote it. I still don't understand whether the 'Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter' was a full time paid position or something else, but that doesn't directly affect the hook. Wnt (talk) 19:17, 30 January 2014 (UTC)

Awesome-- please feel free to suggest any alternate hook text-- your article improvement was much appreciated. Any suggestions for what at WikiProject Mass surveillance might make a good DYK hook? We have several drafts brewing over there, and if you can think of any articles we'll missing, I'll get to work on them-- I make a lousy leader, but I can do some pretty good writing sometimes. :)

Additionally, if you feel like it, you might review Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution which is now at FAC. Peer feedback said it was ready for FAC, but more eyeballs the better. --HectorMoffet (talk) 19:56, 30 January 2014 (UTC)

Invitation to join WikiProject Freedom of speech

• WP:WikiProject Freedom of speech

There is a WikiProject about Freedom of speech, called WP:WikiProject Freedom of speech. If you're interested, here are some easy things you can do:

1. List yourself as a participant in the WikiProject, by adding your username here: Wikipedia:WikiProject_Freedom_of_speech#Participants.
2. Add userbox {{User Freedom of speech}} to your userpage, which lists you as a member of the WikiProject.
3. Tag relevant talk pages of articles and other relevant pages using {{WikiProject Freedom of speech}}.
4. Join in discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Freedom of speech.
5. Notify others you think might be interested in Freedom of speech to join the WikiProject.

Thank you for your interest in Freedom of speech, — Cirt (talk) 01:20, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

So, what are we missing?

Assuming we had a consensus to put NPOV content on mainpage, how are we doing? We have Afroyim v. Rusk for TFA is no repeats are allowed, and maybe Freedom for the thought we hate if repeats are allowed. We have solid POTD Template:POTD/2014-02-21.

Do you think the DYKs are good enough to merit inclusion? Do you think there are any pages we're missing that we should create and propose at DYK?

I've got some time, and I'll leave it to the experts to decide the scheduling. --HectorMoffet (talk) 15:17, 5 February 2014 (UTC)

Can you help fix the concerns raised at Template:Did you know nominations/Arizona Fourth Amendment Protection Act? --HectorMoffet (talk) 16:13, 5 February 2014 (UTC)

Thx for the improvements at the Arizona article! Any response to the concerns raised at Template:Did you know nominations/USA Freedom Act? --HectorMoffet (talk) 17:04, 5 February 2014 (UTC)

This was left at my talk page

Arizona Fourth Amendment Protection Act citations

I see that in addition to being the DYK nominator, you are the original drafter and major editor to date of Arizona Fourth Amendment Protection Act. I note that many of the citaitons in this article are to bare URLs. It would be better practice, as discussed in WP:CITE to provide such metadata (the term is perhaps ironic in this particular case) as author, date, and source where this is available. This can be done using the cite templates such as {{cite web}}, {{cite news}}, {{cite journal}}, and {{cite book}}, or it can be done manually, or via any of various other methods. I like the cite tempaltes myself, and I also like list-defined references, but any method may be used. I could have placed a twinkle maintenance tag, but I didn't want to hold up the DYK. Can you look into adding metadata to the cited references? DES ^(talk) 17:03, 5 February 2014 (UTC)

Friendly check-in

Hey, I just want you to know that, despite how it might seem, I'm on your side on this (to the extent there are "sides"). I just want to make sure we're complying with Wikipedia policies and guidelines while we go about our good work. :-) --Dr. Fleischman (talk) 04:45, 6 February 2014 (UTC)

It doesn't really seem that way. I mean, that's probably the most definitive announcement of this event. Sure, it's a Reddit thread, but an official thread from named persons to answer questions, on the site whose founder the event commemorates. You may or may not personally favor NSA reform, but interactions like this do much to illustrate that on Wikipedia, the main "sides" worth speaking of are still the inclusionists and the deletionists. Wnt (talk) 05:26, 6 February 2014 (UTC)

I urge you not to think of things in such a black-and-white manner. There are some articles in which I have only a passing interest, and for those I tend to critique other's work (which effectively means I do a lot of deleting). There are other (fewer) articles in which I take a more active, creative role. That's just my editing style. Some folks just do copy editing. We all bring our own skills and contributions to the table. Trimming the fat is a very important part of the process. --Dr. Fleischman (talk) 06:20, 6 February 2014 (UTC)

Up to you

So obviously, I've been harassed pretty successfully. Initially I didn't submit content to DYK, but the complaints about that led me to nominated at DYK. A little voice in the back of my head said "What if someone tries to sabotage this initiative by fast-tracking nominations so the run BEFORE feb 11, despite the stated hold request?". But I thought "Come on, this is Wikipedia-- Assume Good Faith! No one would be that much of an ahole".

I was wrong. The OWNers of mainpage are so offended by any suggestion pf NOTBUREAUCRACY is being 'vetoed' by main page apparatchiks, not that they actually have that power.

It clear I don't have the skills set to generate a consensus. I hope you and Jimbo and our other board members do have that skillset. I've done my best to generate options for the community if consensus emerges, but I'm deeply troubled by how a small handful of users presumes to prejudge the outcome of a discussion.

It's time for me to check out-- I got you a POTD and 8 DYK noms, but I don't have the constitution for the ensuing debate. Feb 11 may or may not be special-- the responsibility for making it special lies with you and jimbo.

Do your best. :) --HectorMoffet (talk) 07:45, 7 February 2014 (UTC)

@HectorMoffet and Wnt:Just wanted to weigh in that I've been quite successfully harassed as well. You can view my talk page for the (mostly deleted) proof, as well as the histories of the Russ Tice article and Snowden talk page. It's one thing to 'keep the faith', but at a certain point, an editor sometimes has to walk away. This I have discovered can happen when folks decide to gang up, join forces, and spent heaps of time and energy pursuing a goal. Blessings to you both, petrarchan47tc 21:15, 7 February 2014 (UTC)

@Petrarchan47: I do see some significant issues with deletions on Snowden, but it's hard for me to be as sympathetic about Tice. My position is inclusionist, so I can't get behind something like [3]. I realize that people from multiple points of view are going to edit these articles, and I don't expect the articles to end up slanted toward my point of view; I just want them stuffed by all parties involved with all possible information out of a moral certainty that when all the information is put down, the article will have the effect of persuading people to my point of view (or, I should hope much less likely, of forcing me to reevaluate my point of view). I would urge you to avoid the extremes of forcefulness and disillusionment, focusing instead on being creative and looking for now things to edit about. Wnt (talk) 21:49, 7 February 2014 (UTC)

The revert you show is a revert to work I hadn't done, but it reverted the Wikilinked "psychotic" that had been added to the first prargraph of a BLP. When I finally tore myself away from the project I was working on to tend to the Tice article, I created this section to deal with his dismissal - rather than have it be the first thing one reads and presented in a way that leaves the reader wondering about Tice's sanity. In fact, his sanity is not questioned and he was only last month referred to as a whistleblower, and asked for feedback on the NSA story by the Guardian, Reuters and PBS Newshour. Wikipedia should read more like these sources, who don't even mention the government's reason for letting him go (though I am not suggesting we omit this), but only refer to him in the most respectful ways. It shouldn't be people who edit here whose points of view end up on the page, but really that of RS. petrarchan47tc 23:13, 8 February 2014 (UTC)

Well, the placement can be different, and I'd love to see you use all those sources to refute the allegation of psychosis more convincingly than the present version, but I don't like to see sources go away. I think the reader can be trusted, by this point, to take anything and I mean anything the NSA says with a grain of salt, given their apparent ability to lie flat-out to Congress and get away with it, and all they need is the factual counterpoint to reinforce that feeling. Wnt (talk) 01:39, 9 February 2014 (UTC)

To be more specific: according to your section, According to Tice, claims that he had psychological problems are "bunk" and that 'that's the way the NSA deals with troublemakers and whistleblowers. This is very weak, because it makes us wonder if he's telling the truth or not. Are there third parties who say (in context of his case, to avoid "synth" objections) that this is in fact the case? More generally, that draft doesn't even really make it clear why he's a 'whistleblower'! I mean, it's not really already counted as whistleblowing in official circles in the U.S. to report a Chinese spy ... is it? Wnt (talk) 01:46, 9 February 2014 (UTC)

I would love to have the time to really devote to his article. I knew very little about him prior to these edits, but I knew that a wikilinked "psychosis" in the first para, especially after following the linked article, was a gross misuse of the source, a wildly inaccurate portrayal of the (interesting) story, and a prime example of a smear on a living person. Simply removing that edit, though it reverted to a version that was less informative, was an improvement overall per NPOV, et cetera. I used up a few days' worth of Wikipeida-time researching this man and trying to find all I could on him (not, mind you, with a focus on refuting the NSA's argument, but just to tell the story as it is told in RS). I kept my focus pretty narrow, and stuck to the story of his firing. The placement at bottom I won't defend, except to say that it seemed awkward anywhere else. As I argue on his talk page, the story does need its own section. Bdell555 has insisted upon weaving it into his bio according to a timeline, which to me is sloppy and again not in alignment with RS, which when any aspect of this is mentioned, discuss it in full. I should have stuck around to give the entire article some structure. There is no mention of this man being born and raised, for instance. But I don't have time to do this, and that's the truth. I asked for help at the talk and at BLP noticeboard. I received none, except that Rybec removed the link to "conspiracy theorist" which was added by Bdell555, I believe. So this was the best I could do. Take a look at the edit history. Prior to the one I showed, you will find a diff where I added a quotation from a third party, Sibel Edmonds, from the very source Bdell555 had brought to the article. He then argued here that she was a truther and couldn't be quoted. So in this section, I played it very safe because everything I was doing was being reverted. People are being smeared on Wikipedia in the open, and no one is doing anything about it. A project may have been sidetracked in some ways by this, and that is hard to swallow. The Snowden article has been completely peaceful until around the time we started talking about TDWFB. Welcome to Wikpedia (and the world), though, huh? petrarchan47tc 03:57, 9 February 2014 (UTC)

@HectorMoffet: some points for you to consider.

• To begin with, this DYK response, though infuriating, is not actually surprising to me. I knew that there was something off about the DYK process from my very first comment about the idea, "fishing in the contentious waters off Gibraltar", and this collision was the expected outcome, though not the one I'd hoped for. Before this, people imagined the DYK process was as neutral as I said it should be; now we realize that some people in power are choosing what causes it is OK to feature. Wikipedia has failed to consider the theory of a good, fair DYK process, and that is a problem. As I said in the debate, the clearest issue going forward is religion. DYK has accepted a "Special Day" for the elevation of cardinals of the Catholic Church. It is time now to hunt around among Old Catholic Church, American Catholic Church, Liberal Catholic Church, Universal Catholic Church and find comparable events for which a "Special Day" of DYKs might be requested. (An initial search, leading to [4], is a bit less than satisfactory, but proof of principle) If DYK refuses a Special Day, they can and should be keelhauled for religious discrimination; but if they accept it, then it is clear that Special Days need not be "widely recognized" and the regime will be further exposed and isolated. (Doubtless some wag will say that violates "WP:POINT", but what part of creating articles or fighting religious bias on the Main Page constitutes disruption?)
• Now let's remember also: you have succeeded in all but the most trivial detail. TDWFB was announced as a "month of activism culminating in" February 11, and the early run means that your DYKs go out in that month. At least they do go out, people do read them, regardless of the day, and maybe they will join the new WikiProject. The NSA isn't going away soon, so there's no need to focus so much on one day.
• In general, these things with global surveillance carry the heavy pall of an apocalypse, and no small one at that; it seems as if we must either go out with the destruction of all rights and the subjugation of all people, or with the acceptance of all humanity with all its foibles and everything it has to say. But this is not the first generation to make that choice, and several preceding ones have not failed in the end. It is not in our nature to be holy men, but as things progress we are forced either to go in that direction, or in the other. So it is going to be very important to try to find faith, and to try not to give into frustration.
• Some reflection on Daoist philosophy is also in order. The most forceful action (trying to change all policy and take over the main page) is the least effective. The least forceful action (steady, thoughtful editing about what you find interesting) may be the most effective. Wikipedia is most effective when it is most unpredictable^[5] -- perhaps even when we are not even sure ourselves what we are trying to achieve.
• That said, I don't mean to underestimate the value of your effort; the appearance of great writers ... [who take a solid and persistent interest that troubles us] ... I know nothing about this, but I suspect it all sounds expensive. You can donate money to Wikipedia and have them spend dollar for dollar in combat with these folks, or accomplish the same for free at the cost of nothing but ... frustration. Just because Wikipedia pays nothing doesn't mean it costs nothing for somebody with the opposite agenda and little general public support. There have been idiots who have gone down to protests to smash shop windows who may have inflicted less financial expense, and that at random. Remember, the whole point of opposing an adversary who is out to deny your rights is that simply by doing things that are fully within your rights you are causing them grief.

Wnt (talk) 15:54, 7 February 2014 (UTC)

First off I want to say that I like everything you wrote in bullets 1-4. However, regarding bullet 5, as the heavy editor of ALEC and the one who notes on my userpage that my views don't represent those of my employer, it's clear that you're referring to me (despite the fact that I've hardly edited at Wiki-PR). I find your semi-veiled accusation of paid COI extremely ignorant, offensive, and uncivil. I demand that you review my edit history, retract your accusation, and apologize. It's downright wiki-libel. I've consistently taken a hard line against paid COI editing, not only stating on multiple occasions that at a minimum editors should be banned outright for not disclosing paid COIs, but also actually taking a couple of editors to WP:COIN for undisclosed paid COI editing. One of them eventually got site banned. The other was (I believe) a paid shill for, of all organizations, ALEC. While she was actively editing I consistently battled to keep reliably sourced material that happened to be bad publicity for ALEC, and remove promotional material. This is all easily verifiable, just skim through this for example... so for you, a veteran editor, to be making accusations that are so blatantly the exact opposite of reality is really just... astounding. And what I have to do with the TDWFB DYK is beyond me; I've watched it with interest, but I've never even commented on it. Really, I'm dumbfounded. --Dr. Fleischman (talk) 19:07, 7 February 2014 (UTC)

And I suspect Capitalismojo (another active contributor at ALEC) will laugh at loud at your ridiculous accusation. --Dr. Fleischman (talk) 19:43, 7 February 2014 (UTC)

Heh, well it's more of a snort and a chuckle than laughing out loud. Good humor. Thanks for pinging me. Dr.F may be many things, but having a COI with ALEC is the least likely one I can imagine. Capitalismojo (talk) 20:06, 7 February 2014 (UTC)

Note that I made no accusation, nor did I suggest how anyone stands on those topics, and indeed I don't know. You aren't the only person I had in mind when I made that comment, anyway. The way you keep materializing - here in response to a conversation with one other editor, at Restore the Fourth right after I reverted a removal by a different editor, and your persistent removals at The Day We Fight Back do make me suspicious. In any case, as I did not name you let alone accuse you, and as I do expect the pro-surveillance side to take some kind of action at some point, there's nothing to retract here. Wnt (talk) 20:15, 7 February 2014 (UTC)

That doesn't read like a retraction or an apology. Please tell me exactly whom you were referring to. Now, before I request administrator attention. --Dr. Fleischman (talk) 20:20, 7 February 2014 (UTC)

If you're going to be like that, surely it won't do any good to bring anyone else's name into this. Wnt (talk) 20:29, 7 February 2014 (UTC)

I agree, it wouldn't, since there's no one else whose name might be brought in. --Dr. Fleischman (talk) 20:46, 7 February 2014 (UTC)

(ec) Nonetheless, to avoid further distraction, I'll remove the very general description there, because it doesn't really say anything and therefore not really very interesting. Wnt (talk) 20:26, 7 February 2014 (UTC)

You're getting warmer, but that doesn't read like a retraction or an apology either. More like a whitewash. Hurry along, now. --Dr. Fleischman (talk) 20:31, 7 February 2014 (UTC)

There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. Thank you. --Dr. Fleischman (talk) 22:31, 7 February 2014 (UTC)

Feb 8

What do you about a hook: DYK ... The government of China has installed over 20 million surveillance cameras across the nation?
I've stepped on enough wasp nests for one lifetime, but it's a suggestion you can nominate if you feel it has merit. --HectorMoffet (talk) 16:35, 8 February 2014 (UTC)

It sounds like a good hook (I haven't checked the article, I'm in the middle of one for PCLOB), but you shouldn't be like that. There are editors who put out hundreds of these DYKs. With Wikipedia it's often more useful to focus on what you can do than what you can't, and they haven't banned you from putting them in. Wnt (talk) 16:41, 8 February 2014 (UTC)

That said, I did nominate it. Wnt (talk) 19:01, 8 February 2014 (UTC)

check your email, but basically, but the noinclude thing was a templating problem where passed articles go invisible on dykn.

I think it unlikely that anything special will happen on feb 11, but I will stick around to preserve the option, i.e. make sure holds are held. If, on Feb 10, our board issues a unanimous statement calling on our community to do something special on Feb 11 and an overwhelming majority endorses the plan, then they'll have that option.

Is that gonna happen? probably not. But do I feel that I deserve the same respect on hold dates as any other editor, yes, passionately. They can schedule none for feb 11, one at a time thereafter, or not use them at all. --HectorMoffet (talk) 04:16, 9 February 2014 (UTC)

You need to be watching Template:Did you know/Preparation area 3 and Template:Did you know/Preparation area 4 if you don't want them to run your content ahead of time so it will be unavailable for use. HectorMoffet (talk) 04:38, 9 February 2014 (UTC)

@HectorMoffet: you're getting bogged down on the smallest points. The main thing is to have an article, and make it a good one. A detail is to have a DYK. When that DYK runs is a detail of a detail, and whether it runs on the 10 or the 11th is the smallest detail of a detail. Even the event organizers called for a month of action, not a day of action, and I suspect this detail has subtly cascaded through to our present situation. Had there been one day of activism on the anniversary of Swartz's death, we would have had an easier time getting a special event recognized. Now to be sure, I have and will protest the centralized power and bias inherent in having a few people controlling whether an event can be recognized, but I don't want editors "semi-retired" or worse over this. It's not worth it. What's worth it is the work you put in getting all those articles written. I've had DYKs before -- they get thousands of pageviews, sure, but not that many thousands. I couldn't even tell you whether the impact of running a whole batch of DYKs on a topic is outweighed by fatigue and chance - whether it would be better to let people interested in spying have day after day to click on just one. So please -- focus on the central aspect. We have hundreds of redlinks that can be turned into useful information for all those who read future news stories and political editorials - stories we ought not predict - and need to know the real story behind the news, not just a one-sentence platitude by some talking head. I hope you will realize that this issue doesn't end on the 11th, nor is it the only issue; the real issue of all Wikipedia is knowledge and the right of the people to have it all. Wnt (talk) 05:23, 9 February 2014 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Surveillance awareness day

Hello, Wnt. Despite our disagreement, I respect your efforts to improve Wikipedia and genuinely aim to be helpful.

I attempted to build upon your rewording/reformatting in the hope of explaining the endeavor's background and current status as clearly and impartially as possible. HectorMoffet reverted, noting only that my "changes are without consensus".

In response to a message that he left on my talk page, I've requested that he explain his objections. If you have any thoughts on the matter (including constructive criticism or suggestions), I'd sincerely appreciate your input. Thanks in advance. —David Levy 04:06, 9 February 2014 (UTC)

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

—David Levy 07:36, 9 February 2014 (UTC)

I could use your help

Hey Wnt, I could use your support in convincing people Category:Slave owner is valid, User:Ryulong is reverting my most recent edits, nothing scientific but the slave owner category is an important listing to see the list of slave owners. No one is questioning Jabba the Hutt and the other fictional slave owners I listed, but apparently George Washington being a slave owner is being questioned. I did not know if their were pages for proposing categories or for reporting wikihounding, I've gone a couple of places though, reference desk, jimbowales, ANI board. I also added a couple bioremediating organisms recently wondered about nano particulate from prosthetic titanium implants. I'm also trying to add a ridiculous and sadly accurate amount of terrorist categories as unlike any other crime the definition is limited to each country. CensoredScribe (talk) 06:48, 31 January 2014 (UTC)

DYK for Stop Watching Us

Another draft approaches publication, but I want make sure our hooks comply with the rules.

What do you think of this DYK:

• .... that Stop Watching Us, a protest against mass surveillance, was supported by Daniel Ellsberg, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Lawrence Lessig, Wil Wheaton, and others?

pls rewrite if you can improve it or don't think it would make a good hook. --HectorMoffet (talk) 07:55, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

As you know, your approach was the correct one

There are about 8 articles now at DYK, but I depend on you to find the best wording for them and make sure they meet our standards. --HectorMoffet (talk) 21:25, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for your help at ANI; Ryulong is still reverting everything I do

I'm not sure if this will carry over to anything outside of anime and science fiction; either way I'm not breaking any restrictions. I have not yet evven suggested Category:Time travelers. CensoredScribe (talk) 04:11, 10 February 2014 (UTC)

Well, you're getting a lot of unfavorable feedback. I don't think the process should hit you with an expanded topic ban, but it's looking like a matter of time, and time may be up. I'd recommend you just avoid categorizing stuff even if it's not a formal ban, until you've done some other editing. The Wikipedia category system is hopelessly outdated and ineffective anyway - it's not really worth that much effort until somebody upgrades the code. Wnt (talk) 16:55, 10 February 2014 (UTC)

Thank you for the advice Wnt; I will take it and stop adding categories; they are pretty seriously broken if it takes that long to delete them and there is that little consensus about what elements are defining in a given work. I thought only the biographies of living famous people would be more reverted than medical articles; however I think fiction edits may be more frequently reverted than medicine articles as well. I'm trying to look for something which shows the pages most reverted but only recently; I figure George W Bush may have the long term record but is probably not always the most consistently reverted page. I figure it would show useful trends in what people are arguing about like the top 5000 popular pages. CensoredScribe (talk) 23:59, 10 February 2014 (UTC)

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re The ALA RFC

I'll leave the timing on when to start up to you.

I'd suggest that when you do, you post neutrally-worded-notices to central locations including WP:Village pump, WP:CENT, and other places.

Btw, quick query, is the Internet Archive a member of the American Library Association?

Are there other associates that Internet Archive is already a member of, that might be helpful for Wikipedia to join, as well?

— Cirt (talk) 06:27, 12 February 2014 (UTC)

Outstanding suggestion! It is indeed - see [6] for precisely the logo and text I had in mind (though I was thinking smaller). That's the only organization I see listed there, but I haven't researched it further yet. Wnt (talk) 06:51, 12 February 2014 (UTC)

re Library Bill of Rights

Regarding Library Bill of Rights, I strongly agree! — Cirt (talk) 21:05, 12 February 2014 (UTC)

@Cirt: - but do you agree that it is best to keep it separate from the RFC, or should I try to fold it in as proposal #3? I'm not sure if it makes sense to mix a proposal to ask for membership with an independent idea that would affect policy. Wnt (talk) 21:07, 12 February 2014 (UTC)

It should be separate. — Cirt (talk) 21:09, 12 February 2014 (UTC)

OK, that's what I thought. Wnt (talk) 21:14, 12 February 2014 (UTC)

Farewell, and thank you

Hey Wnt! Thanks for all your help in the last month. It's been great working with you. It was always a long shot that we would do something "special"-- as it should be, and I'm not at all disappointed that a controversial idea wasn't adopted. I had a lot of fun working on it.

Unfortunately, I found out some things about how parts of Wikipedia are run, and they just don't sit with me. I spent two years without really looking at mainpage, and I probably could have happy spent two years more without looking. If you like sausage, don't watch how the sausage is made, I suppose.

Please look after WP:SAD-- last I saw they was edit-warring still, two weeks after it was abandoned. A1candidate has promised to mediate if problems recur.

But I couldn't leave without saying goodbye and thanks for all your hard work! If you ever get bored with with this place, come over to scholarpedia-- all the joy of editing Wikipedia with any of the drama of editing Wikipedia. --HectorMoffet (talk) 01:58, 13 February 2014 (UTC)

@HectorMoffet: dammit, don't be like this. I mean, to take an event Wikipedia is pushing ... you look at these odd people who go off to the Olympics, they spend years of their lives training for something like pushing stones around on ice or sledding down a track. In one of the few bits I watched, some speed skater got sent home, try again in four years, because after the starter took too long to fire his "gun", she supposedly flinched her arm a little bit while waiting. People doing these pointless tasks nonetheless keep getting back up, having some Frankenstein try to piece their knees back together or whatever, and go on to get tripped or sick or "bobble" a step all over again. If people who want to get the truth out about things like government surveillance, like you, want to win, they're going to have to try to have a little more of that kind of weird determination, a little less oh it ran on the wrong day I have to give up. Why is it anyway that we spend all our determination on the most trivial and worthless and outright wrong and misery-making things, and so little of it on the things that can be of benefit?

Don't be bashful about un-resigning when you're ready. It's really really common. People get fed up, they throw in the towel, then they change their mind in anything (even the Olympics I suppose) and just because there's an edit history to look at here doesn't make it any different. Wnt (talk) 03:12, 13 February 2014 (UTC)

ALA RFC

What's the latest update on this, how's it going so far? And where was that link again? :P — Cirt (talk) 02:57, 19 February 2014 (UTC)

Well, the idea is at Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Should Wikipedia ask WMF to join the American Library Association on its behalf? The problem I have is simply that, going over [7] and [8], I just haven't made my case well enough. I just don't know enough about the organization and what it can do beyond my narrow areas of interest, and while they have tons of information online, I haven't really gone through much of it as of yet. Above all, I'd rather hoped that whatever his position on certain related issues, Jimbo Wales would personally weigh in in favor of the idea since it is the logical affiliation to fight SOPA and NSA surveillance and the like. I want to have more confidence about the success of the idea before I take it to a large-scale vote. Wnt (talk) 03:42, 19 February 2014 (UTC)

Understood, please keep me posted, — Cirt (talk) 00:05, 21 February 2014 (UTC)

DYK nomination of Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board report on mass surveillance

Hello! Your submission of Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board report on mass surveillance at the Did You Know nominations page has been reviewed, and some issues with it may need to be clarified. Please review the comment(s) underneath your nomination's entry and respond there as soon as possible. Thank you for contributing to Did You Know! BlueMoonset (talk) 01:28, 20 February 2014 (UTC)

Navboxes and search

Hi! I saw this comment you left about navboxes. I have some ideas about how to address this problem, and it would help me if you could provide some links to search queries that demonstrate the problem. Thanks, Bovlb (talk) 18:27, 24 February 2014 (UTC)

Hmmmm, I'm actually having difficulty reproducing the problem now! Unfortunately, the actual history for when I first ran into this problem doing a search like this, which is I think the better part of a year ago, was lost to a disk crash. But I'm pretty sure I saw this when I simply typed in a search for "revolution 9" "rubber soul". I definitely remember getting lots and lots of Wikipedia spammage on a search like that, and now I'm not seeing anything. It's possible that Google fixed the trouble on their end in the meanwhile, or ... something else happened. Wnt (talk) 22:52, 24 February 2014 (UTC)

OK. There are a few different ways that I know of to mark a section of a page as not for indexing. We could usefully add a couple of them to the navbar template, but I'd prefer to have evidence of the problem before making the proposal. Cheers, Bovlb (talk) 23:58, 24 February 2014 (UTC)

DYK for Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board report on mass surveillance

Thanks for your help Victuallers (talk) 23:32, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

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March 2014

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Jimbo's talk page

Jimbo is taking up your suggestion. User talk:Jimbo Wales/Archive 158#Proposal from Wnt. --Pine^✉ 23:06, 3 March 2014 (UTC)

GREAT! Wnt (talk) 23:35, 3 March 2014 (UTC)

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Stop Watching Us waiting on your consent

Some time ago the three other active participants in the discussion at Talk:Stop Watching Us reached a consensus, but since you were the most active opposition to the idea, wanted to wait for you to weigh in. It's been quite a while now and you haven't weighed in. Would you mind popping over there and giving your $0.02 so that we can make the relevant changes or not?

P.S. You really need to archive your talk page, jeez! 0x0077BE [^talk/_contrib] 18:49, 9 March 2014 (UTC)

I thought I expressed my feelings well enough before. I don't see anything in that conversation that is "dangling" awaiting some answer, and it's just not very appealing to edit an article that keeps losing content. Wnt (talk) 04:50, 10 March 2014 (UTC)

Suicides

Hi I noticed on the Jimbo Wales talk page back in February, regarding a then 'recent' suicide, some suggestion by you that certain things may have been subsequently wiped from their page. I agree with your point about that making it harder to "identify and fix the social phenomena specifically involved in things like this". I'm also unsure why in the discussions there seems to be such avoidance of giving the username, as seems to be given regularly in other cases. I don't seem to have your sleuthing skills to find it myself, assuming it wasn't as long ago as User:AaronSw. Did you confirm any of this by any chance? Sighola2 (talk) 23:47, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

I didn't find anything in the page history that expressed a sentiment that should have warned anyone something like this would happen - I don't know if it was removed or not. But ever since the discussion has been raised, Wikipedians have been attacking one another like mad, with little rhyme or reason, with one casualty after another being called out by administrators or resigning in disgust - the current contention on Jimbo's talk page traces directly back to it. Because of this ongoing trouble, despite my usual inclination, I'd prefer to avoid answering this one, except to say that if you look at talk pages for people originally in the conversation, you should find it. With so many options for retroactively making conversations go away around here, it's a lot easier to search out the name than to figure out what actually happened. Wnt (talk) 00:42, 12 March 2014 (UTC)

It did seem to be definitely stated that he put up then hatted a mental health template didn't it, so I am troubled if that has been wiped away (such a user doesn't seem to show up from 'what links here' at that mh template). I had tried following your route to the name via the prior commenters and tried again but just can't find any mentioned - guess I'm missing something or perhaps they've been wiped too?? I understand if you don't feel able to indicate further, though I'm not aware of where the ongoing trouble is now that the Eric-vs-admin and template-delete stuff seems to be over. Thanks, Sighola2 (talk) 02:41, 12 March 2014 (UTC) p.s. oh unless it could potentially include what I'm involved in regarding wp-is-not-therapy essay which was linked from that same mh template. Sighola2 (talk) 03:28, 12 March 2014 (UTC)

No, nothing was wiped away. It is still there, I've just checked. It is one of these cases, when an editor asked to be heard and understood, but nobody noticed, because as Wnt correctly noticed "Wikipedians have been attacking one another like mad, with little rhyme or reason". They are busy with attacking each others, not being kind and understanding to each other. That so called Wikipedia community is very sick, and in most situations not because of editors with mental health issues, but because of those psychotic, sadistic bullies who call themselves "the Wikipedia community".71.202.123.2 (talk) 04:56, 25 March 2014 (UTC)

DYK for Mass surveillance in China

The DYK project (nominate) 02:08, 12 March 2014 (UTC)

Hey

Would very much appreciate your comment at Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Science#Polyethylene_Glycol. Blessings. Ben-Natan (talk) 01:41, 15 March 2014 (UTC)

barnstar awarded for you

	The Barnstar of Diligence
	For your improving work at Syed Ali Shah Geelani - good work Wnt - Mosfetfaser (talk) 17:41, 15 March 2014 (UTC)

Template:Did you know nominations/Stop Watching Us

Wnt, since Hector isn't around any more and you've been shepherding some of his DYK submissions through the process, I thought I'd let you know that this nomination has some issues that need to be addressed. Is this something you're willing to take on? If so, please respond on the nomination template. Many thanks. BlueMoonset (talk) 19:39, 15 March 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for pointing this out. Wnt (talk) 21:29, 15 March 2014 (UTC)

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Thanks for the numbers.

Aside from being a very good post, it was informatively posted at 4:11 and self-contains 1,408 bytes. Cosmic. InedibleHulk (talk) 15:22, March 17, 2014 (UTC)

CensoredScribe has been blocked indefinitely

You've helped my friend a lot already; but if you are willing to help for what is likely the last time, please contact Drmies Vsmith LadyofShallot and Jmh649. CS wanted me to tell you and those others thank you for your support and to say thanks in general for writing the worlds largest and most read encyclopedia. The only thing they had left to do was finish adding the references from Lives of the Necromancers; they stopped at Pythagoras. Not sure how many users get brought back after being blocked; good bye. 128.138.108.181 (talk) 18:31, 21 March 2014 (UTC)

Honestly I don't think it can help at this point. By the time an editor is hit with a topic ban he's already pretty much on the way out - the admins and any enemies he's accumulated will just stay on him relentlessly looking for ever smaller offenses even as his exasperation grows. Given his interest in fiction there are lots of other specific wikis he could start on fresh that do a better job covering it (I'm thinking of http://www.supernaturalwiki.com, for example); or he could lend a hand in getting http://www.deletionpedia.org or http://www.speedydeletion.wikia.com up to speed; or he could even get serious and go for www.scholarpedia.org, www.openwetware.org, etc. which is actually much more respectable than WP. There are also exciting political wikis - I'm not sure if http://www.echelon2.org/ is going to be open to contributors again, but _that_ is an example of a little wiki that cast a long shadow. There are many others. He needs to find a successful base of operations instead of trying to hang on by a thread here. He would also benefit by focusing more on skills than accomplishments - learn how to program Javascript, PHP, Lua, learn how to run bots, learn to set up his own sites. When years have passed and he's forgotten all about his interest in Wikipedia categories, then he can try starting from scratch here if he wants, if he's prepared to stay absolutely mum about his prior account name and have no interaction with it... but he seems too readily tempted to make that work. Wnt (talk) 21:36, 21 March 2014 (UTC)

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re Another essay attempt...

This may not go well, but I thought I might as well try writing up WP:Internet Employees' Bill of Rights as a general idea, expressing some statements that I've made in recent cases, and in response to the absolutely appalling precedent of Brendan Eich being forced to resign from Mozilla (no, I'm not a section 8 fan, but to me that just isn't the point). Do you think anything good can come of it? Wnt (talk) 02:39, 4 April 2014 (UTC)

Your idea is a sound one, but I'll respectfully defer to you for your editorial judgment about its contents. Please do keep me posted when it's more of a complete work, and I'll take another look. — Cirt (talk) 15:22, 4 April 2014 (UTC)

DYK nomination of FISA Improvements Act

Hello! Your submission of FISA Improvements Act at the Did You Know nominations page has been reviewed, and some issues with it may need to be clarified. Please review the comment(s) underneath your nomination's entry and respond there as soon as possible. Thank you for contributing to Did You Know! BlueMoonset (talk) 17:22, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

DYK for FISA Improvements Act

Thanks from → Call me Hahc21) 16:03, 9 April 2014 (UTC)

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Templates and "What links here"

Hello, Wnt. I seem to remember a discussion where someone, and I think it was you, pointed out how adding topic templates to the bottom of multiple pages affected the "What links here" function by greatly inflating the number of articles linking to a topic, sometimes articles that are only marginally related to the one they link to and wouldn't mention it in the text itself. Do you know whether this has been discussed anywhere, or whether there are ways to make the WLH function ignore links in those templates? (Apologies if I'm mistaken and it wasn't you). ---Sluzzelin talk 19:22, 13 April 2014 (UTC)

I didn't realize we had a Help talk:What links here discussing this very topic. (Though of course I should have; Wikipedia not only HAAOE, but also ADiscussionOE. Sorry for the distraction and have a nice week :-) ---Sluzzelin talk 19:29, 13 April 2014 (UTC)

This message will self destruct in...

This is supposed to be under the modern India section of the India article. New users can't undo or edit that article. "India has the most slaves of any country at 14 million; over 1% of the total population." Here's the bare url. http://www.thehindu.com/news/international/world/millions-in-modernday-slavery-half-in-india-survey/article5243964.ece

Looks like a good idea, so I made an edit. [9] Wnt (talk) 12:21, 19 April 2014 (UTC)

One last thing; should you choose to accept it. This was on the page for free will but is not mentioned on the page for schizophrenia; when it's allegedly one of the key diagnostic criteria.

Similarly, one of the most important ("first rank") diagnostic symptoms of schizophrenia is the delusion of being controlled by an external force. People with schizophrenia will sometimes report that, although they are acting in the world, they did not initiate, or will, the particular actions they performed. This is sometimes likened to being a robot controlled by someone else. Although the neural mechanisms of schizophrenia are not yet clear, one influential hypothesis is that there is a breakdown in brain systems that compare motor commands with the feedback received from the body (known as proprioception), leading to attendant hallucinations and delusions of control.

This tape will self-destruct in five seconds. Thank you and good luck :)

The first bit is in there - the rest I should look up, but it may be a few days until I get to it. Wnt (talk) 17:25, 19 April 2014 (UTC)

This isn't part of an official Japanese policy on population control; the Japanese government is actually trying to have more births not less. However I added a section for Japans birth rate dropping by 25% in certain years do to the influence of Chinese astrology; I didn't think all forms of population control had to be officially ordered by the government in order to count.

In Japan, a strong belief in astrology has led to dramatic changes in the fertility rate and the number of abortions in the years of "Fire Horse". Women born in hinoeuma years are believed to be unmarriageable and to bring bad luck to their father or husband. In 1966, the number of babies born in Japan dropped by over 25% as parents tried to avoid the stigma of having a daughter born in the hinoeuma year.

Did you notice

Hi Wnt: In looking at the "Wikipedia" Page, there is someone that deleted your Ashburn edit, did you notice. FelixRosch (talk) 18:47, 28 April 2014 (UTC)

Sigh. The problem is, they might have something of a point about relevance, and at least they left the part that it was in Ashburn. Still, yeah, the level V security and data center alley should be reintroduced. Maybe there's a way I can improve the sourcing to make it look less like "synthesis". Wnt (talk) 19:35, 28 April 2014 (UTC)

Yes, and if you could add any further "planning information" it might help as well. For example, "The new site is expected to meet Wikipedia needs until MMDDYY", or, "It is expandable up to MMDDYY or indefinitely". Historically, it was also funded by a Google grant from a few years ago and designed for the purpose of enhancing system-wide reliability, which if you can document, might make the edit work. FelixRosch (talk) 17:02, 29 April 2014 (UTC)

May I ask; and have answer?

Hello Wnt. Because I have seen numerous discussions where you have commented; gleaning a wide breadth of intellect, I'll skip the part about "they know not what they do", and; directly ask: why have you raised a straw man against me on Jimbo's talk page? I've only ever known you to be a "straight shooter". Yet, for some reason, the first time I would ever see you deviate that straight course, happens to be when answering a concern raised by me. I can't help but wonder why?—John Cline (talk) 12:08, 2 May 2014 (UTC)

As I explained there, I don't see it as a straw man. I had used the same example previously, and Jimbo had made an "all the way" comment that didn't even seem opposed to the idea. A corporation and a military unit seem very similar, and to be fair, the allegations against the Chinese military unit that they massacred (at that time the article said) 10,000 people were both poorly founded and extremely prejudicial. I prefer to try to line up policies between different areas, which means that on one hand we should avoid giving too much credibility to sensationalistic figures, while not imposing a systematic bias on the other. Wnt (talk) 12:32, 2 May 2014 (UTC)

Russell Targ

FYI the item you added to the list of journal articles on the Russell Targ article was not a journal article. It is already in the references also. There was one article (Targ & Puthoff, 1974) published in nature and a series of comments, letters and matters arising peices discussing the actual article. There is are two sections of discussion on the talk page discussing what papers should be in the list. If you want to add to the list please weigh in at the discussion Talk:Russell Targ#WP:UNDUE and list of works. Thanks for your contributions to WP and happy editing. - - MrBill3 (talk) 05:14, 12 May 2014 (UTC)

Whoops. I thought someone had caught it up by accident with the others, but true, it's just a matter arising. Wnt (talk) 13:46, 12 May 2014 (UTC)

Arbitration amendment request(Fae)

An arbitration amendment request(Fae), to which you contributed, resulted in a motion.

The original discussion can be found here. For the arbitration committee --S Philbrick(Talk) 16:09, 17 May 2014 (UTC)

[re Russell Targ ]

Bobby Fischer: if you want info about my relationship with Bobby Fischer, you can look at "A psycho-biography of Bobby Fischer," By Joe Pontorotto. It has a sweet 1961 photo of 18 year old Bobby, his sister, me and baby Elisabeth at my home in NYC. I am not contributing any family photos to this bio page until Wikipedia decides to treat me with a little respect, rather than mockery and derision. You are able to hide in the dark of the aether and amusingly call yourselves red-balls and blue-balls, and write any mocking insults that come to mind regarding me or my work. So you feel that you get to sit around and decide what kind of relationship I had with my brother-in-law. How absurd is that? And I have no recourse. Don't you guys have any sense of decency? SILVER: I published a paper describing our success with silver. There is an article in the WSJ, and there is a BBC documentary interviewing by broker. What do you want? You publish all kinds of BS from the notorious James Randi. But my published data is no good. Cheers, Torgownik (talk) 04:09, 18 May 2014 (UTC)Russell

@Torgownik: Well, don't blame me for what those other people did; so far as I know I have not mocked or derided you, and try to be open minded, though there are some things I may not easily be convinced of. The problem with a book photo is that Wikipedia needs a free licensed photo and only includes copyrighted photos in some really narrow cases. I think you have suggested some good sources there and I hope to see you get fairer consideration in your article. Wnt (talk) 06:46, 18 May 2014 (UTC)

I have no interest in providing any photos of Bobby or my family to be held up to further "pseudo-unscientific" ridicule. Do people remember that in the big AIR report published for the CIA, in 1995 the president of the American Statistical Assn., Prof. Jessica Utts said that the remote viewing work at SRI was comparable in statistical significance to any other research on "weak to medium strength" phenomena,such as aspirin for prevention of heart attacks. She points out the our average "effect size" over a decade of work, is ten times greater than the effect size for aspirin preventing heart attacks. Why do you guys prefer to align with Randi the amazing, and the lifelong skeptic Ray Hyman instead of Prof. Utts? Just for a change of pace, could you please take a look at the four examples of remote viewing we did for the government on my website, www.espresearch.com. You might actually find it interesting. Torgownik (talk) 07:43, 18 May 2014 (UTC)Russell Targ

I am pretty near certain that no, as Wikipedia editors we do not remember that - certainly I'm no where close to knowing things like that offhand. Some of the problem here is that you're assuming the articles are edited by experts but they're really not. The same people edit articles about anything from airplane crashes to medieval history. This is both the cause and the effect of Wikipedia rules like the one against "WP:original research/WP:original synthesis". Wikipedia is more an assembly line than a mechanic's workshop. The problem is, some people have learned a strong contempt for all speculative topics - rooted, to be sure, in no small number of real examples of deceit with such things, but still an overly broad blanket response - and aren't playing by the rules. Wnt (talk) 13:34, 18 May 2014 (UTC)

FAIRNESS: OK. I understand. I am in jail, begging the guards for crumbs. ii is clear that you have to power to slime my bio page any way you wish. If I don't like I get ignored banned. Let me repeat what I consider the beginning of fairness or truth. OTHER OPINIONS: If you Wikipedia editors have any tiny spark of integrity, you should include the following, which is the other half of the famous CIA sponsored AIR report, which I am sure you all know about. Jessica Utts is a statistics Professor at the University of California, Irvine, and is president of the American Statistical Association. In writing for her part of a 1995 evaluation of our work for the CIA in the AIR report, she wrote: “Using the standards applied to any other area of science, it is concluded that psychic functioning has been well established. The statistical results of the studies examined are far beyond what is expected by chance. Arguments that these results could be due to methodological flaws in the experiments are soundly refuted.… Remote viewing has been conceptually replicated across a number of laboratories, by various experimenters, and in different cultures. This is a robust effect that, were it not such an unusual domain, would no longer be questioned by science as a real phenomenon. It is unlikely that methodological flaws could account for its remarkable consistency.” I will be looking for some part of this to appear on my bio page. If not, I will just assume that you have no interest at all in presenting the truth. It is not the truth that "science" considers remote viewing to be pseudoscience. You can start with the president of the American Statistics Assn. Torgownik (talk) 21:26, 18 May 2014 (UTC)Russell <russ at targ.co>

Trust me, we're not guards - Wikipedia is frustrating for everyone. I haven't moved very quickly on your article; I look in on Wikipedia now and then as I have a chance or my mind wanders, and I was hoping for signs that the discussion was turning. I think though that the tide is turning now, because your article is not the way that most here like to see biographies treated. I'll look into the report you mention (be assured we don't all know about anything). Wnt (talk) 21:33, 18 May 2014 (UTC)

Isotretinoin

I don't know how this ping thing works or if you got my message. But I reacted a little emotionally to you your notes on the ANI and Isotretinoin Talk page, please take the emotional content of my notes and divide by 3. I did not mean to be offensive (or if I did, I regret it now :>))Formerly 98 (talk) 21:53, 21 May 2014 (UTC)

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On your Trivia Questions

Not to nitpick but the IRA per se did not exist until January 1919. Thus none of your multiple choices are correct and I suspect that the answer might well be Tipperary. If, on the other hand, one accepted equating the IRA with earlier Irish nationalist organizations, one might well be able to go back as far as 1798 if not earlier. Juan Riley (talk) 16:02, 24 May 2014 (UTC)

I think the article used to say that the organization conducting the Fenian raids was literally called the Irish Republican Army. It still does say that, in passing, in the Fenian raids article in the title of the inspector-general of it. I understand that (as with many such organizations) there could be different organizations with the same name - not to equate the two, but the first example that pops to mind is the Ku Klux Klan, which has been repeatedly refounded from scratch, yet often is thought of as the same group anyway. Wnt (talk) 21:31, 24 May 2014 (UTC)

• One should not use big letters, e.g., a particular organization like the IRA, to mean small letters, e.g., a militia of Irish men and women with republican sentiments. As noted above, none of your multiple choices are correct whichever vague choice you make. Juan Riley (talk) 21:52, 24 May 2014 (UTC)

Fortunately I don't have to edit war with you about this, but do be assured that other sources use "IRA" to refer to this. [10] The phrase "Irish Republican Army" appears in the 1910 s:Troublous Times in Canada: A History of the Fenian Raids of 1866 and 1870. It is worth noting the parent (?) organization was sometimes called the Irish Republican Brotherhood. I haven't fully explored the various references in the literature, but I'm reasonably convinced that this conflict from the United States was at least something of an inspiration to those who ultimately formally declared the IRA, and that the identical phrase being used was no coincidence. Wnt (talk) 23:22, 24 May 2014 (UTC)

Interesting comment

You state here [11] "Rather, it is well known that Wiki Med, Inc., one of the resources linked from WP:MED, has external funding sources". As the president of WPMEDF I have not heard of any of these external funding sources. In fact the organization has never raised or been given any money and does not even have a bank account. An organization we are partnering with, Translators Without Borders did receive $12,000 from the Indigo foundation to develop their translation center in Kenya to work on our project but other than that all work by all involved is as volunteers. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 04:57, 26 May 2014 (UTC)

I will note your response. I had the impression from reading over the initial proposed bylaws and conversations like [12] that the organization was going to be receiving outside funding routinely, and I did interpret some other comments in this light. I do welcome this statement of independence. Wnt (talk) 05:10, 26 May 2014 (UTC)

We would not ever accept finances from an organization that does not share our goals. Such organizations would include the pharmaceutical industry. We would accept funding from organizations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Current though none has been offered and we are not really set up to handle it if it was. We have mainly provided advice to like minded organizations like Cancer Research UK, the NIH and Cochrane collaboration. We have also done some collaboration between language communities such as Persian and Italian. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 05:46, 26 May 2014 (UTC)

Press mention

See http://www.dailydot.com/news/wikipedia-traking-information-how-long/ Best, Andreas JN466 23:12, 29 May 2014 (UTC)

As flattering as it may be to be quoted, I don't feel like that article adds enough value to the discussion. I should give you credit for finding the policy about dissemination of information (though it actually lacks any statement about when it is disseminated, only gives advice how to improve your odds). But overall, I think my forum post was a request for information, which Jimbo said he'd look into, and your article doesn't give any insight on what that response will be. By and large when a news article has a headline that ends in a question mark, it's not going to be that satisfying. Wnt (talk) 05:15, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

TALK PAGE: The talk page is worthless, if I receive no reply. Just the erasure of what I write. You are happy to denigrate my father, who was a most distinguished NY editor and publisher for fifty yeas. Why can't we include The Godfather among his other junky books? He actually created that book. Why can't we include the Wall Street Journal citation of my silver futures forecasting, instead of saying that there is no citation? And what's wrong with including Jessica Utts saying that the work at Stanford was done correctly? Such editing gives Wikipedia a terrible reputation, even among people who are not ESP enthusiasts. Such obviously biased writing is anti science. Torgownik (talk) 21:33, 3 June 2014 (UTC)Russell

@Torgownik: Did you post this in the wrong place? I'm the one who added the mention of The Godfather, and also support the Wall Street Journal reference. The Utts reference I'm not totally sure about - last I looked the current version didn't mention the AIR report, and since it was an evaluation of the program in 1995 under a different agency, I can sort of see leaving it out of your biography. Still, that's all wrong, I admit. I was hoping Tristessa would change something - I can make another try at it to register my opinion, but with the people they have lined up I can't really win at an edit war. Wnt (talk) 01:32, 4 June 2014 (UTC)

DYK for Christopher Senyonjo

Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 11:20, 5 June 2014 (UTC)

Reference Errors on 7 June

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Obiwankenobi

Do you know that User:Obiwankenobi has edited from a POV agenda, on the subject of his employer, without disclosing his affiliation? One might say those types of users are exactly the sort who should have some of their online privacy exposed, when they are actively trying to impugn the reputations of real-named people while hiding behind a pseudonym cloak. February 23, 2012, if you want the truth. - 2001:558:1400:10:DC33:3186:3BC3:3AEF (talk) 16:10, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

The people at WO seem good at running administrative processes against people - nonetheless, he seems in good standing now and I'm certainly not going to initiate something against him. What I can do is to make minor modification to better detail the data he tried (but failed) to keep out of the article. There is some limit to what I can do there because so far I'm not getting the range of sourcing I would like to see. In any case it is a "punishment" commensurate and appropriate to the "crime", and what better way to punish than growing the encyclopedia? Wnt (talk) 18:08, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

rollback

Just revert my edits where I messed up your comments...I inadvertently rolled you back twice.--MONGO 19:25, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

Did you know we

have a stub for Libby Weaver? I suggested a merge, meant to do that much earlier. Dougweller (talk) 18:24, 1 July 2014 (UTC)

Re: this

See the AN request and more details on this talk page thread. I agree that the renumbering was clumsy, and looking back on it, it would've been better to move the "old" archive under Archive (old) or something similar than to jostle everything around as I did. Sorry for the mess! ☺ · Salvidrim! · ✉ 18:19, 2 July 2014 (UTC)

July 2014

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Media Viewer RfC case opened

You were recently recently offered a statement in a request for arbitration. The Arbitration Committee has accepted that request for arbitration and an arbitration case has been opened at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Media Viewer RfC. Evidence that you wish the arbitrators to consider should be added to the evidence subpage, at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Media Viewer RfC/Evidence. Please add your evidence by July 26, 2014, which is when the evidence phase closes. You can also contribute to the case workshop subpage, Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Media Viewer RfC/Workshop. For a guide to the arbitration process, see Wikipedia:Arbitration/Guide to arbitration. Before adding evidence please review the scope of the case. For the Arbitration Committee, MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 04:10, 18 July 2014 (UTC)

Refdesk qn - colour of osmium

I did some further research on this, but still have a question. Any chance you might be able to answer it? (It's under the same header for July 17.) Double sharp (talk) 13:54, 21 July 2014 (UTC)

Latest stage of submission to the Speaker's Commission on Digital Democracy

Hello there. I thought I would drop you a note as you kindly took part in the first stage of the efforts to crowdsource a submission to the Speaker's Commission on Digital Democracy. The second stage is now live and can be seen here. It would be great if you could help with putting together the submission on the second theme, which relates to representation. Also, if you have any suggestions on how we can widen participation, that would be very helpful. Thanks again for all of your help. Stevie Benton (WMUK) (talk) 11:19, 30 July 2014 (UTC)

Bet you never thought you'd get a barnstar from me, did you?

		The Original Barnstar
		Someone has passed along to me in a email the following words attributed to you, which is one of the smartest and best things I have heard this year: "Wikipedia is an effort to partially roll back the idea that the poor should be deprived even of their right to learn, receiving only as much knowledge as they can scrape together the money to buy." — If you said it, take a bow; if you didn't say it, take the credit. My best wishes to you. Though we frequently disagree on specifics, sometimes bitterly, I am coming to believe we see alike on The Big Issues. best, —Tim /// Carrite (talk) 15:43, 1 August 2014 (UTC)

---

Heh. This is a welcome surprise! :) Wnt (talk) 16:34, 1 August 2014 (UTC)

A barstar for you

		The Barnstar of Diligence
		For answering my question on Refdesk and finally completing my long search! Keresaspa (talk) 02:06, 2 August 2014 (UTC)

Media Viewer RfC draft principles & findings

Hello. This is a courtesy note that the draft findings and principles in the Media Viewer RfC case have now been posted. The drafters of the proposed decision anticipate a final version of the PD will be posted after 11 August. You are welcome to give feedback on the workshop page. For the Committee, Lord Roem ~ (talk) 02:50, 4 August 2014 (UTC)

[David Webb - moved from top]

At last someone is showing some common sense re David Webb. If you really want to set the cat among the pigeons you might ask why this scumbag is considered "notable". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satpal_Ram stabbing a diner to death in a restaurant. Over the years these idiots have deleted almost all my amendments to it. A Baron VennerRoad (talk) 12:32, 4 August 2014 (UTC)

@VennerRoad: I assume you must have been editing as IP back then; I'm not sure which additions were yours. I see one big deletion that is hard to contest - Wikipedia policy definitely isn't going to support painting someone as a murderer based on a GeoCities user site. And you can't possibly expect an edit like [13] to stand - that's the article, not the talk page. I should add that when you edited my talk page, you left your comment at the top instead of the bottom; if I were a little less careful I could have missed it and never responded, because the convention is to put them at the bottom. I want you to seriously consider that you simply haven't learned enough about how Wikipedia works -- how to source your facts and write things the way they should be written. To do that it would be helpful to do some practice editing about a topic that you don't have such strong feelings about, so that you can feel comfortable backing off from any arguments that might arise. Until then, please, don't go running around calling people idiots. You'll piss people off and sooner or later you're bound to land at "WP:AN/I", which is a cattle chute with only one final destination no matter how honest your feelings. Like anything else on a computer, it works better to learn how to work Wikipedia first and then get frustrated with it. Wnt (talk) 14:02, 4 August 2014 (UTC)

@VennerRoad: On further examination, I see the situation is sticker. I was looking for what happened to the GeoCities site and I see that it is defunct, but searching for "flick-knife" I found the same name "satpalramisguilty" now at: http://www.satpalramisguilty.20m.com/ . I was going to look around your site for usable sources, but going to the site index I was hit by an antivirus warning (at http://www.satpalramisguilty.20m.com/ram_site_index.html ) that a "JS-site-redirector [Trj]" had been found. So I haven't gone through that as of yet. In any case, when you start putting your own site into articles as a reference, especially when it's a self-published reference in a BLP, you're seriously going to run into trouble on Wikipedia. See WP:COI. For a change like that you should propose it on the talk page and get another editor to do it, only I'm afraid in this case they really won't. If you're looking for more site traffic this is not a good way - getting the virus warning off your page is! The only way to make this argument in the article is to cut through all your text to the original source news articles. The good news is that I think there is a lot of room to expand on the anti-Satpal Ram side of things, and if done right the overall balance of the article can be improved. Wnt (talk) 14:13, 4 August 2014 (UTC)

A Baron VennerRoad (talk) 14:22, 4 August 2014 (UTC)

I wrote you a long reply and it has disappeared due to an edit conflict, so briefly...I set up the Ram site in 2001 to combat all the pernicious lies that have been spread about the case.

If you check old versions of the page you will find my corrections and the reverts they made. I didn't have an account then and don't know why I bother.

Everything about that case is lies, including the four citations at the bottom of the page now, lies.

I didn't brand Ram a murderer, the jury did that, and his conviction was held up twice on appeal and rejected by the CCRC.

The official documents on the site are far more reliable than left wing press reports, they include the Court Of Appeal transcripts.

Such is the bias of Wikipediots is that they have even removed my updates, like about Ram's recall to prison and his rearrest. He spent several more years in gaol.

These people are not interested in the truth.

Tell me by the way how this thug is "notable" while David Webb is not?

Thanks for your interest.

A Baron VennerRoad (talk) 14:24, 4 August 2014 (UTC)

You don't have to lose your work to an edit conflict! The edit conflict screen has a copy of your text in one of the windows; just follow the instructions. (Personally I find it easier to go back one page, copy my text from the usual edit window, press the section edit link from my history sidebar, and paste it in there, but whatever works for you) I hope this doesn't cause another edit conflict........ Wnt (talk) 14:28, 4 August 2014 (UTC)

Another couple of points, you should not get a virus warning off the Ram site but you can use the Archived version if you want, on the Wayback Machine.

Also, I have been researching in the British Library since 1988 so I know how to do it and to get reliable sources and information.

The simple fact is that a lot of what is published about cases like that is simply lies, and it doesn't come simply from friends of people like Ram but from the likes of Amnesty International, Reprieve and other agenda-driven special interest groups.

A Baron VennerRoad (talk) 14:31, 4 August 2014 (UTC)

This was a decent editorial citing a good primary source about the recall to gaol. You're definitely good at writing and sourcing, so you should be able to succeed with Wikipedia once you do it the right way. But for Wikipedia the thing they're always yammering for is secondary sources, news articles ... so as good as this is I'd be more comfortable if I had a non-editorial news story about the parole violation and this hilarious argument over whether he can collect a government settlement while living as a fugitive. There ought to be something though, I just haven't even started looking yet. Wnt (talk) 14:36, 4 August 2014 (UTC)

To give an idea of how aggravating Wikipedia can be: another copy I found of your site includes a copy of an article from the Scotsman. [14] This article is exactly what I want. However, WP:EL is dead set against me citing a "pirate" copy of a news article; besides, I should give the reader a way to verify it is genuine. I went to the Scotsman web site but although I get search results back to 2002 I don't get this one. [15]. I even went to Internet Archive Wayback, [16] but as usual that's worthless - it's a page of 2014 news, because all the images aren't even there, and I have no idea what the original URL was to look more specifically. Anyway, I think the key thing with articles like this is to throw whatever you actually have at it, no matter how minor, and hope that as the data builds up something will pop out that helps you find the rest. Wnt (talk) 15:06, 4 August 2014 (UTC)

(talk page stalker)Wnt, remember that technically, you don't need to have an on-line version of the article to use it as a reference IF you've got full information about the source (newspaper, date published, section and page, etc). You might check if someone who's got some of the Wikipedia Library accounts could find something for you. My watchlist has a message at the top talking about new resources available, including a newspaper database that might help. HighBeam may also help out there. Even if you don't have access, you can probably ask someone who does (sorry, I don't have anything) to e-mail a copy of the article to confirm the info. Ravensfire (talk) 15:20, 4 August 2014 (UTC)

Module:Highlight

Thanks for that effort, back in February. Lua's regex-like language doesn't have the | operator, or anything to replace it, right? So pages can only be previewed for one phrase or pattern at a time? I'm looking to highlight multiple phrases on a page. (Mediawiki is no help so far ... my bugzilla request has "low" priority.) - Dank (push to talk) 14:22, 5 August 2014 (UTC)

@Dank: There are a lot of ways to skin the cat here, but what I've focused on first is whether we can get full Javascript like regex searching for Lua, at [17]. Doing that from scratch would not be fast and would not be easy! But I'd like to scout out a path in that direction. Meanwhile though, I see now the immediate problem with that module is much simpler; I just need to come up with a way to pass in multiple patterns. Wnt (talk) 14:34, 5 August 2014 (UTC)

Fantastic, thanks for working on that. Yeah, there are a lot of things that would work ... what I've got now at User:Dank/rollyourown is nice because it uses Mediawiki functions, which I assume will be faster when I've got a truckload of strings to check, and because I like the popup-on-hover feature. That code includes the function mw.util.$content.highlightText, which takes a single string as an argument, but within that string, it uses spaces to delimit the arguments that are passed to some other function (presumably) and highlights any of those arguments on any page (for the user only, it doesn't actually make changes to a page). It works great ... except that a space is a bad choice for an argument delimiter, since that makes it impossible to search for and highlight a two-word phrase. I don't know how to get at the code in highlightText ... if I could, I'd ask for a new function (in Mediawiki or not) that gets rid of the line that parses the input string into a character array, because if I could pass it a character array, I'd be golden. - Dank (push to talk) 15:05, 5 August 2014 (UTC)

Yeah, I remember we had a split in purpose from the beginning - the Lua was to avoid people having to do custom javascript or to make something to show other people, but the javascript would be expected to have more raw power and versatility. I've neglected these topics lately... I'm finding some things like that the editor (and in particular the "script error" simply does not work at all on Firefox now). And that I still have a long way to go when navigating gerrit/git. But I did see mw.util.$content at [18], and some version (I don't know if it's the most recent for sure) of the highlightText at [19] with the infamous split-on-space at line 12. The Lua requests board is the wrong place, but there's actually no right place I know of on Wikipedia to ask for Javascript help, so you might want to see there if some of those folks (several of which are very active in updating the site software) can provide a fix or suggest a workaround. Wnt (talk) 16:03, 5 August 2014 (UTC)

Will do! - Dank (push to talk) 16:23, 5 August 2014 (UTC)

Could I ask one more thing? My code looks amateurish without an array to hold the data, but I don't know lua to fix it. My script is getting an enthusiastic reception (see for instance Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Kangana Ranaut/archive1, at the end), which is nice considering it doesn't do anything yet :) Here's my test script, User:Dank/wishywashy.js:

if (mw.config.get( 'wgAction' ) === 'view')
mw.loader.using(['jquery.highlightText', 'jquery.tipsy'], function() {
    mw.util.$content.highlightText(' wishy washy');
    $('.highlight').tipsy({
        title: function() { 
            if ($(this).text()==='wishy') returntext = '"Wishy" is a very silly word; don\'t use it.';
            else if ($(this).text()==='washy') returntext = '"Washy" is even worse.';
            return returntext;
        }
    });
});

I want to start off defining a character array with 4 elements (in this case: 'wishy', '"Wishy" is a very silly word; don\'t use it.', 'washy', '"Washy" is even worse.'), then iterate through that appropriately in highlightText and tipsy. I'm sure it's simple, but so am I, when it comes to code. - Dank (push to talk) 11:18, 6 August 2014 (UTC)

I'm not sure why you say Lua then show me Javascript/jQuery. There are lots of sources about setting up arrays in Javascript - here's one, no particular recommendation for it. (I'm not so good at Javascript that I'd suggest code without actually trying it though!) Wnt (talk) 11:49, 6 August 2014 (UTC)

Here's pseudocode ... no problem if you don't want to give this a shot, I'll ask around. I hate coding with a passion. - Dank (push to talk) 13:13, 6 August 2014 (UTC)

var phrases = {'wishy': '"Wishy" is a very silly word; don\'t use it.', 'washy': '"Washy" is even worse.'};
var argstring = '';
for (var i=0; i<phrases.length; ++i) { argstring = argstring + ' ' + (some function that picks out the keys (ids) in "phrases", one by one) }
if (mw.config.get( 'wgAction' ) === 'view')
mw.loader.using(['jquery.highlightText', 'jquery.tipsy'], function() {
    mw.util.$content.highlightText(argstring);
    $('.highlight').tipsy({
        title: function() { returntext = phrases.getElementById($(this).text()); }
            return returntext;
        }
    });
});

Got the answer, script works fine, now just waiting for an improved highlightText. - Dank (push to talk) 00:21, 8 August 2014 (UTC)

Right to remember

Rather than clogging up Jimbo's talk page, I've replied here. It isn't Gerry Hutch causing the problem in a Google search, other users are agreed on this. As I've said, the list of living people mentioned in the current version other than Hutch is:

• Mike Tyson: Why he would want to block an obscure Wikipedia article averaging 25 views a day is a mystery, and he is not producing the "results removed" message anyway. Only European citizens can make these requests.
• Jim Sheridan, the well-known Irish film director. Not producing the "results removed" request.
• Alan Devine: Irish actor who once portrayed Hutch on screen. Not producing the "results removed" request.
• Felix McKenna: chief of the Criminal Assets Bureau until 2006. He is producing the "results removed" message on google.co.uk and google.ie.

So McKenna is the only name that makes sense, even if he did not initiate the request personally. From the Key personnel list at Global Risk Solutions, here is my list for a "results removed" message on Google;

• Arthur "Kip" Radigan Principal - yes.
• Vincent Levito CPA, CFE - yes.
• David L. Huff ESQ
• Steve Gosser - yes.
• Ross Gagliano CFE - yes.
• Anthony Satira ACA, CGA -yes.
• Doug Radigan ACA -yes.
• Falin McMellon CGA, CFGA, WRS - yes.
• Douglas Maestas AIC, AIS, AINS, CGA - yes.
• Adam Gutman - yes.
• Chris Faiella CCST CCE CHFI - yes.
• Michael J. Perullo CPA - yes.
• Anthony Campo ACA, CGA - yes.
• David Coffman CGA - yes.
• Mark Lowy - yes.
• Bruce Edmund JD - yes.

Can you see a pattern emerging here?--♦IanMacM♦ ^{(talk to me)} 10:47, 7 August 2014 (UTC)

@Ianmacm: But after doing these searches, did your controls stay negative? Still no message when searching for Mike Tyson and the other negatives? Because like I said, my problem was that at some point I started getting the message for the controls, making me unsure if any of my results were really "yes". Wnt (talk) 10:49, 7 August 2014 (UTC)

I also did sample searches for "Tony Smith", "Joseph Williams" and "Richard Johnson", and these did not produce the "results removed" message. This suggests that the message is not being produced automatically for all names in Europe.--♦IanMacM♦ ^{(talk to me)} 10:58, 7 August 2014 (UTC)

From what I have tested, any search using the name of a "non-public" person seems to return the "result removed" message on Google. For instance try some random names such as "Dan Milford" or "Alan Becker". So it could just be a standard message that always shows when googling a random name. The sample searches you mention ("Tony Smith", "Joseph Williams" and "Richard Johnson") just happen to be "public" figures -- in fact all 3 have wikipedia articles; in that case the message does not appear. Bottom line the names from the Global Risk Solutions list could just fall under some "non-public" name rule that always triggers the message and might not be linked to a specific removal request. Of course this doesn't solve the mystery, just deepens it... Dawansv (talk) 23:10, 7 August 2014 (UTC)

Awww hell, I just found one clear factor: I'm getting the notice when I run names in quotes, but no notice when I run the same searches without quotes! That includes for your "public figures". Wnt (talk) 23:45, 7 August 2014 (UTC)

• As an aside, the coverage of this in today's British newspapers is pretty poor.[20] They are far more interested in whether a monkey can own the copyright on a selfie than in whether Google and faceless bureaucrats can block access to non-defamatory Wikipedia articles.--♦IanMacM♦ ^{(talk to me)} 11:49, 7 August 2014 (UTC)

Really, that may be the more important issue; I'd have brought it up myself but there's only so much I should post about at once... While this "right to be forgotten" is a stupid and terrible thing, it is so impossible to implement that it ought to tear itself apart. So far it hasn't even tried to touch Wikipedia directly. Copyright, on the other hand, is already implemented and already deprives us of most of the content we could carry. There are a near-infinite number of inconsistent court decisions about it - anyone who claims that putting a satellite out into orbit and having it shoot photos of the Earth is creativity worthy of copyright might very well claim that handing a monkey a camera gives you copyright also; and if handing a monkey a camera gives you copyright, why can't your cell phone manufacturer claim copyright of any photo you shoot with it? After all, the poor or working-class consumer is less than a monkey - if you doubt that, contrast the popularity of government funded retirement homes for research chimps with the reception the same proposal would receive if lower-class humans were the beneficiary! It is a "sweat of the brow" view of copyright that would greatly increase its scope, eventually to the Holy Grail level of assigning copyright on every PD photo in Commons to whoever snapped the photo or made the scan. So the media's priority on the issue is actually quite correct. Wnt (talk) 16:12, 7 August 2014 (UTC)

The media is still fascinated by the monkey selfie. Yes it is important, but Gerry Hutch has been removed from Google's European search engine results for reasons that we cannot fathom or appeal against. Whatever happened to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in particular Article 19, which says "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers." I want my rights back.--♦IanMacM♦ ^{(talk to me)} 17:29, 8 August 2014 (UTC)

Well, the problem is, so far I haven't even seen the evidence that this result has been removed. At least when I do it, the search on www.google.co.uk produces a message that results could have been removed, if I search in quotation marks, but not if I don't search in quotation marks, but even the search in quotation marks with "Wikipedia" added pulls out the Wikipedia article as the top hit, 'censored' or not. I don't know if Google is still setting up to do it, still arguing it, or what. OTOH the claim that google.org would be exempt while www.google.co.uk wouldn't seems very hard for me to picture, so maybe people with IPs geolocating in the UK do have it censored, and the rest of us only get the message while trying, in vain, to figure out what's going on. All I know is that so far there isn't a single statement that I or anyone else has made about this issue that I actually have any confidence is true... Wnt (talk) 18:21, 8 August 2014 (UTC)

As Jimbo and yourself said, the amount of work required to prove that certain search terms are leading to a block is massive and infeasible. Let's be honest, if Google had not sent the WMF this, we wouldn't even know by now, because Gerry Hutch was previously an obscure article and off the beaten track (average 25 views per day in July 2014). Nevertheless, Google did send the message to the WMF, and presumably someone filled in this form. It is reasonably certain that Hutch did not initiate the request himself, although the system is so silly that it is hard to be 100% sure.--♦IanMacM♦ ^{(talk to me)} 18:55, 8 August 2014 (UTC)

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Media Viewer RfC arbitration case - extension of closure dates

Hello, you are receiving this message because you have commented on the Media Viewer RfC arbitration case. This is a courtesy message to inform you that the closure date for the submission of evidence has been extended to 17 August 2014 and the closure date for workshop proposals has been extended to 22 August 2014, as has the expected date of the proposed decision being posted. The closure dates have been changed to allow for recent developments to be included in the case. If you wish to comment, please review the evidence guidance. For the Arbitration Committee, MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:00, 12 August 2014 (UTC)

Speedy deletion nomination of "Mark Marek"

A tag has been placed on "Mark Marek" requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under section G6 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because it is an orphaned disambiguation page which either

• disambiguates two or fewer extant Wikipedia pages and whose title ends in "(disambiguation)" (i.e., there is a primary topic); or
• disambiguates no (zero) extant Wikipedia pages, regardless of its title.

Under the criteria for speedy deletion, such pages may be deleted at any time. Please see the disambiguation page guidelines for more information.

If you think this page should not be deleted for this reason, you may contest the nomination by visiting the page and clicking the button labelled "Click here to contest this speedy deletion". This will give you the opportunity to explain why you believe the page should not be deleted. However, be aware that once a page is tagged for speedy deletion, it may be removed without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag from the page yourself, but do not hesitate to add information in line with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. --Animalparty-- (talk) 06:30, 14 August 2014 (UTC)

I don't see why we need to pick which of two people with the same name gets the redirect, but since I'm forced to, I'll point to the one I was interested in. This is not an improvement, though. Wnt (talk) 09:36, 14 August 2014 (UTC)

James Foley article

I am a PhD student at UofT in political science, so I am well versed in sources. My first source states quite clearly that Foley worked for USAID "I got to know Jim Foley in 2009 when both of us worked on USAID-funded development projects in Baghdad." http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/james-foley-1973-2014_803537.html. The second source quite clearly shows that USAID fomented rebellion in Cuba "the perfect excuse” to groom Cubans for anti-government activist" and compared USAID with the CIA "Bolton, who once worked at USAID, supports U.S. plots to undermine the Cuban government and hopes the CIA is conducting more professional operations" http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014/08/04/another-usaid-cuba-spy-program-exposed. Another source I was about to post more directly compares USAID with the CIA "Is USAID acting too much like the CIA?" http://www.abc2news.com/nct/video-is-usaid-acting-too-much-like-the-cia. My sources directly support what I have written, and all of my sources are legitimate American news sources, so my edits should not have been deleted.

Nobody knows if your credentials are real; we don't take ID cards here. The way to prove you are educated to us is not to frame sentences like "In 2006, Foley worked for US AID in Iraq, US AID operatives spied on,and attempted to foment rebellion in, Cuba." [21] When you have a defective sentence like that, any interpretation (such as "Foley ... spied on and attempted to foment rebellion") contributes to the meaning.

More to the point, there is defective logic here. Just picture if I wrote "Pope Francis worked for the Catholic Church, the Catholic church has molested children and covered up the evidence." Not a fair sentence for a biography!!! Just as the Catholic Church has generally disavowed the child-molesting, USAID generally distances itself from this sort of political interference. Plus, that is an uncharitable characterization of their activities in Cuba, which were essentially peaceful propaganda so far as I recall; I tend to be very critical of many intelligence-related stunts but this one seemed innocuous to my mind.

Plus there is the procedural problem that you double-reverted on an article clearly marked to revert only once. Wnt (talk) 01:17, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

Media Viewer RfC arbitration case - motion to suspend case

You are receiving this message as you have either commented on a case page or are named as a party to the case. A motion has been proposed to suspend the Media Viewer RfC arbitration case for a maximum of 60 days due to recent developments. If you wish to comment regarding the motion there is a section on the proposed decision talk page for this. For the Arbitration Committee, Callanecc (talk • contribs • logs). Message delivered by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) at 02:33, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

Torrent link for YouTube video at Foley article

Please don't add torrent links. It's never been agreed we can use them, they worry readers, they generally need an external application, and a lot of them aren't stable. Editors also don't know what size it will be. And it's bloody slow too, I'm waiting ages to get it. Ah, got it. And that isn't copyvio? (side issue, the main issue is the torrent and need for a client) Dougweller (talk) 17:05, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

Surely you can't think it's a copyvio - multiple sources complain that ISIS disseminated the video. I would welcome a stable HTML replacement for the torrent, but I had some trouble with links that no longer function. At least for me the download seemed quite fast. My feeling is that in this day and age expecting to access the Internet without a bittorrent client is like trying to do everything with Gopher after HTML came out. There's just a point where you have to recognize it's standard software, and I think we've reached that. Wnt (talk) 17:10, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

So they recorded Obama? In any csae the consensus there is don't add it. Please remove it. You can't just set a new standard on your own. Dougweller (talk) 17:19, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

Say what? I'm not setting a new standard. There's no "standard" against citing magnets. In fact - as demonstrated here = magnet:?xt=urn:btih:VFFKTDZLZIZYDUVOOMFS5MJD2JCNC4IR&dn=James%20Foley%20beheaded%20journalist.mp4&tr=udp%3a%2f%2ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3a80&tr=udp%3a%2f%2ftracker.publicbt.com%3a80&tr=udp%3a%2f%2ftracker.istole.it%3a6969&tr=udp%3a%2f%2fopen.demonii.com%3a1337 = Wikipedia automatically blue-links them so you can click in your browser, which normally is auto-configured to take it straight to the torrent client. So this is part of our routine site software already. As for the recording of Obama, that's a U.S. government work and public domain, obviously. Wnt (talk) 17:22, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

The part showing the decapitated body of Foley in "Message to America" is pretty tasteless, and virtually all media outlets have declined to show this. There was a debate at LiveLeak about the suitability of this type of propaganda video.[22]--♦IanMacM♦ ^{(talk to me)} 17:59, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

LiveLeak was the site I'd intended to cite when I found the link invalid. I was deeply disappointed with them for this, but it was clear from the articles that this was an internal choice rather than driven by a legal claim over copyright or law. But LiveLeak is, ultimately, an entertainment site. Here on Wikipedia, we need to research to the bottom of the issue. However "tasteless" it might be to link to a video that shows one picture of Foley's corpse that other news outlets blur out, we need to balance that against the far greater impact that failure to discuss the video has had on our culture and foreign policy. By not calling ISIS out on their little magic trick, we have encouraged a dialog that says "Oh my goodness, we must not help the thousands of women and children stranded on a mountaintop waiting to be butchered, lest we annoy the great and powerful ISIS!" When in reality I think Foley was already dead when those airstrikes were authorized, with ISIS just waiting for an excuse to play one of their little backup speeches followed by a shot of a head severed from Foley after he died for some other reason. We don't neutralize ISIS propaganda by ignoring it; we neutralize it by understanding it. Wnt (talk) 18:07, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

• Support, Regarding the OP, motivational disaproval of the video incident, yes. Murky legal perspectives, dubious educational qualities, disconstraintive developmental projections based on those principle features, questionable stability on availability. There are videos around, don't pick me up the wrong way, it's a horrid incident, But there are murder videos around of worse torturing than this and we are not rushing to get them up into print, are we? I've seen official US pictures of Jane/John Does, but displaying that sort of work has a different sort of relevance, and its origins are clearly defined. I've no interest in examining a beheading, or inviting others to. Sure, there could be some excuse to further examine that video in search of clues, but we aren't supposed to determine that by referening external resources before debating the transmission method? This media fails to establish notability. ~ R.T.G 23:00, 19 October 2014 (UTC)

censored & sanitized

Hey Wnt, from now on even the discussion is censored & sanitized! Sophie --79.223.11.1 (talk) 08:37, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

Case Opened: Banning Policy

You recently offered a statement in a request for arbitration. The Arbitration Committee has accepted that request for arbitration and an arbitration case has been opened at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Banning Policy. Evidence that you wish the arbitrators to consider should be added to the evidence subpage, at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Banning Policy/Evidence. Please add your evidence by September 16, 2014, which is when the evidence phase closes. You can also contribute to the case workshop subpage, Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Banning Policy/Workshop. For a guide to the arbitration process, see Wikipedia:Arbitration/Guide to arbitration. For the Arbitration Committee, Seddon ^talk 12:33, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

Unbanning

I've been released from my ban. Feel free to help me with Austin Tice. I'm going to stay away from Sotloff for awhile.MeropeRiddle (talk) 22:39, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

To be honest, I'm really not that interested in working on the details of these articles. I opposed your ban and this censorship so that I wouldn't have to go through all this data myself! I really ought to focus first on getting better coverage of the real horrors where ISIS is concerned. Wnt (talk) 02:40, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

Files for deletion

See Wikipedia:Files for deletion/2014 September 5#Steven Sotloff. Another victim of this madness. ~Technophant (talk) 08:47, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

Wikipedia being half nuts about NFCC files isn't actually new. There is a need to ensure that the encyclopedia is redistributable without being caught up in somebody's copyright crusade. I think the ISIS tape is likely free-licensed or public domain, but saying that a lot isn't actually a substitute for proving it. If we could prove it we could legitimately host an intact copy of the video, not one scene, which would actually be useful for people to analyze rather than merely decorating the article, but unless we're doing that I'll be content to reference it. Wnt (talk) 12:32, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

Talk page section removal

I typically do revert talk page trolling/bragging by banned users like Russavia. If that's not what you wanted, I apologize, and I will restore the section if you like. NawlinWiki (talk) 12:41, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

@NawlinWiki: Well, I don't usually delete non-bot comments, especially not interesting ones, so yes, I'd prefer you restore it as it was. Wnt (talk) 12:43, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

OK, here is the Russavia section for your reading pleasure. NawlinWiki (talk) 12:47, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

Message from Russavia

That blocked editor isn't me, but I am pissing myself because of the collateral damage. Ask @Dougweller: on what basis it was determined that the person they have blocked is me. If it is the fact that the person inserted a name that has has 307,000 hits on Google into an article on someone else who was beheaded, then the evidence is pretty fucking shaky. But now that I know what it takes to have someone blocked as me, let's see how many long-term editors who should have been booted long ago I can get blocked for being sockpuppets of me. Do you have anyone in mind? :>

And do you know the worst thing Wnt, this poor sod is going to become notable because his article was censored on WP, rather than being dealt with via normal community processes. I'm pissing myself at watching the entire OS team build a big fucking hole for themselves, because defending a pisspoor decision by one of their own at any cost is more important than anything else. These are the people who will lead to the destruction of WP; not people like myself.

Oh, and there's this too. It appears @NawlinWiki: has based his information on this comment to him from me on Commons. Given the guy has not a single clue, he will never want to RfA again on Commons given his total and utter cluelessness. :)

Well as you can see, Canens doesn't feel like answering any questions. He's playing the usual tactics of staying silent. If you are wondering what he revdelled it was me telling him that I have contacted the media about his abuse of oversight. The person's name wasn't mentioned at all. It's not so much the deletion of the article, but the outright abuse of OS by Canens which is a fucking disgrace. 190.92.46.158 (talk) 07:41, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

There are plenty of people who don't agree with what's going on here in relation to this mess, so there's plenty of people who know about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:AbuseFilter/history/58/diff/prev/12792. It's no secret, believe you me. To even prevent discussion on the person in question is disgraceful. I am dumbfounded that people are not speaking up and questioning what they are doing amongst themselves. They actually are engaging in censorship!! Now, can I ask one thing, if you have messages for me in future which relate to en.wp please leave me messages at User:Russavia/messages. I will put it on my watchlist; I'll respond back here if needed.

By the way, did you see that they have decided after all the blocked editor isn't me. By the way, there's a nice little easter egg that's been left for a specific group of editors on English Wikipedia....when they see it they will shit bricks lol. Best, 151.237.156.42 (talk) 12:10, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

Note: Russavia is, yes, banned on en.wikipedia, but for the crime of "creating drama" by commissioning the artist Pricasso to post a video of his rather remarkable method of painting portraits.^[23] See the section above. Meanwhile... at least this time I reread this to the end. HOWEVER, the page Russavia linked (User:Russavia/messages) is not merely deleted but blocked so that I could not even create a new one. Which is interesting - I didn't realize admins would go to that length to keep a banned poster from receiving messages. Wnt (talk) 13:04, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

I wasn't involved in the Pricasso discussion or the Russavia ban, but I have read it and I think Ponyo summarized it best: "Russavia has crossed the line from questioning those who have perceived power to actually creating drama and purposeful disruption in an attempt to mock and shame. It's unacceptable." I would say he has continued that with, among other things, his "nice little easter egg" (vandalism of two userbox templates, since reverted). NawlinWiki (talk) 13:23, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

Wnt, here's the easter egg i left for them -- http://www.peeep.us/1c039215 and http://www.peeep.us/5c8abe02 -- that's not vandalism. That's a statement of fact, in addition to clearly mocking, which if course they bring upon themselves. :)

Email me champ, I've just re-enabled it. 151.237.156.42 (talk) 13:50, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

Well, actually, that pretty much is vandalism. Still, the response of literally oversighting the history of the template [24], a file that would just about never be looked at, in order to conceal a name that is so widely disseminated in the free-world media... well, the whole reason why vandalism is wrong is that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia with an educational mission that vandalism disrupts. But if Wikipedia's foremost purpose were to skew and distort the news and "protect" the reader from the facts, then vandalism would no longer actually be wrong. Actions like these make that distinction ever less clear. But to be clear: my top priority here is to figure out how much censorship is going on, how it is being done, and stop it; taunting people is just an indulgence. Wnt (talk) 14:18, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

To answer your question from my Commons talk,

20:32 . . NawlinWiki (Talk | contribs) protected "User:Russavia/messages"‎ ‎[create=sysop] (indefinite) ‎({{pp-create}})

That was done 90 minutes ago, almost immediately after I posted the message before. So they are obviously watching this. You better be careful, they might call you a meatpuppet or some shit -- or Nawlinwiki might block you as my sock and say that I was messaging myself. :>

As your message to NawlinWiki on his talk page, he's found this discussion because I purposely pinged him before. Can you ask him why he marked that editor as my sock, it might be interesting to get his answer on that. Particularly as he didn't like my trout slap. He does say on his userpage he is open to being slapped with a trout when he acts in a dickish way. I call blocking someone because of some "SECRET" oversightable information, and then immediately CONFIRMING that they are one of my socks, a big dick move. 178.88.208.204 (talk) 14:05, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

The thing I'm still most interested in is whether you know a way to get any further information about what edit filters exist than that one. Not being inclined to trust such mechanisms in the first place, and seeing reason to think it is being used to censor content, by this point I just wish someone would send Wikileaks and Cryptome copies of the whole edit filter database so the world would know what Wikipedia censors. The one filter you cited is interesting (though I can't even view that), but there are specific things I wish I could query for to see how far the censorship goes. Wnt (talk) 14:18, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

Gender neutral

Thanks Wnt, for accurately clarifying the meaning of my ANI statement, mentioned at the Gender Gap Taskforce :) GoodDay (talk) 00:22, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

Wargames

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/jul/08/wikipedia-censorship-seth-finkelstein#start-of-comments — Preceding unsigned comment added by MeropeRiddle (talk • contribs) 12:09, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

This is already covered in Kidnapping of David Rohde. However, note that that article ends with a statement by Jimbo Wales that "We were really helped by the fact that it hadn’t appeared in a place we would regard as a reliable source." There has clearly been a massive extension between that point and the one where it is deemed improper to include the name of a person whom reputable newspapers throughout the world have covered in depth. Wnt (talk) 12:22, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

Wnt don't tell me you bought the nonsense stated by @Jimbo Wales: when he said "We were really helped by the fact that it hadn’t appeared in a place we would regard as a reliable source." The fact is Wnt (and User:MeropeRiddle), it WAS reported by a reliable source.

Let's look at this unreliable source. Pajhwok Afghan News was founded in 2003 with assistance from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI) through the UN's International Organization for Migration. By 2009, the news agency was the largest in Afghanistan. The director of the new agency, Danish Karokhel, was in 2008 given an CPJ International Press Freedom Award from the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Pajhwok isn't just one of the most reliable sources originating in Afghanistan, but is probably the MOST reliable source of news eminating from Afghanistan since 2004. Now, when Jimmy says "reliable source" he of course must be talking about Murdoch media BWAHAHAHAHA.

Jimmy lost of lot of respect in my eyes the day I read that nonsense of his in the media. And from the above you can understand why. 109.185.4.109 (talk) 05:20, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

I did not want to come out and accuse someone of lying based on my non-knowledge of the initial media reports; what matters is that, truth or lie, we can't allow an exclusion based on unreliability to establish a precedent against reliable sources. And there is a related phenomenon, just as ugly, at work on Wikipedia: the footprint of Britain here also means that there is a strong prejudice against "wogs" of all varieties. If you cited a fact from that source today, even in a non-controversial context, there's a real risk you'd get the same reaction. There are crusaders who run around trying to get articles about real towns in India and Pakistan deleted because they claim it makes the encyclopedia look bad because the people there tend to say "beautiful" or name a leading family more often than others. Even people who don't buy into it end up preferring newspapers from the US and UK routinely because they don't want to deal with a negative reaction to local sources. But on consideration, maybe these two phenomena aren't all that separate after all. Maybe the British prejudice against publications from the region dates back to the occupation of India, where indeed their version of D-notices and DA-notices may have made it very unsafe for British newspapers to repeat things said in the Indian press without running them through censors first. Wnt (talk) 13:50, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

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Fanny Chmelar

Hi, I have taken a cautious approach towards The Chase (UK game show) gameshows references about the person because of the WP:BLP policy. I recently dealt with a similar one relating to Drew Pickles in the Rugrats, meaning that I might come from a different viewpoint than yours. I do not believe that this is about censorship, but the lack of significance. However, if you think it is notable then such incident should belong to The Chase (UK game show): that is probably the article that is most relevant. What do you think? --Marianian^(talk) 17:26, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

Well, the vandalism is actually a clue. When a whole stream of people come to an article to add something - even if it is in a juvenile way - that is evidence that the incident is notable for that person. Like it, hate it, we didn't make the world, so don't blame us for it. We just have to field it. And if we field it properly, we can make it so that people see no, it's not a big deal, and at the same time, send the vandals off to watch the original YouTube video and have a laugh instead of entertaining themselves with our site. We should also take a step back and remember, this isn't actually a negative thing about Fanny Chmelar! What it means is that her sports achievements are so widely known that they make suitable material for a quiz show, that's the bottom line. If you're not going to respond "harshly", the easiest thing would be for me to just try an edit with the news story and YouTube video, trying to be reasonable about it; or I could propose on the talk page. (I don't know if adding some extra fluff like [25] would be any improvement) Oh, I should add that the biggest change I'd like to see is something incidental but relevant: I think we could alter Template:IPA to provide mouseover letter by letter so that you can look at what "x" is pronounced like. I'm still thinking that over because we have some huge IPA module already under development and I haven't honestly figured out what it's for yet! Wnt (talk) 17:43, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

2013 Islamic State kidnapping of British aid worker

The article Draft:2013 Islamic State kidnapping of British aid worker is created and ready to go however User talk:G S Palmer is wanting community consensus approval for this article to be included. I emailed the functionaries 2 days ago for their approval in publishing this draft but have not received a reply. I started a discussion at Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#2013 Islamic State kidnapping of British aid worker.~Technophant (talk) 20:49, 13 September 2014 (UTC)

ISIS

I saw your edit summary about "History" and can understand your frustration. Have you read the Talk page discussions on this? Please see here in particular, and especially my para before my suggested reordering of the sections (Suggestion No. 3). I have a good deal to say there about the "History" section and handling the history of this group, and elsewhere in recent discussions on the Talk page. --P123ct1 (talk) 17:16, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

I was thinking about it, and I think we have an even bigger conceptual problem: we're editing the wrong article. ISIS as an organization is a thing of the past - this really is The Islamic State, in the sense that the leader of the organization has now styled himself Caliph and claims the loyalty of Muslims. The concept that any Muslim, even Sunni Muslim, submitting within territory he claims to any other leader but him is an apostate, and that apostates should have their heads cut off, seems to be central to its new philosophy. But I really don't understand these things! Still, just as a Wikipedia-worker, I'm thinking that a new draft article for The Islamic State should be started, which refers in summary style only to the past history, including the ISIS era. Wnt (talk) 18:29, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

Have you not seen the discussion about that? There have been suggestions already about splitting the article into State and Organization, but no conclusion has been reached. In the meantime we have to work with the article as it is. Perhaps you would like to add your comments to that discussion here. It really is worth looking at past discussions on the Talk page. --P123ct1 (talk) 19:16, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

Hmmmm, I have a hard time seeing this as the same issue... Wnt (talk) 19:41, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

Foley Video

I'm writing you on your talk page because the discussion at VPP has petered out and I was not sure you monitored that section anymore.

I've finished my draft to change the James Foley (journalist) section on "Beheading" in this subpage: User:RoyGoldsmith/Foley. I plan to substitute this text and associated footnotes for the first two paragraphs of that section. The link to the actual video is reference 2 in the note. I have also somewhat expanded the description of the beheading in the article's text.

If you get the chance, please read this draft and make any comments you want. I will monitor this talk page section. I plan to make the substitution before the end of the weekend. Thanks. --RoyGoldsmith (talk) 08:00, 26 September 2014 (UTC)

@RoyGoldsmith: It's hard to comment on this change because I'm not totally sure what it replaces (I assume the first two paragraphs, so it is a net 1-paragraph addition?). It would be best for you to change your draft to the original text, then revert so that a diff can be viewed. In general, I'm all for adding sources, all against taking sources out. I don't really like "Foley then recites a long message of regret" seems to give an impression it's his feeling rather than a script he's very likely forced to read. Also, "The actual beheading shown in the video clip takes place in less than ten seconds although the entire recording uses over four and a half minutes" seems absurdly wordy because it's focused only on the one narrow issue; I'd rather see something that describes the entire anatomy of the video (introduction, recited speech, putative decapitation/fade to black, photo of the body, and threat) or else just shorten it. Wnt (talk) 10:52, 26 September 2014 (UTC)

Thank you for your time. Yes, I added significantly to the details of the video between the third sentence of the current article (ends with ...filmed in several takes) and the fourth (It does not show the actual moment...). That accounts for the new paragraph. The diff between my draft and the current article is here. I have added a bunch of new and improved references but have not removed any.

I did list the five sections of the video: Obama's speech, Foley's message, the threat, the "beheading" and Sotloff. I too was concerned about the "recites a long message of regret" passage in my draft but I couldn't find enough reliable sources to stick in the part about that he's only reading a script. Most RS's gave one or two sentences of Foley's speech verbatim and let it go at that. I felt that was too long for an encyclopedic summary so I substituted "a long message of regret." I even was worried about the word "recites", rather than a more neutral word like "delivers". Can you think of something better for that sentence?

Because I didn't want to interpret the video (as a primary source) and because of WP:WEIGHT, this made my text somewhat disjointed. But I had to go where a majority of RS's led me. Most sources (and virtually all news coverage) played down the actual beheading as something their viewers might find offensive. But I did find several sources about the times of the video, so I included the "The actual beheading..." sentence. --RoyGoldsmith (talk) 01:36, 27 September 2014 (UTC)

I'm uncomfortable interpreting the video itself in my editing. The actual video is a primary source and must be edited according to our NOR policy. For example, in your revision you say "the video appeared to show the beginning of Foley's decapitation" (my emphasis). I checked the two references provided (Rukmuni and SITE) and neither implied that the decapitation was anything but factual. Have I missed something in the citations? Also, the references do not say anything about the "beginning" of Foley's decapitation. Again, what is your secondary source, not including the actual video, for either appeared or beginning?

In my modification, I say (about the actual beheading) that "It does not show the actual moment of Foley's decapitation". But this is not new; it's currently in the article and was added by someone else sometime ago. In my opinion, WP:NOR prevents us from using anything that was shown on the video unless it's corroborated by secondary sources. I think that we could have used the exact spoken words in the video for direct quotations (even if SITE had not provided us with a transcription). But you can't quote a visual image and, if you say "it's obvious that so-and-so happened in such-and-such a way" as shown by the video (or any picture) then that's interpretation of primary sources. --RoyGoldsmith (talk) 09:28, 27 September 2014 (UTC)

I'm not entirely clear what you're referring to in the second paragraph. I'll admit "appeared" is a little edgy, but sources like [26][27][28] were also skeptical. I didn't think using the word was going too far. But ultimately what I care about is preserving the sources and fundamental facts; these little wording issues aren't so important. Wnt (talk) 13:26, 27 September 2014 (UTC)

Susan Lindauer

Thanks for reverting me. I seem to have somehow bypassed the edit conflict screen, and accidentally overwrote a bunch of comments. Good catch. Ivanvector (talk) 18:36, 26 September 2014 (UTC)

RfC

That was an excellent post you made at the RfC. You are absolutely right about all those issues, and you're the first I've seen on these articles to really talk about it. Well said. Can you work up something you can put in the articles about that? I think readers are going to want to know about that. It'd be nice to see that in articles. What do you think? Thanks. SW3 5DL (talk) 22:45, 6 October 2014 (UTC)

Re [29] - Well, on Wikipedia I can only follow the sources, not lead them, and the media is, well, only barely past the point where they realize Ebola could become airborne. And I'm not in Liberia, so when I read news articles about, say, people breaking into Ebola clinics to steal bloody bedsheets I know something smells, but I can't call them on it. It's possible I might add something here or there, but I can't use Wikipedia for philosophical speculations. I was pushing things already just to speculate on future developments in regard to how our articles are likely going to end up being organized. Wnt (talk) 01:17, 7 October 2014 (UTC)

Lua library to implement Javascript regexes

FYI: In case you want this, there's a PD lua script translated from python in apostata.web.fc2.com --Zhuyifei1999 (talk) 11:09, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

Thanks!!! Wnt (talk) 12:02, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

Molecular gyroscope lead image

Glad to see Template:Did you know nominations/Molecular gyroscope accepted! I think the discussion of which image(s) to use where was unresolved. Should the image with the m-methoxytrityls go into the lead? Or some other variant of it? Or some edits needed on the existing one with the concentric caged compounds? I'm having trouble following the other discussions to know which specific chemical is the one whose speed of rotation is the hook. DMacks (talk) 20:54, 15 October 2014 (UTC)

Well, the problem is, neither of the two chemicals in the images actually spin that fast. That rate is the theoretical limiting rate for the rotor portion of the molecule if nothing interacted with it at all, but despite considerable progress, the existing molecules don't manage to keep it free of interaction completely. I really was never fond of trying to use that hook with one of the pictures; I didn't propose it. Wnt (talk) 03:14, 16 October 2014 (UTC)

Now hold on, the hook is "...(pictured) can spin at 2,400,000,000,000 revolutions per second". But the pictured one isn't it? And "can" is just a hypothetical? And 2.4x10^12 isn't in the article at all? WTF is up with DYK process and WP:V? DMacks (talk) 03:48, 16 October 2014 (UTC)

It's a bit complicated because the free rotation can be derived as a component of the experimentally observed motion - my comments at the DYK explain it about as well as I understand it. One person there just really wanted to work the largest number into it, and the picture also, and ... well, they don't really line up. Wnt (talk) 05:11, 16 October 2014 (UTC)

DYK for Molecular gyroscope

Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 12:02, 17 October 2014 (UTC)

Your article is in the first place for DYK views this month, ~ R.T.G 22:18, 19 October 2014 (UTC)

I can only shake my head and note the above conversation. In the new social media the number of hits is everything, and a surprising degree of artistic license with headlines is obligatory, so the person who DYK'd this was doing it right... but I'm still not feeling the love for the new social media. Wnt (talk) 02:42, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

be warned

If you unhat this pseudo science it will be reported to WP:ANI based on Wikipedia:General Disclaimer μηδείς (talk) 20:36, 18 October 2014 (UTC)

See

This is basically Aspro's fault, but see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incidents μηδείς (talk) 21:23, 18 October 2014 (UTC)

LOL ... in the end it appears that everybody but non-admin refdesk regulars completely ignored the thread, letting it sit until it was auto-archived without making any comment on it at all. [30] I'm totally OK with that; the Refdesk can get by perfectly fine without knights riding in to the rescue. But from there and the original discussion at [31] I think a reasonably strong consensus agrees with my take on the matter. Wnt (talk) 02:39, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

DYK

I have a horrid suspicion that I sound passive-aggressive over the Internet and give you a kitten in recompense should that be true.

Panyd^{The muffin is not subtle} 17:41, 26 October 2014 (UTC)

Not at all. I asked something you didn't have to answer, you did anyway, and it was interesting. :) Wnt (talk) 22:16, 26 October 2014 (UTC)

smooth smokes

Hi, regarding "I assume all the various tars and toxins and stink of it tends to self-limit consumption" -- the answer is, they would, at least to some extent, but the cigarette industry has developed sophisticated engineering of its product to mask harshness and keep the sensory characteristics from kicking in.

E.g. did you know that 90 percent of America's entire licorice supply is used as a cigarette sweetener? Menthol is an anesthetic and a cough suppressant. Various other additives, flavors; if you're interested, it's a long list and includes processes as well as substances. A good search term is "smooth smokes". Cloudjpk (talk) 06:37, 11 November 2014 (UTC)

That does seem interesting, but rather than sending me the data I'd far more appreciate it if you used it for article building. Currently cigarette additive redirects to a simple list; either you could add data like this to a preface there, or completely separate the two and make the redirect into a traditional non-list article. Liquorice doesn't actually match your statistic (maybe demand for tobacco use has fallen? Let's hope) but still, using an anti-asthma herbal medicine in this way is definitely interesting. Wnt (talk) 15:44, 11 November 2014 (UTC)

Sure, I will try to add it to the article.

I checked my statistic (Stanford historian Robert_N._Proctor in his massive history of the tobacco industry) and it was the 1980s. So liquorice#Tobacco seems consistent and I bet you're right about why the decline! But of course 73% is still a surprising number, and yes, goes to the interesting questions of: why? why an anti-asthma herbal medicine? and why so much? Cloudjpk (talk) 02:02, 13 November 2014 (UTC)

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Hmmm, that's odd. I actually asked for something on the talk page rather than editing the article. Seems this is a 'warning', per "if, despite being warned, that editor repeatedly or seriously fails to adhere to the purpose of Wikipedia...", yet is being delivered without any particular reason. I'm reminded of once when I was moving out of an apartment near a college, where local ordinance required landlords to notify tenants in advance of apartment showings, so every few days for six months they would leave every outbound tenant a stack of apartment showing notices for each of the next few days. Wnt (talk) 05:51, 19 November 2014 (UTC)

I just occasionally go through the page and talk page history and send out notifications to people who haven't gotten one yet. Just informational, not a warning or implication of any kind that you have failed to adhere to the purpose of Wikipedia. — Strongjam (talk) 14:36, 19 November 2014 (UTC)

Aggression and aggressors (moved from RD/H)

Greetings: I'm moved the off topic conversation that was started here this to your talk page:

The question started (copied from RD/H):

It looks like Portugal was created by the will of Ferdinand I of León and Castile in 1065, who carved out a province of Galicia in the west (setting part of the north-south boundary). The sons then turned on the one who held Galicia and partitioned it, though I'm not quite sure that's what set the northern border. The elongated north-south shape was from the Reconquista, a sort of international jihadist movement where foreign fighters poured in to combat the Muslims. See also History of Portugal (1139–1279). Wnt (talk) 14:22, 23 November 2014 (UTC)

This might be politically correct but please do not compare the people who fought the Muslim aggressors who had occupied Spain in 711 and the "international jihadist movement". For one thing the jihadists have killed more Muslims than they have killed supposed "Crusaders" and more Muslims than those "Crusaders" have ever killed. I know the BBC (an extremely high quality news outlet when it forgets about political correctness) likes to do that. In a documentary about Islam a few years ago on the World Service (radio) Owen Bennett-Jones compared the Knights of Malta who were resisting a Turkish attack to Al-Qaida. Lisa Jardine in an article on a completely unrelated art history subject casually mentioned the supposedly "unprovoked" attack of Charles V on Turkish Algiers. Unprovoked? The Turks had been waging aggressive war in the Mediterranean and in the Balkans for a few centuries. What were they doing before Vienna? Or did the Austrians resist Ottoman conquest in an "unprovoked" manner? Please. This is a reference desk. Let's refrain from politically correct asides and stick to facts. Contact Basemetal here 14:39, 23 November 2014 (UTC)

Well, you're talking about a four century gap after the Umayyad conquest of Hispania. If a group of Native Americans ran into Indianapolis today and scalped the mayor for invading their lands, would you call that self defense? (That's only two centuries) In any case I was not really seeking to condone or condemn ancient events I little understand; the similarity of having a holy war backed largely by the migration of foreign adventurers looking to fight for their faith just struck me. Wnt (talk) 15:20, 23 November 2014 (UTC)

My answer:

I think your logic is shaky. Are you saying that if in X number of years aggression couldn't be reversed then it should stand and the definition of who's an aggressor and what's an aggression reversed? There had never ceased to be a state of war, at a more or less intense level, between Muslim and Christian Spain, for hundreds of years, all resulting from that original invasion of 711 and the decades that followed (which saw the Muslims even try to invade France in the 730s). (Similarly for the Balkans with the Turkish invasion.) The liberal logic never fails to puzzle me. Why don't you turn your logic around? If we're not entitled to think of the Muslims as the aggressors because they had invaded Hispania so long ago, why think of the Christians who were trying to reverse that original invasion as aggressors. It's been a very long time also. The comparison with a group of Native American citizens of the United States who would suddenly, without warning, run into an American city to commit murder and destruction is hardly appropriate. On other hand if say, a state of war had continuously existed between Mexico and the U.S. for hundreds of years over the loss of Mexican territory, and if 150 or 200 years after the fact the Mexicans finally managed to regain some of the territory they had lost you could hardly call them aggressors. On the condition that the relations between the two countries had never been normalized and that the action is an appropriate reaction to the original aggression. (Which means that it wouldn't be ok on the grounds of "making the US pay for the war of 1846-1848" to just go assassinate the American ambassador in Australia.) That's certainly not the same as a bunch of Mexicans or of American citizens of Mexican descent blowing up a building or a subway and claiming it was a revenge for the loss of Texas. As to the "similarities" you mention, which you say are what caused to indulge in that aside, similarities can be very superficial. Note how many of today's Jihadists come from the European countries that they say they hate even though they're sons and daughters of people who moved there for a more prosperous life. Were the "foreign adventurers" of the Reconquista citizens of Muslim countries born there because their parents had moved there for a better life that suddenly turned on their country of birth for ideological reasons? The supposed "analogies" that form the basis of the liberal view of these questions frankly need to be re-examined. I keep wondering if liberals are really honestly misled by those analogies or if those supposed analogies are not just an excuse for conclusions that the liberal credo (that it is almost certainly the West that's at fault in about anything) seems to demand from the beginning. Contact Basemetal here 16:41, 23 November 2014 (UTC)

Out of interest, when was it said the original Muslim invaders weren't aggressors? It doesn't seem to have been said in the discussion you referred to, so are you referring to an older discussion with Wnt? Nil Einne (talk) 17:36, 23 November 2014 (UTC)

No there was no older discussion with Wnt. No one said explicitly invading Muslims weren't aggressors. But it is implied or at least the criticism seems invariably to be reserved for "Western aggression". For instance when Charles V's attack on Algiers is termed an "unprovoked" attack. Contact Basemetal here 17:40, 23 November 2014 (UTC)

Implied by who? It doesn't seem to have been implied by anyone in the discussion you referred to. Nor does it seem to be implied by the comments you referred to. Other than by some Muslim commentators, most people liberal or whatever seem to be willing to accept Muslims can and have been guilty of aggression just as Christians and plenty of other people can be. Whether or not it's accurate to call Charles V's attack on Algiers in 1541 an unprovoked attack (and to be clear, I'm not commenting on whether it is or isn't), would surely have to do with analysis of the situation around the time of the attack, not what happened over 800 years before which is only useful in understanding why things were how they were around the time (but not useful in any way for providing justification for stuff which happened those 800+ years later). In any case, it's probably best if you keep your dislike what people outside wikipedia have said away from the RD. If you want to criticise what Wnt has said sure, that's fine. But there's no reason to bring what others outside wikipedia may or may not have said or believe, which may not be shared, or even known by Wnt or anyone else on the RD. Nil Einne (talk) 17:46, 23 November 2014 (UTC)

You're welcome to go ahead, analyze the situation in the Mediterranean in the mid 1500s (not "800 years before") and come back and tell me if Charles V's attack can reasonably be called "unprovoked". The reason to bring such things up is not to fault Wnt with them, but to show Wnt's was a typical reaction. There's a context. His remark about the foreigners who joined the Reconquista being like Jihadists (which had absolutely nothing to do with the topic of the section and added absolutely no information to the discussion) is not something that can be judged in isolation. Contact Basemetal here 17:57, 23 November 2014 (UTC)

(EC-I noticed you replied, just to let you know I won't be replying further since I've already gotten more involved than I intended) BTW, to be clear I acknowledge you did make some other points, re: why you regard the unprovoked but as highly inaccurate and it was only stuff in ~700 you referred to. And I'm also not denying there are some non Muslim commentators who may deny there was any Muslim aggression. My point is you appear to have come up with a claim which is unsupported by anything you're quoting, and more importantly, seems to be completely unsupported by anything Wnt or anyone else on the RD said. It may be true some commentators don't discuss Muslim aggression much (which is quite a different thing from say they don't accept it or only reserve aggression to refer to Western aggression), but as much as anything that seems to relate to the fact it's still fairly common to give very little consideration to anything not done by "Westerners" whether good or bad. Perhaps it's true that some such commentators tend to downplay the bad and overplay the good, on the otherhand it seems to be equally true that some overplay the bad and downplay the good. Then again, getting back to my early point, it seems clear as much as anything it's a case of lack of knowledge. Personally, I find such most such analogies between modern times and older times a bad idea however you do it so wouldn't agree with Wnt (who isn't exactly a typical commentator anyway nor could they be called PC) nor the other person you mention comparing the Knights of Malta. That said, even if not you, people on all sides quite commonly do make such (IMO) flawed comparisons when it suits them. Nil Einne (talk) 18:27, 23 November 2014 (UTC)

My general prejudice is that in historic times just about any crown was worn by an asshole. The likelihood of continued offense (even between brother and brother, as with the founding of Portugal) did indeed justify a perception of self defense in many situations where our modern sensibilities would not readily accept it. (Then again, our modern sensibilities certainly have their own long list of well-oiled loopholes) My quite substandard knowledge of Spanish history is that in the days of El Cid the major conflicts were not aligned along religious lines - the notion that Christians should fight Muslims or vice versa was not so well established, and in those pre-Inquisitorial days even Jews were tolerated. Only the most expert student of the history could begin to weigh in on which person in a particular conflict was the aggressor - and they might even disagree - and certainly I'm not ready to do so here. I note only, as from the start, that the particular strategy of declaring holy war and then recruiting people from all over the world to come and fight it seems to be the same today as it was then. Wnt (talk) 22:03, 24 November 2014 (UTC)

DYK for Acute flaccid myelitis

 — Crisco 1492 (talk) 12:40, 24 November 2014 (UTC)

Module:Hex

hi.

please note that this module uses the mw.text.strip() function, which is no longer available (see latest technotes in wp:vpt). i also tried to understand what is the purpose of this module and what is it good for. one thing i found strange is your use of data table to map 0-255 into "00" through "ff". why not simply use

string.format("%2x", byteval)

instead of maintaining the data table? was this module just an exercise, or is it actually meant for something practical?

peace - קיפודנחש (aka kipod) (talk) 20:08, 8 December 2014 (UTC)

Early on with Lua I had been confused by strip markers that turned up in the output; sometimes I didn't know if I could search for something in it or not. This was just a way of checking byte by byte what I was getting from some particular situation, which seemed generally useful (if only very occasionally). The answer about the table is simply that I hadn't been aware of string.format at the time, and once the module was working, I didn't do anything more with it. Wnt (talk) 02:56, 9 December 2014 (UTC)

Blackstone

I didn't want to extend ANI with a sidetrack but you seemed interested enough to look it up. Your interpretation of Blackstone is somewhat correct. The difference is that the distinction between correction and violence didn't exist in Blackstone's time either. He, like you, referred to an earlier, less enlightened time of "old common law" that was no longer in practice. Henry Kelly is the source for the interpretation (who is rather universally accepted as the expert and it was an excerpt from this piece that SY86 was misquoting). It's a 25 page article that I suffered through. It's available on JSTOR [32] if you wish ("Rule of Thumb" and the Folklaw of the Husband's Stick, Henry Ansgar Kelly, Journal of Legal Education Vol. 44, No. 3 (September 1994), pp. 341-365.) It's the last two pages where he deals with Blackstone and the quote. From Kelly:In more recent times, Blackstone has been more mistreated. A common mistake has been to cite his account of the older law allowing wife-beating as still current in his own day, and as justified by him. Kelly then goes on to point out how both Sommers and Hirshman at various levels incorrectly state Blackstone as saying violence had basis in law (Hirshman writing that "Rule of thumb" was the law, Sommers writing that lower classes and courts still used old common law - he refutes both). He goes on to say ...from Blackstone through the American judges if the last century to the modern writers on wife-beating, we see a tendency to believe that customs were worse in the earlier eras and other lands than in the writer's own more enlightened time and place.... No one likes to be associated with wife abuse. But we must all guard against unfairly accusing others of harboring beliefs or engaging in practices for which there is no evidence and we should be concerned to give due credit to those in the past tried to mitigate the harsh customs and practices of others. I believe this is where Paul B. is coming from and he is correct. It was nit to use Kelly as being critical of Sommer's book (a corrected version was noted in the footnotes as it wasn't a main point by Sommer's - in fact, I think it makes her point more strongly to omit it). It's an entire fabrication to use Kelly as the basis for "Rule of thumb" as a legal term. Those were my objections to SY86 in both articles. --DHeyward (talk) 20:26, 12 December 2014 (UTC)

Hmmm, it's true I haven't looked into things deeply enough to keep all the implications straight, and I certainly see how it takes some care and patience to try to put up a good text for an article like this. Wnt (talk) 22:12, 12 December 2014 (UTC)

"Donated to charity"

You said here that Wales had graciously donated his $500,000 prize from the UAE government to charity. The Daily Dot indeed reported that Wales had pledged to donate the money to charity, but that turned out to be incorrect and has been changed at Jimmy Wales' request: The headline now says, Jimmy Wales pledges $500k UAE award to human rights causes, and the text has been updated with a clarification from Wales that indicates he will keep the money to start a Human Rights Foundation of his own with it. Cheers, Andreas JN466 14:04, 19 December 2014 (UTC)

Oh, while I'm here, you might find this interesting. Andreas JN466 14:08, 19 December 2014 (UTC)

depression and tiredness.

It would be a shame to have to hat your response due to your expressing your opinion on the efficacy of a drug used in treatment. Can you edit that out so the rest can be left in place? Thanks. μηδείς (talk) 01:22, 27 December 2014 (UTC)

I see nothing inappropriate in mentioning that the study found that some people with depression 'respond to' paroxetine. I did not suggest it was the best drug, that it was devoid of side effects, or that it was a good idea for the OP to use it. I think you're reading in something here that I did not say. Wnt (talk) 01:27, 27 December 2014 (UTC)

File:George Zimmerman head welts (ABC, Daily Caller, Forensic Protection).png listed for deletion

A file that you uploaded or altered, File:George Zimmerman head welts (ABC, Daily Caller, Forensic Protection).png, has been listed at Wikipedia:Files for deletion. Please see the discussion to see why it has been listed (you may have to search for the title of the image to find its entry). Feel free to add your opinion on the matter below the nomination. Thank you. - Cwobeel (talk) 23:25, 28 December 2014 (UTC)

The article seems to address this image from the news very specifically. It doesn't seem like this should be contentious to keep. Wnt (talk) 02:45, 29 December 2014 (UTC)

FYI

Please carefully read this information:

The Arbitration Committee has authorised discretionary sanctions to be used for pages regarding Complementary and Alternative Medicine, a topic which you have edited. The Committee's decision is here.

Discretionary sanctions is a system of conduct regulation designed to minimize disruption to controversial topics. This means uninvolved administrators can impose sanctions for edits relating to the topic that do not adhere to the purpose of Wikipedia, our standards of behavior, or relevant policies. Administrators may impose sanctions such as editing restrictions, bans, or blocks. This message is to notify you sanctions are authorised for the topic you are editing. Before continuing to edit this topic, please familiarise yourself with the discretionary sanctions system. Don't hesitate to contact me or another editor if you have any questions.

This message is informational only and does not imply misconduct regarding your contributions to date.

—Given that the remedy has just been enacted, I am providing this notice to everybody who has participated in the discussion on Jimbo Wales' talk page for their information. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 16:42, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

I don't really see the relevance. We were discussing the issue of MEDRS and this is some motion about acupuncture. Even if defining "complementary and alternative medicine" is likely to be elastic, nor are the "discretionary sanctions" particularly well defined... I'm sure all this must mean something to an admin or two, but to the rest of us it is just another flag and pile of rocks by some river mouth that ArbCom thinks gives it claim to a continent. Wnt (talk) 22:31, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

This is Russavia

You may be interested in this. It is what was sent to me by Philippe after I was locked. There was no discussion, etc.

A couple of weeks ago I posted this in relation to the abusive use of CU tools by a Commons admin. I also informed the OC and WMF legal. I made the comment to numerous users that my pressing the issue of the clearcut CU abuse on Commons, and the distribution of my CU data to all and sundry (except to me), would likely result in my being globally locked.

Sure, I've socked here on English Wikipedia, and created some pretty content content in the process. I've also engaged in "calling a spade a spade" commentary on those who have being allowed to attack me unabated. The comments about history of legal concerns is fucking nonsense, as is their other ToU violations -- name them you fucking clowns.

Enough said for now. :) 194.181.242.15 (talk) 01:46, 18 January 2015 (UTC)

I'm a bit confused by the whole CU thing. When you admit to sockpuppeting, under Wikipedia policies, it's hard to see how you can effectively argue the CU should never be allowed. But the thing is, Meta:Terms of Use doesn't mention sockpuppeting as a violation! They talk about fraudulently impersonating other users, which is obviously a more severe thing, especially if they are named. I remember that was one of the things I paid attention to when they passed them.

To do WMF's explanation for it, I would suppose the "other legal issues" part would be the thing mentioned in meta:WMF Global Ban Policy where they talk about "repeated harassment of another user". Their claim would be that by uploading a cartoon by a third party about Jimbo, that you were "repeating" what they deem "harassment", and because it was done on Commons and then promptly linked from Jimbo's talk page, it was "on multiple projects", the other part of the policy they've just made. Now, if you were behind the IP posting to Jimbo's talk page your case is harder than if you simply uploaded the comic. I would argue that anyone could have reasonably found that comic about Wikipedia to be funny and germane to our project, and uploaded it with innocent intent, and how can it be harassment to upload what is innocent? But to deliberately rub his nose in it was nastier. Nonetheless, nastier or not -- that part of the "harassment" would be limited to Wikipedia, and it is still not an extreme case. I mean, when I look at their bold print policy I'm thinking of people who out editors, try to get them fired from their jobs, libel them as criminals and make that a top Google hit for them... I'm not thinking comics. It is still a huge overreach, from everything that I've seen, to take this Wikipedia spat and make it into something that costs us a productive Commons admin and prolific uploader.

And it bothers me more that it is using a brand-new mechanism by which top WMF people can bypass all community discussion and explanation. Simply put, the medium is the message. So long as computers are a hierarchical top-down resource owned and controlled by one person, all the pretenses of not censoring and ruling by consensus are nothing but vain hopes. Only a decentralized forum, like Usenet or Bittorrent, can possibly preserve a functional political system. In the end any centralized computing system appears doomed to be dominated by high priests who need not publish any Twelve Tables of their laws, but who simply swoop down without explanation or apology. This is a lesson we will have to learn and learn soon as the truly creepy technologies slouch rapidly past the gates of Bethlehem. Wnt (talk) 03:04, 18 January 2015 (UTC)

Hey, I just clicked here by accident, but then I read the last entry anyway. I'm not really sure what's being discussed, but don't forget about freenet as a modern thing that sort of inherently prevents top-down control of anything on its network :) SemanticMantis (talk) 00:08, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

Yeah, but we need something big and fast, capable of swallowing up a Wikipedia edit stream's worth of data without a hiccup. And I think that Usenet really would benefit from hosting a project that provides a renewed sense of purpose a la Star Trek I. Wnt (talk) 01:39, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

Sock policy is set by individual wikis and not by the WMF, though I can understand the WMF banning someone for repeatedly breaking local wiki policies even if the policies being broken aren't WMF-wide. The English Wikipedia incremental revision dump is around 500MB a day compressed, not too bad, but I can't tell from the above what you want to do with it. I bet it could be made a lot smaller by squashing it into a diff stream instead of a stream of complete copies of every new revision. 50.0.205.75 (talk) 18:03, 27 January 2015 (UTC)

mass surveillance dyk

I saw further up you were looking for mass surveillance DYK's. I just did about 3x expansion of the Citizenfour article and there's plenty more good expansion possible, but I'm sort of out of steam. The DYK requirement is apparently 5x in 7 days so maybe someone else can join in. I have a bunch of sourcing notes that I can post if anyone wants them. It seems like a good article to be expanding, since the film appears likely to win the best documentary oscar in a few weeks. I've always opposed the DYK program and wasn't thinking about it when I did the expansion, but I can understand why people get into it. Have you read Greenwald's book No Place to Hide? I haven't yet, but its content apparently overlaps the film a lot, so it's likely to be useful for the film article. 50.0.205.75 (talk) 17:56, 27 January 2015 (UTC)

Paid access

I saw your note about JSTOR charging for publicly available text. Of course one can also think of it as chargeable text having a freely available overattentive - it's surprising how often a free version of something can be found.

But I thought you would be interested in http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-361776905.html - this is interesting for three reasons:

1. It makes a claim to copyright "COPYRIGHT 2009 NewsRX"
2. It is attributed to a "staff writer" of Medical Devices & Surgical Technology Week, when it is a word-for-word copy of a press release by Clitoriad
3. It is attempting to charge for access to something of little value, and available freely elsewhere

As I replaced this reference (and an effectively identical one attributed to Health & Medicine Week) it occurred to me that it might be valuable to have a list of journals which regurgitate press releases in this manner.

All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 12:52, 29 January 2015 (UTC).

Misc ref desk

I would be interested in your take on the bruxing discussion which another editor zapped. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 00:48, 31 January 2015 (UTC)

ANI notification

There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. The thread is Does Wikipedia offer medical advice now?. Thank you. Ian.thomson (talk) 21:02, 31 January 2015 (UTC)

re

re something you said, email me, about something I've said indirectly there and elsewhere but....since I'm being watched would rather discuss privately, not out of fear though.Skookum1 (talk) 07:28, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

More like prudence.Skookum1 (talk) 08:11, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

I really don't want to get into private information here - when I'm on Wikipedia the goal is to get what can stand up in an article for the world to see. I don't expect you to trust me with a confidence (in unencrypted email, yet, which is a laugh!) and I'm not ready to trust that you know the facts for an article better than published sources either. If this is about other Wikipedians, well ... I think it's much more productive for you to filter the argument at your end by coming up with a list of bad diffs, i.e. specific bad edits to the encyclopedia against which you protest, rather than focusing on the editors who made them. Especially if they are shills, focusing on them as individuals tends to blow up into the wrong kind of fight really quickly since I would expect a true shill is highly prepared for a fight, may have powerful allies ready to help him, and in the end is free to regard his account as expendable and therefore is ready to make a sacrifice play if that's what it takes. Wnt (talk) 15:09, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

All too true...and I get irked by people demanding diffs when I raise something that has been going on or went on in the past. What I was wanting to say was an observation and not about any one article but about the whole general thing we are seeing so much more of but has always been around; and have powerful allies, including those similarly here all along. And yes don't kick a dragon in the knees if you don't have a magic sword, someone I used to know once said. Not that I do, but I'm tired to being played by their game (of whichever faction/agenda) and by the general decay of this place into misrule by guidelines and procedure and those who run/inflict them. I've some thoughts on reform and though I've said them elsewhere earlier don't wish to discuss them with hostile eyes looking on. Sad that that would be the case, but after all this is the encyclopedia that anyone can edit. And mess with, and you....and not just in Wikipedia.

Being monitored is a given it's what to do about the infiltration and manipulation that the system has so many ways to do; what was supposed to be wiki - quick and easy - is becoming more and more arduous and complicated; which are guidelines and renderings/statements about them more and more and more; more rigidity, more mechanistic ways of thought, an obsession with numerical statistics (quantitative analysis) and invoking guidelines if Holy Writ, and no qualitative considering of what is right and what is wrong; the amorality is breatheaking sometimes....and that speaks to the matter also, in terms of an account being expendable... just like people. I haven't looked at the list of missing wikipedians lately....it's been growing steadily I imagine huh?Skookum1 (talk) 16:15, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

e.g. .... like a mantra, or from a manual, and there are indeed such manuals, about such tactics to denounce discussion or the person fielding it; my most recent here and note my recent response on JimboTalk. Same old line over and over; by people who don't or won't read what you have actually said, alleging NPA and AGF against you in response, and criticizing your writing which they won't even read. Absurd or what? So sad how far this place has fallen, but more and more the entrenchment of these tactics is institutionalized into the place and treated as if the valid norm; it's not, and for those who aren't doing it deliberately it speaks to an inability to read and think or understand complex sentences and/or sustained argument. They want it all in point form - 1000 =- that's almost as constraining as Twitter. And presume to be writing an encyclopedia for god's sake. That also implicitly and by definition information suppression and control and persecution/condemnation of those resisting it.

Innocent or by systematic design or professional assignment, there's getting to be more and more of it, and less and less good content and more and more bad decisions and/or completely tainted one. I tire of it, and don't need to hear criticism from people who refuse to read what they do not know; because they do not listen, and do not want to. (talk) 16:39, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

Whether by lack of reading/thinking ability or lack of knowledge of the subject and issues, or by design or contract, there's too much of it going on and too many people with the power and influence to condemn someone without even ONCE discussing any of the content issues that led to the dispute. 3000 words is fine in a newspaper even rather short, for a magazine. Makes me wonder how much such people have read, and what they are capable of reading and/or understanding. Perhaps most just do not; I'm of the opinion this is a semi-literate or post-literate age....but that, too, is by design, unwitting or immanent or by contrivance; look up the Book of the Machines and have a read.... hm no article or redirect on it; look in gutenberg.org or marxist.org or various other places.... it should redirect to Erewhon but maybe no one ever mde oneSkookum1 (talk) 17:03, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

Ref Desk proposal

Hi Wnt, I don't know if you've been following the recent threads on the ref desk talk page, but based on some review of that material, I have a simple proposal that I'd like your feedback on before I shop it to the whole group. It's very simple: For a trial period (1 month?), we agree to not remove or hat any questions for reasons of seeking medical/legal advice (and perhaps extend to include requests for opinion). Rather than a free-for-all, we first respond with boilerplate or a template, something along the lines of this:

“ Hello, and welcome to the Wikipedia Reference desk. Your question seems to be seeking medical or legal advice [or perhaps a request for opinion]. We do not give this type of advice [links to disclaimer and guidelines, header, etc], but our users will be allowed to post citations/links to informational references. We hope this information might be useful to you. If you further pursue advice here, this question may be removed. ”

At that point, we can remove any responses that diagnose, proscribe, treat any illness or legal situation, but allow links to RS. Perhaps even demand that any responses include references, or risk removal. Would that seem ok to you? The thing is, we really don't get that many medical legal questions, and I like how this puts us in the position to police ourselves as respondents, rather than posters. As I see it, this proposal is consistent with our guidelines, and it might forestall some debates, because hopefully the use of a template will warn all our regulars (and irregulars) to be on their best behavior. On the upside, we can then provide useful information, such as links to other people's opinion pieces, links to WP pages that are about medical topics, peer-reviewed literature, etc. So, any thoughts? Would you support such an experiment? Thanks, SemanticMantis (talk) 15:04, 6 February 2015 (UTC)

I don't think you'll get it past them, but I'd prefer a wording that doesn't seem as discouraging to the questioner at first glance. Perhaps "Hello, and welcome to the Wikipedia Reference desk. Your question appears to invite medical or legal advice. Our users may answer you with informational references that may help you to learn more about your topic, but it is inappropriate for us to provide professional advice [link to guidelines]. You should not rely on it as such, because anyone can write these replies [link to anyone can edit statement] and Wikimedia disclaims responsibility for erroneous or even malicious suggestions. [link to disclaimer]" Wnt (talk) 15:22, 6 February 2015 (UTC)

Well, I wasn't terribly optimistic, so that's why I asked a few people individually first :) I'm happy to tweak the details, work on the wording, etc. Your wording does seem like an improvement. Part of why I thought this might have some support is that it's sort of a compromise - people who want to police get to put the template up, and people who want to give non-advice responses can still do so. I'll see what the others say, and maybe post on the talk page over the weekend. Thanks, SemanticMantis (talk) 16:40, 6 February 2015 (UTC)

Hyperinflation in Zimbabwe

Would you please look at Talk:Hyperinflation in Zimbabwe#Maximum rate? From your comment in Daily rate on the same page, it looks as if you might understand the issue better than I do. TIA. --Thnidu (talk) 21:17, 11 February 2015 (UTC)

I don't really understand it. The numbers appear to be straight from the CATO Institute source [33] and are "month-to-month" and "year-to-year" rates. But when I take the last 12 months 796000001*6900001*125*32.9*27.0*9.39*5.334*3.1254*3.8129*2.2586*2.2083*3.4006 I'm off by something like five orders of magnitude from the year-to-year rate. I could easily be missing something obvious. Wnt (talk) 21:52, 11 February 2015 (UTC)

Your Costas Vaxevanis quote

After seeing your copyedit of Finn Nørgaard I went to your user page and saw your the quote: "I'll say something that's very simple: Journalism means publishing something that others are trying to hide. Everything else is public relations."

On that note I wanted to point out that in Denmark a journalist whose publications fall in the latter category is referred to as a 'mikrofonholder', literally a 'microphone holder'. Is there an English equivalent? Thanks and all the best. Lklundin (talk) 19:21, 15 February 2015 (UTC)

The word "mouthpiece" is used this way, but perhaps it is a more general term than yours? (Note that despite doing the translation... I don't actually know Danish! :) So I just hope I didn't foul anything up too badly. Wnt (talk) 22:21, 15 February 2015 (UTC)

Maybe it is not so close. The 'microphone holder' is decidedly pejorative, whereas 'mouthpiece' seems more neutral, or no? I think translations are challenging, one has to balance being accurate and idiomatic. Especially translating headlines into English is hard, because in English the phrases and the usage of verbs seem quite different than in normal text. Anyway, as far as I can judge your copy-editing of English articles clearly created by non-native speakers is fully correct. Lklundin (talk) 23:00, 15 February 2015 (UTC)

February 2015

Welcome to Wikipedia. I have noticed that some of your recent changes, such as the one you made to Tintin in the Congo, have conflicted with our verifiability policies. While we invite all users to contribute constructively to Wikipedia, we urge all editors to provide reliable sources for edits made. When others disagree, we recommend you seek consensus for certain edits by discussing the matter on the article's talk page. Keep in mind that this is a Featured Article that was reviewed by may different reviewers. Feel free to contact me if I can answer any questions. Prhartcom (talk) 20:40, 16 February 2015 (UTC)

Wnt, Wikipedia is not a soapbox or a place to tell the world about your noble cause. The article you are disruptively editing is a classic comic book; it is not the place to inform readers about former atrocities of the Congo. If you have any questions I will be glad to discuss them with you. Prhartcom (talk) 21:31, 16 February 2015 (UTC)

Why then is it not a soapbox to complain about the 'cruelty to animals' of going on a safari, as you do interminably in your not-worthy-to-be-a-featured-article? I think you're the one on the soapbox, presenting a phony analysis of the comic in terms of generic issues that have NOTHING to do with the historical context in which it was being written. Wnt (talk) 21:34, 16 February 2015 (UTC)

Hell, your article doesn't even explain what 'breaker of rocks' means because previously according to the talk page somebody (I haven't looked up who, but I have a guess) decided to delete the explanation about Stanley. Wnt (talk) 21:35, 16 February 2015 (UTC)

Transfer of copyright

There have been discussions on Commons for a few years about this, refer to c:Commons_talk:Transfer_of_copyright. Thanks --Fæ (talk) 10:06, 27 February 2015 (UTC)

A kitten for you!

Hi Wnt

Thank you for being so kind to a rank newbie. I hope you like kittens. I'm kinda more of a sabertooth kinda person, but I would say that, given that I'm something of a nerd and I like ancient history, heh. Sorry for using person. I'm kinda gender-confused, if you know what I mean. But that's OK on the wiki, right? I am so glad your not judging me for my interest in fashion. I may be a woman, after all. My mom took me to all those shows when I was little, and I could have been a model, only now I got pimples which makes me kinda sad and emo, but yeah, yolo, whatever, right? Have a great day and keep up the good work. Your my inspiration. :-)

Plastic-Al1ty (talk) 05:23, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

Heather Bresch

It's a non-issue at this point, but @Hipocrite: did specifically say they were being sarcastic when asked.

If you have a minute, I'd appreciate it if you took a look here to see if that addresses your concerns. As stated at ANI, I never intended to imply that her government lobbying was philanthropic, nor did I ever support such a depiction. The suggestion to add more information/context seems perfectly reasonable to me.

CorporateM (Talk) 01:53, 7 March 2015 (UTC)

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bold

My original position was that we should not use bold as a rule - glad to see you agreed. Collect (talk) 13:00, 22 March 2015 (UTC)

It's not really "agreeing"; it's just that if I have a choice between having you bold half the section that uses a slightly darker font or not bold the two sentences that were in larger/darker font than those with them, the latter option is better. I remember a time when getting bold font on a dot matrix printer was a cool new extra, so I can live the lapse. Wnt (talk) 13:53, 22 March 2015 (UTC)

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Areas of Interest/Expertise

Hi Wnt, would you please consider adding some topic headings to your entry at Wikipedia:RD_regulars? I know you are quite expert at some types of biology, but there are probably lots of other things I haven't even guessed :) I'm hoping to get participation up, so that it can become a useful resource for all of us. Thanks, SemanticMantis (talk) 14:36, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

Your vote

Appreciate your input on the discussion at the Amos Yee AfD. Just wanted to share with you, Yee's views in his video might not be totally accurate. For one, his statistics are uncited and are most likely bollocks. For example, the income tax rate for residents can never rise above 20% - and that's for the wealthiest people earning above S$320,000. But because it's a progressive tax, if you earn less than S$20,000 a year, you pay 0%. Check this tax calculator download from this website. Also, Yee's view that Lee thought "money = happiness" is nonsense IMO. Having read Lee's book Hard Truths To Keep Singapore Going, he establishes even in the introduction that economic progress was vital to have strong and technologically superior defence forces. Having experienced colonial masters over Singapore, in Japan and Britain, IMO Lee was far more concerned about keeping Singaporeans "safe" than "happy", especially since Singapore is surrounded by other nations with different ethnic ratios. Lastly, there are easily 30 more countries with larger income inequalities than Singapore by various indexes. starship.paint ~ ¡Olé! 03:30, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

That tax structure sounds similar to the U.S., minus the earned income credit and with lower taxes for the wealthy; still, I'd have to be an expert at the two tax codes to really compare how each affects people meaningfully, and I'm certainly not. What's easier to say is that the list of countries with higher income inequality is dominated by African and other poor countries that are not often held up as examples for anyone. It seems pretty clear to me that both Singapore and the U.S. have reached levels of income inequality that are already incompatible with meaningful democracy, and approaching the point where even the trappings of democracy are unsupportable. Wnt (talk) 13:13, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

There are actually quite a few prominent examples of countries with higher inequality than Singapore which are not African or poor. Amongst North/South America, I count at least Chile, Mexico, Uruguay, Argentina and Costa Rica which are above the world average for GDP per capita. Hong Kong and Malaysia are Asian examples. Lastly, three are members of BRICS (Brazil, China, South Africa). About democracy, the United States has vowed to embody that, but I don't think [ http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/03/lee-kuan-yew-conundrum-democracy-singapore/388955/ Singapore has ever similarly championed] democracy or political rights. But if democracy isn't acceptable, what is? starship.paint ~ ¡Olé! 23:35, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

Uruguay seems really out of place on that list, since I think of it as a level-headed and democratic country (thanks in fair part to Mujica). Indeed, I'm finding a lot of sources putting its Gini coefficient at 0.379 in 2012 e.g. [34], though the World Bank is quoted for the 0.45 figure in the article. Apart from that, I'm not sure what to say here. Wnt (talk) 23:59, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

• Just the last bit I asked then. Are you championing democracy or another political system? starship.paint ~ ¡Olé! 00:11, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

I believe I was saying the loss of democracy due to economic inequality is a legitimate concern. Wnt (talk) 12:50, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

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@Cwobeel: I don't know why it has become so routine to post these, but do you realize this doesn't even say which topic you're giving notice about? So many things have become considered as vaguely related to some Arbcom case or other... Wnt (talk) 11:26, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

The topic is BLPs, as said in the notice's first paragraph. - Cwobeel (talk) 13:46, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

MfD nomination of Wikipedia:Lua/Modules

Wikipedia:Lua/Modules, a page you substantially contributed to, has been nominated for deletion. Your opinions on the matter are welcome; please participate in the discussion by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:Lua/Modules and please be sure to sign your comments with four tildes (~~~~). You are free to edit the content of Wikipedia:Lua/Modules during the discussion but should not remove the miscellany for deletion template from the top of the page; such a removal will not end the deletion discussion. Thank you. Steel1943 (talk) 20:25, 20 April 2015 (UTC)

Edit Conflict on WP:RD/S

An unfortunate, accidental edit-conflict removed one of my comments. As this comment was primarily an apology directed from me to you because I was being grumpy, I thought I could just note on your talk page rather than messing with the reference desk page history. Happy reading! Nimur (talk) 11:48, 7 May 2015 (UTC)

Oh, I know that reading Fox News is asking for abuse. :) But as it happened, eventually a good explanation was put forward, and sometimes it's just interesting to know where the errors in the news come from. Wnt (talk) 20:56, 7 May 2015 (UTC)

Kostas Vaxevanis

Hey,

Random query after glancing at your user page;

I think the quote you're ascribing to Kostas was originally said by Orwell right? Is there a reason you credit it to Vaxevanis? NickCT (talk) 12:39, 7 May 2015 (UTC)

See Kostas Vaxevanis for the relevant circumstance. (Incidentally, when I put it up, I don't think the outcome of the case had been decided) My feeling is, he earned the cite. :) Wnt (talk) 20:53, 7 May 2015 (UTC)

Hmmmm.... Interesting. Thanks. NickCT (talk) 01:53, 9 May 2015 (UTC)

COI commentary

I suggest that you read https://www.change.org/p/jimmy-wales-founder-of-wikipedia-create-and-enforce-new-policies-that-allow-for-true-scientific-discourse-about-holistic-approaches-to-healing and think for a moment about what these people want.—Kww(talk) 00:04, 11 May 2015 (UTC)

Nay, that doesn't work. The thing about trying to be open minded is you know that 99.44% of the stuff you're open to will be pure unadulterated nonsense; it's the remaining 0.56% that pays for all. If Wikipedia is bombarded by alternative medicine POV pushers - and that's the most that I see in the petition you cite - that's no reason to abuse our COI policy, which addresses a quite specific situation, just in order to shut the door on open-mindedness. Wnt (talk) 03:19, 11 May 2015 (UTC)

RfC: Guidance on commas after Jr. and Sr.

Following the closure of a recent RfC you participated in, I have started an RfC on the separate but related issue of commas after Jr. and Sr.. Please see Wikipedia:Village pump (policy) § RfC: Guidance on commas after Jr. and Sr. and feel free to comment there. Thanks! —sroc 💬 06:03, 14 May 2015 (UTC)

Template:Interlanguage link

You left a note on Template:Interlanguage link in November 2013, about {{Link}}. What became of that proposal? Please can you update (or remove) your note? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 13:41, 26 May 2015 (UTC)

GM food RfC

Note about this RfC where you !voted. I tweaked the statement to make it more clear that it is about eating GM food and health. I'm notifying each person who !voted, in case that matters to you. Sorry for the trouble. Jytdog (talk) 21:08, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

Proposed deletion of Shawskank

The article Shawskank has been proposed for deletion because of the following concern:

WP:NEO

While all constructive contributions to Wikipedia are appreciated, content or articles may be deleted for any of several reasons.

You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{proposed deletion/dated}} notice, but please explain why in your edit summary or on the article's talk page.

Please consider improving the article to address the issues raised. Removing {{proposed deletion/dated}} will stop the proposed deletion process, but other deletion processes exist. In particular, the speedy deletion process can result in deletion without discussion, and articles for deletion allows discussion to reach consensus for deletion. reddogsix (talk) 14:20, 24 June 2015 (UTC)

DYK nomination of Shooting of Walter Scott

Hello! Your submission of Shooting of Walter Scott at the Did You Know nominations page has been reviewed, and some issues with it may need to be clarified. Please review the comment(s) underneath your nomination's entry and respond there as soon as possible. Thank you for contributing to Did You Know! BlueMoonset (talk) 22:58, 26 June 2015 (UTC)

DYK for Shooting of Walter Scott

Do try and pass this thank you on. Thanks. Victuallers (talk) 00:10, 5 July 2015 (UTC)

I agree with your comments

It's also that people here become a bit too much emotionally involved in supporting certain policies (or the way they should be implemented). It's purely factional/tribal warfare driven by a sense of an "emergency" that is felt by one side, but which is not based on a real problem. Count Iblis (talk) 20:39, 8 July 2015 (UTC)

Comment request

Hi! I was wondering if you could possibly comment on this discussion? Thanks! Chihciboy (talk) 18:44, 13 July 2015 (UTC)

Standard Offer unblock request for Technophant

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

Technophant has requested an unblock under the standard offer. As one of about 60 editors who has contributed to User talk:Technophant you may have an interest in this request. Sent by user:PBS via -- MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:48, 18 August 2015 (UTC)

I'm not going to riddle all of this out right now, but I made a comment about the bit I remember at [35]. Wnt (talk) 15:21, 19 August 2015 (UTC)

Russian Political Pressure

Hey, thanks for your input on the Charas article, I think this issue is more about 'Sputnick' than detailing drug cultivation :-) Anyway, they are insistent the entire article comes down which would be completely unacceptable. Tbh, I think you mistook my attempt at wit for self-censorship, I was trying to conflate Putin with his wish to return Russia to the bad old days of the USSR and 'censorship', it obviously didn't work. Moving on, I edited the article after discovering that there were no sources and the entry detailed the manufacture of illegal drugs. To protect Wikipedia's independence I left the article in the main alone and contacted Jimmy for a policy request, best wishes. Twobells^t@lk 14:22, 23 August 2015 (UTC)

[untitled Refdesk]

Hi Wnt, thanks for your answer to my questions on the Science Reference Desk. There were at least two recently, one was about gravitational potential energy. I have replied the other one, concerning brown dwarf stars.Regards, Rich Peterson144.35.45.43 (talk) 14:49, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

Proposed amendment to WP:ADMIN regarding paid editing

You recently commented on a brainstorm that discussed banning administrators from paid editing. A concrete proposal to amend the administrator policy to this effect has been made at Wikipedia talk:Administrators#Proposed change - 'No paid editing" for admins. Your comments would be appreciated. MER-C 08:17, 5 September 2015 (UTC)

Research

Hello Wnt! Your username appears in a chapter of my PhD thesis about the progress of the Egyptian Revolution of 2011 Wikipedia English article. I'd love to share a pre-publication version with you if you'd like to review it? Let me know :) Many thanks. Best, --hfordsa (talk) 16:31, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

Vision

Hi Wnt. I happened to run upon your comments here. I thought they eloquently laid out the central principles our wikis are based on. I think they encapsulate something very beautiful and important which is overlooked a lot. I wanted to invite you to create a page for them on meta, listing the points about history, revision, archives and the ability to revert every edit, along with all comments being equal - these should be guiding principles for future development that I think most community members would agree with but doesn't seem to be communicated well enough. You can call it philosophy or the wiki way or a vision or whatever you deem suitable. I really hope you take me up on my offer. I'm mostly active on meta if you wanna reply, I'll be happy to help. Thanks. Kind regards. Theo10011 (talk) 20:52, 16 September 2015 (UTC)

Visibility of nebulae

I don't want to put this on the Reference Desk as I've been castigated for giving too few references but any field guide to astronomy should say which nebulae can be seen with a telescope without a camera, those are by necessity naked eye visible when right next to them. Okay I do have one reference for that, though introductory sounding at the beginning [36]. It's the colors that are hard to see without long exposures (I think some people just "photoshop" the red channel to the exact red of hydrogen-alpha, the green channel the shade of the big greenish emission line.., though you can Google Oxygen III filters, Hydrogen-alpha filters and so on which are used for more accuracy). Usually they look gray to the eye. Some needing perfect conditions to glimpse but some are pretty bright. I saw the Ring Nebula in a big 14 inch scope and even only 4 miles from Times Square it was easy to see (though very dim). When the outreach team went to a much shorter eyepiece I thought the surface brightness drop would surely make it invisible but it barely survived letting me stare at it for a while. It's awesome to see a large (apparent diameter) planetary nebula so dim that it's on the very knife edge between existence and non-existence, you have not seen what "ghost" means till you've see that. In space the sky is a little darker (no airglow, atmospheric extinction or scattering) and telescopes don't transmit 100% so the list of things that a book says doesn't need astrophotography to see is a lower bound. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 01:14, 1 October 2015 (UTC)

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Beta Uprising

Thanks for your suggestion, I've followed up on it. The sources are indeed a bit thin and a lot of the text is still unsourced, but here's hope more media will treat it soon. Darth Viller (talk) 17:29, 3 October 2015 (UTC)

I removed the picture at BU that you had moved. The image was inserted in the first place by vandals who came from /r9k/. Darth Viller (talk) 12:19, 10 October 2015 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

The Original Barnstar

Thank you for defending the Beta Uprising page in the deletion review. I especially liked what you said here: "This isn't supposed to be decided based on what you think that someone might be 'inspired' to do. But since most of the delete votes are on just this basis, then I will restate what I said at the AfD: this meme is actually interesting and important and can inspire people not just to commit mass slaughter, but to reevaluate and correct aspects of society that may be leading misguided people to commit such crimes. The premise is that a fundamental change in the pattern of sexual relations throughout society have consequences." I agree and I hope the cultural notability of this meme will be acknowledged. The war on shrugs (talk) 21:14, 5 October 2015 (UTC)

"tyranny of copyright"?

I gather you don't write for a living, nor know anybody who does so. --Orange Mike | Talk 15:10, 6 October 2015 (UTC)

@Orangemike: Copyright is a system of taxes that is supposed to compensate authors. We can design a better system of taxes that compensates authors more and unproductive middlemen less, that is equally answerable to reader choice, which does not ration what we read. It isn't that complicated. Instead of having to pay a royalty on a per-item basis, people have to pay a certain figure, based on their income, each year. They can direct this to any funding organizations for writing/arts/music they wish, or even designate individual recipients for the tax money themselves. However, the amount from one person to any one recipient has to be capped at a very small level, to prevent corrupt deals and also as a matter of ensuring that a large number of artists are able to do their work rather than one raking in all the money.

Copyright is a doomed system. News outlets are folding. Books and movies are becoming easy to pirate en masse. Nothing short of a perfect Orwellian state can slow that down. Meanwhile, even working as it "should" be, musicians are reduced to "indentured servitudes", signing low-paying 30-year contracts just to get access to the market. And a third of all our culture is taken over by advertising meant to encourage the sort of consumerist culture Pope Francis disapproves of.

We don't need any of that. You can say that a tax like I suggest is "bureaucratic", but can you seriously tell me that copyright lawsuits aren't? You might call it heavy-handed, but is it as draconian so as a SPDA raid? No. The copyright tax seemed like a tolerable approximation of justice when books were expensive and it didn't affect how much people could read very much. But it was never right, because it conflicted with freedom of speech. That's the fundamental right, whereas copyright is just a broken program. Wnt (talk) 18:03, 6 October 2015 (UTC)

Thank you for your participation on the talk page of the Founder

I know it is quite difficult to convey irony through just the printed word. In good faith you were helpful in pointing out how the encyclopedia can be misused. I should probably let you know that I create content and edit medical articles with excellent citations to systematic reviews and meta-analyses (when available) along professional, graduate level texts. My reversion rate is pretty low in content creation. I guess I am only responding here on your talk page because my post to Wales talk page turned into a slightly embarrassing tutorial. Not really your problem, but mine. Best Regards, Barbara (WVS) (talk) 10:37, 7 October 2015 (UTC)

Well, I tend to reply to the topic, not the person - I realized you knew better, but as you saw further down, some other people were not as clear on some of these points. Wnt (talk) 10:47, 7 October 2015 (UTC)

Reputation management companies creating editor dossiers

Hi, on Jytdog's talkpage you recently said this: "...reputation management companies and companies that pay editors will have a permanent advantage over ordinary volunteers who can't download their own copy of the database and create dossiers on people." As someone who's trying to better understand and document our "challenge" with the PR/SEO/RM industry (see my essay), I'm genuinely interested in knowing more about this. Is it a hypothetical or do we think this is really going on at Wikipedia? - Brianhe (talk) 21:02, 20 October 2015 (UTC)

Hypothetical. I have absolutely no evidence for it.

However, large networks do exist [37] which actually do seek to make money by controlling community decisions. This seems like an attractive tactic for them to use ... but only if administrators allow it to become usable. Wnt (talk) 22:41, 20 October 2015 (UTC)

Okay thanks. Every once in a while I get a glimmer of accounts catering to our preferences/prejudices (e.g. personas suggesting they're from a region of an active anti-COI volunteer) but nothing solid yet. – Brianhe (talk) 01:38, 21 October 2015 (UTC)

It reminds me of a promotional article I deleted today and the editor came back with, "But I was told that every company needs a Wikipedia page!" And I believe he was told that, along with advice about setting up a Facebook page and everything else involved with having an online presence.

So, there are social media consultants or reputation management consultants or whomever advising people who start new companies that they need to create a Wikipedia article. And probably charging a nice price for the advice. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 18:05, 21 October 2015 (UTC)

Honestly, I'm enough of an inclusionist to just about agree with that ... the catch being, by "needs" I'm as often thinking of "...to say what the scam is, who their competitors are, how you can improvise to do without their product" as the thing the marketer has in mind. Wnt (talk) 18:08, 21 October 2015 (UTC)

Inxight

Hi, you added some material to the Talk:Inxight page which mentions the Inxight and Endeca text systems. I don't see how that information is relevant to improving the article, so I've "collapsed" it. Of course, any organization that is doing large-scale text processing work is going to use text analysis and search tools. But I don't see that it's useful to add the customer list of Inxight to the article... unless, say, we find that 60% of Inxight's revenue comes from one agency. --Macrakis (talk) 21:55, 21 October 2015 (UTC)

A cup of tea for you!

With this ever dramatic world including WikiDrama, here's a cup of tea to alleviate your day! This e-tea's remains have been e-composted SwisterTwister talk 07:03, 22 October 2015 (UTC)

Centre for Equality and Inclusion

• Centre for Equality and Inclusion

Hey there Wnt,

I saw a redlink on your userpage and decided to create an article for it.

Please see Centre for Equality and Inclusion.

Feel free to improve the page, add categories, expand, etc.

Thank you,

— Cirt (talk) 14:32, 25 October 2015 (UTC)

Re your comment

Regarding this, I was on Arbcom at the time; the incident definitely happened as described, and the admin in question is no longer an admin and banned from Wikipedia. I don't feel it's appropriate to name the admin involved; Wikipedia's hope for banned editors is that they will leave Wikipedia or the affected area with their pride and dignity intact, whether permanently or for the duration of their ban is still (rightly) Wikipedia policy, and there's nothing to be gained by raking over old incidents. ‑ iridescent 23:53, 1 November 2015 (UTC)

I'm relieved to learn this isn't something recent. Wnt (talk) 11:28, 2 November 2015 (UTC)

Profligate prostitution party of apostates.

The Daily Beast was far from the only one who got fooled again. Even reputable sites like CBC, The Guardian and TIME bought it. The New Yorker confirms the translation was SITE's. But the vast majority of them omit mentioning this, instead putting it on ISIS. The scary part is this is normal. No way to measure how much of what the news says any Islamist group since 2001 has said or done is actually embellishment or complete fabrication. Probably not all of it. InedibleHulk (talk) 08:52, November 16, 2015 (UTC)

Many sites quoted the dubious translation, but the Daily Beast actually went out and ran with it, saying "ISIS targeted Muslims in Paris" It really was a mistake for them to publish a whole article in their own voice assuming the veracity of the translation of something preposterous, and a particularly unfortunate one since Muslims in France and elsewhere right now have enough problems. For most people (as for the unsung SITE translator) the whole meaning of "apostate" probably flew right over their heads. Wnt (talk) 14:47, 16 November 2015 (UTC) (note to passersby: this was discussed at [[38]])

BLP

Hi, I removed your abortion comment, it should be clear what you imply is a violation of WP:BLP. Please don't restore it, I really don not want to have to take this to the BLP notices board. Thanks. μηδείς (talk) 20:24, 18 November 2015 (UTC)

I have reported the behavior to WP:BLPN. μηδείς (talk) 01:52, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

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Reference desk question on conduction electron : atom ratio

Hi Wnt,

Wnt, thank you very much! You seem to have put a lot of time into this. I'm stunned!

It will take me some time to work through this myself. While I could not understand the Wikipedia articles Jayron linked to, I did get a sense that it depends on temperature. For say copper, for which you calculated 0.96 electrons per atom at presumably room temperature, (compared with 0.995 or unity from Jayron's data, which elsewhere he said would be very wrong) what would it be at -200 C? at +200C? If you have a feel for this, can you comment on the Refrence Desk?

The page you linked in the second line of your answer is a dead link - clicking on it gives a 404 page not found error.

Again, thank you very much for the time you spent on this. So much better than somebody else telling me I'm not entitled to an answer, or another person who told me I don't need to know.

And what the third peanut was on about with "WickWack" and 2012 I have no idea.

I discovered the Reference Desk some months ago. The Language page is very good, but the Science page seems to attract vandals randomly deleting things, people who don't understand the topics, and nut jobs who do anything but help the persons who ask the questions. 124.178.179.79 (talk) 02:43, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

ArbCom elections are now open!

Hi,
You appear to be eligible to vote in the current Arbitration Committee election. The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to enact binding solutions for disputes between editors, primarily related to serious behavioural issues that the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the ability to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail. If you wish to participate, you are welcome to review the candidates' statements and submit your choices on the voting page. For the Election committee, MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:41, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

Signpost inquiry

Would you be interested in turning your comments on the Feinstein bill at User talk:Jimbo Wales into an op-ed for the Signpost? Gamaliel (talk) 05:01, 19 December 2015 (UTC)

@Gamaliel: Yes. I had been hoping to get more response to work with, but I shouldn't wait very long. I think I should also rework what I wrote into sections rather than the numbered list format. I haven't actually written content for the Signpost so any suggestions would be much appreciated! Wnt (talk) 09:55, 19 December 2015 (UTC)

Hmmm. I'm not sure I have any general ones. Just go with your instincts and see our archives for some previous examples. Once you have a rough draft we usually put it in a google doc and we provide you with comments, suggestions, and copyediting. Gamaliel (talk) 20:06, 19 December 2015 (UTC)

Arbitration enforcement 2 case closed

You are receiving this message because you are a party or offered a preliminary statement and/or evidence in the Arbitration enforcement 2 case. This is a one-time message.

The Arbitration enforcement 2 arbitration case (t) (ev / t) (w / t) (pd / t) has been closed, and the following remedies have been enacted:

1.1) The Arbitration Committee confirms the sanctions imposed on Eric Corbett as a result of the Interactions at GGTF case, but mandates that all enforcement requests relating to them be filed at arbitration enforcement and be kept open for at least 24 hours.

3) For his breaches of the standards of conduct expected of editors and administrators, Black Kite is admonished.

6) The community is reminded that discretionary sanctions have been authorised for any page relating to or any edit about: (i) the Gender Gap Task Force; (ii) the gender disparity among Wikipedians; and (iii) any process or discussion relating to these topics, all broadly construed.

For the Arbitration Committee, Kharkiv07 (T) 02:41, 25 December 2015 (UTC)

Discuss this at: Wikipedia talk:Arbitration Committee/Noticeboard#Arbitration enforcement 2 case closed

Words

Please take a look at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Crime and Criminal Biography#Style guide? whenever you have a few minutes. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:17, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

Arnnon Geshuri

Was the WMF board fully aware of Arnnon Geshuri's central role in a major anticompetitive scandal at Google when they approved his appointment? In 2010, the Justice Department shut down the illegal collusion between Google and five other Silicon Valley corporations. Geshuri helped manage that collusion for Google. A class action lawsuit settled in September, 2015 forced those companies to pay $415 million in compensation to 64,000 employees whose careers were damaged by the conspiracy that Geshuri was part of. Geshuri was directly involved in the ugly and humiliating termination of a woman who did not comply with the illegal scheme. He was chastised by federal judge Lucy Koh for attempting to pull Facebook into the conspiracy, and threatening retaliation if they didn't. Details can be found at User:Cullen328/Arnnon Geshuri. Cullen³²⁸ Let's discuss it 07:17, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

Note on User talk:Jimbo_Wales re:azWiki

Hey WnT,

I just wanted to let you know I've removed the section on Jimmy's talk page your responded to about AzWiki. For the record the WMF worked closely with the community after the concerns were raised but beyond that I can't say much more. I'm happy to talk a bit more if you'd like on IRC or via email but I think you're instincts were right when you said it may not be best to have it all out in the open especially with names. Jalexander--WMF 02:12, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

@Jalexander-WMF: I made only the most rudimentary observation from the presented text in that conversation, so I really don't have any special claim to information on the case that isn't public knowledge. I don't know what the use is for me to find something out from you unless I feel free to go on and post it publicly in some online forum - I don't want to imply that I would keep something in confidence simply so that I alone could know it, without being able to do anything about it. Wnt (talk) 08:25, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

Understood :) Thanks for your understanding. Jalexander--WMF 07:38, 21 January 2016 (UTC)

Conserved homologies

Worth remembering that a conservative approach is needed. For example:

• This applies to entities foo, bar and baz.

the changes

• This applies to entities such as foo, bar and baz.
• This applies to entities: foo, bar and baz etc.

should not be changed to

• This applies to entities such as foo, bar and baz etc..

This requires understanding of scoping qualifiers.

Similarly wiki-specific issues such as two additions of a reference with the same name.

All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 14:15, 17 February 2016 (UTC).

It's true that I glossed over a lot - I didn't really want to overwhelm the page. To begin with, the usual purpose of a DNA or protein alignment is to get at a conserved sequence, whereas here we're looking for the non-conserved portions of each edit. And of course, as you say, when edits directly collide within a sentence or sometimes even within a paragraph there can be trouble. But even without a minimum diagonal length, provided the editor gets suitable color coding on the example above, it is easier to work with than the current two-version system.

What gets trickier is that we would like to be able to diagram movements of text as part of a diff, so that you can look at it and see that the other person moved this paragraph that you edited, or vice versa. If the movements are complicated enough, that might be trouble. But... the nice thing here is that we can always give up. We just throw whatever can't be figured out back as an old fashioned edit conflict. This is a quest for the ninety percent, not the hundred.

The references with the same name are unlikely to happen. I think it can be readily defused by automatically appending something to the name of an added reference when it duplicates an existing reference - actually, this is no different than doing/suggesting it for a normal non-conflicting edit, come to think of it. But it doesn't seem like a big problem that we don't have that now. Wnt (talk) 16:01, 17 February 2016 (UTC)

Melena

Wnt,

We briefly interacted in regards to Toxoplasma in the Reference Desk. Your comment about the entry on Melena being less-than-ideal got me interested, but I don't know how to reference a textbook in Wikipedia.

Any help would be appreciated, thanks greatly,

PiousCorn (talk) 06:15, 4 March 2016 (UTC)

The George Osborne article

@Wnt: Hi! I noted that you have had some, er, disagreements about this article, and thought that you may like to add your opinion to my rather forthright comments on this, which appear in the Tax credits section. All the very best to you! Boscaswell talk

Should the current artist's impression be removed from the Planet Nine infobox?

Hello, Wnt. You have new messages at Talk:Planet Nine#Conclusion 2.
You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

Regards, nagualdesign 15:02, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

Knowledge Engine (Wikimedia Foundation)

According to leaked internal documents that have been authenticated, the Knowledge Engine was originally intended to directly complete with Google. This is an absolute undisputed fact. There cannot be a disagreement over the facts. That would be historical revisionism if any person claimed the Knowledge Engine was not originally intended to compete with Google. QuackGuru (talk) 20:28, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

Environmental impact of the Wikimedia movement

Hi, I just saw that you're interested in making the Wikimedia movement more sustainable. I created an essay regarding the environmental impact of the Wikimedia movement on Meta. I'd love to hear your ideas and maybe even have your support! Thanks, --Gnom (talk) 22:33, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

The elephant

Given your reference to the elephant story, you might this interesting, making the same point.--S Philbrick(Talk) 01:48, 12 March 2016 (UTC)

A rational argument?

While on the subject of 999..., you might enjoy taking a peek at the tangentially related Six nines in pi, particularly Doug Hofstadter's quote. -- ToE 14:57, 27 March 2016 (UTC)

RfC History of South America

Hi Wnt, you may wish to comment. Kind regards -- Marek.69 ^talk 01:09, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

Kind request for correction of a typo

Hi Wnt, I thought that talking about typos would be such semantics that it would not be fitting under the topic I started on Jimbo Wales's talk page, so I decided that I would leave a message here on your talk page. I'd like to ask if you could be kind enough to correct the typo you made when writing my name. My first name is Ylva — the second letter is L. (I used a capital letter here to make it more clear.) I can see why it's so easy to get mixed up — after all, in sans serif fonts capital I (India) and lower case l (Lima) often get mixed up. (The code words of NATO phonetic alphabet used for clarification.) Thank you in advance! —Ylva Carennah (talk) 19:15, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

I don't have that excuse - when I look, I see the difference. The blindness was lexicographical - I just didn't think an "l" could go there! Wnt (talk) 21:14, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

No problem! I can understand the reason — whereas in English y is considered to represent a vowel sound only in certain cases, and always a consonant in the beginning of the word, both in Finnish and Swedish, y is always a vowel. In Swedish, it's pronounced as a near-close near-front rounded vowel, just like ü in German. In Finnish it's almost similarly pronounced, as a close front rounded vowel. So I can see why it would be difficult to consider it as a vowel, if one doesn't speak Finnish or Swedish. :) As my name is Swedish, I have sometimes to explain the pronunciation even to other Finns, even though the reasons are different. So I'm used to seeing my name miswritten, or hearing it mispronounced. Thank you for making the correction; it's always nicer to see one's own name written correctly. —Ylva Carennah (talk) 23:08, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

Vaxxed Drama

Your input would be appreciated Here. Thanks. MjolnirPants Tell me all about it. 21:07, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

Disambiguation link notification for May 3

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Regarding...

...this, the reason the OP used dashes was to foil the edit filter. Just in case you didn't already know. :) ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 17:16, 3 May 2016 (UTC)

That's ridiculous. Computers should not be in charge of what people coming here can post. Use an edit filter to have an edit looked at, sure - but not to order people around. Wnt (talk) 17:17, 3 May 2016 (UTC)

It's an effort to foil the Jew-hating troll that keeps popping up here. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 17:33, 3 May 2016 (UTC)

And I don't especially like it either. I would rather just call him what he is: a dirty Nazi pig. But they probably consider that a "personal attack". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 17:49, 3 May 2016 (UTC)

:-)

My brain is a bit odd, but you probably noticed that already. The Quixotic Potato (talk) 19:28, 15 May 2016 (UTC)

Collect essay; second bite at the cherry

You participated in an MfD discussion about an essay by Collect that was in mainspace. The result was userfy and it was moved to user space accordingly. The essay has been moved back to mainspace. There is a discussion as to whether it should be renamed and moved. The discussion is here. Writegeist (talk) 00:52, 17 May 2016 (UTC)

Discussion on Jimbo's page about GMO issues

I have been working on a reply to this comment you made. I was close to posting it, but I noticed the thread is archived already. Would it be better if I post it here or back on Jimbo's page? I'm not sure what the protocol is for continuing a discussion when it is archived by a bot and someone wants to keep discussing. On article pages, sometimes I have reverted the archiver for issues unresolved, and no one has complained, but I was never sure if that was frowned upon. --David Tornheim (talk) 06:54, 24 May 2016 (UTC)

@David Tornheim: The best thing to do really depends on the comment. If it's sort of a new take on the thread a new one might be needed. If you un-archive a thread to respond to it, well, it's a big thread, but if it's mostly relevant it might make sense. Still, I'd generally lean against that option because generally you can stably link to the archived thread and avoid the confusion. You might also have an idea for which a specific article talk page is relevant, or a policy idea that could have its own RFC... etc. And of course you can reply here and perhaps ping some others in the conversation you are interested in. Wnt (talk) 09:35, 24 May 2016 (UTC)

Desk: revert

I reverted the IP's post, because it was a sock of a banned editor (Vote X). GoodDay (talk) 12:41, 30 May 2016 (UTC)

@GoodDay: Well, if a banned editor brings a useful reference, the traditional WP:IAR rule is to value the reference. But if you wish we can rework the question to omit the IP data, for what it's worth, and keep the reference. Wnt (talk) 12:46, 30 May 2016 (UTC)

You may do as you wish. Personally, I don't value any posts or edits by banned evading editors. GoodDay (talk) 12:48, 30 May 2016 (UTC)

Well, to me people developing tolerance to arsenic by eating it is interesting. Everything else is just paper shuffling. (I revised my reversion to include just the link and my description on it, which I hope is more accurate) Wnt (talk) 12:50, 30 May 2016 (UTC)

Note that's he's back, at the Humanities desk, as well. Anyways, I'll leave all that with you. GoodDay (talk) 13:57, 30 May 2016 (UTC)

Well, looks like I'm not the only one objecting [39]. We can't stop everyone who evades a block or ban by using new IPs, and if the edits themselves are good, we shouldn't feel bad that these are among the ones we miss. Wnt (talk) 15:13, 30 May 2016 (UTC)

You have mail at WPO

link... best, —Tim /// Carrite (talk) 02:14, 2 June 2016 (UTC)

ANI

We didn't quite edit at the same time, but I hadn't seen your response when I opened the page to edit, and my response ended up before yours. I don't think it is a big deal, but I will relocate mine if you wish.--S Philbrick(Talk) 14:10, 21 June 2016 (UTC)

It wouldn't have mattered under the best of circumstances... and this, alas, is not that. Wnt (talk) 14:24, 21 June 2016 (UTC)

On the subject of AN/I

You either have the greatest amount of patience of any person I have ever met, or, naivete (given how long you've been around I'm leaning towards the former). I have no idea how it is that you are not getting frustrated with that thread. I read her comment about 'accusing others of creating a toxic climate' about ten times and I could read it no other way than I described. You somehow managed to take a lesson from that. Not to mention that I don't think I've ever seen a thread of that length discussing any topic, let alone on AN/I. That one thread is literally longer than most articles on Wikipedia. Mr rnddude (talk) 16:40, 21 June 2016 (UTC)

Well, there are a few factors here, not really patience. To begin with, I think people around here are far too eager to throw out editors. They act as if there's someone else waiting at the door to get in, but it's not true. We can throw people out from these bitter arguments, but then for the next bitter argument it becomes all the less likely that any neutral third parties will wander in to defuse things, which is what we really need. The small Wikipedias generally are not doing very well - every now and then you see someone desperately begging Jimbo in broken English to throw out their crooked admins, and nothing ever comes of it. That could well be our future on this one. Also, at heart I think she's trying to point out things that have been reported in the news and are true, to counter a bias that the editors so hot to get rid of her seem eager to maintain. I mean, the basic gist of the story is that supply side economics doesn't work - something that I think is very widely acknowledged in this day and age. She's fundamentally trying to do the right thing, just in a very sloppy way. As for the length... well, looks like it's up to 107k, but most of the credit for that goes to a few vocal opponents, which is something to bear in mind. All in all... I'd far rather see her resolve to be more careful and have someone neutral keep an eye on whether she's succeeding than any kind of topic ban. And I really am afraid that ANI is going to rush to ban her from discussing what's wrong with these articles with neutral parties who might take her hints as to where to improve them. Wnt (talk) 19:22, 21 June 2016 (UTC)

While I understand much of your argument above there is one thing I would like to address specifically: "I think she's trying to point out things that have been reported in the news and are true", unless they're being reported in reliable scholarly sources other than the news I find it very difficult to trust that information based on news reports alone. There are a lot of things reported in the news that are so riddled with inaccuracies that it beggars belief. I do agree that in many cases people are quick to try and pull the trigger, I noted that in AN/I when Phmoreno asked for the ban against EllenCT to be enacted due to "failed mediation" even though none had taken place. I too would far rather see EllenCT make an effort to co-operate, but, she needs to make a conscious effort to listen and when she makes a mistake she needs to acknowledge it. For example, despite numerous editors repeatedly correcting her mistakes (including myself), that were by no means trivial, and pointing out the errors in her interpretation of some of her own sources she responds with "I'm confident that the discussion clearly shows that I haven't misapplied, misused, or misinterpreted sources beyond the occasional trivial mistake, and I have clearly addressed the central point of all the other arguments." I don't mind mistakes, even some incompetence, these can be corrected but only if she'd listen when called out on it. I think that's part of the reason why some editors have pushed so hard to ban her, because they just can't cope with it anymore. This issue according to some of them has been going on for years, I wouldn't have minded it going to ArbCom to give her one last chance but with 11 support and 1 oppose (currently) for a topic ban, I'm not sure that she'll get the chance. Mr rnddude (talk) 05:45, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

Well, the vote is also heavily in favor of arbitration, so if she wants to take that route I would assume she still can - at least, it would create some presumption in favor of a case. At this point the case wouldn't really be about her avoiding trouble, but rather to see if she can document serious issues about someone else. Wnt (talk) 11:06, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

Vote for arbitration is at 4 support and 2 oppose, which is in favour of support overall. I don't know that she'll be able to document a strong case against somebody else to be honest but that's down to her. That said, I was surprised to see somebody decide to go around (or ignore) the first proposal before it was concluded to start a second one. I didn't realize that was acceptable conduct. It struck me as being sort of like "I don't want arbitration, I just want a ban because (insert "subjective" reason here)" Mr rnddude (talk) 11:13, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

I don't think it would be a very good design to say that anyone can propose arbitration in an ANI thread and bring everything else to a stop. I mean, there's a way to propose arbitration, by starting a case request; even if that were done it would be up to the ANI people to decide whether to withdraw after seeing whether the votes that mattered there (the arbitrators) were for it. But as I said there, I'm mistrustful of relying too much on the arbitrators in political issues. Wnt (talk) 11:56, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

• I have to concur with Mr. rndude's comment, and I can exercise patience. Unlike it seems with NS36, I have a life. Thanks for your perseverance. This has been unnecessarily time-consuming. Activist (talk) 20:11, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

Your submission at Articles for creation: José Gregorio Vielma Mora (June 27)

Your recent article submission to Articles for Creation has been reviewed! Unfortunately, it has not been accepted at this time. The reason left by LaMona was:  The comment the reviewer left was: Please check the submission for any additional comments left by the reviewer. You are encouraged to edit the submission to address the issues raised and resubmit when they have been resolved.

• If you would like to continue working on the submission, go to Draft:José Gregorio Vielma Mora and click on the "Edit" tab at the top of the window.
• If you need any assistance, you can ask for help at the Articles for creation help desk or on the reviewer's talk page.
• You can also use Wikipedia's real-time chat help from experienced editors.

LaMona (talk) 17:42, 27 June 2016 (UTC)

Hello! Wnt, I noticed your article was declined at Articles for Creation, and that can be disappointing. If you are wondering why your article submission was declined, please post a question at the Articles for creation help desk. If you have any other questions about your editing experience, we'd love to help you at the Teahouse, a friendly space on Wikipedia where experienced editors lend a hand to help new editors like yourself! See you there! LaMona (talk) 17:42, 27 June 2016 (UTC)

Wow. Totally forgot about my Spanish translation exercise there. That draft actually came straight from es.wikipedia, where it is still a live article. [40] I don't see any more references there than it had when I did this in 2014. I think I might actually have left it as a draft because of the poor sourcing, though it's possible I just plain forgot to do anything more with it. Wnt (talk) 18:32, 27 June 2016 (UTC)

Notice of Neutral point of view noticeboard discussion

Hello, Wnt. This message is being sent to inform you that there currently is a discussion at Wikipedia:Neutral point of view/Noticeboard regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. Thank you. Niteshift36 (talk) 19:15, 27 June 2016 (UTC)

Harsh trimming?

You doubled, if not tripled the size of that section. I don't know where the "harsh trimming" you said was coming went, but it wasn't in that article. I truly appreciate the work you put into it, but I really don't see it as an improvement. Niteshift36 (talk) 02:38, 2 July 2016 (UTC)

I agreed with some of your reductions, such as the bulk of the part about the DHS. You're trying to keep one section at 5% of what it should be to stay "even" with another section that's 5% of what it should be. This is meant to be a massive article overall. G4S is apparently the second largest private employer in the world, so there must be some content about the non-Mateen part of it. But for now, today, we were interested in getting together the story of what happened in response to this, which is something that has a major effect on perception of the company. Wnt (talk) 02:47, 2 July 2016 (UTC)

• I still disagree. The answer isn't to put more material in so that this looks smaller. I think that the majority of this should be in the Mateen article or the article devoted to controversies involving G4S. If you look at the parent company article, it's a single sentence and a hatnote directing to the controversies article. I'm going to take a day or two to think about it. Niteshift36 (talk) 14:10, 2 July 2016 (UTC)

Yuck! I had no idea there even was a Controversies surrounding G4S article until just now. This is terrible design, because we already have a split based on the subsidiary (G4S Secure Solutions); I was viewing this as the most specialized article because it doesn't even link to the "controversies" article. If we have to have a POV fork (which I strongly don't think we do) it should be at the lowest level, i.e. Controversies surrounding G4S Secure Solutions. Anyway, I've admittedly been using "G4S" in the text (per sources) often where the subsidiary is really meant. There's even an old complaint on the talk page that the article is "American-centric". Anyway, it'll be important to sort out the high-level structure more clearly. Wnt (talk) 15:13, 2 July 2016 (UTC)

Another Barnstar for you

		The Barnstar of Diplomacy
		Thanks so much for your diligence, patience and extensive editorial work to produce a topical and acceptable article in the midst of substantial USER conflict. Activist (talk) 08:13, 3 July 2016 (UTC)

Well, I'm flattered, but that article still has a very, very long way to go. For example, yesterday I found out half of it is about a G4S Government Services division that was split off in 2011 and has since been sold, to be reorganized as Centrex, none of which is mentioned. So when I say this article needs work, I mean it still is confused about even the most basic basics. Wnt (talk) 10:43, 3 July 2016 (UTC)

Curious, I looked it up and couldn't find anything on Centrex, except a dozen similarly named companies. Then I discovered the spinoff is Centerra.{http://www.securitymagazine.com/articles/85942-g4s-government-services-sold-to-form-new-company} You're right, of course, the article needs to be scaled back to reflect those services which are no longer provided and removing mention of those federal government agencies that have gone to the new provider. Activist (talk) 18:11, 3 July 2016 (UTC)

@Activist: Sorry! I hadn't added all that yet. I was working on some of it on the draft page. I think these spinoffs can be handled in summary style, but I have to decide whether it's worth trying to make a new article for Centerra at this time or not... I won't do it right away; I'll try to just explain the situation in situ first under what in the draft article is a "divestments" section. Wnt (talk) 02:35, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

No reason to be sorry. I'm not being critical at all. I hugely appreciate all the work you do and have no particular expectations of further production. Activist (talk) 03:16, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

Hi!

I left some comments on Wikipedia:Reference Desk/Science#Miracle Mineral Supplement! Mage Resu (talk) 21:14, 14 July 2016 (UTC)

Again. Mage Resu (talk) 01:07, 15 July 2016 (UTC)

And Again. Mage Resu (talk) 02:26, 15 July 2016 (UTC)

Kerri Riverra is eugenically suppressing atypical minds with her "miracle cure"! Something has to be done! Mage Resu (talk) 02:35, 15 July 2016 (UTC)

Nothing is impossible in biology but this I highly doubt. Wnt (talk) 02:39, 15 July 2016 (UTC)

This stuff is killing people! No matter how much you correctly believe that it's a scam, there are still people who are actually buying into it and killing their kids! Mage Resu (talk) 19:14, 15 July 2016 (UTC)

New reply

Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Science/2016 July 10#Miracle Mineral Supplement Mage Resu (talk) 04:11, 15 July 2016 (UTC)

Request

Hi, and thanks for pinging me here. I see you are worried by my attempts to remove poor sourcing from BLPs. I would appreciate it if you do not understand or have problems with any of my edits, that you raise it with me in the first instance at my user talk. Thanks in advance, --John (talk) 21:41, 18 July 2016 (UTC)

Thank you

thanks for adding my silly tao te ching (dao de ching) box to WP:Dao of Wikipedia. it was fun to create.Mercurywoodrose (talk) 03:44, 31 July 2016 (UTC)

Comment on Jimbo's page

Hi Wnt:

In this comment, I would like to hear more about the scandal(s) you are talking about. Was it in the news? The only things I know of off the top of my head are: (1) WifiOne (2) BP (3) politicians and editors from DNC or RNC editing their own or their opponents pages (4) police editing articles about police shootings. And when you say pro-company, did you mean pro-small-biz? Finding Wikipedia in the news is hard with Google since it always brings up Wikipedia articles. --David Tornheim (talk) 03:22, 3 August 2016 (UTC)

@David Tornheim: See Conflict-of-interest editing on Wikipedia and Orangemoody editing of Wikipedia for further information. Wnt (talk) 09:46, 3 August 2016 (UTC)

Thanks. I think I stumbled upon that article once and haven't seen it for some time. I know there is some big discussion about COI and at harassment page. Are they trying to address problems like those or chase off small businesses? I agree with your position on Jimbo's page, that problems like you describe are the most concerning. I don't care much if the 15-seat coffee shop puts up their actual menu and this "travesty" is not noticed, as long as it is not filled with fluff saying its the best, most popular, etc. restaurant in the area as if that is a fact. Although the menu is WP:OR, it is not misleading or deceptive. In fact, the secondary sources about the place saying its the best place to eat in town could be more misleading! The reason I agreed with Wikid77 is that the use of the word "solution" is often just fluff and marketing jargon, typical of the dot.com boom buzz lingo filled with hype and lacking in substance.

I am with you, that the white-washing is particularly troubling. --David Tornheim (talk) 18:01, 3 August 2016 (UTC)

BLP

You're mistaken about BLP. BLP doesn't allow us to discuss anything and everything provided we only refer to RS. In fact, at the very top it says:

Contentious material about living persons (or, in some cases, recently deceased) that is unsourced or poorly sourced – whether the material is negative, positive, neutral, or just questionable – should be removed immediately and without waiting for discussion.

Biographies of living persons ("BLPs") must be written conservatively and with regard for the subject's privacy. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a tabloid: it is not Wikipedia's job to be sensationalist, or to be the primary vehicle for the spread of titillating claims about people's lives; the possibility of harm to living subjects must always be considered when exercising editorial judgment. This policy applies to any living person mentioned in a BLP, whether or not that person is the subject of the article, and to material about living persons in other articles and on other pages, including talk pages.

The RD is a bit of an odd-duck since we discuss stuff which often wouldn't go in articles, but we have to take care not to go too far especially on BLP. Notably when the info involves contentious info on non-notable living persons it's very often the case that the discussion is simply unsuitable for wikipedia. You're free to take this to WP:BLP/N if you disagree. BTW I agree that we have to be fair to victims and their family but that in this particular case the victim is too young to have any idea what rape is. So we can be sure that the victim isn't saying they were raped (something we could report if it were an article). Therefore ultimately we can only go by what other high quality RS say and all of them say the charge is going to be short of (or not if you prefer) rape. Low quality RS have no place in discussions involving BLPs but generally speaking the opinion of RS high or low quality of how to characterise the incident is irrelevant anyway. Frankly Snopes isn't the best RS, but in this particular case on the key issues they relied on what they were told by the official involved in the case. Acknowledging this doesn't victimise the mother or child. No one ever said in the discussion on wikipedia that the incident wasn't serious so I don't get why you bring that up. You can have a serious sexual assault without it being rape. In fact in some jurisdictions, it's unfortunately not even possible for a male to be raped. To give a related example, we should not say someone is a murderer if all they were ever convicted with is manslaughter. In this particular case, the jurisdiction involved uses English so we don't get into the complexities when the words used in a different language and may not perfectly correlate with English words. You are of course personally free to say whatever you want to outside wikipedia, simply bearing in mind whatever criminal and civil penalties you face, but not on wikipedia. Nil Einne (talk) 04:12, 28 August 2016 (UTC)

@Nil Einne: Well, I wasn't expecting that response. I don't understand how you can quote this hard line about BLP, even as you yourself start a talk page section the links to material you think is inappropriate, then make a blanket statement that "all RS agree" that what happened was "short of rape", then tell me it's wrong to cite actual journalistic sources (of whatever quality) that are out there, published, and not being sued for libel. This is even more bizarre in this case where there was no actual "B" in any of this BLP, since the names of the child assaulted and the children accused are withheld, and even the mother is quoted under a pseudonym. This was, strictly speaking, an article about an event, though I should concede that I'd hold the same interpretation of Wikipedia policy if the parties were known. I think Wikipedians should always be free, on article talk pages and noticeboards and also on the Reference Desk, to cite sources about an event and discuss what they say, to ask if a better source exists or if the source is of sufficient quality, even when we look down on the publishers of those particular sources. That said, I haven't seen any great reason to deprecate Snopes in the first place, and one disagreement on one shrouded case like this one wouldn't change that. Wnt (talk) 12:47, 28 August 2016 (UTC)

Arbitration Case opened

You recently offered a statement in a request for arbitration. The Arbitration Committee has accepted that request for arbitration and an arbitration case has been opened at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/The Rambling Man.

Evidence that you wish the arbitrators to consider should be added to the evidence subpage, at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/The Rambling Man/Evidence.

Please add your evidence by September 17, 2016, which is when the evidence phase closes. You can also contribute to the case workshop subpage, Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/The Rambling Man/Workshop. For a guide to the arbitration process, see Wikipedia:Arbitration/Guide to arbitration.

For non-parties who wish to opt out of further notifications for this case please remove yourself from the list held here

For the Arbitration Committee, MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:04, 3 September 2016 (UTC)

I was only commenting against the idea of some kind of special action against the Refdesk that is basically unrelated to that case. I haven't really run into Rambling Man himself recently, so I'll likely stay out of this otherwise. Wnt (talk) 15:44, 3 September 2016 (UTC)

Relativity Simultaneity From Wikipedia Reference Desk

Since I can't edit Relativity Simultaneity of Wikipedia Reference Desk therefore I am using your talk page w/o your permission. You can delete this section if my reply is not worth it.

Ref back to the diagram of article, according to the observer in green frame of reference (grey light cone), time axes Ct’ and Ct” are oblique. Now draw a red light cone w.r.t Ct’ and blue light cone w.r.t Ct” such that their bases are parallel to their respective space axes i.e. x’ and x”. As mentioned earlier that everything is happening on the surface of each cone therefore would they still be able to see one another if compare all the 3 surfaces (grey, red and blue) of 3 cones w.r.t the event at any time “t” (Ct, Ct’, Ct”). To the observer in green frame of reference, aren't event on red and blue surfaces / bases below the surface / base of grey cone (green cone if drawn separately) - i mean lie in his past.162.157.217.155 (talk) 00:22, 15 September 2016 (UTC)eek

I drew a case of food poisoning recently and at least at the moment I just plain can't follow this. At least specify which diagram for sure (link to the image)... I'll look at it when I can. Wnt (talk) 12:13, 16 September 2016 (UTC)

I believe you are the expert but still you can confirm the following with pundit of relativity at your own convenience before editing the diagrams of the article (second diagram from top).

Each perceives that the time-axis of his cone is vertical & base (surface of the cone) parallel to its space axis i.e. grey cone and other have tilted time-axes and base parallel to their respective space axis. All 3 cones don’t coincides with one another and hence their surfaces. Since event happens on the surface of each cone therefore surface of each oblique cone that extend in different direction is well below the surface of vertical grey cone if shown on a diagram.

According to the observer in green frame of reference (grey light cone), time axes Ct’ and Ct” are oblique. Now draw a red light cone w.r.t Ct’ and blue light cone w.r.t Ct” such that their bases are parallel to their respective space axes i.e. x’ and x”.

Thus would all 3 observers still be able to see one another when to the stationary, other observers are positioned in his past?

I can rewrite the previously mentioned scenario of Einstein and Galileo for your help if all above are correct as mind was scattered that time and still due to some inexplicable reasons. - Bye — Preceding unsigned comment added by 162.157.217.155 (talk) 06:22, 19 September 2016 (UTC)

Look at the third diagram in that article. When you shift between the three different light cones, the stuff on the inside moves around, but the edges of the cone always stay on the diagonals of the squares of the map grid. So all three cones remain in the same place. A light cone is determined by where you could go, not by how you happen to be moving at the moment. Wnt (talk) 11:43, 19 September 2016 (UTC)

But still the space axes made by those parallelograms are not parallel to the surface of grey cone the way you explained – My last reply - thanks for your all replies — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2001:56A:739C:6D00:CC8A:2223:FEBD:438 (talk) 02:53, 22 September 2016 (UTC)

You might be interested in helping on this

Please see Studs Terkel Radio Archive Smallbones_(smalltalk) 18:47, 27 September 2016 (UTC)

I really don't know anything about Studs Terkel or what content he covered in these shows. Can you explain what you think I'd be particularly interested in or be able to help with? Wnt (talk) 01:18, 28 September 2016 (UTC)

WP:RD/G/M

Wnt, hi. This was over the line as far as "treatment advice" is concerned, IMO - I've deleted the question and answers, and replaced it with the standard template message. Feel free to discuss this on the talk page if you think it should be restored. Tevildo (talk) 13:41, 1 October 2016 (UTC)

Proper nutrition is recommended for everyone; therefore, it is not treatment advice. Wnt (talk) 14:55, 1 October 2016 (UTC)

The Rambling Man arbitration proposed decision posted

A proposed decision has been posted in the open The Rambling Man arbitration page. Please review this decision and draw the arbitrators' attention to any relevant material or statements. Comments may be brought to the attention of the committee on the proposed decision talk page. For a guide to the arbitration process, see Wikipedia:Arbitration/Guide to arbitration. If you are not a party, you may opt out of further notifications regarding this case at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/The Rambling Man/Mass Message List. For the Arbitration Committee, Kevin (aka L235 · t · c) via MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 01:36, 2 October 2016 (UTC)

I only opined against a suggestion to expand this to something open-ended about the Refdesk, which didn't happen ... I haven't followed the case itself enough to have an opinion on the decision. Wnt (talk) 15:52, 2 October 2016 (UTC)

They have to send these things out to everyone who commented, otherwise someone invariably complains that they weren't notified—don't take it personally. If you remove your name from Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/The Rambling Man/Mass Message List, you'll stop getting them. ‑ Iridescent 15:57, 2 October 2016 (UTC)

Honestly, I didn't expect anyone to read my answer. :) I just wanted to note something down so that if I looked back at this in a year or two I could figure out where it came from. Wnt (talk) 16:07, 2 October 2016 (UTC)

You leapt to conclusions.

I was asking Phil Holmes to justify his suggestion, not conspiring with him over it. FYI. _Muffled ^Pocketed 14:00, 9 November 2016 (UTC)

OK - I'll note that, but I still want to avoid having admin crap infecting the Refdesk proper. Wnt (talk) 14:02, 9 November 2016 (UTC)

Yes, fair enough. _Muffled ^Pocketed 14:13, 9 November 2016 (UTC)

Image of mature Caudina arenicola seacucumber specimens

Hi Wnt. Don't know if your watching Talk:Caudinidae but have added a comment. --Aspro (talk) 21:31, 18 November 2016 (UTC)

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Popular science mags

"@SemanticMantis: If they sought you out in order to write an article about you on your own, that's news. If they sought you out to talk about you becoming a client, that's advertising. Did you get to the point where you found out which they were doing? Wnt (talk) 12:47, 3 December 2016 (UTC)"

They sent me an email - I almost deleted as spam, thinking it was indeed a predatory publisher or perhaps merely a desperate/low esteem outfit. But then I looked at the webpage and a few articles and I liked their mission statement, thought it looked like a good kind of thing for undergrads to read if they are interested in science and maybe pursuing it - you get some cool findings digested for easy consumption, and also a little bit about the scientists themselves. Also some academics do seem to read it, and they claim their circulation rates and article downloads are quite good.

So I thought I'd look into it further and keep talking to them. The point is they did seek me out to write an article on me, I think because they found an announcement of a fairly big NSF grant that I was on. In that sense, it seems legit. But after a nice phone chat, they mention they neglected to discuss publication charges. Now, as you know, many/most journals make the researchers pay publication charges, even when the content is paywalled (the publishers get the research work for free, they get the peer review for free, they charge the writers to publish, then charge their peers to read- as you know it's a shitty racket all around, and the big execs at Springer and Elsevier live in palaces if they want).

Anyway, what Scientia are asking for pub charges is comparable to what PLoS ONE would ask, and far *less* than what Elsevier or Springer asks you to pay them to make your article open access, but maybe a bit more than they would charge as "page charges" for a closed access article. Make sense? It's all very confusing. I was leaning towards going for it - sure, it's a little bit of a vanity press feel, but if it directs citations to my work or gets some poor kid in Oregon or Kashmir interested in it, I'm fine with that. But then my boss found Beall's comments and said she can't condone spending NSF money on it - it's a total waste of funds in her book. I think that's a bit extreme, so that's why I asked what WP people thought about it. Unfortunately most of them seemed to not understand what I was asking, but that's probably my fault :) Anyway, if you want to discuss further, feel free to email me, I don't like to put too much of my science career here on WP. Cheers, SemanticMantis (talk) 17:05, 5 December 2016 (UTC)

@SemanticMantis: I think this belongs with the question, and would encourage you to copy/transfer it there. It is true that there is some degree of similarity. The underlying issue here is that the "open access" model is broken, not as badly as the copyright model, but nonetheless, it is. [41] The money that goes to "open publishers" ultimately comes from funding agencies - hence, funding agencies should fund the open publishers directly, rather than creating a model that charges readers or authors and creates undesirable pressures. So I think it's a bad model, but what's bad about it is distilled from a broad segment of scientific publishing - the less-flawed segment, as it so happens... Now as for your own choice, that I can't tell you. But to me, just looking at the site, it seemed a few bricks shy of a load. It didn't come off like I was reading a cool magazine, just a bunch of separate entries. They aren't sourced like a scientific paper and not really enrapturing as popular prose. There was an awkwardness about whether it was written by or about the researcher. Wnt (talk) 22:42, 5 December 2016 (UTC)

Yeah, I'm coming around to the opinion that it's not a "cool magazine", but maybe it could be some day. Another point in their favor, I think, is that they are relatively new, and may get better. I agree the open access model is full of pitfalls, and that the funding agencies should directly fund publication... but for now open access is less bad, and that's the best I can hope for. Not that it matters, but now I'm curious: are you still in academia? Are you still researching/writing/reviewing in the traditional or open access models? I get the feeling you have some rather advanced training, but that you may have left traditional academia... email offer still stands. SemanticMantis (talk) 23:02, 5 December 2016 (UTC)

Humulone NMR

You might say that information about this method is...not sufficiently covered:) I was pretty surprised the first time I heard of it, and even when I did it myself I was still surprised that it actually worked. DMacks (talk) 15:44, 19 December 2016 (UTC)

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Hiya!

I hope it doesn't surprise you that I fully agree with that last comment you left in that discussion. I combine having deep respect (and love!) for certain individuals with a dislike of an organization they believe(d) in. Maybe I am weird. Probably. If I didn't care so much about the individuals then I would have less of a reason to dislike the organization. (((The Quixotic Potato))) (talk) 05:23, 27 December 2016 (UTC)

TB

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Your draft article, Draft:José Gregorio Vielma Mora

Hello, Wnt. It has been over six months since you last edited your Articles for Creation draft article submission, "José Gregorio Vielma Mora".

In accordance with our policy that Articles for Creation is not for the indefinite hosting of material deemed unsuitable for the encyclopedia mainspace, the draft has been nominated for deletion. If you plan on working on it further, or editing it to address the issues raised if it was declined, simply and remove the {{db-afc}} or {{db-g13}} code.

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Thanks for your submission to Wikipedia, and happy editing. 1989 (talk) 17:00, 15 January 2017 (UTC)

For future reference, the guy is a provincial governor in Venezuela who seemed to have some interesting political relevance. The draft was my try at translation of es:José Gregorio Vielma Mora. But it had some BLP sourcing issues and while I can pick away at a Spanish translation exercise it's much harder to scan the Spanish news media looking to fill in details. He still is in the English-language headlines now and then and I'd encourage anyone to start the article. Wnt (talk) 19:34, 15 January 2017 (UTC)

ANI notice for advice on User talk:Jimbo Wales

There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. The thread is "Go to one of the enforcers and plunge a knife into its guts". Closeapple (talk) 10:42, 29 January 2017 (UTC)

Oh lord, there's no poetry in the world any more. There, clarified to avoid unfortunate misinterpretations. Wnt (talk) 12:37, 29 January 2017 (UTC)

You may appreciate this

I came across this tweet earlier. Your comment on the article talk page of Renewable Heat Incentive scandal has been shared on Facebook and Twitter because of your apparent disbelief at the scandal. Lol, it was actually sent to me and I recognised it as your comment. Thought you might appreciate this. st170e 23:43, 30 January 2017 (UTC)

Well, as usual Twitter doesn't come close to a whole conversation... pretty useless really. Those folks should have stuck to the article talk page! Though actually, I still don't understand how the scheme was that good yet so few people applied. Wnt (talk) 00:32, 31 January 2017 (UTC)

People were just reluctant to take up renewable energy; and some were unaware. It turns out that some DUP members have family members who benefitted from the scheme, and their decision to postpone the scheme allowed more people to apply. It's just gross incompetence. It's still huge news. There's been discussion that wood pellet manufacturers actually leaked news of its closure (from DUP officials), so people would buy wood pellets. Amazing watching it unfold. st170e 01:07, 31 January 2017 (UTC)

RfC on "No paid editing for Admins" at WT:COI

I've relisted an RfC that was run at WT:Admin in Sept. 2015. It is at Wikipedia talk:Conflict of interest#Concrete proposal 3 as there are a number of similar proposals going on at the same place. Better to keep them together. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 04:32, 5 February 2017 (UTC)

Sean Sphincter listed at Redirects for discussion

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Template:Z33 QuackGuru (talk) 02:46, 20 February 2017 (UTC)

It appears that you are very good at what you do. Wnt (talk) 04:03, 20 February 2017 (UTC)

ITN recognition for 2017 South Sudan famine

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Jimbotalk

You started by posting a link doxxing a Wikipedia editor and then went off on one about how everybody who disagrees with you is "misguided". Did you think that was going to be helpful, in any way? You should know better than that. Guy (Help!) 09:15, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

Ridiculous. Wikipedia has degenerated to the point where one of its main forums is talking about an article in the Daily Mail, visible to millions of people, yet even though all the participants are in fact able to find and read the article, they uphold some kind of pseudo-Victorian horror of putting the actual link there as if HTML formatting is somehow evil. Hmmm... you know, now you've gotten me in the mood for an experiment! See you back at the forum. Wnt (talk) 01:36, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

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User_talk:Johnuniq/Archive_3#Why_shouldn.27t_editors_have_a_say_about_policy.3F

One word: tabloidophobia. Looking at the history of the policy, that was the reason. N I H I L I S T I C (talk) 06:29, 9 April 2017 (UTC)

Ref desk

Hi Wnt. I see you've been contributing at the ref desk. Can you please think carefully about edits like this one? I've warned the OP as well but this is the sort of thing that puts women off from contributing here. Thanks. --John (talk) 10:15, 9 April 2017 (UTC)

Please don't continue to comment at that closed thread. --John (talk) 12:49, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

Following my secondary support of the hat put on responses to "Could a natural breast look like fake?", you have chosen to draw me into this post in which you make wide ranging accusations. Wikipedia has no censorship restriction on objective information about the female Breast including their anatomy and cosmetic procedures for augmentation and reduction. Your notion that Galileo meant by E pur si muove that women's breasts jiggle is so untenable that I am inclined to assign your claims more to stupidity than malice. Nevertheless, others find your breast-obsessed posts offensive. Internet sites where you may seek salacious entertainment abound but in Wikipedia I continue to support the hatting of your posts, and when you ignore requests to stop, their deletion (thank you @John). Blooteuth (talk) 14:37, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

Starting to answer a question is no "obsession". I merely have no obsession to deny the obvious. The Galileo quote, well, can you teach a sense of humor? There is no inherent contradiction between science and idle curiosity, humor and factual information, or the admiration of breasts and the respect for women. (not that it's only women who have lovely jiggling breasts: [42] 1:15) I should add that I found a bit more about the wheel I was trying to reinvent with my initial suggestion - the "seismographic" approach I suggested has in fact been studied, not to find breast implants but to find breast cancer successfully: [43][44]. A relevant term there is shear-wave elastography. Honestly I don't know if S-waves or P-waves are the more prominent to the naked eye; they seem hard to film and I don't think that the Airplane! style motion is actually either of these. Note that there is a fairly short path, intellectually speaking, from idle admiration of a jiggle to potentially saving lives while sparing women uncomfortable mammography. There is thus an equally short path between prudish censorship of silly things and killing people. Wnt (talk) 23:43, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

I am impressed by your two references that could start a serious article about shear-wave elastography, which is an article that I would encourage if it emerges verifiably as an instrumental diagnosis tool in medicine. To write about the subject you will need to dissociate your text from the common voyeuristic language that is causing disruption at the ref desk, apparently with intention to do so. WP:DENY remains the reasoned response to attempts to prolong your arguments under "Could a natural breast look like fake?". Your first video reference showing male singer Trey Songz seems irrelevant. You probably wanted this. Blooteuth (talk) 16:26, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

@Blooteuth: Look again, around 1:15. Meanwhile: your link actually does demonstrate the difference between two types of waves I was talking about -- first there are P/S waves that go upward quite rapidly, then a slower overall motion. (I can't see it close to the initial contact, so this one isn't directly usable for imaging any heterogeneities in the central breast) This is the sort of video I'd like to see a physicist comment on. Speaking of which -- if you're OK with looking that up and posting it here, then why on Earth are you objecting to doing it at the Science Refdesk which is the place we've set aside specifically to talk about this kind of stuff? Wnt (talk) 19:32, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

Please see my post at WT:RD. Blooteuth (talk) 13:05, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Defender of the Wiki Barnstar
	For your edits on State-sponsored terrorism#Turkey. Not for self, but for Wikipedia. Gott mit Uns! Vami_IV✠ 02:04, 30 April 2017 (UTC)

State-sponsored terrorism

Hi Wnt, thanks for your interest in fighting censorship and your work on the article. Your response is actually well-placed given that we've already lost a number of references due to the publishing websites having been closed down by the Turkish governnent/due to "economic reasons". Just a response to this: coming from across the pond and not really being familiar with the American right-wing websphere save for the glorious Breitbart, I just looked over the WND links thinking they were just another ordinary news source... and had an allergic reaction at the sight of a Daily Mail article being used in so sensitive an article :) I think the WND sources need to be removed anyway, that's not exactly WP:RS. --GGT (talk) 12:38, 30 April 2017 (UTC)

Continue of the conversation

Hello, Wnt. I would like to answer you to your comment on Jimbo Wales' talk page about article Murder of Dwayne Jones. It is not just the case I talked about. The article doesn't violate WP:AVOIDVICTIM because Dwayne Jones is already dead. But I talked about cases when victims did not die - and rule WP:AVOIDVICTIM describes particular such cases. Кадош (talk) 17:32, 26 July 2017 (UTC)

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Change to RfC at NOT

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Discussion at Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Killing_of_Patrick_Harman

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RfC note

Hi Wnt, please see my response to your !vote at Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy)#RFC:_Proposal_to_allow_Template_Editors_the_ability_to_indirectly_edit_the_Main_Page. Happy editing, — xaosflux ^Talk 15:47, 14 October 2017 (UTC)

WP:CLEAN

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Proposed deletion of Celeb Jihad

The article Celeb Jihad has been proposed for deletion because of the following concern:

non-notable website

While all constructive contributions to Wikipedia are appreciated, pages may be deleted for any of several reasons.

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@Ringerfan23: The "non-notable website" seems a little fishy to me, and not just because I made sure the GNG was met. People almost never go after Wikipedia articles trying to delete them because of what they don't say ... they go after them because of what they say. You have a bazillion contributions in WWE and Guns N Roses articles, so I looked up on the site, and sure enough, they released photos of "WWE diva Paige" and "WWE diva JoJo" on November 4, and "WWE diva Maria" on November 6. So I have a suspicion you might find this site a little too notable. In any case, you've prodded me into starting some more work on the article; there are sources I never got around to, and I don't think psychic powers are needed to smell some more news articles are on the way. Wnt (talk) 01:06, 10 November 2017 (UTC)

There are no conflicts of interest in it; in the article's current state it made no overt claims to notability. Upon further research it seems the site is more notable than it appears to be but the article needs to be expanded to demonstrate that. I'll remove the prod and help improve the article as best as I can. RF23 (talk) 05:11, 10 November 2017 (UTC)

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Forum

Quick question/request, on Jimbo's talk, you just said, "It seems like it would be wiser to stick to the forum."

I'm not sure what you mean by 'forum' in that context?

(Maybe best to clarify over there)

86.20.193.222 (talk) 22:32, 23 November 2017 (UTC)

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Please be advised

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Jimbo_Wales&diff=814153010&oldid=814152633

Thank you. 185.13.106.229 (talk) 04:34, 7 December 2017 (UTC)

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Lol, I have no idea. ;) Wnt (talk) 01:15, 15 December 2017 (UTC)

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• Only one block is set at a time, to adjust what the user is blocked from the administrator would have to modify the existing block.
• Block logs should display information about the granular block
• When a blocked user attempts to edit an applicable page, they should see a block warning message which include information on their block (reason, expiration, what they are blocked from, etc.)
• If a category is provided, the blocked user cannot edit either the category page itself and all pages within the category.
• If the File: namespace is blocked, the user should not be allowed to upload files.

We like this direction because it builds on top of the existing block system, both a technical and usability wise. Before we get too far along with designs and development we'd like to hear from you about our prosposal:

1. What do you think of the proposed implementation?
2. We believe this should be an expansion of Special:Block, but it has been suggested that this be a new special page. What are your thoughts?
3. Should uploading files be combined with a File namespace block, or as a separate option? (For example, if combined, when a user is blocked from the File namespace, they would neither be able to edit any existing pages in the File namespace nor upload new files.)
4. Should there be a maximum number of things to be blocked from? Or should we leave it up to admin discretion?

We appreciate your feedback on this project's talk page or by email. For the Anti-Harassment Tools team, SPoore (WMF) (talk) , Trust and Safety Specialist, Community health initiative (talk) 20:54, 9 May 2018 (UTC)

My poem is bad but my apology for the bad links is sincere!

Roses are red,
Good message links are blue,
My proofreading stinks,
So here's a good link for you SPoore (WMF), Trust & Safety, Community health initiative (talk) 16:33, 10 May 2018 (UTC)

.

Thank you very much

The RfC discussion to eliminate portals was closed May 12, with the statement "There exists a strong consensus against deleting or even deprecating portals at this time." This was made possible because you and others came to the rescue. Thank you for speaking up.

By the way, the current issue of the Signpost features an article with interviews about the RfC and the Portals WikiProject.

I'd also like to let you know that the Portals WikiProject is working hard to make sure your support of portals was not in vain. Toward that end, we have been working diligently to innovate portals, while building, updating, upgrading, and maintaining them. The project has grown to 80 members so far, and has become a beehive of activity.

Our two main goals at this time are to automate portals (in terms of refreshing, rotating, and selecting content), and to develop a one-page model in order to make obsolete and eliminate most of the 150,000 subpages from the portal namespace by migrating their functions to the portal base pages, using technologies such as selective transclusion. Please feel free to join in on any of the many threads of development at the WikiProject's talk page, or just stop by to see how we are doing. If you have any questions about portals or portal development, that is the best place to ask them.

If you would like to keep abreast of developments on portals, keep in mind that the project's members receive updates on their talk pages. The updates are also posted here, for your convenience.

Again, we can't thank you enough for your support of portals, and we hope to make you proud of your decision. Sincerely,    — The Transhumanist   18:21, 26 May 2018 (UTC)

P.S.: if you reply to this message, please {{ping}} me. Thank you. -TT

That rollback

Yes, it was a total rollback misfire. Sorry, if I knew I'd done that I'd have immediately self-reverted. My apologies. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 00:06, 5 June 2018 (UTC)

Per your comment per Article 13.

I don't like the wording of Article 13 either, as it's technically IMPOSSIBLE to catch every single violation.

I wouldn't be opposed to applying project wide blocks of EU based users if Article 13 passed, given that many US sites (like the Chicago Tribune) already locked out EU uses over GDPR concerns, meaning it's already harder for me to check references to some US sourced.

Do you have an admin bit? I have read WP:POINT and more than happy to get blocked for implementing a Betacommand style purge of fair use images, to prove just what impact Article 13 could have. ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 16:30, 13 June 2018 (UTC)

I don't have a bit and I don't see merit in a plan to get blocked. As I said in that discussion, this is going to a WMF dictatorship -- either they will make a top-down decision to run a banner, or they will make a top-down decision to cut off all ties with Europe, or they will make a top-down decision to implement European closed-source censorship machines in an effort to comply with their laws, or something else. In order of increasing probability. Wnt (talk) 23:38, 13 June 2018 (UTC)

Your submission at Articles for creation: Amphetamine synthesis (June 28)

Your recent article submission to Articles for Creation has been reviewed! Unfortunately, it has not been accepted at this time. The reason left by Winged Blades of Godric was: Please check the submission for any additional comments left by the reviewer. You are encouraged to edit the submission to address the issues raised and resubmit when they have been resolved.

• If you would like to continue working on the submission, go to Draft:Amphetamine synthesis and click on the "Edit" tab at the top of the window.
• If you now believe the draft cannot meet Wikipedia's standards or do not wish to progress it further, you may request deletion. Please go to Draft:Amphetamine synthesis, click on the "Edit" tab at the top of the window, add "{{db-self}}" at the top of the draft text and click the blue "publish changes" button to save this edit.
• If you need any assistance, you can ask for help at the Articles for creation help desk or on the reviewer's talk page.
• You can also use Wikipedia's real-time chat help from experienced editors.

∯WBG^converse 06:41, 28 June 2018 (UTC)

This is a draft in progress I was going over, and never submitted to anything. The reviewer comments are kind of confusing, since he says at once that it is a work in progress, is "better handled" at existing articles, and should be moved to mainspace. I should mess with this again but there is sooo much organization needed to convert the collection of data from those papers into a comprehensible hierarchical review of retrosynthesis routes. There are hundreds of different ways by which the compound is arrived at, but by going backward one step at a time it should be possible to categorize all that mass of information into something more comprehensible. Caveat is ... it will really take some time to work through all that stuff. I'm not sure how I should progress here, but I'll take another look at it, it has been quite a while since I started it. Wnt (talk) 20:54, 28 June 2018 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Module:Expression

Module:Expression has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the module's entry on the Templates for discussion page. {{3x|p}}ery (talk) 02:40, 29 June 2018 (UTC)

I should comment that early on we tended to put any draft with a hope of one day being a useful module in Module: space and left it there to work on it; now I'm moving all these when challenged to pages like Module:Sandbox/Wnt/Expression. It's probably a net benefit since this way at least I am reminded I had something underway. Wnt (talk) 11:30, 29 June 2018 (UTC)

I guess I wouldn't know that because if I arrived in April 2016, years after Scribunto was installed and that convention kind of faded. In any case, I'm holding all of module namespace with the exception of subpages of Module:Sandbox as Template namespace or anywhere else except user namespace, which often seems to entail nominating a large number of modules (which I get by reading Special:AllPages/Module:) for deletion. {{3x|p}}ery (talk) 16:08, 29 June 2018 (UTC)

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Commons comment

Hi Wnt,

I was going to post something on commons and thought it might be better to post something to you here because things have begun to calm down in what had been very stormy conversations. You just voted on the blocking issue and I am a little confused about how you were canvassed. The posting was about the difficult relations between the projects over this issue and wasn't asking anyone to come and vote. Further, you weren't pinged into the discussion. Noone was. Regarding your vote, it's immaterial because you voted undecided. I just hate for someone to be put into a bad light, when I absolutely do not think that their intention was to canvas for vote. Sorry if I've gotten oversensitive about the word "canvassed" perhaps you aren't meaning it the way that I am taking it.–CaroleHenson (talk) 00:27, 12 July 2018 (UTC)

I thought it might have been the same user that posted this lovely message about relations between the projects, and it was.–CaroleHenson (talk) 00:43, 12 July 2018 (UTC)

@CaroleHenson: I probably spoke inappropriately -- I was thinking that canvassing refers to any effort to recruit people to come to a page, and that violations of WP:CANVAS represent improper canvassing. However, that page gives a different definition where it says that canvassing only applies to non-neutral postings. I still think my interpretation is rooted in, well, English. So when I said I was "canvassed", I was leaving open whether it was properly or improperly, because it's quite a philosophical question to decide whether the commentary included in the original posting is relevant to which way a person would vote at the end. I like User:Tryptofish's work, I don't have a problem with his posting, I do suspect both sides in the final vote have good reason, and I never intended to make an issue out of it; however, the influx of Jimbotalk readers is going to distort the result and that has to be noted for the best closure to be made. Wnt (talk) 14:11, 12 July 2018 (UTC)

Thanks, I think I may have been the only one to catch it... and they are closing the issue saying that it was improper to go for a vote.–CaroleHenson (talk) 14:14, 12 July 2018 (UTC)

Thanks, both of you. I'm feeling a bit concerned about eliciting such an influx from my Jimbotalk post, but so far, it looks to me like that hasn't really happened yet. I'll make a clarifying statement about it, though. --Tryptofish (talk) 17:28, 12 July 2018 (UTC)

I think it's fine, Tryptofish. You were alerting to an issue regarding relations across projects. I didn't see it as canvassing at all.–CaroleHenson (talk) 17:39, 12 July 2018 (UTC)

Yes, I think we are OK, thanks. Just to be absolutely transparent about it, I also put a disclosure link at the Commons discussion. --Tryptofish (talk) 17:41, 12 July 2018 (UTC)

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A barnstar for you!

	The Random Acts of Kindness Barnstar
	thank you bro... you really helped enlighten in many ways AUSrogue (talk) 20:20, 20 August 2018 (UTC)

pH feedback

1. You’ve got the longest Talk page I’ve seen, by far.

2. You answered this Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Science/2018 August 1 (on pH in blood) and helped: even though I had the mental picture of CO₂ being released in the lungs as a gas, and even though I knew the CO₂ in blood was encased in the haemoglobin I still had the idea that the CO₂ would attach to water in the blood to make it acidic. Ta.

3. I was going to post that “realisation” to the Desk page, but I figure it’s too old now. MBG02 (talk) 11:07, 21 August 2018 (UTC)

Question

Seeing your excellent response to me here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Science#Are_there_any_pathogens_where_the_fraternal_birth_order_effect_makes_a_difference? -- I was wondering if I could please ask you another science-related question. Futurist110 (talk) 01:35, 3 October 2018 (UTC)

@Futurist110: oh, obviously. Whether you'll get a good answer is less predictable. ;) Wnt (talk) 01:46, 3 October 2018 (UTC)

OK. Anyway, could you please respond to my fertility question here? : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Archives/Science/2018_August_24 Futurist110 (talk) 06:25, 3 October 2018 (UTC)

We'd have to do a more thorough search (PubMed might have it, but you might have to really go through review papers and start understanding what research was done to understand the epididymis in the first place) to find out if the experiment had ever been done, because this is not something that can be predicted from first principles. For example, I don't know what would happen if a duct opened between the vas deferens and rete testis - would more and more of the rete tubules attach, then would the regenerating tissue in the region start to take on an epididymis-like identity? No idea. I can say that testicular sperm aspiration (TESA: needle to the testis) is used in in vitro fertilization procedures. [45], so it's at least possible to bypass this step. With biology "what would happen?" never gets a reliable answer. Wnt (talk) 12:30, 3 October 2018 (UTC)

Isn't IVF necessary in TESA because it's impossible to get pregnant naturally with such immotile sperm? If so, wouldn't this suggest that an extension of the vas deferens into the rete testis would result in sperm once again coming out of one's ejaculate, but with this term being immotile and thus incapable of causing pregnancy? Futurist110 (talk) 21:02, 3 October 2018 (UTC)

What do they have in common?

Re: "I laugh to think of the secondary source that would list these three [Ted Kaczinski, Aldous Huxley, and Francis of Asissi] together", What do Kermit the Frog and Jack the Ripper have in common? -Guy Macon (talk) 02:57, 17 October 2018 (UTC)

They have the same middle name. --Guy Macon (talk) 10:21, 1 November 2018 (UTC)

Email

I want to send you an email Nil Einne (talk) 06:55, 1 November 2018 (UTC)

Suicide of Katelyn Davis deleted

Hi Wnt,

Do you remember "this discussion" you participated in about the Suicide of Katelyn Davis article? You said "The case is clearly notable. The free speech angle alone makes it worth covering." Unfortunately (at least to those of us who agree it's a notable event) some people went beyond the "let's delete the picture because it's disturbing" suggestion and even the "let's make the entire article just a stub" idea, and deleted the article altogether. :( Others have recreated a "new and improved version of the article", however the draft got rejected saying the event is not notable enough. Do you have any advice for improving the article or making more apparent the subject's notability? It would be really nice to have this one back in article space. Thanks, Cruiser1 (talk) 07:29, 18 November 2018 (UTC)

This is a formidable lobby to try to go up against, so don't do it repetitively and pointlessly: nobody cared about this girl - including herself - so don't stick to trying to restore an article about her per se. Look at a broader issue of suicide video on the internet or the like, and corporate-government responses to it. My impression is that censorship has gotten considerably worse, but a good article would make it possible to track that between cases and get some expert commentary. Some other questions to ask pertain to my "royal road" comment before: do videoed suicides lead to more prosecutions of alleged bullies and malefactors, and has that tendency increased or decreased due to censorship? But I don't know if you can get anything like that. Still, if you can find secondary sources it gives a chance to dive into things. Remember: a censor's strength is to destroy and mislead; but the other side's strength is to think, analyze, and be creative. Wnt (talk) 19:03, 18 November 2018 (UTC)

Indeed, the latest version of Draft:Suicide_of_Katelyn_Nicole_Davis isn't about the individual person (who wouldn't otherwise be notable) but rather about the event, which is clearly notable. See most of the other pages in Category:Bullying_and_suicide which are also titled "Suicide of X" instead of just "X". WP:SINGLEEVENT says that "The general rule is to cover the event, not the person." Compare Katelyn Davis' page to the filmed suicide page "Suicide of Kevin Whitrick" which was deemed notable enough that it even survived a "deletion proposal". Not that it's a contest of course, but Katelyn Davis' case should be considered more notable, in that it had much more national and international coverage, her death was actually recorded on video and was seen by literally millions of people (often unwittingly) during its weeks on Facebook, and in the case's later ramifications on modifying policy on Facebook and other social media platforms. Thanks, Cruiser1 (talk) 23:17, 20 November 2018 (UTC)

Update: You may be interested to see that the new Suicide of Katelyn Nicole Davis article, after a few iterations, did pass the Articles for Creation review process and entered article space! However, the new article was promptly [proposed for deletion]. As you mention above, some have suggested merging the article's content into other topics such as Facebook's response to suicides. Anyway, as one who has made thoughtful comments on this subject before, you may be inspired to do so again during this seven day deletion discussion. Thanks, Cruiser1 (talk) 05:15, 25 January 2019 (UTC)

ArbCom 2018 election voter message

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There's no need to delete this

I just saw two rounds of somebody saying the following:

Please stood vandalizing my edits

Please stop vandalizing my edits. Policy says Jimbo can be asked but people revert before he can respond. So please stop vandalizing my edits and give Jimbo a chance to respond. 64.134.98.148 (talk) 15:05, 3 December 2018 (UTC)

As it happens, I don't know why I was messaged with this since I didn't do that, but I don't need people removing his comments on my talk page and "vindicating" his position that way. You may need "rollback" to handle vandalism in mainspace, but using it on mild talk page rebukes is unwarranted. Wnt (talk) 15:24, 3 December 2018 (UTC)

On clandestine efforts by a competitor to shut down the refdesks

Hi Wnt,

you know, it's not impossible. But you can't prove it, I'm pretty sure. As long as you can't prove it, I don't think it's going to win many hearts and minds. The discussion is trending very heavily "oppose", hopefully enough to get a close that says "consensus not to close" rather than "no consensus to close" like last time. So I don't see any need to go there. Just a friendly suggestion; I'm on your side. --Trovatore (talk) 05:37, 15 January 2019 (UTC)

There is still a troll out attacking the Refdesk. There is still the problem of new users being prevented from asking questions (no matter which way that other RFC goes ... I'm not sure it even matters). And there will be a fourth call to shut the Refdesks a few months after this one, and another after that. The only way I can see to get the situation back to normal is if we get a little inquisitive, a little suspicious, and try to get some clues who is behind the attack. If the pointless ritual of "revdeling", so antithetical to Wikipedia's crowdsourcing ideal, weren't already out of control, there's a chance we could already have riddled it out looking at the old edits. Wnt (talk) 13:47, 15 January 2019 (UTC)

I just read that list you posted earlier of reasons why Quora sucks

Some of those factors potentially militate against others, as when the closed nature of Quora keeps the privacy violations from being as big a deal as they otherwise might be.

But another problem with Quora, besides those mentioned, is that there are just a lot of people posting unverifiable stories. Sometimes the Quora mods verify people's accounts using, e.g., LinkedIn, which I guess they could use to figure out if someone was LARPing as a cop or a soldier or an astronaut or whatever. It doesn't keep them from making up stories just for the heck of it, or to prove whatever point they want to make.

Another problem with Quora is that the character limit on questions is too brief to allow for a very elaborate premise to a question. That prevents people from posting polemical speeches masquerading as questions, but it also can be very limiting in scenarios where, say, you may want to provide a quotation or anecdote, or explain a complicated concept, and get people's thoughts on it.

In those situations, you pretty much have to go to a web forum and start a thread instead. That's okay, but the downside is that you won't have features like the ability to upvote the best response to the top so that they'll be more prominent. A thread might go on for, say, 20 pages and people will have to dig through it for the most highly-upvoted posts.

Q&A sites are a lot like wikis -- there's a lot of potential there for the format to be put to greater use than what we're seeing now, but the keys are, good policies, good moderation, good implementations, etc. And there's only so much talent and other resources being directed toward making that happen. So, there's some potential going unrealized.

Another problem that is infesting the entire Internet, and even society as a whole, is that SJWs are taking over everything, so that those who dissent are reduced to joining bands of ragtag rebels, discredited by the mass media, and mostly deplatformed and otherwise economically and socially ostracized to the fullest extent possible. They're not able to take advantage of infrastructure that can leverage network effects and economies of scale, so the available viewpoints and narratives are skewed to the point that we're just in a giant echo chamber of leftist propaganda unless we venture outside of the big Silicon Valley sites.

Because of that, in a lot of cases it may not even matter if we build beautiful and elegant software, and design great sites, since the necessary human element for an open and frank discourse is missing. MW131tester (talk) 07:58, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

@MW131tester: My first feeling is that this is kind of useless since I don't use the site, but then again it is intel I don't otherwise have for the same reason, so thanks. Honestly though, I think that the forums were technically broken first and the SJW plague (and other plagues, like harassment without a political excuse) are the consequence. A key factor in my mind is that a forum needs to have a low Gini ratio, i.e. everybody gets read about the same. Once you start talking about upvoting (and worse, downvoting) now you're in a battle for eyeballs that only a professional marketer deserves to win. The corporations jumped on the voting thing early on, probably for precisely that reason. If some insensitive soul thinks a girl looks like a beached whale in a video that gets 100 views, he can make an idiot out of himself saying so if he wants but it doesn't go far. If the same thing falls all over the net in a snowball of upvotes by people who have never had anything of their own good or bad given that kind of attention until 3 million people have read it, the outcome is going to be very different. After 10 years of that the people who have learned the bullies' law of the jungle get into political scheming (less Jefferson, more Survivor) and the outcome is comparable. Wikipedia is better than most sites on the Web mostly because it was written earlier, before any of the upvoting crap became standard, and the site's anarcho-bureaucratic characteristics hinder the imposition of Progress. This is a good thing! Wnt (talk) 21:41, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

Before the SJW religion became dominant, we had regular religion. But then people got smart and decided, "We don't believe anymore in outdated metaphysical ideas that have no basis in science. So instead, we're going to use leftist doctrine as our new dogma, and punish political incorrectness as blasphemy, and excommunicate any heretics, and persecute any heathen. We're also going to dismiss anyone who puts forward alternative ideas as cranks, cultists, reactionaries, etc. and define progress as a doubling down on what we already know to be true, and a more complete exiling of all who disagree, and a burning of any manuscripts that deviate from the orthodoxy. This is what it means to be a skeptic." MW131tester (talk) 19:37, 11 February 2019 (UTC)

The first essay there makes an interesting point, and definitely one I believe in, but I don't agree with the author on everything. For example, Islam could be compared to his hypothetical Hitler cult, given its origin in conquest and government, but we seldom see it done. Even so, the belief in "religion" isn't actually delineated by religion -- the same people who would feign great reverence for Muhammad despite not believing in Islam would scarcely even imagine that an American or Briton who extols obedience to Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is practicing a 'valid religion', despite the appalling extent to which the latter man tried to model his abuses on the former. In this regard I am reminded of descriptions of the Roman Empire's distinction between religion and "superstition", with religions being longstanding and superstitions (what we would call cults) being of more recent origin. That distinction was at the root of the persecution of the Christians, and later affected the ways in which they were pushed at the Council of Nicea, for example to adopt the Old Testament as part of the state-funded Bibles. So there is deep-seated bias and careless thinking going on, yes. But where the author goes wrong is then to carelessly commend the idea of banning Naziism as a philosophy. Even if the conquerers of Germany felt it was a practical way to suppress resistance, I'm not particularly convinced -- Naziism was never stopped because of the books being banned, but because the victims from other countries fought back at a time when Mein Kampf was in every house or else. Today, people such as myself have skimmed through Mein Kampf and not found it to be particularly effective at turning us into Nazis; a book like that needs a big carrot and a big stick behind it to work, and if they have sufficiently large carrot and stick in hand they don't need the book any more. In the end I think that a failure to believe in freedom of expression will inevitably lead to grievous errors of all sorts, just as thinking that 4=5 is sure to cause any number of additional math mistakes. Wnt (talk) 14:28, 12 February 2019 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Module:FileData

Module:FileData has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the module's entry on the Templates for discussion page. {{3x|p}}ery (talk) 21:36, 22 February 2019 (UTC)

Talk pages consultation 2019

The Wikimedia Foundation has invited the various Wikimedia communities, including the English Wikipedia, to participate in a consultation on improving communication methods within the Wikimedia projects. As such, a request for comment has been created at Wikipedia:Talk pages consultation 2019. You are invited to express your views in the discussion. ~ Winged Blades^Godric 05:23, 24 February 2019 (UTC)

On wikitext list markup

In case it might help, I thought I would offer a brief summary on how the wikitext list markup works. I realize this is unsolicited, so feel free to ignore any or all of it, particularly if you already know what I'm saying and I've misunderstood where the gaps are in your knowledge.

The *, #, or : characters introduce a new list of a specific type—bulleted, numbered, or unbulleted—as well as a specific item in that list. (Technically, it's more complicated than that for unbulleted lists, but I'll ignore that for this description.) So a string of these characters defines a nesting of lists. For example, *:# means (reading from right to left) a third-level numbered list item nested in a second-level unbulleted list item nested in a first-level bulleted item.

To keep the result tidy for screen readers, it's best to avoid changing the nesting of lists in the middle. So if responding below a comment that starts with **:, if you want to preserve the same indent level, this corresponds to adding another item of the same type as the current list, and so you should use **:. If you want to add an additional indent level, then you should copy the current prefix, and add the character corresponding to the new type of list you want to have. So with this example you could use **::, **:*, or **:#, depending if you wanted to add a fourth-level unbulleted, bulleted, or numbered item.

To expand on the issues with screen readers: if you switch from, say *** to :::*, as many people do, then this closes the three levels of bulleted lists, and starts four lists, all nested within each other. As I understand it, the screen reader describes the end of the first three bulleted lists and the opening of the next four. This introduces a lot of extraneous noise when trying to follow the threads of conversation. I hope this is helpful. isaacl (talk) 16:55, 24 February 2019 (UTC)

@Isaacl: Thanks -- we should have a more prominent instruction on this ... but at this moment I'm not sure it's worth writing if it's all about to be changed. Also, you make me think that we need to have a "screen reader simulation mode" for our pages. To be sure, I don't mean simply listening to a reading, which no one who doesn't have to would have the patience for, but rather the quixotic but not so impossible task of explaining blindness to a sighted man by showing a text transcript, with convenient formatting (unavailable to the blind) to make it easier to parse for those not used to parsing it as they hear it in their mind. Some creativity may be required. Wnt (talk) 18:46, 24 February 2019 (UTC)

I could have sworn I'd seen guidelines like these before, but I can't locate them at the moment. Help:List#List basics of course covers the basics, and Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Accessibility#Lists provides guidance on not leaving extra blank lines between list items, nor switching between list types unnecessarily. I wouldn't count on the use of lists in talk page discussions changing any time soon; there is a large existing base of users who wish to continue using wikitext on talk pages.

A greater understanding of how screen reader users navigate the web would indeed be helpful. Once when I explained to an editor that using "here" as link text was not best practice (as per WCAG and numerous accessibility guidelines), since screen reader users often tab quickly from link to link to decide where to go, the editor replied that users using screen readers should learn not to do that. The person didn't seem to appreciate that screen reader users employ all kinds of techniques to reduce the tedium that would otherwise ensue from listening to entire pages being read. (As I understand it, they typically speed up the reading rate and act quickly on small cues to decide where to go.) isaacl (talk) 19:46, 24 February 2019 (UTC)

I don't know if I ever noticed that help file! It sure does lay it out there. The problem is, I always remember seeing :s described as "indentation" and *s as "bullet points", and I wouldn't have thought "Help:List" had anything to do with these. The idea that a semicolon isn't just a title? Never heard of it! Wnt (talk) 13:09, 25 February 2019 (UTC)

Indeed, I just looked up Help:indent and got WP:Indentation, an essay that leads via a redirect to Help:Talk pages, which says "Some pages (deletion discussions, for example) use asterisks (*) rather than colons for indentation. Generally colons and asterisks should not be mixed; if you see asterisks are being used in a page, use them as well. " Which is about the state of what I knew on the topic! Wnt (talk) 13:12, 25 February 2019 (UTC)

Yeah, for simplicity, I skipped over the details of semi-colons and colons generating definition lists. The upshot is that unless you're making a glossary or some other list of definitions, the resulting HTML from a colon-prefixed list item is semantically wrong. I think wikitext predates the introduction of style sheets that allows you to control how an unordered list is rendered by a browser, so there was no other way to avoid a bullet being shown than to misuse description lists. Nowadays, the wikitext parser could be modified to output an unordered list with the appropriate styling to omit the bullet for colon-prefixed items. However any semantically-correct use of definition lists would have to be altered to a new syntax. I'm skeptical that enough people could be convinced of the benefits (and to be honest I'm not sure there would a lot of practical impact).

I think this illustrates another point: if long-time editors aren't aware of the semantic meaning of this extremely common markup, I think it is a fair criticism to say the current threading convention is always going to cause problems. I know there's a big base that likes the status quo, and in many ways I count myself among them. But I don't think documentation alone is going to make things better. isaacl (talk) 21:00, 25 February 2019 (UTC)

Well, HTML "semantic meaning" sounds rather philosophical. Most people just want HTML code to look right. In any case, you make it sound like it might be possible to fix the semantic-meaning problems at the HTML level without most people ever noticing there was any change at all! Wnt (talk) 05:05, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

In theory it's possible to change the meaning of the colon and semi-colon prefixes, but then of course new syntax would have to be developed to replace them, for the few places where they were being used in accordance to create definition lists. All Wikipedia pages would then have to be checked for any pre-existing uses of the new syntax, and appropriate fixes applied. Semantic markup just means the page is composed of elements with specific roles, so something like "a paragraph followed by another paragraph", rather than "five lines of text, followed by vertical blank space, followed by three lines of text". Using the right elements based on their semantics makes it easier to parse the page, whether it is by screen readers, search bots, Wikipedia tools, or anything else. It also makes it easier to have consistent formatting of each type of element. Because HTML uses opening and closing tags to surround elements on a page, it can specify element boundaries and nesting very precisely. Wikitext, on the other hand, relies a lot more on the parser interpreting the editor's intent, which is why some layout choices are impossible to specify or are awkward to specify, like multi-paragraph list items. isaacl (talk) 07:11, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

Isaac.it is my impression that the use of definition lists in enWP is very rare--perhaps the solution for them is to deprecate them at least here (they might be useful in project like Wiktionary, but I don't work there). They were a convenient syntax which I used back at the beginning of html, but I've seen little point in using them since at least in WP. Similarly, since semicolons mess up screen readers (if I understand that correctly), we could deprecate them also. I do see them used here, but used primarily in promotional articles by people unfamiliar with WP , and they have the net effect of introducing excessive segmentation oand overemphasis for their typical use for the different project of an organization. DGG ( talk ) 20:26, 28 February 2019 (UTC)

I thought I said it somewhere already, but I guess not: yes, I agree definition lists are very rarely used. Glossary of poker terms uses them with the semi-colon/colon syntax; a few other glossaries I checked use templates to wrap the underlying HTML. Whether the functionality is completely deprecated and removed or modified to a new syntax, the current uses have to be located and changed. isaacl (talk) 04:21, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

I still am not seeing a need for this "reform". It is one thing to add new functionality to add new functionality, something else to take away old functionality just to take away old functionality. I think the biggest problem is that Help:List is a practically unknown page. Other editors (even myself) might have used that format more often if we'd thought of it. Wnt (talk) 12:44, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

Not sure if you are replying to me (as the indent level would nominally indicate) or DGG, since I already said I don't think there would be a lot of practical impact in transitioning the : syntax to output different HTML, and I didn't suggest taking away old functionality. As for greater use of definition lists if the format were more widely known: the semantics are so narrow that there's really no use for definition lists other than glossaries and the like. isaacl (talk) 20:28, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

Alert

This is a standard message to notify contributors about an administrative ruling in effect. It does not imply that there are any issues with your contributions to date.

You have shown interest in post-1932 politics of the United States and closely related people. Due to past disruption in this topic area, a more stringent set of rules called discretionary sanctions is in effect. Any administrator may impose sanctions on editors who do not strictly follow Wikipedia's policies, or the page-specific restrictions, when making edits related to the topic.

For additional information, please see the guidance on discretionary sanctions and the Arbitration Committee's decision here. If you have any questions, or any doubts regarding what edits are appropriate, you are welcome to discuss them with me or any other editor.

Merely a formality as it does not look like you've been notified in the past 12 months. --K.e.coffman (talk) 18:39, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

If this ruling affects an article about a web browser plug-in, I should ask what it doesn't affect. This is an "interstate commerce clause" for the Arbitration Committee to override any doctrine of enumerated powers. Wnt (talk) 18:42, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:Plotter

Template:Plotter has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 18:49, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. NorthBySouthBaranof (talk) 03:11, 24 March 2019 (UTC)

One comment in the thread inspired me to write a small user essay: WP:NOTTHOUGHTPOLICE. Regards, --Pudeo (talk) 12:48, 27 March 2019 (UTC)

That's a nice essay, but it is something of a different issue. The people I ran into weren't content that I'm not actually a racist -- they simply could not tolerate a link to racists even on a talk page, or any concession that they might be able to write well. Given their chance they would "clean up" i.e. censor even the main links for articles about websites. So I see this more as a pure freedom of expression issue. Nonetheless, it is also true that actual racists do get a much more hostile treatment ... problem is, that argues that despite your optimistic title Wikipedia really is thought police. The situation is muddled. But I suspect the clarity behind it is that censors in a range of European countries have, as a matter of practice, made it dangerous for them to post or follow links, and they have internalized this prohibition. I haven't actually tried to figure out who lives in what country with which hate-speech law though. And at this point it seems scarcely worth bothering to figure out, because with the new EU copyright and censorware policies that tax or criminalize news aggregation, these editors may start to be the same way about any kind of news link at all. Wnt (talk) 13:18, 27 March 2019 (UTC)

Assange

Thanks. – Sca (talk) 15:12, 12 April 2019 (UTC)

NewsGuard

My comment on Jimmy's talk page was unsurprisingly removed, i'm guessing because i mentioned Qorvis which i think is still a sore spot for him, but since you seem to be aware of the reasons why an app like NewsGuard is problematic, you might be interested to know that it does, indeed, track browsing history, as has been documented by (security researchers). i don't need to connect the dots between "browser add-on that tracks history and evaluates Wrongthink" and "advisory board staffed by ex-NSA, ex-DHS, ex-CFR." frankly, the RT article Smallbones posted doesn't go far enough in raising the alarm. Microsoft is packaging this with all new machines. it's installed on public libraries in Hawaii and Illinois. this is not the direction we need to be moving. i don't expect much from Jimmy, but i know from experience that if the media or a large enough number of Wikipedia editors throw a fit he'll do something. Gnarly charlie ate some barley (talk) 22:16, 28 April 2019 (UTC)

I offered a response based on your edit. I think the MintPress story seems to hinge a lot on a Twitter posting, but it doesn't seem unlikely especially as the given link does work. I almost missed the link to Qorvis but found it: according to the MintPress story, investments by the Publicis Groupe. Monopolization of news and attacks against competitors do go hand in hand, so this deserves further investigation. Wnt (talk) 23:18, 28 April 2019 (UTC)

Rama Arbitration Case

You were recently listed as a party to a request for arbitration. The Arbitration Committee has accepted that request for arbitration and an arbitration case has been opened at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Rama. Evidence that you wish the arbitrators to consider should be added to the evidence subpage, at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Rama/Evidence. Please add your evidence by May 10, 2019, which is when the evidence phase closes. You can also contribute to the case workshop subpage, Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Rama/Workshop. For a guide to the arbitration process, see Wikipedia:Arbitration/Guide to arbitration. For the Arbitration Committee, -- Amanda (aka DQ) 19:41, 2 May 2019 (UTC)

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Previous listing as a party

My apologies for the above section stating that you are a party. You are not, I made a mistake with the template. -- Amanda (aka DQ) 19:51, 2 May 2019 (UTC)

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Wages for Facebook

http://wagesforfacebook.com/ Remind you of anything? The scrolling is part of the message, but you can stop it by turning off Javascript. 67.164.113.165 (talk) 21:07, 11 June 2019 (UTC)

Proposed deletion of File:Article used in capital case.gif

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unused, low-res, no obvious use

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This bot DID NOT nominate any file(s) for deletion; please refer to the page history of each individual file for details. Thanks, FastilyBot (talk) 01:02, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

Well that's odd... the user nominated the template for deletion two years ago, [46] but left my crappy graphic. The best of my 'art' would not be worth fighting for, and this is not it. Perhaps it was too much to react to [47] in the first place ... but Wikipedia has disclaimers now, at least where New Zealand's sole Founding Father is concerned. Wnt (talk) 02:25, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

New Founder, Jan Eissfeldt

Regarding that phrase, no, not new. I read a post on his German user talk which fits the current situation exactly, only - it's from 2014. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 13:55, 24 June 2019 (UTC)

New Zealand shooting video threat

Just so we're crystal clear: If you ever come through on that threat to undermine the project in such a despicable way, you'll be indeffed so fast your head will spin. El_C 00:36, 29 June 2019 (UTC)

Straight to indef if I were to add a single citation? Interesting. I hope that Jan Eissfeldt and his team will take a more nuanced approach to administering the site once they get the kinks worked out of their transition. Trust me -- after that last show of support, I have no further interest in supporting any protest action against their authority. This is their site and they will do what they wish with it. Wnt (talk) 00:45, 29 June 2019 (UTC)

Frankly, I considered indeffing you right on the spot. You can't use the crisis of confidence with the Foundation as pretext for such outrageous disruption. El_C 00:52, 29 June 2019 (UTC)

And then you even go on to have a play-by-play (redacted) of the video itself — what are you on about? El_C 00:42, 29 June 2019 (UTC)

Normally I answer questions, but I was just threatened with being blocked if I continued expressing my disagreement with the posters there, so I literally have nothing to say to you. Wnt (talk) 00:45, 29 June 2019 (UTC)

The question was mostly rhetorical, anyway. I don't expect you to say anything, just to listen and reflect. El_C 00:52, 29 June 2019 (UTC)

Wnt, I have referred to this conversation at El C's talk, just to advise you of that. I have no wish to directly engage with you. cygnis insignis 02:22, 29 June 2019 (UTC)

Block

You have been blocked indefinitely from editing for your April 7 link to New Zealand shooting video It's one thing to discuss adding the link to Wikipedia, it's wholly another to actually do it. I realize that blocking you for something that happened a month ago is likely to be challenged, but in light of today's events, it is the last straw for me.

If you think there are good reasons for being unblocked, please read the guide to appealing blocks, then add the following text below the block notice on your talk page: {{unblock|reason=Your reason here ~~~~}}.

El_C 03:04, 29 June 2019 (UTC)

@El C: - I don't quite agree that past events should be considered as last straws... starship.paint (talk) 03:14, 29 June 2019 (UTC)

Let me put this way: had I known about the April 7 incident, I would have indeffed on the spot instead of issuing a warning. So it is a last straw, even if in reverse. Basically, there seems to be an unhealthy fixation with that video that raises alarm bells for me. El_C 03:19, 29 June 2019 (UTC)

@El C: - I don't know about an obsession with that video, but what I can say is that Wnt is the most pro-transparency person I've come across, and that applies to the video, among other things. starship.paint (talk) 03:30, 29 June 2019 (UTC)

That may be so, but a line has to be drawn. Families of victims of that shootout deserve our protection from displaying their loved ones' final and horrific moments on this earth for all to see. El_C 03:36, 29 June 2019 (UTC)

I'm not arguing against that. Merely offering my take on Wnt. starship.paint (talk) 03:40, 29 June 2019 (UTC)

I appreciate that. I, too, believe in transparency, but my point is that there's red lines one does not cross. El_C 03:48, 29 June 2019 (UTC)

Wnt, whether or not you decide to appeal, I hope you will be well. starship.paint (talk) 03:42, 29 June 2019 (UTC)

Wnt, if there's anything I can do to help, please let me know in e-mail. My initial reactions would probably not be helpful. --Trovatore (talk) 04:33, 29 June 2019 (UTC)

I was aware back in April that Wnt had added a link to the Christchurch shooting video. I thought at the time that this was poor judgment from an experienced editor. However, I do think that an indefinite block is harsh.--♦IanMacM♦ ^{(talk to me)} 05:15, 29 June 2019 (UTC)

I hope the admin concerned to review the decision. I am not sure if this is fair to ban him/her indef over one count of transgression. --It's gonna be awesome!✎Talk♬ 05:24, 29 June 2019 (UTC)

• This is a damn good (and necessary) block. I just came across his edits of today and shocking is an understatement. ∯WBG^converse 08:14, 29 June 2019 (UTC)

Unblock request

This user's unblock request has been reviewed by an administrator, who declined the request. Other administrators may also review this block, but should not override the decision without good reason (see the blocking policy).

Wnt (block log • active blocks • global blocks • contribs • deleted contribs • filter log • creation log • change block settings • unblock • checkuser (log))

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Request reason:

I have given this block some thought, and the truth is, I did commit the WP:Disruptive editing that it was issued for, and I did so foolishly. When the news of Fram's ban came out, some editors leapt into a People's Crusade to cause trouble for the WMF, T&S, and JEissfeldt (WMF) in particular. I owe them several apologies. I immediately projected my own thoughts for reform onto the group, imagining that since this was a reaction against "civility enforcement" they wanted some kind of 1990s-era internet liberty that in increasingly strong terms they told me they didn't want. Just before I was blocked I finally got the point (above) that this was always a battle over power, not principle, and that I should never have been involved in it at all. While being involved, several times I jumped into discussions that said "let's disrupt Wikipedia like this, or this, or this", and each time I started brainstorming "well, if you really want to disrupt Wikipedia..." I rationalized this by telling myself that if the idea gained consensus, it wouldn't be against policy; but in reality the entire WP:FRAM discussion can never create a consensus against the WMF, even if everyone voted for something. This was one of those cases. More specifically, I didn't "get the point", per WP:DE (which to be honest I hadn't read in ages), that the video wasn't wanted by other editors of the article, so re-proposing its addition, even on another forum, was violating the policy. I suggested the most contentious thing I could think of on the grounds that nothing could disrupt Wikipedia for the WP:FRAM mob better than that. Obviously, I need to stop participating in this disruptive anti-WMF action and to recognize its failure, both at the practical level, and in the more fundamental sense that the system the rebel editors want is not meaningfully different than what T&S would impose. Even if some admins are retiring, it is entirely normal for employees to move on when they realize their jobs will be phased out, and at this point, certainly none of my concern. The role of "protection" in this block is more difficult to interpret. WP:BLP has a short section on avoiding victimization that speaks of trimming sections back to the sources, so I did not think citing a source per se, especially on a talk page, would violate it. The policy has a section on images, but only in the sense of a "false light". The block policy speaks of defamation, and it doesn't seem like it is defamatory to be the victim of a crime. I bring this up because I have to be clear I have been engaging in similar behavior for a long time, and I don't know which of my behavior would be viewed as improper. For example, at Muath Al-Kasasbeh I added a Fox News article that includes the video of ISIS setting the man on fire; I was very clear about this in an edit in February 2015 (I don't know if it would be a blockable offense for me to link to the diff), and the source remains in the article today. I checked the video still works last night; it does, and it is still far more horrifying to watch than the other one. At Christchurch mosque shootings I added a reference whose archive still contains the shooter's full manifesto, which as some said is now illegal to read in New Zealand (a first for that country) and certainly is also propaganda, and still available at the archive link. I should disclose that the situation at that article had already escalated to an AN/I thread where a block had been "clearly rejected" for reinserting a primary link to the racists' take on the situation. I had assumed that if a clearly unsuitable source for the article was not blockable to return to the talk page, then an archive.org link to a video being discussed worldwide should be uncontroversial. That particular article had been the home of proposals I had never heard of for an encyclopedia article before, like that the murderer should not be named, and I did not take the critical voices in the AN/I as seriously as perhaps I should have. In the past I have thought of myself as a citizen of Wikipedia, even a "part owner", trying to push for it to keep true to what I thought were its fundamental ideals. Over the past two weeks it has become apparent that it is much like any other social media corporation. I could wish for the old Wikipedia, but it no longer exists, and it is pointless to try to speak to the dead. In this new Wikipedia, I am merely a social media user trying, like any, to figure out how the rules have changed lately. But I am not entirely above using social media now and then, though with much less enthusiasm than I used to have for Wikipedia. So I will request the unblock whenever you see fit because there are still some things I can do here you might find useful, and will try to take your advice. WP:DE mentions the possibility of escalating block terms before an indef is reached, so that's what I'll hope for. Obviously, I will not be reposting about the New Zealand video going forward, but you'll have to decide how to bring anything else I've mentioned into compliance with T&S and the informal community administrative process. I recognize now that this is not my site and it is not my role to tell the owners how to run it. I give up, really. I was already at my wit's end with those wacky ideas I was proposing before. Wnt (talk) 16:50, 29 June 2019 (UTC)

Decline reason:

WP:TLDR; please shorten your request and resubmit. 331dot (talk) 17:17, 29 June 2019 (UTC)

---

If you want to make any further unblock requests, please read the guide to appealing blocks first, then use the {{unblock}} template again. If you make too many unconvincing or disruptive unblock requests, you may be prevented from editing this page until your block has expired. Do not remove this unblock review while you are blocked.

Unblock request 2

This user's unblock request has been reviewed by an administrator, who declined the request. Other administrators may also review this block, but should not override the decision without good reason (see the blocking policy).

Wnt (block log • active blocks • global blocks • contribs • deleted contribs • filter log • creation log • change block settings • unblock • checkuser (log))

---

Request reason:

I have given this some thought, and I did foolishly commit the WP:Disruptive editing that it was issued for. I failed to realize this was a battle over power, not principle, which I should never have been involved in it at all. Several times I jumped into discussions that said "let's disrupt Wikipedia like this" and brainstormed for more ideas, rationalizing that if they gained consensus they couldn't be disruptive -- but there can be no consensus against the WMF. The video was the most contentious thing I could think of ... but I didn't "get the point", per WP:DE, that the video wasn't wanted by other editors of the article, so re-proposing its addition, even on another forum, was violating the policy. I need to stop participating in this disruptive anti-WMF action and to recognize its failure.

The role of "protection" in this block is harder to understand. WP:BLP's section on avoiding victimization speaks of trimming sections back to the sources, so I didn't see how a source on the talk page could violate it. I also didn't see how being a victim of a crime would be a false light or defamatory. I bring this up because you should know I have been engaging in similar behavior for a long time. At Muath Al-Kasasbeh I added a Fox News article that includes the video of ISIS setting the man on fire; I was very clear about this in an edit in February 2015 At Christchurch mosque shootings I added a reference whose archive still contains the shooter's full manifesto. Both are still in the articles. An AN/I thread "clearly rejected" a block over a different objectionable link, and I assumed an archive.org source would not be a violation of policy as I knew it. In the past I have thought of myself as a citizen of Wikipedia, even a "part owner", pushing for it to keep true to what I thought were its fundamental ideals. I give up on that idea; I am just a visitor on someone else's machine. But I will request the unblock whenever you see fit because this is the Social Media we have now, and there are still a few things I could do you might find useful, and I will try to take your advice. WP:DE mentions the possibility of escalating block terms before an indef is reached, so that's what I'll hope for. Wnt (talk) 18:24, 29 June 2019 (UTC)

@Dlohcierekim:Thank you for your encouraging words. I wasn't expecting an immediate unblock; what matters is if it can happen or not. My understanding is that formerly blocked editors are subject to much higher scrutiny, especially when there is this level of disagreement. I assure you that I have no intention of further WP:DE or WP:POINT violations, or any violations of policy. WP:POINT is a crime of passion, and my passion for this project is I think permanently diminished. This is a matter of trying to salvage what is left.

@Lourdes: makes a good suggestion of undoing disruptive edits, but so far as I know the worst of them were already cut out of the page, and the rest of my intemperate anti-WMF comments were archived. Given the higher level of scrutiny, I am hesitant to start editing talk page archives. I mean, I have some harsh words in archive 2 and 3, but I'm not sure if editing the archive is more disruptive than leaving it. What I do intend to do, if it is permissible, will be to make an apology on the active page, recant my involvement, and urge others to abandon disruptive actions.

@El C: The edit I was talking about was on February 9. Our present reference #34 links this video internally within the company under "WARNING: EXTREMELY GRAPHIC VIDEO"). I don't want to provide a diff here because linking to it seems nearly identical to the action I was just blocked for. If you think the page is violating policy at present, it is up to you to address that. Wnt (talk) 00:52, 1 July 2019 (UTC)

Decline reason:

Obviously, it's possible to do the wrong thing for what might appear to be the right reason. I might even agree with the reason. I almost accepted this, but I need fuller assurance that you will not disupt Wikipedia to make a point. My decline should not carry sufficient weight that the next reviewing admin should feel any trepidation at granting an unblock. Having said that, the insertion of a link to that video would be enough reason to block, though for how long is debatable. Hope to get you back soon, and it's sad that certain events have occurred to make this situation possible.   Dlohcierekim (talk), admin, renamer 03:43, 30 June 2019 (UTC)

---

If you want to make any further unblock requests, please read the guide to appealing blocks first, then use the {{unblock}} template again. If you make too many unconvincing or disruptive unblock requests, you may be prevented from editing this page until your block has expired. Do not remove this unblock review while you are blocked.

• I would probably request Wnt to add a line to their statement (suggested above by Dlohcierekim) that they will also in good faith attempt to undo all the past edits that they know are probably disruptive. Lourdes 06:09, 30 June 2019 (UTC)

Perhaps if Wnt would add diffs to what they are talking about regarding Muath Al-Kasasbeh...? At any rate, it's clear that they do not grasp the gravity of adding a link to the New Zealand shooting video. We don't do that on Wikipedia for reasons that are too obvious to mention. Trying to wikilawyer about that continues a wrongheaded approach. Participants have suggested to Wnt what tone they ought to take —display some reflection and honest introspection— but I suspect that this will not be happening because Wnt doesn't actually believe that they did anything wrong. El_C 16:37, 30 June 2019 (UTC)

I would suggest that it should not be a single admin's judgment about what is too obvious to mention that controls whether someone gets an indef block. --Trovatore (talk) 17:19, 30 June 2019 (UTC)

And you are more than free to bring this up to any forum of review you see fit. Displaying or linking to videos of executions is prohibited on Wikipedia. Which is, indeed, too obvious to mention. Oh well. El_C 17:31, 30 June 2019 (UTC)

I'm not saying there can't be (iconic) exceptions, but as a general rule — have I missed something about this being not being obvious? El_C 17:39, 30 June 2019 (UTC)

Can you point me to the policy that says displaying or linking to videos of executions is prohibited on Wikipedia? Or is this your rule, which you want everyone else to agree is obvious? --Trovatore (talk) 17:53, 30 June 2019 (UTC)

WP:OM, WP:DE — it is obviously disruptive and not encyclopedic. El_C 18:04, 30 June 2019 (UTC)

OM does not mention enforcement at all, as far as I can tell. Also it emphasizes the "principle of least astonishment"; the main concern seems to be avoiding giving offense to the unwary. The edit with the link has been revdel'd so I can't evaluate whether an unwary editor was likely to click it by mistake, but from the context around the discussion I would lean towards guessing that it was not likely.

DE does mention enforcement, in considerable detail, and has nothing at all about an indef block on the basis of a single admin's judgment about where the red lines are, outside of disruption-only accounts which is clearly not Wnt's case. --Trovatore (talk) 18:24, 30 June 2019 (UTC)

Sorry, I'm not that interested to further debate policy interpretation or semantics at this time. I feel like my position has been sufficiently explained. But just to reiterate briefly, as the 2nd reviewing admin said: "the insertion of a link to that video would be enough reason to block." I argue that this, coupled with the threat to insert that link to scare of Wikipedia corporate donors and the like, justifies this block. El_C 18:34, 30 June 2019 (UTC)

As I suspected, the video linked in ref number 34 of Muath Al-Kasasbeh (FOX News) does not display any actual executions. Drawing parallels between it and the New Zealand shooting video is perplexing, to say the least. El_C 01:04, 1 July 2019 (UTC)

Further digging shows that FOX News actually embedded the unedited video (Guardian) — shame on them. El_C 01:09, 1 July 2019 (UTC)

I found (and redacted) an unedited footage of that ISIS execution, so thanks for bringing that article to my attention. I note that mainstream news organization chose not to show the video (Washington Post) — because of course they didn't! El_C 01:19, 1 July 2019 (UTC)

• So, there are two issues here: advocating for WP:POINT disruption in protest to the WMF, and the actual linking of offensive content. The former is understandable. You admit you got carried away by the Fram hysteria. You'll drop it and move on. Great. The latter is what has not been sufficiently addressed. Can you explain why you've been pushing the inclusion of shocking and offensive content? I don't really understand that part. ~Swarm~ ^{sting} 20:24, 1 July 2019 (UTC)

  @Swarm: Please bear in mind in reading this that I am speaking of my motivations in the past, when I genuinely believed that Wikipedia had a policy against censorship. I am not suggesting any kind of defiance of your present requirements. In prior editing, for example, I followed copyright policy even though I don't believe in it.

  The original reason for including this kind of content was a general feeling that primary sources are important for a comprehensive and neutral point of view. If a politician is being accused of a sexist Tweet, and his defenders say it wasn't sexist, you can include two paragraphs of secondary sources and not get nearly as accurate an impression as if you simply reprint the Tweet. This feeling traces back to advanced biology courses where I was told always to go back and look at the original paper, see the gel, look at the constructs, examine the rationale of the experiment -- not just to trust reviews of reviews. Secondary sources are essential for Wikipedia, and primary sources can't often be used without them, but they aren't enough to do a topic justice.

  In the context of offensive material, I saw a situation where Wikipedia articles could be more informative than other sources. When media would avoid linking to a source, we, being "NOTCENSORED", could provide a more comprehensive view of the topic. The media's aversion to sources seldom feels genuine -- for example, Associated Press almost always avoids giving useful authorship information about science papers, preferring to say something like "researchers at the University of Bristol". This is because the media outlets don't want readers clicking away to read a primary source when they should be going on to the next advertisement.

  I have been aware of a greatly increased abhorrence, on and off Wikipedia, to "extremist" or violent content in recent years. I am aware of laws passed in Britain and Australia. I was under the impression that Wikipedia, being in the U.S., was not going along with that, and did want to try to help maintain the site's distinctive ancestral character by seeking out these links.

  To the extent that primary sources become hard to find, the absence tends to promote misinformation. For example, there is a conspiracy theory I was surprised to find hosted on archive.org today that claims that an ammo clip was left behind from a "previous take". The uncut video makes quick work of that deception, because the killer can be heard dropping it the moment before it is seen.

  Any retreat from this position was stalled by the lack of a notable change in policy, and uncertainty regarding where the change would come. Would it be a ban on descriptions of charas usage, which the Russians complained about, or synthesis routes for illicit drugs, or images of Rorschach blots, or Muhammad, or coverage of news now restricted under EU's Article 13, or leaked State Department cables, or links to Iranian or Venezuelan propaganda? We have had so many controversies over the years, so many times we had ultimately rejected restricting the content. But Brenton Tarrant has fundamentally changed Wikipedia just as he changed New Zealand. I was a bit surprised that El C did not remove the manifesto reference (#134) from the shooting article since it is as illegal in New Zealand as the video footage, but it is up to you to decide what the policy is.

  It is clear enough now that news source linking to video of people dying are no longer permitted by policy, and as I said, I have no intent to violate policy. I hope this has not been too lengthy a response; trim it if you like. Wnt (talk) 22:05, 1 July 2019 (UTC)

• Wnt, I find your (and your defenders) lack of basic human empathy for victims of a mass murderer to be mind-boggling. Your tendency to wikilawyer about policy and getting back at WMF when the issue is posting a video of human beings being slaughtered and calling it "bestgore" is frankly, unbelievable to me. I have no confidence that you even understand the line you crossed into frankly 4chan-type of behavior. I will not review an unblock request because I am admittedly appalled, not only at your efforts and suggestion to post this video but the fact that you can talk about butchery of innocent people in such a detached way. Typically, we see this behavior in trolls, not experienced editors. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 21:23, 1 July 2019 (UTC)

  @Liz: I do feel empathy for them. What I don't understand is why looking at or sharing a video of a terrible injustice being done to them would reflect a lack of empathy. How is it empathetic not to be willing to see a person crying, or a person fighting back?

  You may also think it cold to be able to watch such a video. That is true: I know cold. I have had to help pull my mother naked from a bathroom floor, feeling the shattered bone grinding in her hip. When I waited for the diagnosis of her metastasis out in the coldest blizzard of the winter, it felt as warm as a day at the beach. I was colder than the heart of winter. There was no national day of mourning for Mom. The liars who built those machines to certify the "low-tar" cigarettes in the 1970s were never prosecuted. And that cold heart inside me thinks that Mom would have been very fortunate indeed to have died in a few seconds of turmoil, surrounded by thoughts of God and salvation. Nothing in that video was as bad as when I expected when I first hit Play; it was a relief compared to what my imagination had conjured up. Call me a troll; it is not wrong. But is it against policy to be cold? Wnt (talk) 22:25, 1 July 2019 (UTC)

• Based on the last response, can I request that talk page access be removed without going to AN/I? cygnis insignis 22:21, 1 July 2019 (UTC)

  @Cygnis insignis: What do you feel I did wrong with that response? I am not seeking to violate any policies here. If an admin asks me a question pertaining the unblock, shouldn't I give a truthful answer? I certainly do not want to engage in "continued abuse of their user talk page", and could delete anything you think strayed from the present purpose. Wnt (talk) 22:32, 1 July 2019 (UTC)

  I can only try mate. This is sort of discussion that led to the creation of video? I can't help from where I'm sitting, and my attempts in the real world are not professional and very limited in their success. cygnis insignis 22:55, 1 July 2019 (UTC)

  There is a difference between NOTCENSORED and intentionally shocking and discomforting people, not to inform them, but to make a point. Just as I think we should have free speech, I also think people have a right not to listen - and that includes the right not to be bullhorned. Wether right or wrong, I have the impression that you are still trying to make a point, not to constructively engage with the others. I'm willing to consider an unblock, but I don't want whiny pretension of "I am right, but the world is unjust, and I will play by its crooked rules". I want a sign that you understand that your position is not the only possible or moral one, and that if in doubt you will not confront others with more shock and graphic violence (or sickness) than they should expect in this environment. Giving information is fine, but let others make the decision how much and in which form they want it. If in doubt, go for consensus. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 22:59, 1 July 2019 (UTC) I'll also be mostly offline for the next 12-14h, so nothing I do will be quick. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 23:05, 1 July 2019 (UTC)

  @Stephan Schulz: Thank you for this kind response. My response to Swarm was verbose, but at the end I said that I would treat video of death (also "graphic violence") as being against policy unless I have some very clear indication otherwise. I'm not sure what you meant by "just information" -- as I recall, my archive.org link led to a user profile that led to two uploaded videos each of which had a warning. So far as I can tell, any link that even indirectly navigates to such a video is considered against policy and my days of providing "information" are just about over. My feeling is that some people here would not at all mind to see me blocked again for any reason -- my account is precarious, and I am going to have to use it very lightly if I want to keep it for anything at all. (Sorry for rushing this response, but I'm not sure if I'll be allowed to post it later) Wnt (talk) 23:24, 1 July 2019 (UTC)

  No worries. But what I see is more extrinsic motivation. "My account is precarious", therefore I need to be careful". I'd like to see some sign of an intrinsic understanding of the problem. To get away from the video: before my first post here I saw the shortish discussion on WP:ANI, I remembered you as someone with sometimes unusual ideas, but at least some that are usually worthy of consideration, and hence I decided to see what the situation is and if I could help diffuse it. I was expecting the usual - (maybe heated) discussion about Wikipolicies, maybe a bit of cussing, maybe even a bit of rational discourse (yes, I'm a bit of a Pollyanna). Instead, I get confronted with dead or dying mothers, broken bones grating, and metastasising cancer thrown around. I'm normally robust, but it took me half an hour or so to get that imagery out of my head before I went to sleep yesterday. I don't think I deserved this. In particular because I think it served no useful purpose. I'm a free speech advocate, and pretty much an absolutist. But if we all use all of our rights to the extreme limits, communities break down. Words have power, and with power comes responsibility. If I were to unblock you, I would need some sign that you will consider the effect of your words (and links, and whatever) on the readers, and try to maintain proportionality. Making German officials visit Auschwitz concentration camp after WW2 was proportional. Brainwashing Alex was not. In between there is a grey zone. My impression is that you are not very good at grey. But, like John Nash, we can sometimes overcome some of our weaknesses by using our strength. If you don't have a good intuition about what people find acceptable, be conservative, use your higher-level reasoning, and if in doubt, ask someone else before acting rashly. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 14:45, 2 July 2019 (UTC)

(←) Okay, so basically what I'm getting from your replies is that you felt that something like an actual video of an incident, however horrific, is an important primary source with legitimate academic value, and, per NOTCENSORED, should not be excluded purely because it is offensive. You're not obsessed with spreading that video or shock content in general to make some sort of point. Your advocacy for doing so at WP:FRAM to protest the WMF had nothing to do with your reasons for advocating for including it in the past. I do hope that it is understandable to you as to why an admin would see your comments advocating for horrific shock videos to be posted to disrupt Wikipedia, which is extreme by any measure, and then see that you actually have done so in the past, and interpreting it as willful disruption or vandalism. I certainly don't think El_C was unreasonable for thinking that you have an "unhealthy fixation with that video that raises alarm bells". Can't you see how horrible that looks? I mean, you're upsetting a bunch of people by even suggesting that we spread that video to troll the WMF, and then we find out that you've already posted the video on-wiki. If you had a nuanced, academic reason for doing so, you didn't present any that talk page, you just said "we should put a link" and then posted it. That's why you're blocked. There's going to be little tolerance for someone who appears to have an inexplicable fixation on posting a horrifying shock video of a mass shooting. It's not because we have some new zero-tolerance policy on offensive material. NOTCENSORED is an important policy, and above even that we have a Content disclaimer, which actually goes so far as to say that we may freely host content that is illegal outside of the US. The OM guideline is just a caveat to all that, which basically boils down to "within reason". Offensive material will be protected from censorship all day, but there has to be a good reason for it in the first place. We don't want you to treat offensive/objectionable content as a policy violation, because it's not, and that's not the point. You just need to understand that it's not unchecked, and the inclusion of such material needs to be based on weighing encyclopedic value against needless distress inflicted. This is subjective and a spectrum. It is not one extreme or the other. As you can clearly see, these situations can very quickly become highly emotional and should not be treated lightly. You can and should advocate against censorship, but such advocacy needs to focus on the encyclopedic value of the relevant content, which is subjective and can and should be reasonably discussed. These situations require nuance. If you want to include something that is offensive for an academic reason, that's actually fine. But you have to reasonably explain the underlying rationale, stay within policy, and avoid needlessly upsetting people. And if you're going to do that, you probably shouldn't simultaneously advocate for using that same content to disrupt the project. That's certainly not a good look. ~Swarm~ ^{sting} 01:58, 2 July 2019 (UTC)

@Swarm: That is a far more sympathetic response than I had expected, and something I can agree with throughout. I will heed your advice. Thank you. Wnt (talk) 02:06, 2 July 2019 (UTC)

@El C: Do you want to add anything to what I'm saying here? ~Swarm~ ^{sting} 02:12, 2 July 2019 (UTC)

Sorry, but it still doesn't feel like Wnt actually feels regret or shame for what they've done — and it was regretful and it was shameful. Sure, now that they see which way the wind is blowing, they are coming across as more amenable to reform (makes sense), but fundamentally, I'm just not seeing it. El_C 02:37, 2 July 2019 (UTC)

So is it now to be about the user's emotional state? --Trovatore (talk) 02:44, 2 July 2019 (UTC)

It is, in part, about reflection and honest introspection. El_C 02:47, 2 July 2019 (UTC)

You yourself might benefit from that, Trovatore. Read what Liz wrote. El_C 02:51, 2 July 2019 (UTC)

While I cannot be sure of others' mental processes, my hypothesis is that in what Liz wrote, and perhaps also in your own reactions, there is a tendency to take the justified horror at the enormous crime that was committed in Christchurch, and to let it inappropriately color one's reactions to other things that are not strictly connected with that crime. We recoil at the shooting; we recoil at the fact that the videographer posted it apparently with approval. I hope and believe that all of us are on the same page on those facts.

It does not follow, at least not without further argument, that it is shameful to do anything that impedes the video from being consigned to the memory hole. Certainly I do not want to watch it. But it is, in essence, part of the public record, and as Wnt says, there may be elements of it that are useful in understanding certain aspects of the events. --Trovatore (talk) 03:15, 2 July 2019 (UTC)

I get what you're saying, but including this kind of content is strictly dependent on academic considerations. This user was advocating for spreading the video around purely to disrupt Wikipedia. Then when you look into their history you can find them adding the video to a talk page, with no stated reasoning. I really can't blame El_C for having alarm bells go off. The optics are terrible, there's repeated attempts to spread the video, with no apparent academic advocacy behind it. ~Swarm~ ^{sting} 03:36, 2 July 2019 (UTC)

Not displaying or linking to that video does not erase it from the historiography in any way. Wnt having linked to it was grossly inappropriate, which is not something I believe is in dispute here by anyone else. El_C 03:49, 2 July 2019 (UTC)

(←) @El C: Of course. This is more than fair. I tried to properly explain the root of the issues, and the proper changes that should be made going forward, but it's your block, and I will not overturn it before you think the user is where they need to be. I just wanted to give you the opportunity to review my assessment and advice as a first step. I feel Wnt has generically satisfied the GAB, but has shown little sincere introspection or understanding. I've tried spelling it out for them. I think all the answers are in my statement. Wnt, please reflect on what I said. I believe you when you say that you can understand and agree with what I'm saying, and that you'll make the changes I suggest. And I'm sorry if this feels like you're being forced to jump through hoops, but you're not being singled out for harsh treatment. A genuine, sincere statement that shows both an understanding of what you did wrong and a convincing assurance that you will not repeat the problematic behavior is what we expect in any unblock request. That means you tell us where you went wrong in your own words, and, as I said, treating offensive content as a policy violation is not convincing because that's not the point. I'd be looking for an assurance that you will not add potentially-offensive/shocking content that holds no encyclopedic value, and if you believe any such content to hold encyclopedic value, you will rationalize and discuss the addition of such content before adding it. I don't think that's asking too much. ~Swarm~ ^{sting} 03:26, 2 July 2019 (UTC)

My 2c:

• I believe that Wnt is completely sincere and well-intentioned in their beliefs given the consistency with which they have expressed them over the years, and is not trying to game the system to get out of the current block.
• However, my reading is that they believe that society has grown too coddled and that the reality of extreme and violent content should be thrust in their faces for its own good; see this and other posts in the section from 2012 or their contribution to Bestgore.com including this edit from 2014 for examples involving such content/argument.
• The problem, as I see it, is that this argument is essentially ideological and universal, as opposed to an argument based on reliable secondary sources for inclusion of extreme content in individual cases. To spell out the difference: we have a strong source-based reason for including "disturbing" content at The Falling Man, My Lai Massacre, Phan Thi Kim Phuc etc. And strong source-based examples and reasons to not propagate depictions of school- and other mass-shootings. Wnt doesn't seem to recognize the difference and the need for wikipedia to follow the example of secondary sources; you'll note that in the 2012 and 2014 diffs linked above, there is no secondary source cited!
• Finally, I don't really think we should be asking Wnt to demonstrate shame or regret. They are welcome to hold on to their ideological beliefs as long as their actions on wikipedia respect the policies and goal of writing an encyclopedia that summarize secondary sources. At the same time, I don't think asking them to simply "rationalize and discuss the addition" of violent content is good enough since that leaves them open to make purely ideological arguments and/or indulge in verbal imagery (refer to the 2012 diff, recent post at WP:FRAM, or the "mother" anecdote in this very section).
• I am too lazy to expand on this but note also problems with Alex Jones-ish posts, of which examples abound in wikispace, especially at User talk:Jimbo Wales.

All this is to say that if/when Wnt is unblocked it should be with clear conditions to temper their disruptive acts, while encouraging their useful contributions to encyclopedic content, which they are certainly capable of. A possible restriction would be a ban from wikispace and other discussions forums (with the usual exceptions) although I am not certain if that is completely necessary or sufficient. Perhaps @Swarm, El C, Liz, and Trovatore:, or Wnt, have some better suggestions?

PS: Apologies Wnt for talking so frankly about you in the third-person on your own talkpage; I know it sounds rude but I can't see how to rephrase to avoid it.Abecedare (talk) 04:59, 2 July 2019 (UTC)

I've been mulling over whether to comment here or not, but I'd like to endorse basically everything Abecedare has said above. I recall very bluntly telling Wnt that "masturbating to gore porn does not constitute 'legitimate scholarship'" during the debate over whether the article on the Christchurch shooting should link to the video. Abecedare hits the nail on the head for when and why to include material that may be considered offensive. Mr rnddude (talk) 05:28, 2 July 2019 (UTC)

I agree that "shame" is not the best standard to hold an unblock request to. Neutral policy consideration is the standard that we should hold Wnt to, not morality policing. According to policy, offensive content that holds encyclopedic value is permitted, but this is a highly subjective standard. There can be no blanket presupposition to allow or ban such content one way or the other. I think an agreement that he will preemptively rationalize and discuss such content rather than adding it outright, and only follow through with such an addition when it is supported by the local consensus, is a reasonable moderating check on future problems that is in line with the policy requirements. The next-best alternative would be a hard TBAN on adding offensive content. That would be assuming that Wnt's judgment in terms of offensive content is completely irredeemable. I'm not convinced that even that is necessary. Something like a full TBAN from the Wikispace would not seem to address the root of the issue, which is the overly-liberal introduction of offensive content in subjective situations. ~Swarm~ ^{sting} 05:35, 2 July 2019 (UTC)

Endorse Abecedare's comment above. starship.paint (talk) 06:47, 2 July 2019 (UTC)

Which part do you endorse over my refutation? ~Swarm~ ^{sting} 07:08, 2 July 2019 (UTC)

Oh no. I got confused on some points, I'm sorry everyone. Reading all the above paragraphs, they all got jumbled in my head. I agree with Abecedare and Mr rnddude on when and why to include material that may be considered offensive. But I must have missed Abecedare's point about a total ban from Wikispace. I meant to agree with your suggestion, Swarm - to allow Wnt to preemptively rationalize and discuss such content rather than adding it outright. However, I do agree with Abecedare that Wnt should stop posting conspiracy theories on Wikispace, but I'd prefer a warning (or a topic ban from talking about conspiracy theories?) over a total ban from Wikispace. Anyway, I'm out, don't contact me about this! starship.paint (talk) 07:21, 2 July 2019 (UTC)

@Abecedare: As I said, at this point I don't think "NOTCENSORED" is really a policy any more. In 2012 I posted that diff to Jimbo's page in front of an audience of administrators without even worrying about being blocked, let alone indefinitely. I thought of the diff in the Bestgore article as citing a primary source by the subject about himself, which could be debated in the normal course of article editing. But even in the midst of my ill-considered Fram rampage, I did not dare to post a comparable link to Bestgore, but only suggested doing so, and that was still much too much. User:Stephan Schulz above is telling me that even explaining my personal perspective in response to an admin request about my emotional state is too much. This is not the Wikipedia it used to be -- and to be fair, this is not the internet it used to be. The plus side of that for you is that I can say that my days of challenges and conspiracy theories about Wikipedia politics are behind me. Now that it is made clear by the block and many comments favoring it that the policy I care about is no more, why should I get worked up about any other?

Your proposal of a WP space ban disturbs me, since the Reference Desks and WP:Lua are some of the places I was thinking I might still be of use. I think the sources people are complaining about are spread throughout article, talk, and other discussion places fairly evenly. My impression is that what you are mostly concerned about is violent video, wherever I would post it, and also that you regard this as against policy no matter who does it. Why don't you just come up with a way to write more clearly into policy the things you don't want posted? It would be easier than placing restrictions on editors one at a time, and it would avoid giving other editors not yet restricted the idea that these links are acceptable for them. In the meanwhile, as I said, I do understand you regard these links as against policy and I won't defy your policy. Wnt (talk) 20:52, 2 July 2019 (UTC)

So those links were fine once, but now they're not? That is your argument? I'm not sure that's true, but, say it was, it would be to the project's discredit. Again, I was not asking for your emotional state, I was asking for reflection and honest introspection, which I'm disappointed but frankly not surprised is still absent. El_C 21:53, 2 July 2019 (UTC)

@El C: Well, I don't think you would say I'm being dishonest, and I've been introspective enought to get a tl;dr notice and a request to have my talk access revoked. So the question is whether I'm reflecting on what you say. So far from what I could see, you've been saying or at least implying pretty consistently that anyone who posted the archive.org link that I did should be blocked forever, no ifs, ands, or buts. I've said repeatedly that I wouldn't dare post them going forward. Are you asking me to believe that these links are wrong, outside of the sense of them being prohibited on Wikipedia? Wnt (talk) 22:28, 2 July 2019 (UTC)

I'm trying to get you to appreciate why so many people are so upset — it's clearly not working. El_C 22:36, 2 July 2019 (UTC)

@El C: They don't usually say why they are upset, so I would only be guessing. Fox News, a major American TV network, still hosts that Jordanian pilot video you redacted recently, so the sentiment is not universal. Some may find the material disgusting, some are worried about claims that these videos lead to "copycats", some think they can defeat bad ideas by stamping out extremist material. I had originally thought that the formal illegality of the shooting video in Australia and New Zealand was the dominating factor that made this different, but I don't think you ever did remove the manifesto from the Christchurch shooting article, and nobody has mentioned it but me. Maybe the biggest thing is that I don't use social media to any significant degree, and I know that they have been restricting their rules every other month, so perhaps there is some acculturation going on I haven't been a part of. I don't understand some, maybe most of it. After I posted the idea I had somebody claiming to have cried for half an hour just from the thought that someone might be able to find the video, and that is truly a mystery to me. But does it matter why I think they don't like the content, as long as I don't use it? Wnt (talk) 22:49, 2 July 2019 (UTC)

I believe you. I was hoping for empathy, if not, at least sympathy. But I'd take puzzled apathy if it's the honest truth. I get the sense, then, that, also intellectually —not just in the realm of EQ— you still fail to grasp the gravity of linking to that video. Sure, you realize it's prohibited, but the risk of you trying to push this envelop again at some point in the future, possibly to the detriment of the project's public image or legal liability, that's not a risk I am willing to take at this time. El_C 23:04, 2 July 2019 (UTC)

@El C: Do you really think that the project is in that kind of danger at all, let alone from me? If I posted the link, it would be momentary, and then I'd be blocked again, and what would the point be? There's no use in carrying out a freedom of navigation exercise if there's no freedom of navigation! Anybody on Earth might do the same thing, and I don't think it would be the end of Wikipedia - it never has been before. It's not kiddie porn, and the project has had a fair amount of that posted in the past. And I've given you no reason (except the Fram debacle) to think that I routinely violate policy if I know it's a policy. I would think the biggest risk you are taking with this project is in not having a policy that spells out clearly what is prohibited for those among us who might have some trouble recognizing when it's innately wrong to mention an archive.org file on a talk page. Wnt (talk) 23:28, 2 July 2019 (UTC)

Truthfully, I don't think there are that many who share that ambiguity for us to need to spell it out in policy. But it wouldn't hurt, I suppose. El_C 00:19, 3 July 2019 (UTC)

Subsection 3

I could wish for the old Wikipedia, but it no longer exists, and it is pointless to try to speak to the dead.

I don't know what old Wikipedia Wnt is talking about above. I've been an editor for 15 years (and an admin for 14 of those), and as far as I am able to recollect, displaying or linking to graphic executions was never okay — again, some (iconic) exceptions notwithstanding. At any event, the argument as to Wikipedia not being therapy works both ways, in this case. Wikipedia is not bestgore and I don't know how healthy it is for the project to have users who approach it not being censored in such a manner.

Anyway, I don't need for Wnt to actually feel shame and regret for their shameful and regretful actions (their emotional state is, indeed, none of my concern), but failing to express reflection and honest introspection about these actions having taken place is a problem. Them merely saying the bare minimum needed to comply with the guide to appealing blocks, or even also agreeing to several proposed modalities that are meant to temper their predisposition to violate WP:OM so blatantly with unencyclopedic, offensive material — sorry, none of that works for me, and I continue to object to lifting the block on that basis alone.

And frankly, I'm surprised there is seemingly such a push to gently guide Wnt toward an unblock, seeing as what they've done is so beyond the pale. They're not the only one conveying longing for an old Wikipedia. But I suspect I do so for opposite reasons. El_C 10:37, 2 July 2019 (UTC)

• Just one comment from me, just to refute any idea that "Bestgore" is any sort of "real news, just uncensored" site. I've just taken a look (because it's unfair to criticize a site you haven't seen), and it blatantly isn't, as a quick glance at its selection of topics or at any of its captions/descriptions makes perfectly clear. It's a grotesque shock site, aimed at satisfying whatever it is its followers want from it (and I really don't know what that is). Anyone who sees it as any kind of legitimate journalism is, frankly, a disturbed individual. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 11:15, 2 July 2019 (UTC)

  @Boing! said Zebedee: I really don't think I have ever cited a Bestgore item outside of (a) a talk space conversation or (b) about itself. I suspect all of my diffs about it may have been referred to here by now. On Jimbo's forum I was speaking in a broad, metaphorical, now archaic sense, the way that some used to say that Assange was a journalist. Wnt (talk) 21:25, 2 July 2019 (UTC)

  Sorry, I might have synthesized something in my head after reading your references to bestgore together with what someone else said about the site after following up your edits to the Wikipedia article. I am, however, still disturbed by any suggestions that similar material is in any way appropriate for Wikipedia, and that prohibition of such material is something new and in opposition to NOTCENSORED. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 09:13, 3 July 2019 (UTC)

• Am going to be off-wiki for the next day and am perfectly happy with the involved admins deciding if/under-what-conditions Wnt should be unblocked. Hope the background I wrote above about the problem with Wnt's editing was of some help. Abecedare (talk) 17:24, 2 July 2019 (UTC)
• Wnt, I believe I gave a fully sufficient explanation about the difference between including offensive content because it is of encyclopedic value vs excluding offensive content with little to no encyclopedic value. You initially indicated that you understood this point, but when pressed to restate it in your own words, you've done about the worst you can do. I gave you all the answers. I did not ask for any sort of self-betrayal in the interest of political correctness. I simply asked for you to understand that it's a spectrum and that discussion and consensus may be required. Instead you're continuing to rail on about censorship and the "old Wikipedia" that no longer exists. It's not a great look. You could have been unblocked same-day, yet you're seemingly arguing against your own best interest. Seriously. I gave you the answers already. Get serious. ~Swarm~ ^{sting} 07:32, 3 July 2019 (UTC)

  @Swarm: I was able to agree with everything you said, but it doesn't sound like the others do. Abecedare wants me restricted from a large part of Wikipedia that I use for many other purposes. I don't think he or the others want me to "include something that is offensive for an academic reason" even if I "reasonably explain the underlying rationale, stay within policy, and avoid needlessly upsetting people." From what has happened, from how people are responding, I don't think I am going to stay unblocked (if I get unblocked) if I start opening up talk page sections asking people if they want to link this kind of video, let alone just adding it with a careful edit summary or a talk page explanation. Failure to realize that is a failure of 'reflection and honest introspection', I think. I didn't mean to dismiss what you said -- I value it, I wish it were true. I am also doubtless committing many strategic errors; I've never been blocked before and I don't know how the process works or very much about what people are expecting. My apologies - I know you are trying to help me with this process. Wnt (talk) 10:21, 3 July 2019 (UTC)

  On consideration, I think I dismissed something that User:El C said much too hastily. He talked about the possibility of some kind of legal action against the project for including the link. My first instinct was to wave a flag-colored sparkler and say no, that could never happen in America; after all, we have been allowed to watch videos of our own soldiers getting decapitated for nearly two decades. But the Assange prosecution illustrates how something deeply wrong, considered unconstitutional for an entire century, can now go forward. There is also the disturbing reality that archive.org, as best as I can tell, seems to have removed the full videos since the time I found them, even though it retains fragments of the video promoting highly offensive conspiracy theories that don't show anyone being killed. That footage is just as illegal with the Chief Censor in New Zealand, so by what standard did archive.org, normally an organization I would trust to preserve content, change its mind? How do I know if some creative prosecutor couldn't find a way to redefine "obscenity", itself an obscenity, to include violence also? If I had actually posted the link in the context of plain out and out mischief, I might well have gone beyond the sort of reasoned academic talk page discussion the Miller test is supposed to be reliable in protecting. And of course, there are an infinite number of other creative theories possible, in a world where so many other countries seem to have changed their core beliefs overnight. As a believer in free speech I should never have been nearly so blithe about the possibility of creating a terrible test case against myself and Wikipedia that would harm what I hold dear. For that offense against my own cause, I've decided I owe people here an apology and an acknowledgement of respect that so far I have denied them, because I don't actually know they weren't doing me a favor, even if I never get unblocked. They may have just been the messengers of something beyond their control. The world shouldn't be that way... but there it is. I should have been willing to listen to people. Wnt (talk) 23:13, 3 July 2019 (UTC)

Look, man, I'm just trying to get you to check the boxes so we can all move on. You don't need to overcomplicate this with further ideological musings. I get that you've never been blocked and you're apparently not even sure if you can be unblocked, but that's not how indefs work. An indef block is as short as you want it to be, all that is required is a suitable unblock request. What is required in such a request is fairly objective, and spelled out in the guide, and spelled out by me here. An understanding of the underlying policy considerations, an understanding of where you went wrong, and a change that you will voluntarily make to prevent the issue from happening again. I'm going by what policy says and what the standard unblock process requires. I'm not worried about abstract ideology or emotion, I am objectively explaining the problem and the appropriate resolution to the problem. I'm not looking for blanket statements, or punitive sanctions, or musings about the way the world is, or even an apology. I will unblock you if you meet the standard criteria for unblocking. That's it. I have spelled out what to do to meet these criteria. It's literally all spelled out. All you have to do is affirm what I said, in a genuine statement that shows that you understand what has already been explained and will make a change to avoid continued drama. You can take it or leave it, but I assure you that it is the correct path. Read the guide for yourself if you don't believe me. Should you meet this standard, any other logical and reasonable policy-based concerns can be considered, addendums can be made if necessary, but ultimately I will guarantee that you will be unblocked. The only thing I don't think I've covered that other people are concerned about is for you to sound human. I mean, someone above has the impression that you "masturbate to gore". Someone else said you lack basic human empathy. I get it, people have morbid curiosity and become desensitized to these videos, and I'm not going to punish you for that. I don't know whether you truly lack empathy or not, but that's no one's place to say. Lack of empathy is an objective disorder that affects ordinary people. It is not a decision to be evil (although it is stigmatized and misunderstood as such). We are not the empathy police. We are enforcers of basic objective standards. I will unblock you over objections that are not in line with policy or demands that exceed the scope of the offense. But a simple acknowledgment that, ideology aside, you can actually comprehend the emotional backlash you've sparked would go a long way. ~Swarm~ ^{sting} 04:46, 4 July 2019 (UTC)

As an uninvolved editor, I just wanted to tackle what seems the be a major disconnect here.

What I don't understand is why looking at or sharing a video of a terrible injustice being done to them would reflect a lack of empathy.

Because sharing the video comes across as exploitative. It's being shared & viewed because it's taboo. The thrill of sharing/watching such a video becomes the primary purpose. Or, in your case, using it to disrupt the WMF as part of a cause. That is why people are objecting to its inclusion on Wikipedia, along with other videos depicting killings. Such material needs to be handled with care, or else it's simply exploitation of the dead.

Wikipedia isn't improved by adding the video, because we can't provide any valuable commentary beyond "it exists." Any use of that video for information or education has to be handled very delicately, and with guided purpose, or we're right back to this exploitation. It stops being about informing, and becomes about the spectacle or the way it affects the audience. Which brings me to the next point:

How is it empathetic not to be willing to see a person crying, or a person fighting back?

For one, many victims families aren't going to be suddenly comforted by seeing their loved ones killed, crying, begging for their lives, or even fighting back. Even to people not related to the victims, witnessing brutal murders can be traumatic.

So the idea that it's less empathetic to refuse to share/view such material is... unorthodox, to say the least. Regardless of how violent our entertainment media can be, we all know that it's just pretend... and even then, some people are uncomfortable watching it. Expecting most people to be alright seeing actual murders is a huge disconnect.

I work in a healthcare environment. I've seen a lot of deaths, including some very gory ones. And I still don't want to see videos like this one, because I empathize too much with the victims & their families. I don't need to see it to know how awful the experience would be.

And that's been Wikipedia's stance for the longest time. WP:BLP and other policies exist precisely because sharing everything possible can cause more harm than good.

I've seen you pop up on Wikipedia lots of times over the years I've been here. You do good work, but your unflinching stance on censorship has always struck me as naive at best. I wish it hadn't taken this for you to realize that Wikipedia was never the bastion of free speech you believe it to be. And I'm hoping this post helps you understand why you've always faced an uphill battle on that front. We can't just consider "is this informative?" but also "what impact does sharing this have on the victims, their families, and our audience?" Weighing those things is not easy, and we can't just treat WP:NOTCENSORED as the only goal. That route causes harm to real people.

It sounds like now you understand using that video to disrupt Wikipedia was never really going to help. Even outside the "power struggle" aspect you mentioned before, it was just going to make things worse. I'm hoping this explanation I've written helps you understand why this particular choice of topic was especially egregious. If that makes any sense, I hope it helps you form your unblock request & find your way forward in the future. — The Hand That Feeds You:^Bite 21:12, 4 July 2019 (UTC)

Amen. Well stated. Compassion is superior to reason for human beings. Every time. Not even close. :::Life is not a video game. People bleed and people die and those who loved them are left deavasted. 2600:100F:B11E:E9B3:4BB:E524:946C:D505 (talk) 02:51, 5 July 2019 (UTC)

Draft unblock

@Swarm: Thank you for putting into a lot of effort into trying to find a way forward. There is still a good chance the following is insufficient, so per the guideline I'll ping you to ask if the draft covers everything I need to cover before putting an unblock template on it.

[unblock template goes here]
a) I understand that several of my edits to WP:FRAM were highly disruptive and not useful to build an encyclopedia.
b) I understand that Wikipedia is a collaborative effort and that I failed to take the very strongly worded comments of fellow editors into consideration several times leading up to this, or to show them proper respect.
c) I understand that there is a large group of editors telling me that links to these graphic videos are excluded by some aspect of BLP policy or ELNEVER, even when used for encyclopedic reasons.
a) I will be more mindful of WP:DE in the future. In particular, it is not my goal to 'make a point' or 'fail to get the point' or otherwise play games with this issue that can only be counterproductive.
b) I will respect the need for civil discussion about contentious article changes.
c) I will consider links to videos or images showing the death of identifiable persons to be against overall Wikipedia policy, as evidenced by this block, unless and until I see a strong, widely supported consensus to the contrary. Judging by this discussion, I doubt that is going to happen. (By 'identifiable persons' I mean to exclude anatomical and surgical images of anonymous donors that I think are still widely accepted on the site)
d) I will bear in mind that there are fundamental emotional factors involved here that I don't understand, with a mutual perception of lack of empathy between some like myself and many fellow editors, and that my initial assumptions about why this is happening are unlikely to be accurate.

Going forward: images of death were only a tiny number of my overall edits, so there is still plenty of useful ground that I could cover if given the chance. Wnt (talk) 22:30, 8 July 2019 (UTC)

• So sorry, Wnt. I'm fine with this. I'm still open to unblocking. Just ping the blocking admin and address any outstanding concerns. ~Swarm~ ^{sting} 05:06, 17 July 2019 (UTC)

  @Swarm and El C: Apart from the ping suggested I'm not sure what I should say at this point, except that whatever was going on with UTRS on this page I indeed know nothing about. Wnt (talk) 22:56, 17 July 2019 (UTC)

Wnt, when you write even when used for encyclopedic reasons, I'm wondering if you had a chance to read THTF extensive comment, in which they partially say: Wikipedia isn't improved by adding the video, because we can't provide any valuable commentary beyond "it exists." Other than that, I suppose your draft more or less checks all the boxes. I still have reservations, however, sorry to say. But I'm not going to stand in the way of consensus to unblock, either. El_C 23:23, 17 July 2019 (UTC)

@El C: My statement was that it is clear I need to treat the video as against Wikipedia policy regardless, so I shouldn't debate about criteria for what I said won't affect that. You can treat it as a hypothetical if you prefer. Wnt (talk) 00:09, 18 July 2019 (UTC)

Notice of noticeboard discussion

There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. Thank you.--wumbolo ^^^ 19:47, 1 July 2019 (UTC)

Closed with no action. starship.paint (talk) 07:23, 2 July 2019 (UTC)