User talk:Asilvering

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Hi Asilvering! The thread you created at the Wikipedia:Teahouse, Adding self-made artwork to articles without images, has been archived because there was no discussion for a few days. You can still read the archived discussion. If you have follow-up questions, please . See also the help page about the archival process. The archival was done by Lowercase sigmabot III, and this notification was delivered by Muninnbot, both automated accounts. You can opt out of future notifications by placing {{bots|deny=Muninnbot}} on top of the current page (your user talk page). Muninnbot (talk) 19:02, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

Hugo Gottesmann

Please contact me at mjdoerr@att.net 12.239.192.130 (talk) 16:37, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

No, sorry. You can talk to me here, or ping me (see Template:Reply to if you're not sure how) on any Wikipedia talk page. -- asilvering (talk) 00:28, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

February with Women in Red

Women in Red Feb 2022, Vol 8, Issue 2, Nos 214, 217, 220, 221, 222 Online events: New: Black women | Hong Kong and Macau | Women in sport Continuing: Climate (year-long initiative) | #1day1woman Other ways to participate: Encourage someone to become a WiR member this month by registering in the box at the top of our main page. Join the conversations on our talkpage. Help us plan future events. Follow us on social media: Facebook | Instagram | Pinterest | Twitter

--Megalibrarygirl (talk) 15:09, 31 January 2022 (UTC) via MassMessaging

Thanks for help with Eclipse

Thanks again for your work making Eclipse Foundation a better article and helping me navigate the editing process.

Lkb335 (talk) 20:31, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

@Lkb335 No problem! Pass it on, and good luck out there. -- asilvering (talk) 20:56, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

Eugène Protot

Just to make sure we don't cut across each other, this is to let you know that I'm intending to work through the translation of the whole article, but that this may take a little time as there are quite a few French legal terms in it (and I have other things to do besides). Ingratis (talk) 14:16, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

Yes, thank you for doing this! I just stepped in to resolve that dab link and am happy to leave you to it! -- asilvering (talk) 17:38, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

Thanks! I've done as much as I think I can do with it for now as a translation but will certainly have missed something - if you have a moment to cast an eye over it that would be great. On a point of translation, do you think it's correct to translate avocat as "barrister"? they are similar but I'm not sure that they're the same. Ingratis (talk) 15:32, 6 February 2022 (UTC) Checking further, it seems that although they are now different they were the same in the 19th century so I've left it. Ingratis (talk) 15:39, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

Honestly, since legal terms differ based on time, place, language, and dialect, in a general-reader context I tend to just default to "lawyer" unless there is some specific reason why that would be unhelpful or misleading. Leaving the original word in brackets as you did is a good call, I think. -- asilvering (talk) 17:51, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

Yes, I think you're right! Ingratis (talk) 05:44, 7 February 2022 (UTC)

Irmintraut Schneider

Thankyou fro putting a proposed deletion nomination on Irmintraut Schneider. It is really getting frustrating how a mass sub-stub creator, who at times created articles at the speed of one article a minute, is able to get away with my reasoned attempts to lessen the flooding of Wikipedia with such sub-stubs. His determined mass reverting of my redirects is getting very tiresome.John Pack Lambert (talk) 19:15, 7 February 2022 (UTC)

@Johnpacklambert Judging by the edit summary I saw on Irmintraut Schneider from the other editor, I think it might help if you mentioned specifically what you checked to determine that the stub wasn't of a notable person? That might reduce the feeling of "there's no way that guy did a WP:BEFORE that fast, he just hates that I make a lot of stubs". It's pretty clear that you do hate mass stub-creation, so I can see why it would be hard for the other editor to assume good faith all the time. I've personally learned to be suspicious of "not notable" or "no sigcov"; even though I haven't been here all that long, I'm already coming to the conclusion that "fails WP:GNG" is synonymous with "I didn't check" in an alarmingly high % of cases, especially when the article is a neglected stub or a pile of disastrous WP:OR. I'm with you - it's frustrating how much work it can be to remove things relative to how much work went into making them in the first place - but I don't want people to feel trampled on, either. -- asilvering (talk) 20:43, 7 February 2022 (UTC)

• • The editor in question made so many stubs that he has been banned from making new stubs because his actions were so disruptive. At times he was making them at a rate of one a minute. It does not matter how much effort I put into checking background, he will revert me, and with the unreasonable limit of one AfD edit a date being placed on me, I end up with a list way too long to ever get to. I am really tired of how hard it is to remove total rubbish and articles on people who are not by any stretch of the imagination notable from Wikipedia.John Pack Lambert (talk) 20:49, 7 February 2022 (UTC)

    If you're being habitually reverted by the same person despite showing evidence of good-faith background checking before you PROD things and can't get anywhere talking to that editor, I think you may have reached "dispute resolution" time, alas. -- asilvering (talk) 21:42, 7 February 2022 (UTC)

Burkhard Wilhelm Pfeiffer

Good morning! Could you tell me what amount of inline citations would be appropriate for this article to remove the citation banner? Do I need to attach one to the end of every sentence? I tried to include them in reasonable amounts by grouping statements based on sources together and then citing after that. Is that not correct? Thank you. Evansknight (talk) 14:46, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

@Evansknight You've got the right idea! I wouldn't have tagged it if there were footnotes on the end of every paragraph, for example. But there are some sentences that definitely don't have attribution, like "The immense size of the work, and it’s somewhat pedantic and overbearing nature, earned Pfeiffer the nickname der praktische Pfeiffer, or "the Practical Pfeiffer" for the rest of his life." That one is right at the end of a paragraph so I can't generously assume that the next sentence will have the citation.

By the way, I noticed copying that one over that the German text is in italics rather than German-language markup. Did you know about this template you can use to tag non-English text? It will automatically put it in Italics, and it's helpful for pronunciation for screenreaders: Template:Lang. Kind of a pain to add if you're working in visual editor, but not so bad to add in the source editor. -- asilvering (talk) 20:25, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

Thanks again! I’ll make sure to back and footnote as much as I can. A lot of the information is from the same sources so I wasn’t sure if it seemed weird to footnote the same source several times in a row, but you’ve made it make sense to me. -Evansknight (talk) 20:48, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

It does feel kind of weird to me sometimes too, so I won't necessarily use the same footnote for two sentences that look pretty related. A trick I've seen some editors use is to comment out (WP:COMMENT) the citations when they're repeated, so any editor can see that they're there if they're going to move anything around in the wiki text, but people reading the article aren't distracted by dozens of individual footnotes. -- asilvering (talk) 23:27, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

Would you mind taking a look at the articles for Burkhard and Johann Pfeiffer and letting me know if they are sufficiently cited? I hate seeing that tag on them, but obviously I wouldn't remove it without external confirmation of their suitability.-Evansknight (talk) 01:39, 13 February 2022 (UTC)

@Evansknight I added a couple more for clarity, but I think you're fine to take off a maintenance tag like that if you've addressed the problem. -- asilvering (talk) 03:31, 13 February 2022 (UTC)

Thank you! Once I get more headway on the rest of the Pfeiffer articles, I may rely on your input again. -Evansknight (talk) 04:26, 13 February 2022 (UTC)

Thanks!

Thanks for helping w/ the deletion process in the Joan McAlister article. You know I got a nasty note telling me I'm "too new" and have no right to propose deletion or participate in deletion discussions? And of course this person vetoed the deletion without lifting a finger to improve the article afterwards... — Preceding unsigned comment added by Just Another Cringy Username (talk • contribs) 03:58, 12 February 2022 (UTC)

@Just Another Cringy Username Yeah, I noticed that. I'm really sorry this is happening to you. The newcomer guidance is all "BE BOLD!!" but then if you do anything competent you get accused of being a sockpuppet, and if you do anything wrong you get told you're too new to do things and should stop. There's a real whiplash between the cheerful and encouraging stuff developed by Growth Team and then the reality of actually interacting with the community. It helps to keep in mind that the admins who deal with things like vandalism and bad-faith deletion attempts are seeing the worst bs on this website day in and day out, so they're all some degree of jaded, out of patience, or developing brainworms, unless they're basically saints.

In that particular case, the admin was right to decline the speedy deletion - basically, you should only ever use a WP:PROD for something you think would be totally uncontroversial, and WP:CSD is for very specific types of deletion that are both completely uncontroversial and really urgent. It would have been fair for you to use PROD on that article (someone might have reversed it, but it wouldn't have been the "wrong" choice), but definitely not CSD. When I first started out, I sent everything to WP:AfD rather than ever using PROD because I figured that since I was new and wasn't confident that I completely understood what made an article deletable, everything I did should have other eyes on it to make sure I wasn't screwing something up. I'm not sure that's necessarily good advice, but it does seem to have worked out for me. It's why I put Joan Faber McAlister up for AfD instead of PROD - I'm not in Women's Studies, so I don't know if those awards or that journal EIC stint is enough to count under WP:NPROF. I didn't think so, but there's someone in the deletion discussion now arguing that that is the case, and they may well be right. In that case, I can come back and clean up the article some more so it's stubbier but less lopsided. This particular WikiEdu assignment type (write about a person and three of their works) can make some good articles but tends towards weirdly lopsided ones. -- asilvering (talk) 18:28, 12 February 2022 (UTC)

Sociology of Disaster

Yes, I'm at it again LOL. I'm trying to get Sociology of Disaster deleted as it's another of what you called those WikiEdu assignments. I've done everything right that I can see, but the link I placed on the delete log page just refuses to parse. It has my reasoning on there, but it won't show the standard heading and list it under the ToC like all the other page nominations. What am I doing wrong? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Just Another Cringy Username (talk • contribs) 07:45, 12 February 2022 (UTC)

@Just Another Cringy Username Yes, this one is also WikiEdu, but a different format of assignment this time. And some WikiEdu articles are very good! They're mostly made by undergraduate classes, so of course some students are very into it and some are not, some are very quick learners and some are not, and so the resulting articles run the full spectrum from "extremely valuable" to "total disaster". Most fall somewhere in the middle. You only really notice the ones that are problematic. Unfortunately, since they're class projects, the Problem Ones tend to come in batches.

I don't think you're going to have success getting this one deleted (apologies in advance for !voting keep). In general you're going to find the wikipedia community extremely unsympathetic to arguments about quality unless what you're looking at is a total disaster. Sometimes even then it's hard. (Here's an example, a total unworkable disaster of an article that hadn't been fixed in fourteen years, which I tried to get help for at the relevant wikiprojects to no avail, and even still it looked like it might be kept until another editor dropped a three-paragraph bomb onto the discussion and turned the tide: [1].) You will see a lot of people yelling WP:NOTCLEANUP and then doing nothing whatsoever to help clean it up; I'm afraid there's not a lot you can do about that one. If it's any consolation, it clearly drives a lot of long-established editors crazy too. I'm of the firm opinion that having a bad article is worse than having no article, since people who could write something worthwhile look at a mess and nope right out of there, but this is clearly not the consensus of the community and wikipedia runs on consensus so I'm SOL there. (See Paradise Lost as a great example - the article's been in this state for years, and it's one of the most famous works in all of English literature. There's simply no way there aren't people on WP right now with the skills and knowledge to write a much better version. I've improved it a bit, but I'm not a Milton scholar, and... ugh.)

The general argument in favour of "get rid of this, it's unsalvageable" is WP:TNT, but it's almost always very controversial and I suggest you avoid invoking it until you've watched enough deletion discussions that you feel reasonably confident that it won't go down like a lead balloon. Often, one "bad" vote can boomerang the whole discussion - it's like people start arguing over the merits of that one vote, rather than the merits of the article or the article's subject. (I made the mistake of calling an article a "stub" in an AfD once, and the comments were arguing that it's perfectly valid to have stubs, like this has anything to do with whether a subject is notable. The article was kept even though no one argued against my case for deletion! A bad close I could have disputed, I think, but I didn't feel it was worth the effort or drama.)

tl;dr: wikipedia editors are generally speaking extremely comfortable with extremely bad articles hanging around forever because "someone could fix it" or "it's not that bad". If you think the subject (not the article in its current state!) could pass WP:GNG or a subject-specific guideline like WP:NPROF, you are very unlikely to succeed in getting it deleted. But you can delete or consolidate text. WP:ATD has some other options. -- asilvering (talk) 18:58, 12 February 2022 (UTC)

@Just Another Cringy Username As for the technical question: I think someone else fixed this for you because it looks fine now? But now that you're autoconfirmed, you can use Twinkle, which makes the whole process so much easier that I don't actually remember how to do it manually. Find it in Preferences --> Gadgets. Also, I suggest you go to Preferences --> Editing --> Discussion pages and turn on all those options. -- asilvering (talk) 19:00, 12 February 2022 (UTC)

I'm discovering that even if an article doesn't get deleted, nominating it is a good way to get people talking about it and finally digging in to fix longstanding issues. Same thing happened w/ the Anil's Ghost article. People hated me for trying to delete it, but it looks a lot better now than it did and I doubt that would've happened if I hadn't forced the issue.

Thanks for your help...again! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Just Another Cringy Username (talk • contribs) 21:12, 12 February 2022 (UTC)

@Just Another Cringy Username That's certainly true, but definitely better as "a reason to not feel bitter about articles being kept" rather than "a reason to nominate dodgy articles to AfD". That's definitely not what AfD is intended for, and if it looks like this is what you're doing, or if in general people think you're misusing the AfD process, you might get blocked from AfD entirely. Which would be a bummer! I think now that you've seen the outcome of the Anil's Ghost AfD you can see what kinds of changes you can make on your own without raising too many eyebrows, and it's better to use solutions like that wherever possible. The kinds of articles you've been digging through have often been forgotten for a long, long time, and were created back when Wikipedia was all about just throwing as much stuff up as you could and having faith that the community would improve it later. "Later" is now. It's ok to just cut that stuff. When you give full edit summaries about what you removed and why, someone can find it again later if it's really necessary, or they can revert your changes and have a chat with you about it.

fyi, you can sign your posts on talk pages by typing ~~~~ at the end. -- asilvering (talk) 21:47, 12 February 2022 (UTC)

Ernie O'Malley

Hello there. Thank you for your very fair review of the above article. May I ask what grade of article below GA it stands at now, and would you add that info. to its Talk page? Many thanks, Billsmith60 (talk) 21:33, 13 February 2022 (UTC)

Got you covered already: I rated it as B-class right before doing the review. -- asilvering (talk) 22:50, 13 February 2022 (UTC)

@Billsmith60 Sorry, adding ping asilvering (talk) 22:51, 13 February 2022 (UTC)

D&G

Replying here, just so our friend Czar does not get more notifications than necessary :) I have a couple of problems with using the primary source material on body without organs about the egg example. And I think these could be informative about my work on Wikipedia in the future. These are just some considerations; I really don't think your suggestion was misplaced or incorrect. Here's just what I've decided on now.

If this were a paper I was writing, I would absolutely rely upon the source material, and based on our exchanges about Lorenza Boettner, that's your view as well. Totally understandable, but I find that to be somewhat of an untenable solution in this case. I'm not sure how familiar you are with D&G, but the interpretation of their work is varied (a particularly stark example), so going beyond statements of fact ("D&G use the egg as an example. They say 'quote that is not understandable to most people'.") is potentially controversial. (If not impossible, because of their intentional ambiguities.) In this respect, I think it is different from a plot summary; when one starts to interpret the text -- and interpretation has to happen with D&G's work, IMO -- our guidance on plot summaries is not so helpful.

Second, while WP:V technically allows us to cite materials that are hard to access or hard to read -- you can cite the sole surviving copy of an Esperanto treatise on [whatever] held in the private vaults of an archive, which has a waitlist of 3 years to access -- I find it a bit unfair to expect people to verify things directly from the very complicated texts of D&G. In math education, we talk about 'mathematical maturity' when students encounter a new idea; do they have the mathematical maturity to engage with it? This is not just having had classes in number theory or whatever, but the kind of thinking of a mathematician; of recognizing patterns, following arguments, devising new ones, sensing that a certain line of reason is worthwhile, understanding trial and error, etc. In my experience, many of the people interested in D&G -- and especially the BwO -- are high schoolers, who do not have the philosophical maturity to engage with the source material. So even if I'm off about my first point (whether it is actually interpretive), I also have a pedagogical rationale to exclude that source material, and look more to overviews and accessible journal articles. Whether this approach is workable is TBD, of course ;)

Just some thoughts. Again, if it were anywhere but here, I'd oblige; but this space is special and may need special considerations. Urve (talk) 23:36, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

@Urve Yes, that makes a lot of sense. When I initially wrote my question I had the interpretation problem in mind but thought "well, surely just summarizing the example itself is possible," but in retrospect that's a nonsense thought. Without veering into interpretation you'd be left with a sentence like, I don't know, "D&G use the example of an egg to demonstrate their point." Yes, very informative, good summary, much helpful.

I'm amazed there are high schoolers interested in D&G! I doubt I'd even heard of them until grad school. -- asilvering (talk) 02:08, 16 February 2022 (UTC)

Thank you. D&G are essential reading for high schoolers doing debate in some parts of the US -- they were when I was! It's rarer now, but D&G's arguments still pop up relatively frequently, depending on where you are. Urve (talk) 05:29, 16 February 2022 (UTC)

Teahouse talkback: you've got messages!

Hello, Asilvering. Your question has been answered at the Teahouse Q&A board. Feel free to reply there!
Please note that all old questions are archived after 2-3 days of inactivity. Message added by David Biddulph (talk) 01:43, 16 February 2022 (UTC). (You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{teahouse talkback}} template).

Deletion Process

So it appears there's speedy delete and AfD and then a sort of "middle ground" between them where you can put the delete tag up top to recommend deletion w/o doing the full AfD process. Am I reading that right? Just Another Cringy Username (talk) 21:24, 16 February 2022 (UTC)

@Just Another Cringy Username I think you're talking about WP:PROD. Does that link help? -- asilvering (talk) 00:39, 17 February 2022 (UTC)

Yep, that's it! I just wanted to make sure I wasn't conflating the two. I kept thinking PROD and AfD were the same thing, but then not. Thanks! Just Another Cringy Username (talk) 02:07, 17 February 2022 (UTC)

@Just Another Cringy Username Indeed not! Basically, CSD (speedy) is for specific types of deletions that are totally uncontroversial and/or need to happen very urgently, PROD is for deletions that don't fit into a CSD category and which you think are almost certainly uncontroversial, and AfD is for everything else. Happy to answer any specific questions if you have them. -- asilvering (talk) 04:27, 17 February 2022 (UTC)

Precious

women anarchy

Thank you for quality articles such as Joan Mitchell and Blanche Lefebvre, with competence in several languages, for beginning with Roter Ochse, for reviewing, such as Lorenza Böttner, for explaining with patience "unless they're basically saints", - you are an awesome Wikipedian!

You are recipient no. 2701 of Precious, a prize of QAI. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 20:25, 18 February 2022 (UTC)

Thank you, @Gerda Arendt! I hasten to add that I claim no writing credit for any of these (well, except "basically saints"), but I suppose that's extremely apt for a Precious labelled "women anarchy". :) -- asilvering (talk) 04:34, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

Well deserved. Get ready for sweetheart Gerda to bless your talk every once in a while. I look up to both of you. Urve (talk) 06:24, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

Your GA nomination of Joseph Favre

Hi there, I'm pleased to inform you that I've begun reviewing the article Joseph Favre you nominated for GA-status according to the criteria. This process may take up to 7 days. Feel free to contact me with any questions or comments you might have during this period. Message delivered by Legobot, on behalf of No Great Shaker -- No Great Shaker (talk) 16:40, 25 February 2022 (UTC)

Your GA nomination of Joseph Favre

The article Joseph Favre you nominated as a good article has passed ; see Talk:Joseph Favre for comments about the article. Well done! If the article has not already appeared on the main page as a "Did you know" item, or as a bold link under "In the News" or in the "On This Day" prose section, you can nominate it within the next seven days to appear in DYK. Bolded names with dates listed at the bottom of the "On This Day" column do not affect DYK eligibility. Message delivered by Legobot, on behalf of No Great Shaker -- No Great Shaker (talk) 13:41, 26 February 2022 (UTC)

March editathons

Women in Red Mar 2022, Vol 8, Issue 3, Nos 214, 217, 222, 223, 224, 225 Online events: New: Women's History Month Art+Activism | Feminism and Folklore | Dutch Caribbean Continuing: Climate (year-long initiative) | #1day1woman | Women in sport (Feb/Mar) Other ways to participate: Encourage someone to become a WiR member this month by registering in the box at the top of our main page. Join the conversations on our talkpage. Help us plan future events. Follow us on social media: Facebook | Instagram | Pinterest | Twitter

--Megalibrarygirl (talk) 16:37, 27 February 2022 (UTC) via MassMessaging

Gerhard Schröder

I have repeated the edit to Gerhard Schröder, which is factual, to list his current role first not hide it at the bottom of the page. Listing old roles, which at this stage are actually LESS known globally than his current role is engaging in misinformation.

I have changed the lead from ... is a German retired politician, consultant and lobbyist, who served as the chancellor of Germany from 1998 to 2005 ... TO ... is a member of the board of the Russian state owned company Gazprom, he is also a retired German politician, consultant and lobbyist, who served as the chancellor of Germany from 1998 to 2005.....

This edit is NOT a disruptive edit. Its a fact, a highly relevant fact - his current role, and the role he is most known for throughout the world. 79.155.94.28 (talk) 17:21, 27 February 2022 (UTC)

Since one of your earliest edit summaries is "kill this man" I think you're going to have real trouble convincing anyone you are being anything other than disruptive here. -- asilvering (talk) 18:51, 27 February 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the suggestion on Theresa A. Yugar draft.

This is helpful. --Dzingle1 (talk) 19:31, 28 February 2022 (UTC)

@Dzingle1 Glad to hear it, and good luck with the article! -- asilvering (talk) 19:49, 28 February 2022 (UTC)

Could you rename Draft:Armand Baltazar to Draft:Timeless (series)?

Hi User:Asilvering, I have read your comments and think they make sense. Could you please rename the draft to Draft:Timeless (book series)? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:647:5800:1A1F:DC52:32D7:10ED:939F (talk) 00:48, 2 March 2022 (UTC)

I've decided to request g7, as I won't have time to improve the draft right now. I'll probably pick the project up again at a later time, or move onto something else. 2601:647:5800:1A1F:DC52:32D7:10ED:939F (talk) 00:57, 2 March 2022 (UTC)