User talk:Risker

Beware! This user's talk page is monitored by talk page watchers. Some of them even talk back. On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog Stats for pending changes trial Wikipedia:Arbitration/Index/Cases Category:Wikipedia semi-protected pages Useful things for me to remember or I will never find them again, plus archive links Column-generating template families The templates listed here are not interchangeable. For example, using {{col-float}} with {{col-end}} instead of {{col-float-end}} would leave a <div>...</div> open, potentially harming any subsequent formatting. Column templates Type Family Handles wiki  table code?† Responsive/ Mobile suited Start template Column divider End template Float "col-float" Yes Yes {{col-float}} {{col-float-break}} {{col-float-end}} "columns-start" Yes Yes {{columns-start}} {{column}} {{columns-end}} Columns "div col" Yes Yes {{div col}} – {{div col end}} "columns-list" No Yes {{columns-list}} (wraps div col) – – Flexbox "flex columns" No Yes {{flex columns}} – – Table "col" Yes No {{col-begin}}, {{col-begin-fixed}} or {{col-begin-small}} {{col-break}} or {{col-2}} .. {{col-5}} {{col-end}} † Can template handle the basic wiki markup {| | || |- |} used to create tables? If not, special templates that produce these elements (such as {{(!}}, {{!}}, {{!!}}, {{!-}}, {{!)}})—or HTML tags (<table>...</table>, <tr>...</tr>, etc.)—need to be used instead. Notes [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] {{subst:User:Alison/c}} {{subst:W-screen}} Wikipedia:SPI/CLERK ArbCom election watchlist: [6] Note to self: Research Laura Muntz Lyall (or persuade one of the Riggrs to do so), consider writing an article about the Forster Family Dollhouse in the Canadian Museum of Civilization. Some day. Emergency desysops The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it. Other note to self re "emergency" desysops: Spencer195, Marskell, Cool3 - Level 1 Hemanshu - committee motion, mischaracterized as "emergency desysop" on noticeboard, desysop occurred minutes before the motion passed. Sade - to check "involuntary per arbcom", Feb 09 RickK/Zoe - July 08. Long dormant admin accounts, shared compromised password. Eye of the Mind - Dec 07. Main page deletion. Shreshth91 - done at request of single arbitrator, Aug 07. Vancouverguy - Jun 07. Long dorman admin account, apparent compromise. Yanksox - Mar 07 - Jimbo desysop, confirmed by Arbcom in full case (DB deletion wheel war) Robdurbar - Apr 07 - mass blocking, self unblocking, deletion. Wonderfool. Husnock - Dec 06. Admitted shared password, desysop confirmed by Arbcom in full case. Notes for AFT: call to action stats, numeric conversion and newcomer quality - very technical quality assessment Nov-dec 12 q4 report Messages below please Desysops I don't see the purpose in even considering a de-sysop of SchuminWeb without an actual case. He's not randomly deleting articles nor issuing blocks from an undisclosed location. We did desysop Henrygb while he was inactive but we'd nailed him for sockpuppetry and he refused to answer the case against him. We also banned him at the end of the case for all that, though I imagine he wandered back under a new name. I'm sad that it came to this; he and I have had our differences but he's doing an absolutely thankless job and I have some sympathy for what that does to a user. I gave FFD a look today and shuddered at the thought of implementing our policies there. De-sysopping without a case sends the wrong message and guarantees the eventual outcome. This case is at least as important as the yearly Christmas Civility Clusterf--- and there's actual encyclopedic content at stake, for once. Cheers, Mackensen (talk) 19:20, 19 December 2012 (UTC) Merry Christmas! TheGeneralUser (talk) is wishing you a Merry Christmas! This greeting (and season) promotes WikiLove and hopefully this note has made your day a little better. Spread the WikiLove by wishing another user a Merry Christmas, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past, a good friend, or just some random person. Happy New Year! Spread the cheer by adding {{subst:Xmas2}} to their talk page with a friendly message. Hello Risker! Wishing you a very Happy Merry Christmas :) TheGeneralUser (talk) 13:28, 25 December 2012 (UTC) .. Seasons greetings to you and yours Dougweller (talk) 13:55, 25 December 2012 (UTC) Happy holidays to all my Talk Page Watchers Some Christmas traditions are very difficult to explain. Kind of like Wikipedia policies. Wishing you and yours a joyous holiday season, and happiness, health and hopefulness in 2013. I trust you'll enjoy this little token, a favourite performance of Baby, it's Cold Outside, for your holiday amusement. For those of a more traditional inclination, I offer this rendition of my favourite carol. Best, Risker (talk) 02:57, 25 December 2012 (UTC) Ping I mentioned you here; certainly, after more than a year of this BS, I'm not happy about all of the sock enabling that has allowed the FA process to be disrupted for so long. We got no answers on Merridew, EotR forced me to shut up, we still got no answers, and I wonder if we'll get answers here. Why was this allowed to continue? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 01:23, 2 January 2013 (UTC) Pong Do you have anything constructive to add to "what we have here is an attitude problem"? Rich Farmbrough, 04:49, 4 January 2013 (UTC). I am commanded... Dear Madam, I am commanded by my employer to point out to you a very distressing edit war which appears to have broken out [7]. Naturally, my employer, as the First lady of Wikipedia, is completely detatched and impartial. However, you may feel that it is greatly to be regretted that the nouveau riche, parvenu and other generally arriviste type people are permitted to edit Her Ladyship's encyclopedia. Are we next to have Mr Obama creating dukes from the White House and listing them in the Almanach? Yours faithfully Vera Corpus (Miss) (talk) 19:35, 9 January 2013 (UTC) Two unrelated matters Hi. First, this was just brilliant. I've started a draft of an RFC at Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Article feedback. Any help would be appreciated, of course. Second, someone pointed me to this discussion on the German Wikipedia today. The number of page watchers is now available at ?action=info. E.g., <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page?action=info> (number of page watchers: 76,527). By default on Wikimedia wikis, the value is only displayed if you have the "unwatchedpages" user right (admins) or if the page has 30 or more (or perhaps just more than 30...) watchers. The Germans are apparently going to do away with this value (the vote is overwhelmingly supporting a value of 0). Strange how times change... perhaps The kohser will start editing there. ;-) --MZMcBride (talk) 04:05, 11 January 2013 (UTC) Hi MZM. I periodically show up over there to, umm, express my opinions and concerns. A lot of time, energy and money has been invested into a tool that really hasn't produced: the last statistics I saw showed a near-zero rate of account creation and editing from those who leave feedback, and they aren't even attempting to measure whether or not the feedback is incorporated into the article or even discussed on its talk page for consideration of inclusion. Instead we have random IPs saying that a particular feedback comment is helpful, like this one on the Facebook page. (For casual readers of this page, the comment says "I think the graphs of age and popularity were the most useful." I don't understand how that comment is helpful; it's positive feedback, but it's not helpful. I'm pretty sure people are clicking "helpful" because it's the closest option to "like". This one is even less comprehensible as a "helpful" comment.) The fact that non-registered users are the ones determining whether or not something is helpful pretty well tells the story of the tool: it's become a game for people who don't actually edit the project. Meanwhile, the WMF continues to expend staff time and energy, and we keep hearing that it's going to be expanded to more and more articles. That's just an additional workflow for our already beleaguered editors to try to maintain. As to the "unwatched pages" issue, the reason that the German Wikipedia can consider this is that all of their articles are managed under flagged revisions, and they have almost no vandalism to articles. (The Russians use flagged revisions everywhere too, and they have months-long backlogs. Not sure what the German Wikipedia backlog is for this; the last time I looked most were reviewed within a week, but that was a long time ago.) I'd be interested to see some stats about any variations in frequency of vandalism to "unwatched" pages on a large Wikipedia that does not have flagged revisions, should someone implement it; however, I think this is one example of a setting that shouldn't be tested on English Wikipedia first. And yes...my how times change. :) Risker (talk) 04:54, 11 January 2013 (UTC) German Wikipedia backlog is currently four weeks [8].--Ymblanter (talk) 06:58, 11 January 2013 (UTC) Huh. When the Germans can't keep up with the backlogs, you know there's a problem. ;-) I actually see a lot of similarities between FlaggedRevs and ArticleFeedbackv5. Maybe we'll see a name change in short order from ArticleFeedbackv5 to Valued Input, similar to the name change we saw prior to the FlaggedRevs (err, Pending Changes) deployment. :-) There seems to be a growing dichotomy between tools that help users reduce backlogs and tools that create new backlogs for users, though we can safely say that both kinds of tools often have simply awful names. --MZMcBride (talk) 08:17, 11 January 2013 (UTC) Withdrawal When Salvio commented that unless it was pretty blatant it would be unlikely for Arbcom to overturn a community decision. That was what I was looking for, and would not have even brought the appeal if that was clear. On the other hand, Rschen7754 has been working on a statement of why the issue should go before Arbcom. Plus as mentioned there are at least two suggestions that Arbcom should get involved. I would like that if it was for the purpose of eliminating the harassment that I have been subjected to for bringing up the topic. Basically I think it has to be one of the strangest topic bans ever. If the purpose of bringing it to Arbcom is to shut me or anyone else up, no. Apteva (talk) 05:40, 13 January 2013 (UTC) User rights automatically being assigned to education program participants? Risker, this was a surprise for me when I just learned about it. Is Arbcom aware that rollback, autopatrolled, filemover, account creator, IP block exempt, and reviewer rights are apparently being assigned automatically through the Education Program Extension? If not, I think Arbcom may want to look into this situation. --Pine✉ 07:31, 21 January 2013 (UTC) In fairness, my interest in this subject is personal rather than driven by being an arbitrator; I'm not entirely certain this is something that Arbcom would normally comment on as a committee. Having said that, there was an RFC before these permissions were approved by the community, but I'd have to go back and see what information was available to the community at the time of the discussion. I don't recall seeing anything about IPBE (which is something that usually has my antennae twitching), but I may simply not have noticed it before. Let's see if I can dig up the original RFC, which was discussed on the 'crat board during July, if I remember correctly. Risker (talk) 08:27, 21 January 2013 (UTC) Article feedback RfC Thanks for posting those questions - they're a good way of informing and guiding the discussion. Regards, Nick-D (talk) 11:05, 22 January 2013 (UTC) AFT5 newsletter Hey all; another newsletter. If you're not already aware, a Request for Comment on the future of the Article Feedback Tool on the English-language Wikipedia is open; any and all comments, regardless of opinion and perspective, are welcome. Our final round of hand-coding is complete, and the results can be found here; thanks to everyone who took part! We've made test deployments to the German and French-language projects; if you are aware of any other projects that might like to test out or use the tool, please let me know :). Developers continue to work on the upgraded version of the feedback page that was discussed during our last office hours session, with a prototype ready for you to play around with in a few weeks. That's all for now! Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 16:08, 23 January 2013 (UTC) that business yesterday In case you were not aware there are a few users questioning your use of revdel on my talk page. See the thread titled "Do the WP:CIV and WP:NPA policies apply to administrators?" and the discussion it points to if you're interested. The section right above that one titled "on another matter" contains some further remarks from me that are probably more what you were looking for with your email request yesterday, that is, a more thorough explanation of why I did what I did and what might happen differently in the future. Not sure if it matters but I don't really have an opinion either way on the revdel, I get why you did it but it seems like the cat is out of the bag anyway. Beeblebrox (talk) 17:54, 23 January 2013 (UTC) Request for review Hi. I understand you recently blanked an edit summary that I feel should remain on the record. Are you able to reverse the action or otherwise explain why we should maintain the status quo? --Senra (talk) 18:01, 23 January 2013 (UTC) Hi Senra. I am not willing to reinstate that edit summary, as it is clearly and obviously a personal attack directed at a specific user. It is a perfect example of why revision deletion of edit summaries was enabled in 2009, in fact. Such edit summaries create an inhospitable editing environment for all users, particularly the target, and are unacceptable. Risker (talk) 18:21, 23 January 2013 (UTC) Before I take the above response to the wider community (and yes I have seen your reply here) please let me know which specific part of the policy applies to your apparent unilateral redaction. Your edit-summary removal appears to be specifically excluded from item 2 of Wikipedia:Revision deletion#Criteria for redaction with the sentence "[Redaction] includes slurs, smears, and grossly offensive material of little or no encyclopedic value, but not mere factual statements, and not "ordinary" incivility, personal attacks or conduct accusations". I therefore repeat: [a]re you able to reverse the action? --Senra (talk) 18:52, 23 January 2013 (UTC) The specific phrase used falls under "grossly offensive", at least in my book, and qualifies for revdel. In my opinion, it was moot as the phrase is all over ANI and VPP, but it is allowable under policy. --Rschen7754 18:55, 23 January 2013 (UTC) In that case, would you consider reversing the redaction on the grounds it sets an unhelpful precedent? I do not see a personal interpretation of policy being allowed to stand, particularly as such an interpretation is not applied across the whole of Wikipedia --Senra (talk) 19:03, 23 January 2013 (UTC) No, Senra, I am not willing to reverse the revision deletion. That not all administrators follow both the intent and the letter of the policy is an issue that is separate from whether or not this revision deletion is correct. I can't think of a single policy on Wikipedia that is consistently applied in all cases. I do not understand why you think it is a good thing that a user should be verbally abused in an edit summary and that that verbal abuse should be kept for all time, when you are giving the impression your request is motivated by your displeasure that the person who wrote the edit summary wasn't punished sufficiently for your liking. I had nothing to do with the blocking decisions; I would have felt it sufficient for an NPA block, but since the situation was being discussed on the noticeboards, I left it to the community to decide what to do in that respect. It is my considered opinion that no situation is ever resolved more effectively by saying "fuck off" to someone, and that it is even less likely to be effectively resolved by tacking on a highly inflammatory and personal insult to the end of the "fuck off". Risker (talk) 19:26, 23 January 2013 (UTC) You want my honest opinion? This is flat out wikilawyering. I see no reason to unredact the summary just to unredact it or just to overturn another admin's action. It falls under "I might not have done things that way, but it's perfectly within reasonable bounds" for me. Frankly, I wish all admins had that mentality. --Rschen7754 19:06, 23 January 2013 (UTC)