User talk:Iridescent

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

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Do we really need to fix RfA

All section breaks are mine to break up what was becoming a slightly long and confusing thread—if anyone feels I've misrepresented them, feel free to retitle the relevant section.

I already know some of your answer to this, so I’m slightly hijacking your talk page to avoid posting an anathema thought on WT:RFA, but I’m curious both to you and your stalkers thoughts on this. I don’t actually think we have an admin crisis. I think the replacement rate of 15-25 a year is more than sufficient to meet our actual needs and provide new blood and thought, and while I haven’t been following RfAs nearly as closely as I used to, I’m not overwhelming convinced that they’re excessively negative beyond the negativity that comes with opening yourself up to any constructive feedback, which always sucks to hear even if you’re genuinely open to it. I don’t think we need over 1000 admins for this stage of the projects lifecycle, and while I’m genuinely very much a “no big deal” type, to me it seems like we’re actively promoting roughly the right amount to meet the needs of a project that’s already reached cultural hemomgeny and that’s in its maintenance phase. In other words, it’s not a symbol of our decline, but of our shift from upstart project that spun off of Jimmy trying to develop a porn site to institution. Anyway, your thoughts as well as others are welcome. TonyBallioni (talk) 01:02, 20 February 2021 (UTC)

Tony, I apologize for side-tracking from what you wanted to ask, but I'm genuinely curious about "spun off of Jimmy trying to develop a porn site". What's the history about that? (Inquiring minds want to know. ) --Tryptofish (talk) 20:31, 20 February 2021 (UTC)

Wikipedia was originally attached to a website known as Bomis which hosted porn. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 20:47, 20 February 2021 (UTC)

Not sure what to make of the fact that one of the cofounders of Bomis is a strong candidate for "terrible BLP free-use image of the day"... Vaticidalprophet (talk) 21:17, 20 February 2021 (UTC)

You could always ask Jimmy (or User:TimShell although he hasn't edited for a decade) if there are any better quality photos from back then. (That said, he tends to go quiet and change the subject when the topic of Bomis or Nupedia is raised; "Wikipedia was created to try to drive traffic to a low-quality porn site in the late 1990s" doesn't tally with the official "Wikipedia was created ab nihilo in January 2001 as a public service" creation myth the WMF peddle so assiduously. It's hard to overstate just how seedy Bomis was.) ‑ Iridescent 05:18, 23 February 2021 (UTC)

Yeah, I find myself wondering if "Hey, are there any nicer photos of your coworker from when you were a porn peddler?" would go over well over at Jimbotalk, to say the least. Bomis is the kind of thing that's endlessly hilarious to me as a member of the "Wikipedia has always existed" generation -- it's so spectacularly at odds with the image that built up over the next two decades that you can't just let it slide. Vaticidalprophet (talk) 05:28, 23 February 2021 (UTC)

If you want "hilariously at odds with the image he's spent the last two decades creating"… You could always ask Larry Sanger (@lsanger), who was also there in Bomis days, if he has any photos lying around. If you're going to sup with Larry use a very long spoon, as he's now a full-fledged member of the online crazysphere. ‑ Iridescent 05:49, 23 February 2021 (UTC)

Routine tasks & backlogs

First-time caller here, but since my RfA is among the most recent, I'll chime in with my thoughts. I think there's two connected questions here: (1) Is RfA a bad process, and (2) Do we need more administrators? To the first I'll say that my RfA was surprisingly easy-going, even though I don't think myself superlatively "qualified" for the role. I'm not sure how much of that easy run was due to nominators, my low profile outside topics I'm interested in, the fact that other RfAs were running concurrently, et al. I don't think recent RfAs have been particularly negative, but I'll note that Hog Farm and Hammersoft – both uncontroversial candidates – got a whopping 27 and 28 questions during their successful RfAs, compared to my much-easier 11. So maybe not "negativity", but perhaps an unnecessary drain on their time and energy for what can be a relatively small payoff.

To the question of whether we need more administrators, I think it depends. Are issues sitting unresolved at WP:AN for want of administrators? Maybe not. But if MER-C hangs up their cleats tomorrow, WP:CP will be underwater in a matter of months. WP:CCI is already deep underwater, but if Moneytrees leaves it'll be swallowed by the ocean floor. Perhaps there are other similar low bus factor processes that I don't frequent as well? At least for the copyright admin areas, I don't imagine reforming RfA would help us much. We just don't have a bench of copyright-interested editors waiting in the wings that could be enticed by a lower bar at RfA. Instead I'd advocate we take some of the energy we'd spend on RfA-related hand wringing, and channel it to periodically taking stock of what administrative needs we have, how healthy do our processes look for each, and how can we improve processes to attract new talent to the undermanned areas. If there are some areas where we have editors interested in those processes but fearful of RfA, then perhaps their concerns could guide a discussion of how RfA should change. Ajpolino (talk) 21:30, 20 February 2021 (UTC)

We regularly see backlogs at the "definitely needs tools reasonably soon" that are complained about at AN. And by regularly, weekly if not more often. Until that doesn't happen, we don't have enough admins and definitely are not promoting enough accordingly between inactivity and clouds. --Izno (talk) 23:21, 20 February 2021 (UTC)

Izno, I actually pretty strongly disagree with this. Most of those backlogs aren't emergencies, and the reason for them isn't lack of people. It's lack of interest. If I had to estimate we have 50 admins who do most of the heavy lifting, and another 100-200 that also contribute behind the scenes but do less of the maintenance work. We have 1,111 admins. So roughly 900 more than the amount who are actively working on maintenance tasks. The cause of these backlogs isn't lack of people, it's that they're boring. Adding 50 new admins a year isn't going to change that. TonyBallioni (talk) 05:37, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

I'm talking AIV and RFPP and speedies directly, not just all the hidden and "lower priority" backlogs. That said, if any single one of our high-perf output admins on the so-called 'boring' ones leaves (or heck, MaterialScientist on the high priority ones), dies, decides they are in fact boring, we will have issues on those too. Then there's a constant call for clerks on some of the processes. So on and so forth. Then there's the XFD eternal backlogs that need admins to close for deletion in many/most cases. More admins now, while we have the institutional knowledge to support them, can only be for the better. --Izno (talk) 05:42, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

Well, the reason for AIV is that the reporters are usually wrong and no one wants to get yelled at for declining, so they just leave it until an admin who has less strict standards for blocking new accounts comes along... That's a problem with the reporters, not a lack of admins. We have the people to do everything you pointed out. People just don't want to do a lot of those rolls, and I don't think getting more people will end the backlogs. TonyBallioni (talk) 06:12, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

Surely things like RfPP aren't boring for everyone? There are admins that spend hours each day doing tasks I think would be boring (eg dealing with AfC draft deletion or CfD closures). More people with interest in those areas would hence resolve that. And even more people with only casual interest in those areas would up the overall output to some degree. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 11:24, 22 February 2021 (UTC)

Yes; and there's also the fact that the relatively mechanistic processes like RFPP are the ones that tend to be the go-to places for admins who are having one of their periodical "I haven't done anything adminny for a while and I probably ought to, but I don't have time to commit to something that's potentially going to need me to commit to lengthy follow-up". (I speak from experience, having just spend the last hour or so cleaning out the deletion backlog.) ‑ Iridescent 15:59, 24 February 2021 (UTC)

Recruitment and retention

"Fix" is a slippery term—does that include recruitment? As WereSpielChequers mentioned in the original post for that thread, I think it would be helpful to have more admins from newer generations of editors. As others and I have mentioned before, more new administrators would help alleviate the pressure on earlier admins, letting them take a break from all the people getting riled up no matter what you do. isaacl (talk) 05:27, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

I agree with that, but it also isn't inconsistent with believing that RfA is already promoting enough to do this. TonyBallioni (talk) 05:37, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

With regards to new generations, current stats indicate not enough are being promoted. With regards to relief for earlier admins, it's a trickier question. We'd have to try to estimate how many admins are burning out from a sense of weariness. Sheer workload numbers won't tell the whole story, since everyone has different thresholds, plus it's the contentiousness and poor behaviour faced that is likely the largest tiring factor. isaacl (talk) 08:17, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

Registration date is a really bad stat to use. A ton of people created accounts in 2007 and disappeared for a decade. I’m a 2016 generation admin, because that’s when I became active, even though I’ve been around in some form for 15 years myself. There’s a lot like that. TonyBallioni (talk) 08:28, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

Or, hey, me. Registered in 2012 but became active only in 2015. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 09:13, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

Just for fun, I've started collecting some data on the years when various editing thresholds were met. I'll agree in advance that edit counts is of course also a flawed measure; it's hard to figure out a way to determine shall we say the formative period for an editor, without actually analyzing individual edits, which is more work than I want to do (will have to leave it to someone completing their graduate thesis). isaacl (talk) 18:09, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

@Isaacl, I think that page will be more find-able and useful if you move it (whenever you're satisfied with it) to a subpage of WP:RFA. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:52, 22 February 2021 (UTC)

Thanks; I'll bear it in mind for the future. (As of yet, it's just my own notes and I'm not trying to make it useful or findable.) isaacl (talk) 01:11, 22 February 2021 (UTC)

You both alredy know this but for the benefit of others reading, "editing number threaholds" is also not a very useful metric. There are plenty of people whose early histories consist entirely of search-and-replace typo fixing or wikilinking every instance of a particular term once the article on that topic was created—they look feverishly active in the logs, but may not have really become "active" in the sense of writing articles or engaging in Wikipedia's internal debates until years later. There's also a fairly large constituency of people who started off on other WMF projects and thus had an account here created automagically when WP:SUL was introduced, but only shifted their primary focus here later on. ‑ Iridescent 06:14, 23 February 2021 (UTC)

I did think about editors from other projects, but for purposes of identifying a formative period on English Wikipedia, I think time spent on this site is key. I don't think periods of time spent typo-fixing have to be discounted in themselves—what really counts is the time the editors spent reading discussions. But that's not discernable from any publicly available info. Engagement through edits is a very rough way of trying to approximate that. Talk page edits might be a better indicator—maybe I'll collect some numbers on that, too. isaacl (talk) 07:31, 23 February 2021 (UTC)

Engagement through WP: space might be a better way to measure it—there are quite a few younger editors who chat away on their talk pages to their friends until either they get bored, or someone gives them a WP:NOTHERE block. Someone flagging articles for deletion / participating at Requests for Whatever / reviewing Featured Artcle (Picture, List) Candidates / nominating pages at DYK / requesting advanced permissions / arguing at ANI is a certain sign that somebody is taking at least some kind of interest in how the site actually operates, rather than just treating it as just another kind of writing medium. ‑ Iridescent 14:10, 23 February 2021 (UTC)

I started with Talk + Wikipedia + Wikipedia_talk; I deliberately excluded User_talk. isaacl (talk) 16:05, 23 February 2021 (UTC)

I believe that @EpochFail had a script somewhere that will tally up an estimated number of hours, if you're interested. I believe it's based on the (research-tested) theory that if you haven't edited for more than 30 minutes, then you're done. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:52, 24 February 2021 (UTC)

Sorry, I'm missing some context: what do you mean by "if you haven't edited for more than 30 minutes, then you're done"? isaacl (talk) 02:58, 24 February 2021 (UTC)

I assume "if an editor doesn't edit for 30 minutes the WMF's user-statistics bods treat it as the end of that editing session for measuring purposes". ‑ Iridescent 16:01, 24 February 2021 (UTC)

Correct. For most editors (not always including me), on most days, the distribution of time between edits is not linear. You might make an edit every minute, or every few minutes. Some edits take longer, but for the most part, the time between opening the window and closing it is (much) less than 30 minutes, and if it's been more than 30 minutes before your last edit, then you're probably offline. Based on this, it's possible to estimate approximately the number of hours that someone is engaged in Wikipedia in any given week. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:44, 24 February 2021 (UTC)

Sorry for the late reply. I mainly wanted to +1 to what User:WhatamIdoing said about the measure. We usually use a cutoff of one hour rather than 30 minutes though as that seems to optimize better how people actually behave. The measure is intended to work in aggregate very well (lots of editors, lots of edit sessions) but it will be less accurate for individual editors. We originally developed it to measure how much time people spent editing Wikipedia (about 12 million labor hours per year) as I think that puts a lot of important dynamics of Wikipedia in context. It also highlights all of the hard work that goes into editing in a way that edit counts don't. I still think it is interesting to apply to individuals assuming we can highlight the caveats. --EpochFail (talk • contribs) 16:54, 3 March 2021 (UTC)

I think that makes me happy. Because I build my edits based on multiple reliable sources, edit holistically to make sure the intro covers the article well and the structure is clear and well marked by section headers, things are linked on the first occurrence and not after, etc., etc., use preview, and when I hit an edit conflict, politely use another tab to see what changed in the meantime and then to paste in my edit with those changes incorporated—and furthermore I sometimes I have to walk a dog, do off-line or else-net work, or eat mid-edit, or occasionally I have had loss of session data—the WMF is unaware of most of my work. Another case of the WMF assuming, but I think on the whole I like this one. They can't claim credit for what they haven't realised I do. Yngvadottir (talk) 01:00, 25 February 2021 (UTC)

Yngvadottir, you're right to note that the measure will not capture the time spent doing activities before your first edit in a session. But let's say you check your watchlist, revert some vandalism, reply to a message, and then start your editing work. Just so long as your research for the editing work took less than one hour before you made your first edit, the activity would be captured and the labor hours counted. Note my reply above for a discussion of the caveats in applying this measure to individuals. But I still suspect it will be a good approximation -- though definitely conservative as we all do work outside of editing (e.g. just plain reading, mailing list activity, etc.). FWIW, I developed this metric before I was hired at the Wikimedia Foundation and now I'm a volunteer again so this isn't really a WMF initiative. I don't think it is captured in any of the standard metrics for wikis -- which I think is actually quite a bummer. --EpochFail (talk • contribs) 16:54, 3 March 2021 (UTC)

It would be technically possible to track situations like Yngvadottir's more precisely if you could persuade the WMF to allow monitoring of the touched attribute for individual editors, but the backlash would probably be huge and not worth the effort—casual editors aren't going to appreciate the nuanced difference between "a select group of researchers can track the times at which I'm interacting with the website even if I'm not actively making an edit" and "a group of strangers is keeping a log of which pages I visit". Since all the researchers would see is "Yngvadottir is currently active on Wikipedia" and it would still be impossible to tell whether she was painstakingly drafting a lengthy and detailed rewrite of an article, was idly looking up whether "Yes Sir I Can Boogie" had ever been translated into Romanian, or had forgotten to switch the computer off and gone shopping, the data wouldn't have much practical use. ‑ Iridescent 06:09, 4 March 2021 (UTC)

Looking at my pattern, I basically have WP always visible, in about 50 or 60 windows, often divided between 2 computers, and go from one to another for a few minutes each at intervals during the day, incrementing some each time--essentially, the exact opposite of the way Yngvadottir works. I see I rarely work for more than an hour at a stretch, but if I'm away more than 3 hours I'm usually sleeping or out of the house or watching something. I work on what I think will be a group of easy drafts or articles or discussions, and typically one takes much longer than usual; if it takes too long, I go back to it --sometimes that day,, sometimes later that week, and sometimes, unfortunately, never. For anything that takes thinking what to say, I do the thinking away from the computers. I've always worked in this pattern, with everything. We're a collection of very idiosyncratic people. DGG ( talk ) 03:27, 18 April 2021 (UTC)

Yeah—one size fits all doesn't really work, which is why the "active editor" stats are so meaningless. I could rack up 5000 edits using a script to standardize the use of hyphens and en-dashes for date ranges on articles or doing one of my periodic search-and-replace patrols for "targetted" and "honourary" in the time it would take to make a single substantive edit if I were composing the substantive edit off-wiki in a word processor to make sure it was coherent and balanced before I let it be visible to readers. There really is no right way to measure these things. Unless we're going to start keystroke logging—which is never going to happen—it's impossible to measure whether "logged in to Wikipedia" equates to "active on Wikipedia", or what the relationship between "active" and "doing something useful" actually is. ‑ Iridescent 15:22, 19 April 2021 (UTC)

Editing activity charts and spikes

Very true, and one thing the difficulty of measuring conceals is the drastic decline over the last decade (while editor numbers have remained apparently fairly stable) over the % of edits actually adding text - now surely less than 10%, to judge from my watchlist. Johnbod (talk) 15:34, 19 April 2021 (UTC)

It's not quite the same thing, but the aggregate total of non-bot content edits (i.e. how much the text of Wikipedia's articles has changed owing to edits made by IPs and non-bot editors) doesn't scream out "decline". There was a spike in 2017 which rose and fell so sharply I assume it's a bug, and something weird going on in late 2019–early 2020 (I initially thought it was linked to covid lockdowns, but the rise begins too soon), but other than that there's been a fairly consistent rise in mainspace editing since 2015. While I don't necessarily trust the new Wikistats, if (a big if) it's accurate then the ratio between content and non-content edits has risen steadily since 2007, although this latter metric doesn't consider the size of edits so part of that rise may be accounted for by increases in vandal-reverting and typo-fixing. ‑ Iridescent 16:07, 19 April 2021 (UTC)

The charts are both 'all wikis'. The 2017 spike in chart #1 was "something that isn't enwiki", as it doesn't show up on the enwiki chart, which similarly has the uptick resemble COVID lockdowns more than whatever's going on there. Chart #2 for enwiki similarly looks like the classic birth-2007, 2007-2014, 2014-present pattern in literally everything on enwiki, with no apparent up- or downtick in content/not -- perhaps if you squint there was a little more 'not' at the nadir? Vaticidalprophet 16:18, 19 April 2021 (UTC)

It shows up in the Wikidata chart. Maybe that was the month when the bots moved all the interwiki links? (Wikidata doesn't use the bot flag the same way we do here.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:31, 21 April 2021 (UTC)

If that were the case, there ought to be a corresponding flurry of bot edits on Wikipedia as all the previous ILL templates were removed, but the bot activity level didn't even twitch. There's also something very strange going on at Commons recently if the figures are right—some of that's possibly going to be the result of Fae's (and his assorted socks's) disruptobots but even he surely can't account for all of it. ‑ Iridescent 12:28, 21 April 2021 (UTC)

I think Fae's activity is enough to account for virtually all of that - now he just imports books, and has done thousands, at 50 mb or more a pop, so Commons search results look like this - ie completely useless. Johnbod (talk) 14:07, 21 April 2021 (UTC).

Commons is a complete mess. It's impossible to do any meaningful maintenance over there because everyone seems to think that anything is in scope. Anarchyte (talk • work) 14:23, 21 April 2021 (UTC)

It's not just that they think everything is in scope, it's that the administration has broken down so completely that there are no longer even workable processes to decide what the scope is or to identify and deal with the people who are causing problems (and any brave souls who do try to address the issue are accused of "not being mellow" and kicked out as soon as they fall foul of one of its self-appointed super-users). I honestly think it's reaching the point where the WMF should seriously consider either cutting it loose and setting up a Commons 2.0 forking across only those files which are currently in use and imposing much stricter rules about scope, going back to individual wikis hosting files locally, or start dishing out global bans on the worst offenders pour encourager les autres. (I don't say this as a Commons-hater—I have over 40,000 uploads to Commons—but as someone who recognizes that it's become a disaster area totally detached from its actual purpose.) It's not doing either the public who want to find files for reuse, the readers and editors of the wikis, or the Commons editors themselves, any good for the WMF to continue to allow a handful of crazy people to hijack the site and try to turn it into the internet's dumping ground. ‑ Iridescent 14:42, 21 April 2021 (UTC)

It is indeed a mess, but they can always be mellow. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:19, 21 April 2021 (UTC)

Not mellow enough, in my experience: [1] then [2]. EEng 03:00, 22 April 2021 (UTC)

I made the mistake of looking at Commons:Commons:Staying mellow, and saw what may be a contender for "dumbest oozer-boxen ever". --Tryptofish (talk) 20:45, 22 April 2021 (UTC)

I'll guess "melon/mellow" are homophones in the language so the gag makes sense, and it just doesn't translate well. The alternative—that someone genuinely thought "Ha! Someonee could interpret 'I want you to be mellow' with 'I want you to be a melon', that's hilarious!" is too depressing to think about. ‑ Iridescent 06:58, 26 April 2021 (UTC)

No, it's not Fae, since the spike disappears if you exclude bots. I suspect it's BotMultichillT going around and adding structured data to every file (and managing to make 8.5 million edits in one month, which I didn't know was even possible, in the process). For comparison, the most active bot in Wikipedia is WP 1.0 bot, which has made about 8 million edits in 14 years. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 14:56, 21 April 2021 (UTC)

And I suspect the 2017 Wikidata spike was a series of "Updating citation graph" edits by Harej, who, according to Wikiscan, made 2 million edits and added 39 gigabytes of content in one month. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 15:07, 21 April 2021 (UTC)

Opposition at RFA

I will just say that I'm continuously disappointed in what seems to be regular pestering of anyone who opposes or is neutral. I brought this up on the talk of Hog Farm's RfA and it seems most people disagree with my view. IDK—I understand the onus being on the oppose/neutral people but I'm not convinced that it's good practice for the current RfA to have every oppose and neutral vote being responded to by someone calling them out or trying to change their mind. Though I don't think this is anything seriously detrimental to RfA, it always stands out to me as odd. Aza24 (talk) 06:02, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

In my experience on TV Tropes, while we don't have an RfA equivalent negative comments are much more likely to elicit responses than neutral or positive ones in discussions. I suspect there is a kind of psychological effect that underlies this pattern, and which might carry over to RfA. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 09:13, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

I expect that pattern varies according to whether the vote is lopsided. The members of the minority are always wrong and must be shown their errors. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:52, 22 February 2021 (UTC)

Speaking as someone with a reputation as a serial opposer (albeit an unfair one IMO), I never really saw badgering as a particular problem and rarely experienced it. In my experience it's usually a case of people opposing for a confusing or obviously inaccurate reason, others asking them to clarify, and this being taken as badgering. It's why if opposing, I generally write a mini-essay explaining why I've opposed, and whether the oppose is a "never" or a "here are the things I feel you need to address"; I know it makes me look like some kind of nitpicking crank, but IMO there's no point saying "you need to improve" if one's not going to explain in what way you need to improve. (Objections to opposes does sometimes change people's minds; I've certainly retracted opposes on occasion at RFA if the candidate's given a decent explanation for why they did whatever I thought was problematic.) ‑ Iridescent 05:26, 23 February 2021 (UTC)

I have seen more badgering of opposes since the revising down of the "discretionary range"—note scare quotes—but it may have been caused by the increasing "not enough admins" panic and/or the addition to central notices and the larger participation that brought, rather than by the change to the numbers. It disturbs me for two reasons. One is that most candidates are not well known to most participants at RfA (especially since the central notice change) and so the candidate's comportment during the RfA is all the more important in judging whether the community should trust them. Having the nominator or even worse a posse of wiki-friends bludgeon the Oppose section gets in the way of seeing that—and maybe encourages more questions—and gives me at least the impression the candidate's friends think they can't handle negativity, which is a big red flag, if only because admins get a certain amount of negativity. More importantly, I want members of the community to feel they can raise perceived issues without being hammered for it. To me that's a major part of the respect for fellow editors that should be the reason for our civility policy (rather than importing the norms of discourse in a work environment that most of us have never been in). I've gone to bat for editors to not be punished for lèse-majesté against admins (and arbs) at AN/I, and in a discussion of whether someone should be trusted with the block and protect buttons, I absolutely want editors who do know the candidate and have concerns that they might be an abusive administrator to not be scared away from raising those issues. Yngvadottir (talk) 01:00, 25 February 2021 (UTC)

I haven't really followed RFA closely enough recently to have strong opinions—I tend to only start following RFAs either if they're close and it looks like there's a potential that something I say will actually make a difference, or if I think The Community is about to make a mistake and it's my duty to raise the issues. These situations are atypical and more likely to have arguments than usual.) That said, I probably do oppose more often than most precisely because I don't generally bother with the 'support' pile-ons that are obviously going to succeed. In my experience a lot of what gets called "badgering" is actually people raising legitimate concerns ("you opposed because they did [bad thing] but you've misread the history and what they did was actually reasonable"). The "how dare you disagree with my friend" whining and the off-wiki-coordinated flashmobs do happen, but in my experience if an oppose is based on reasonable concerns, any replies to it will also be based on reasonable concerns. ‑ Iridescent 08:50, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

How many is 'enough'?

@TonyBallioni, I think this is an interesting question. I wonder if we might be able to formulate a way to determine how to measure "enough" admins. Is it a certain rate, so that AFC articles get reviewed within some particular time period? A certain number of actions needed in that backlog? People's notion of an acceptable backlog size is largely a matter of perception: if you get used to seeing 2,000 articles in the New Pages queue, then anything below 1,500 is good, and anything above 2,500 is bad, and you can see editors claiming that X is terrible one year, and a couple of years later, saying how great it is that the Big Event resulted in the number declining to "only" 2X.

Do we have people with the skills we need? (Maybe we need more folks who can write Lua modules.) Do we need to be training admins on specific subjects?

Or, more expansively, do we want enough admins that the work can be done without some people needing to spend many hours a day pushing admin buttons? Instead of 50 admins investing 500 hours a week, what if 500 admins invested one or two, and the original 50 could realistically do something else (if they wanted to)?

Which leads me to the other thing: Do admins feel stuck? Do they worry that if they stop, or get hit by a bus, the work just won't be done? This has been a noticeable problem with CCI in the past, but I don't know if other areas have the same problems. I'd guess that spam has a reasonable group; we could always use more hands, but spammers wouldn't find that much has changed if one or two of the regulars disappeared for a month. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:08, 22 February 2021 (UTC)

I have been trying to recruit new admins for the past five years, principally for the following reasons:

1. There is no limit on administrators, and it shows people that the admin corps is not "us" vs "them"; it is possible to join
2. It reduces any possible backlogs
3. New people coming in, with potential new and fresh thoughts and ideas; the admin corps is not just tired old faces of "the old guard" who've been there since time immemorial
4. A popular editor passing RfA makes the community feel good

The bar for adminship is about right. Out of those I helped start an RfA, about three quarters passed, which I guess is reasonable. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 18:45, 22 February 2021 (UTC)

I more or less agree with everything Ritchie says above. I'm not particularly concerned about backlogs—the number of active admins dropped to ≈500 at the time of Framageddon and has remained virtually constant since then and the wheels haven't fallen off—but I do think it's healthy to have a constant churn to prevent the formation of a ruling class with a sense of entitlement and to allow for new ideas. I disagree, and always have disagreed, with the "RFA is broken" meme, which in my experience generally translates as "either I or a friend of mine ran at RFA, and someone had the temerity to oppose". ‑ Iridescent 05:33, 23 February 2021 (UTC)

The last RfA I saw that was a bit of a bloodbath was Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/GRuban, and even then that was because the candidate really did put their foot in it. Most of the more recent ones have been drama free, even Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/L293D didn't have anything I would reasonably describe as incivil (and I think L293D would agree he massively put his foot in it as well). Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 11:31, 23 February 2021 (UTC)

It's not hard to find RFAs where there's significant opposition, but the "RFA is hell" idea requires that the opposition be unwarranted. For RFAs that are variations on "this candidate has some faults, this is a discussion as to whether we consider the faults serious enough to render them untrustworthy", it would be a sign of problems if there wasn't opposition—unanimous support can often be a sign of somebody who's avoiding all conflict and thus can't be judged on how they'll handle the inevitable arguments when somebody challenges a decision. RFAs which failed unfairly in the sense that one can't say "I personally think this should have passed but I can understand why this was opposed" ought to be littering Wikipedia:Unsuccessful adminship candidacies (Chronological), and I'm struggling to think of a single one. ‑ Iridescent 14:20, 23 February 2021 (UTC)

I can't find anything going back to 2015. There are a couple where I think it's a shame that many people opposed, but that's just my personal view, and it's very much in the minority. And there are cases like Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/EvergreenFir and Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/GoldenRing which had (IMHO) a whole bunch of nonsense opposes, but they passed anyway. Although people think RFA is stressful (because anyone could come along and say anything at any minute), it's not really any more stressful than a job interview, provided you're prepared for it.

Another myth that I'm convinced I can debunk is that people oppose when the candidate doesn't answer an "optional" question. I don't think that's the case - sure, people might not support or be less inclined to support until they think "wow, that's a good answer, I'm convinced" and do so. And the most recent RfA saw a bit of a song and dance over not answering a relatively pointless question posed by a sock, which suddenly ended when the candidate answered it. But in terms of affirmative action against not answering, I don't think I've seen anyone go further than neutral. There was the case at Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/331dot where Andrew D opposed and then asked a question (which was ignored), but that's not the same thing. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 14:43, 23 February 2021 (UTC)

There's also the case where you ask a question, not because you're on the fence about the candidate, but because you're just curious to know their answer. (Something I have done.) Perryprog (talk) 14:48, 23 February 2021 (UTC)

There have probably been cases where people have opposed (or at least withdrawn support) when the candidate hasn't answered a question about their past conduct rather than the usual hypothetical scenarios. I don't think any sane participant would hold it against a candidate if they ignored some of the nonsense questions from the usual look-at-me-me-me crowd; the proliferation of irrelevant questions is becoming ridiculous. ‑ Iridescent 15:05, 23 February 2021 (UTC)

(Putting this here, but it's mostly about "Do we need more admins" and then generally about RfA.) I said years ago that we had too many admins. Now I'm not sure, but I don't think we're anywhere near having too few. For one thing, a lot of being an admin is the non-logged actions, as I've said before, including deciding not to speedy delete a page (or for that matter, closing an AfD as keep or no consensus), and (trying to) defuse conflict by explaining things. Along with the creeping increase in the "database with lots of templates" view of the wiki has gone a creeping increase in the "reporting stuff for admin action" type of activity, I guess partly because filters and ClueBot, and the requirement to make a new page, now handle more of the vandalism that used to appear in the shooting gallery at Recent Changes. For another, admins are editors and volunteers too, and sometimes they're more active and sometimes they're less active. However, we've lost some fine admins to resignation, several over things that I also deplore. (I think we've also lost some good admins to ArbCom trigger-happiness and to the inactivity rule: not everyone is going to ask for their bit back, much less re-run RfA as Opabinia did, and while I see the security threat from neglected admin accounts, I think password testing, which when I was one, admins used to be warned would be periodically performed on their accounts, is an appropriate counter-measure and the ABF assumption that "legacy admins" will be out-of-touch cowboys when they return is harmful as well as not conforming to what I've observed.) I am very concerned that "We need more admins" turns easily into "We need this person" per "We need to do something — This is something — Therefore we need to do this". We don't need more abusive admins. We need fewer of those. (And I don't necessarily mean lop off their heads desysop them; a better way would be for their friends and fellow admins to work to reverse the transformation when the powah goes to their heads, or when they burn out from all the shite they see or from sheer overwhelm. I spoke long ago about admins closing ranks at the noticeboard as being a problem, and I'm afraid I think it's got worse in recent years.) But even while I recognise that we sometimes have backlogs of stuff that should be rev-deleted, for example, every additional abusive admin does more harm than any backlog by poisoning ordinary editors' views on admins, even if their abuse doesn't include permanently disappearing articles or deliberately driving editors off the project, things that are unlikely to be reversed. Of course, editors disagree heftily about which admins are abusive; one reason being that there's a bloc of editors for whom civility means not using "dirty words" or actually calling someone an idiot, and sarcasm and mockery of their stupidity are how you win an argument, and then there's a bloc of editors like me who regard prescribing "workplace language" as classism and lack of international experience, and snideness and other tactics of "forensic debate" as inherently battlegroundish. Probably some others, too :-) ...Those differences are probably related to how different candidates feel at RfA. For what it's worth, I know many candidates feel attacked. I didn't, but then I went in with the attitude "Oh shit, I got nominated for admin, well, this process might actually be fun"; it helped that the first neutral raised an interesting concern, so I responded and the person promptly supported. (My RfA should not be generalized from; I think most of us enjoyed ourselves, with me cracking wise and silly socking happening and all.) People have different personalities; and some candidates have never encountered much opposition to what they do on-wiki, or never taken the criticism seriously, so they probably perceive a sudden eruption from out of the woodwork. I think nominators need to work hard at uncovering such issues and getting the candidate to realize they will probably arise in the RfA, rather than trying to protect the candidate after the missiles start flying; people do change, and I want to see the candidate demonstrate an appropriate response (including defending their choices, which was what I did with that first neutral !vote). Also, although people said it at my RfA, nothing can prepare you for how nasty it can be to be an admin (in my case it wasn't so much attacks because I was an admin as things I saw because I was an admin, but that will vary), and the RfA is the first taste of that for many candidates who may have been even more unprepared for that aspect than I was. (I'd moderated listervs and hung out on IRC but never for example worked as a Twitter mod or a police officer.) I am sorry for candidates who find RfA a horrible experience, but I think that's at least partially a matter of personality, and it's more important to me that the community be able to suss out whether we trust a candidate. Yngvadottir (talk) 01:00, 25 February 2021 (UTC)

It's never a good idea to get too emotionally invested on Wikipedia, and I think the "RfA is broken" people often forget that. RfA could be especially emotionally charged, since many people view adminship as something quite special (even though it shouldn't be), which you're just on the brink of getting - but alternatively, if something is found about your behavior, your situation on the site could become significantly worse. Oh well. I think your perspective is good here (and while I haven't done an RfA, other processes have lead me to my conclusion here).

As for backlogs - admin backlogs are far less of an issue than editor backlogs generally - unreferenced articles from 2015 are much worse than a two-day elapsed PROD. I'd love if processes needing admins went faster, but I don't really feel like they're particularly slow - backlogs are more due to certain things being tough things no-one wants to do - you don't need to close the controversial multi-page RfC, so why should you, and then take the heat from the editors who disagree with your close. There's no real solution here - and many prospectives at RfA say they would initially shy away from controversial closes, even though controversial RfCs are what make the backlogs large - and why admins are even needed.

I do feel like if someone would not eventually be able to pass an RfA, they're probably not a good fit for the project - nothing should permanently sink someone's chances at adminship that should not also get them indeffed, and ideally we'd all be admins. Needing more good editors is the hard part, here, not needing more of them willing to step up for adminship (if this makes any sense). Elliot321 (talk | contribs) 01:52, 25 February 2021 (UTC)

I think it's reasonable to draw a category of 'positive contributors to the project ill-suited for adminship'. The big example would be prolific gnomes who aren't in the subset of 'those who need the tools for the type of gnoming they do' -- the importance of content creation to adminship is an easy thing to misunderstand, but (as Iridescent frequently says things quite similar to) it's a matter of "does this person know how it feels to write an article, how it feels for an article you wrote to get CSD/PROD/AfD tags slapped on it, how it feels to undergo sometimes messy processes like DYK/GAN/FAC, and where the line between content dispute and conduct dispute is?", which are all absolutely core to admin work and difficult for people who haven't been through any of those to get from first principles. Not trying to shove every peg in the admin hole is an endorsement of gnoming work, not a diss of it -- dedicated and hard workers deserve respect for their contributions, not "now you should take up a bunch of unrelated work totally outside of the fields you know what to do in".

I also wonder a bit how much 'editor backlog vs admin backlog' is a red herring. An unreferenced article from 2015 isn't unlikely to become an eight-day PROD/AfD once someone spots it. (This ties in a bit with my thoughts, during a self-imposed AfD hiatus, on what "AfD is not cleanup" means and how we can deal with the fact that's how many articles actually get cleaned up.) Vaticidalprophet (talk) 02:05, 25 February 2021 (UTC)

Vaticidalprophet, I don't think I've ever heard such a good explanation (even if it's by proxy, from Iridescent, through you ;)) of why content creation matters for an RfA. That's a convention I've been confused about for quite a bit, but that comment gave me a decent "a-ha" moment just now. Perryprog (talk) 02:11, 25 February 2021 (UTC)

Vaticidalprophet I think we agree generally - but my perspective is a bit more out-there - content creation matters for decent gnoming, too. Someone who is a gnome for ten years should probably at least have a few decent articles written. Also, I'm not saying everyone should have admin responsibilities, but that everyone should ideally reach the point where they're trusted enough for the tools. Even if they only use them once in a blue moon. Elliot321 (talk | contribs) 02:17, 25 February 2021 (UTC)

@Elliot321: Like Vaticidalprophet, I think there are and always will be a lot of valued contributors to the project who wouldn't be good admins (I may have been one); I'm thinking also of people who make only occasional contributions for whatever reason, and people who lose their tempers easily ... which brings me to why I decided to respond to you. I find your viewpoint refreshing; I wish we could get (back) to NOBIGDEAL; but I have to disagree with "never a good idea to get too emotionally invested on Wikipedia". A lot of us care deeply about this project, and in any case people have a right to be however emotional they naturally are: not everybody's following a path of detachment :-) I don't like the internet usage of "drama(h)" to mean "someone's problem that they should shut up about because it harshes my mellow" for that reason, and while I respect those who prefer to operate on pure logic, the world is messy, so are humans, even the Vulcans overcome rather than negate their emotions, and I'm more Rihannsu myself :-) Yngvadottir (talk) 03:49, 25 February 2021 (UTC)

To add to your examples of good editors who'd be bad admins, I'd also put people who are only interested in a particular niche area like image enhancement or Lua coding (I'm in awe of whoever designed {{Syrian Civil War detailed map}}—I could no more write this than I could write in Japanese—but the ability to create it says absolutely nothing, positive or negative, about the author's ability to assess whether Diane Stein is deletable and if so under which process and whether it's worthwhile spending time discussing it, or to read some back-and-forth in which one person is making annoying-but-civil coments until another person snaps and swears at them, and detrmining which of the two is being "uncivil".) I'd also add "editors for whom English isn't their first language and whose ability to understand the nuances of meaning between different variants of English isn't as good as they think it is" and "people who are primarily interested in the back-office side of things and spend all their time hanging round at ANI, the Signpost, the Manual of Style, etc", as perennial groups that are often valued contributors but awful admins.

The boilerplate comment I made so often at RFA that I literally used to have it as a template I could just paste—which I assume is what Vaticidalprophet is referring to—was I don't think a candidate needs to have "audited content" provided they've done demonstrably useful collaborative content work, but you don't seem to me to have demonstrated a reasonable amount of content contribution. I don't think editors who haven't had the experience of putting large amounts of work into an article, and/or defending their work against well-intentioned but wrong "improvements" or especially AFD, are in a position to empathise with quite why editors get so angry when their work's deleted and/or The Wrong Version gets protected, and I don't support users who don't add content to the mainspace being given powers to overrule those who do. I still stand by all of that; I don't insist that someone's written a Featured Article or whatever, but I don't think it's right from either a practical or an ethical point of view for people to be sitting in judgement over something in which they have no experience themselves. It's hard to overstate just how dispiriting it is to spend days—sometimes weeks—working on something, only for some drive-by random to declare it "non notable" because they haven't heard of it or announce that a source is "unreliable" because they haven't heard of the publisher; if someone's going to have the power to block people for incivility or edit-warring, I want them to be people who understand why people lose their tempers and why people sometimes get fed up and just blanket-revert. ‑ Iridescent 08:39, 25 February 2021 (UTC)

@Yngvadottir and Iridescent: Understandable perspective there. I guess I didn't really consider long-term incredibly niche editors. People who only spend their time working in very limited areas indeed probably shouldn't be admins – nor are they a net negative. However, for your average gnome/vandal fighter/occasional article writer, I do think that if they wouldn't eventually be qualified for adminship, that's an issue. I think all gnomes and vandal fighters should get in some prose writing experience. That's what the site is about, after all, so everyone who spends a significant amount of time around here should at least have some experience, regardless of if they are an admin.

I guess my perspective is more critical of people who don't do at least some writing than it should be. People focus a lot on deletions and blocks and reverting vandalism - and though all of that is certainly important, it's not what we're here for, and I think anyone who is around a lot, admin or not, should have that experience. It'll make them a better collaborator in the process, and keep everyone's eyes on the prize - an encyclopedia. Elliot321 (talk | contribs) 10:47, 25 February 2021 (UTC)

I don't agree with that philosophy. I agree that Wikipedia is ultimately all about the content—I'm the one who way back in the distant past said "without the articles, Wikipedia is just Facebook for ugly people"—but there are plenty of entirely legitimate reasons for someone to be active here but to do minimal actual writing. We're long since past the Nupedia days of the site just being a giant set of editable text files; without the army of people in the background doing stuff like bot coding, template markup, image design, typo fixing and (especially) source reviewing, the wheels would fall off so spectacularly that the WMF would probably need to lock the database. That doesn't mean I think the people who work primarily in these niches would make good admins—as per my previous comments, I think Wikipedia is an environment where one needs to experience the problems before one's competent to try to fix them—but "not admin material" isn't equivalent to "not here to build an encyclopedia".

At the risk of igniting a particularly sensitive touchpaper, giving some kind of supremacy to article writers has the potential to introduce serious systemic bias as well. It's very well documented that in most environments men are statistically more likely to jump in and try to learn from their mistakes, while women are more likely to engage in minor tinkering until they've developed the confidence to engage in more substantive work. I don't know if the WMF have ever done any kind of measuring of this, but given that it's true in pretty much every real-world work environment it would be more unusual if it wasn't a statistically significant trend on Wikipedia; assuming the case, then formalising "favour the bold" would statistically be fast-tracking male over female editors, which is probably not the signal we want to be sending out. (I've always had extreme issues with the whole Wikipedia:Be bold mentality. In my opinion it essentially translates as "fling things at the wall and see what sticks" and "do whatever you want provided you think you're correct even if other people disagree", and creates an environment in which brash obnoxiousness is favoured over discussion and consensus-building. It's never been any kind of official policy, and was never the subject of any formal adoption process—it's a piece of drivel Larry Sanger wrote back in 2001—but some people seem to act like it was brought down from a burning bush somewhere. If I didn't know it would have enough support from the "but we've always done it this way" crowd that it would inevitably be a "no consensus" keep, I'd MfD it without blinking.) ‑ Iridescent 13:44, 25 February 2021 (UTC)

I always understood "be bold" (or at least BRD specifically) to be something more akin to "we can sit and discuss this all day, but it's clear we're not going to reach agreement despite the kilobytes of existing discussion, so let's try this and see what happens". The key here is that "this" is something novel that hasn't been tried before, such as a compromise between sides.

I agree with Iridescent to a point about "content creation is the only important thing", principally because I decided to try a bit of anti-vandalism work, thinking "how hard can it be?" and came away with the conclusion that like unblocking drains and cleaning toilets - somebody's got to do it. I do think we need to get better at delegating it to tools (is ClueBot NG still accepting data sets, and if not - why not?) but you can't delegate everything. The principal issue I have with the heavy-hitters on the anti-vandalism side - as demonstrated by my recent comments about CLCStudent - is that if you work in that area, you have to be excellent at determining what's vandalism (as defined in the policy) and also be excellent at explaining it to other people, because the minute you make a mistake ("What do you mean vandalism? The single hit number 47 in the South Korean Cantopop charts, not number 48, don't you know anything?"), if you can't talk your way out of the situation, you'll land in trouble. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 14:57, 25 February 2021 (UTC)

Anti-vandalism isn't difficult to do well; what's difficult is resisting the urge to do things quickly and assume that something that looks like vandalism at first glance must be vandalism. Because of the volume of edits involved, everyone working the recent changes queue makes mistakes; the important thing is to make as few mistakes as possible, to resist the temptation to revert anything that isn't immediately obvious, and to be prepared to admit you've made mistakes when somebody points it out and not to get defensive. You see the same problem right the way up the ladder from new editors who've just discovered Huggle, all the way up to senior oversighters. (As someone who once had an edit mistakenly oversighted and spent the next few days fending off "but you must have done something seriously wrong otherwise why would your edits have been oversighted?" from the peanut gallery, I can testify that the shoot-first-and-hope-God-will-know-his-own mentality doesn't appear to vanish with wiki-experience.)

Automating vandal patrolling is harder than it sounds; "machine learning" and "artificial intelligence" are great buzzwords but computers are inherently stupid. Bear in mind that Facebook's algorithm will still ban you for hate speech if you post your mum's faggot recipe or your holiday snaps at Plymouth Hoe and that the Barnard Castle Eye Test saga never trended on Twitter because the word "Cummings" caused the discussion of it to be flagged as porn; then bear in mind that these big social media sites spend literally millions of dollars trying to make these things work, while anything Wikipedia does will be done for free or at minimal expense, presumably by the people who weren't good enough to get jobs at the big social media sites trying to make these things work. ‑ Iridescent 19:18, 25 February 2021 (UTC)

The best anti-vandalism essay I have read is "A Plan for Spam" by Paul Graham. It's basically machine learning, but supplying equal amounts of what is and what isn't vandalism, and weighing the whole edit on the overall ratios. For example, if a brand new user adds <ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-56196226|title=Lady Gaga's dog-walker shot and bulldogs stolen|work=[[BBC News]]|date=25 February 2021}}</ref>, the odds of it being "not vandalism" should be approximately 1 and drown out everything else. It's basically what ClueBot does; however it's only as good as its data set, and the more data it can be fed, the better it should be. The faggot controversy should (at least in theory) have been counter-balanced by a load of positive cookery-related terms that never appear in actual hate speech, and I can only assume that Facebook's problem is it didn't have enough of them to tip the probability in the right direction. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 21:41, 25 February 2021 (UTC)

Fair enough, the background work does need to get done. I dunno, something still doesn't feel quite right to me about the situation wrt adminship but I don't know how to effectively articulate it here. Elliot321 (talk | contribs) 19:35, 25 February 2021 (UTC)

@Elliot321, I wonder if the question you're dealing with is something along the lines of "If this person's everyday behavior is so bad that an RFA would be hopeless, then why are we keeping this person around at all?" WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:25, 26 February 2021 (UTC)

Even those people don't fit neatly into "good editor" and "bad editor" pigeonholes. Editors are real people with real lives and as such are complex characters. To take some entirely hypothetical obviously examples, someone who edits in uncontroversial obscurity 99% of the time but every few months gets drunk and makes joke edits before they sober up and apologise; someone who creates huge amounts of perfectly uncontroversial high-quality work but has one particular niche obsession about which they fanatically editwar at any opportunity; someone who's intensely disliked by a lot of high profile editors, and consequently is regularly involved in fights that genuinely aren't their fault; someone who's (openly and within the rules) on the payroll of the PR department of a major corporation and spends a significant fraction of their time explaining the corporate point of view on relevant talk pages. All of these are people who couldn't and shouldn't be trusted with admin permissions, but equally all of them are people we not only shouldn't be looking to kick out, but for whom kicking out would likely be a substantial net negative both directly in terms of the loss of their good edits, but indirectly through the loss of goodwill among their friends and subsequent likelihood that they'll in turn reduce their work. ‑ Iridescent 21:38, 26 February 2021 (UTC)

I don't agree that every editor should be following a set of behaviours such that they would, if they chose to, pass an RfA at some point. There are editors who just aren't interested in editing in areas that are usually used to demonstrate they can be trusted with administrative privileges. They can still be making worthy contributions to Wikipedia. isaacl (talk) 22:26, 26 February 2021 (UTC)

@Isaacl: perhaps the consideration for adminship privileges should be different? Depending on the area, I might be more inclined to support than others - for example, I probably would've supported this RfA (which did succeed, but it was quite different compared to most). Elliot321 (talk | contribs) 23:53, 26 February 2021 (UTC)

When a community is small and everyone knows everyone, people can rely on their personal knowledge. As a community grows and no longer has this ability, though, it's reasonable to examine a person's actions to determine what level of trust to give them. Understandably, there are specific Wikipedia tasks that provide an opportunity to demonstrate the degree of judgement sought for by the community. isaacl (talk) 00:07, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

@Isaacl: Sure, I'm just curious what you're thinking of in particular. I'm still of the opinion that it's good for most people to get some amount of content work - and what are the other areas that people are expected to participate in? AfD, I guess, but I don't see people caring nearly as much about that in comparison to content work. Everyone has their own criteria for what experience admins should have... Elliot321 (talk | contribs) 00:14, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

The big tools for admins are deletion and blocking, so the community likes to see evidence of good judgement and policy knowledge in these areas. Content creation is of course part of the context that helps shape judgement. It's hard to show judgement about deletions without actually participating in deletion discussions, so that's a key area to work in. Participating in some higher-visibility venue and demonstrating sound judgement is helpful. isaacl (talk) 00:48, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

Pretty much this. It wasn't the most well-thought-out perspective for the reasons Iri mentioned above. Elliot321 (talk | contribs) 23:50, 26 February 2021 (UTC)

"Be bold" and hat collecting

Dunno about the "Be bold" point. Plenty of stuff one slams onto a talk page and either gets no response (not everywhere is like this talk page - ime, most things most editors couldn't care less about, sometimes to the point where it's a struggle to even find a couple of interested editors), or respond with vague concerns that aren't quite opposition, not quite support, and not quite informed either. Usually to the point where if you made the change in the first place nobody would've bothered reverted. IMO: at worst it blockades changes, and at best it just slows things down to snail pace (a bit like WP:CRP). ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 03:49, 21 March 2021 (UTC)

I think that's a different interpretation of "be bold" to what I'm talking about above—"be bold" in the sense of "not everything needs to be done cautiously with discussion at every stage" is a completely legitimate philosophy. What I'm talking about above is the commonly-held attitude that "be bold" means either:

1. Bulldozing one's personal opinions and preferences through regardless of how controversial or contentious one expects them to be, in the hope that either they won't be noticed right away and will stick around for long enough to call "consensus" even though they had virtually no support, or
2. Making deliberately biased changes to content, or taking deliberately hardline positions in back-office discussions, in the hope that when the changes are reverted or the proposal is challenged, it will have shifted the range, and consequently any resulting compromise will have shifted towards one's preferred position.

Both of those are fairly common interpretations of "be bold". The underlying structure of the Wikipedia community, based as it is on trying to apply a set of rules drawn up for a small group of people from similar backgrounds who mostly knew each other, onto a sprawling amorphous group of people with wildly different backgrounds, values, and interests, has unintentionally created a whole bunch of perverse incentives for decent people to become obnoxious bullies, sometimes without even realizing it. IMO the whole "everyone do what they want, and if there's any disagreement it will be resolved in favor of whoever shouts the loudest and whoever hs the most friends" interpretation of "be bold" is very definitely both one of these perverse incentives, and one of the drivers of Wikipedia's systemic bias. ‑ Iridescent 14:00, 21 March 2021 (UTC)

Oh, I see. I remember a few instances of similar from last year. One was this & this questionable change to WP:N and edit-warred in. In the eventually ensuing RfC nearly a year later there were mixed opinions between a new text vs outright removal of the text, but (iirc) pretty much unanimous consensus to not retain the then-current one. (The text was eventually replaced.) Similar with this change, which was also edit warred in after being disputed much later on (I guess it's not strictly inaccurate, but the text is not a complete picture either). There's also the rather sorry state of WP:Dispute resolution (apparently a policy) which, judging by the page history, has gotten seriously worse over the years (compare to 2006) through various bold changes. Some sections there are literally not even part of the dispute resolution process (example, which was added in solely so that WP:AE could link to it [incidentally, my removal of this was initially reverted for the rationale that whoever added it might be offended by the removal]). WP:CONTENTDISPUTE isn't even grammatically correct, never mind accurate/helpful on process. The whole page should be rewritten imho. It appears not many people care for the page, suspect because most 'experienced editors' don't need/want tips on how to resolve their disputes.

It's a bit questionable to watch people force a text in and then later rely on it (and the fact that the page hosting the text has a PAG banner) in a future discussion to enforce ones views. Even though, really, the addition has status equivalent to an essay. It's also bit strange that adding disputable content to a PAG (whose contents, apparently, represent "a widely accepted standard") are sometimes treat as kept-in-until-consensus-to-remove rather than vice versa.

Not sure this is a problem with WP:BEBOLD itself, rather just how some people sometimes use it in some cases (I still feel like this stuff is a minority of instances, though, and generally it's a good way to cut through stonewalling/fussing over minor details on talk until exhaustion). I don't necessarily think one should have to get consensus if they're simply adding/modifying text to reflect the status quo. It's important for PAG pages to reflect communal norms, otherwise it's a skewed advantage in favour of editors with long history and memory. I understand there can be reasonable disagreements on what the 'status quo' actually is, but I'm pretty sure many such texts are forced in with the knowledge that their added text doesn't represent the status quo, and their changes wouldn't stand a chance in an RfC. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 16:30, 21 March 2021 (UTC)

Early in my time editing, I took a strong interest in WP:V and I was very involved in the voluminous discussions about "verifiability, not truth". I was struck at the time by the huge number of policy talk page comments that went into such discussions, and at how it seemed that some editors spent much more time debating content policies than contributing actual content. Since then, I largely lost interest, but kept quite a few such pages on my watchlist and have noticed that discussion tends to be semi-constant. And I, too, have come to be concerned about this issue of someone finding a way to get a policy or guideline to say what they want it to say, and then to use that to win arguments. I sometimes feel like, if I stop watching something, it's just a matter of time until someone changes it to something that I would have opposed, had I been paying attention. It's a problem: do we have to watch over every nit at every policy page, to guard against something sneaking its way in? Or does every tiny change require a widely-announced RfC? Elsewhere on this talk page, people have discussed FAC and MOS, and I think that MOS could be susceptible to this sort of thing. In theory, MOS would not need to be changed very often, and yet it has its own ecology of constant discussions about changes. Continuing off of Iri's observation about "bulldozing", I could make a case that if someone, for some reason, really wants to attain pure "power" over the editing process, power for its own sake, it would be by hunkering down on some seemingly boring and nerdy policy and guideline pages that most content-oriented editors just wouldn't be interested in, and gradually acquiring "ownership" of what it says there, and then being able to cite that – more so than by becoming an admin or an Arb or anything else with a collectible "hat". --Tryptofish (talk) 17:19, 21 March 2021 (UTC)

Having a collectible hat does grant a bit of social ability making it less likely your changes will be reverted. I suppose in part because people think that means they know what they're doing (which is not exactly true in many cases), and partially because the change may not be worth pissing someone off over. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 17:37, 21 March 2021 (UTC)

Having collectible hats does make some editors more equal than others, and there's nothng wrong with that. Wikipedia is an environment where there's almost no link between real-world identity and online identity—most people here are determinedly anonymous, and even when someone uses a real name it doesn't generally mean much. (Just because someone is using a real identity, it doesn't necessarily mean it's their real identity—there's at least one highly-regarded admin whom I'd lay a reasonable sum has never even met the person they claim to be—and even if someone is undoubtedly who they claim to be, it's not uncommon for people to overstate their experience and credentials in the knowledge that people are unlikely to check.)

In that context, somebody's on-wiki history (or at least, on WMF SUL ecosystem history) is often the only thing we have on which to judge "is this someone to whom it's worth listening?". Since Wikipedia is too large for most people to know most either people as anything more than passing acquaintances, collectible baubles are the least-worst shorthand we have for "at some point at least one well-regarded person (in the case of low-level trinkets like rollbacker), a significant proportion of that part of the community which is most engaged with Wikipedia (in the case of the higher-level ones like admin and arb), or the group of people who are active in a particular field (for the more inside-baseball ones like FA Delegate or MILHIST co-ordinator) has considered this person trustworthy". Hats are the Wikipedia equivalents of qualifications and honorifics. ‑ Iridescent 11:50, 22 March 2021 (UTC)

arbitrary ease-of-editing break

Interesting point that I've been thinking about lately. There's a page in one of my realms of interest that I think is at entirely the wrong name -- there are two or three names you could choose for the topic that all have reasonable claims to WP:COMMONNAME, where one of the names is in sync with our other articles and overall usage for similar things, and the other two possibilites both 1. aren't and 2. are exceptionally awkward-sounding, and it's at one of the latter. I proposed an RM in 2017 that closed with no consensus. At the time, I was some random typo gnome with call-it-fifty-odd edits. I'm now a page mover who's written an adjacent GA. I have the sneaking suspicion a second RM would pass.

There's a few factors involved in how much a hat means, and I don't know that we-as-a-community are actually very good at disentangling them. I've seen wildly inappropriate behaviour (think 'a long pattern of serious, sustained BLP vios') from admins who got the bit when the standard was "no outstanding murder warrants" glibly brushed off as "if we can't trust an admin, who can we trust?". (That specific example ended with a tban, but I'm still reeling a bit over the given response.) Similarly, while it's reasonable to go "hats are our promotions/honorifics", I still look askance at the tendency to treat popping in at PERM as getting a promotion regardless of whether you've done the appropriate work -- page mover again gets a fair amount of this, because it's probably the easiest of the "upper level non-admin" perms to game in that respect, in that someone without much actual interests in RMs has an easier time pretending to have one than someone without much interest in, say, higher-level templates does. (The tendency in some corners to define 'draftifies stuff frequently at NPP' as a need for the PMR tools is of particular "oh, come on" to me, considering how often draftspace is a backdoor G13 and the whole reason PMR is higher-level is it's the closest thing viable to an unbundled deletion.) Vaticidalprophet 12:18, 22 March 2021 (UTC)

There's also the issue that some areas tend themselves to needing more hats than others. Technical areas are notably more restricted than content areas. eg my editing is half technical and so I guess I have a couple of "hats" (abusefilter, templateeditor, BAG). I suppose the equivalent of my editing in another area, say content (writing and reviewing FAs), may not require any hats at all, not even page mover, yet that person could be highly competent with no 'permissions' to show for it. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 14:02, 22 March 2021 (UTC)

The people engaged in things like writing and reviewing have a parallel ecosystem of green and gold stars and "I participated in 317 GA reviews!" userboxes, which serve the same purpose as having something in brackets after your name at Special:ListUsers; they're shorthand for "I didn't just get off the turnip truck". One of the reasons Mattisse is so reviled in the litany of Bad Users From The Old Days isn't just that she was obnoxious and arrogant—plenty of people were and still are both—but that she blatantly and repeatedly claimed credit for other people's work. ‑ Iridescent 16:11, 22 March 2021 (UTC)

<groan> That particular aspect of Mattisse did not even figure on my radar; I am much more troubled by other "prolific" FA writers who display such a hat-collecting tendency with FAs that aren't, than I am by Mattisse trying to claim credit, which nobody buys. Mattisse did not use that collection of fictitious stars to try to further power. No, there were much more troubling things about Mattisse, and most of them revolve around other sockmasters and other editors who joined with her to undermine FAC. Had just a few prominent editors stood up to her, that little episode did not need to turn into what it did. In her later years, both Laser and I took to just watching her socks and keeping tabs on her, and she was often just a little bit right, until she inevitably spun out of control again. She certainly was triggered by bad editors, but then she became just as bad. No, my worst memory of her destructive "copyediting" was at major depressive disorder, where she was reading abstracts and not full journal articles, and altering text written by ... a psychiatrist (Cas) ... that FAC ranks right up there with the five Catholic Church FACs for my worst memories. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:54, 22 March 2021 (UTC)

I did say "one of" the reasons; I certainly wasn't the only one who was infuriated with her habit of pretending to have written things she'd barely touched—this is the sum total of her contribution to Space Invaders, for instance—and I wasn't even involved with any of the things she'd claimed to have written. (I note that Major depressive disorder is one she claims…)

On the other point, I'm not going to condemn cookie-cutter FAs out-of-hand. Wikipedia has some arcane and inflexible "each topic needs a separate article" rules in some areas, which leads to stand-alone topics that should never really have existed. (As you know, I ran into this with Infrastructure of the Brill Tramway, where "every rail station needs to have a stand alone page" meant the creation of utterly pointless pages like Wood Siding railway station that are considerably less use to readers than the corresponding entry on the list, and which are only "thorough and representative surveys of the relevant literature" because the topic is so boring there is hardly any relevant literature.) I know it leads to hurricane-of-the-week and coin-of-the-week, but if Wikipedia's rules compel editors to do problematic things the problem is with the rules, not the editors. ‑ Iridescent 19:01, 22 March 2021 (UTC)

Any time she "copyedited", she claimed credit; what was more infuriating was that her copyedits were not that good, while her defenders insisted that she was a fine copyeditor.

Nothing in my post related to "cookie-cutter FAs", which I don't have a problem with. My complaint is about the FAs that were pushed through on prose only for a period of several years, and including many cases where, along with the problem that only prose was reviewed, the prose nonetheless is deficient! SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:06, 22 March 2021 (UTC)

Ah, right; I thought it was a reference to the short same-y cookie-cutter articles. Something being passed at FA owing to a flurry of "support, well-written" drivebys with nobody bothering to actually check anything else is nothing new; I just looked at FAC from today 16 years ago and this was the first thing I saw. ‑ Iridescent 19:16, 22 March 2021 (UTC)

Yes, but what returned full force sometime around 2015 (don't know exactly, when since I wasn't paying attention then) was a variation on that. To make them not look like drivebys-- although they usually were-- a series of prose nitpicks were posted followed by Support. In the past, at least it was "What You See Is What You Get": in that 2007 FAC, that kind of support was normal. But by 2015, it wasn't normal, but more indepth reviews were actively being discouraged via bullying (on prose, MOS, and sourcing alike), while drivebys were supporting based on prose nitpicks only. Now, if the prose passed in that era had been stellar, I would have little complaint; MOS stuff is easy to fix after the fact. But the prose passed in many cases was not competent. When I returned to editing, I found editors with full lines at WP:WBFAN with narry a decent FA. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:14, 22 March 2021 (UTC)

At least some of that is presumably just going to be an artefact of the fact that reviewers are more familiar with the regular nominators, and that a lot of FA nominations form part of a series. If I see (e.g.) a Cas banksia, a Sturmvogel ship, or a Wehwalt coin, IMO it's not a sensible use of my time to be checking sources, since I know with near certainty that everything is going to check out. We're not back to the days when the handful of regulars who thought they owned Wikipedia would write personal essays with only the vaguest of waves towards referencing, on the assumption that nobody would dare challenge it and risk one of their friends finding a pretext to get them banned. ‑ Iridescent 23:15, 22 March 2021 (UTC)

I'm not talking about the same thing your're talking about, which is a phenom I'm familiar with. In the days of Yomangani, I could count on always needing to check for a a, an an, and the the double typos. With Ceoil, one knows what to check, and so on. I am talking about bullying out of all other types of reviewers (sourcing, comprehensive, prose, MOS, etc) while passing substandard prose up the line on a cursory look and driveby support. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 23:40, 22 March 2021 (UTC)

@Vaticidalprophet: the darkly hilarious corollary to this is that the "specific example" you refer didn't exactly empty the closet of relevant (mostly on-wiki) skeletons; and should you uncover them, you'll immediately appreciate why those who remember might not care to jump up and rattle them. Choess (talk) 04:40, 23 March 2021 (UTC)

I was actually racking my brain as to who the "specific example" was. I can think of a lot of desysops-for-cause where there are still plenty of worms in the can which nobody particularly wants wriggling out, but not in the specific circumstances described. ‑ Iridescent 06:09, 23 March 2021 (UTC)

Oh, I was familiar with that guy long before I got too deep into Wikipedia, and I've seen and heard of some nasty stuff both on and offwiki. I can only imagine what'd happen if anyone actually decided to scrub away seventeen years of grime. Vaticidalprophet 08:51, 23 March 2021 (UTC)

Power-grabs

Why use the conditional in referring to this method of gaining power? I'm not sure if anyone expresses it, even to themselves, as naked desire to have power over other editors; I think it's generally couched in rationalization. "Only I can save the encyclopedia from inaccuracy/disinformation/perpetual conflict, so I'll just keep rewriting the rules until the Bad Actors are silenced or driven off." But yes, if you have the sitzfleisch to argue endlessly about either the text of a policy, or its interpretations, you can gain quite a bit of leverage through sheer tedium, and people certainly have. Choess (talk) 04:40, 23 March 2021 (UTC)

That's probably unfair, at least in most cases. I don't doubt there have always been some people who want to carve out a little kingdom in an obscure niche and declare themselves king of it (there are even some who don't try to hide the ambition, like the guy last year who tried to declare himself in charge of Wikipedia's history articles), but I suspect they're in a minority. I've always had the strong impression that the people who appoint themselves as gatekeepers on whether archived teletext pages should be treated as a newspaper, or under which circumstances it's appropriate to use a soft hyphen more than halfway through a word of under 12 characters, are doing so because they genuinely feel the issue is important and can't understand why the rest of Wikipedia doesn't share the concern. Just look at things like WT:MOS or a niche-but-still-active Wikiproject like WT:TRAINS, and note how many of the people trying hardest to push their peculiar interpretations of policy aren't familiar from arguments elsewhere.

The real route to power on Wikipedia, as with the real route to power in the real world, isn't through politicking to rewrite policy, but in making oneself indispensible enough that people will turn a blind eye to your ignoring policy. That in turn will set a precedent that whatever you did has consensus support since nobody complained, and thus that's the real policy. There are some people on Wikipedia who have this down to an art form. ‑ Iridescent 06:03, 23 March 2021 (UTC)

Sorry, I wasn't very clear there. I meant "rationalization" to include self-rationalization; I agree that power for its own sake is probably not a common justification for these sort of actions, and that the protagonists believe that they are taking control to fix a real problem which few or no others are willing to address. E.g., the MoS devotees really do believe that the encyclopedia would collapse into a continuous brushfire war of style-related edit wars if they weren't codifying every crownlet of every letter. And to be fair, I also understand the frustration coming from their side: editors kick when changes in the MoS or citation templates or whatever get sprung on them, but ordinary editors also don't want to participate in War-and-Peace-length discussions of those arcana. It's difficult to find out if there's a consensus for arcane changes because most editors haven't really formed an opinion on them until they actually take effect. Choess (talk) 14:04, 23 March 2021 (UTC)

I agree; two of the definite problems Wikipedia has are: that the collaborative model is really bad at handling situations where different people agree that something is an issue but attach different priorities to it; and the disconnect between the people who are interested in editing in the Wikipedia sense of "writing things", the people who are interested in editing in the real-world sense, the people who aren't particularly interested in (or confident in their ability to participate in) either form of editing but are interested in creating an environment in which editing can take place, and the people who are interested in the internal social dynamics and external impacts rather than the actual product itself. The canonical example of both problems would probably be the interminable discussions over conflict of interest, where we've spent the past 15 years drifting towards ever-more-extreme positions even though there's little evidence that either the editor base or the broad readership support them, because the "if you've ever eaten a Big Mac you have a conflict of interest regarding McDonalds" hardliners are the only ones who care enough to take part in the policy discussions and the "delete even though any issues are easily fixed, the page isn't absolutely neutral in every way" and "keep even though this is obviously spam, it provably exists" types are the only people who still have the appetite to participate in thhousands of near-identical deletion discussions. ‑ Iridescent 07:00, 25 March 2021 (UTC)

another arbitrary break

Iridescent, what might be an appropriate wording change to propose to WP:PGBOLD to solve the two issues you listed above? The "strongly encouraged" seems too weak to actually have any practical effects. Ideally at minimum I'd like to see bold changes which evidently fail to gain consensus in talk page discussion after being disputed be strictly removed with consensus required to reinsert, rather than left in until widespread RfC consensus to remove. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 14:53, 22 March 2021 (UTC)

Go back to the spirit (although not the actual wording which has now been deemed forbidden by the Feigned Offense Tendency) of WP:Don't be a dick. Replace the current bald Directly editing these pages is permitted by Wikipedia's policies with something along the lines of:

Although directly editing these pages without discussion is permitted by Wikipedia's policies, use common sense. Wikipedia is now over 20 years old, and our policies are often the result of years or even decades of discussion, compromise, and collective experience. Stop to consider if the change you intend to make has been proposed before and read the relevant talk archives to see if it has previously been considered and rejected, and whether the reasons for its rejection are still relevant. If you feel it is likely that your planned change will be disputed, even if you feel that the objections you anticipate will be unreasonable, discuss the changes first and if appropriate create a formal Request for Comment. Wikipedia has no deadlines; although you may feel discussion is a waste of time, it will waste much more of your time and that of other people if you spend significant time making a change and it is immediately reverted.

I do feel that one of the legacies of Wild West days (and the predominance of people from Wild West days among Wikipedia's managerial class) is that there's still an unhealthy feeling in Wikipedia—and even more so the WMF—that "run fast and break things" is still an acceptable attitude. "Don't fuck with the formula" may not be as cool and may not give the same warm fuzzies as "I've made a change to the rules about what gets included in the definitive record of the world's culture!", but Wikipedia is arguably the most successful educational project of all time—the formula isn't something we should still be outsourcing to whoever happens to be shouting the loudest at a given time.

As I've now been saying for more than a decade, in an ideal world we'd have an elected GovCom with the authority to make binding closures to RFCs. This among other things would still allow people to propose and discuss changes as they do now, but blunt the worst edges of WP:BOLD and the revert-war cycle by forcing people wanting change into a position where they're obliged to explain convincingly why they feel their change is an improvement. Given the current malaise I'm not sure we have the numbers for it, but I still think separate RFC-closure and user-conduct committees is where we're ultimately going to end up when Wikipedia's collective hivemind finally figures out that the Arbcom model wasn't fit for purpose in 2004 and certainly isn't fit for purpose now. ‑ Iridescent 16:00, 22 March 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for this BTW; I made a change to WP:PGBOLD with some parts of your text. (Ironically as a bold change, but I think the change documents what's already considered good etiquette.) I tweaked some parts, as I think it's possible to improve the writing or documentation of some of the current PAGs to more accurately/clearly reflect current norms, and didn't want the text to possibly inadvertently discourage those doing that. I think the key problem is when people make bold edits as a backdoor to change an established, intentional norm, so I tried to distinguish between these two things. I guess it's to be seen whether some text on a page actually makes it less exhausting to revert bad bold changes. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 16:21, 13 April 2021 (UTC)

More broadly, I'm curious why you think the ArbCom model is problematic? Broadly I get the feel you think something is wrong with civility enforcement, but I don't quite follow what exactly? My perception is that ArbCom is criticised because it makes tough decisions, and since it appears to have drastically lowered its case volume those tough decisions tend to be on intractable issues often involving popular users. Naturally this leads to vocal (minority?) unpopularity. I don't get the feeling that ANI could deal with these issues, though, or that ArbCom decisions are dramatically unfair or unreasonable, or that just because a lot of people hold a certain opinion ("consensus") that opinion is automatically more fair, rather than just more stable. If you woke up tomorrow and decided to become a habitual jerk, surely ANI wouldn't dream of doing anything about it? ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 12:33, 10 April 2021 (UTC)

How long have you got? I find the whole concept of Arbcom outdated, confusing and increasingly irrelevant.

1. Firstly and most obviously, it's performing a job it was never intended to do—it doesn't ever actually arbitrate anything but instead functions as a Supreme Court, but it was never intended to act as a Supreme Court and doesn't have the processes and procedures in place to do so properly. The most obvious one would be the fact that because Arbcom cases are nominally "arbitration", they expressly don't have the authority to set precedent; thus, you can have near-identical cases with completely different results.
2. The usurping by Arbcom of the roles of the other dispute resolution mechanisms which were meant to accompany it, such as mediation and WP:RFC/U, has centralized power to an extent which neither its creators back in 2004, nor Roger when he wrote ARBPOL in 2010, nor the voters who approved ARBPOL in 2011, ever envisaged;
3. Meanwhile, it's also become a general dumping ground for sensitive issues which for legal and ethical reasons need to be resolved behind the scenes, and which its members (who are, reasonably enough, elected on the basis of their on-wiki activity) are often singularly ill-qualified to handle; the creation of Trust & Safety was supposed to begin addressing this particular issue, but I think it's reasonable to say that particular road has been somewhat bumpy;
4. The introduction of election by secret ballot to replace the former RFA-like process (Arbcom elections used to consist of a 'support or oppose, with an explanation if you feel it necessary' page like this for each candidate) may have been done with the best of intentions but has broken the ability of electors to flag potential areas of concern and explain what they want to see in candidates, so candidates are left to guess what line the community actually wants them to take on the issues that are likely to come before them;
5. This ties in with (4); the introduction of the annual mass-spamming and watchlist notices means that the elections are no longer decided by the subgroup which follows Wikipedia's internal processes and thus are actually familiar with both the issues that are currently likely to affect Wikipedia, and who are likely to have actually seen the candidates in action attempting to resolve disputes or taking difficult decisions. This in turn means candidates are judged on their ability to write convincing candidate statements rather than their actual abilities, and it also places hugely disproportionate power to affect elections in the handful of people who write the annual voter guides; both of these lead to a process which actively discourages competence, since the more competent candidates are those more likely to have taken action against someone with a lot of friends in the past;
6. Arbcom acts as a massive timesink for all those even tangentially involved in a case; even a simple case leads to the creation of numerous lengthy and frequently-updated pages, all of which everyone involved in the case is expected to read in full since a lack of comment on even the stupidest point will be interpreted as tacit acceptance of that point.

The whole process is basically a pointless self-perpetuating bureaucracy, whose continued existence inflicts constant corrosive damage to Wikipedia's credibility, to the cohesion of the editor community, and to the committee's actual members. Plenty of larger WMF wikis have no Arbcom or equivalent, and none appear to be unduly suffering from the lack. All we actually need is at most to publicize the RFC process more than it currently is, to re-establish the concept of user conduct RFCs as a subset of RFCs, and to have a small elected committee with the ability and duty to issue binding closures when requested to RFCs in cases where the community consensus isn't obvious or where it's considered desirable to set a formal precedent. Wikipedia neither wants nor needs either a Governing Council nor a Supreme Court, let alone a single committee which claims all the powers of both; the only reason Arbcom exists is that the egos which abolishing it would bruise are the egos of those same people who would need to make the decision to abolish it. ‑ Iridescent 14:39, 10 April 2021 (UTC)

I say this to provide an alternative view, and not to be argumentative, but I actually feel oppositely to you on each of those numbered points. Just goes to show, I guess, how opinions can be diverse. But I do agree that things would work better if editors would make more and better use of RfCs, and then insist on respecting consensus. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:32, 10 April 2021 (UTC)

Certainly on some of them, like the degree to which mass participation transformed the elections from a measuring of community trust into a test of campaigning ability and whether that's a good thing, then yes there's a reasonable opposing position to take—but I'm honestly curious how you could feel oppositely to me on all of them. I don't see how you can dispute something like "arbcom is performing a job it was never intended to do" (arbcom was supposed to be people who are volunteering to get involved in arbitrating user disputes, with the results of the arbitration being formally binding in the sense that it is at least possible for the arbitration committee to vote to ban someone or take some lesser action to enforce their decision, not the Wikipedia House of Lords). I certainly don't see how you can disagree with "arbcom has become a general dumping ground for sensitive issues which for legal and ethical reasons need to be resolved behind the scenes"; one of the current or recent arbs can give better picture of the current situation, but in my day I'd estimate that roughly 95% of the arb workload consisted of hidden activities that couldn't be done on-wiki. (My "you have 644 new emails" screenshot may have been from a worse-than-usual day but it wasn't hugely unrepresentative.)

The central premises of all six of my points—that 17 years of the accruing of additional powers to the Arbitration Committee, and the marginalization and sometimes outright abolition of the processes which were supposed to act as checks and balances, have concentrated authority in a single small group of people to an unhealthy degree, and that the selection process (in terms of who volunteers as candidates, how the election process itself works, and which successful candidates resign or informally drop out once they discover what the job actually involves) means that small group of people isn't reflective of the community it's supposed to serve—aren't points I'd have thought anyone could reasonably argue with.

I don't think anyone with any experience of the arb process—including the current arbs and the relevant people at the WMF—seriously believes the Arbcom model is working. As with so much of Wikipedia, what keeps us using something that was designed in the early 2000s for a project with 296 active editors and 195,000 articles* isn't that anyone has any attachment to the existing setup, but that it's impossible to get a consensus for what should replace it (cf wikitext, talk pages, the concept of "article importance", image markup, actively misleading jargon like 'oversight' and 'administrator', the Main Page's layout, the fact that we have 2000+ different citation templates, the fact that our quality scale goes S-S-C-B-G-A-F…). ‑ Iridescent 07:32, 11 April 2021 (UTC)
*Those numbers are genuine, not exaggerations for effect; at the time the Arbitration Committee / Mediation Committee model was introduced the whole of Wikipedia's database came to 420mb.

I'll happily reply given that you said that you're "honestly curious" about some of my reasoning. I actually do not disagree at all with your description of it, as a factual matter of history. So, for example, I agree that it is now doing jobs that it was never intended to do. The disagreement is where you see some of these things as problems, whereas I see them as either improvements or as neutral. I don't object at all to them no longer being strictly mediators of an arbitration process, because I think that the needs of the community are better addressed by what they do now than what they did then. It's natural that a changing and evolving community will need an evolving ArbCom. I also think that WMF, for all of their manifest inadequacy and even, sometimes, stupidity, have quite rightly accepted ArbCom's requests that they (WMF) take over stuff like child protection that ArbCom used to have to do (by default), but was never equipped to do. That leaves ArbCom with stuff that still has to be handled privately in order to protect personal information (as "personal information" is defined by the outing policy), but that seems to me to be the best way we have to handle it. And I also think that the community has increasingly proven itself to be incompetent at resolving certain kinds of intractable conduct disputes, so that, although one can accurately say that such disputes get dumped on ArbCom, then at least ArbCom deals with them after the community just spews forth an inconclusive wall of text at ANI. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:02, 11 April 2021 (UTC)

It's obviously all subjective, but I really don't see these changes as positives. Because we've ended up putting all the dispute-resolution, internal management and beckroom administrative process eggs into a single basket with no checks and balances of any kind (other than the fact that the arbs need to stand for re-election after two years, and a theoretical appeal-to-the-WMF route which would trigger open civil war if they ever tried to use it), we've ended up both creating an elected dictatorship, and putting such a workload on the current arbs that they become detached from the community they were supposed to represent. Just gonna put these here: [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16]. ‑ Iridescent 15:17, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

A couple points certainly immediately make sense to me. Others are less intuitive. But even if you scrap ArbCom and replace it with a small elected committee that can close RfCs, most immediately what comes to mind is what you do with all the rest of the stuff ArbCom does. Reviewing CUOS; send it to the Ombuds? (I still feel like privacy issues should be investigated by the WMF anyway, as the data processor, but I digress.) Reporting harassment/similar issues privately; T&S? (noting the current community sentiments around that, plus their smaller toolset to deal with issues.) And though I wasn't active during the RFCU days, I feel like diversity of participation might be a problem. Just theorising (and maybe it works better than I'm giving it credit for) but I imagine there'd be some decent analysis, but that'd be between a lot of noise of less dispassionate comments. For comparison, a contentious ANI case (in, say, Israel-Palestine) involving established participants often devolves into people trying to just ban/keep their ideological opponents/supporters. To add, I think you'd have an issue with reviewing administrator conduct. Tony's proposal seems nice but a threshold of 40% to retain an admin severely limits its usefulness. IMO only those who have sufficiently fell out of favour with the people whose opinions carry more weight around here would fail to obtain that. (c.f. User:Thryduulf/What happened after a desysop and the support percentages on re-RfAs.) A ~65% threshold to retain would be just fine, but it'll (probably?) fail to get consensus.

As an aside, I feel like #5 is a traditional failing with democracy. I've always saw the point not as ensuring the best outcomes, but at ensuring the appearance of legitimacy. Even in a real life GE a lot of people vote for, uh, questionable reasons. I'm not sure the appearance of a backroom Wikipedia cabal deciding ArbCom's makeup is a good one (and not sure the outcomes would be radically different anyway?). I'm certainly not saying the ArbCom model is the best Wikipedia can come up with, though, and certainly agree it's a massive timesink amongst other issues. ProcSock (talk) 15:06, 11 April 2021 (UTC)

Experience levels of voters in 2014 (blue) and 2015 (yellow) Arbcom elections

(5) is a traditional failing with democracy when you're talking about something like electing a national government, but Wikipedia is orders of magnitude smaller. The active encouraging to vote of people who aren't familiar with either the issues or the candidates was rammed through as a fait accompli—what was actually agreed was only to notify editors active in the previous three months who meet all criteria to vote for arbcom, but the closer of the RFC unilaterally changed it to all users who meet the voting criteria, which completely shifted the participant base. (See the chart to the right; in terms of experience the typical voter in the last pre-mailshot elections had between 20,000–100,000 edits, the typical voter in the first post-mailshot elections had <1000 edits.) The talkpage spamming isn't some kind of hallowed Wikipedia tradition; between 2004–14, our attitude was always that anyone who'd managed not to notice the watchlist notice about the election, the chatter on numerous talkpages about the election, the calls for candidates on every significant noticeboard, or the fact that it's December and Wikipedia invariably holds elections at the same time (That's not just tradition, it's because SecurePoll has tantrums if the WMF are holding more than one election at a time so we have a use-it-or-lose-it window to hold our election), is somebody who probably shouldn't be encouraged to participate in elections. (I have no problem with elitism in the specific case of "only people with skin in the game get to participate". It's not as if Apple Computer allows everyone with an iTunes account to vote in their board elections.) ‑ Iridescent 15:17, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

Hmm, interesting. Although, has there been a notable decrease in the quality of arbs post-2014? Have later ArbComs made worse decisions? Were there better candidates in post-2014 elections who failed to get elected and instead less qualified/suitable candidates did? If so, did that happen at a rate higher than pre-2014? I mean, the graph does show less established editors voting in elections, but it can't really say who they voted for. Whilst it stands to reason their votes might not be as informed as those who know how to research an editor (and that edit count might correlate with that ability), it still seems plausible on the surface that the change in voter makeup hasn't materially changed ArbCom's composition? At the same time, I don't really know how to measure the answer to any of those questions (is it even possible to measure by any reasonable metric?), or if there are better questions to evaluate whether change in makeup has affected outcomes. (aside: there's many reasonable admins who don't appear to run for AC. I can probably guess why that is, but I'd have thought the available candidate pool affects ArbCom's membership more than voter makeup?) (aside #2: in fairness, Apple isn't a consumers' co-operative. Granted I think many cooperatives have participation requirements of their members to vote at AGMs, eg [17].) ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 03:19, 13 April 2021 (UTC)

"Better" and "worse" are obviously subjective, and it's hard to separate "bad decision" from "not the decision I'd have made". If pressed, I'd say the worst Arbcoms of all were the very early ones when it basically consisted of Jimmy's cronies, but the quality rapidly improved. In terms of "is this a group I'd trust to reach fair decisions?", I'd personally say the committees and the individual arbs (with honorable exceptions) have got steadily worse since around 2012–13. Part of that is obviously that the workload has steadily increased as the project grows and the dispute resolution processes wither so it's become an impossible job that turns everyone who attempts it into a cynical hack if they don't jump ship soon enough, but I do think there genuinely is a consistent pattern of the committee gradually but steadily coming to favor expediency over fairness over the past decade or so. Floquenbeam or Risker might be good people to talk to if you want contradictory views to mine. ‑ Iridescent 16:15, 13 April 2021 (UTC)

Actually, don't ask me. I pretty much agree with Iridescent here. I've had increasing doubts as to the continuing value of Arbcom for several years. I can't think of anything they do that we couldn't find a way to do without them. Keep in mind that, back in 2008-09, we came very, very close to shutting it down when an arbitrator went rogue. (It was only later that we found out how rogue he had really gone.) Instead, Jimmy in his wisdom decided to massively expand the number of arbitrators (this was the year I was first elected to Arbcom), and some useful stuff did come out of it: CU and OS primarily staffed by community members instead of arbs, publication of CU/OS stats, an actual Arbitration Policy (now desperately needing a refresh, but...), the creation of community-based discretionary sanctions and blocks of problem users (including longtime editors in some cases) almost always being done at the community level. Realistically, though: AE is a problem, being stuck in the corner like it is and managed by just a handful of admins; the application of Arbcom discretionary sanctions so indiscriminately that an argument could be made that they cover up to 10% of all articles; we haven't figured out a good way to vet potential CU/OS candidates for genuinely problematic behaviour, so if it was turned over to the community it could easily become a popularity contest instead of a viable alternative. (I mention this because other wikis have had this very problem with direct community selection.) I worry a lot that Arbcom is "staffed" by a mix of people who've spent waaaayyy too much time on the committee, people who do actually see Arbcom as a kind of court, people who are in it for the power, and some genuinely good souls who are just trying to solve problems. I think the WMF really hopes we'll never get rid of Arbcom because it makes their life easier to have a small group to dump their ideas and problems on; the fact that even functionaries almost never hear about anything the WMF discusses with Arbcom is a problem. (Seriously folks, it can't all be about things so private that a CU or OS can't hear about it, because we're much more likely to have to deal with the repercussions.) I know it will be really hard to blow things up, but you know what the first thing is that I would do? Get rid of SecurePoll for electing Arbcom. My first election involved public "voting", and it made an enormous difference in the way that the election went. Risker (talk) 03:46, 14 April 2021 (UTC)

Break-in-a-break

On CU/OS, fr.wiki has split the baby: nominations committee that only exists to appoint/remove functionaries. Ombuds will have to sort out if that's allowed, but it'd be a reasonable compromise and one I'd support. I'm also going to ping AmandaNP as a former arb who might contribute something to this discussion about the future of the committee.

My personal view is similar to Iri's and Risker's: the only things that make the committee still relevant are desysop and CU/OS. The latter fr.wiki has given us a model that would probably work better as you'd have a group of people actually appointed for a specific task. The former is still with ArbCom because of power issues: arbs who are philosophically for community desysop pre-election and in some cases post-election regularly oppose community desysop when they're on the committee; depending on how the wind blows, the people with grudges support or oppose the proposal based on how it would impact the admin they most want to see desysoped; controversial admins vote the way that is most likely to keep them around at a given time. That'll get you a long way towards failing right there for any proposal.

The only other thing that can't be done publicly is some of the privacy stuff, but honestly, en.wiki isn't that special. Most of the harassment stuff can be handled by the OS team, and if it can't be, T&S or legal is probably the correct place to go. TonyBallioni (talk) 05:05, 14 April 2021 (UTC)

On a personal note, I can tell you that my tenure as an arb was one of the most unpleasant experiences of my life. As for other opinions, I like to know Newyorkbrad's. Paul August ☎ 11:09, 14 April 2021 (UTC)

Hmmm, I only ever sought election when I was worried that a committee might go seriously pear-shaped and threw my hat in just in case. Luckily my fears have been (relatively) unfounded. Arbing is not something I enjoy but see as something of value. The desysop and privacy issue items are the main reasons for its continued existence. My idea for a desysop process was User:Casliber/Fivecrat, and ultimately I saw some role for an expanded T&S committee that became more familiar with the editor base of en wiki as being a place for privacy issues at some point in the future. My reduced editing has to do with playing pokemon go since 2016, resuming Dungeons and Dragons since 2017, and my marriage coming to an end since mid 2020, and all the fun complications that arise thereof...Paul why did you dislike arbing and Iri what was the crisis of 2007ish? Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 12:11, 14 April 2021 (UTC)

Cas, there was serious ongoing factional conflict on my committee, along with the not infrequent personal attacks, all of which I found ... stressful (too thin-skinned I suppose). Paul August ☎ 17:25, 14 April 2021 (UTC)

Paul, about those personal attacks, were those the ever-present attacks from (some members of) the community, or attacks by some Arbs against one another? --Tryptofish (talk) 21:30, 14 April 2021 (UTC)

The value of having Arbcom as an institution is that the community generally accepts it as legitimate. In other words: if it makes a decision that's unpopular, daresay even objectively wrong, we haven't as of yet had a full-on revolt (the implied comparison is to Fram - I don't think that the events of 2008-09 were as bad) because at the end of this year or next year, we can vote those responsible out.

But otherwise, a lot of what Arbcom doesn't necessarily need a formal body to do. What I spend a lot of my time ond—possibly over 50% of it, particularly when the list is otherwise quieter—are block appeals, specifically Checkuser block appeals. We hear appeals of blocks (i) based on checkuser or oversight evidence, (ii) based on information that is not suitable for public discussion, or (iii) as a result of an arbitration case or arbitration enforcement remedy.Yes, I copy-pasted part of our boilerplate. The majority of these in-service-area appeals are CU blocks. The outcome is one of "user still socking/was socking last week", "non-appeal appeal", or "we will extend WP:ROPE/a second chance, pretty please don't screw this up". On very rare occasion do we conclude that the block was actually erroneous. Most of this could go to a (theoretical) UTRS-checkuser queue. OS blocks appeals could go to oversight-l. I suppose Arbcom should be reviewing its bans. The appeals on private evidence could theoretically go to the functionaries, if there is interest. So could a lot of other privacy-related matters that get sent to Arbcom, if there is a decision made to move on from Arbcom.

ADMINCOND cases are another sore point, given it's presently one of the committee's core functions. Right now, the tipping point for them is acceptance. Once accepted, the administrator in question is overwhelmingly likely to be desysoped. I'm not saying that the outcome is fixed, but the scope of a case to "examine administrator X's conduct within the scope of ADMINCOND" tips us over. (At the risk of re-igniting an argument, I don't think that case naming by itself is why we're predisposed to certain outcomes, but it's the stated scope of the case that pushes us in that direction.) I have a draft of an analysis of a decade's worth of ADMINCOND cases or cases that involves sanctioning administrators that I need to tidy up and post... Maxim_(talk) 14:11, 14 April 2021 (UTC)

The aforementioned analysis is now at User:Maxim/ArbCom and desysops. Maxim_(talk) 14:46, 14 April 2021 (UTC)

Thanks Maxim, that's very useful reading. Iri, I have the same question that Cas asked (and since he asked, I figure I'm not ignorant or alone in asking). What was the crisis of ~2007? --Tryptofish (talk) 20:03, 14 April 2021 (UTC)

I guess while we're taking history lessons, @Risker: what's in 2008-09, we came very, very close to shutting it down when an arbitrator went rogue. (It was only later that we found out how rogue he had really gone. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 20:06, 14 April 2021 (UTC)

@ProcrastinatingReader: Yes I know that one - not sure how much of that is public and how much is non-public actually....so not sure how much can be discussed or even mentioned....@Paul August: that (the conflict) sounds terrible. I think for about 85% or more of the time of the terms I've been on the committee, things have been pretty collaborative. Occasional differences of opinion and (let's say) robust discussion but for the most part constructive...or maybe I was missing subtle digs...heck I dunno know..Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 21:02, 14 April 2021 (UTC)

What happened in both 2008–09 isn't something we talk about, but it's not some kind of skeleton in the closet; the reason it isn't discussed is a combination of (1) respecting the dignity of someone who is long-departed and for obvious reasons not able to give their side of the story, and (2) our wanting to encourage the person involved to stay away, and not be tempted to come back to Wikipedia. You can figure out the back-story without much difficulty by looking at {{Arbitration committee chart}} or Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee/History#Current and former members; I'd advise you not to bother as you're not going to find some kind of smoking gun, just evidence that when a committee has had 112 different members, there's no sifting mechanism yet devised that will prevent some proportion of that 112 being either self-serving sleazebags, incompetent wastes of space, or outright liars.

I agree entirely with Risker above that if we only had the ability to make one change to try to improve Arbcom, that change should be abolishing secret ballots. See my point #4 above—turning the elections from a community consensus-based process to select delegates, into a political process to elect representatives, may have been done with entirely good intentions but there's probably been no single change that's done more damage to Wikipedia's internal dynamics. ‑ Iridescent 10:42, 16 April 2021 (UTC)

About 2008–9, I understand now, and will leave it at that. But I wasn't aware at the time that there was serious consideration given to shutting ArbCom down as a consequence. I'm surprised at the mental jump from one-out-of-112, to getting rid of the entire Committee. (About 2007, I understand that one too, now. We have a page about it, so I assume there's nothing to keep un-named.) --Tryptofish (talk) 23:12, 16 April 2021 (UTC)

It was a lot more than one-in-112. The Wikipedia tradition of not publicly naming-and-shaming problem editors if they agree to quietly disappear is both an honorable one (for not wrecking the rest of someone's life for something they once did on a website) and a practical one (in incentivizing problem editors to go away and make a clean break rather than hanging round causing trouble), but it does have the unfortunate effect of making the history of Wikipedia's administration look cleaner than it was. I can think of at least half-a-dozen former arbs whom I wouldn't trust in the slightest, and I assume there were more I either wasn't around for (my editing history has big gaps) or where Arbcom or T&S managed to keep a scandal behind closed doors. ‑ Iridescent 15:32, 19 April 2021 (UTC)

I should clarify that all that I meant by that ratio was that this was one member of the Committee. And my point was that one person misbehaving need not be a reason to consider shutting down the entire program. If however the issue was that there were simultaneously other members of ArbCom who were also doing things that were wrong, then I'm not aware of that. --Tryptofish (talk) 18:40, 19 April 2021 (UTC)

If a backlog fell in the woods, but nobody showed up to close it, would it still make a sound?

I think that Hammersoft and Chicdat have made some truly fascinating observations in another discussion: [18], [19]. I don't want to go off-topic with the discussion there, whereas this has become a de facto Village Pump for what I'm about to say, so I'm posting here.

At Commons, deletion discussions that sit for 10 months with nobody to close them. At Wiktionary, 17 months. Yes, 17! And smaller but still very meaningful delays here, at AfC. And I can't help noticing, in Katherine Maher's resignation, all the self-congratulation about how well the "Wikimedia Movement" is growing. Well, maybe not!

If one were to extrapolate these unmet backlogs to en-Wiki, the prognosis would be pretty dire. And that strikes me as genuinely possible. On the other hand, does the general public really care? If a random person wants to go online and look up some information about something, are they even aware of an unclosed discussion in project space that is about something else? Obviously not, at least not until the stuff that is getting backlogged intrudes into what they are trying to read, at which point the digital wheels could well fall off and Wikipedia goes back to being the butt of jokes.

For me, this kind of thing raises truly interesting questions about the ongoing viability of the Wikimedia projects. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:44, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

• Thanks for the ping Tryptofish. Some four years ago, I noted that we needed to start planning for a post-admin era. Four years on, and nothing's been done about it, and the situation is worse. I noted then, and it's true now, the sky isn't falling. But, inexorably, the project is edging closer and closer to being nonviable. There isn't going to be a judgment day when all hell breaks loose and the project falls apart. It's going to be far more insidious than that, as it progresses bit by bit, day by day. Few, if any, will recognize how bad things are getting simply because they aren't much worse than they were last month, or the month before that. But, worse it will become. To my knowledge, the WMF isn't doing anything about this. There is a lifecycle to any organization and any product. The WMF isn't apparently capable of recognizing this, and therefore recognizing the rather dire circumstances the projects are in. This is going to require serious leadership, and serious long range planning to fix. RfA, backlogs, etc. are all just symptoms of the problem. With thorough research, it is likely possible to predict a point in the future at which the balance has shifted in favor of bad actors. That would help to determine at least a time frame within which we have to act. It would also sound the alarm. I can't claim to have all the skills necessary to do such research. Some people need to be identified that have the skills and are willing to do the research. What is clear now is that the current model of operations is not viable in the long term. It can not sustain. --Hammersoft (talk) 21:24, 15 March 2021 (UTC)
  • Given our backlog in AfC review, the issue goes beyond the availability of admins. It also includes non-admin editors willing to put in time on certain kinds of tasks. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:22, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

• There was a long tangentially-related thread here (which later spilled into the Signpost) two years ago, when the aftermath of Framageddon had had time to filter though into the "active in the last 30 days" figures and as a consequence the admin activity level fell through the 500 barrier. (An arbitrary number but a significant one, as the peak was almost exactly 1000 so it marked the group of active admins contracting by half.) FWIW, the figure has remained almost completely stable at 500±10 since then, other than a brief uptick in January–February this year, presumably caused by legacy admins briefly coming back to comment on the US elections and thus technically temporarily being marked as "active in the last 30 days". However, since that article was published, the total number of admins (active+inactive) has followed the projected trend line there almost exactly—it projected us being at 1100 at the moment and Special:ListUsers/sysop currently has 1109 entries.

  After two years of reflecting on it, I've moved away from the sky-is-falling camp. What seems to actually be happening is that the receding tide is exposing those parts of Wikipedia and of the WMF ecosystem which people don't actually care about (and since the supposed point of all WMF projects is to provide what people want, by extension those parts of Wikipedia and of the WMF ecosystem which we either didn't need in the first place or which have now become obsolete). A leaner and more focused Wikipedia/Wikimedia might actually be a good thing—at the moment we're spaffing money, editor time, and developer work on things which few or no readers ever see.

  (As an aside, that is a cue for some statistics; the other projects' belief that Wikipedia thinks it's more important than the rest of the WMF ecosystem is justified, even though the WMFs hate to admit it. Last year this talkpage averaged 271 pageviews per day. The Wikivoyage pages for London, Paris, New York City and Rome combined averaged 256 pageviews per day. At the time of writing, thus far in 2021 the English Wikipedia WandaVision article has had more readers than all pages on Wikiversity combined.)

  TL;DR: a near-death experience might be a good thing, if it forces the WMF and Wikipedia's ad hoc informal management into confronting the fact that continued growth in size with the same number of people is an unsustainable model. We might have deferred the maintenance phase for a decade, but sooner or later we're going to enter it if things continue as they are, and anyone who claims to know what the psychological impact will be when either the deletion rate overtakes the article creation rate, or the backlog starts to impact on what readers see—and one or the other has to happen soon if things continue the way they are—is lying.

  I suspect a lot of what happens next will depend on the internal politics at the WMF, and how the dust settles following Katherine Maher's departure and the Board's attempted coup. If Maher's replacement is someone who actually understands how Wikipedia works (Maggie Dennis?), we might for the first time have a management willing to make the difficult decisions regarding how "constantly growing" fits with "relatively constant numbers of editors and admins", both within Wikipedia and across the WMF as a whole, and more crucially be someone who's actually trusted when it comes to steering the discussions on where to draw limits and how to enforce them. At the moment we're still working largely with rules that were drawn up c. 2006 for a project with 1,000,000 articles, 3500 active editors and 1000 active admins; thanks to COVID the number of active editors has risen to 5600 but we now have 6,272,914 articles and only 500 active admins.

  As far as I know the only person who's put in serious thought when it comes to adapting our policies and practices to address how we operate in future, as opposed to just something-must-be-done-ing like you and I, is WhatamIdoing, and she's obviously now constrained in what she can do owing to her real-world job. At some point we probably need to have a full-scale Wikipedia Constitutional Convention to try to establish whether some of our established principles like the General Notability Guideline are sustainable going forward. While it may be necessary, it will likely be an sustained Shit Bucket Challenge on a scale never before seen on Wikipedia for everyone involved, and I do not volunteer to be a part of it. ‑ Iridescent 07:29, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

• The Wikivoyage pages for London, Paris, New York City and Rome combined averaged 256 pageviews per day -- to be fair, Wikivoyage is an odd case. Most projects don't have a competitor with almost the exact same name and visual layout that's been totally moribund for most of a decade but retains a higher search ranking for complicated historical reasons.

  I'm always a bit taken aback, on that note, to see how Wiktionary turns up on that kind of stuff. My bubble -- and I do not mean a Wikimedian bubble here, in that the vast majority of such people have never edited a Wikipedia article (for perhaps anything more than IP copyediting) and wouldn't know where to start -- sees Wiktionary as a pretty major day-to-day dictionary. The bubble being filtered there is more or less "young adults with some interest, ranging from 'passing' to 'obsessive', in linguistics"; I wonder to what ratio it's the linguistics (a weird nerdy hobby, and a common on-ramp for getting Into Wikipedia) and what ratio it's the 'young'. That ties into my broader thought on the sneaky-death-spiral, on Wikipedia criticism, on HTD, etc., which is that the project at this point is too big to fail. Starting from a few years older than me and going down, the current cohort of emerging adults and younger are people who live in a world where Wikipedia has always existed, and never or almost never been anything but one of the most trusted web resources. It's a hell of a process to weather, going from a trend to an institution. Vaticidalprophet (talk) 08:10, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

How to kill a wiki

• We're not too big to fail. The office and servers are rented; other than the WMF's cash slush fund, literally our only asset is goodwill, and if we get a reputation for inaccuracy—or if someone else successfully launches something better—Wikipedia could shrivel to a moribund set of archived pages within weeks. (Compuserve, AOL, Myspace and AltaVista were all far more dominant in their time than we are now.)

  If one of the big tech companies were to give me the budget, I could kill Wikipedia within a year. Fork all the pages with over 1000 hits per day to Knol 2.0; pay subject-matter experts to review them for errors (it wouldn't need to be Nobel laureates, grad students would do fine); once the page had been reviewed, remove that Wikipedia page from PageRank and replace it with the corresponding Knol 2.0 page. Then repeat the process for pages with >900, >800 readers per day, eventually leaving Wikipedia as a set of unmaintained and increasingly-outdated pages on major topics but with little or no incoming traffic, and a collection of stubs on arcane low-interest topics; meanwhile Knol 2.0 has creamed off all the articles which people actually want to read and the competent editors who want their work to actually be seen by people, leaving Wikipedia as an unmoderated wasteland full of shitty stubs which the donors will desert in droves.

  If this has occurred to me, you can be sure it's also occurred to Jeff Bezos; our market dominance is a case of none of the big corporations wanting to acquire too dominant a share of the internet and consequently trigger US antitrust legislation, not that we're uniquely adept at surviving in the modern age. The WMF is basically the buffer state between Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook. ‑ Iridescent 13:20, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

• Not 'too big' in the sense we can't fail, 'too big' in the sense we shouldn't. The sneaky-death-spiral is all too real -- and disastrous on a level I'm not sure a lot of either the editor base or the critic base realizes. The detached admin corps that sees Wikipedia from when it was a cool free-knowledge project to play around with is the detached admin corps that doesn't realized it's stumbled backwards into steering The Biggest Thing That Man Has Ever Done; the HTD crowd who want to burn something they have sometimes-understandable, sometimes-bizarre grievances against don't quite get what the consequences would be. This is both the definitive general knowledge source of the modern age and a weird failing project on a drama ship, and we're all surviving somewhere in the space between. Vaticidalprophet (talk) 13:33, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

• To be honest, if Wikipedia failed it probably would barely be noticed. (Do you remember the protest rallies, waves of outrage and petitions over Myspace or Friendster dying? Me neither.) As everyone who's ever worked in marketing can confirm, brand loyalty is real but extremely malleable; no matter how much people claim to love a brand, they barely notice it disappearing provided an alternative remains. Since the existing content would still continue to exist, if Wikipedia vanished tomorrow and Google started directing all searches to the corresponding page on a revived and souped-up Veropedia instead, it would probably draw no more attention than the disappearance of A&P or Safeway (delete according to which side of the Atlantic you're on). ‑ Iridescent 15:22, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

• Without constant maintenance, backlogs swell to enormous (I'm an American) sizes and continue to swell unless constant maintenance occurs. Wiktionary's 17-month backlog? Blame it on the 73 active or semi-active (semi-active could mean users like X! who edits 10 times in 1 year). If we had 73 active or semi-active administrators, Wikipedia. Would. Be. A. MESS!! Since TJMSmith just became an admin, the next user I can expect to go through RfA is Vami IV, who passed WP:ORCP with a rating of 8/10. And that one RfA certainly won't be enough to balance the four inactive admins that will soon be removed for inactivity. Losing more admins, aren't we? 🐔 Chicdat  ^{Bawk to me!} 11:35, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

• That sort of hyperbole doesn't help anything, and is just going to prevent people sympathetic with your case from joining the discussion for fear of being labelled as cranks, while alienating those who disagree with your case but are open to persuasion. Desysopping inactive administrators has an impact on the headline number but has no impact at all on Wikipedia's actual function—these people are by definition inactive, so it's purely a bookkeeping exercise of moving them from one column to another; the change in the headline number of admins is no more a reflection of a decline in Wikipedia's activity, than the occasional drop in the {{NUMBEROFPAGES}} total when we periodically delete a batch of stale abandoned drafts reflects a decrease in Wikipedia's scope.

  As I've already pointed out above, the active admin count—which is the only statistic that matters—has been astonishingly stable in recent years—other than on the single day of 21 June 2019 (the day the WMF escalated Framageddon into a declaration of war against English Wikipedia, prompting a lot of hitherto-inactive admins to log in either to see what the fuss was, or to tender resignations), the number of active admins on en-wiki hasn't once moved out of the 490–540 range for three years. The issue, if there is one, isn't a decline in the number of active admins; it's (1) that the number of admins is remaining constant while the number of articles rises steadily, meaning it becomes increasingly less feasible for admins to conduct routine maintenance to pre-empt potentially problematic editors before they start and instead rely increasingly on a fire-fighting model of only taking action once an issue is reported, and (2) a lack of churn and the "RFA is hell" myth discouraging new participants and as a consequence the admin corps becoming increasingly detached psychologically from the editor base, with admins potentally predisposed to see things in terms of the issues affecting the Wikipedia of 2008 rather than 2021 (and also potentially giving the impression that RFA is much more difficult to pass than it is, since most of the admins a new editor will encounter tend to have 10+ years experience; in reality any reasonably competent editor who hasn't made any serious recent errors and hasn't been unduly argumentative will generally be waved through RFA as a formality).

  Comparing Wikipedia to Wiktionary is irrelevant as they're completely different sites. Wiktionary averages 130 million pageviews per month which isn't small potatoes but is dwarfed by English Wikipedia's 10 billion monthly pageviews. Plus, Wiktionary is ultimately a mixture of a vanity project and a dumping ground for Wikipedia's substubs; it has a potential value for some minority and endangered languages, but for English (or French, or Chinese, or Turkish, or Russian…) it wouldn't make the slightest difference to readers were it to be shut down tomorrow, given the plethora of other available dictionary resources available; Wikipedia on the other hand, has for better or worse temporarily become the de facto base text of the internet. The reason Wiktionary has so few admins isn't some kind of instututional snub; it's that very little that happens on Wiktionary (and Wikivoyage, and Wikiversity, and Wikispecies, and pretty much everything else except the Wikipedia–Commons–Wikidata core) has any significant potential to have the slightest real-world impact, and consequently anyone inclined to maintenance-type tasks is going to be much more use on one of the three core projects. ‑ Iridescent 13:20, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

• Iridescent, your information is outdated. For the first time in over three years, the number of active admins went out of the 490-540 range. As of yesterday it's 488. See: Wikipedia:List of administrators. 🐔 Chicdat  ^{Bawk to me!} 11:51, 24 April 2021 (UTC)

• The number is consistently ticking along around the 500 mark; the sudden drop this week in "admins who have been active in the past 30 days" (the figure being measured there) will almost certainly be a statistical anomaly caused by the lifting of the English lockdown in March, and as a consequence a significant proportion of admins simultaneously either having something better to do than stare at a screen, or returning to work and having to devote their time to clearing year-long accrued backlogs. If the anomaly hasn't self-corrected within two weeks, then maybe it's evidence of decline, but at the moment I'd just consider it background noise. ‑ Iridescent 06:58, 26 April 2021 (UTC)

• Ah, now I understand. Chicdat (talk) 10:09, 26 April 2021 (UTC)

• The backlogs at Commons was elegantly described to me as "a small Wiki with large Wiki problems". Most Commons contributors only upload files and don't participate in the community other than what is necessary to work at their local project. Wikipedia is huge. Ungodly huge compared to any other Wiki that exists. Commons would need a Wikipedia-sized community (or considering the other projects, multiple times that) to keep on top of tasks there and they just don't have it. Add the burden of multi-lingual-ism and I think it's unfair to compare Commons issues to Wikipedia ones. Wikipedia has large Wiki problems, but we're also a large Wiki - we can, and do, handle it. As for backlogs, we need more participants interested in doing thankless boring work, and people willing to volunteer their time to that is relatively small. We could give rewards, but really, what does Wikipedia have to offer, and how do we prevent the gaming of that? The only rewards we can give out, really, are permissions, and there's a good reason we don't do that, though it is something we should perhaps consider. Elli (talk | contribs) 06:41, 17 March 2021 (UTC)

• Every project has its own problems, and Commons' are most definitely their own rather than ones that are applicable to en.wiki. It's become known for its hostility to other projects and serving as the place where the banned somehow persist in kicking around (Fae and Rodhullemu being prime examples.) People treat it as a dumping ground for anything and everything free rather than the purpose it more usefully serves, which is an appendage to relevant projects. As for Wikipedia disappearing or being replaced, that would require someone to get a critical mass of editors to migrate en masse and fork Wikipedia, and then get the search engines to privilege it. Otherwise people are still going to go to the one at the top of results. There's no way any other project that could replace it is getting off the ground otherwise. Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs ^talk 13:45, 17 March 2021 (UTC)

• Strong agree. My observation/opinion on Commons is that it in some ways considers itself to be a content project—say like any "big" Wikipedia—but the reality is a bit more nuanced, because Commons decisions have a direct impact on what's going on our project. Perhaps it is insular to a fault where it has to be attracting many enWPians, many frWPians, deWPians, esWPians, etc. Or, maybe working on image issues is very few people's cup of tea.

  I do have a second comment, more in response to the original post. I recall a time when projects such as n: or b: were vibrant; think lots of admins/power users, lots of new content being written, etc. I don't really want to go down the rabbit hole of commenting on individual merits of some projects, but if one looks at the last 500 recent changes at Wikibooks, it's so much of global actions (renames/account creations), garbage, garbage cleanup, and some sporadic content additions. It doesn't give a feel that there's a vibrant community or a growing project. I wonder if for a bigger project like even enwiki, there is a generalization that could be made, that over time, a continuous drop in administrators is largely correlated to a continuous drop in power users, which itself would leave a moribund project without a coherent community and with stagnant content. Maxim_(talk) 17:06, 17 March 2021 (UTC)

• Perhaps it is insular to a fault where it has to be attracting many enWPians, many frWPians, deWPians, esWPians, etc. Or, maybe working on image issues is very few people's cup of tea -- I suspect both, combined with the fact it's selecting for people who look at the "Richard Stallman did nothing wrong" image policy of Wikimedia as a whole and decide they want to participate in the project that consists entirely of that. Vaticidalprophet (talk) 17:40, 17 March 2021 (UTC)

over time, a continuous drop in administrators is largely correlated to a continuous drop in power users, which itself would leave a moribund project without a coherent community and with stagnant content ... or, the opposite: as Wikipedia has grown, the admin/editor ratio has increased. Correlation isn't causation, but it is correlation. There is a correlation between decrease in administrators and the project growing and getting better. We should at least consider that 3,500 active editors and 1,000 active admins was a mistake and that the decrease happening since then is nothing more than a natural correction of an imbalance.

I agree with Iri's comment above, What seems to actually be happening is that the receding tide is exposing those parts of Wikipedia and of the WMF ecosystem which people don't actually care about.... In addition to separate wheat from chaff over the last 20 years, the project may have evolved to have a more efficient workflow and simply not need as many restricted-button-pushers (admins) as it may have once needed. Similarly, we may need fewer power users than we once did, and rather than leaving a project moribund or stagnant, fewer power users—fewer elite users, fewer high-profile users—may actually be a sign of a healthier project and a stronger community, one where the power is distributed, where editors are empowered to handle their own problems instead of relying on a small cadre of power users. This is why I'm a big fan of WP:RFCEND #2 and opposed to WP:BADNAC #2: I think it's bad for the project to rely on a few people (admins) to close contentious discussions. And it's why I don't think we need more admins. Rather, we need to develop editors' abilities to be self-sustaining; small groups of editors who edit certain topic areas should be able to resolve their issues without outside help, as much as possible. Levivich ^harass/_hound 06:43, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

You're missing another obvious point, that the shift in the active admin/active editor ratio is just a reflection of the fact that the structure of Wikipedia 2021 is totally different to the structure of Wikipedia 2008. In 2008, unless you had a particular interest in images, Wikipedia was where everything happened and Wikipedia admin was what you needed to perform quite a lot of relatively mundane tasks. In the current model, huge swathes of people who in 2008 would need admin status to do necessary but uncontroversial tasks have no need of it any more—the people who need to do high-volume edits to bulk sets of pages and ensure their edits don't accidentally miss a particular page because it happens to be protected, such as the people updating Wikidata links or renaming templates, are now largely on Wikidata; people standadizing file names have the FileMover userright; people generating huge "every article related to New York City"-style lists are using custom scripts rather than the old admin-only NoLimits plugin; a lot of the recent changes patrolling has been farmed out to an unhealthy combination of bots and overenthusiastic new editors; etcetera etcetera etcetera. "Active admins" is a misleading number; if you did a count of the number of admins who actually patrolled the true admin areas like CAT:EX, it probably hasn't changed substantially since the original boom of 2005–06, other than perhaps a slight dip reflecting the broader cross-WMF dip in activity during the bleakest period of Sue Gardner's reign of error. ‑ Iridescent 20:10, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

Forking and private companies

• (edit conflict) I agree about the toxicity of Commons culture, but I wouldn't be so sure about the difficulty of extrapolating from there to here. It isn't about WP disappearing, so much as about it becoming increasingly dysfunctional. We don't need to fall in search engine rankings for backlogs to start to get out of control. And I think that Iri's analysis of how Big Tech could well be eyeing us is an excellent one.

So would that be Bezopedia? Zuckopedia? Suckopedia? (With criticism website Suckopedia Sucks!) Or Peder? (With Peder-readers. And Peder-asts.) I think we should start an office pool, on what it will be called.

But I digress.

It's seriously quite a thought, that CC by SA could, once one of the Big Tech companies gets broken up by US anti-trust laws, allow one of the baby-Bezos to create a mirror that they can monetize. As Iri says, they could easily hire a bunch of underpaid PhDs to maintain it. And I think that the community here would strongly reject the concept of volunteering free contributions for something that ends up being for-profit for someone else. Contributions here would vanish, as would the community as we know it.

An interesting dilemma would then become how they would deal with recentism. No matter what the existing wiki gives them to mirror, it will still need to be updated over time. They can have company policy that dictates what the underpaid PhDs would write, but just imagine the Congressional hearings that would result. --Tryptofish (talk) 17:10, 17 March 2021 (UTC)

• "Peder-asts" reminded me of discussing the project with some non-Wikipedian friends, one of who in an attempt to derive the demonym came up with "wikipediphiles...that can't be right, can't it?" Vaticidalprophet (talk) 17:40, 17 March 2021 (UTC)

• I think you're overestimating the degree to which people wouldn't be willing to volunteer their labor for other people to profit. A hypothetical for-profit Wikipedia would lose some of the Free Culture types for sure (TBH in my experience most of them would be no great loss), but an Amazonpedia or Googlepedia could easily replace the editor losses a hundred times over through increased promotional opportunities. (Consider if on every Google search for a term that had a corresponding Wikipedia page, there was a "Seen an error in this page? Correct it!" link.) Consider the fact that the number of people who upload photos to Google Maps—for no pay and no obvious reward other than a vague "hey, someone searching for the Buttmunch, Indiana branch of Taco Bell might see my blurry photo of the parking lot!"—probably outnumber the number of people who upload photos to Commons by a hundred to one, or consider how many people write for Wikia/Fandom in the certain knowledge that their deathless prose is going to be plastered with adverts and all the revenue is going into Jimmy Wales's personal bank account.20:10, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

• That's an interesting point, and one that I had not adequately considered. What you describe are what I might describe as "drive-by IP edits", and it's entirely possible that they would be of considerable quantity. But I think that the number of miserable neurotics, um, I mean, deeply thoughtful and dedicated experienced editors, who would log-in day after day for months or years, would decline. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:58, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

• I still think you're overestimating people's loyalty to Wikipedia's principles and brand rather than Wikipedia's function. I honestly don't think most editors care in the slightest whether the WMF is run for-profit or not; they care about whether whoever's in charge keeps their hands out of our affairs and doesn't try to meddle or set agendas. (Lest we forget, when the Wikipedia spark caught light we weren't run by a group of selfless angels working tirelessly for the public good because Information Wants to Be Free, but by the owners of nekkid.info trying to generate traffic to their site. Thanks to Internet Archive you can still read Jimmy Wales's blog from before he transformed himself into the Saviour of the World, which makes enlightening reading—France has a per-capita GDP lower than the per-capita GDP of the poorest state in the United States (West Virginia). If you imagine the embarassing poverty of West Virginia or Mississippi, and extend it to the population of Texas, New York, and California, then you've got France. This is not a first-tier nation. being fairly typical.)

  We not don't just have such things as Wikia, TripAdvisor, Blogger et al to demonstrate that people will work for free for another person's profit providing they think it means their voice is being heard. We also have evidence from languages where Wikipedia isn't the top search result; Baidu Baike, for instance, is run by a thoroughly for-profit corporation but has no trouble recruiting editors. (To pre-empt "yes, people want their writing/photos to reach an audience and see that as their "payment" for working for these dubious multinationals, but who does the routine maintenance?", see this very long post of mine on that very issue. It's astonishing how much routine drudgery people will do provided you give them the feeling of authority; it's also true that the routine maintenance tasks attract a particular type who want to see themselves as "the real bosses", and thus the people who want to be moderators/administrators aren't necessarily the group you want as admins) ‑ Iridescent 08:07, 19 March 2021 (UTC)

• (In which Tryptofish sneakily tries to change the subject...) So, you used to work for an early online dating site? I wouldn't have guessed that one! --Tryptofish (talk) 16:12, 19 March 2021 (UTC)

• I've worked all kinds of weird places in my time. Around that time, online dating was a genuinely cutting edge place to be working; the e-commerce bubble had burst and dating was one of the few areas that were actually viable enough—and competitive enough—for people to invest in blue-sky research and large-scale experimentation on the dynamics of human behavior online. The machine-learning "what did you like about x, what didn't you like about y, you may be interested in z" algorithms that drive things like Netflix all derive from dating websites, and Mark Zuckerberg is quite open that Facebook ultimately derives from a Hot or Not clone. ‑ Iridescent 16:22, 19 March 2021 (UTC)

Rethinking basic assumptions

Totally agree a Wikipedia Constitutional Convention would be a Shit Bucket Challenge that I would not partake in either. But some kind of "Basic Questions Gut-Check" process might be useful. You mentioned whether GNG is viable. I'd have us have a big RFC about What is the purpose of WP:N? Or What should the encyclopedia include? When is the last time there was a watchlist-notice-level-advertised RFC (like the recent desysop one) about these kinds of basic questions, I wonder? Granted it would be a big giant mess, but I wonder if it'd be good for everyone to have the discussion if for no other reason than everyone can see how everyone else feels about it (and how much we're all on the same page, or not, about basic questions like what kind of encyclopedia is this?). The pillars, as written, seem distant from today's ethos: like principles written to answer the questions of yesterday. They, and our core PAGs, need broad reassessment. If we had our shit more together, that's the kind of thing we'd have done for the 20th, and every five or ten years. Levivich ^harass/_hound 06:51, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

The pillars really aren't Wikipedia's ten commandments; until relatively recently WP:5P was just yet another shitty personal essay. (It still has an explicit "this is not a policy nor a guideline" disclaimer on its talkpage.) I personally strongly disagree with its very existence, as it gives good-faith new editors the impression that these five arbitrary items are somehow "the important policies"—how is something like Should conflicts arise, discuss them calmly on the appropriate talk pages really "more fundamental" than something as absolutely basic as "follow basic formatting guidelines", "write in English" or "don't write about obviously trivial topics even if sources exist for them". I'd MfD it in an instant if I didn't think a swarm of "keep, it exists" whiners would descend on the discussion and it would consequently inevitably be a "no consensus". If Wikipedia does actually have "pillars", it's the old WP:NPOV / WP:DBAD / WP:IAR trifecta, to which all our other policies are essentially footnotes. ‑ Iridescent 20:32, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

The problem is that consensus, even in the looser Wikipedia sense of "most people agree with this", doesn't scale up well. The Wikipedia community, like most groups trying to follow consensus, genuinely doesn't want to make passionate contributors unhappy. This stalemates any significant change, because there are ardent supporters on all sides of any deviation from key policies and guidelines. And it's just nigh impossible to have in-depth conversations with dozens of people at the same time—and hard to sustain ongoing engagement from more than a handful of editors. Before any fundamental aspects can change, the community either will have to accept that changes will cause shifts in the editing population, or will have to shift first (be run over by paid editors, shed all newer editors, replace earlier cohorts with more recent ones, or something) so the remaining population is in greater alignment with its goals. isaacl (talk) 21:33, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

I get the feeling that the WMF would very cheerfully re-engineer the editing community (aka replace earlier cohorts) to remake the project in their naive vision of a politically correct and smilingly harmonious image. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:26, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

Maybe a new cohort is less libertarian and less devoted to libre principles, which would move the project in a different direction. There are all kinds of possibilities. isaacl (talk) 23:06, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

You don't need to rely on getting the feeling when it comes to the WMF wishing they could dismiss the editing community and appoint a new one; occasionally the mask slips and they admit it publicly. It's not that long since Jimmy Wales was openly trying to whip the crowd of True Believers that attends Wikimania into carrying out a Great Purge of everyone he considered "annoying" (and as you can see he'd brought powerpoints, so this was pre-planned and thought through and not a case of him accidentally mis-speaking or mis-stating the WMF position whilst speaking off the cuff). ‑ Iridescent 08:07, 19 March 2021 (UTC)

I guess I was "getting the feeling" as in bursitis. I remember that presentation. Annoying Foundation, Good Website. --Tryptofish (talk) 16:16, 19 March 2021 (UTC)

Interesting that you think Jimbo is one interested in doing such a thing. That seems to fly counter to a lot of narratives about WMF (or at least, what I assumed). Elli (talk | contribs) 15:24, 21 March 2021 (UTC)

Jimmy has never made any secret of the fact that he wants to purge Wikipedia of anyone whom he doesn't feel shares his particular values and opinions. "I have a longstanding view … that a fair number of toxic personalities need to be shown the door immediately" if you want a direct and relatively recent quote (I note with a complete lack of surprise that of the five "good faith users" egging him on in that particular thread, three are now blocked or banned). Indeed, Jimmy fairly notoriously lost his ability to block editors on English Wikipedia when he tried to block a long-term editor because he decided she had a "toxic personality". ‑ Iridescent 16:27, 21 March 2021 (UTC)

Wikipedia Finally Asking Big Tech to Pay Up

Any thoughts on this article in Wired: "Wikipedia Finally Asking Big Tech to Pay Up"? Paul August ☎ 19:21, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

Without knowing the details, it looks like a common-sense approach, or at least as common-sense as one can get when the information in question is free-use so the only control we have over it is to make life a nuisance for free-riders. "Wikipedia Finally Asking Big Tech to Pay Up" is PR-speak—the Foundation is already funded by Google, Amazon and Facebook—but making it a formal arrangement rather than dependent on the whims of multinationals seems reasonable to me, and might also assist with quantifying the actual value of Wikipedia as a service.

The obvious thought that immediately comes to mind is that, since all this data is already CC BY-SA and the WMF thus can't restrict what a reuser does with it, it would be an eminently viable business model to pay for a subscription to this service, and then relicense the data stream on to twenty further customers charging each of them 10% of what the WMF would charge them, giving each of the customers a 90% saving while simultaneously instantly doubling your money. AGF and all that happy stuff prevents me saying names, but I can certainly think of a few people I'd be watching closely were I the suspicious type. ‑ Iridescent 20:36, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

I am looking forward to it (and I suspect my list of people to watch closely matches yours in at least for a couple of people). Its going to give some people a sharp lesson in civil law if they try it. Only in death does duty end (talk) 10:57, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

• This is from the horse's, er, mouth on meta: Wikimedia Enterprise/Essay. Johnbod (talk) 19:05, 17 March 2021 (UTC)
• And a monster thread at Pump. Johnbod (talk) 21:22, 17 March 2021 (UTC)
• One of the discussion points that (probably intentionally) doesn't get mentioned is that it's massively easier for these large commercial entities to make a solid business case to purchase the kind of feeds they want than there is for them to make donations without a rock-solid guarantee that Wikimedia will continuously provide them with that feed. Since this is an additional specialized feed that won't in any way alter the feeds available to the rest of the users, this actually sounds like a very positive solution. Risker (talk) 00:57, 26 March 2021 (UTC)

• Don't get me wrong, I don't object to any of this. I think it's healthy for all concerned for the WMF to have some kind of formal tithing system from the big tech companies which leach from it, rather than depending on questionable continuing goodwill. If this arrangement can put an end to the annual "if you don't give us $3 we might shut down!" charade, so much the better. ‑ Iridescent 07:03, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

Removal of Olilifood

I would like to know why my post "Olilifood" was deleted please. Makarios62 (talk) 23:08, 25 March 2021 (UTC)

Because Wikipedia isn't a webhosting service or a company directory. We host articles on companies if–and only if–they're sourced to independent reliable sources to demonstrate that the company is considered notable by those not connected to it, and the resulting article is written from a neutral point of view. Your article, on the other hand, was a piece of pure puffery about how great this particular company was, sourced entirely to press releases and containing such lines as Imagine not having moved an inch or call more than 4 vendors for a particular Pizza flavor and still have the option to pay for it with bitcoin. ‑ Iridescent 06:57, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

New message from Jo-Jo Eumerus

Hello, Iridescent. You have new messages at Talk:Huaynaputina.
Message added 15:27, 26 March 2021 (UTC). You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 15:27, 26 March 2021 (UTC)

I'll have a look when I have time but can't promise when that will be. I will say in passing that I think bundled citations are almost never a good idea—they make it much more difficult for readers to verify exactly which source is being used for what, they make it very hard for subsequent editors to move sections of the text around or copy-paste fragments to other articles, and they're even worse than the wretched list defined referencing for making the editing process incomprehensible for newer editors who don't feel wholly confident with the more eccentric aspects of Wikipedia's eccentric "hybrid wikitext/HTML/templates" markup system. ‑ Iridescent 07:42, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

I rarely write an article without some bundling, as I like to use two or three sources at a time (typically a basic one freely online, plus more detailed subscription or book sources). And I hate taxi ranks of refs, and am usually writing on subjects where one plain fact doesn't follow another. The first two objections have some truth, but the third is avoided if you don't use templates at all. Johnbod (talk) 15:51, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

I hate cab ranks of refs^{[1][2][3][4][5]} as well, but to me they're almost always a symptom of an underlying problem which should be addressed by figuring out why the citations are log-jamming and doing something about that, rather than by shoehorning the references into one big reference and sweeping it under the rug that way. There are legitimate reasons to use two references for the same statement (e.g. a high-quality foreign-language or hard-to-find source and a lower quality but more readily available source so people can verify more easily; a primary source for the information and a secondary source to demonstrate it's not a synthesis by the WP author; multiple citations for an improbable-sounding fact to demonstrate that it's genuinely a widely-supported view not the fringe opinion of a single author), and sometimes an explanatory footnote as well.^{[1][2][note 1]} In my experience, anything more than that is either a sign of someone using poor-quality sources and trying to substitute quality with quantity (a tip from What They Don't Teach You On The Wikipedia Outreach Courses: "three or more references together" is second only to "accidentally using the word 'we' when describing a company" for getting oneself flagged as a potential UPE); or, it's a sign that the author is misplacing citations at the end of a sentence rather than with the statements they support. (There are obviously legitimate reasons to use lots of different references in a single sentence, if it's drawing together information from multiple sources, but it's very rare that the references should all be lumped together. Thus, Cats eat birds,^[1] fish,^[2] rodents,^[3] small reptiles,^[4] and fresh carrion.^[5], not Cats eat birds, fish, rodents, small reptiles, and fresh carrion.^{[1][2][3][4][5]}—we want the readers to know exactly which source supports what rather than "here's a bunch of references, one of them supports the particular fact you want to verify but you'll need to check all of them to find out".) To me, the situation where one would need to bundle citations should almost never arise, as in almost every case it should be addressed by changing either the writing or the positioning of the references. ‑ Iridescent 05:28, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

Yes, User:Johnbod#Johnbod's Law states that "5 refs on a line is almost always a sure sign of trouble", but the best single reference will almost always be to something on JSTOR (still 100 free articles per month to anyone btw) or in a big fat book most public libraries won't have, and if one takes seriously helping readers who want to verify information in articles, the best thing is to add more accessible, if less detailed, RS as well. Plus they often have something slightly different and extra to contribute. In the "thematic" articles I tend to write, dividing text into a string of little factlets often doesn't work at all. Academic writing on this sort of topic very rarely attempts anything like this. Johnbod (talk) 14:15, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

If anyone reading this needs JSTOR access, then stop by the Wikipedia:The Wikipedia Library and get your free library card. They're one of the most generous publishers. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:20, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

JSTOR are still handing out 100 free articles a month to anyone who registers at their site. Very easy indeed. Johnbod (talk) 13:47, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

Baitus Sami Mosque

Cleaning out a backlog or six and this article came up. Curious about your thoughts from your 2010 dePROD. I was going to take it to AfD as I can find zero coverage other than the protests surrounding its construction. What am I missing architecturally? Thanks! StarM 16:49, 26 March 2021 (UTC)

I have no objection to it being AfDd if you can't find a source, but to me that's an absolutely clear-cut deprod. Large-size purpose-built places of worship—particularly in a country like Germany with a strong tradition of local media—are never going to be non-notable in Wikipedia terms. There will always be reams of coverage of the discussions around the need for a new church/mosque/synagogue/temple/whatever; the discussions and objections about where to build it and why it needs a new-build rather than converting an existing building; the competition for the design and further objections and appeals regarding its design (as anyone in earshot of a mosque can confirm, there's no such thing as an uncontentious minaret); the groundbreaking ceremony and opening ceremony; and assorted events which have taken place in and been organised by it.

As such, these articles might not be appropriate for Wikipedia if nobody wants to expand them (or might be better-suited to be entries on a list rather than stand-alone pages), but they don't meet the "uncomplicated deletion proposals where no opposition to the deletion is expected" requirements for WP:PROD. In this particular case, while I don't speak German and don't know enough about the German press to assess the reliability of sources, the existence of a fairly substantive article on German Wikipedia also indicates to me that this isn't going to be uncontroversial, since de-wiki are generally much less tolerant than us of marginal-notability topics. ‑ Iridescent 07:29, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

Thanks, as always. I totally get what you're saying, I thought I was missing something obvious on the architecture front; notable design or firm that I wasn't seeing. I'm going to wait as I don't have time to tackle a complicated, in depth AfD right now with some offline time coming up (yay), but so far I've been unable to find much independent outside of the protests, but am going to dig a little in scholar to see if I can find anything on the architecture side that popular media might not have picked up. There were some listings of their events, but nothing in depth for significant coverage. Guess we'll see. Thanks! StarM 14:03, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

So far as I can tell, the deletionists now consider this Routine Coverage™ and therefore inadmissable in court AfD. With the caveat I don't do many building AfDs (don't see many of them in the first place), but it comes up all the time with schools, where a given type of editor's apparent deep offense at the idea school articles are something readers are interested in leads to everything closing no consensus. Vaticidalprophet 22:23, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

I won't touch anything music related with a ten-foot pole, schools are a 9.99 foot one. They turn into an unnecessary argument all the time because people can't/won't see the difference between run of the mill coverage (school X's open house was on date) and actual notability. Somehow GHits is sometimes still an acceptable argument at AfD and I don't get it. I personally truly believe few primary and secondary schools are truly (real world, not wikipedia) notable. That said, I'm 1000% guilty of trying to save all the museums when some are scarcely more notable then schools. If this church had been a school, I'm not sure I'd have tried to save it. A lot of what I've stumbled on in clearing out notability backlogs is article X was created because X was in the news and then forgotten about, ergo no subsequent coverage and/or wow, notability standards were very different ca. 2010, and I was here then too. In some cases though I find some real gems and wish there was an active enough editor base in topic Z to maintain the article. StarM 23:41, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

Aside from a few genuinely notable schools like Le Rosey and Haberdashers' Aske's, I tend to agree. As far s I'm concerned 99.9% of schools could be covered perfectly adequately with List of schools in Fooville tables rather than the current situation of having tens of thousands of pseudo-articles like Meole Brace School, none of which serve the slightest useful purpose to readers since anyone wanting the minimal information they provide can find more in-depth and more up-to-date information on either the school's or the local school board's website and as such the existence of Wikipedia articles is actively damaging since it puts an article which is more likely to be outdated and inaccurate at the top of the search results.

In all fairness, the same could probably be said for museums. For every Art Institute of Chicago there are a hundred 'local history museums' which consist of a couple of spare rooms in a municipal building and contain nothing more than a dusty case full of arrowheads, a handful of amateur paintings of local landmarks, and a bunch of samples of whatever the local factory/mine/refinery happens to make (generally accompanied by a display board explaining why said factory/mine/refinery is a wonderful place to work, the greatest thing that ever happened to the area, and why that unpleasantness about the fatal explosion/child slavery/contaminating the bread with asbestos was all an unfortunate misunderstanding by the big-city press). ‑ Iridescent 06:26, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

I'll be honest, if Cedarburg History Museum is AfDed, I won't be surprised. I'd still !vote keep, but I'd understand good faith arguments. I created it out of trying to figure out how to address the current status of Chudnow Museum of Yesteryear, which seemed worth saving even if it's borderline itself. I think the broader issue is no one is coming to Wikipedia to find out about the schools in their prospective town and the same is true for museums in cities they're planning to visit. Part of the reason I like List of museums in Whoville is because it tells you something about the role of culture in the town. Is this pre-Thunder OKC where you have to go to Dallas for the arts, or is this like Albuquerque where Santa Fe is better, but you can enjoy the local scene? I feel like that's something we used to read about in the dusty Funk & Wagnalls, which somehow feels more "encyclopedic". StarM 13:50, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

I agree that nobody comes to Wikipedia to find out about schools, but I disagree nobody comes to find out about museums (or visitor attractions in general). Wikivoyage is nice in theory but Wikivoyage is dead and just hasn't finished twitching yet (to repeat something I said further up the page, my talkpage alone gets a higher readership than the Wikivoyage pages for London, Paris, New York City and Rome combined), and Google knows this and in most cases has removed Wikivoyage (and its evil twin Wikitravel) from search results for destinations. Given the number of different people—none of whom are particular fans of Wikipedia—I've seen doing it over the years, I can say for certain that people do use Wikipedia to plan their holidays, on all aspects from the Wikipedia page on the town to see what the sights are, to the pages on the airport/station to see which airlines/rail companies go there, to clicking on the photos in the article to expand them (although I've never—and I mean never—seen anyone figure out how to continue through to Commons to see other photos, since MediaViewer was imposed). It might still be dogma that "Wikipedia is an encyclopedia", but that's nowadays little more than a legal fiction we use as a pretext to delete clutter; "Wikipedia is a directory of things which independent sources have at some point considered interesting" isn't as pithy but it describes things more accurately. That people are using Wikipedia to plan vacations is measurable—the million people a year visiting our Disney World article aren't doing so because they're interested in the history of theme park design. ‑ Iridescent 14:51, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

I do think people are coming to Wikipedia to find out about schools! (I did exactly that when I was still in the compulsory educational system -- I switched schools more than a few times and would read the articles of new possibilities.) It's difficult to do a views-per-article analysis because "local high school" is much more niche than "Disney World", but I checked the largest two high schools in my approximate geographic area and found respectable yearly pageviews of around 15k-20k, much higher than I'd expect of a local-interest article about anything else. (One was also a GA.)

To once again veer totally off-topic at the mention of Wikivoyage we're trying our best, man, I recently decided to run through the 'active'-users-by-project of the side projects after seeing a mention in a history search that you could track the chronological rise-fall-rise of the Wikimedia experiment in its side projects as well as in Wikipedia proper, with Wikiquote as the given example. It turned out when I checked the rest that Wikiquote was the only one to have this pattern, and the patterns of the rest of the lot were interesting in and of themselves. Wikivoyage is a straight line but for the obvious. Wikiversity has a frankly bizarre pattern with swings of several hundred users, which strikes me as slightly too high to be explained even by the tenuous definition of 'active' (five+ edits a month) the WMF uses -- I have to assume it's something to do with educational recruitment drives. Wikibooks is also spiky, but downwards. Wikinews is dead. Wikisource is basically upwards, although the timeline raises COVID questions. And Wiktionary is the most interesting of the lot, with a strong, significant upwards trend that strongly implies much higher comparative activity than the given number, considering that while Wikidata and Commons may be nominally way higher that activity (especially the former) is overwhelmingly people interacting with them as an aside from another project. Vaticidalprophet 15:34, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

Wikivoyage is actually a niche project. In the format they have chosen they can not compete with big publishers, and therefore Rome or London are generally not the best pages they have. I am not so well familiar with the English Wikivoyage, but I am sure there are come articles about an semi-obscure place in Idaho or in Cork County which are better than everything else written about these locations. The problem is of course they are difficult to find, and most people just do not have motivation searching.--Ymblanter (talk) 21:24, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

I don't think you have to worry about off topic Vaticidalprophet when we've already meandered from mosque to museums via schools. :D I guess my question then, Iri, is what info are we providing? Historical info about the museum/school/mosque should be easy if they're notable whether it be content, listed building, etc. I guess what we don't (and probably shouldn't) convey is what's on at museum X. Ymblanter, I think obscure is always what's done best. StarM 01:29, 30 March 2021 (UTC)

My point isn't that people aren't coming to Wikipedia to learn about schools, it's that people are coming to Wikipedia to learn about schools when really they shouldn't. Since most of these articles are unpatrolled and unmonitored magnets for vandalism and dubious trivia, anyone reading them has to operate on the assumption that at best they're outdated and at worst they're actively wrong. Given that any local education authority is already going to have comparable pages which are kept up to date, the existence of the Wikipedia articles for non-notable schools is actively damaging as it puts potentially inaccurate content above the accurate content in search results.

Yes, obscure is always what the WMF does best—for popular topics we're rarely the best source since our nature means we're always slightly out-of-date, and at any given time our pages are a lottery as to whether that particular version is neutral. (If I ran the internet, I'd order the search engines to remove pages like Coronavirus disease 2019 and Joe Biden from search results altogether unless the search string was something like covid wikipedia that specifically indicated the searcher was looking for us.) I'm not sure the "we fill in the blanks more reputable sources don't have the space to cover" model translates as well into a travel guide though, as people use the two differently—even for places completely off the tourist trail there will usually be some kind of official website which is more informative than anything we can provide, and when it comes to travel readers understand how to decode marketing euphemisms in a way that isn't always the case with more general content, and thus neutrality and paid-editing aren't so much of an issue. ‑ Iridescent 14:12, 30 March 2021 (UTC)

Passover

There have been numerous edits by Jaredscribe recently and while I was tracking down a problem edit, I made two discoveries. One is that this editor made the problem edit. The other is that the editor has been blocked in the past, so it's possible someone needs to look at the person's edits to make sure they're all right. I wouldn't know myself, and my fixes to the problem edits I did see may be all right or they may not. I didn't see anyone who was watching the article so I'm just contacting some people who have made recent edits.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 18:40, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

I'd have indefblocked them without blinking for Special:diff/1012070280, which was pretty much hanging out an "I'm only here to Right Great Wrongs and have no interest in either collaboration or neutrality" banner, but for whatever reason the admin in question stretched WP:AGF to its limits and gave them a second chance. I'm not qualified to assess the accuracy–or competence–of their edits to Passover. This is a high-profile article and there are a lot of editors who do have substantial knowledge of Jewish religious history and practices; as such if there's a systemic problem with this editor rather than just someone who's accidentally making mistakes, it should be spotted very quickly. Even though it's not normally something I'd wish on anyone, in this case if you see a pattern of problems from this editor it would probably make sense to start a thread at WP:ANI; they seem to be editing a lot of pages on a lot of different and very varied topics, so the involvement of the peanut gallery would actually be beneficial since assessing whether there's a systemic issue here that needs addressing will need multiple editors with multiple perspectives. ‑ Iridescent 05:51, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

The edits look good to me except the person worded one edit in a way that should only be found on the talk page, and then linked to an article with parentheses (parenthetical disambiguation seems to be the term) but didn't pipe the link. I hope I corrected both in a satisfactory way. Anyway, the others I contacted refused to do anything because their edits relate to very specific needs that have nothing to do with the article's content.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 21:27, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

Now I have time to look at the editor in question in more detail—complete with the boasts on their userpage about how dedicated they are to edit-warring—this is probably not someone whose stay on Wikipedia is likely to last very long, but I'm willing to give them a chance. He certainly isn't the first person to come in to Wikipedia thinking they're joining some kind of revolutionary vanguard; generally once they realize that's not the case and that Wikipedia's remit is specifically and explicitly to represent the establishment point of view at all times, they either calm down and become valuable contributors or they get bored and stop editing here. ‑ Iridescent 14:12, 30 March 2021 (UTC)

There is one additional comment I need to make about what you said. You said people who knew Jewish practices were watching the article. I was curious to see how the article represented how Christians see Passover, and those interested In Jewish practices might be less likely to pay attention.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 17:18, 30 March 2021 (UTC)

"How Christians see Passover" is probably too vague, given how diverse the various Christian sects are and their different perspectives on the Old Testament and Judaism in general—mainstream Christian perspectives will range from "barely familiar with the back-story and never given the festival itself a moment's thought" to sects like Jehovah's Witnesses for whom it's the most solemn event in the liturgical calendar. WikiProject Christianity is still reasonably active and is probably the best place to ask. ‑ Iridescent 11:20, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

Okay, thanks. I wasn't interested in the Jehovah's Witnesses but in the mainstream view. But someone does need to check the edits.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 16:57, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

It's getting into the long grass now, but Nicene doctrine (and by descent Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Anglicanism, Calvinism etc) is that the sacrifice of Jesus replaced the sacrifices mandated in Judaism, and thus Good Friday and Easter Sunday literally replaces Passover as opposed to just taking its spot in the calendar, and the eucharist replaces the seder. Some of the more isolated Christian communities which were far enough away to safely ignore Rome and Constantinople retain some of the elements of the older Jewish ritual—see Pesaha Appam for instance. We have an extremely crappy article on the topic at Passover (Christian holiday). ‑ Iridescent 20:04, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

Non-Anglican Protestantism is more complex as their Eucharistic theology is less developed by nature of the views they inherited from Luther, Calvin, et amici. Luther and Calvin, of course, themselves developed Eucharistic theologies to counter the theology of the Rome on the subject, but as a consequence of the theology they developed, there was significantly less work in the area by their successors than you see on the Anglican/Catholic/Orthodox side academically, and even less emphasis devotionally.

All that contributes to the fact that you can see some local Protestant communities hosting Passovers and seders because there really isn't much modern education in their clergy about Christianity's historical Eucharistic theology and it's development, even within their own traditions. This has gotten more popular recently in the United States, not sure about elsewhere.

You're correct that any of the Christian traditions with significant theological development around the Eucharist/Holy Communion/Lords Supper/Paschal mystery/whatever the tradition calls it wouldn't have anything resembling this in their Holy Week celebrations. There's literally a standard line in the liturgy of many of those churches that resembles "this is our passover." It wouldn't flow with the rest of the liturgical cycle if Fr. Tom decided to host an ecumenical seder on Maundy Thursday. TonyBallioni (talk) 04:17, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

I've reverted their changes at Passover and another page, several of their otehr recent edits have already been reverted. I think they are too POV-driven or incompetent to edit religious articles. User:力 (power~enwiki, π, ν) 18:02, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

You know, watching this sort of thing kinda makes me want to start a "Make the pope give back his title" campaign on wiki... heh. (For those not getting the joke - the title I'm talking about is Pontifex maximus, which is, originally, the title used by the chief priest of the pagan Roman state religion. Since we now have Roman reconstructionists again (and even temples in a few spots! Go go my fellow co-religionists, all 15 or so of us!) it hardly seems fair that he's hogging our title... Ealdgyth (talk) 18:20, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

To be fair, the Pope probably has a legitimate claim to the Pontifex Maximus title if he wanted to make it formal, since the pagan title was one of those subsumed into Imperator and Constantine subsequently de facto gave the job to Sylvester I. ‑ Iridescent 16:41, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

Curious for your take

We have an arb being taken to task for posting on WO during a case in which he was active, and simultaneously two more being threatened with blocks and called on to stand down for removing TPA while INVOLVED (having just desysopped an admin for INVOLVED). Is this just typical emotions running high after a contentious case, or is there really revolution in the air against the current committee?-- P-K3 (talk) 15:18, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

With the disclaimer that I haven't had time to follow the RexxS case at all, that just looks like "how dare the committee make a decision that isn't what I wanted" venting rather than some kind of organized revolt. No decision is going to satisfy everyone—with a he-said-she-said case like this, the supporters of one side or the other are by definition going to consider the outcome unfair.

For the record, on the broader issue in the first diff I agree with Lourdes 100% in this case. I have no issue at all with Wikipedia editors participating in threads on criticism sites—seeing what people think we're doing wrong and why is important, and it's sometimes the case that we just need to engage and explain why we've done something that at first glance appears unfair and it defuses the tension and prevents misunderstandings turning into long-term grudges. I do on the other hand have an issue with serving arbitrators participating in these sites—particularly sites like Wikipediocracy where most of the content is hidden from non-members—unless they also make it clear on-wiki exactly what they've been saying, about whom, and why. Arbitrators are in a Caesar's Wife situation; the whole arbcom system relies on the committee's members being trusted, and it's impossible to trust someone if we know, or even suspect, that they're discussing us behind our backs but we don't know what they're saying. (On this particular issue at least, I have put my money where my mouth is; I used to be reasonably active trying to explain the Wikipedia point-of-view at Wikipediocracy's precedessor WR, but terminated my account the day I put my name in the hat at the arbcom elections. I assume Somey could verify that if anyone really feels they need to check.) ‑ Iridescent 15:40, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

Nah. Giano declaring that ArbCom has been conspiring on IRC and they will imminently be disgraced and removed is...perhaps best understood as an anachronistic ritual. The main practical effect is to find out who among the Rising Generation can or can't resist the temptation to slap a porcupine. (The old-timers are perfectly aware that trying to threaten Giano into moderating his tone will only make you look like a thin-skinned authoritarian and are content to ride it out.) Choess (talk) 05:13, 30 March 2021 (UTC)

That. Despite the unwarranted reputation for radicalism we sometimes have, in practice ever since 2004 Wikipedia's governance has been small-c conservatism of a kind any Sir Humphrey Appleby, midwestern governor, Catholic theologian or 1980s Soviet bureaucrat would recognize immediately. All our significant processes—from Good Article Nominations, to ANI threads, to Arbcom cases, are at root about slapping down non-conformity with the prevailing orthodoxy of whichever clique currently happens to be on top. (At the moment, on social issues and civility the prevailing Wikipedia orthodoxy is a particular form of an enforced-inclusivity agenda which in the US is associated with youth movements and the left but in the UK is associated with the loathed and discredited Cameron/Clegg/Blair right. I do notice repeatedly in all the recent bushfires about language and civility just how much at cross-purposes editors on opposite sides of the Atlantic tend to be; the pros and antis on any given dispute now tend to break down geographically, while in the past they used to tend to break down in terms of admin/non-admin or age.)

In that climate, the dedicated dissidents being periodically subject to show trials (sometimes with legitimate cause, sometimes without), and in turn lashing out at the establishment, has become a part of the furniture, and isn't going to change anything. It's now been 17 years which is enough time to declare that Arbcom as a concept is a failure, but ultimately Arbcom is just a symptom, not the disease. The response to the failed Arbcom model isn't to try to overthrow it, it's to ignore it; their authority only derives from the willingness of people to take them seriously. ‑ Iridescent 14:17, 30 March 2021 (UTC)

As a Brit who has been Stateside for most of their Wikipedia editing career I'm certainly keenly aware of the geographical divide (which also rears its head with tedious regularity every time a US shooting is nominated at ITN, but that's a different subject).-- P-K3 (talk) 15:38, 30 March 2021 (UTC)

I came the other way and can confirm that the "divided by a common language" works in both directions. As well as the completely different attitudes towards individual and collective responsibility (which I think is at root of the divide we're seeing here), there are still so many little things like "how is Bernie Sanders considered left-wing when he's never said anything you can't imagine being said by Margaret Thatcher?" that throw me even now when people assume that because of my background I'll be able to explain. ‑ Iridescent 11:45, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

Now I can't get the image of Margaret Thatcher wearing Bernie Sanders' mittens out of my head. --Tryptofish (talk) 18:50, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

Break: on the arb case

A slightly belated further reply to Choess, as I got somewhat sidetracked above; Giano isn't just a straightforward gadfly trying to get attention. In my experience he'll always listen to advice provided it's coming from someone he respects, even if the advice is something he doesn't want to hear; the problem is that the pool of people he respects has steadily shrunk as the Wikipedia community shifts and his generation moved on.

For the record, this latest thread/RfC/petition has finally prompted me to at least skim-read Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/RexxS; I haven't looked at all the subpages and there may be something I've missed, but this looks like a seriously weird decision. Whatever the rights and wrongs, it certainly gives the strong impression that at least some of the arbs had come pre-determined that RexxS needed to be sanctioned in some way, and kept shifting the scope of the case until a pretext could be found. Sure, nobody has a divine right to be an admin and there was unquestionably legitimate evidence of subobtimal conduct, but there are plenty of admins who've done worse and had the problems waved away, including at least arguably some of those who voted for desysop. The whole thing is very odd. ‑ Iridescent 18:59, 2 April 2021 (UTC)

(out of sequence post). Given this post I think Giano has every right to be upset and/or concerned. While I understand the plausible deniability that nothing was implied, I would also think that anyone with even a modicum of experience would be aware of how easily others might infer a suggestion to file a case. In regards to the case in general, perhaps I'll post further tomorrow or tomorrow evening (my time EDT/DST USA) — Ched (talk) 00:40, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

Ouch; yes, if Beeblebrox is talking like that about Giano publicly with impunity, Giano should be allowed some kind of free hit to talk about Beeblebrox. To be fair, Beeblebrox did make it clear there that he knew he was biased and would stand aside from a hypothetical case, so it's arguably to his credit. The arbs are human and are going to have opinions—I have a lot more respect for someone who admits they're biased, explains why they dislike someone, and stands aside, than I do for the people who nurse a grudge and follow somebody around looking for a pretext to block them.

@Lourdes (or any of the "support the principle but oppose the wording" folks), if you want a proposed addition to WP:ARBPOL that's both going to be much more workable and much more likely to be accepted, try All comments made by serving Arbitrators on publicly viewable websites or fora regarding Wikipedia or Wikipedia editors will be treated for conduct purposes as if they had been made on the English Wikipedia. That would still allow the arbs to give polite explanations if they saw a factual error on another site / host commentary about Wikipedia/Wikimedia on personal websites (e.g. GorillaWarfare's timeline) / reply to questions when asked / raise concerns on other WMF sites / engage off-wiki with editors who are banned from commenting on Wikipedia but whose perspective might be valuable regarding a particular case. But, it would bring off-wiki comments made by arbitrators under Wikipedia's social policies and essentially make "don't say anything off-wiki you wouldn't say to the face of the person you're discussing" a binding policy for arbitrators. (To pre-empt the "but we don't have the right to restrict what people do elsewhere!" arguments, we sanction people for things like off-wiki canvassing all the time. This clause wouldn't restrict a current arb from posting even the most abusive and scurrilous comments off-wiki about other editors or from canvassing on social media for people to pile onto arb cases to support a particular side while allowing them to keep their own hands clean on-wiki; it would just make it make it a statutory rather than an ethical duty to consider the on-wiki implications of what they say elsewhere.) ‑ Iridescent 05:58, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

I respect Giano's acuity, but in his initial salvo on any given topic, it usually has to be chiseled out of a mass of rodomontade, before settling down to lucid and unobjectionable commentary like this. Maybe this is a clever way of getting eyes on it, but I think the resulting Punch-and-Judy show tends to divert from actual consideration of the message—e.g., I remembered that the last episode of this that got Giano blocked was in 2019, but had forgotten that he was criticizing Beeblebrox's character when he did so. But perhaps this reflects the weakness of my own mind, and I am not to be dictating to him his own affairs.

The two things that struck me as unusual about the case were the limitation in scope to RexxS's behavior, rather than the usual boomeranging free-for-all, and the grapple over the "RexxS did not participate" FoF. One hypothesis that might tie the two together is that a critical mass of Arbs saw sufficient bad behavior in the preliminary statements to open a case, and were looking to see where his reaction fell on the spectrum from contrition to defiance. His failure to participate beyond a preliminary statement then left them with an open case to be resolved with what they had on hand. Choess (talk) 12:14, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

Choess, (skipping the first, replying to the second) .. one of the things that stuck out IMO is that opening "accept" coming from someone who had/has less than a year of experience at being an admin. (also volunteered to draft the case PD). Now if someone is chatting on IRC with the person who filed the case, and they're opening remarks are we can always close the case without action., which assumes the case will be accepted, and I do not want Proc v. Rexx to dominate the case ... - to me that's a reach even if the IRC stuff is innocuous article work. In my mind, if you're collaborating with someone in article work, even then it's likely a friendly association - maybe recuse? (and it was brought up)[20]. I just felt the whole case was troublesome from start to end. Even that experimental "we'll do the evidence and workshop at the same time" thing to test if it saves time. Just so much of it felt wrong to me. — Ched (talk) 12:42, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

Yes. To repeat myself, since we invest a lot of authority (IMO too much) in Arbcom, the arbs don't just have to be fair they have to appear fair. When a case has the appearance of being messed up and based on the individual arbitrators voting based on which of the participants they like rather than on the evidence—even if that's not what actually happened—it has a corrosive effect on confidence. This is the case whoever's involved; it's particularly true in a case like this where the subject was a very high-profile editor—I've attended I think six—maybe five or seven—Wikimedia events in my life; RexxS was present at all but one of them, and that one was in another country I happened to be visiting, and I know he taught a lot of "how wikis work"-type courses, as well as obviously being very active on the site itself—so more than the usual number of people will have interacted with him in some way, have some kind of opinion on him,* and consequently be more likely to read an arbcom case regarding him. In this case, those people who will consequently be more likely to read an arbcom case regarding him have seen what looks like a mess of people venting personal grudges in both directions, and are quite reasonably going to draw the conclusion that Wikipedia's internal management is hopelessly disfunctional. ‑ Iridescent 18:38, 3 April 2021 (UTC)
*Cards on the table for the record, having read the front and evidence pages of the arb case my opinion of him hasn't shifted from what I said on his RFA: I disagree with RexxS more often than I agree with him but he's one of the few editors on Wikipedia whom I'd trust completely and without reservations, as someone who's willing to listen when others disagree with him. Frankly, I'd consider someone being willing to tell people who are fucking around with things they don't understand to stop fucking around with things they don't understand to be a positive not a drawback; nowhere in WP:Civility does it say we're obliged to accept disruption because it would upset the disruptor were we to point it out. I'm still having difficulty finding anything more in the evidence than "occasionally gets impatient and grumpy"; I could probably cherry-pick an equally damning set of diffs from the edit history of anyone who'd been active on this or any other website for more than a couple of years. ‑ Iridescent 18:38, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

Break: "conservatism"

I'm not sure that I'm convinced that "conservatism" has sole ownership of 'conform or else' anymore. Never mind, after reading a second and third time - I think I may have misunderstood the point being made. I do think age is a factor in many of the more rebellious posts, or perhaps I've just become to numb to the old guard. That there still exists those elder said dissidents is a fair point though. But since I'm here anyway, hello Iridescent - good to see you still around. Best always, — Ched (talk) 16:31, 30 March 2021 (UTC)

I mean "conservative" in the traditional sense of "risk averse and opposed to large-scale sudden change", not its modern-day American sense. (Per my comment elsewhere on the page, a dislike of change-for-change's-sake is a completely legitimate position to take when it comes to Wikipedia. Since we know it's working and we don't fully understand why, we can't anticipate with any confidence whether any given change will be the change that ends up being Wikipedia's obituary. The reason the layout of our main page hasn't been changed since 2004 isn't because people think the design is cool.)

On age, I do think it's fair to say there's a divide in terms of age-of-account and that the people who've been around since the 2000s often have a different set of underlying assumptions and biases. I'm not so sure the difference in attitude between editors based on real-world age is as true as myth would have it—I suspect a lot of it is selection bias in that you only notice (e.g.) younger editors taking criticism as a personal affront when they do so, and just mentally file younger/older editors who don't conform to stereotypes as "editors". (It isn't helped by the fact that for lots of reasons white men are more likely to be willing to have their photos made public, and that students and retirees are much more likely to have the free time to attend Wikimedia-related events, and the WMF's habit of inveriably scheduling Wikimania in what's a traditional holiday period for students and retirees but the most difficult time of year for people with real-world jobs and real-world children to find free time. When every photo of any Wikimedia/Wikipedia related event is of a bunch of old white men mixed with people in their late teens and early 20s, one can't really blame everyone who perpetuates the meme that Wikipedia is simultaneously run by old men and kids.)

Good to hear from you as always and hope you're keeping well… ‑ Iridescent 11:45, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

I pretty much agree 100% with your description of the small-c conservatism issue and orthodoxy at play here, as well as the solution. I've been actively ignoring ArbCom this year because at some point I realized how little those dramahs matter in the grand picture, and that by trying to take a side arguing in the crowd as an independent voice from either the committee or the sides, I was just causing myself more stress.

I also think your comment on the meme of old people and young people running Wikipedia amplifies this. At one point in a former life I had a boss who was a devout Southern Baptist. She had a saying that went "a janitor on the streets can be a deacon in the church." Basically meaning that people who have more time on their hands in their everyday life, or lack a lot of oversight responsibilities in their work, etc. tend to be the people who populate leadership roles in volunteer groups. The point she was usually making was that brings with it a unique set of challenges when dealing with volunteer leadership, because for the majority of them, its a passion project and they are getting to do something that they normally wouldn't get to do: have significant influence over the direction of something they care a lot about. When you combine that with the small-c conservatism you're describing, the outcomes are somewhat predictable.

And before this get's diff'd somewhere, obviously it doesn't describe every arb/functionary/admin, but it does apply to some if not many people who are "community leaders" and the like. It's an issue in many non-profits/NGOs and pretending like it doesn't also present potential challenges on Wikipedia would be ignoring a legitimate criticism of how non-profit/volunteer self-governance works. TonyBallioni (talk) 19:53, 2 April 2021 (UTC)

Why is Wikipedia working anyway? Surely this site doesn't exist because everyone is motivated wholly by the noble, sisyphean goal of putting the sum of human knowledge into everyone's fingertips? Any good studies that attempt to answer this, for example? ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 22:43, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

Short answer, "a workforce willing to work for free means we can undercut competitors"; long answer "a workforce willing to work for free means we don't need as much of an income stream to be viable and as such don't pose a threat to the big tech companies, and also it's in the interests of American tech companies that a US-based nonprofit have a significant market share of internet traffic as it provides plausible deniability of market manipulation for the purposes of antitrust legislation". Everything is predicated on the "workforce willing to work for free" part, which is why the WMF is so vulnerable to changes in community sentiment on the big wikis and in particular English Wikipedia—the entire business model is based on English Wikipedia retaining enough competent volunteers to hold it together. On why the workforce is willing to work for free, there are a lot of studies but nobody's sure since it's all based on how one gathers and interprets anecdata. ‑ Iridescent 04:49, 4 April 2021 (UTC)

• Somewhere way up above, someone used a very telling phrase, “ Rising Generation.” Since time immemorial it has been known that the young can be taught nothing by their elders. This is most believed here on Wikipedia, where students and, I suspect, perennial students even older than me, from Delaware to Everywhere, think anyone who edited before 2010 has one foot in the grave and their thoughts are worthless. Editors, like myself, who were here in 2004 clearly need to have our embalming fluids checked. These barely tolerated old people are expected to embrace every new and ridiculous woke idea and promote it too. The simple fact is we don’t and won’t because we have seen it all before and probably once marched to support it. We could then explore social class and education (in serious subjects) and Wikipedia, but it’s probably best not to go there today. My point is that just sometimes older people should not be compelled to adhere to the passing fancies and ideals of those considerably younger. Giano (talk) 19:44, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

• It cuts both ways. "Youngsters thinking they know it all and dismissing those with more experience as stuck in the past" probably goes back to Cain dismissing Adam's advice on which crops to offer to God and youngsters have been insufferable prigs for just as long; but, "experienced people dismissing the opinions of fresh eyes because they don't accord with their preconceptions" goes back just as much to the dawn of time and older people (either in terms of age or in terms of experience in a particular job) have always been dismissive of fresh ideas. For something like Wikipedia, where we're trying to square the circle of simultaneously summarizing the canon of academic thought over centuries and summarizing current thinking on each field of study, it's important we don't dismiss out of hand the adherents of current fads just because they haven't yet figured out that there is nothing in religion, science or philosophy that is more than the proper thing to wear for a while. ‑ Iridescent 14:31, 8 April 2021 (UTC)

Anna Laetitia Barbauld Featured article review

I have nominated Anna Laetitia Barbauld for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets featured article criteria. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. If substantial concerns are not addressed during the review period, the article will be moved to the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Delist" the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:09, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

This probbly earns some kind of special mention as the first time anyone in Wikipedia's history has ever thought "it's a shame Ottava isn't still around, it would be interesting to hear what he has to say".

SandyGeorgia, this is purely a suggestion but with FARs of the "prose style is fine but a hundred print sources need to be checked" as opposed to the "badly written prose but we largely trust the accuracy" type, I would think it would make sense to wait until lockdown is lifted. Even if I were a massive fan of Anna Laetitia Barbauld (who to be honest I've never heard of except in discussions about her Wikipedia bio) and was willing and able to devote my entire waking life to improving this article, with the libraries all closed it would be physically impossible at the moment to address the concerns (other than by going on Amazon and buying every book cited, which few if any people are going to be willing to do). If we end up with 200 articles logjammed at WP:FAR becauuse they clearly haven't been brought up to present-day standards but we consider it an unfair gotcha to demote articles when it's impossible for people to rescue them, there's a potential risk of demotivating people altogether; to people who don't know all the background and don't appreciate that the spike is the result of clearing backlogs rather than a Great Purge, the point when the number of pages at FAR overtakes the number of pages at FAC will be a powerful "why should I bother?" psychological signal. ‑ Iridescent 05:36, 4 April 2021 (UTC)

I’ve had more than a few “shame Ottava is not around” moments lately, although I don’t miss the constant turmoil on my talk page ... what someone used to refer to as, “there’s another Ottava cage match at Sandy’s talk”!! I used to just let ‘em run, and archive when they were finished.

Good point about library lockdowns, but I am not sure there remains anyone on Wikipedia who will take on fixing these articles, with or without library access. My thought was to float first the one that was in the most trouble of Awadewit’s suite, to see if the WikiProject notifications would entice someone to begin cleaning up the others as well. Although I tagged them months ago (after you mentioned the problems), no one has touched them, so I suspect they aren’t even watchlisted anymore. If someone surfaces, I would hope the rest of them will be addressed and don’t even have to come to FAR. If library access is a problem, as much time as needed is given at FAR, so I hope the notifications will entice someone to engage. Meanwhile, Wikipedia on Barbauld got called out in a journal for spreading (allegedly) an inaccuracy.

FAR was moribund for ten long years; now there is ten years worth of backlog, and FAC slowing down doesn’t mean FAR should stop working; as many old FAs are being cleaned up as are being demoted! And we’re now in a position relative to TFA that we will need those older FAs for mainpage diversity. The still good older FAs are outpacing the deficient, so that is encouraging. I put out the quarterly report to share that good news. Bst, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 06:30, 4 April 2021 (UTC)

We got called out for reflecting the "traditional" view, even though some sources had challenged/pointed to mistakes in it even by the time the FA was written. Still an issue, but not quite the same one. Johnbod (talk) 17:49, 4 April 2021 (UTC)

SlimVirgin might be interested in taking this one on, if you haven't asked her already. On a quick skim, the issues seem mainly to boil down to the fact that Wikipedia in the 2000s had different standards to Wikipedia in the 2020s and Awadewit even then was pushing the limits of what was considered acceptable when it came to writing from personal experience rather than sources; as we now take a harder "cite anything that could possibly be challenged and make it clear exactly which citation supports which fact" line, the article has become problematic but because it's so long and detailed, it would be a mammoth task to rewrite it to present-day standards. This certainly isn't unique to Awadewit—a lot of older FAs have the same issue—but in her case it's particularly delicate both because for understandable reasons people are reluctant to do anything that looks like trashing her reputation when she can't answer back, and because the official party line is that she was the closest thing Wikipedia has to a saint, and nobody (including me) has any particular urge to spend the next six months being hassled by WMDC types for having a lack of dedication to the True Faith.

In all honesty, I'm starting to think we should seriously consider making FA status time-limited and automatically delisting everything that hasn't had either passed FAC or survived FAR for ten years. Anything that hasn't deteriorated and still has someone taking an interest could be renominated for a pro forma "nothing has changed since last time" quickie-FAC to retain its status, but it would instantly filter out all these early promotions that no longer meet current standards, without creating the bad feeling that's understandably being caused when editors who were active in the old days log in to find a huge stack of "there are substantial concerns about an article you contributed to" FAR templates on their talkpage and understandably feel they're being singled out, and without flooding FAR with articles which we know are going to be delisted but which still waste editor time going through the motions. We did a bulk-delisting once before when Brilliant Prose became Featured Articles; it's not something that would break the wiki. It might also prompt us to finally have the conversation we've been collectively avoiding for the past ten years about whether the S-S-C-B-G-A-F assessment scale we inherited from the days when we had to select which articles were worthy of including on the restricted-size CD-ROM is actually serving any useful purpose any more, or whether a more straightforward "inadequate-adequate-excellent" scale would be more sensible. ‑ Iridescent 13:10, 4 April 2021 (UTC)

Iri you probably know that I floated proposals for a very long time to deal with the very old FAs (similar to what you mention) that went nowhere because ... no one cared. And we shouldn’t penalize the half of very old FAs that are still watchlisted, maintained, and in good shape. The position we are in is simply a side effect of the negligence that took over the entire FA process after they fired a director, leading eventually to three seemingly unrelated areas (FAC, FAR, TFA) without apparent concern for the overall pool, with FAC becoming populated by those who seemed more concerned with climbing WP:WBFAN than maintaining the standard of the pool. A proposal to straight up vote out the deteriorated FAs was rejected; what FAR is doing now is working, and the active participants are taking great care to not overwhelm any single editor at once. I did not know that SarahSV might have an interest in Awadewit’s articles; perhaps she will respond to your ping. But as you know, the problem there is not one of changing standards; it is that even according to the standards then, Awadewit got away with inserting original research because no one challenged her. It is unfortunate that it now takes a library to sort what can be supported by the sources, but that’s where we are on that suite of articles— which is not the same as where we are on most deteriorated FAs, which have simply fallen into disrepair from neglect rather than being a reflection of changing standards. Bst, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:27, 4 April 2021 (UTC). Forgot to add that, as a result of the 1Q report, WP:URFA/2020 has picked up several editors who are now working through older FAs, tweaking up the outdated, and marking them Satisfactory. So, don’t mess with success ??? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:45, 4 April 2021 (UTC)

Sandy, I'm pretty much with Iri on this. Last night I took a brief trawl through Project MUSE (they have lots of journals re children's lit) because I've never heard of this woman either, and find that more has been written in the past decade than who-knows-for-how-long. For lots of reasons to do with the stressors associated with the pandemic I seem to have stopped editing altogether and am not all that interested in having to fix an article about an obscure 18th century woman in a limited amount of time, especially without access to the relevant literature (and since I had the most god-awful allergic reaction to the vaccine I might never get out of the house). When I can, I'll take a look at the newish bits added and maybe fix the citation formatting, but my gut feeling is that if you all think there are issues, have been long-term issues with Awadewit's articles, then go ahead and delist. Unless someone else comes forward of course. If it's delisted now, substantive rewriting that needs to be done can be done at a more leisurely pace. Anyway, those are my thoughts. Happy Easter all and apols Iri for butting in. Victoria (tk) 14:41, 4 April 2021 (UTC)

Ack on allergic reaction; will write more to you after church. But most important point for now; FAR does provide a leisurely pace. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:46, 4 April 2021 (UTC)

Regarding we shouldn’t penalize the half of very old FAs that are still watchlisted, speaking as the author of (by my count) 28 FAs that would be delisted under this, I don't see it as a penalty. For something like Quainton Road railway station which is still watched and still maintained, it would literally be a case of a "anyone have any objections to this one retaining its FA status?" mini-candidacy. I would feel at least slightly insulted if someone started spamming me with "this article you wrote is no longer considered worthy" templates even if academically I knew it were part of a broader sweep; I wouldn't feel remotely offended at what's essentially a variation on "your membership is about to expire, do you want to renew it?". (OK, I'll bite the bullet and give the example I've been trying to avoid using: with a "FA status needs to be renewed" mechanism the insanity over the delisting of Moors Murders would have been replaced with a straightforward "oppose, I have concerns that the sourcing no longer meets current standards on neutrality", and about 10,000 editor-hours worth of arguing—and the blocks and general interpersonal hostility that sprang from those arguments and which are still affecting Wikipedia—would have been saved.) ‑ Iridescent 15:36, 4 April 2021 (UTC)

At both ... Victoria, I am so sorry to hear of your allergic issues with the vaccine. I have had anaphylaxis twice, and serious medication allergies, and was scared to death to get the vaccine. I was crying when my turn came up, and the entire clinic was holding my hand as they could see how frightened I was ... anaphylaxis is survivable, but no fun. A couple of the nurses said, "You don't have to do this, you know." I replied, "Oh, yes, I do!" And I had narry a side effect-- while I was sicker'nadog with both pneuomovax and shingrix. I hope you are better soon.

You say you are in agreement with Iri, but your post indicates we are in agreement :) "[M]ore has been written in the past decade than who-knows-for-how-long" and FAs that aren't watched and maintained are, naturally, outdated now. And as is typical, no one cares today about what one editor cared about a decade ago, and no one wants to put the effort in to updating someone else's 15-year-old work. It's not changing standards; it's simply datedness.

Iri, on editors being overwhelmed, to my knowledge that isn't happening. If an editor of many older FAs is still involved, they are given time to bring articles to standard and get them updated, and most editors who are active at FAR are careful not to bring multiple articles from same area or same editor at once (which for me has meant we have dozens of dated medical FAs, but I don't put more than one up at a time). There are sporadic instances of the opposite: editors who have old deficient FAs, and are given time, and yet are actively bringing new articles to FAC without having addressed their outdated FAs. I would have preferred a straight-up vote on the older ones, but no one went for that, and the good news is that many of the older ones are being brought to standard. It's surprising to see on which someone has engaged, versus those on which no one engages. What is discouraging (historically) is that a number of the ones we brought to standard in the last sweep (2006 to 2008), for example, Emsworth's, are now coming up again, because no one kept them watchlisted and they simply fell into disrepair again. Some very good news is that several active FAR participants are working to salvage WP:MILLION FAs (high visibility), so we are now able to run things like earth as TFA on Earth day. And "in the encyclopedia that anyone can edit", older unwatched FAs are going to deteriorate. Look at Emsworth at WP:WBFAN. In their day, they were the number one FA writer; now most of Emworth's are defeatured. It's the nature of the beast when "anyone can edit" and destroy what was good work. The bronze star cannot have any value if we don't clean out those that have fallen out of standard. Bst, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 00:19, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

Anyone who needs access to Project MUSE should check out https://wikipedialibrary.wmflabs.org/partners/38/ WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:32, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

@SandyGeorgia: this might be a weird suggestion - but assuming the information about a subject hasn't changed significantly since FAC, could you not revert back to that version? Sure, you'd lose a lot of potentially good changes - but it's better than delisting. Elli (talk | contribs) 06:21, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

Elli there have been instances where that works, and reviewers typically check for that, and it was once a good solution. But now that we have fallen so far behind, with FAs that haven't been checked in 15 years, a revert is increasingly unlikely to solve the issues. As an extreme example, in Geography articles, cities, states or countries that haven't been updated in over ten years can't be fixed by reverting to ten-year-old data (economies, demographics, etc are all off). Similar for BLPs. Medical, no chance, as medicine evolves. And when the deficiency is that new scholarship has not been incorporated, similar. It can sometimes work, but more and more rarely will that do that trick, as we have just fallen too far behind as a result of ten years of essentially zero activity at FAR. Best regards, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:00, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

Thanks Sandy. Sorry I think I wasn't very clear. I agree with this comment Iri made, particularly that "it would be physically impossible at the moment to address the concerns". Without access to books it's impossible to know how much work is needed and how much updating is needed. I'll try to post to the FAR page, rather than here at Iri's page, but my feeling is that if it needs to go to FAR then it might be best to delist. Imo a rescue of an article like that takes time, motivation, and full access to sources. I do have access to Project MUSE, but access isn't the same as having the time or energy to read all the literature and then update the article as needed. Victoria (tk) 13:11, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

Victoriaearle just keep in mind that if it is an article you want to work on once you have time, you can ask the Coords to put it on hold for a few months. Best, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:01, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

I think we actually all agree on the destination; it's just that you (Sandy) think the best way to get there is to review the existing FAs and delist those that have unaddressed concerns, while myself and VE are talking about delisting potentially problematic FAs much more readily, but being willing to give the status back without a full FAC process. Regarding sourcing, I think the point we're both trying to make is that for topics where most of the sources aren't online (which covers big swathes of both arts and technology topics that were fashionable fields of study pre-internet days but have fallen out of favor), the current situation of not being able to access print sources makes it difficult to assess whether enough exists to write about a topic to existing standards. (WorldCat etc allow me to see that a book exists abou a particular topic, but it's much harder to tell whether it's a well-regarded academic work, a once-respected but now hopelessly outdated book, or a crazy person's ramblings which they managed to convince someone to publish.) Without being able to assess either the existing sources used in the article or any potential sources to expand it and bring it up to date, it's hard to judge whether it's worth making the effort to rescue any given article. ‑ Iridescent 08:50, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

Refund

please see the thread by me and answer by user:Graeme Bartlett: Wikipedia:Requests_for_undeletion/Archive_358#Heino_Hankewitz--Estopedist1 (talk) 06:20, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

Restored at Heino Hankewitz, although you may want to move it out of article space until you've worked on it. In my opinion Jdcooper's tagging of it for deletion was fairly clearly correct, as there's no credible claim of significance that I can see. "Has a state award" is very definitely not a credible claim of significance except for a few major awards like the Legion d'honneur or the Congressional Medal of Honor. Most states hand out hundreds of awards and decorations out every year, and many if not most are fairly meaningless (as a point of reference, here's the 1300-ish decorations given out by the United Kingdom so far this year; note how few of them are of people considered "notable" by Wikipedia's specific use of the term, and the UK has relatively strict controls and approval processes). As with all topics, the article needs to explain why Hankewitz is considered important and provide evidence of significant coverage of him im multiple, independent, reliable secondary sources. ‑ Iridescent 18:59, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

Are you deprecating Gordon Charles Penrose. Honorary President, Institute of Roofing [honored for] services to the Roof Slating and Tiling Industry? EEng 21:20, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

Looking at his biography he's a good illustration of why these "National Order of Excellence" type state awards are a really bad indicator for notability in Wikipedia terms. He clearly is at the top of his chosen field and as such has earned this award fairly, but equally he's someone who's unlikely ever to be "notable" by Wikipedia's definition of the term since his achievements are in a field that doesn't get covered outside of a few trade journals. ‑ Iridescent 08:50, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

How do you get such a forum-y talkpage?

Just curious, as someone who is often bored and interested in talking about Wikipedia-stuff, how did you get so much discussion ending up here? Was it intentional, or did it just kinda happen, and if so, why? Elli (talk | contribs) 06:11, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

There are many many interesting meta conversations that happen here. And speaking of meta, crossreferencing meta:Universal Code of Conduct/Drafting committee here. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 09:01, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

@Jo-Jo Eumerus: interesting. Does that need more applicants? Elli (talk | contribs) 10:13, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

• What do you guys think? Should I apply? The teaser is: "Do you care about safety, inclusivity, and friendliness in the Wikimedia movement? Are you interested in the guidelines and policies that guide it? Do you have any experience with how they are applied?" I mean, there's no one that can hold a candle to me on that last point. EEng 14:24, 6 April 2021 (UTC) In all seriousness, maybe I should do it. Ha, ha! Just kidding!

  Fram might beg to differ... Only in death does duty end (talk) 14:34, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

Trauma-informed lens

Yeah, but do they have Experience applying a trauma-informed lens and working within anti-racist and anti-oppressive frameworks? EEng 14:42, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

I personally think the sensible thing to do is completely ignore UCOC since it's certain to fail. (It would probably be difficult to come up with a set of conduct rules that are equally accepted in towns 30 miles apart, let alone cultures on opposite sides of the world. The only way to come up with a set of conduct rules that would be equally appropriate in Beijing, Baghdad, Belfast and Berkeley would be to make them all such obvious things like "don't post credible death threats" that there would be no point codifying them in the first place.) As far as I'm concerned any engagement with it will just encourage them, but if we have to go through the motions of having the discussions, we could do worse than have someone like you who's been on the receiving end of Wikipedia's warped definition of "civility"—I'd assume the discussions will attract mainly the self-appointed Moral Police types and it would be good to have someone constantly reminding them that all the "problem users" they're trying to manufacture pretexts to purge have real people behind the stupid usernames. ‑ Iridescent 19:41, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

UCoC implementation meeting: [21]. The result: [22]. Seriously, why don't you join the committee and I'll be a sort of ex officio historical exhibit. EEng 21:31, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

Reply

Regarding the original question, this page isn't actually as forummy as it appears; although there's a lot of discussion on it, it you look at it it's almost always directly relevant to Wikipedia, rather than a general chatroom free-for-all. The reason it's so active (as far as I can tell) is the combination of a number of factors:

1. I've written enough to be reasonably well-regarded (even if not necessarily one of the top editors) on a wider range of topics than most of the active editors, which has put this page on the watchlist of a lot of disparate people from the "content creation" part of Wikipedia;
2. I was briefly on the arbitration committee, which put this page onto a lot of people's watchlists from the "inside baseball" part of Wikipedia;
3. I was involved (albeit tangentially) with some of the discussions around the relationship between the various WMF projects, which put this page onto the "broader meta issues" aspect of Wikipedia;
4. I've been an admin for a long time, which has put me on the watchlist of a lot of people who at some point came here to complain about an admin action I took and who never bothered to take me off their watchlists.

1–4 mean this page is on the watchlist of more people (627 at the time of writing), from a broader cross-section of the wiki than is usual, and as such comments on this page are more likely to attract the attention of other editors who might feel inclined to reply. That in turn leads on to:

5. Because this is a user talk page rather than a WP:-space page, it means it can be moderated to a much greater extent. I can discreetly remove potentially offensive comments and unfunny jokes to a degree that would cause uproar at an 'official' noticeboard, and on the rare occasions it becomes necessary can issue "any further posts from you will be reverted on sight" bans which would require a week of drama to apply at something like the Village Pump. (It also means I can turn a blind eye to socks and banned users to a degree which would never be allowed in WP-space, if I think they have something useful to say);
6. Likewise, because this is a user talk page it's largely subject to real-world standards of civility rather than the warped WikiSpeak definition of the term. People aren't going to be punished or have their posts redacted for making comments that happen to disagree with whatever the wiki-orthodoxy happens to be this week, and are going to be quickly shown the door for being obnoxious; the exact opposite of the situation on Wikipedia's official fora;
7. Although there are a lot of people who don't particularly like me, I have very few outright enemies on-wiki and have rarely become involved in the player-vs-player nonsense; as such this is a page on which most editors feel reasonably comfortable commenting both to me and to each other.

5–7 mean that in effect this page serves as a kind of neutral embassy; people who openly loathe each other and for whom commenting on each others' talkpages would be seen as a provocation can talk to each other on this page under the polite fiction that they're actually talking to me, while die-hard antis who'd never deign to legitimize the establishment by communicating directly with (e.g.) Arbcom or the WMF can post here in the knowledge that the relevant people will see it.

As well as these broader reasons, there are also a couple of more prosaic ones:

8. I've been around long enough to remember the traumatic events of 2007-ish which formed the modern Wikipedia community, but not so long that I was actively involved in them (the same also goes for a number of others in a similar position like NYB), so I can generally comment reasonably neutrally if people want to know why some particular thing is done in a particular way;
9. I do my best to give a full and honest answer to any reasonable question, rather than just a gobbet of "See WP:RGJGIOJF, WP:FJDKGRFI & WP:PEFJIESU" gobbledegook, so I've built up a reputation as someone to whom people come with questions;
10. (Boringly but relevantly) Because the nature of my real world life means I quite often disappear at very short or no notice for quite long stretches, the archiving is (usually) set to a month rather than the more usual 7–10 days to make sure questions don't disappear before I've had the chance to answer them, so stale threads hang around longer than usual and make the page look longer than it is.

It's worth pointing out that although this talkpage is the current one with the "secret backroom where the cabal meets" reputation, it wasn't the first and it won't be the last. When I arrived, User talk:Keeper76 was the place Those In The Know hung out, to the the extent that it got its own WP:AN/K redirect); the talkpages of Giano, Bishonen and Malleus all also had similar status at some point, as to a lesser extent do that of NYB ('lesser' because he tends only to get questions about Wikipedia's administration rather than the more general mix of questions I get asked) and EEng ('lesser' because a lot of editors find his entourage incredibly annoying and don't want to get involved with them) and probably others I'm not even aware of, and at some point the traffic on this page will die down in the same way it has on all the others. ‑ Iridescent 19:41, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

Replies to reply

My talkpage is one of the secret backrooms where the cabal meets? That is so, so sad. You have disparate people – I have desperate people. EEng 13:17, 8 April 2021 (UTC) EEng 21:43, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

It certainly is sad. We all know it's more like a dark and dank cellar. Martinevans123 (talk) 13:21, 8 April 2021 (UTC)

And I always thought it was the wonderful Arbitration Committee and administrator artwork at the top of the page that drew people here. :-) — Ched (talk) 20:56, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

Pretty sure the (lovely) artwork rotation is what convinced me to scroll down the page when I first arrived, so perhaps there's genuine substance to that point. Aza24 (talk) 05:44, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

I need to refresh those at some point, the current bunch have been up there too long. (At least two of them have been in the rotation for over ten years.) Maybe I'll just replace them all with cats. ‑ Iridescent 08:51, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

Sounds good, but only if they're cats by Giacometti :) Aza24 (talk) 15:35, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

Will they be siamese cats or ragdolls, though? Elli (talk | contribs) 15:38, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for the in-depth answer! (didn't mean to imply the page was fourm-y in a policy-violating way, just that a lot more discussion happens here) Elli (talk | contribs) 06:05, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

One of the quirks of 2020s Wikipedia which was unanticipated by the people of 2000s Wikipedia was the extent to which significant discussions now tend to take place on user talk pages. It's not a healthy situation—it acts as a barrier to entry to newer users who are obviously going to be unaware of all the "WikiProject Horses is moribund but all the horsey people watch User talk:Montanabw so if you have a question about a horse article ask it there and someone will answer" situations—but with hindsight it was an inevitable consequence once we collectively began to be obsessed with conforming to arbitrary rules in project-space. ‑ Iridescent 08:51, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

I've always wanted someone to publish a Guide to User Talk Pages, giving recommendations on which talk pages to read and why. @Iridescent: Care to offer yours? Paul August ☎ 10:28, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

Mmmmm, but in my experience, with one or two exceptions, the owners of the best ones usually end up site banned! Which does tend to limit dialogue. Giano (talk) 10:31, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

Perhaps, but which ones (and why) do you read? Paul August ☎ 10:56, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

@Paul August, way back before the dawn of time we did try to compile a directory of "users whose talkpages would be a good place to ask questions about particular subjects and who are active enough that they're likely actually to answer". It proved imposible to maintain, and it always fit a little uncomfortably with Wikipedia's whole ethos to be essentially arbitrarily declaring some editors to be super-users.

@Giano, Wikipedia:Database reports/Most-watched pages by namespace#User / User talk hasn't been updated since 2017, but it at least gives a snapshot of which talkpages had a lot of people watching them four years ago (it's misleading, as a lot of the entries are just for admins who deleted a lot of pages and consequently had people coming to them to complain, rather than editors who had a lot of conversations take place on their talk, but it at least gives an indication). The only names I recognise as being sitebanned and people whose talkpages were genuinely busy are Eric (who was more of a deliberate wikicide than anything else) and Cirt (whose ban I don't think anyone would argue against). All the other names I recognise as having talkpages where a lot of people would go to ask actual questions—DGG, Bishonen, Moonriddengirl, NYB, Raul & Sandy, Kudpung, The Rambling Man, Dennis Brown etc etc etc—may no longer be as active as they once were, but aren't actually banned. ‑ Iridescent 11:13, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

@Iridescent: Well I wasn't thinking of anything like what you've linked to above (wow). I'm more interested in the personal opinions of knowledgeable editors like you (or the other readers of your page) saying which pages they like to read (and why), like a list of favorite books or movies. Paul August ☎ 11:49, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

That’s very interesting, and some names of people I hadn’t realised has disappeared. Giano (talk) 11:20, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

"3000 active editors"

(edit conflict) Looking at WP:HAU: ah, schedules approximated via timezone, because "writing an encyclopedia for fun" is presumably strongly correlated with having a totally normal schedule that's best predicted by what huge continent covering multiple timezones someone lives in. I remember you saying quite a few times that night shift employment is common amongst heavy editors?

I picked up pretty early "you have to go to user talks, not wikiprojects", but it's certainly not the most intuitive imaginable thing. It also has weird interactions with stuff like canvassing and talk page spamming. (I'm starting a newsletter; my options are apparently to advertise it either on moribund project talks, or directly hit up individuals I think might be interested, and both of these are fundamentally flawed.) "3,000 active users" is a number that rolls around my head a lot, because the consequence is one of the most important websites on the internet is, essentially, a small town, with accordant weird institutional quirks like "you have to know people to do anything, and the obvious institutions are mostly traps". The specific everything-is-hidden structure also induces cross-culture project shock -- I'm not sure if I find it weirder that every way to interact with the Wikivoyage community is on its sidebar, or that none of the ways to interact with the Wikipedia community are. Vaticidalprophet 11:27, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

It is really like a small town, isn't it? It feels big and intimidating, but there's just a lot of.... emptiness, devoid of people. The actual people are the same. Like Wyoming, or Vermont. Hey, could be worse - see literally any other wiki. Elli (talk | contribs) 15:24, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

The "3000 active editors" figure is misleading, as it's not always the same 3000 people but a mix of people drifting in and out, with an average of 3000 active at any given time. The analogy would probably be more akin to something like an airport, with a small handful of people who are present day-in-day-out, but the majority of people in constant flux. The social dynamic between the two is very different; in a town everybody knows each other, but a large part of the social driver behind Wikipedia is about interaction between people with very difficult levels of experience and ability and the misunderstandings that result. ‑ Iridescent 06:45, 8 April 2021 (UTC)

I'm reminded of the quote in Crocodile Dundee ... "Gosh, seven million people, all wanting to live together, New York must be the most friendliest place in the world." Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 13:03, 8 April 2021 (UTC)

I think it depends on what you call "active editors". 140,000 registered editors made an edit in the last month. Typically, about 5,000 editors make more than 100 edits in the last month, and 10,000 average more than one edit a day. The number of "highly active editors" has been pretty steady for the last decade, with a dip here or there and an increase during the pandemic, but still averaging around 5,000 editors. (I think that the oft-quoted 3,000 number was based on the number of people making more than 100 edits per month, but the old stats site didn't count all edits, so those numbers were artificially low.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:18, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing I don't doubt that the 3000 figure is an artefact of the old Wikistats site, but but but… If you filter out the bots and limit the count to people who've edited actual content pages—which one could certainly argue is a more accurate measure of the number of "real" Wikipedia editors—then prior to the recent rise, the "active editor" count fluctuated fairly consistently within the 3000–3500 range. ‑ Iridescent 16:38, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

I wonder how it decides whether to count an editor as being "content" or "non-content". The numbers seem to add up, with no indication of duplication, but which one am I?

I don't think that we should say that people who spend their days at AFD or the ArbCom pages aren't "real" Wikipedia editors. Or, depending upon how it handles deleted edits, imagine someone whose edits are mainly using Twinkle to tag an article for speedy deletion. That can generate a large number of non-content edits, and the edit to the mainspace might not be counted. But would a New Page Patroller not be a "real" Wikipedia editor? WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:51, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

If only there was someone here who worked for the Wikimedia Foundation and could ask… The documentation for Wikistats is opaque and incomplete even by WMF standards, but when it comes to deleted contributions it looks like it used to count all edits deleted or otherwise, but in April 2020 the counter ceased to count deleted edits towards totals in order to eliminate a discrepancy between the old and new counter, and all the totals were retro-recalculated at that time. Anything based on editcounts is going to be misleading to some degree—people with multiple accounts will be double-counted, people with a "one big edit" editing style will be undercounted compared to those who do a string of smaller edits, and all the totals will be artificially skewed by people running bots and scripts on their main account. (Plus of course we're only counting edits on Wikipedia itself; someone editing Wikidata or Commons isn't going to show up.)

All that said, we probably do have enough data to generalize that the English Wikipedia community at any given time consists of around 10,000 regulars and a long tail of ≈50,000 long-term occasionals, with 3000–5000 people actually active at any given time. (FWIW, yes I would say that people who spend their days at AFD or the ArbCom pages aren't "real" Wikipedia editors, although maybe less so in the case of AFD since one could argue that deletion is technically a form of editing. If nothing you do has any effect on what readers see, you're not an editor you're a game-player. As you know, a deeply disproportionate number of Wikipedia's problems come from people without 'skin in the game' whose experience of Wikipedia editing is either outdated or nonexistent but nonetheless feel they have the right to tell other people what they should be doing.)

If a new page patroller genuinely has an editing pattern such as you describe, where they're racking up huge numbers of deletions but no other edits, let me know who it is and I'll remove the relevant userrights. New Pages Patrol and Recent Changes are about spotting potential issues and fixing them, not Wikipedia's equivalent of Space Invaders with an objective of zapping as much as possible; somebody who's doing nothing but hover over Special:NewPages tagging pages for deletion is somebody with a serious attitude problem. Even such a person would still show up as an active mainspace editor, since a significant proportion of their deletion tags would be inappropriate and consequently show up as "reverted mainspace edits" rather than "deleted edits" in the logs. ‑ Iridescent 07:01, 10 April 2021 (UTC)

Is clicking the big blue button in the mainspace the only way to be a "real" editor? I'm not sure that a simple edit to an article is more "real" than the edits I trigger, indirectly. I've written a lot of content-related policies and guidelines over the years. I provide advice and information to other editors. When other people make edits because of how I've helped them or to comply with the rules I've written, I'm still having a significant effect on what readers see. If the only thing I did was to help others improve articles, would you start considering me a "fake" editor? WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:04, 11 April 2021 (UTC)

If you made no actual edits yourself, then yes. I'm well aware (possibly more aware than most) that there's a huge They Also Serve factor on Wikipedia and that there's an absolutely vital rear echelon holding the whole thing together, but I'd look very askance at someone trying to rewrite content guidelines or policies, attempting to advise other editors, or any other "here's how you should do things" activity if they didn't have any relevant experience themselves. I don't think this is an unreasonable view on my part—if I went over to somewhere like Wikidata and announced "I've never actually edited your site, but here's a list of changes I think you should make" they'd be quite within their rights to tell me to do one. ‑ Iridescent 15:18, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

Enforced sabbaticals

I've long had the view that longstanding editors ought to take sabbaticals every now and then to recharge themselves. In my case, I had no reason to believe Wikipedia would be at all affected by my absences - and indeed it wasn't. So an average number of editors with a general turnover makes perfect sense; a static number would be quite worrying for the reasons just stated. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 10:56, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

Radical idea: mandatory admin sabbaticals: a 3-month tool-break required in every 3rd year of adminship. Breaks are needed! I found it was good to remember the kinds of things I could not do without the toolset. It would also help identify areas with heavy bus factor. –xeno^talk 12:19, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

For better or worse, we have a sense already of where the heavy bus factor is. More hands in AE may be good; three months of "AE without El_C" shock treatment, on the other hand, sounds like the kind of thing that kicks off the spiral that kills the site. Vaticidalprophet 12:43, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

I have to say I agree more with Xeno than with Vaticidalprophet on this one. As those with long memories may recall, I was (AFAIK) the first to put my money where my mouth was and say "desysop me for a year so I don't risk becoming part of a ruling class", and found it definitely worthwhile. (I haven't done it recently as I haven't been adminny enough to run that risk—and would oppose making it mandatory for the same reason—but it's definitely helpful for admins to experience Wikipedia without the unconscious deference.)

With regards the More hands in AE may be good; three months of "AE without El_C" shock treatment aspect, a process being dependent on the presence of a single person to function is a process that's dysfunctional beyond repair and we want that process to be exposed so we can get rid of it and figure out how to replace it. We have long experience to demonstrate that what pushes various parts of Wikipedia and the broader WMF ecosystem into mini-death-spirals is when that part of Wikipedia/Wikimedia relies on a single person or small clique of people to function; look at the history of any once-active but now-moribund process or website and nine times in ten you'll see someone declaring themselves "co-ordinator" shortly before the collapse. If AE is really so dependent on the presence of El C that it can't function without him, then the results of any AE decision involving anyone with any kind of relationship with El C (positive or negative) is by definition going to be seen as biased, which taints the whole process.

(On the topic of AE, to bang a drum I've long been banging I find the whole AE process both distasteful and illegitimate, and would urge every editor and especially every admin to completely disregard it. If Arbcom want somebody blocked or sanctioned, the arbitrators can damn well block or sanction them themselves, rather than trying to keep their hands clean by farming out the dirty work to a self-selecting posse of self-appointed WikiPolice. If on the other hand it's a more general conduct issue that's too trivial for arbitrators to bother themselves with but which happens to fall into an area affected by an arbcom decision, it should be taken to a more general noticeboard where genuinely neutral observers—rather than the handful of weirdos who follow WP:AE plus the friends and enemies of those involved who happen to have seen the notification on their talkpage—can discuss the issue. I don't think it's any great secret that I think the entire Arbcom model is hopelessly outdated and should be ignored until it drifts into irrelevance, but for as long as it still exists we should at the very least not be allowing them to operate their own parallel "super-ANI" for incidents involving people against whom a simple majority of Arbcom members have at some point taken a dislike.) ‑ Iridescent 16:22, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

No editor, admin, functionary, or arbitrator is irreplaceable. Nature abhors a vacuum. If there's actually a need, someone will step in. Kudpung and I ran NPP for a while. It's still going after we became less involved. CAT:CSD, WP:SPI, CAT:RFU, and many other areas have had their irreplaceable significant personalities come and go over the years. Someone always steps up. TonyBallioni (talk) 22:59, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

To a point. Nobody is essential, in the sense that we can always work around somebody's absence, but there are certainly aspects where the presence or absence of one or two individuals makes a significant difference. Compare Featured Articles before and after Raul was present to bang heads together when discussions got too meandering, or how WikiProject Greater Manchester went from hyperactive to moribund in a matter of days once it lost the three or so people who were driving it. Not to mention the ever-increasing reliance we have on tools which are dependent on the goodwill of their author(s); you only need to look at how old some of the tickets are on Phabricator to see what happens when something becomes dependent on a handful of people and none of that handful are active. ‑ Iridescent 23:19, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

What I know is that when I was active on the Russian Wikipedia, my main admin activity was cleaning up AfD. I was doing that for a couple of years, and the backlog during that period was at most two-three weeks, sometimes I managed to reduce it to zero. I left that project ten years ago, and the AfD backlog has been steadily growing, now it is over a year long. Does this make me irreplaceable? Certainly not. The community allowed the AfD backlog to grow because apparently it did not consider it important, and nobody volunteered to step up. Two or three admins can easily clean it up without overworking. Note that the community there is big enough, it is not like a project with three active editors and one suddenly leaves. Did my presence make a difference? Looks like it did.--Ymblanter (talk) 07:24, 10 April 2021 (UTC)

Oh, definitely; you only have to look at Commons:Admin backlog (currently at 75 months) to see what happens when a handful of admins was holding things together and that handful has subsequently lost interest or left. (I imagine Wikidata is going to start seeing serious fallout from the departure of RexxS fairly soon, as well.) What I'm saying is that projects as important as Commons or Russian Wikipedia shouldn't have any process that's dependent on one person; if the ru-wiki backlog is building up to an unacceptable level, then it's time to start looking at how to replace the process with something that will actually work. (Off the top of my head, some kind of super-WP:PROD where anyone—or perhaps anyone with a certain minimum edit number—can close AfD discussions as delete, and pages so tagged go to a holding category for a month. During this period, any admin—but only admins—can remove the deletion tag if they think it's been applied in error or if somebody has raised a legitimate concern; otherwise, the pages are automatically deleted by bot.) ‑ Iridescent 13:51, 10 April 2021 (UTC)

Yes, I fully agree that it is unhealthy for a big community when some crucial processes depend on a small number of users. However, it happens, and the communities often can not respond to these situations.--Ymblanter (talk) 15:13, 10 April 2021 (UTC)

To be fair I do think a good bit of the problem with categories for discussion there isn't just about admins but about the fact that the discussions don't get enough input to really have a consensus to close to. Elli (talk | contribs) 17:40, 10 April 2021 (UTC)

No, the main reason is actually that there are no clear policies describing categories, which opens broad possibilities for groups of users from all corners of the Wikiverse to lobby their interests.--Ymblanter (talk) 18:01, 10 April 2021 (UTC)

Well, that too - a 72-month backlog clearly has many problems contributing. Meanwhile, categorization at Commons is... crazy. Categories for each time displayed on a clock? For each ship by identification number? It's for people who were sad their categories at enwiki got merged and still wanted to play around with them (admittedly, I have created many categories too, but I feel like mine are slightly less ridiculous). Elli (talk | contribs) 18:26, 10 April 2021 (UTC)

Indeed, as an example, I uploaded this file a long time ago. It is a painting of a larch, and I was just watching how people were adding and adding categories describing the larch, until they (finally?) converged to commons:Category:Larix decidua (illustrations). On the other hand, as soon as it does not take my time, I do not mind. I am not using these categories, and I do not find them useful, but apparently some people do. The real problem is illustrated by this discussion, where a group of users tried to push a fringe spelling, did not want to accept any of the two reasonable options they were offered, painted pretty much everyone who did not agree with them anti-Belarusian chauvinists, and it took six and a half years and a reasonable admin to close this discussion. An unreasonable admin, who are plenty on Commons, could just agree with them, because they had a numerical advantage.--Ymblanter (talk) 18:49, 10 April 2021 (UTC)

You don't even need to be an admin to close CfDs unless you close them as delete - the backlog is so large, they just want people to close them, tbh. Elli (talk | contribs) 20:49, 10 April 2021 (UTC)

> I am not using these categories, and I do not find them useful, but apparently some people do.

Less than some Commons editors believed, apparently. BTW, Search is changing at Commons. You can see the new version if you are logged out or in a private/incognito window. Go to Commons, type something in the search box, and see what you get. Apparently click-through rates on the search page (which indicate that people are finding what they want) are way up in the new system. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:08, 11 April 2021 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing: well yeah, structured data is clearly the ultimate solution here compared to categories which just poorly imitate that (the trend being "put something in one category, then put that category in all the relevant categories"). Structured data does that better. Well, it could do that better. The whole model is a mess and I don't like thinking about it too much. Elli (talk | contribs) 22:51, 11 April 2021 (UTC)

I believe that the story was that "everybody" knew that searching for categories was the right way to find content on Commons. It appears that "everybody" was the same "everybody" that teenagers say is going to the party this weekend, i.e., "almost nobody".

I am not immune to this way of thinking; the main difference is that when I tell my story, I sometimes remember to preface it by saying that this is how I do it, and that I'm not normal. (In this particular case, of course, I'm one of the "nobodies". According to my web browser's history, less than 5% of my searches on Commons involve categories.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:17, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

Searching for categories on Commons doesn't work because the category structure is so haphazard, and haphazardly named too, plus they are only half-filled. You have to find a relevant file and then see what categories it is in. Structured data won't work because the majority of files have little or no data, or the wrong data or in the wrong language. Plus (thanks to Fae) all you get on most natural searches is 400 pdfs of old books (unless you know to exclude these). Johnbod (talk) 02:23, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

The new search looks pretty, but their relevance algorithm still needs work. As an example, I just searched "Cambridge University"; I'd expect pictures of things like chapels/churches, a couple of the colleges' buildings, a few logos, and maybe some rowing. But Commons gives me a few dozen images of (presumably) the same cricket match...? Compare to Google's results for the same term, limited by site. Using categorisation or structured data is probably not the solution, it's too difficult and infeasible to maintain. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 15:18, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

@Xeno: Now THAT is an idea I could fully Support. — Ched (talk) 15:45, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

Analogies-a-go-go

• Just mentioning in passing that whenever someone asks me of good places to take the "temperature" of the project (often WMF staff, particularly newer ones), I start off by saying "first, watchlist Iridescent's talk page." I think you've pretty much hit the nail on the head in your assessment of the reasons for its popularity: diversity of comment, limited moderation (but at the same time, participants whose comments generally don't need that much moderation), and the lack of "official" status that allows users to let their hair down a bit. I've often thought this page was the most informative one on my own watchlist; I don't even bother with a lot of the supposedly more "important" ones like AN, ANI and Jimbo's page. Heck, I even strip off the majority of arbcom-related pages (except for those that directly affect me). Risker (talk) 03:34, 9 April 2021 (UTC)
  • Said slightly differently: it's the page where people who either wrote the existing major policies or will write the future ones discuss what is going on. TonyBallioni (talk) 04:12, 9 April 2021 (UTC)
    • "The Congressional bar as opposed to the debating chamber" might be a more accurate analogy; your (Tony's) description makes me sound like I'm operating some kind of Masonic lodge. Risker's comment makes me mildly curious and regretful that @action=info only gives the number of watchers, not the names (and yes I know there are good reasons why we don't allow it). ‑ Iridescent 16:49, 9 April 2021 (UTC)
      • I wouldn't compare active participants on this page to congresspeople, but I suppose that sounds less sketchy than my description :D TonyBallioni (talk) 20:05, 9 April 2021 (UTC)
        • "Cop bar as opposed to the police station" maybe. (Although I'm not sure [comparing] active participants on this page to congresspeople is as far from the mark as you'd think. By my reckoning in this thread alone I count three former arbs, two WMF staff including the one with the unenviable task of trying to persuade the wikis to eat the shit sandwich being prepared at m:UCoC, four of those I describe above as having "the talkpages where Those In The Know hang out", and admins with a combined total of 79 years of +sysop status. Back in the old days that sort of group would have had Wikipedia Review screaming that they'd uncovered Wikipedia's equivalent to Bohemian Grove.) The important difference is that it's open and transparent, and not some smoky backroom where plans are cooked up out of sight. ‑ Iridescent 23:01, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

          You know, y'all should be nicer to him. If you'd lay off him, I could make him do an extra tedious project instead of me this month. (Legal's updating the language of the Privacy policy to say things like "payment account number" instead of "credit card number" or "applicable law" instead of "law". Extension:Translate is not my idea of fun.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:19, 11 April 2021 (UTC)

@TonyBallioni, re: I wouldn't compare active participants on this page to congresspeople. In my area (USA), I'd consider being called a congressperson very insulting. Perhaps even bordering on NPA, so I'm slightly leery of your description is. :-) I suppose location is key here. — Ched (talk) 23:12, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

Oh, I agree. That's the joke I was making. Let us not insult the participants here by comparing them to members of the United States Congress. TonyBallioni (talk) 23:27, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

dang, and here I am wanting to be the first congressperson to edit Wikipedia without violating policy! Elli (talk | contribs) 04:18, 10 April 2021 (UTC)

Just chiming in here to agree with everyone else that I watch this page partly because Iri's and my editing interests overlap occasionally but mostly because it's the best way to quickly get up to date on what's going on in project space and what actually matters and, of course, to add 12 years to Iri's count! ;). I have a long watchlist which includes AN, ANI, ACN, and most of the pumps, but I find the heat-to-light ratio there off-putting. Also, I enjoy the tangents and in-jokes here that would quickly be shut down elsewhere. Sometimes they're more enlightening than the original topic! HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 20:56, 11 April 2021 (UTC)

I'll chime in too, because just looking here today, I learned for the first time about Tarrare et al. and Wikipedia:Wikipedia records, and these are the kinds of things that I love to learn about from Wikipedia. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:54, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

If you like "weird 19th-century stuff", can I put a word in for Pig-faced women? It's not as salacious or offensive as it sounds (just a crummy name; PFWs are just a folklore motif, the name is akin to mermaids being called "fish-bodied women") but I find it astonishing that people even in well-educated countries were still believing this obviously lunatic idea almost into living memory. It also has some of Wikipedia's most surreal illustrations, and the sentence Once shaved, the drunken bear would be fitted with padded artificial breasts. Daniel Lambert is also an impressive feat (if I do say so myself) of writing in the "neutral to the point of dourness" Wikipedia house style without losing the innate weirdness of 18th–19th century culture. ‑ Iridescent 16:15, 13 April 2021 (UTC)

I'll just chime in too and add my pile-on to the reasons others have stated above. I really am semi-retired from this Wikipedia. In my pre-desysop times, I had 36,000 pages on my watchlist. On 1 March 2020 I deleted all but my article creations from the list and one talk page–this one. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 21:09, 14 April 2021 (UTC)

I watched this page because I heard there were good posts here, and boy, has it delivered on that promise. Thanks for making posts, everyone! jp×g 08:48, 22 April 2021 (UTC)

As one of the evil banned users you mention I don't have a watchlist, but this is one of the pages I always look at. There's no better place to take the pulse of what the people behind the scenes at Wikipedia. 92.40.168.74 (talk) 11:21, 22 April 2021 (UTC)

A kitten for you!

just read tararre and charles' article and wanted to say good job

TANTICALS (talk) 06:40, 11 April 2021 (UTC)

Thanks—I'm still not entirely sure why, but those obviously struck some kind of a chord. Tarrare in particular consistently gets upwards of a million readers per year; it surely must be the most obscure topic to have a steady berth in the most viewed pages list. ‑ Iridescent 15:17, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

Considering Charles Domery's eating habits, a kitten is an interesting choice, Tanticals!-- P-K3 (talk) 20:16, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

Pages with most references

I recently came across National day of mourning which currently has 1424 references. Is there a way to find the articles with the most references? (Not sure if repetitive use of a reference should be counted or not.) Asking here in case you or others watching might know, but may have to ask elsewhere for a definitive answer. Carcharoth (talk) 00:05, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

@Carcharoth: Wikipedia:Articles with the most references isn't guarenteed to be up to date, but short of running something on the database dumps, it's probably the most authoritative. At the moment, List of lakes of Ontario: B tops the list, but 2019 deaths in the United States is the more realistic record-holder, given how weird the former's references are. Vahurzpu (talk) 00:09, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

Well, African humid period is right but then I only update it once per year. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 09:36, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

I hate to be the destroyer of records, but I've just split that into 2019 deaths in the United States, January–June and 2019 deaths in the United States, July–December (after running ReFill on it to fill out references and watching the subsequent behemoth page blow up MediaWiki from exceeding the template limit)... although, for what it's worth, the resulting articles still have 884 and 784 references, respectively. jp×g 22:47, 22 April 2021 (UTC)

@Carcharoth: wow, that article needs a split.

I feel like anything >1000 references should be split if only for performance reasons. Elli (talk | contribs) 00:20, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

@Vahurzpu, thank you for that link. I'm relieved to see that out of 1,100+ articles with ≥400 refs, only 49 of them are about COVID. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:21, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing: looking at some of these, I feel like we should have a policy on "Wikilinks as references", though perhaps this is too open for SYNTH. Elli (talk | contribs) 01:32, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

For those who are interested, Wikipedia:Wikipedia records has a lot of these kind of things. Aza24 (talk) 02:21, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

Special:Diff/164003350 were talkpages only moved to a separate namespace in 2007? That can't be right. Elli (talk | contribs) 02:57, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

The first subpage being for Atlas Shrugged says plenty, little good. Vaticidalprophet 03:07, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

@Elli: Nope, talk pages were moved to a separate namespace in 2002 by Conversion script. It's just that most talk pages were at a title like "Christianity/Talk" and this one was at "ChristianityTalk". I've added a note to that effect to Talk:Christianity/Archive 1 and imported the earliest available history. Graham87 09:57, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

Some of the entries at Wikipedia:Wikipedia records are fascinating. Bit disappointed by the two that no-one has worked out yet (see "Fill in if found"): "Article with most outgoing links" AND "Featured topic on the most different language Wikipedias". Can anyone here think how to work those ones out (or find likely candidates)? Surely Wikidata would help provide the answer here, or can these only be answered for snapshot moments (i.e. might have been different in the past)? Carcharoth (talk) 14:55, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

Most outgoing links is feasible, if you're counting links to distinct pages (that is, discarding duplicates) and don't care if they're from template invocations. quarry:query/54051. Classical Hollywood cinema with 4191 is the highest among pages with titles that don't look like lists/indices/outlines. Index of Singapore-related articles has 12289, if you allow those. —Cryptic 18:12, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

@Cryptic: Thanks very much; I've added that info to the records page. Graham87 07:49, 13 April 2021 (UTC)

@Carcharoth, a Wikidata query could probably handle the second one. The first might change over time. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:19, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

Wikidata tracks featured articles with the badge system, but featured topics, since they involve groups of articles that might be slightly different across wikis, would be difficult without parsing wikitext across several wikis. Vahurzpu (talk) 01:00, 13 April 2021 (UTC)

@Vahurzpu: you could make interwiki links for featured topics? Elli (talk | contribs) 11:31, 22 April 2021 (UTC)

There might be a good reason for 2019 deaths in the United States to exist, but I must admit I'm having trouble thinking what it could be; I literally can't think of any possible reason why anyone would ever want to read it, especially given that "place of death" is such an arbitrary criterion to use. As far as "true" articles go, the example that always used to come up was International recognition of Kosovo; certainly that's (AFAIK) the only prose article that regularly crashes owing to hitting the template limit. ‑ Iridescent 15:18, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

Apparently our articles like Deaths in 2021 are highly-read (beats me as to why), so I don't see that one being too unreasonable. Elli (talk | contribs) 17:53, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

That's because the "Deaths in" page for the current year is permalinked from the Main Page in bold, which artifically inflates pageviews. The moment we tick over into a new year and the link on the Main Page is retargeted to the next year, the viewing figures drop off a cliff. ‑ Iridescent 18:00, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

Still, it's getting a few thousand per day, which is a few thousand more than I'd expect. Elli (talk | contribs) 16:37, 18 April 2021 (UTC)

Thanks all for the pointers (should have found those pages myself). More serious question (partly from being really impressed by the amount of work for African humid period): how does the amount and type of work in producing a Wikipedia article like that compare with producing (say) an academic book? (By this I mean both the 'trade' academic books produced for mainstream book trade [cheaper and in hardbacks and paperbacks], and the academic books [more expensive, sometimes only hardbacks] that tend to be peer-reviewed and produced for academics and students mostly to read and use - both sorts have extensive footnotes and bibliographies, but there is a subtle and important set of distinctions between the two types.) What amount of time and labour goes into a top-notch Wikipedia article compared to those sort of books (I can give examples of such books if that helps)? I am less interested in the arguments about quality and reliability, than in the amounts of time invested and (crucially) the readership gained (academic books might have less readership and visibility than certain Wikipedia articles, but might have more impact long-term over decades of research, for example). Or is it wrong to compare (like apples and oranges)? Both have their place and function in the information ecosystem? (Might a better comparison be between Wikipedia articles and 50+-page review articles in academic journals?) Carcharoth (talk) 14:42, 12 April 2021 (UTC) I am sure someone will split this off under a new header if needed... :-)

I'd say the more appropriate comparator for Wikipedia articles would be school textbooks. The crucial difference is that Wikipedia articles—like textbooks, but unlike academic publications—aren't engaged in original research or pushing a particular hypothesis, but instead are (theoretically) attempting to provide a neutral summary of current thinking in a style which general readers with no prior knowledge will understand. ‑ Iridescent 15:25, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

"Theoretically" indeed. Sure, all countries will have bias in their textbooks, but historical revisionism is especially ripe in some places, see Japan (a first world country, and democracy!) for instance (Japanese history textbook controversies) and of course the whole fiasco with southern textbooks in the US, which used to be often led by this group... Aza24 (talk) 16:45, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

Well, yes—we have a whole series of articles on the topic—but you could make the case that Wikipedia itself has a conscious bias when it comes to sensitive issues, even if it's more subtle than the [insert red state] Board of Education demanding that Of Pandas and People be taught as fact. (The WMF may like to engage in "we're a resource for the world" posturing, but on hot-button issues as varied as trans rights, disputed territories, and the difference between 'good' and 'bad' wars, Wikipedia "consensus" very squarely reflects the current collective opinion of the American center-left. To take the example I usually use, if we genuinely lived by the WMF's babblings about cultural relativism and everyone in the world's opinion needing to be given due weight, probably more than half of our Homosexuality article would be devoted to the "sinners who will burn in hell" hypothesis.) ‑ Iridescent 17:46, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

Like the Irish history textbook which described the funeral of Elizabeth I, where her coffin was pulled by "four horses, so great was the weight of that black heart...". Unfortunately Prof Google doesn't know the passage, so that's from memopry. Johnbod (talk) 17:55, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

Homosexuality point taken, but it may be a little misleading. It seems we are mainly aligned with academia (which has a Western and left-leaning bias) in which the impact of the supposed negative opinions on homosexuality from academics at the University of Tehran (complete speculation on my part, merely based on their Governmental stance on gay rights) is already minuscule if not absent. The only major universities not in the West that I can think of—or in countries that do not align with Western perspectives on homosexuality—are some universities in China like Peking University and Tsinghua University (the latter especially), but even then, I don't know how big an impact the academics from there have on a subject like homosexuality. Anyways, I don't know that sensitive topics are covered in the same light across different Wikipedias; a while back I compared our article on Xi Jinping, to the Chinese Wikipedia one and even with a crude google translation of the latter's lead, it's revealing to see how all talk of authoritarian, human rights violations etc. is left out. It doesn't seem reasonable to consider a world where we base our articles of public opinion (and not academia), what would we source, Gallup polls? Aza24 (talk) 18:49, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

I feel we're getting onto a sidetrack, but with regards to this specific example then Singapore, Malaysia and Russia all have highly respected academic sectors; there are also religiously conservative countries like Poland to consider, while closer to home there are whackadoodle institutions like BYU which still manage to retain at least some academic credibility. Even on relatively clear-cut issues like this there's not an unambiguous monolithic "view of respected academics" like there is with (e.g.) evolution; when you get onto more contentious things like the Armenian Genocide, the historicity of Jesus, or the ethics of 19th-century imperialism, "academic consensus" breaks down completely even between very culturally close countries and cultures, but it doesn't stop Wikipedia taking a particular (almost always American) line on those issues. That's not to say I'm against this—there's a good case to be made that for all its faults Wikipedia is one of the last solid bastions of Enlightenment values and our job is to reflect those values, not the values of whatever current populist opinion is—but it's silly to pretend it isn't happening. ‑ Iridescent 19:53, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

Yes we're definitely getting side tracked—but then, isn't that all this talk page is? :)—when I reread my earlier comment, it seems to be all over the place. But it can be summed up as, I took your homosexuality example as one saying Wikipedia is biased, but it seems that the academia which we're centered around is biased, and we can merely reflect that ourselves. This holds true for the Armenian Genocide and the ethics of 19th-century imperialism (I don't really think the historicity of Jesus is nearly as controversial as those topics, at least today) where Wikipedia follows the disagreement in academia and thus also struggles to find coherency. Perhaps this is a meaningless distinction, but I thought I'd at least clarify what I was saying before. Aza24 (talk) 20:21, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

April 2021

Hello. Regarding the recent revert you made to WhatsApp: you may already know about them, but you might find Wikipedia:Template messages/User talk namespace useful. After a revert, these can be placed on the user's talk page to let them know you considered their edit inappropriate, and also direct new users towards the sandbox. They can also be used to give a stern warning to a vandal when they've been previously warned. Thank you. Firestar464 (talk) 06:23, 13 April 2021 (UTC)

Something does rather give me the sense Iridescent is aware of templates. Vaticidalprophet 06:26, 13 April 2021 (UTC)

...and Iridescent didn't even make that revert. — J947 ‡ ^{message ⁓ edits} 07:19, 13 April 2021 (UTC)

And another oldie but a goodie from the vault: WP:DNTTR — Ched (talk) 08:39, 13 April 2021 (UTC)

I'm not in the "never template a regular" school of thought (I've given templates with a bit of personalization for, say, repeated bad speedy tags that were received as well as could have been by their recipients), and my position on the 'open question' mentioned by the lead of that essay is that giving them to newbies is itself problematic practice, but I can't hide my amusement at giving someone who's been admin for over a decade a template targeted specifically at introducing new users to templates. Vaticidalprophet 09:07, 13 April 2021 (UTC)

I don't agree with the WP:DTTR essay; I have no issue with templates in their proper place, and as far as I'm concerned "the regulars" are precisely the people who are aware that Wikipedia has a lot of semi-mechanical processes and should understand that it's not practical to write everything out personally. Where I do have an issue is with sloppy editors who dish out inappropriate and incorrect templates, since if they're given to good-faith new editors they can quite often cause that editor to retire in either confusion or disgust. In light of that, Firestar464, would you care to try to explain why you've given me a {{Uw-warn}}, and why you've linked to a page on which I've made a grand total of two edits in my entire 15 years here, neither of which were reverts? ‑ Iridescent 16:15, 13 April 2021 (UTC)

Never mind Iri, there's no shame in being a pesky noob. Welcome to Wikipedia. We hope you'll stay. Martinevans123 (talk) 16:22, 13 April 2021 (UTC)

I've found that writing my own templates that don't look like warning ones tends to work better - for example, about section heading capitalization (is there a warning for this? dunno, but this is something I run into far more often than uh, not knowing that user warnings exist) Elli (talk | contribs) 19:18, 13 April 2021 (UTC)

@Elli: I've been thinking of writing some of those in my userspace and using them as custom templates with Twinkle, but I don't think there's any way to make them progress automatically, or be easy to select (the way that Twinkle will detect a level-2 template and auto-select a level-3 template). Is there any way to set them up to work the way the others do? jp×g 22:13, 22 April 2021 (UTC)

@JPxG: ...Twinkle does this? Elli (talk | contribs) 22:14, 22 April 2021 (UTC)

 Self-trout SORRY! --Firestar464 (talk) 01:13, 14 April 2021 (UTC)

Does warning vandals actually reduce vandalism?

I saw you mention AN/K: I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve considered redirecting WP:AN/IRI here (only stopped by the tenuous hold that was kept on even the historical record of the former).

Has there ever been any kind of testing done to see if "a stern warning" to vandals actually reduces further vandalism rather than inviting it?

I always wondered if I’d ever get hit with this template, since I’ve anecdotally found that a simple revert and no warn is usually more effective. –xeno^talk 03:11, 14 April 2021 (UTC)

@Xeno, I don't think anyone's tested it. I don't think that we've even gotten as far as figuring out what percentage of talk page messages get read by IPs and newcomers. Since most newcomers don't make a second edit, it probably looks like the warnings "work". I think that the closest we've come is the usability project that re-wrote some of the uw- templates about a decade ago (mostly to make them sound less like stern warnings). WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:06, 15 April 2021 (UTC)

If they're using the mobile app, the percentage read by IPs is zero. But yes, I tend to do the same as Xeno - revert and no warn (unless it's a serious issue), and only warn if it's repeated. Black Kite (talk) 01:28, 15 April 2021 (UTC)

Given the way that many mobile phone providers handle IP addresses, then "zero" might be the correct approach. Maybe 1% of users will edit (ever). If you have a dynamic IP and it gets reassigned between editing sessions (i.e., more frequently than average), then basically all of the messages would end up reaching a non-editor. But for an occasional editor, even a typical length (often at least several days, with maybe 10% using the same IP for a whole month, but "normal" varies a lot between countries) is likely to result in someone (or no one) getting your message. This is a consequence of our decision to use regular wikitext pages as the primary basis for communication.

As a side note, because of the apps' history (they originally required editors to create an account), there are more registered editors than IPs editing from them. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:51, 15 April 2021 (UTC)

Indeed, though the fact that registered editors have only made 22 edits in 20 hours today in usertalk and articletalk using the apps suggests they don't know where they are either. Black Kite (talk) 19:08, 15 April 2021 (UTC)

I see 33 talk-page edits by IPs and logged-in editors during the last 24 hours on the two apps. I wonder how that compares, as a percentage, to IPs and newcomers on the mobile site. I can't imagine trying to edit wikitext on a phone. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:12, 15 April 2021 (UTC)

I'd be fairly sure that warning vandals has at least some impact, in sending a "don't bother trying, we're watching you" signal. It would be easy enough to test—just set all the Twinkle templates to go to dev/null instead of the user talk page for a couple of days, and see if the vandalism rate rises—although I can't imagine the WMF being very keen to try the experiment. I'm very confident that the impact of warning templates is minimal compared to the impact of rapid reversion; if vandals see their handiwork disappear within 10 seconds every time, it removes the incentive.

There are some regular editors who edit primarily via phone—Cullen328 is one I know of—but AFAIK anyone doing anything more complicated than the occasional typo fix just uses the desktop site on their mobile device, which is why the WMF's insistence on overriding cookies and forcing editors onto the mobile site even when they've selected "use desktop site", unless they go through a complicated rigmarole of selecting "show desktop site" in their browser and manually deleting .m from the URL of whatever page they're on, is such a constant source of complaints. ‑ Iridescent 10:43, 16 April 2021 (UTC)

The vast majority of casual mobile editors have no idea that the fully functional desktop site works just fine on modern smartphones and have no idea how to find it and try it. It is really a sad situation. Cullen³²⁸ Let's discuss it 16:18, 16 April 2021 (UTC)

I think they also help with Wikipedia's inclusivity (I think it was Yngvadottir who said that our broad inclusivity is Wikipedia's biggest strength, and I fully concur) when people who at first glance seem totally useless are given a couple of chances before getting the boot. That gives folks the confidence that you don't need to be perfect right from the get-go to participate.

Editing by phone is a leg pain. I don't try except for the most trivial stuff and Commons uploads. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 11:09, 16 April 2021 (UTC)

Yes—and the better-worded templates can also serve as a gateway into the pages which explain how Wikipedia works. Quite a bit of disruptive editing is actually people trying in good faith to make Wikipedia better and not understanding our rules. (Yes, we have the "About Wikipedia", "Help" and "Learn to edit" links in the sidebar, but none of the three is exactly comprehensible to anyone who doesn't already understand the jargon, and certainly not for editors whose English isn't fluent.) Sure, most disruptive edits are just people messing around, but in at least some cases if you explain (even just with a template) "I've reverted your edit because we can't accept unsourced claims", the editor will come back later with a source.

Template messages also have a secondary practical purpose in making it clearer who reverted the edit, so if there's a mistake—or at least, if the reverted person thinks there was a mistake—they know who to query it with. (Everyone, no matter how experienced, will at some point flag a valid edit as vandalism, or incorrectly tag a page for deletion. New editors are unlikely to know how to check page histories; if they see themselves being reverted and want to challenge it, then unless they receive an "I reverted you" message they're very likely to raise it on the article talk page rather than with a specific editor. Unless the article talk page is a very high-traffic topic like Talk:Joe Biden, then chances are nobody will see any comments on the talk page—but the new editor will probably assume that the fact they were reverted means someone is watching the page, and feel insulted that their good-faith question on the talk page isn't answered. I know I sound like a broken record on the subject, but it's very easy to forget just how counter-intuitive everything about Wikipedia is both for absolute newcomers, and for people who are used to other user-generated websites.) ‑ Iridescent 15:07, 16 April 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for the ping, Jo-Jo Eumerus; I'm rather surprised the claim needs attribution :-) In that line, I suspect people vary in their reactions, including depending whether they come back any time soon to see that they were reverted (though I believe e-mail spammage when one's edits are reverted may now be a default setting for newly registered editors, which would encourage thinking of it as an unexpected and possibly hostile act, since the disclaimer above the edit window is easy to miss and for all I know, not visible in the disastrous smartphone apps), and depending what other online places they haunt. Not all new/driveby editors who do react react as if they took us for a social media site. More broadly, I agree that template messages show useful links—for those not using the disastrous smartphone apps—and also identify someone to engage with, although a significant number of vandalism patrollers are using automated tools and may not even remember the basis of their decision or engage in good faith with a new editor when they respond more or less emotionally to the revert. They also of course provide a trail on the editor's talk page when reconstructing their trajectory as an editor. Broadly speaking, while mindful of Ritchie333's WP:HNST (and having just been reminded of Chiswick Chap's WP:How Wikipedia looks to newbies while searching for it), I like (or liked, when I was active) to use the templates. I trust the experienced Wikipedians who worked hard to word them clearly and fairly, trust that's reflected in their being used by ClueBot and in WP:AIV almost always requiring them to have been tried. I used to find a significant amount of vandalism was indeed "messing around", such that applying AGF, reasonable people might differ as to whether it did fall under our definition of vandalism: stuff like adding oneself or a friend to the list of alumni of a school, or the sad case of CejeroC, who was overriding infoboxes using a model they got from somewhere and in so doing, again and again introducing an invalid parameter, and presumably because they were using a mobile app—but for all I know it's a language problem—their non-responsiveness has led to discussions at AN/I and elsewhere and to blocks. I'm quite attached to Uw-test1 and Uw-joke1, and for good faith attempts to do what we're here for such as adding plot summaries copied from IMDb, expansions by overwriting with text from, for example, the Encyclopedia of Bangladesh or Memory Alpha, or even uploading and adding someone's photo from Facebook, to things like Uw-unsourced1 and Uw-copyright-img.

However. Since we can't read the person's mind, including knowing whether they even know about copyright or have a grasp of what an encyclopaedia is—they weren't a big thing in my schooling, so I'm quite ready to believe some schools in some countries never had them, and we've played a significant part in driving the standard ones to the brink of extinction so that I suspect few schools have them nowadays—and since Wikipedia is indeed an encyclopaedia that anyone can edit (I believe I'd have to register to edit Wikia, and I know I'd have to jump through hoops to edit at, say, heimskringla.no or the Skaldic project, both of which appear to be Mediawiki instances), I am aghast at people starting the talk pages of any but obvious vandals with a naked warning template. That does communicate a message of hostility. ClueBot appears to still leave a blank line at the top when it creates a user talk page, and I've always assumed that was for a welcome template, and I almost always slot in my welcome template at the top following that pattern and what I consider best practice. It's part of AGF and treating people like humans. We even have special welcome templates for unconstructive users and for specific cases like those who aren't giving references and those who appear to be editing with a conflict of interest. Nowadays I have to check the welcome template first, because the WMF has changed the default to a tiny thing that just leads to their intro pages and videos; it looks like boilerplate to be ignored. And someone was in good faith changing the others to wrappers for that worse than useless thing, and I can't be sure all those changes got reverted. But my default is Template:Welcomeh; I like the comprehensiveness and logical layout, so the recipient can choose what to look up, and I like the section header because everything else on their talk page will have section header. I'm alarmed that the 5 pillars page is less informative now; I'm not sure what's happened, but I believe it used to link in an obvious way to explanations of each pillar, and although I know you roll your eyes at the pillars, Iridescent, I think they're a good way in for new editors. I doubt the question posed at the start, whether warning templates deter effectively, can be answered; not only do people differ in what they were trying to do, and whether they understand the English of the template, or bother to read it, or even know it's there, but they may come back as a different IP or under a different user name (many people take a long time to realise we don't like them having more than one account) after a short or a long period. But since the institution of the Teahouse, I have deplored the change that came in with it to not welcoming people and instead leaving it to the Teahouse bot and leaving the explanation of how we do things to the Teahouse hosts, and even after it became apparent that that and the Wikipedia Adventure were indeed not working as our sole means of orienting new editors, the tradition of giving people welcome templates has not been revived. I believe that's a major source of our problems with well-intentioned relatively new editors, and while I understand the theory behind DFTT, it conflicts with AGF, BITE, and fundamentally with CIV in my understanding, which is "treat fellow editors like human beings", and does make our warning templates appear like "You're PWNed". (/hobby horse) Yngvadottir (talk) 21:58, 16 April 2021 (UTC)

WP:5P sidetrack

My problem with the Five Pillars essay isn't its existence—I agree it's useful to have a summary of key policies which new editors need to know—but with the wording. To me, it gives a false impression that a selection of arbitrary-chosen policies are "the important ones", which potentially lulls new editors into thinking that as long as they abide by those five policies, they can treat everything else as just an advisory guideline. (Lord knows I see enough variations on "How was I to know that wasn't allowed?" as a defence.)

I also feel it makes even fairly experienced editors think that these five policies are somehow "the non-negotiable core principles" and thus puts people off questioning them, when in reality our only non-negotiable core principles (unless you count this meaningless set of platitudes) are that our purpose is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally, and the six founding principles. (I could make a case that Maintaining room for fiat to help resolve particularly difficult problems is actually the most important principle of all—arbitrariness isn't an aberration when it happens but has with good reason been intentionally built into all our processes from the start. You won't find even a hint of it at WP:5P which gives the impression that Wikipedia runs purely on consensus; we then blame editors when they take that at face value and get confused and upset when told they can't keep trying to re-litigate decisions.) ‑ Iridescent 15:53, 19 April 2021 (UTC)

because the WMF has changed the default to a tiny thing that just leads to their intro pages and videos that was actually done by the community, see here ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 21:28, 19 April 2021 (UTC)

So that's the background to the well-intentioned attempt to turn them all into mere wrappers. I think that's a good example of a discussion with relatively few participants overriding broader consensus; although welcoming has fallen into such disuetude that I may be wrong and the preponderance of those who still do it may have changed their minds in favour of that kind of vague handwaving. I am happy to see that after the kerfuffle at AN/I that I saw, those of us who use them have our detailed welcome templates back. (Not to mention past recipients; or do I have substitution/transclusion the wrong way round?) We increasingly expect newbies to familiarise themselves as soon as possible with all sorts of rules and guidelines, from "Don't use allcaps and bold for emphasis" through "ping correctly and not too much" and "The intro is a summary of the article" to "Source everything you add even if you've seen unsourced stuff, but don't use certain newspapers, don't use search links, don't use 90% of YouTube, don't use any social media, don't use publish on demand books or those from a list of publishers that you will have to learn by experience but may be a mainstay of your school library, and be prepared for battle if you use a thesis or dissertation" and "maintain the same citation format and variety of English, even if you've never encountered either before, while avoiding bare links, inline links, and editing in quick succession to format the reference because it will hammer someone's watchlist, which is one of the mysterious red links at the top of your screen". Yet we rarely give them a way to look up any of this stuff. Oh, and "The wiki process is about people who may have widely differing backgrounds and skill sets collaborating to improve articles", but "Any change you make to something someone else wrote counts as a revert, and reverts are very bad, even if they do not exceed 3 within a 24-hour period, and even if you believe your change is beneficial. Also, a whole raft of articles are under super-sekrit protection discretionary sanctions, which means you can't revert more than once or WHAMMO." Welcome to Wikipedia. (All quotations my own wording.) The least we can do is give them an indication of where to RTFM. (Or try to; some will never realise they have talk pages.) Yngvadottir (talk) 01:47, 22 April 2021 (UTC)

Two other details for Yngvadottir: While {{Welcome}} is purely a volunteer creation, {{Uw-test1}} is one of the templates that the WMF re-wrote back in 2012 (before my time there, but I remember seeing the discussions here).

Also, I'm pretty sure that the only reason ClueBot leaves a blank line at the top of a new page is because the MOS says that All Good Editors™ add a blank line before adding a new ==Section heading==, and it was easier on the bot's volunteer creators to always add a blank line instead of adding it for existing pages and skipping it when creating a page. It has no effect on the rendered page, and someday, the servers might even start stripping it before saving the page. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:08, 21 April 2021 (UTC)

I'm prepared to believe you on both; the WMF has not always been a juggernaut bureaucracy that sees itself as running the projects and is largely staffed with non-editors. But if the servers strip that blank line, I'll take it as yet another instance, albeit small, of WMF meddling in a damaging way. Yngvadottir (talk) 01:47, 22 April 2021 (UTC)

I don't think a juggernaut bureaucracy that sees itself as running the projects and is largely staffed with non-editors is entirely fair. In my experience, in most cases the WMF consistently tries to avoid responsibility for making difficult decisions, even when the governance of projects is clearly breaking down and order being imposed from above would actually be of benefit.

Largely staffed with non-editors is also a bit unfair—sure, there are a lot of people with no apparent editing experience on their bloated staff roster, but a lot of those are in things like engineering and accounts where they haven't been recruited for their Wikipedia experience. There still seem to be plenty of people with Wikipedia experience in the editor-facing jobs (WMF job titles are written in a particularly impenetrable form of West Coast Newspeak, so you sometimes have to click through on things to see that e.g. a "Talent & Culture Officer" isn't actually an editor-facing job despite the name). I also assume that a non-negligible proportion of the people who don't have a Wikipedia username listed are actually just people who are in fact editors but want to keep their work and private lives separate.

I could certainly argue the case that the WMF hiring people who are also active editors has a destabilizing effect on the communities (incentivizing people to take actions they think will curry favor with a potential employer is just as much a conflict of interest as straightforward paid editor, and—as was demonstrated rather spectacularly in 2019—an editor holding a position of authority creates serious practical and ethical problems as well as a vicious chilling effect if their conduct is called into question). I could also certainly argue the case that there's no obvious correlation between editing experience and whether someone will do a good job at the WMF; for every Moonriddengirl or Keegan there's also an Ironholds or Kaldari. ‑ Iridescent 06:57, 22 April 2021 (UTC)

I was trying to be polite. But I must insist on the point that that is how they regard themselves. Yngvadottir (talk) 08:31, 22 April 2021 (UTC)

I'm (as you know) no fan at all of the WMF and am entirely willing to think the worst of their motives (I know you're already aware, but for the benefit of any TPW that doesn't know the back-story I was the person who made the original complaint that led to Framageddon), but I do think you're being unfair here. Certainly there are some who give the impression that they think working for the WMF entitles them to act like Wikipedia's management, but since 2019 none of them dare show their faces on the big wikis. Yes, there's a lot of big talk on Meta about a theoretical right to impose rules, but the WMF know as well as I do that if they actually tried it they'd immediately lose 75% of the core editor base and be left hosting an empty shell which—without admins and recent changes/new pages patrol to maintain it—would degenerate into a mess of spam and libel in about eight minutes (cf #How to kill a wiki a few threads up). In reality, for all the hype about UCoC it will either be so anodyne nobody could possibly object to it, or User:Xeno (WMF) will have to try to convince people here (and at minimum de-wiki and Wikidata as well) to accept it—the WMF aren't going to be stupid enough to try to impose a substantive change on one of the big Wikipedias against consensus for a third time after seeing what happened on the first two occasions. ‑ Iridescent 18:56, 22 April 2021 (UTC)

UCoC is a small part of it. Last I heard they were still forging ahead with this based on this, where such pronouncements as "The focus on mainstream, Western-idea of academic-based knowledge limits the inclusion of other ways of knowing or presenting knowledge" caused pushback but the entire exercise was a display of what they believe is their authority over the projects. I do believe entrenched bias is a problem in the project, but I refuse to grant any authority to that organisation to determine what it is or enforce remedies over the people who do the work. And that appears to be most of what they see as their aim: see their recent mission statement, their desire to steal the name of our project in rebranding ... and we won't get into the changes in the composition of the Board or the suspension of Board elections, because the Board is in any case a rubber stamp (and could hardly be expected in any case of challenge what is presented as the raison d'être of the organisation). As I say, I was being nice, conceding that there was (presumably) a time when some WMF staffers worked on committees with fellow editors to improve something identified by the community as a need. Yngvadottir (talk) 19:59, 22 April 2021 (UTC)

@Yngvadottir, I think you're being unfair. This story, from where I sit, sounds like this: "Several years ago, there was a committee of 10 people who don't work for the WMF plus one WMF board member and two WMF staff. One of those two staff members has been editing Wikipedia since 2005 and is a volunteer admin here at the English Wikipedia plus at five other wikis, so he's hardly some outsider who doesn't know anything. The committee talked to a bunch of editors and did some research, and they made a lot of suggestions. Some of the suggestions drew some justified criticism [at least, my criticism of it was justified ;-)], so those suggestions got dropped from future rounds, and the reason I can't link to them in the final recommendation is because the idea has been rejected. But I still blame the WMF for even letting that independent committee, which was made up of 77% non-WMF folks, make that recommendation."

The WMF did not pre-screen the committee recommendations. Some non-starters could have been tossed if they had, but the point behind having independent committees is that they get to say what they want, and not what you want them to say. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:22, 23 April 2021 (UTC)

Maybe I am. Perhaps it is possible to sponsor a whole process to come up with ways of rejiggering the projects while realising one's organisation doesn't run the projects and therefore has no right to change how they operate. See also owning the aims and statements of the 5P article below. Maybe it is possible to want to control who participates in a volunteer project—one with guaranteed anonymity—without claiming control over that project. I don't think so, though. I am required to assume good faith of those WMF employees who edit here. As a volunteer, I am not required to accept the WMF as my boss regardless of how pure their stated intentions. Yngvadottir (talk) 08:21, 23 April 2021 (UTC)

Movement Strategy wasn't the WMF's idea. It was the affiliates' idea. That is presumably why it is called "Movement Strategy" instead of "WMF Strategy". The affiliates said that having a written strategy in which everyone formally agrees that we're all going to _____ makes it easier for them to get external grant funding.

Also, since one of the main outcomes could be summarized as "the WMF should have much less control over everything", I think you're going to have to pick either the view that the WMF was secretly in charge of all the outcomes, or the view that the WMF thinks that it is and should continue to be in charge of everything, but not both, because "we're in charge of making us not be in charge" seems unlikely whenever humans are involved. But perhaps that's just me being cynical and depressed about humanity again. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:25, 23 April 2021 (UTC)

WP:5P sidetrack (part II)

So what do you think of this 5P rewrite proposed by some academics? Johnbod (talk) 03:10, 20 April 2021 (UTC)

The rewritten principles look interesting, though there's not a whole lot that you could copy over (unless admins are going to start blocking trolls for being "discursively irresponsible"). However, I think adopting their #5 would probably help address Iridescent's concern: people might be justly irritated if you break a norm, and norms carry considerable weight, but they don't necessarily have to be followed when unreasonable. Vahurzpu (talk) 03:52, 20 April 2021 (UTC)

I am inclined to think that that rewrite is a bad idea. For one thing, "epistemically and discursively responsible " reads like Chinese to me. For the other thing, what is an "objective community "? People who happen to share my preferred POV? Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 09:01, 20 April 2021 (UTC)

Yes, you need a High Californian dictionary for it. Johnbod (talk) 13:06, 20 April 2021 (UTC)

It looks like all five are active un-improvements to me; "Wikipedia is an encyclopedic process" is meaningless ("an encyclopedic process" could just as well mean we divide everything alphabetically), "Wikipedia is written by an objective community" and "The integrity of Wikipedia is a function of the size and breadth of its community" are Berkeley platitudes, "Editors should be epistemically and discursively responsible" is gibberish, and "Wikipedia is norm-driven (rather than rule-governed)" is a straightforward lie. (Plus, obviously, it doesn't address my "what makes these five more important?" objection.)

While I'm generally more than happy to assume that anything emanating from the WMF should be treated with deep suspicion, if we're going to have a brief set of core principles I genuinely don't see why we can't just use

1. Neutral point of view (NPOV) as a guiding editorial principle.
2. The ability of almost anyone to edit (most) articles without registration.
3. The "wiki process" as the final decision-making mechanism for all content.
4. The creation of a welcoming and collegial editorial environment.
5. Free licensing of content; in practice defined by each project as public domain, GFDL, CC BY-SA or CC BY.
6. Maintaining room for fiat to help resolve particularly difficult problems.

which does a perfectly adequate job of summing up what Wikipedia is about, and has the added advantage of being the only policies where People who strongly disagree with them are nonetheless expected to either respect them while collaborating on the site or turn to another site is written into policy across every WMF site meaning they're unambiguously enforceable without the endless "but IAR means I can ignore this if I don't like it" or "but this isn't how I'm used to doing things on other projects" whining. ‑ Iridescent 14:21, 20 April 2021 (UTC)

written into policy across every WMF site -- what about ptwiki with #2? I don't think there is such a cross-project unambiguous enforcement even for the Big Ones (ptwiki is definitely not a microproject that might be half-expected to be doing something bizarre). Certainly the different places that projects draw the lines of "how many exceptions, if any, can you make to having everything on the site be free licensed" alone is a point of consternation. And then there's inescapable disagreement even within projects about the interpretation of certain guiding editorial principles. 5P's conflation with policy is a bit lame, but people apparently use it to fill some kind of void, and I'm not sure what else that void can be filled with (my response might be 'nothing, you don't need to rank every policy in order of Objective Importance', but this doesn't scale). Vaticidalprophet 14:40, 20 April 2021 (UTC)

You'd need to ask the WMF (probably WAID but it might go all the way up to board level) what they're going to do about pt.wiki and their unilateral declaration of independence, as that's well above my pay grade. (I would imagine they'll take the pragmatic route of waiting to see if it works, if it fails then framming those behind the proposal, and if it succeeds then claiming it was their idea all along—but good luck getting anyone to admit that.) "A capacidade de praticamente qualquer pessoa poder editar (a maioria dos) artigos sem se registar" is a global policy across Portuguese-language WMF sites and as such is still official policy on Portuguese Wikipedia just as much as "The ability of almost anyone to edit (most) articles without registration" is on English Wikipedia. ‑ Iridescent 14:52, 20 April 2021 (UTC)

"Waiting for research results" appears to be the only answer I can get right now. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:49, 21 April 2021 (UTC)

I meant to say earlier: I sincerely hope nobody gets frammed again, ever. Yngvadottir (talk) 08:31, 22 April 2021 (UTC)

@Markworthen has made two attempts at writing a summary of that paper, and I was just telling him that "The integrity of Wikipedia is a function of the size and breadth of its community" means "biased people create biased content". I believe that "epistemically and discursively responsible" means that they want editors to have epistemic responsibility (do good research, including actively seeking out information and views that have been overlooked in the past) and to intentionally make space for voices that are being excluded. I haven't figured out how to translate "objective community" yet.

I do think they're correct about the English Wikipedia being norm-driven; there are things that we do because we always do that even though the rules technically discourage them, and things you can't do because we don't do that, even if the rules permit them. We can't really be rule-governed when IAR is one of the rules, or when some of the rules contradict other rules. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:23, 21 April 2021 (UTC)

Sort of, but I don't think it's particularly, and certainly not to the extent it should be considered a "pillar". Despite popular perceptions of Wikipedia as a free-for-all, IAR is more of a cultural symbol than an significant part of Wikipedia's culture. In my experience, in reality if anything we usually take the written rules more seriously than they deserve, not less—if Wikipedia has a problem it's not that there's an aristocracy who make up the rules as they go along (some of the usual malcontents like to talk about "unblockables" and "super-users", but when you ask them to actually point to an example they tend to change the subject), but that we spend too much time deliberating the minutiae of every little rule. (I know I keep heading to the same easily-available barrel when I feel like shooting a fish but seriously, try imagining what Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style looks like to a normal person.) I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing—I'd certainly prefer overdependence on bureaucracy to the alternative of ending up as a "anyone here know what policy is this week?" mess like Commons. ‑ Iridescent 12:50, 21 April 2021 (UTC)

If you are interested, here are the two attempts at summarizing the article:

Feminist critique of Wikipedia's epistemology

2nd draft

WhatamIdoing and Talpedia offered excellent critiques of both attempts, some of which you'll find on the respective talk pages.

I still believe it's an important article with valuable insights for Wikipedians, but it's so dense that translating the academic phraseology into practical examples eludes me. Mark D Worthen PsyD (talk) [he/his/him] 16:03, 21 April 2021 (UTC)

I read the abstract and quotations on your 2nd draft page, which Iridescent linked above, and what is most unclear to me is the "feminist" bit; I'm not prepared to read it to track down the answer, but they appear to have elided in their summary the step(s) whereby they went from "insights derived from feminism" to "generalised identity politics" to "promotion of participation by all marginalised communities". That said, the bits you have on that page are clearer to me than some other jargon I've read, and from my perspective, hostile to the project. By explicitly replacing the objective of creating an encyclopaedia with the objective of widening participation, they lose the point of why we're here; that starts with replacing "is an encyclopedia" with "is an encyclopedic process", which is intended to include those who may be uncomfortable with the idea of an encyclopedia, but means the project becomes goal-less (not to mention intentionally opening up for unending debate what an encyclopedia is; in practice, up to now we define it by doing it, which is effectively pretty damned inclusive). The replacement of "free content" with a statement about the inclusivity of the community that was implicit in their Pillar 1 and should have been a phrase there lays us wide open to copyright violation and its legal repercussions. I understand their repudiation of the principle of NPOV but if we do not have such a statement, we do not have a single project, but a collection of blogs. My first guess at the meaning of their "objective community" wording was that it was an attributive adjective: "a community with an objective", but I see that their explanation is worse than that: a community that collectively defines its notion of objectivity. That's worse than the steam-rollering of "fringe" views that we have now, I suspect they talked themselves into a Klein bottle. Especially since they removed the objective, the result would be fragmentation. (Why am I thinking of EEng's "diffusing conflict"?) I would have liked to see a good suggestion for CIV, but "epistemically and discursively responsible" appears to mean "responsible both in their interactions and in their writing", which is so anodyne as to be useless in any area of conflict. And conflict does happen. I bow to Iridescent's wealth of experience and superior logic regarding #5, although how consensus is interpreted around here makes my head spin, so my initial response was that they have this one right. Perhaps the key is that "Ignore all rules if the alternative does not benefit the encyclopedia" is different from "There are no firm rules". So anyway, what do I know. Yngvadottir (talk) 01:47, 22 April 2021 (UTC)

This is very much getting into the long grass, but I see the 'feminist' angle as a good-faith misunderstanding of Wikipedia. There's an entirely valid movement in academia that argues that history, and the corpus of knowledge more generally, is written from a male viewpoint, and that genuinely neutral writing needs to take into account the views of women and of under-represented communities more generally.

However, that's not what Wikipedia means by "neutral point of view" (representing fairly, proportionately, and, as far as possible, without editorial bias, all the significant views that have been published by reliable sources on a topic). When we talk about NPOV, we mean that we're neutrally reflecting the current state of academia, not that we're neutrally reflecting objective truth; if the majority of books and papers on a given topic focus on white men, then if our coverage of that topic isn't similarly focused on white men then we're not doing our job properly. In an ideal world we'd rename Wikipedia:Neutral point of view to something less open to misinterpretation like Wikipedia:Reflect current mainstream consensus, but realistically it's been 20 years and that ship has long sailed. ‑ Iridescent 07:37, 22 April 2021 (UTC)

The proposed replacement for the third pillar seems bizarre, at best, unless I am missing something. "Wikipedia is free content that anyone can use, edit, and distribute" is not even the same type of claim as "The integrity of Wikipedia is a function of the size and breadth of its community". The first version is a concrete statement that the content is licensed freely, that nobody owns it, that you don't have to pay anyone for it, that you can modify and redistribute freely, that everyone has an equal right to participate, et cetera. To me, this seems like the major advantage of Wikipedia over traditional encyclopedias; I think it's cool that poor people can read the highest-quality writing on any subject without a subscription plan, and the fact that anyone in the world can benefit from my writing here is the main reason I do it. The proposed replacement seems to focus entirely on deciding who can edit the project, and disregard the free licensing altogether; when I saw this in the summary, I thought it was simply an oversight in summarization, or a failure to convey the paper's nuance. So I looked up the paper itself... which says absolutely nothing about free licensing, and even says "the third pillar retains an inappropriate focus on content". For this reason, it's difficult for me to take the paper seriously (while I'm sure a Microsoft-owned encyclopedia project could do wonders for diversity, I certainly would not write articles that children in Pakistan had to pay $5.00 per month to read). jp×g 06:50, 23 April 2021 (UTC)

I think that they are using the term "Wikipedia" to mean the people and processes rather than the content. I believe that most of the people who frequent this page would use the term "the community" instead. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:33, 23 April 2021 (UTC)

• Any rewrite of 5P should recognize and respect the validity of tree pronouns. EEng 07:30, 22 April 2021 (UTC)

• This bizarre episode, in case anyone's confused by the apparent non sequitur. ‑ Iridescent 07:48, 22 April 2021 (UTC)
• This descendent of Ash and Elm resonates with that. Yngvadottir (talk) 08:31, 22 April 2021 (UTC)

You're probably right that that's where they're coming from. (The resemblance was obvious to a certain San Francisco-based organisation's pronouncements from about a year ago.) But it's a surprisingly simplistic and frankly clueless approach to be labelled "feminist". Yngvadottir (talk) 08:31, 22 April 2021 (UTC)

I think (emphasis on 'think') that "A Feminist Critique of Wikipedia’s Epistemology" is shorthand for "A critique of Wikipedia's epistemology using the analytical tools which developed from the feminist movement", rather than "Speaking as a feminist, this is why I think Wikipedia is wrong".

I assume the Death Star globe represents Wikipedia, and the gratutious nudity represents Commons.

The misunderstanding of Wikipedia which I reference above, which I think is what's going on here, is a fairly common one. For the past 30 years it's one of the absolute givens of every field of study at every level—whatever one's political viewpoint—that the internet and the flow of information are the current drivers of cultural, social and economic change. Unless you're very, very familiar with how Wikipedia operates, what its rules on sourcing and more particularly on proportional due weight are, and why they came to be that way, then it's totally counter-intuitive that the website which to most people is a symbol of progressiveness and the freedom of ideas (see this monument on the Polish-German border, and note the familiar-looking globe; because we get so used to seeing Wikipedia/Wikimedia as a bunch of people squabbling over minutiae it's easy to lose sight of just how deep the cultural impact of this website is) should have deference to established wisdom, resistance to new ideas, and an unwillingness to engage with any idea outside the academic mainstream, literally hard-wired into its most fundamental processes. ‑ Iridescent 18:56, 22 April 2021 (UTC)

You are right on the impossibility of renaming Wikipedia:Neutral point of view, but we can still clarify, in that policy, the misunderstanding you've pointed out. Paul August ☎ 00:50, 23 April 2021 (UTC)

replacing the objective of creating an encyclopaedia with the objective of widening participation, they lose the point

I don't think so.  They believe that Wikipedia's volunteers are richer, whiter, more western, more educated, and from more industrialized, more individualistic, and more democratic societies than the overall world population.  (We all agree with them.)  They believe that biased people create biased content.  (Number of featured pages supported by Wikipedia:WikiProject Football: 274. Number of featured pages supported by Wikipedia:WikiProject Trains: 111. Number of featured pages supported by Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red: 8. Number of featured pages supported by Wikipedia:WikiProject Parenting: 1. Maybe they're right?)

Given these starting beliefs, if you want a less-biased Wikipedia, then you need to widen participation.  And that means, among other things, seeking out, encouraging, and supporting newcomers.  There are a lot more non-white people, a lot more women, and a lot more people who don't speak English natively with good internet access in 2021 than there were in 2001, or even in 2011.  A random internet user has a higher chance of being different from "us" now compared to 10 or 15 years ago. If, on the other hand, we take the traditional California approach of pulling up the ladder behind us, we will not ever have a less biased group, and we will always struggle to create less biased content.  Widening participation might get us better content in the end.

Iridescent, I agree with your interpretation of the title. Feminist research has a couple of unusual models, such as working as a waitress in a diner before writing scholarly articles about how difficult it is to be a waitress in a diner. And that brings me to the other point: this wasn't written by a "them"; it was written by an "us". Amanda Menking is User:Mssemantics, who has written half a dozen articles. "We" think there are problems that could be ameliorated by widening participation. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:21, 23 April 2021 (UTC)

Very well said WhatamIdoing. :0) Mark D Worthen PsyD (talk) [he/his/him] 04:46, 23 April 2021 (UTC)

More or less what I said above, then. I would not normally bother to respond to such assumptions and insinuations about the people who actually do the work here for which the WMF takes the credit. But this is potentially extremely damaging to the project I love. (Not to mention hurtful and damaging to real editors, and real readers who have come to depend on us.) Because it very much does stem from a mindset of control. And our strength is indeed our diversity in pursuit of a shared goal. I'm sorry, Iridescent. Yngvadottir (talk) 08:21, 23 April 2021 (UTC)

The remit of Women in Red is specifically biographies of women which are redlinks—that is, by definition any person in their remit is a niche subject in whom no Wikipedia editor had shown an interest for 20 years, and thus sources are unlikely to exist; it's something of a surprise to me that there are any featured articles in their remit let alone eight. Plus—uniquely among WikiProjects since the unpleasantness over Esperanza—WiR is a membership organization, so someone like Alice Ayres whom I took from redlink to FA doesn't qualify because I'm not a member of their little gang. A better comparator would be the 191 FAs covered by WikiProject Women's History or the 100 FAs covered by WikiProject Women.

I'm not at all surprised that WikiProject Football has 274 FAs. Unless and until one lives outside North America, it's hard to appreciate just how culturally significant football is. Assuming the usually-quoted figure of 4 billion people following football is even vaguely accurate (which it probably is; the TV audience for the World Cup is consistently 3+1⁄2 billion and not everyone has a television or will be off work or in a suitable time zone), football fans considerably outnumber women. Football articles (and sports in general) also have an advantage in Wikipedia terms in that many of the sources come pre-collated; if I want to write biographies of every player who played for Mansfield Town in 1953, all I need is the 1953 Rothmans Football Yearbook and The History of Mansfield Town F.C. and a lot of the heavy lifting has already been done for me, or to put it another way if I have the sources to write a biography of one player, I also have the sources to write the biographies of all 15 of his team-mates. (The same thing is true of your other example of trains; if I've gone to the trouble of getting the sources to write the history of one station on the Chicago Green Line, I can almost certainly use those same sources to write the history of the other 29 stations on the same line.)

I know "Wikipedia is biased" is an article of faith at the WMF, but I'm still unconvinced that it's anything other than an artefact of Wikipedia reflecting real-world sources. The historical record is always going to include more male than female biographies since there were so many professions which were either formally off-limits to women (military, politics, religion…) or de facto off limits since they required professional qualifications and women were forbidden or discouraged from studying those topics (engineering, visual arts, medicine…). If the number of biographies of women on Wikipedia started to approach the number of biographies of men, I'd consider that in and of itself as evidence of a seriously problematic systemic bias. ‑ Iridescent 06:59, 26 April 2021 (UTC)

All very true, but in practice WiR, like WMUK & other organized initiatives, tends to take an "inclusive" approach, & if Alice Ayres is not claimed for their trophy cabinet, it is probably mainly because it predates the project. And there are still wierd notability gender differences. A post at WiR talk recently drew my attention to WP:NRU - what about that? Johnbod (talk) 15:37, 26 April 2021 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Biography has 1,477 FAs. If WikiProject Women has tagged 100, then the math suggests that we have something in the vicinity of 13 FAs about a man for every one FA about a woman. I'm not convinced that is entirely due to the combination of no sources and historical discrimination. I think that a more significant factor is that we just don't want to write those articles. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:25, 26 April 2021 (UTC)

I'm female, wife, mother and have always disliked being told that I have to write about any of those. I mean, honestly, who want to write about parenting if the entire day is about parenting? This place is supposed to be an escape and I never thought I had to write about women. Of the FA biographies I've written a couple have been about women i.e Murasaki Shikibu but as many are about men. There's no rule that women can't write about men, or literature, philosophy, medicine, art, mathematics, etc. but for some reason we persist in insisting that women have to stay in their corner. I reject that premise. Maybe I'm not the only editor who feels that way? Victoria (tk) 23:48, 26 April 2021 (UTC)

the unpleasantness over Esperanza is there a write-up about this somewhere? (also, nice FA) Elli (talk | contribs) 12:09, 26 April 2021 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2007-01-02/Experanza is probably the best Cliff's Notes on what happened, while the 'official' version of events is at WP:Esperanza. The deletion discussion itself is at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:Esperanza which in turn links to the endless deletion reviews, while the original failed deletion proposal is at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:Esperanza/Archive1. ‑ Iridescent 14:19, 26 April 2021 (UTC)

Eh, Wikipedia as a whole community imparts its own biases by inclusion or omission, even if neutrality is adhered to on an article-by-article basis, so I think it's fair to identify problems there and propose solutions. The bigger question is how much those efforts matter if the wider source-making context remains as skewed as it is, essentially missing the forest for the trees. I suspect the issue of "garbage in" is the more pressing one versus "garbage out", but I have fairly low expectations that's going to meaningfully change anytime soon. For all its faults, the community has waaaaay more cognizance of its blind spots than the press. I couldn't find a single pundit covering the Donna Strickland case that reflected on the fact that they hadn't considered her worth writing about until she had a Nobel and a tech issue on Wikipedia to cover. Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs ^talk 21:35, 26 April 2021 (UTC)

Thank you

wild garlic

I had forgotten that you reviewed this, but just looked it up for personal reasons. Missing Yoninah. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 22:18, 14 April 2021 (UTC)

I'd forgotten as well, to be honest. I'm not sure why I reviewed that, as it's not a subject I'd usually touch (I'm totally unqualified to comment on it); there must have been a particularly big backlog at the time. First I've seen that Yoninah had died; a shame to hear that, she was one of the good ones. ‑ Iridescent 10:42, 16 April 2021 (UTC)

Summary style

There has been a 14-year-long discussion on Talk:Motorola 68000 about its bitness (c.f. Talk:Motorola 68000/Archive 1#So, how many bits? and do not mention Where's Romford this week? ☺). This is something that people have been discussing for 40 years, as I mentioned when it came up on the Administrators' Noticeboard. But it got bogged down on Wikipedia because practically everyone was pointing at themselves and no-one was pointing at "Here! This expert says this.".

Well we're onto sources and what experts in the field actually say a little bit more, now. I even found the initial conference paper on the design by the two senior Motorola engineers, which as far as I can tell has taken twenty years to reach this article. I'm trying to steer clear of now hitting "16-bit^{[1][2][3][4][5]}", which seems otherwise inevitable once people start citing sources. See Talk:Motorola 68000#Draft content.

I have a vague recollection that recently we had an Emperor has no clothes moment with Project:summary style, with an outright statement that it was a bad idea that we picked this, and it has led to nut 'graphs and news. Certainly, in recent years I've seen a lot of people at Project:Biographies of living persons noticeboard and elsewhere more willing to cut the Gordian knot with the intractable "Irish-Catholic-Atlantean-Turkish-of-Scottish-descent-with-a-Brazilian-passport^{[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14]}" stuff by recommending that introductions should introduce and if something is complex it should not be squashed into a Nanopaedia in the first sentence, or even the introduction, and instead one should actually explain the complexity in the rest of the article.

Did I dream that moment? Uncle G (talk) 19:13, 15 April 2021 (UTC)

I'm not aware of the discussion, but I think the basic premise of summary style is sound. On most topics, we're simultaneously writing for people with little or no knowledge of the subject who just want the answers to "I'm visiting Des Moines next month, is there anything interesting there?" and "I heard a song I liked on the radio and I want to know more about the band" type questions, and people who actually want to know the full history of whatever the topic is. In my opinion the current preferred structure of Wikipedia articles (irrespective of the fact that most articles don't actually follow it) is about right: a brief summary of the topic at the start for people who just want to know what it is and don't need the full story (with an infobox if appropriate if it's a subject where names-and-numbers are significant); a longer explanation after the Table of Contents for people who are actually interested in both the detail and the controversies; and links to sub-pages for those aspects which are either so arcane that the majority of readers won't care, or which are so complicated that it would give them undue weight if they were covered in full in the main article. ‑ Iridescent 10:43, 16 April 2021 (UTC)

I think one issue with sub-pages is that maintaining (and reading) a set of pages is harder than just one. That's been my reason for not splitting African humid period despite several requests. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 11:09, 16 April 2021 (UTC)

A lot of the time it depends on just how obscure the sub-page is. As an example, Glass Age Development Committee is essentially nothing more than a footnote to Vauxhall Bridge—which is its only incoming link—but it's too long to have as an actual footnote in the main article, and too irrelevant for 99% of readers to include in the body text, so a stand-alone page is the only logical place for it. Wikipedia has quite a lot of these ultra-niche pages that ideally wouldn't exist, but which don't have any obvious merge targets and where outright deletion would be a disservice to the handful of readers who actually do want to know about the topic. ‑ Iridescent 15:15, 19 April 2021 (UTC)

Pilkington, eh? I came across that for The Burgies (AfD discussion). I also came across Morteza Javid (AfD discussion) with 10 sources for the word "Iran", exemplifying the aforementioned problem. Uncle G (talk) 09:53, 20 April 2021 (UTC)

Now that (Morteza Javid) is an impressive piece of bad sourcing. As far as I can tell on a quick skim, that's the same press release cited about 20 times from 20 different publications in a crude effort to give the illusion of broad coverage. If not for the inevitable complaints, I'd be inclined to invoke IAR and delete it as a de facto unsourced BLP. ‑ Iridescent 14:27, 20 April 2021 (UTC)

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