User talk:Thumperward/Archive 81

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Works for you?

Chris, you were admonished in the civility-enforcement case. In what sense, does holding your breathe, etc. work for you? Have you embraced non-retaliation or civility?

Kiefer.Wolfowitz 12:20, 1 November 2012 (UTC)

I imagine I've been pretty closely watched in the last year regarding what happened then, and so far nobody's suggested I've done anything untoward. I don't see that expressing my generally low opinion of wiki-martyrdom (one with broad support, I may add) has much to do with my responsiveness regarding admin actions that I may take. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 12:46, 1 November 2012 (UTC)

"martyrdom" escalates conflict, as do "Diva" and "histrionic". Better to choose words that are less provocative. Kiefer.Wolfowitz 13:24, 1 November 2012 (UTC)

I'm led to believe that you're a fan of plain talking. As am I. Where exactly the line lies between forthrightness and incivility (if indeed it is merely a matter of language, something that I disagree with) is one of the major issues in this discussion, as I'm sure you're aware. If you want to me to retract particular words in favour of less inflammatory euphemisms then I'm fine with doing that, though. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 13:34, 1 November 2012 (UTC)

Chris,

I think that your are generally good as an administrator. I think I defended you somewhat after a block with Malleus, in that you at least responded to the community. (I did criticize your first actions.)

Thank you for the recognition that I prefer straightforward discussions. I also prefer reconciliation to continued conflict, particularly to escalation, and many of us have commented on the inflammation of discourse on that CfD page. Kiefer.Wolfowitz 13:39, 1 November 2012 (UTC)

Disambiguation link notification for November 4

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Infobox officeholder honorifics, redux

Could I trouble you to take another look at Template talk:Infobox officeholder#Formatting of name & honorifcs, please? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 10:27, 6 November 2012 (UTC)

Done. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 10:36, 6 November 2012 (UTC)

Hello, Thumperward. You have new messages at Template talk:Infobox officeholder.
You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

Swiffer

Hello, and thanks for the edit, but I found a problem and therefore had to revert it back. You said that you were tidying up, but that removed the bold lettering to the products, and added periods to the ends of the product names. Please know that some apostrophes can mean bold or italic. Brycecordry (talk) 02:28, 7 November 2012 (UTC)

The removal of the bold was deliberate: bold should be used sparingly in articles, rather than to decorate every proper noun as happens in some cases. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 10:25, 7 November 2012 (UTC)

Continuous Integration

Hi Thumperward, over at Continuous integration I have removed your tag that the lede was too short. If you think it is still needed, feel free to reinsert it! Martijn Meijering (talk) 15:36, 9 November 2012 (UTC)

Your assumption of "pointyness" was innaccurate

The RFC on the RFA talkpage was not attempting to make a point. Odd that you didn't link to the RFA that, for some reason most editors stuck to one question, which was the reason I made the proposal. It seemd far better in my opinion and I wanted to suggest it. Period. Accusations are certainly easy and I see you are one to make them, but that doesn't make them accurate. How about trying to stick with facts and if you have questions just ask. There is no need to bash the efforts of others in such an aggressive manner.--Amadscientist (talk) 19:30, 10 November 2012 (UTC)

You asked multiple questions and complained that a candidate who hadn't answered them was passing; you were pulled up on it; you started an RfC asking if multiple questions should be barred; you responded, when questioned on this, that you were annoyed that the candidate didn't respond favourably to being asked multiple questions. Those are the facts, and it is disingenuous to suggest that your actions prior to raising said RfC have nothing to do with it. I don't consider a three-sentence response to be "aggressive": blunt, certainly, but it wouldn't have benefited anyone for me to have made the same point in more words. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 19:40, 10 November 2012 (UTC)

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Template:Navbox (2)

Hello Chris.

Was there recently a change that removed the "dot" between list entries in Template:Navbox?

I'm not sure that I support it. It makes entries like "New Zealand Papua New Guinea United Kingdom United States" look pretty awkward, as you can't tell where one entry ends and the next one starts, unless you move the mouse over them (and only if they're linked).

Was there a discussion somewhere?

HandsomeFella (talk) 18:34, 11 November 2012 (UTC)

Not that I can see. Examples? Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 18:37, 11 November 2012 (UTC)

Template:Foreign relations of Somalia

The dot has disappeared betweeen the "V T E" links in the top left corner too.

Maybe it's something that has changed on my computer. I'll check from work tomorrow. HandsomeFella (talk) 18:45, 11 November 2012 (UTC)

New Infobox

I think Template:Infobox BART station is redundant to {{Infobox station}}. 69.158.95.113 (talk) 13:10, 12 November 2012 (UTC)

When you make your judgment, please take Template:Infobox LACMTA station and various other metro station templates into consideration as well. Thanks. --Yong (talk) 08:07, 13 November 2012 (UTC)

That template is two years old. Eventually it will be merged to the main template, but that will take time. It is certainly not a good idea to take the existence of such forks as meaning that new ones should be created at will. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 10:38, 13 November 2012 (UTC)

Interesting. May I know if the plan of merging all of the templates into one has been discussed and agreed upon, or is it the intended plan of your own? I don't see the general benefits of a grand, unified template (or what great change this would bring) but if you can show how a majority of other editors have agreed upon this I'd be glad to agree with you. --Yong (talk) 14:42, 13 November 2012 (UTC)

Pro and con list tag

Hi Chris. You recently added a pro and con list tag to Preference tests (animals). When I wrote the page, I wrote these advantages and disadvantages as concisely and neutrally as possible. These were included simply to advise the reader about some pitfalls of the technique rather than as a discussion of whether preference tests were 'good' or 'bad'. As such, I am not sure that the tag applies here. Could I get you to re-assess this with a view to removal of the tag. All the best.__DrChrissy (talk) 18:42, 13 November 2012 (UTC)

The article is in its early stages of development: I believe that the material in question can be presented in a better manner. However, I'll try to prioritise doing that work myself. Thanks for giving me a shout. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 19:13, 13 November 2012 (UTC)

This is simplistic, dogmatic automated tagging of what appears to be any article with a suggestive section heading. For band brake, the article already presents these points as prose, yet the 'bot tagged it anyway. For firecracker welding, a simple list of simple points is unlike;y to be improved by being made verbose.

This is a poor tag, and a worse bulk tagging. It's the sort of make-work editing that adds nothing. If an article is unclear, note that it's unclear, don't just rubber-stamp everything that meets some trivial search regex. If editing was that easy, we'd have robots writing it, not needing human editors. Andy Dingley (talk) 19:29, 13 November 2012 (UTC)

There's going to be some fallout, but I'm trying to ignore appropriate cases or fix easy ones as I go. As for "make-work", I've got what I consider to be a very good record of doing the work myself. Nothing gets done by itself around here: this is a two-year-old template inspired by a six-year-old essay, and the sentiment seems to enjoy broad approval. It's time to start sorting this out, and that means properly populating a cleanup category. Please do keep my feet to the fire over appropriate tags here: there's lots of work to do, and some oversight at this stage will help in the long run. Improving the essay would be a good idea as well. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 19:43, 13 November 2012 (UTC)

I'm afraid I must second Andy Dingley's comment. Over the last several years, there has been an explosion in the number of dubious tags appearing on virtually every Wikipedia page. These distract the reader and, in my experience, more often indicate a deficiency in the tagger's understanding of the text than a deficiency in the actual text itself.

I am a casual user of Wikipedia. I refer to it frequently and edit very rarely. I find it to be an invaluable reference, despite the fact that it shares many of the same shortcomings with most major newspapers, magazines, websites, and reports from thinktanks, universities, government agencies and industry. In my experience, most experts reviewing anything written by a generalist find obvious shortcomings -- have you ever read an article about Wikipedia in a newspaper? By contrast, much of what experts write is well informed and factually accurate, but is often written with the express purpose of advancing or defending a point of view. Nevertheless, I read the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal every day, and in the conduct of my business and general interests, I regularly review academic articles, government publications and industry PR, even though I know from experience the limitations of the information I read. Is it realistic to hold Wikipedia to a higher standard than the New York Times, the New England Journal of Medicine, the Federal Register or Dow Jones?

I landed on this page because i was having trouble understanding why someone would have tagged the Symmetric Multiprocessing article with "This article contains a pro and con list. Please help improve it by integrating both sides into a more neutral presentation." The article did not contain a pro and con list, and the section it referred to was presented in a factual and neutral way. Even if it did contain a pro and con list, I can't see any reason that that would be considered a shortcoming. Virtually every business proposal I have ever reviewed contains a list of pros and cons; in fact, a proposal would be considered deficient if it did not address pros and cons. The logic for the tag escaped me.

When I checked the revision history of the page, I saw that Thumperward had tagged the article. When I looked you up, I saw that you had tagged twenty five articles in the last two days. In reading this page, I gathered that there are a number of bots that helpfully suggest articles that should be tagged. It seems a virtual certainty that, with the assistance of one or more bots, you are adding tags much more quickly than they can possibly be addressed. In the case of the Symmetric Multiprocessing article, I can only assume that the article was flagged because it included the phrase "advantages and disadvantages" in comparing symmetric multiprocessing to other types of multiprocessing. This is like flagging the "advantages and disadvantages" of driving to grandma's vs flying. There are clear and objective advantages and disadvantgages on each side. Describing these need not imply bias; in fact, we just had that very conversation last night at dinner.

In my experience, this explosion of tags distracts the casual reader -- who is, after all, the intended audience. The tags lower the quality of the product by focusing the reader's attention on alleged shortcomings rather than on the information provided. It's like painting warts on every portrait in a gallery. Some of the portraits are very good, some not so good -- but all look worse with the warts painted on. Try running some of your bots on the latest issue of the New York Times and see how many suggested tags come up.

As a casual user, I am not familiar with the history or application of these tags. I just know that there are a lot more tags than ever before, and the number of tags has increased exponentially over the last several years. I find them distracting and, in most cases, inappropriate. I would encourage you and the Wikipedia "management" (or whatever the community of gurus is called) to reassess the tagging policies from the top down. At a minimum, I would suggest that no tags be displayed unless they are reviewed by at least two live people. It might also make sense to add a voting button to the tagging software, so readers could vote on whether they agree that the tag is appropriate. Finally, you migh wish to adopt a written tagging policy that explicitly list the goals of the tagging process and, yes, the pros and cons of adding a tag. The policy ought to recognize that there are real costs involved in adding a tag (in terms of readability, credibility and ultimately, the usefulness of the website to the reader). You might decide to weigh the benefits of adding a tag against the costs. The wikipedia guru-ship might decide to establish a goal for the total number of tags, or the maximum or minimum percentage of articles with tags, and then ration the tags with a pseudo-pricing mechanism to allocate a limited number of tags to the articles where they are most needed - for example, each tag might be scored based on the perceived severity of the shortcoming, the number of readers of a given article, etc; and then the top n percent of tags would be displayed to the readers. A second type of tag, limited to the talk pages, or even to a new category of "tag pages," could ensure that issues raised are not forgotten over time.

Although I am not familiar with the history of the tagging process or its current application, I can attest from personal experience and from the experience of friends, coworkers and acquaintances, that the tags are annoying and often address issues which are at best trivial. All sources have their own shortcomings, and Wikipedia is no less immune than the New York Times, the Federal Register or any of the other leading soures of information. While it is important to foster the continued improvement of the information in Wikipedia articles, it is no less important to foster the continued improvement of the readability and usefulness of the Wikipedia project. A written policy that explicitly addresses both the costs and benefits of adding a tag, and allocates tags to the articles that need them most, might go a long way towards eliminating dubious and errorneous tags and towards improving the Wikipedia project as a whole. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Tpkaplan (talk • contribs) 19:45, 15 November 2012 (UTC)

The tagging wasn't bot-assisted: it was manual, albeit done at a fast pace (with a lot of browser tabs). The SMP article is presently very low-quality, and is very much in need of the sort of targeted style edits that tagging assists with, lest it remains forever a grab-bag of randomly-ordered factoids and opinions interposed between lists of trivia. I'd very much like to point you at a well-written summary of how tagging got to this point and what the accepted community norms are, but to my knowledge nobody's created one: all I can say is that of the various proposals to curtail or otherwise alter the existing tagging process none have had community consensus to date, which leaves us in a situation where the placement of tags is up to user discretion. The community, by and large, lets people create work for themselves if they want to. By comparison, The New York Times is rather blessed by actually paying people to point out or correct mistakes and deficiencies in its content before it goes to press, although I can't speak to whether the editors responsible are also subject to cheap analogies to the defacement of paintings. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 23:05, 15 November 2012 (UTC)

I have just noticed that the Preference test article is now tagged at the very top of the article with "This article is in a list format that may be better presented using prose." This is clearly inaccurate as the first few paragraphs indicate. The tag is also distracting and implies poor quality, with which I strongly disagree. Please remove this tag.__DrChrissy (talk) 19:30, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

Besides the first first section, the article consists of bullet points. If you want to remove the tag, feel free to, but that won't get the bulleted sections rewritten any faser. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 00:52, 17 November 2012 (UTC)

*boggle*

{{Solareclipse200 db}}! Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 18:46, 17 November 2012 (UTC)

... Wow. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 22:10, 17 November 2012 (UTC)

Windows RT Edit War (sigh)

Please contribute to the poll on Talk:Windows RT. (You are being asked because you commented on Linux.) Tuntable (talk) 23:41, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

Isla Fisher

Chris, I don't know if you still have the above article on your watchlist, but it's recently become the subject of choice of user Internet Meme. I can see from his talkpage that you've had dealings with the editor before, and it was yourself who originally suggested the compromise position that most editors have been maintaining for the lack of a better alternative. The real problem I have is not his position per se (as it seems a reasonable option for consideration) but the tendentious manner he's trying to push the changes through. I wondered if you could have a look back in, and either weigh in on the discussion, have a word with the editor himself, or let me know if I'm the one in the wrong here? Stuart.Jamieson (talk) 19:11, 23 November 2012 (UTC)

Sorry, dropped the ball on this one. I've left a comment on the talk page. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 16:16, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

Userbox merging

• Category:Not an admin user templates

There are quite a few "admin hopeful" userboxes in that cat which could probably use merging, I think. Interested? - jc37 03:43, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

Dropped the ball on this one as well; sorry. There's the potential to merge a couple of the ones under the generic userbox user (which I see has changed), but in general we let people fork these things at will in their own userspace. All we can do is try to encourage people to use the generic ones if we want a bit more uniformity. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 16:18, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

Beyond My Ken

I noticed your comment on AN/I. BMK has not stopped adding his "spacing" comments, and continues to replace them when removed, occasionally verging into edit warring over it. Would you consider supporting an RFC/U about his idiosyncratic use of images and formatting, ownership of articles, and edit-warring to maintain these idiosyncratic styles? It's high time he stopped. Yworo (talk) 18:12, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

I'd certify one if it were opened, though I've a low opinion on the efficacy of RFC/U in general. Pretty sure he's had at least one previously under his old user names, by the way. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 18:16, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

Old user names? Do please enlighten me. Yworo (talk) 18:28, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

User:Ed Fitzgerald, User:Before My Ken. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 18:40, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

You'll find a succinct summary of my history here. Oh, and Chris, I have never in my entire Wikipedia career knowingly made an edit which reduced the quality of an article. Beyond My Ken (talk) 19:04, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

Your own definition?Curb Chain (talk) 05:34, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

I see that Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Ed Fitzgerald exists: In summary, he opposes style guideline consensus and editedits pages to his own style vision.Curb Chain (talk) 05:40, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

I beg to differ, BMK. In my opinion, many, if not most, of your edits reduce the quality of the articles. You are style-blind and layout-challenged. And you don't even realize it. Yworo (talk) 07:49, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

Style discussions

Do let me know if you have any talk page discussions about certain idiosyncratic styles and formatting you'd like support on. I'd be happy to help clean such stuff out of articles through consensus. Yworo (talk) 08:26, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

Can't remember off the top of my head: much of this is in the past as fas as I'm concerned, and most of my recent interactions with BMK has been positive. Broadly, we have a consensus that articles should follow the MoS, which already covers the matters of superfluous whitespace and of image sizing (the two most recent flareups). Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 16:07, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

Chris: Out recent interactions have been positive because, in general, I think you're a good admin, and I agree with the majority of the things that you do to protect the encyclopedia. I do think that you have this one blind spot concerning style issues, but that pales besides the larger issues. Beyond My Ken (talk) 13:04, 30 November 2012 (UTC)

That's precisely why I don't spend too much time dwelling on it. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 13:15, 30 November 2012 (UTC)

KFC

Hi, I'm behind 95% of that KFC article. I want to continue to improve it. It has been listed for GA status (let down solely by some of the formatting of the references) and no one then had a problem with the length of the controversies section. Have you read the Controversies section? I think it actually helps to clear up a lot of the misconceptions about KFC. For example, I allow their response at length to the Virgina animal cruelty scandal. And with the racism accusation, I think the article shows that KFC were unfairly criticised by Americans who saw the video online and didn't understand its Australian context. Farrtj (talk) 12:30, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

Also, is your only problem with it that it is too long? Farrtj (talk) 12:31, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

I suppose this comment (that I missed as it was accidentally added to my user page, rather than my talk) is redundant given that you've already done the work yourself to fix the underlying problem here. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 10:16, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

Coordinate errors affecting multiple infoboxes

Please see Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Infoboxes#Coordinate errors affecting multiple infoboxes. Your assistance would be appreciated. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 14:10, 8 December 2012 (UTC)

Replied over there. I'll keep this in mind for future article sweeps. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 09:59, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

Help with map

Hi. I'm doing a GA review on Svalbard Rocket Range, and the article author inserted a map with the {{Locator map}} template, but they say it is showing the wrong location. I noticed you've worked on that template. Can you help out? Thanks. --Noleander (talk) 21:38, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

I see this has already been fixed. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 09:54, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

Football records in Spain

Thanks a lot for removing frivolous records which neither belonged to the subsections in the article nor they were records. Even the citations were from the club itself. I liked your justice -"sock sock sock is not the answer". Have not seen a true admin like you for years! Instead of improving the article and stopping the users who were the real ones to blame and the real socks, the other admin simple used admin right to do idiotic measures like blocking people and even protecting page so that he/she could only edit it when he/she doesnt know anything about what a record is! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 49.244.28.247 (talk • contribs) 16:05, 10 December 2012‎

Help with a article

in Supercopa de España, an admin without any knowledge of the records is trying forefully to revert my edits. The records he is reverting is the correct version but the one he is trying to put is saying messi has 10 goals which is totally a lie. Raul has the record for total goals scored in supercopa. You may check it for yourself. Messi only has 3. Could you please stop him/her from messing up the article. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 49.244.53.63 (talk) 06:38, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

A brief look through the year-by-year Supercopa articles allows one to easily count the number of goals Messi has scored, and it's far more than three. Stop this now: I'm going to ensure that any proxies that you use to continue editing (I assume that you aren't actually in Nepal) are closed. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 10:32, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

I just saw my mistake. I had forgotten to see the second legs :). And I am actually in Nepal. The person who I am being accused of is in US. My opera browser automatically proxies because it helps web pages load fast. I can stop using proxy and use a Nepals internet server to prove that. But all in vain. They are accusing me of being about 10 wiki users who i dont know.

And by the way, the records you reverted in Football records in spain is reverted by the Sockpuppet user:adnan. see for yourself. that person is the sockpuppet of about 7 users who are pro barcelona fans. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 49.244.160.230 (talk) 06:03, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

I'll deal with Adnan. I'm not interested in assertions that such-and-such is a sockpuppet without firm evidence. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 09:13, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

Hi, this sentence is when i use firefox, without the opera browsers turbo function which created proxies.this is a nepals address. would you like a skype session and i show you the himalayas mountains and mount everest live early morning to prove that I am a nepalese :) You know its getting funny now I am being accused not only of being 10 other users but also my place of existence is being questioned. what a joke. i guess thats a weakness of wikipedia. it cant autmatically detect where a person is. 49.244.160.230 (talk) 06:09, 12 December 2012 (UTC)