User talk:BrownHairedGirl

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This talk page was last edited (diff) on 9 October 2022 at 18:12 by GeneralNotability (talk • contribs • logs)

Link Rot Banner Removal

Hello! I saw the banner you placed on Barbara Handschu regarding link rot, which I have cleaned up. I wanted to leave a note in case there were any issues, as this is my first time removing one. I am leaving the other banner on the page for now, as I am still looking for more citations to improve the page. Please let me know if there are any issues with that removal, and happy editing! :) StakeStack (talk) 23:47, 22 August 2022 (UTC)

Hi @StakeStack

Thank you for taking the time to improve the refs. This is unglamorous, but valuable work which support the core Wikipedia policy of WP:Verifiability. I see that you have made only 24 edits, but you seem to be a fast learner

I too a look at your edit[1], and I saw two things:

1. You moved the NYTimes ref from the "See also" section to an inline ref, and elegantly used it in three places, correctly naming the cite so that it doesn't get multiple entries in the reflist. Nice work.
2. You deleted the bare URL ref to http://www.dobrishlaw.com/attorneys_Barbara-E-Handschu.php ... which is not so good.
   Yes the link is dead, but per WP:DEADLINK, it should not be removed unless repair has been tried. The simplest step is to tag it with {{Dead link}}, like this: <ref>http://www.dobrishlaw.com/attorneys_Barbara-E-Handschu.php {{Dead link|date=August 2022}}</ref> ... which alerts other editors and bots to try to rescue it.
   Alternatively, you can go a few archive sites such as https://web.archive.org/ or http://archive.today, and look for an archived copy. That's what I did: I found https://web.archive.org/web/20150601005148/http://www.dobrishlaw.com/attorneys_Barbara-E-Handschu.php and I added it in this edit.[2]

Hope this helps. And thanks again for your good work BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 00:10, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

I appreciate your help. I have been traveling and unable to edit recently, but am starting up again and will continue to study Wikipedia policies so I am formatting and tagging things correctly. It seems the "source editor" may be more efficient in completing some of these referencing/tagging tasks - I have a lot to learn! Thanks again :) StakeStack (talk) 11:59, 14 September 2022 (UTC)

Interesting Engineering page

Hello,

I'm the editor-in-chief of Interesting Engineering. I notice that on the page about our website, there is a box alerting users that there may be a conflict of interest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interesting_Engineering_(website)

However, I note here that the box can be removed if "the problem is not explained on the article's talk page, and/or if no current attempts to resolve the problem can be found."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:COI#When_to_remove

I note that there is no discussion on any issues and nobody has raised any issues. With that in mind, would it be possible to remove the box now? Otherwise, is there anything I can do to help with its removal?

Best,

Mike MikeBrownIntEng (talk) 17:20, 13 September 2022 (UTC)

Hi @MikeBrownIntEng

The page Talk:Interesting Engineering (website) does include a note that @Nick.lucchesi has a COI. The issues are explained more at User talk:Nick.lucchesi.

To be bluntly honest, the article as it stands is crap. It is wholly promotional in tone and substance, and the refs provided do not add up to evidence that the website meets WP:GNG. The last two of the article's four sections look like extracts from a pitch to advertisers. The whole thing needs a complete rewrite.

It's all so flimsy that I would have WP:PRODded it if I hadn't seen that the website has a lot of hits. That leads me to think that there may be more WP:SIGCOV available to establish notability. The most useful thing tat you could do would be to identify that WP:SIGCOV, and post links on the article's talk page ... along with a clear declaration of your own COI. See WP:PLAINSIMPLECOI. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 17:40, 13 September 2022 (UTC)

Okay, thanks for your help on this, I will share thoughts on the talk page! MikeBrownIntEng (talk) 08:59, 14 September 2022 (UTC)

I just shared some links on the talk page, let me know if those are helpful and if there's anything else that can be done to help here. MikeBrownIntEng (talk) 16:13, 14 September 2022 (UTC)

Thanks, @MikeBrownIntEng. That looks like the sort of thing that might help.

I have not analysed or even viewed the links you posted, so I can't say whether those particular links help (other than that Youtube rarely helps to establish notability). But links is the best that a COI editor can provide.

However, I have no idea why you chose to approach me. My only edit to the article was an automated technical edit[3] to fix formatting of references. In doing that, I viewed only the changes, and never even read the article until you posted a link here.

I have absolutely no interest whatsoever in the topic, and want no further involvement with it. I was happy to show you what you can do, but that's limit of my involvement ... unless someone chooses to nominate the article for deletion, in which case I think that unless something big had changed, the evaluation I would make would probably lead me to support deletion.

Best wishes, BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 16:28, 14 September 2022 (UTC)

Okay, thanks for your help. I was looking for a Wikipedia editor that may be able to help with the issue, so looked at the version history to see who contributed. I won't bother you any further, and I appreciate your assistance with this. MikeBrownIntEng (talk) 16:32, 14 September 2022 (UTC)

AFD - Study Techniques

Wow - an unrhymed coupled in an AFD! Wonderful.  Velella  ^{Velella Talk}   23:03, 13 September 2022 (UTC)

Thanks, @Velella BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 23:08, 13 September 2022 (UTC)

Category:Categories by century and country has been nominated for merging

Category:Categories by century and country has been nominated for merging. A discussion is taking place to decide whether this proposal complies with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. Privybst (talk) 14:56, 14 September 2022 (UTC)

Category:Novels by country by century has been nominated for renaming

Category:Novels by country by century has been nominated for renaming. A discussion is taking place to decide whether this proposal complies with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. Laurel Lodged (talk) 07:25, 15 September 2022 (UTC)

Category:Politics by country by century has been nominated for renaming

Category:Politics by country by century has been nominated for renaming. A discussion is taking place to decide whether this proposal complies with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. Laurel Lodged (talk) 07:26, 15 September 2022 (UTC)

Category:Television by country by century has been nominated for renaming

Category:Television by country by century has been nominated for renaming. A discussion is taking place to decide whether this proposal complies with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. Laurel Lodged (talk) 07:28, 15 September 2022 (UTC)

Converting bare URL

Hello, in a run of Citation bot you have made a large number of changes such as this which fill in the bare URL of https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/business-government/tools-support/open-data-support The problem with this is that just goes to a top level page which does not actually verify anything. I assume that when these were added they should have pointed to some page on the site that gives detail on the subject of the article. May be we should remove them all and replace with {{cn}} tags or add a tag such as {{failed verification}}. Any thoughts? Keith D (talk) 19:33, 16 September 2022 (UTC)

Hi @Keith D

At first glance, I thought that maybe you were telling me that @Citation bot has screwed up the filling of some soft 404 URLs, by using the title from the redirect target.

But in the case of the diff you posted,[4], @Citation bot seems to have correctly filled the bare URL ref to https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/business-government/tools-support/open-data-support

So the problem here is not in any way with @Citation bot. The problem is that some editor or editors have added a ref which is not just bare, but uselessly vague.

The correct action in such cases would be to add the {{nonspecific}} tag to the current ref or, as you suggest remove these refs and replace them with {{Citation needed}}.

But I got curious as to what had happened here, so I went burrowing. First I searched for insource:/https:\/\/www\.ordnancesurvey\.co\.uk\/business-government\/tools-support\/open-data-support/i, which found 119 hits. But I was curious as to how so many of them had come to be filled just now, so I did a little more burrowing, and found that there was a mass replacement of older URLs by @Citation bot's owner @AManWithNoPlan: see these edits.

I know that AManWithNoPlan is an exceptionally skilled and conscientious editor, so I am sure there was a good reason for this, and possibly some discussion somewhere. Maybe AManWithNoPlan can explain.

Also, this has echoes of a UK geography issue to which @PamD drew my attention a few months back. It was being discussed on some project page, tho I can't recall which. But the same project may have a view on this mess ... and I don't want to go ripping out refs unless there is a clear consensus to do so. So some projectspace discussion is needed. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 21:21, 16 September 2022 (UTC)

Thanks, I have dropped a note on WikiProject UK geography. Keith D (talk) 22:38, 16 September 2022 (UTC)

The problem is that this is link to a database. As such, there is no real good link. And, the old link had no good archive. So, I turned "total rubbish" into "kinda rubbishy". AManWithNoPlan (talk) 21:13, 17 September 2022 (UTC)

Emporis.com has gone, but is preserved

Emporis.com, used as a source and/or an external link in thousands of articles on tall buildings, has recently been discontinued. The target pages generally seem to have been preserved in the Internet Archive, though. Can you come up with a script to substitute in those working IA links? BD2412 T 00:16, 18 September 2022 (UTC)

Hi @BD2412! Hope you are well.

I am pretty sure that this is not a wildly complex task. But I have not done that sort of thing before, so it would take me quite a bit of work to get up to speed.

However, I know two most excellent editors who may be able to help:

• @GreenC does a lot of work with the Internet Archive, and is a v skilled programmer
• @Rlink2 does a lot of v skilled and accurate work with archives.

I hope that one of them may be able to help. If not, I suggest a post at WP:BOTREQ. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 01:17, 18 September 2022 (UTC)

Many thanks, I'm sure one of your proposed avenues will work out. BD2412 T 01:24, 18 September 2022 (UTC)

User:BD2412, I can do it. -- GreenC 03:15, 18 September 2022 (UTC)

Great! BD2412 T 03:28, 18 September 2022 (UTC)

Thread for this request now picked up at Wikipedia:Link_rot/URL_change_requests#Emporis.com_links. -- GreenC 15:13, 20 September 2022 (UTC)

Sorry

Sorry for stepping on your toes, however, please note that my edits predate your posting of the inuse, which you posted while I was still editing.--Auric talk 13:30, 20 September 2022 (UTC)

Not so, @Auric. See https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ba%C4%9Fc%C4%B1lar&action=history

My edit of 13:02[5] was the first edit in 8 days, the start of a planned series of cleanup edits. You decided to jump in immediately after my first edit, and created an edit conflict. So before my next edit, I added an {{inuse}} tag, which you chose to ignore. Even if you had not seen the tag when you started editing, you will have been made aware of it when saving your edits.

This has all been a big waste of time. You piled in on my work, multiplying the total editor effort in involved by a factor of at least three, and that is before the time used up on this talk page.

If I had no been disrupted, fixing the mangled refs on this article would have taken about 5 to 10 minutes of my time. But thanks to your disruptive interventions, nearly 40 minutes has passed before I am ready to do the next page.

Please, please ... when someone else is fixing something, don't jump into the middle of their work and start creating edit conflicts. You are a highly experienced editor, so I am surprised that this should need to be said. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 13:41, 20 September 2022 (UTC)

Again, sorry. I didn't receive any edit conflicts and had no idea you were doing anything. I checked the history before I started, but didn't see any IPs, so I didn't check back. I was focusing on the bottom sections of the article, so I didn't notice any new tag.--Auric talk 13:52, 20 September 2022 (UTC)

@Auric: I do believe that you mean that apology, and I don't want to be rude. But I still think that this episode could have been avoided, so for future benefit I'll explain why and take the risk of this appearing rude.

If you checked the history before you started, you'd have seen my edit a minute or two before, manually cleaning up some refs. That should have been a good indication of work-in-progress. I don't see what IPs have to do with any of this.

This page is from a list of articles with bare URLs produced by one of my big searches, in this case from the 2020220901 database dump. Most of them are fed to citation bot and/or my User:BrownHairedGirl/No-reflinks websites tagging process, but some I cleanup manually. This is one of a small set where I decided to do manual cleanup.

So I am puzzled that you jumped on this page only about 100 seconds after my edit. That doesn't seem like a coincidence: what's up? BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:08, 20 September 2022 (UTC)

Coincidences do happen. The page in question popped up in Category:CS1 errors: unsupported parameter, likely due to the references being in that odd combination of English and Turkish. I usually check the History of pages with odd references like that to make sure it isn't some IP user making an odd edit, as either a new user error or vandalism, like Lili Marleen, which I found and fixed earlier, which can be easily fixed with a simple undo. Since I didn't see any recent IP activity and there was no visible sign on the page of any editor activity, I started fixing references. Then a notification popped up on another website and I stopped editing for a little time, only to come back to your edit. --Auric talk 14:26, 20 September 2022 (UTC)

@Auric: sorry, Auric but that doesn't tally with the history I see.

My first edit was saved at 13:02.[6] Your first edit was a tiny one,[7] converting a space to a dash. It was saved three minutes later, after only a tiny simple change ... so if you had checked the history, you should have seen my edit. I'm not suggesting any bad faith, just a lack of care.

I could of course reduce the risk of this by being much more prolific with {{inuse}} templates, but in general I try to avoid them on low-edit pages because they take more of my time and clutter up the page history. And in this case, {{inuse}} didn't help. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:44, 20 September 2022 (UTC)

Regardless, that is what happened. I did see your edit, but I didn't attach any importance to it. Lots of users edit an article, making only one change here or there. I suppose editors could wait 5 minutes to see if the last editor is going to make other changes or leave a message on their talk page to see if they are finished editing that page, but that could easily tick someone off, and I try to avoid that.--Auric talk 14:55, 20 September 2022 (UTC)

@Auric: That's what I thought happened, and why I didn't just drop this.

You saw that I was on the case, fixing refs on a page with a lot of refs to fix, and you decided to pile in and do the same thing at the same time ... and you didn't foresee the inevitable duplication of effort and edit conflicts.

I am sure you acted in good faith, but it was not a great judgement. No need to leave a msg in such cases; just move on to one of the many thousands of articles with stale problems which are not being actively fixed by someone else. That avoids wasting you time and someone else's times.

Best wishes, BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 17:57, 20 September 2022 (UTC)

Please don't assume my actions. I saw no such thing. I saw an article that needed fixing and that wasn't being fixed. I'm sorry to have caused you stress, but I acted in good faith.--Auric talk 19:52, 20 September 2022 (UTC)

I did not assume. I had a hunch, so I asked nicely, and you confirmed my hunch. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 01:29, 21 September 2022 (UTC)

Wikipedia entry on Fiona Watt

Dear BrownedHairedGirl, I am contacting you as the Wikipedia editor who did the last updates and change to the entry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiona_Watt. I am referring to the addition of a whistle-blowing investigation which was added to the entry earlier this year. The addition is factually correct and referenced correctly. Its position however in the entry from our view is should be rearranged, and the corresponding paragraphs be moved to the section 'Career'. I do no want to make that change without having consulted with a Wikipedia editor. For disclosure: Fiona Watt is now heading EMBO (see Embocomm). I'd very much appreciate your feedback. Best regards, Tilmann Kiessling. Embocomm (talk) 09:07, 21 September 2022 (UTC)

Hi @Embocomm (Tilmann Kiessling)

My edits to the article Fiona Watt were purely technical, to fill bare URLs. I have no substantive interest in the topic.

However, I do see that you have a clear conflict of interest (COI) wrt to Watt, who is Director of the European Molecular Biology Organization. Wikipedia's policy WP:Conflict of interest is very clear that a person should not edit an article where they have a COI. However, as far as I can see all of the edits to Wikipedia by User:Embocomm have been to articles where you have a clear COI.

That is unacceptable. Please desist. I will now post warnings on your talk pages and on the articles which have been edited by the user Embocomm (talk · contribs). I note that the page User:Embocomm (permalink) correctly declares a COI wrt to two articles, but despite this the account has repeatedly been used to edit articles which should not have been touched.

Also, please note that the username "Embocomm" is not acceptable per our policy WP:ISU because it implies that it is a shared account, which is forbidden by our policy WP:Username policy#Shared_accounts. The page User:Embocomm (permalink) confirms that such misuse has indeed taken place: Under this account, EMBO staff members have created and edited Wikipedia chapters related to EMBO and to EMBO-related activities. I will also take action to tackle that problem.

I have to say that I am surprised and disappointed to see that Wikipdia's COI policies have been so persistently breached by staff of a major professional association of scientific researchers. The COI was declared only in 2018,[8] ten years after the account's first edits; yet four years after that declaration, the account has been used today to make edits in pursuits of that COI. This reflect very poorly on your employer. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 12:57, 21 September 2022 (UTC)

PS I note that on 1 February 2020‎, @Randykitty posted[9] on your talk page a note about your COI, including the clear and prominent request to avoid editing or creating articles about yourself, your family, friends, colleagues, company, organization or competitors.

Yet 2½ years later, you are still editing an article about your boss. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 13:17, 21 September 2022 (UTC)

Hi BrownHairedGril, thank you getting back right away. I will desist from further edits. Please note that the edits were corrections of grammar or updates of outdated information. In this talk, without having done a substantial change yet, I actively asked for consultation and declared the COI. I am happy to undo the changes (corrections of grammar and factual updates) in the hope that someone from the Wikipedia community will be doing them. Best regards, Tilmann Kiessling Embocomm (talk) 13:38, 21 September 2022 (UTC)

@Thomas: thanks for the reply, but you seem not to understand the seriousness of the situation.

Over the last 14 years, Embocomm (talk · contribs) has made 158 edits to six articles, some of them very substantial, and in each case there is a clear COI.

Even today, you not only ignored the request 2½ years ago to avoid editing or creating articles about yourself, your family, friends, colleagues, company, organization or competitors; you even defend having done so after the breach is noted.

Continuing to push the line like this after so many years is the sort of conduct which I associate with dodgy startup companies engaged in marketing, not an international scientific association. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 13:57, 21 September 2022 (UTC)

• Escalated to WP:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents#User:Embocomm. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 15:09, 21 September 2022 (UTC)

Embo

I think you have typed "15" for "158" in the ANI. PamD 17:36, 21 September 2022 (UTC)

So I did. Thanks, @PamD for spotting it. Now fixed. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 18:14, 21 September 2022 (UTC)

GEOnet Names Server citation

Hi, I hope you are doing well. I have what I hope is a quick question. I was going through some geography stubs for cities in Iran and noticed a few of them have citations like these: Kelarabad can be found at GEOnet Names Server, at this link, by opening the Advanced Search box, entering "-3068788" in the "Unique Feature Id" form, and clicking on "Search Database".

Personally I don't think this is a decent/reliable citation (given that the reader has to go on a treasure hunt to confirm the information) and should be removed but it is providing data of sorts. Do you think this is an okay citation format? If not I will go through and clear it out but as some of these articles are thin on sources I would rather not add to the unreferenced article list :/ I really appreciate any insight you can offer - thanks! Kazamzam (talk) 00:33, 22 September 2022 (UTC)

Hi @Kazamzam, and thanks for your message.

However, I won't make any blind comments. So please post some links to articles with this style of citation, so that I can examine them. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 00:38, 22 September 2022 (UTC)

Sure thing! Fereydunkenar, Rineh, Gazanak, and Kelarabad all have this type of citation. Kazamzam (talk) 00:43, 22 September 2022 (UTC)

Thanks, @Kazamzam. I took a peek, and ... ouch, that's bad. My view is that:

1. The directions given on how to find the info amount to a research guide, not a citation. The crucial part of WP:Verifiability is that the info access must be repeatable, but this seems to me to be too fuzzy to be repeatable.
2. http://geonames.nga.mil/namesgaz/ is dead, so I can't verify how clean or messy the pathway is
3. The GEOnet Names Server is not a neutral source. The geographical requirements of one country's armed forces are a very partisan approach to the world, and in this case the USA's approach to Iran is so hostile that a US military source is wholly inappropriate.
4. The GEOnet Names Server has a poor reputation for accuracy.

So my view is that those refs are junk. In my view they should be removed, and replaced with {{citation needed}}.

However, please be aware that my views on quality are sometimes opposed by other editors, and some of them get very angry and aggressive about it ... and when they come at me with pitchforks, it turns out that me identifying quality problems is uncivil and bludgeoning and so on.

So while I have given you my assessment, I won't advise you what to do about it. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 01:38, 22 September 2022 (UTC)

Much obliged! Kazamzam (talk) 01:45, 22 September 2022 (UTC)

Edits at Talk:Death and state funeral of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani

Thank you, @Matilda Maniac! I love brownies. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 01:31, 26 September 2022 (UTC)

After reading the comments directed at @H. Carver below, and including as I now have found out that WP:BLUDGEON is an actual 'thing', I no longer feel like I should have sent you a brownie after all. So I am retracting that offering, unfortunately, and simply wishing you a Good Day. Matilda Maniac (talk) 03:08, 26 September 2022 (UTC)

As the youngsters say, wotevah.

If you and H. Carver put a fraction as much effort into applying policy as you have put into complaining about being asked to apply policy, then we would all have expended less effort and would be much closer to a consensus.

Instead we have drama about drama about drama, while the policy WP:AT grows lonely in a corner somewhere. That makes me sad. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 03:19, 26 September 2022 (UTC)

Retraction request

Please retract the reference to WP:NOTHERE you made with Special:Diff/1112299634. I had already apologised for the remark you were objecting to before you made this edit: Special:Diff/1112299036. Even if I hadn't already apologised and explained that I didn't intend the remark in the way that it was read ( I have accept, regardless of my intention, the error in writing it), the call to NOTHERE so quickly goes against WP:UNCIVIL, which says that "In general, be understanding and non-retaliatory in dealing with incivility. If others are uncivil, do not respond the same way."

I really don't want to carry on having any kind of argument on a personal level, as this was never my intention. I have always tried to play the ball, as it were, and not the person. I am writing this message because I would very much like to try and de-escalate our disagreement before I make my next update to the move discussion at heart here.

In the spirit of reciprocity, if I have made any particular statements that haven't been addressed by my previous apology, or that you would like me to retract, please let me know. Best regards, H. Carver (talk) 01:45, 26 September 2022 (UTC)

Hi @H. Carver

I welcome your efforts to de-escalate, and I have no wish to continue an argument.

However, I stand by my view that ignoring policy at an RM discussion timewasting and disruptive, and that persisting in ignoring policy after being warned is so severely disruptive that it is WP:NOTHERE.

That may sound harsh, but it's because in my long experience on Wikipedia I have seen far too many occasions where vast amounts of time are wasted by failure to adopt (or failure to observe) a common policy or guideline on a recurring issue. Without some agreed set of principles on how to decide such issues, the result would be decisions taken at random by whoever shows up, with multiple inconsistencies in article titles which would baffle readers and impede editors. So before joining any discussion, a good faith, competent editor finds and studies the relevant policies, and seeks to apply them. Sadly, you chose not to do that. You ay that you want to play the ball ... and if that's truly the case, play by the rulebook, which in this case is the policy WP:AT.

I object strongly to efforts by any editor to claim that it is somehow uncivil to note such misconduct and disparage it ... and I consider such claims to be manipulative and bullying attempts to deter editors from upholding policy.

So if you want revise your stance, and base your comments on policy, that would be great. And it would render my complaints moot.

However, I will not retract or revise what I have written. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 02:14, 26 September 2022 (UTC)

I am disappointed by your reply. I am not intentionally ignoring policy, and to again suggest I am is once more going against WP:UNCIVIL. You have explicitly said now that you are assuming I am acting in bad faith - "Sadly, you chose not to do that" - which is uncalled for, as is accusations of 'manipulative and bullying' behaviour. Before you take that latter argument any further, I think you should look at WP:BLUDGEON and consider how it applies to your responses in the move discussion in question.

If any of the above makes you reconsider your viewpoint, I would be happy to carry on the discussion. But if there is no change in your views, I suggest that per WP:CIVILITY we do no respond to each other any further, and I specifically request that you do not respond to any more comments I make in the move discussion in question. If as you believe my arguments are really that weak, trust the eventual closer to read them that way rather than try and refute me yourself. I wish you good day, H. Carver (talk) 02:29, 26 September 2022 (UTC)

@H. Carver: I hoped that you would take a step back, and reconsider the disruptive effect of ignoring policy.

However, I thought it more likely that instead of resolving the substantive problem, you would persist in offence-taking.

I wish that my pessimism had been misplaced, but sadly not.

It's still not too late for you to actually read WP:AT. Insofar as you fail to base your arguments in policy and in fact, I reserve te right to reply to you on those points. Please note that you still not identified any article which be made ambiguous by using changing the title "state funeral", so your statement that removing "state" creates ambiguity is simply false.

I have no idea why you are making such a drama out of a blatant falsehood. It is a very very odd thing to make a stand on. Anyway, stay off my talk. I have had enough of your timewasting, and more than enough of your attempts to invoke civility as a shield against challenges to your disruption. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 02:44, 26 September 2022 (UTC)

BareRefBot

hello there,

You said that you were focusing on other tasks during my work on filling bare URL pdfs when it came to BareRefBot. I have been making improvements to the bot for a while so I would love to proceed with the next steps (if you think the bot is still necessary) Rlink2 (talk) 13:59, 26 September 2022 (UTC)

Comparison of orbital launcher families

Hi BrownHairedGirl,

I saw the "bare URL" banner you added today to the page Comparison of orbital launcher families; after a little searching, I found one instance of a bare URL that someone added years ago (in the table entry for the Japanese H3 launcher) and proceeded to convert it to a regular reference with author, date, title, and link. Your comment to the edit adding the banner stated that there's still one instance of bare URL on that page, so this now should have been rectified; I'll leave it to you to remove the banner from that page in case there are more unnoticed bare URLs on that page. Cheers! Spotty's Friend (talk) 22:12, 26 September 2022 (UTC)

@Spotty's Friend: the easiest way to find a bare URL on a page is to press Ctl-F to search, enter http in the search box, and press F3 to find successive occurrences.

In this case the remaining bare URL is ref #111: http://www.indiandefensenews.in/2014/10/isros-unified-launch-vehicle-ulv.html BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 22:55, 26 September 2022 (UTC)

The bare URL in reference number 111 led nowhere, Had some difficulties finding another good source from India for this proposed launcher; finally settlted on a secondary source from a US spaceflight discussion forum as replacement. Cheers! Spotty's Friend (talk) 01:47, 27 September 2022 (UTC)

Question about linking in citations

Hi! I wanted to thank you for replacing the archive.ph with archive.today links on the MSNBC article. I didn't know that the owner requested links to archive.today instead of the individual domains until today.

I had a bit of a question about linking within citations and the citation process in general. I linked the MSNBC links in the citations on the MSNBC page itself because I sometimes copy the citation and paste it directly in another page and in those pages, the link would be functional. I understand it's normally pointless to self link on the page itself but I figured that it might be useful for those circumstances of reusing a citation. Is that alright or is it better to just not do that and let whoever may copy-paste the reference in the future handle that?

My other question was about references in general since you also seem to do a lot of work on them as well. I sometimes get hooked on a project of fixing up an article's references like I did with the MSNBC page but it is a time consuming process; I was wondering if it is useful work or if there's an automated process that does this efficiently. I use ProveIt and tried ReFill and several other tools and love them for what they do with doi's and ISBNs but have found most of them are more spotty if fed URL's or pdf reports so I end up doing those manually through ProveIt. I only ask because I'd hate to put in all the time to fixing them up if there's a different bot or tool that I don't know about that does it better. Thanks in advance. Jasonkwe (talk) (contribs) 15:58, 27 September 2022 (UTC)

Hi @Jasonkwe, it's great to know that you are working on refs. The foundation of every article, too often neglected.

On your first question, of self-links, you will probably have noticed that a self-link appears as unlinked, bolded text. That is not what you want in a ref, I reckon so best left unlinked. If you copy to another article, linking the work isn't hard.

As to the broader issue of filling refs, there is no magic wand. Instead there is a set of tools with overlapping strengths, and some weaknesses (or horrors). No one tool does everything, not least because webmasters have devised a huge variety of creative ways to avoid supplying structured metadata. The one exception is identifiers such as doi, hdl and isbn: @Citation bot can fill those refs accurately and completely.

Otherwise, it's mostly a matter of choosing which tool is least crap for the task in hand, and doing the rest manually. My notes at User:BrownHairedGirl/No-reflinks websites#Reference-filling_tools may be of some interest.

One wundrkid is InternetArchiveBot. Saves mountains of time on dead links and adding archive links.

Hope that helps. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 20:52, 27 September 2022 (UTC)

Ahh, I didn't think about the fact that bolded text within the citation isn't great. Thanks.

• sigh, I was afraid of that. I definitely appreciate working on scientific/medical articles because of doi and PMID but most others are a slog. Are those "creative" actions on the part of webmasters intentional to prevent structured metadata? I dunno why they would want to do that (but I don't know too much about hosting).

Thank you for the notes, it's awesome that you compiled all this info. The fixing up that I do is very very slow so it's a drop in the bucket compared to the need in various articles but I'll keep at it if it is helping. Jasonkwe (talk) (contribs) 23:08, 27 September 2022 (UTC)

I'm glad that was of some use, @Jasonkwe.

I think the thing about webmasters is that commercial web design has tended to be dominated by visuals rather than by structure. Some websites do go to great lengths to ensure that their webpages really are properly structured documents, whereas at the other extreme some sites have not really recovered from the dot com bubble era of entirely presentational focus. Others seem to mangle the structure to impede bots from reading their sites, while others are hard to parse because they change structure so many times (e.g. I wrote a tool to fill WaPo refs, and after supporting 3 wholly distinct formats, I gave up trying to support any more). Others are very elegantly coded, but so strapped down with security that they can only be bot-parsed at snails place (e.g. Researchgate), or beautifully coded but completely lock out all tools (e.g. CBC.ca). It's all a right pain.

Anything you can do to improve refs is great. Some of it is inevitably slow, but that doesn't make it any less valuable.

However, given the inevitable slowness of this work, you may want to consider targeting your efforts on topics which you personally regard as important. I find that if I take that sort of focused approach to manual ref improvement, I get much more satisfaction than from scattering my efforts randomly ... and I reckon that satisfaction is a very important factor in being able to sustain this sort of work.

So at one extreme I am likely to put a lot of energy into polishing an Irish history or politics article, 'cos that's my core area of interest. At the other extreme, I will devote very little of my time to polishing an article on sports or pop culture, since those topics don't interest me much and I think that Wikipedia has far too many articles on such topics. Likewise with airlines and airports, where there seems to be a cluster of editors busily adding squillions of inappropriate bare URL refs: someone could work full-time just on those articles, and never even keep with the flood of crap added every day.

Hope that is of some help. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 23:36, 27 September 2022 (UTC)

@BrownHairedGirl Oh wow. Did not expect it to go back that far; I was just in elementary school during the dot com bubble. So, if I'm understanding it correctly, a lot of that dot com bubble era mentality was that internet based companies needed users and they would be willing to host information or tools on their sites for free (almost like loss leaders) if it meant users would go to their site. And there's less user retention/return if you could just, say, print out an article and use the hard copy instead of going back to the article whenever you needed it. So the response would be to host the info or tools in an interactive presentational form (like the scrolling window at the bottom of this page) that would ensure user interaction with the website, but would also greatly hinder metadata extraction since things aren't cleanly laid out like in other documents? Those also seem to be the kinds of pages that often don't archive properly with the internet wayback machine and I think that's probably related to the presentation styles. That is a pity about some of the sites like Researchgate and CBC.ca.

Oh good gosh. I get ticked off when I see something rolled back and the contributions of that editor who did the rollback seem to be almost exclusively rollbacks (and am not a huge fan of deletionism), but I forgot that this is a worldwide wiki open to the public and just 'cause the articles I often go to don't have constant activity doesn't mean others don't lol. I get what you mean about particular interests--I usually work on military, history, or medical stuff but sometimes just get stuck in working on a random article where I opened it to fix the CS1 error message in the citation list then end up spending a few hours fixing the other references and find that kinda satisfying in its own way too. Yesterday's was the musical Americana and I don't know squat about theatre lol. It definitely was helpful and reassuring to hear all this so thank you, I really appreciate it. Jasonkwe (talk) (contribs) 19:32, 28 September 2022 (UTC)

@Jasonkwe, I just randomly saw this thread, and I'd like to note that my bot, User:Qwerfjkl (bot), is approved to automatically remove self links, though I haven't run it for a while. — Qwerfjkltalk 12:02, 3 October 2022 (UTC)

@Qwerfjkl Ahh, thanks, that's good to know. I'll take a look at it. Jasonkwe (talk) (contribs) 17:05, 3 October 2022 (UTC)

Reference template

You've tagged many entries on my watch list with the "1 citation" tag (such as the opening tag at Works based on Alice in Wonderland) so there must be many more. If a page has dozens of cites, yet one or even more are missing data, it doesn't seem encyclopedic or helpful to add the subjectively ugly tag onto the entire page. Can you rethink using these? Thanks. Randy Kryn (talk) 16:58, 27 September 2022 (UTC)

@Randy Kryn: that comment makes no sense to me.

You mention the "1 citation" tag, by which I assume you mean {{One source}} ... but I don't add that banner to articles with more than one source. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 17:30, 27 September 2022 (UTC)

The Cleanup bare URLs tag, see top of the Works based on Alice link above. Randy Kryn (talk) 17:34, 27 September 2022 (UTC)

Thanks, @Randy Kryn. That makes sense now, tho it's pity that you didn't identify the template clearly at the outset.

I have indeed thought about this many times, and then summary answer is no: I won't stop. I could write a very long reply to you, but I will try to make this brief:

1. No cleanup tag is encyclopedic. None of them conveys encyclopedic content; every one of them is a note about a problem.
2. bare URLs are a major deficiency in an article's compliance with the core policy of WP:Verifiability. This is not a trivial issue.
3. This is the mopping-up phase of bare URLs. I have been working on them full-time (50-70 hours per week) since July 2021, and in that period the total number of bare URLs refs has fallen by ~95%, while the number of articles with bare URLs has fallen by 80%
4. We are now at the limit of what can be achieved with bulk tools such as @Citation bot. That means that further progress can be made only one page at a time, either by manually filling the refs or with tools such as WP:ReFill ... and for that to happen, editors need the pages to be tagged so that they can identify the problem.
5. Where possible, I use inline tags such as {{Bare URL inline}}
6. However, the tool WP:Reflinks will not fill refs tagged with {{Bare URL inline}}, so using the inline tag on those refs actually impedes filling the ref.
7. WP:Reflinks is unmaintained, so there is no prospect of a fix.
8. So I have developed a list of websites which WP:Reflinks cannot fill, and in those cases I apply {{Bare URL inline}}: see User:BrownHairedGirl/No-reflinks websites. Building that list of over 2,000 websites has taken hundreds of hours of work.
9. After inline-tagging everything possible, and feeding the articles through @Citation bot many times, I have recently taken to applying the {{Cleanup bare URLs}} banner to articles which still have untagged bare URLs.
10. I have now applied the {{Cleanup bare URLs}} banner to all but ~300 of the remaining articles which still have untagged bare URLs. Once those stragglers have been tagged, the number of {{Cleanup bare URLs}} banners will fall, as the 15-year backlog is slowly cleared up.

Hope this helps. Please note that in August, this was discussed at length at WP:VPM, and I don't have energy to debate it all over again. If you want to read the August debates, see WP:Village pump (miscellaneous)/Archive 71#Mass_addition_of_Cleanup_bare_URLs_template. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 18:22, 27 September 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for your long and educational answer and for your work. I did find the broken code on one page that was tagged, and it seems a process of going through each one individually if I'm not mistaken. Seems like you've been on a long process with this project, and just consider me a now more educated sidetrack. Randy Kryn (talk) 21:37, 27 September 2022 (UTC)

I consider your excessive and unnecessary citation edits harassment. Stop.

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

BHG, I had very rarely seen Citation bot edits anywhere until a while back when we had an editing dispute, that I completely forget the details of. Now, they are present and made by you at nearly every article I edit. With this timing and the consistency, you cannot convince me it is a coincidence. Your actions are petty and inappropriate, and I consider it harassment. However you may try to justify it, even if you think you are making improvements, you cannot dispute that actively choosing to stalk my edits and then needlessly editing the same articles almost every single day is wrong.
Since these edits are occasionally meh, mostly detrimental (seriously, the tool is shit), but easy to ignore or revert, I have stayed silent, until now; I did not think an adult(?) could be using Wikipedia edits out of spite so consistently for so long, but that is a you problem.
No, I come here now because it is completely ridiculous to add maintenance banners at the top of articles for a single bare url, especially when tagging is an option. I do not know why you thought it was a good idea in the slightest; you tag bare urls on articles I edit all the time. I am struggling to find a good faith reason for the edit, but will grant you the benefit of the doubt.
However, with the incessant history, it has prompted me to tell you that I do consider your targeted edits/stalking after an editing conflict to be harassment, and since these edits are now more disruptive, I request you stop. This message is not here for discussion, either. I do not wish to engage with you at all, but had to leave a message somehow. Stop, or I will take further steps to resolution. Kingsif (talk) 06:51, 28 September 2022 (UTC)

Bare URL ugraded, in less time than it must have taken to write that screed. PamD 07:14, 28 September 2022 (UTC)

And did writing this comment take more or less time than upgrading another one, Pam? But seriously, I am clearly not talking about a single edit, nor to you. You can improve WP without being snarky about genuine concerns that are none of your business, and I suggest you start. Kingsif (talk) 07:25, 28 September 2022 (UTC)

(watching:) Kingsif, I believe you are wrong thinking that the tags have anything to do with you in person, - just look above for others who feel something is wrong. BHG distributes thousands of them, and the best way to react is fixing the bare urls. When it hits an article I watch (in 90+% of the cases not written by me), I just try to repair the problem. Often enough, the one bare url in an otherwise meticulously referenced article was added by an IP, goes nowhere or to the official website or to a dubious website, and so can just be removed. I think I fixed three yesterday, and expect some today. It happens, no more. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 07:16, 28 September 2022 (UTC)

I accept it happens excessively in general, which I also find unnecessary but clearly BHG is not for reconsidering, especially given her abhorrent treatment of Materialscientist simply for voicing concern above, but as I said upfront, the timing of the start of the frankly absurd number of such edits that bring interactions with me cannot be coincidental (in just the one linked, her edit reason says she made at least 7 passes in 5 days on an article I only started editing recently and she had not before). I do not think BHG finds issues with my edits, which is actually the problem: if BHG is watching the articles I edit, including ones since the dispute which she must be stalking my edits to find, and only then choosing to 'fix' things, that is concerning. I wouldn't care if the edits were good or meh, but they are bad. When they are made on articles I edit, I get to fix them. It would be better if they were never made in the first place. Since stopping BHG and the shit bot completely seems unlikely to happen, stopping her from following my edits and thus making hers at articles I feel some responsibility to improve at least makes her editing less of a problem for me.
It would also be unjustified to ask someone to stop making edits they think are improvements (and which they have previously said they won't stop…) without it being a behavioural (rather than editing) concern, which (since I do honestly believe BHG has only found these articles through stalking my edits and the history supports that) is why I mention the timing and harassment. Kingsif (talk) 07:33, 28 September 2022 (UTC)

@Kingsif: my work on bare URLs is based on lists of articles which are made by two methods:

1. a set of about 30 scans of the twice-monthly WP:Database downloads
2. searches for articles with bare URLs, such as insource:/\<ref( [^\>]*)?\>https?:\/\/[^ \<\>\{\}]+ *\<\/ref/i

These methods lead me to feed over ten thousand articles to @Citation bot every day. My work lists are not based on contribs of any editor, and can unequivocally say that I have been wholly uaware of any overlap with your work until you posted here. I can't even recall when you last entered my mind.

Your allegations of stalking and harassment are not just wrong; they are utterly unfounded. They are a blatant assumption of bad faith, and also easily disproven by any examination of the facts.

If you want to strike and withdraw all those allegations, then I will happily discuss any concerns you have about the substance of the edits. If not, I will simply close this section, and direct you to ANI. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 11:12, 28 September 2022 (UTC)

Actually, I have just re-read the opening message by @Kingsif, which says This message is not here for discussion, either. I do not wish to engage with you at all, but had to leave a message somehow.

Since this pile of abusive nonsense is not intended for discussion, my offer to discuss was pointless, and I withdraw it. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 11:25, 28 September 2022 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The history: Kingsif already asked to stay off my talk

A few hours after closing the discussion above, I got curious: what was my previous encounter with Kingsif (talk · contribs)?

I found it in my archives at User talk:BrownHairedGirl/Archive/Archive 068#February_2022.

It's a pattern of conduct depressingly similar to that above. In February, Kingsif came to my talk, guns ablaze with bogus accusation, based on that occasion on a quote which Kingsif had fabricated. They launched into a barrage of personal attacks against me.

After that, I banned Kingsif from my talk.

I have no idea what causes Kingsif to fabricate quotes, to repeatedly assume bad faith, to ignore evidence, and to make streams of angry personal attacks. But I see no reason at all the indulge such appalling conduct, so for avoidance of doubt Kingsif, do not post on my talk page ever again, for any reason or on any topic. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 15:17, 28 September 2022 (UTC)

How to follow up?

I decided to have a go at resolving some of the pages you'd recently tagged (after doing the one mentioned above), so picked on the initial "P", and hit a question on the first attempt: Push (2009 film). The bare URL (https://www.cgccomics.com/census/search-results.aspx?title=push&issue=1&matchtype=anywhere) leads to a log-on page, no access for non-members. The link was added by an IP in their only edit. Where do we go now, to save other editors wasting time following the steps I've just done? Perhaps ask for an expert from a relevant WikiProject? What do you think?

Best wishes! PamD 07:27, 28 September 2022 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) I'm nowhere near experienced in that, but with the circumstances being an IP adding the link and it being their only edit, I'd probably remove it altogether. LilianaUwU ^{(talk / contribs)} 07:29, 28 September 2022 (UTC)

As said in the above discussion: I'd also just remove it, without much ado. A link that doesn't help and causes a formatting problem doesn't have to be there. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 12:29, 28 September 2022 (UTC)

There's another in Port Adelaide, again added by IP. PamD 08:25, 28 September 2022 (UTC)

• @PamD: that IP edit amounts to adding a link which other people cannot view, while providing no info on what is in the link. That feels like a form of passive aggression.
  The whole point of a ref is to assist WP:Verifiability, but this not does aid verifiability. So I am inclined to agree with @LilianaUwU, and revert the edit which added this non-ref.
  Other options I have used include tagging the ref with {{Bare URL inline}} or {{Failed verification}} or {{subscription required}}, but those just kick the can down the road with little likelihood that anyone else will be able to resolve the problem. So I think that removal is probably best. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 11:48, 28 September 2022‎ (UTC)

I think "passive aggressive" is perhaps a bit OTT: just thoughtless. The IP presumably had subscriber access themself, and it's not always easy to remember what one's accessing through a subscription or membership access, as opposed to what everyone else will be able to see (if you use Facebook you'll see the same kind of thing, where people try to "Share" something to a group and it comes up as "Content unavailable" because it's restricted to members of some other group that the poster is a member of). I'll have a think. Meanwhile, I need to stop spending so much time on this fascinating quest: I've worked my way from Push (2009 film) to Peter Joslin and found all sorts of variations - the most recent being a Googlebooks snippet which did not support the information it was supposed to. Addictive. I must get on with some Real Life stuff. Perhaps a mention in the Signpost would be worth doing, when you get to the end of your tagging, to attract the sort of Wikignomes who would enjoy ferreting out the sources? Looking at Category:Articles_with_bare_URLs_for_citations I see there is plenty to work on! PamD 12:16, 28 September 2022 (UTC)

Klais Orgelbau

In Klais Orgelbau, I looked in vain for the link rot, - in edit more I found that the ref with a bare url was commented out. I may have done that even, meeting a dead link and commenting it out, rather than deleting. I deleted it now, because I believe that the tag causes more harm for the article than not being able to find some history easily. Can the script perhaps be refined, ignoring bare urls in hidden comments= --Gerda Arendt (talk) 22:17, 28 September 2022 (UTC)

Hi @Gerda Arendt: tanks for your msg, and sorry for the annoyance.

I am aware of that glitch, but I don't have a neat solution. Excluding comments makes for cumbersome (and processor-intensive) regexes which don't fit neatly into AWB.

For now the best workaround I have found is to tag all the commented-out bare URLs with a inline tag. That excludes them from my citation bot runs, and also from my runs of applying the {{Cleanup bare URLs}} banner.

I will try to find my tag-the-commented-out-bare-URLs script, and do another run with it on my scans of the 20221001 database dump. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 22:34, 28 September 2022 (UTC)

Thank you for thinking. I don't remember where I did such things, - I find them just per my watchlist (which I try to reduce). What is an inline tag? Will you do that workaround or is it advice for me to do? --Gerda Arendt (talk) 22:42, 28 September 2022 (UTC)

Sorry, @Gerda Arendt. I should have been clearer.

By "inline tag" I mean a cleanup tag such as {{citation needed}} or {{when}}, which is placed adjacent to the problem, as in this fictitious example:

British Prime Minister Truss recently denied that there was any connection between her appointment and the death two days later of the Queen, or between her government's first mini-budget and the immediate collapse in the UK's pound sterling currency.

For bare URLs the standard inline tag is {{Bare URL inline}}, in contrast to the {{Cleanup bare URLs}} banner. Here's {{Bare URL inline}} in use:

As markup: Truss denies.<ref>http://dailyscurillous.net/Truss-denial {{Bare URL inline|date=September 2022}}</ref>

... which renders as:

Truss denies.

References

I try to do this systematically, but I am also pointing it out to you as a workaround. If you come across a commented-out ref which doesn't look it should be deleted, then tagging it with {{Bare URL inline}} will mean that my tasks ignore it. So my AWB jobs won't add the {{Cleanup bare URLs}} banner ... and if there are no other bare URLs on the age, my bare-URL-remover job will remove any existing {{Cleanup bare URLs}} banner.

Hope this makes sense. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 23:29, 28 September 2022 (UTC)

yes, it does, thank you! --Gerda Arendt (talk) 23:43, 28 September 2022 (UTC)

@Gerda Arendt: A wee update. I found my old code for commented-out bare URLs, and got to work. On my first pass of the ~44K articls with untagged bare URLs in the 20220920 database dump, I found 28 articles with commented-out bare URLs. I tagged all 28.

I then ran all 28 through my remove-redundant-{{Cleanup bare URLs}}-banner script, which removed the {{Cleanup bare URLs}} banner from 12 of those 28 articles.

Out of ~44K articles with the {{Cleanup bare URLs}} banner, 12 is a very low error rate.

However, this may not be the full total. Many web browsers accept as HTML comments markup which is invalid, but which is not too far removed from the correct syntax. This fuzziness cause difficulties for a task such as this, because it's hard to know how much to loosen the rules. I will experiment a bit more, and see where I get to. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 02:42, 30 September 2022 (UTC)

James Chico Hernandez Article

Thank You BrownHairedGirl for Your help and I can still use more of it ...Please help me get this article to up to Wiki standards...I am just a novice and can use all of the help I can get. Thank You Once Again...Chico 9 (talk) 09:51, 28 September 2022 (UTC)

Sorry, @Chico 9, but there is only one of me, and I have a lot of demands my time. So I try to focus on my to-do lists of tasks which few others do, explaining my work to lots of nice people, and fending off the attacks from angry eejits. (That's not you of course, but I had one very unpleasant eejit today, who sucked a lot of my psychic energy).

If you need more help, I recommend the WP:Teahouse. Good luck! BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 20:30, 28 September 2022 (UTC)

Bare URLs milestone: all tagged

A few hours ago, I finished bare URL tagging as of the 20220920 WP:Database dump.

That means that on every article which had one or more bare URLs as of the 20220920 database dump, either:

• the article has a {{Cleanup bare URLs}} banner
  or
• every bare URL on the page has an inline tag, i.e {{Bare URL inline}} or one of the specialised alternatives for other mime types (e.g. {{Bare URL PDF}})

This means that for the first time, Category:All articles with bare URLs for citations does actually contain all articles, because all are tagged.

Note that sadly, hundreds of new bare URL refs are added to articles to every day. Those are picked up in the next database dump, and either filled by @Citation bot (CB), inline-tagged by my User:BrownHairedGirl/No-reflinks websites AWB runs, or if CB fails after multiple passes I add the {{Cleanup bare URLs}} banner.

Some numbers

• Articles with bare URLs as of May 2021: ~470,000
• Articles with bare URLs as of 28 September 2022: 94,959
• Articles with the {{Cleanup bare URLs}} banner as of 28 September 2022: 44,049
• Articles with one or more {{Bare URL PDF}} tags of 28 September 2022: 36,149

Thanks to everyone who has helped reduce the backlog. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 00:00, 29 September 2022 (UTC)

This prompted me to update not just the bare URL on XUL but several other oddly formatted sources. Hopefully it pushes others to keep standards high for verifiability. I have no idea how you find the time to handle all this. Good luck! Rjjiii (talk) 05:40, 29 September 2022 (UTC)

the banner truly is ugly

Hey, just wanted to be another one of the people stopping by and letting you know that I thought the banner you’re dropping all over the place is ugly. Many of these will probably just sit at the top of these pages forever…. I routinely find citation needed templates that are over 10 years old. This is just adding to that same type of clutter. Regards ShaveKongo (talk) 03:19, 29 September 2022 (UTC)

Indeed, the banner is ugly. But the bare URLs are a failure of the core policy of WP:Verifiability.

The banner can be removed when the problem is fixed.

And no, I am not dropping [the banner] all over the place. I have added it to ~16,000 pages this month, making a total as of right now of 44,006 pages with the banner. That is only 0'67% of all articles. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 10:34, 29 September 2022 (UTC)

@BrownHairedGirl are you no longer an admin? Ishan87 (talk) 12:52, 29 September 2022 (UTC)

Tag

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

Can you explain why you made this edit please? The Rambling Man (Keep wearing the mask...) 06:52, 29 September 2022 (UTC)

(watching:) The script used can't see that the bare url is commented out. Compare just above, #Klais Orgelbau. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 06:56, 29 September 2022 (UTC)

Then the script needs to stop being used until that bug is fixed. The Rambling Man (Keep wearing the mask...) 08:06, 29 September 2022 (UTC)

Did you see the reply to that above? - Also I understand that the job is done, so won't happen to old articles again (until someone adds the next bare url). --Gerda Arendt (talk) 08:19, 29 September 2022 (UTC)

I see. Just down to the rest of us to clear up the mess then. The Rambling Man (Keep wearing the mask...) 09:32, 29 September 2022 (UTC)

Not so. A I explained above in the section #Klais Orgelbau to which Gerda linked, I will be trying to clean it up using data from the next database dump. But as usual, The Rambling Man prefers snark and ABF to civil discourse, which is why I banned him from my talk long ago.

I estimate that the number of articles with this problem is about 100–150 out of 44,006 articles with the {{Cleanup bare URLs}} banner. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 10:40, 29 September 2022 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Gnoming away

Real life calls and I must stop hunting bare URLs for now: there is now only one left in the "P" section of Category:Articles with bare URLs for citations from June 2021 - about an hour's work to take 12 articles out of the category - see my contributions list. (Couldn't resolve Pomeroy–Mason_Bridge - link to a US newspaper, dead to me and not in Internet Archive, which may or may not be a valid link from the other side of the pond). So at that rate your 95k articles, at 5 minutes each, should take us 7,916 hours of editing. Well, between us we can chip away at it. The ones I fixed were an interesting mix - pdf press release, a pdf of a journal article which I sourced to a better location, pdfs of NHRP inventory forms (there might be a template for those, but I couldn't find one on a quick check), etc. In almost all cases I could turn a bare URL into an informative reference. It's a valid and useful project, and you're doing the encyclopedia a great service.

Presumably some of these articles are on people's watchlists, though I'm beginning to wonder just how many articles are totally unwatched. This week I found an editor who for three years has been making edits which include a mixture of (a) converting inappropriately to US spellings, (b) changing spelling inside quotes, even in one case where it said "[sic]", (c) and generally showing that English isn't their mother tongue and that they are probably using some sort of spell-checker, as in changing "Bibliomemoir" to "Bibliometric" in Elizabeth Gaskell, which is what led me to them (I was reading the article and couldn't understand what "bibliometric" meant in that context!) and "to night" to "tonight" in "changed to night flying..." in Strategic bombing, as well as a lot of clumsy addition of "the" which varied from unnecessary to damaging ("where X owned property" to "where X owned the property", etc). Stuff like changing "Surviving the once in 100 years or once in 1000 years sea state is a normal demand for design of ships and offshore structures." in Sea state to the unintelligible "Surviving the once in 100 years or once in 1000 years, the sea state is a normal demand for the design of ships and offshore structures.". Aaargh. I spent an afternoon cleaning up their mess, but only a tiny proportion of their edits (10%?) had been reverted, although most were made a couple of years ago. Depressing. When people ask "But surely anyone could add rubbish to Wikipedia" I always tell them that there are people watching the article and reverting rubbish edits: I fear there are not enough of us doing so.

Ah well, stay cheerful. At least you're not in the UK with our appalling new PM. PamD 10:12, 29 September 2022 (UTC)

@PamD: we in Ireland have had our share of dysfunctional govts, and we currently have a hideous housing crisis and an appalling health service ... but the current regime over your way seems to be chasing and passing new records in horror. The FT published data a fortnight ago (see https://www.ft.com/content/ef265420-45e8-497b-b308-c951baa68945) which includes dynamic charts that show about how poorest 5% of people in Ireland are about 65% better off than the poorest 5% in the UK.

Our comedians are having fun with the UK crisis, but it's mixed emotions for everyone: after 2 centuries of emigration, nearly all Irish people have relatives in the UK, and have friends there too. I am heartbroken for that poorest group in the UK who will be hit so hard by this crisis. Many more people will be hungry and cold in a society which already has far too many hungry and cold people, and many will die, following the tens of thousands who died under the austerity regime. For over a century, a lot of rural Ireland was sustained by remittances from emigrants to the UK and the USA. Now the flow is reversed: I know lots people ending cash support to relatives in the UK. I hope you can all find a way through.

Anyway, back to Wiki.

Thanks for your great work gnoming away through the backlog of bare URLs. It can be depressing to find how badly neglected some articles are, and how poor quality edits persist for years. It's important to remember, tho, that my work of tagging all articles with bare URL finds some of the worst of our 6.5 million articles, so don't be too discouraged into thinking of this as a representative sample.

All the same, some wonderful statistical work was done a few years ago by @Iridescent, comparing number of articles to number of active editors. Basically, editor counts have fallen significantly while article counts have risen significantly; IIRC, the articles:editors ratio had risen from ~600:1 to ~2000:1. My hunch is that this decline is not evenly spread, and that many articles on less popular topics have been effectively unwatched for years.

I fear also that those numbers disguise two other problems: a fall in the quality of editors, and a loss of history. I won't say too much on the first problem, 'cos sadly wikiculture has a depressingly anti-intellectual hostility to comments about lack of skill; but the examples you give illustrate unskilled editors without skilled people to clean up.

The second problem is less controversially observable. It's the loss of editorial history: an article written in say 2007 will have been watched by the editor who wrote it, and maybe by a few other editors over the next few months. However, 15 years later, those editors may no longer be active, so the tally of watchers is misleading, often wildly so.

Staying too long immersed in this long tail of neglected crud can rot the soul, so please be gentle with yourself as you venture into it.

To try to stay sane, I try to tackle the bare URLs backlog from four angles:

1. various tools to try to fill and/or tag large numbers of articles across the whole set. About 1/3 of this work is programming of various forms, which I find intellectually stimulating when done in modest doses.
2. Randomly tackling articles from my list of bare URLs, either just 'cos the topic catches my eye or 'cos Citation bot failed on it. That can be fun, and it is mostly how I built my list at User:BrownHairedGirl/No-reflinks websites.
3. tackling bare URLs to particular websites, from a list I made of which sites have the most bare URLs. That allows fast work, cos there are strings which can be recycled, and they come in nice clumps of a few dozen, so I can see progress: website X done. I tend to be quite ruthless about only tackling the bar URLs, to make progress on that front. Sometimes the state of the article is grim in many other ways, but I can't fix everything.
4. Using Petscan to find bare URLs in topic areas that interest me. That can be fun, engaging with topics that I care about. Here's an example search for bare URLs in a topic area that might interest you: bare URLs on biogs of people from Lancashire born in the 19th-century. If you would like me to devise any other searches, I'd be happy to help.

Best wishes, BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 03:45, 4 October 2022 (UTC)

Women in Red October 2022

Women in Red October 2022, Vol 8, Issue 10, Nos 214, 217, 242, 243, 244 Online events: New: Alphabet run: G and H | Women in STEM / Ada Lovelace Day | Geofocus West Asia Continuing: Climate (year-long initiative) | #1day1woman See also: Women in Green's "Wildcard Edition" Good Article editathon Other ways to participate: Become a member. You can always opt-out of notifications. Join the conversations on our talkpage. Help us plan future events. Follow us on social media: Facebook | Instagram | Pinterest | Twitter

--Lajmmoore (talk) 14:58, 29 September 2022 (UTC) via MassMessaging

The Signpost: 30 September 2022

• News and notes: Board vote results, bot's big GET, crat chat gives new mop, WMF seeks "sound logo" and "organizer lab"

• In focus: NPP: Still heaven or hell for new users – and for the reviewers

• In the media: A few complaints and mild disagreements

• Special report: Decentralized Fundraising, Centralized Distribution

• Discussion report: Much ado about Fox News

• Interview: ScottishFinnishRadish's Request for Adminship

• Opinion: Are we ever going to reach consensus?

• Serendipity: Removing watermarks, copyright signs and cigarettes from photos

• Recent research: How readers assess Wikipedia's trustworthiness, and how they could in the future

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• Featured content: Farm-fresh content

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• From the archives: 5, 10, and 15 Years ago: September 2022

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:00, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – October 2022

News and updates for administrators from the past month (September 2022).

Administrator changes

ScottishFinnishRadish

Staxringold

Ahoerstemeier (deceased) • Ched

Interface administrator changes

Cyberpower678

CheckUser changes

GorillaWarfare

Guideline and policy news

• Following an RfC, consensus was found that if the rationale for a block depends on information that is not available to all administrators, that information should be sent to the Arbitration Committee, a checkuser or an oversighter for action (as applicable, per ArbCom's recent updated guidance) instead of the administrator making the block.
• Following an RfC, consensus has been found that, in the context of politics and science, the reliability of FoxNews.com is unclear and that additional considerations apply to its use.
• Community comment on the revised Universal Code of Conduct enforcement guidelines is requested until 8 October.

Technical news

• The Articles for creation helper script now automatically recognises administrator accounts which means your name does not need to be listed at WP:AFCP to help out. If you wish to help out at AFC, enable AFCH by navigating to Preferences → Gadgets and checking the "Yet Another AfC Helper Script" box.

Arbitration

• Remedy 8.1 of the Muhammad images case will be rescinded 1 November following a motion.
• A modification to the deletion RfC remedy in the Conduct in deletion-related editing case has been made to reaffirm the independence of the RfC and allow the moderators to split the RfC in two.
• The second phase of the 2021-22 Discretionary Sanctions Review closes 3 October.

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• An administrator's account was recently compromised. Administrators are encouraged to check that their passwords are secure, and reminded that ArbCom reserves the right to not restore adminship in cases of poor account security. You can also use two-factor authentication (2FA) to provide an extra level of security.
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• You are invited to comment on candidates in the 2022 CUOS appointments process.
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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:42, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

James Chico Hernandez article

BrownHairedGirl,Hi and Thank You for Your Reply and I know You are very busy...When You can get a chance, could you take a look at the James Chico Hernandez article and take down the banner you put up...“This article uses bare URLs, which are uninformative and vulnerable to link rot. Please consider converting them to full citations to ensure the article remains verifiable and maintains a consistent citation style. Several templates and tools are available to assist in formatting, such as Reflinks (documentation), reFill (documentation) and Citation bot (documentation). (September 2022) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)” if it meets the Criteria of Wiki statdards...Again Thank You for your time as I tried my best to clean it up. Chico 9 (talk) 17:10, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

William Kentridge bare URL

Hi BrownHairedGirl, I've tried to improve cites on Kentridge. Is the bare URL banner still needed? Thanks, Mick gold (talk) 14:06, 5 October 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the clanup, @Mick gold. Banner removed.[11] BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:15, 5 October 2022 (UTC)

Speedy deletion nomination of Category:Pages with old-style lang-sh invokation

A tag has been placed on Category:Pages with old-style lang-sh invokation requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done for the following reason:

It may meet Wikipedia's criteria for speedy deletion under CSD G8

Under the criteria for speedy deletion, pages that meet certain criteria may be deleted at any time.

If you think this page should not be deleted for this reason, you may contest the nomination by visiting the page and clicking the button labelled "Contest this speedy deletion". This will give you the opportunity to explain why you believe the page should not be deleted. However, be aware that once a page is tagged for speedy deletion, it may be deleted without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag from the page yourself, but do not hesitate to add information in line with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. If the page is deleted, and you wish to retrieve the deleted material for future reference or improvement, then please contact the deleting administrator, or if you have already done so, you can place a request here. —⁠andrybak (talk) 19:38, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

ANI it is

There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. Thank you.UtherSRG (talk) 01:38, 9 October 2022 (UTC)

Category:Referendums in the Philippines has been nominated for renaming

Category:Referendums in the Philippines has been nominated for renaming. A discussion is taking place to decide whether this proposal complies with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. Hariboneagle927 (talk) 12:32, 9 October 2022 (UTC)

October 2022

You have been blocked from editing for a period of 12 hours for violation of the civility probation imposed by the community at Special:Diff/1039021442. Once the block has expired, you are welcome to make useful contributions.

If you think there are good reasons for being unblocked, please read the guide to appealing blocks, then add the following text below the block notice on your talk page: {{unblock|reason=Your reason here ~~~~}}.   -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she|they|xe) 13:11, 9 October 2022 (UTC)

This user's unblock request is on hold because the request has been copied to WP:ANI as this is only reservable by a community discussion

BrownHairedGirl (block log • active blocks • global blocks • contribs • deleted contribs • filter log • creation log • change block settings • unblock • checkuser (log))

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Blocking administrator: Tamzin (talk)

Reviewing administrator: Dreamy Jazz ^{talk to me | my contributions} 15:27, 9 October 2022 (UTC)

Request reason:

This kompletely Kafkaesque.
Tamzin's comment[12] at ANI "nasty", "sneaky", and "anti-intellectual bullying" are all uncivil makes it clear that she is punishing me for describing the bad actions of others. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 13:32, 9 October 2022 (UTC)

Administrator use only:

After the blocking administrator has left a comment, do one of the following:

If you decline the unblock request, replace this template with the following, substituting {{subst:Decline reason here}} with any specific rationale. If you do not edit the text after "decline=", a default reason why the request was declined will be inserted.

{{unblock reviewed|1=This kompletely Kafkaesque.
Tamzin's comment[13] at ANI "nasty", "sneaky", and "anti-intellectual bullying" are all uncivil makes it clear that she is punishing me for describing the bad actions of others. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 13:32, 9 October 2022 (UTC)|decline={{subst:Decline reason here}} ~~~~}}

If you accept the unblock request, replace this template with the following, substituting Accept reason here with your rationale:

{{unblock reviewed|1=This kompletely Kafkaesque.
Tamzin's comment[14] at ANI "nasty", "sneaky", and "anti-intellectual bullying" are all uncivil makes it clear that she is punishing me for describing the bad actions of others. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 13:32, 9 October 2022 (UTC)|accept=Accept reason here ~~~~}}

Blocks made under this restriction must not be reversed except by consensus of a community discussion. – wbm1058 (talk) 14:54, 9 October 2022 (UTC)

Just a note also that the community is not being sneaky. There is a discussion about this matter at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents#Uncivil behavior by BrownHairedGirl. – wbm1058 (talk) 15:09, 9 October 2022 (UTC)

The Kafkaesque nature of this saga ramps up another level.

I described UtherSRG's actions as "nasty" and "sneaky" because they went behind my back to seek sanctions on me for an issue they had not raised to my face, and they did so two days after I had disengaged.

I stand by that description, unequivocally. I will nor rephrase it, retract it, or withdraw it. This was nasty, sneaky conduct.

But now because I described that nasty, sneaky conduct I am blocked from a discussion about me. And that exclusion of me is somehow not sneaky.

As an exercise in the theatre of victimisation and of bizarre logic, this is quite the show. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 15:21, 9 October 2022 (UTC)

I'd like to better understand something. What is the difference between a warning and a threat, if any? wbm1058 (talk) 14:54, 9 October 2022 (UTC)

@Wbm1058: what is that question about? BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:57, 9 October 2022 (UTC)

On User talk:Wbm1058#State funerals RM you used the term "threat" in some form half a dozen times. I thought I only warned you. Are all warnings threats, by definition? Is there any difference? wbm1058 (talk) 15:09, 9 October 2022 (UTC)

@Wbm1058: see my longer reply below. The possible block was not act of nature; it was a human action within your power, and you had explicitly discussed with UtherSRG the possibility of using the power. So it was a threat. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 15:15, 9 October 2022 (UTC)

It would help to know the context, but after a quick round of googling, it seems that a common theme is that a threat is when the adverse action will or may be implemented by the speaker; whereas a warning is where the adverse action will come from some source outside the speaker's control.

So, two examples based on that:

1. Sean tells Roisin: "Get outta here or my team will shoot you". That is a threat.
2. Padraig tells Maedbh: "Get outta here or the flood will drown you". That's a warning.

Hope this helps. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 15:11, 9 October 2022 (UTC)

So do you think all of these user warning templates actually are used to threaten editors? "Stop vandalizing Wikipedia or my team will block you?" You must have noted in that "sneaky discussion" that I said I could not block you after closing the RM, as that made me an "involved" editor. I, the speaker, have no control over the administrative actions taken by other administrators. – wbm1058 (talk) 15:26, 9 October 2022 (UTC)

@Wbm1058: yes, of course they are threats, and very clear threats. We usually regard them as justified threat, but the sense of justification does not remove the very clear threat.

Your comments about blocks were a clear invitation to another admin to block me, which is exactly what happened. So that was a clear threat. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 15:30, 9 October 2022 (UTC)

On hold having copied this to the AN section, as this block cannot be removed by an individual administrator and only instead by community consensus (which would be done at AN). Dreamy Jazz ^{talk to me | my contributions} 15:27, 9 October 2022 (UTC)

@Dreamy Jazz Have corrected the link, as the section is currently at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents#Unblock request as far as I can see? -- Asartea ^{Talk | Contribs} 15:57, 9 October 2022 (UTC)

Well well

This is turning out to be a very interesting episode. Several editors have commented at WP:ANI#Unblock request about how they regard it as utterly unacceptable to describe another editor's actions as "sneaky", or "nasty". AFAICS, none of those who has expressed that view has made any criticism whatsoever of the admin who had made a series of very bad closes, and who sought revenge for WP:ADMINACCT by trying to get me blocked (the nasty bit) and who actively sought to do so without notifying me (the sneaky bit).

This is absolute textbook victimisation: punishing someone for making a complaint in terms which some feel are excessively blunt, but failing to even properly consider the substantive complaint.

I want to be absolutely and unequivocally clear about where I stand on this. Victimisation is a hallmark characteristic is a dysfunctional institution, aa is using tone-policing to suppress and dismiss complaint against authority.

I will not in any way concede to either of these tactics. I am over 50 years old, and have spent most of my adult life one way or another engaged professionaly in campaigns against injustice, most of them successful. I have worked at all levels of authority, up to meeting ppl at cabinet-level in government, and I have taken campaigns from being untouchable to having their goals legislated as statute law. So I have seen a lot of how those wit power handle dissent. I have also had significant experience in my own personal life of abusive conduct, and of the consequences of various strategies for handling it (I have tried most of them).

Over these decades I have learnt that those who behave badly will often try to deter criticism and to deligitimise their critics. This is a tactic used by institutions, by gangs, by political groups, and by individuals. It is an old tactic, and it often works -- which is why it keeps on being used.

But it is a tactic which is always used to divert attention away from discussion of the substance. And that's what's happening here.

If that is going to how Wikipedia is run, then that is sad. But no matter how big the pile-on in support of victimisation, I will not in any way bend to the victimisation.

I am aware that we are now into the re-victimisation phase. My objections to the sneaky actions of UtherSRG have been explicitly treated at ANI as being extra problematic because they follow me accurately describing as sneaky the actions of another editor more than two years ago.

Again, that is part of the pattern. The critic of bad conduct can be treated more harshly now because they had previously described bad conduct.

And of course, this pattern is common to many organisations, most of which start out with noble goals, but which in time ossify, and lose the ability to self-critique. So no surprise; just sadness. Wikipedia had a chance of being better, but seems to be choosing a culture of polite mediocrity which supresses debate and dissent. It's a old story. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 17:48, 9 October 2022 (UTC)

• PS @Premeditated Chaos: false assertion. Arbcom did not impose a civility restriction on me.
  @Giraffer: I understand very clearly why I was blocked. And equally clearly, I have explained why I deplore that sort of constraint. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 18:08, 9 October 2022 (UTC)

October 2022

Your ability to edit this talk page has been revoked as an administrator has identified your talk page edits as inappropriate and/or disruptive.

(block log • active blocks • global blocks • autoblocks • contribs • deleted contribs • abuse filter log • creation log • change block settings • unblock • checkuser (log))

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If you think there are good reasons for being unblocked, you should read the guide to appealing blocks, then contact administrators by submitting a request to the Unblock Ticket Request System.
Please note that there could be appeals to the unblock ticket request system that have been declined leading to the post of this notice.

 GeneralNotability (talk) 18:12, 9 October 2022 (UTC)