User talk:SMcCandlish

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User talk:SMcCandlish/IP

Old stuff to resolve eventually

Cueless billiards

Unresolved

 – Can't get at the stuff at Ancestry; try using addl. cards.

Extended content

Categories are not my thing but do you think there are enough articles now or will be ever to make this necessary? Other than Finger billiards and possibly Carrom, what else is there?--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 11:12, 18 January 2010 (UTC) Crud fits for sure. And if the variant in it is sourceable, I'm sure some military editor will fork it into a separate article eventually. I think at least some variants of bar billiards are played with hands and some bagatelle split-offs probably were, too (Shamos goes into loads of them, but I get them all mixed up, mostly because they have foreign names). And there's bocce billiards, article I've not written yet. Very fun game. Kept my sister and I busy for 3 hours once. Her husband (Air Force doctor) actually plays crud on a regular basis; maybe there's a connection. She beat me several times, so it must be from crud-playing. Hand pool might be its own article eventually. Anyway, I guess it depends upon your "categorization politics". Mine are pretty liberal - I like to put stuff into a logical category as long as there are multiple items for it (there'll be two as soon as you're done with f.b., since we have crud), and especially if there are multiple parent categories (that will be the case here), and especially especially if the split parallels the category structure of another related category branch (I can't think of a parallel here, so this criterion of mine is not a check mark in this case), and so on. A bunch of factors really. I kind of wallow in that stuff. Not sure why I dig the category space so much. Less psychodrama, I guess. >;-) In my entire time here, I can only think of maybe one categorization decision I've made that got nuked at CfD. And I'm a pretty aggressive categorizer, too; I totally overhauled Category:Pinball just for the heck of it and will probably do the same to Category:Darts soon. PS: I'm not wedded to the "cueless billiards" name idea; it just seemed more concise than "cueless developments from cue sports" or whatever.— SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ Contribs. 11:44, 18 January 2010 (UTC) I have no "categorization politics". It's not an area that I think about a lot or has ever interested me so it's good there are people like you. If there is to be a category on this, "cueless billiards" seems fine to me. By the way, just posted Yank Adams as an adjunct to the finger billiards article I started.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 11:57, 18 January 2010 (UTC) Cool; I'd never even heard of him. This one looks like a good DYK; just the fact that there was Finger Billiards World Championship contention is funky enough, probably. You still citing that old version of Shamos? You really oughta get the 1999 version; it can be had from Amazon for cheap and has a bunch of updates. I actually put my old version in the recycle bin as not worth saving. Heh. PS: You seen Stein & Rubino 3rd ed.? I got one for the xmas before the one that just passed, from what was then a really good girlfriend. >;-) It's a-verra, verra nahce. Over 100 new pages, I think (mostly illustrations). — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ Contribs. 13:41, 18 January 2010 (UTC) If I happen to come across it in a used book store I might pick it up. There's nothing wrong with citing the older edition (as I've said to you before). I had not heard of Adams before yesterday either. Yank is apparently not his real name, though I'm not sure what it is yet. Not sure there will be enough on him to make a DYK (though don't count it out). Of course, since I didn't userspace it, I have 4½ days to see. Unfortunately, I don't have access to ancestry.com and have never found any free database nearly as useful for finding newspaper articles (and census, birth certificates, and reams of primary source material). I tried to sign up for a free trial again which worked once before, but they got smart and are logging those who signed up previously. I just looked; the new Stein and Rubino is about $280. I'll work from the 2nd edition:-)--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 14:16, 18 January 2010 (UTC) Hmm... I haven't tried Ancestry in a while. They're probably logging IP addresses. That would definitely affect me, since mine doesn't change except once every few years. I guess that's what libraries and stuff are for. S&R: Should be available cheaper. Mine came with the Blue Book of Pool Cues too for under $200 total. Here it is for $160, plus I think the shipping was $25. Stein gives his e-mail address as that page. If you ask him he might give you the 2-book deal too, or direct you to where ever that is. Shamos: Not saying its an unreliable source (although the newer version actually corrected some entries), it's just cool because it has more stuff in it. :-) DYK: Hey, you could speedily delete your own article, sandbox it and come back. Heh. Seriously, I'll see if I can get into Ancestry again and look for stuff on him. I want to look for William Hoskins stuff anyway so I can finish that half of the Spinks/Hoskins story, which has sat in draft form for over a year. I get sidetracked... — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ Contribs. 14:29, 18 January 2010 (UTC) It's not IPs they're logging, it's your credit card. You have to give them one in order to get the trial so that they can automatically charge you if you miss the cancellation deadline. Regarding the Blue Book, of all these books, that's the one that get's stale, that is, if you use it for actual quotes, which I do all the time, both for answer to questions and for selling, buying, etc. Yeah I start procrastinating too. I did all that work on Mingaud and now I can't get myself to go back. I also did reams of research on Hurricane Tony Ellin (thugh I found so little; I really felt bad when he died; I met him a few times, seemed like a really great guy), Masako Katsura and others but still haven't moved on them.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 18:31, 18 January 2010 (UTC) Ah, the credit card. I'll have to see if the PayPal plugin has been updated to work with the new Firefox. If so, that's our solution - it generates a new valid card number every time you use it (they always feed from your single PayPal account). — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ Contribs. 18:37, 18 January 2010 (UTC) PayPal Plugin ist kaput. Some banks now issue credit card accounts that make use of virtual card numbers, but mine's not one of them. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ Contribs. 19:49, 8 February 2010 (UTC) Thanks for trying. It was worth a shot. I signed up for a newspaperarchive.com three month trial. As far as newspaper results go it seems quite good so far, and the search interface is many orders of magnitude better than ancestry's, but it has none of the genealogical records that ancestry provides. With ancestry I could probably find census info on Yank as well as death information (as well as for Masako Katsura, which I've been working on it for a few days; she could actually be alive, though she'd be 96).--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 04:52, 9 February 2010 (UTC) Sad... How well forgotten some very well known people are. The more I read about Yank Adams, the more I realize he was world famous. Yet, he's almost completely unknown today and barely mentioned even in modern billiard texts.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 13:47, 21 January 2010 (UTC) Reading stuff from that era, it's also amazing how important billiards (in the three-ball sense) was back then, with sometimes multiple-page stories in newspapers about each turn in a long match, and so on. It's like snooker is today in the UK. PS: I saw that you found evidence of a billiards stage comedy there. I'd never heard of it! — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ Contribs. 15:17, 21 January 2010 (UTC) Jackpot. Portrait, diagrams, sample shot descriptions and more (that will also lend itself to the finger billiards article).--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 01:34, 22 January 2010 (UTC) Nice find! — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ Contribs. 06:07, 27 January 2010 (UTC)

Some more notes on Crystalate

Unresolved

 – New sources/material worked into article, but unanswered questions remain.

Extended content

Some more notes: they bought Royal Worcester in 1983 and sold it the next year, keeping some of the electronics part.[3]; info about making records:[4]; the chair in 1989 was Lord Jenkin of Roding:[5]; "In 1880, crystalate balls made of nitrocellulose, camphor, and alcohol began to appear. In 1926, they were made obligatory by the Billiards Association and Control Council, the London-based governing body." Amazing Facts: The Indispensable Collection of True Life Facts and Feats. Richard B. Manchester - 1991wGtDHsgbtltnpBg&ct=result&id=v0m-h4YgKVYC&dq=%2BCrystalate; a website about crystalate and other materials used for billiard balls:No5 Balls.html. Fences&Windows 23:37, 12 July 2011 (UTC) Thanks! I'll have to have a look at this stuff in more detail. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ Contribs. 15:54, 16 July 2011 (UTC) I've worked most of it in. Fences&Windows 16:01, 17 July 2011 (UTC) Cool! From what I can tell, entirely different parties held the trademark in different markets. I can't find a link between Crystalate Mfg. Co. Ltd. (mostly records, though billiard balls early on) and the main billiard ball mfr. in the UK, who later came up with "Super Crystalate". I'm not sure the term was even used in the U.S. at all, despite the formulation having been originally patented there. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ Contribs. 21:04, 17 July 2011 (UTC)

WP:SAL

Unresolved

 – Not done yet, last I looked.

Extended content

No one has actually objected to the idea that it's really pointless for WP:SAL to contain any style information at all, other than in summary form and citing MOS:LIST, which is where all of WP:SAL's style advice should go, and SAL page should move back to WP:Stand-alone lists with a content guideline tag. Everyone who's commented for 7 months or so has been in favor of it. I'd say we have consensus to start doing it. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ   Contrib. 13:13, 2 March 2012 (UTC) I'll take a look at the page shortly. Thanks for the nudge. SilkTork ✔Tea time 23:19, 2 March 2012 (UTC)

You post at Wikipedia talk:FAQ/Copyright

Unresolved

 – Need to fix William A. Spinks, etc., with proper balkline stats, now that we know how to interpret them.

Extended content

That page looks like a hinterland (you go back two users in the history and you're in August). Are you familiar with WP:MCQ? By the way, did you see my response on the balkline averages?--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 15:54, 6 January 2013 (UTC) Yeah, I did a bunch of archiving yesterday. This page was HUGE. It'll get there again. I'd forgotten MCQ existed. Can you please add it to the DAB hatnote at top of and "See also" at bottom of WP:COPYRIGHT? Its conspicuous absence is precisely why I ened up at Wikipedia talk:FAQ/Copyright! Haven't seen your balkline response yet; will go look. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖ⊝כ⊙þ Contrib. 21:34, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

Hee Haw

Unresolved

 – Still need to propose some standards on animal breed article naming and disambiguation. In the intervening years, we've settled on natural not parenthetic disambiguation, and that standardized breeds get capitalized, but that's about it.

Extended content

Yeah, we did get along on Donkeys. And probably will get along on some other stuff again later. Best way to handle WP is to take it issue by issue and then let bygones be bygones. I'm finding some interesting debates over things like the line between a subspecies, a landrace and a breed. Just almost saw someone else's GA derailed over a "breed versus species" debate that was completely bogus, we just removed the word "adapt" and life would have been fine. I'd actually be interested in seeing actual scholarly articles that discuss these differences, particularly the landrace/breed issue in general, but in livestock in particular, and particularly as applied to truly feral/landrace populations (if, in livestock, there is such a thing, people inevitably will do a bit of culling, sorting and other interference these days). I'm willing to stick to my guns on the WPEQ naming issue, but AGF in all respects. Truce? Montanabw(talk) 22:40, 6 January 2013 (UTC) Truce, certainly. I'm not here to pick fights, just improve the consistency for readers and editors. I don't think there will be any scholarly articles on differences between landrace and breed, because there's nothing really to write about. Landrace has clear definitions in zoology and botany, and breed not only doesn't qualify, it is only established as true in any given case by reliable sources. Basically, no one anywhere is claiming "This is the Foobabaz horse, and it is a new landrace!" That wouldn't make sense. What is happening is people naming and declaring new alleged breeds on an entirely self-interested, profit-motive basis, with no evidence anyone other than the proponent and a few other experimental breeders consider it a breed. WP is full of should-be-AfD'd articles of this sort, like the cat one I successfully prod'ed last week. Asking for a reliable source that something is a landrace rather than a breed is backwards; landrace status is the default, not a special condition. It's a bit like asking for a scholarly piece on whether pig Latin is a real language or not; no one's going to write a journal paper about that because "language" (and related terms like "dialect", "language family", "creole" in the linguistic sense, etc.) have clear definitions in linguistics, while pig Latin, an entirely artificial, arbitrary, intentionally-managed form of communication (like an entirely artificial, arbitrary, intentionally managed form of domesticated animal) does not qualify. :-) The "what is a breed" question, which is also not about horses any more than cats or cavies or ferrets, is going to be a separate issue to resolve from the naming issue. Looking over what we collaboratively did with donkeys – and the naming form that took, i.e. Poitou donkey not Poitou (donkey), I think I'm going to end up on your side of that one. It needs to be discussed more broadly in an RFC, because most projects use the parenthetical form, because this is what WT:AT is most readily interpretable as requiring. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖ⊝כ⊙þ Contrib. 00:12, 7 January 2013 (UTC) I hate the drama of an RfC, particularly when we can just look at how much can be naturally disambiguated, but if you think it's an actual issue, I guess ping me when it goes up. As for landcraces, it may be true ("clear definitions") but you would be doing God's (or someone's) own good work if you were to improve landrace which has few references, fewer good ones, and is generally not a lot of help to those of us trying to sort out WTF a "landrace" is... (smiles). As for breed, that is were we disagree: At what point do we really have a "breed" as opposed to a "landrace?" Fixed traits, human-selected? At what degree, at which point? How many generations? I don't even know if there IS such a thing as a universal definition of what a "breed" is: seriously: [6] or breed or [7]. I think you and I agree that the Palomino horse can never be a "breed" because it is impossible for the color to breed true (per an earlier discussion) so we have one limit. But while I happen agree to a significant extent with your underlying premise that when Randy from Boise breeds two animals and says he has created a new breed and this is a problem, (I think it's a BIG problem in the worst cases) but if we want to get really fussy, I suppose that the aficionados of the Arabian horse who claim the breed is pure from the dawn of time are actually arguing it is a landrace, wouldn't you say? And what DO we do with the multi-generational stuff that's in limbo land? Montanabw(talk) 00:41, 7 January 2013 (UTC) I'm not really certain what the answers are to any of those questions, another reason (besides your "STOP!" demands :-) that I backed away rapidly from moving any more horse articles around. But it's something that is going to have to be looked into. I agree that the Landrace article here is poor. For one thing, it needs to split Natural breed out into its own article (a natural breed is a selectively-bred formal breed the purpose of which is to refine and "lock-in" the most definitive qualities of a local landrace). This in turn isn't actually the same thing as a traditional breed, though the concepts are related. Basically, three breeding concepts are squished into one article. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖ⊝כ⊙þ Contrib. 00:52, 7 January 2013 (UTC) Side comment: I tend to support one good overview article over three poor content forks, just thinking aloud... Montanabw(talk) 23:01, 7 January 2013 (UTC) Sure; the point is that the concepts have to be separately, clearly treated, because they are not synonymous at all. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖ⊝כ⊙þ Contrib. 02:07, 8 January 2013 (UTC) Given that the article isn't well-sourced yet, I think that you might want to add something about that to landrace now, just to give whomever does article improvement on it later (maybe you, I think this is up your alley!) has the "ping" to do so. Montanabw(talk) 21:55, 8 January 2013 (UTC) Aye, it's on my to-do list. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖ⊝כ⊙þ Contrib. 22:25, 8 January 2013 (UTC) Although I have been an evolutionary biologist for decades, I only noticed the term "landrace" within the past year or two (in reference to corn), because I work with wildland plants. But I immediately knew what it was, from context. I'm much less certain about breeds, beyond that I am emphatic that they are human constructs. Montanabw and I have discussed my horse off-wiki, and from what I can tell, breeders are selecting for specific attributes (many people claim to have seen a horse "just like him"), but afaik there is no breed "Idaho stock horse". Artificially-selected lineages can exist without anyone calling them "breeds"; I'm not sure they would even be "natural breeds", and such things are common even within established breeds (Montanabw could probably explain to us the difference between Polish and Egyptian Arabians). The good thing about breeds wrt Wikipedia is that we can use WP:RS and WP:NOTABLE to decide what to cover. Landraces are a different issue: if no one has ever called a specific, distinctive, isolated mustang herd a landrace, is it OR for Wikipedia to do so?--Curtis Clark (talk) 16:21, 7 January 2013 (UTC) I have been reluctant to use landrace much out of a concern that the concept is a bit OR, as I hadn't heard of it before wikipedia either (but I'm more a historian than an evolutionary biologist, so what do I know?): Curtis, any idea where this did come from? It's a useful concept, but I am kind of wondering where the lines are between selective breeding and a "natural" breed -- of anything. And speaking of isolated Mustang herds, we have things like Kiger Mustang, which is kind of interesting. I think that at least some of SMc's passion comes from the nuttiness seen in a lot of the dog and cat breeders these days, am I right? I mean, Chiweenies? Montanabw(talk) 23:01, 7 January 2013 (UTC) The first use of the word that I saw referred to different landraces of corn growing in different elevations and exposures in indigenous Maya areas of modern Mexico. I haven't tracked down the references for the use of the word, but the concept seems extremely useful. My sense is that landraces form as much through natural selective processes of cultivation or captivity as through human selection, so that if the "garbage wolf" hypothesis for dog domestication is true, garbage wolves would have been a landrace (or more likely several, in different areas). One could even push the definition and say that MRSA is a landrace. But I don't have enough knowledge of the reliable sources to know how all this would fit into Wikipedia.--Curtis Clark (talk) 01:01, 8 January 2013 (UTC) Landraces form, primarily and quickly, through mostly natural selection, long after domestication. E.g. the St Johns water dog and Maine Coon cat are both North American landraces that postdate European arrival on the continent. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖ⊝כ⊙þ Contrib. 20:16, 9 January 2013 (UTC) I see some potential for some great research on this and a real improvement to the articles in question. Montanabw(talk) 21:55, 8 January 2013 (UTC) Yep. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖ⊝כ⊙þ Contrib. 20:16, 9 January 2013 (UTC)

Redundant sentence?

Unresolved

 – Work to integrate WP:NCFLORA and WP:NCFAUNA stuff into MOS:ORGANISMS not completed yet? Seems to be mostly done, other than fixing up the breeds section, after that capitalization RfC a while back.

Extended content

The sentence at MOS:LIFE "General names for groups or types of organisms are not capitalized except where they contain a proper name (oak, Bryde's whales, rove beetle, Van cat)" is a bit odd, since the capitalization would (now) be exactly the same if they were the names of individual species. Can it simply be removed? There is an issue, covered at Wikipedia:PLANTS#The use of botanical names as common names for plants, which may or may not be worth putting in the main MOS, namely cases where the same word is used as the scientific genus name and as the English name, when it should be de-capitalized. I think this is rare for animals, but more common for plants and fungi (although I have seen "tyrannosauruses" and similar uses of dinosaur names). Peter coxhead (talk) 09:17, 3 May 2014 (UTC) I would leave it a alone for now; let people get used to the changes. I think it's reasonable to include the "general names" thing, because it's a catch-all that includes several different kinds of examples, that various largely different groups of people are apt to capitalize. Various know-nothings want to capitalize things like "the Cats", the "Great Apes", etc., because they think "it's a Bigger Group and I like to Capitalize Big Important Stuff". There are millions more people who just like to capitalize nouns and stuff. "Orange's, $1 a Pound". Next we have people who insist on capitalizing general "types" and landraces of domestic animals ("Mountain Dogs", "Van Cat") because they're used to formal breed names being capitalized (whether to do that with breeds here is an open question, but it should not be done with types/classes of domestics, nor with landraces. Maybe the examples can be sculpted better: "the roses", "herpesviruses", "great apes", "Bryde's whale", "mountain dogs", "Van cat", "passerine birds". I'm not sure that "rove beetle" and "oak" are good examples of anything. Anyway, it's more that the species no-capitalization is a special case of the more general rule, not that the general rule is a redundant or vague version of the former. If they're merged, it should keep the general examples, and maybe specifically spell out and illustrate that it also means species and subspecies, landraces and domestic "types", as well as larger and more general groupings. I had noticed that point and was going to add it, along with some other points from both NCFLORA and NCFAUNA, soon to MOS:ORGANISMS, which I feel is nearing "go live" completion. Does that issue come up often enough to make it a MOS mainpage point? I wouldn't really object to it, and it could be had by adding an "(even if it coincides with a capitalized Genus name)" parenthetical to the "general names" bit. The pattern is just common enough in animals to have been problematic if it were liable to be problematic, as it were. I.e., I don't see a history of squabbling about it at Lynx or its talk page, and remember looking into this earlier with some other mammal, about two weeks ago, and not seeing evidence of confusion or editwarring. The WP:BIRDS people were actually studiously avoiding that problem; I remember seeing a talk page discussion at the project that agreed that such usage shouldn't be capitalized ever. PS: With Lynx, I had to go back to 2006, in the thick of the "Mad Capitalization Epidemic" to find capitalization there[8], and it wasn't even consistent, just in the lead.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  11:11, 3 May 2014 (UTC) Well, certainly "rove beetle" and "oak" are poor examples here, so I would support changing to some of the others you suggested above. I think the main problem we found with plants was it being unclear as to whether inexperienced editors meant the scientific name or the English name. So you would see a sentence with e.g. "Canna" in the middle and not know whether this should be corrected to "Canna" or to "canna". The plural is clear; "cannas" is always lower-case non-italicized. The singular is potentially ambiguous. Whether it's worth putting this point in the main MOS I just don't know since I don't much edit animal articles and never breed articles, which is why I asked you. Peter coxhead (talk) 21:55, 3 May 2014 (UTC) Will take a look at that later, if someone else doesn't beat me to it. Beats me. Doesn't seem too frequent an issue, but lot of MOS stuff isn't. Definitely should be in MOS:ORGANISMS, regardless.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  00:46, 4 May 2014 (UTC) Worked on both of those a bit at MOS. We'll see if it sticks.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  01:18, 5 May 2014 (UTC)

Note to self on WP:WikiProject English language

Unresolved

 – I think I did MOST of this already ...

Extended content
Finish patching up WP:WikiProject English language with the stuff from User:SMcCandlish/WikiProject English Language, and otherwise get the ball rolling.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  20:22, 17 August 2016 (UTC)

Excellent mini-tutorial

Unresolved

Extended content

Somehow, I forget quite how, I came across this - that is an excellent summary of the distinctions. I often get confused over those, and your examples were very clear. Is something like that in the general MoS/citation documentation? Oh, and while I am here, what is the best way to format a citation to a page of a document where the pages are not numbered? All the guidance I have found says not to invent your own numbering by counting the pages (which makes sense), but I am wondering if I can use the 'numbering' used by the digitised form of the book. I'll point you to an example of what I mean: the 'book' in question is catalogued here (note that is volume 2) and the digitised version is accessed through a viewer, with an example of a 'page' being here, which the viewer calls page 116, but there are no numbers on the actual book pages (to confuse things further, if you switch between single-page and double-page view, funny things happen to the URLs, and if you create and click on a single-page URL the viewer seems to relocate you one page back for some reason). Carcharoth (talk) 19:10, 12 September 2016 (UTC) @Carcharoth: Thanks. I need to copy that into an essay page. As far as I know, the concepts are not clearly covered in any of those places, nor clearly enough even at Help:CS1 (which is dense and overlong as it is). The e-book matters bear some researching. I'm very curious whether particular formats (Nook, etc.) paginate consistently between viewers. For Web-accessible ones, I would think that the page numbering that appears in the Web app is good enough if it's consistent (e.g., between a PC and a smart phone) when the reader clicks the URL in the citation. I suppose one could also use |at= to provide details if the "page" has to be explained in some way. I try to rely on better-than-page-number locations when possible, e.g. specific entries in dictionaries and other works with multiple entries per page (numbered sections in manuals, etc.), but for some e-books this isn't possible – some are just continuous texts. One could probably use something like |at=in the paragraph beginning "The supersegemental chalcolithic metastasis is ..." about 40% into the document, in a pinch. I guess we do need to figure this stuff out since such sources are increasingly common.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  20:29, 13 September 2016 (UTC) Yes (about figuring out how to reference e-books), though I suspect existing (non-WP) citation styles have addressed this already (no need to re-invent the wheel). This is a slightly different case, though. It is a digitisation of an existing (physical) book that has no page numbers. If I had the book in front of me (actually, it was only published as a single copy, so it is not a 'publication' in that traditional sense of many copies being produced), the problem with page numbers would still exist. I wonder if the 'digital viewer' should be thought of as a 'via' thingy? In the same way that (technically) Google Books and archive.org digital copies of old books are just re-transmitting, and re-distributing the material (is wikisource also a 'via' sort of thing?). Carcharoth (talk) 23:13, 13 September 2016 (UTC) @Carcharoth: Ah, I see. I guess I would treat it as a |via=, and same with WikiSource, which in this respect is essentially like Google Books or Project Gutenberg. I think your conundrum has come up various times with arXiv papers, that have not been paginated visibly except in later publication (behind a journal paywall and not examined). Back to the broader matter: Some want to treat WikiSource and even Gutenberg as republishers, but I think that's giving them undue editorial credit and splitting too fine a hair. Was thinking on the general unpaginated and mis-paginated e-sources matter while on the train, and came to the conclusion that for a short, unpaginated work with no subsections, one might give something like |at=in paragraph 23, and for a much longer one use the |at=in the paragraph beginning "..." trick. A straight up |pages=82–83 would work for an e-book with hard-coded meta-data pagination that is consistent between apps/platforms and no visual pagination. On the other hand, use the visual pagination in an e-book that has it, even if it doesn't match the e-book format's digital pagination, since the pagination in the visual content would match that of a paper copy; one might include a note that the pagination is that visible in the content if it conflicts with what the e-book reader says (this comes up a lot with PDFs, for one thing - I have many that include cover scans, and the PDF viewers treat that as p. 1, then other front matter as p. 2, etc., with the content's p. 1 being something like PDF p. 7).  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  08:07, 14 September 2016 (UTC)

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Current threads

Books & Bytes – Issue 36

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 36, September – October 2019

• #1Lib1Ref January 2020
• #1Lib1Ref 2019 stories and learnings

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 05:21, 21 November 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Template talk:Senate of Canada

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Google Code-In 2019 is coming - please mentor some documentation tasks!

Hello,

Google Code-In, Google-organized contest in which the Wikimedia Foundation participates, starts in a few weeks. This contest is about taking high school students into the world of opensource. I'm sending you this message because you recently edited a documentation page at the English Wikipedia.

I would like to ask you to take part in Google Code-In as a mentor. That would mean to prepare at least one task (it can be documentation related, or something else - the other categories are Code, Design, Quality Assurance and Outreach) for the participants, and help the student to complete it. Please sign up at the contest page and send us your Google account address to google-code-in-admins@lists.wikimedia.org, so we can invite you in!

From my own experience, Google Code-In can be fun, you can make several new friends, attract new people to your wiki and make them part of your community.

If you have any questions, please let us know at google-code-in-admins@lists.wikimedia.org.

Thank you!

--User:Martin Urbanec (talk) 21:58, 23 November 2019 (UTC)

Ship gender

You said "We've been over this many times before, seemingly about every year or so..." which was also very much my impression, as a distant and uninterested onlooker. But when I asked, a little way above you, for links to the equally interminable previous discussions, the guy who raised the matter said he didn't know of any... Do you have links? Johnbod (talk) 01:29, 24 November 2019 (UTC)

@Johnbod: Not right off-hand. It comes up in different venues. I know it's been discussed at various MoS talk pages, and at a number of article talk pages, and in some wikiproject ones. Maybe also Village Pump. It's not the kind of thing I keep track of. I directed VPPOL, and various additional wikiprojects (since ships and MilHist were already notified) to the current thread, so the input should be broader this time. Maybe put an RfC tag on i?  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  08:50, 24 November 2019 (UTC)

PS: If it's important, I would start with searching the MoS archives for "ships".  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  08:51, 24 November 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Template talk:Infobox officeholder

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Arbitration Case Opened

You recently offered a statement in a request for arbitration. The Arbitration Committee has accepted that request for arbitration and an arbitration case has been opened at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Portals. Evidence that you wish the arbitrators to consider should be added to the evidence subpage, at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Portals/Evidence. Please add your evidence by December 20, 2019, which is when the evidence phase closes. You can also contribute to the case workshop subpage, Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Portals/Workshop. For a guide to the arbitration process, see Wikipedia:Arbitration/Guide to arbitration. For the Arbitration Committee, SQL^{Query me!} 20:38, 26 November 2019 (UTC)

Noted. I'm going to start gathering diffs, but not at a fast clip. I want to see how much the scope gets constrained.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  20:13, 27 November 2019 (UTC)

Question about Senate of Canada's seating plan image

Hi @SMcCandlish:

I was mousing over your miniature userbox and user rights' icons at your your userpage and, noticing your file mover rights, wondered if you might be able to resolve an outstanding question I had in this discussion. Long story short, I don't think it's a caching issue or a problem with my web browser because the updated seating plan image that MikkelJSmith2 uploaded to the Commons on 21 November 2019 at 19:14 loads fine when you maximize that version. However, notice the thumbnail for that version shows the older version from 15 July 2019? Similarly, at commons:File:Senate of Canada - Seating Plan By Province.svg, it still shows the old version (without the new Senate groups). Likewise, here, it shows the older version. I'm not sure what the problem is, but I suspect there's something we're not doing piping it over to the Wikipedia file namespace maybe.

Cheers,
--Doug Mehus T·C 00:23, 27 November 2019 (UTC)

DmehusIt honestly shows the new version everywhere for me just like Huon said in the original discussion. - MikkelJSmith (talk) 13:03, 27 November 2019 (UTC)

MikkelJSmith2, Nevertheless, there's something somewhere that needs to be corrected—that you and I aren't doing to get it to show up properly on the Commons and on the "File:" namespace. I'm hoping we can get it resolved, so we know what we're not doing for next time. I honestly think Huon prematurely closed, or short-circuited, the discussion I raised to close an active "help me" request instead of taking the time to properly show us what we hadn't done. Doug Mehus T·C 15:47, 27 November 2019 (UTC)

@Dmehus: If page reload doesn't work, try deleting you WP-related cache and cookies, and re-login. If that doesn't work, try WP:PURGE (or maybe do that first, then the cache/cookie/login thing). I use a user Javascript (in the "Gadgets" section of the "Preferences" menu) that puts a UTC clock top-right (near "... Contributions   Log out"). Clicking that clock will purge the current page and everything it transcludes. That's probably one of the best userscripts ever, since you get two useful features in one.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:45, 27 November 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)

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Please comment on Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style

Disregard

 – I was already knee-deep in this one before the RfC bot came around.

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style. Legobot (talk) 04:24, 28 November 2019 (UTC)

Legobot, Oh the WP:MOS, that's right up SMcCandlish's alley. Thanks, Legobot. You do us proud. ;-) --Doug Mehus T·C 05:03, 28 November 2019 (UTC) (talk page stalker)

Yeah, pretty rare for this thing to drop of an MoS RfC notice for something I haven't already commented in (or opened as the OP).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  08:26, 28 November 2019 (UTC)

Giving thanks

Thanksgiving

Cassia javanica, Torremolinos
... with thanks from QAI

Happy Thanksgiving! --Gerda Arendt (talk) 16:24, 28 November 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)

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Precious anniversary

Precious

Two years!

--Gerda Arendt (talk) 07:46, 1 December 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia talk:New pages patrol/Reviewers/Redirect autopatrol

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Please comment on Talk:Epstein didn't kill himself

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Exemplification of your humourous EFF essay

@SMcCandlish:,

Hope you're doing well. Well, this ANI discussion exemplifies why sometimes it's best when you're the subject of an ANI discussion to just ignore it. It's probably a good thing I was absent from Wikipedia for a few days as I might've been tempted to get involved (to a potential detriment). I'm sure you've probably had an editor take you to ANI before, so I guess I can say I'm no longer a WikiVirgin (if that shortcut wikilink doesn't exist, it might be a useful, humourous Wikipedia essay on ANI). ;-)

Interestingly, this was despite my previously trying to use ANI as a de-escalation medium Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive1022#Seeking de-escalation over at User talk:Dennis Bratland#Kinda bitey reply at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Erica C. Barnett, which Britishfinance closed as consensually de-escalated. I realized then, thanks to Rhododendrites, that ANI is not normally known as the medium for de-escalation; indeed it's the opposite.

It seems Wikipedia has a lot of incivility...I wonder if we could establish consensus to make mandatory dispute resolution prior to taking another editor to ANI? It seems like a reasonable solution.

Cheers,
--Doug Mehus T·C 15:22, 3 December 2019 (UTC)

ANI is a WP:DRAMA factory. ANI is part of WP:DR. The lower sorts of DR, like WP:3O and WP:DRN are themselves voluntary (and often not applicable – they won't take "cases" than involve things like disruption of internal material, e.g. squabbles over guideline wording). So, ANI already is the first stage of mandatory DR. Which may account for its high drama level.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:49, 4 December 2019 (UTC)

PS: WP:WikiVirgin would indeed be a funny essay, but since the metaphoric referent involves sex and females, you'd almost certainly get castigated for writing it under that title. Learn from the User:SMcCandlish/It MfD drama, repeated attempts to MfD WP:DIVA (presently WP:HIGHMAINT though even that title and the longer version WP:Don't be high-maintenance have been accused of sexism), and the ongoing brouhaha about ships and she (at WT:MOS), and so on. A spectral WP:BATTLEGROUND can arise from the fog in an instant, like a portal to a hellish otherworld, despite one's best intentions.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  11:28, 4 December 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia talk:Did you know

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Please comment on Template talk:Infobox person

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Please comment on Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard

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Off-Broadway

Hey there! I see the discussion has been closed and page moved for off-off-Broadway. Does not the same logic apply to Off-Broadway? Cheers, GentlemanGhost (séance) 14:01, 10 December 2019 (UTC)

@GentlemanGhost: Yes, it does. I'd already made that change, a week ago, but someone reverted it. Then I did that RM, so I think I'll go re-instate that change.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  08:38, 11 December 2019 (UTC)

Ah, I should have dug into the edit history. Thanks for following through! GentlemanGhost (séance) 08:52, 11 December 2019 (UTC)

@GentlemanGhost: Well, I would almost bet money I'll get knee-jerk reverted again. If that happens, I'll RfC this at WT:MOSCAPS. I'm really getting tired of the "capitalize every term related to theatre, acting, dance, and other arts" WP:SSF nonsense, and it's getting increasingly wearying dealing with it on an article-by-article basis. This is just another sliver of MOS:ACTCAPS. We extended it to explicitly cover non-trademarked games, sports, and dance terms about a year ago, and probably need to mention acting/theatre more specifically (though it already includes "method acting" at MOS:DOCTCAPS, for related reasons).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  09:29, 11 December 2019 (UTC)

Yeah, that could easily happen. Experienced editors should be aware of the MOS, but some notions may be hard to dispel. In the case of off-Broadway, The New York Times MOS (and probably the AP Style Guide) may make some editors more familiar and comfortable with the capitalized variation but the bottom line is that the only MOS which applies here is our own. Even though it personally feels odd to me, in the same way that a British spelling of a word does, I see the value in consensus and applying MOSCAPS consistently, so others should be able to as well. --GentlemanGhost (séance) 10:11, 11 December 2019 (UTC)

The main thing is to not apply an unnecessary stylization (including capitals). The entire problem with the "we should write about theatre the way theatre-centric writers do, and write about birds the way ornithologists do" is every specialization wants to over-capitalize various things within their little fiefdom, and the end result would be nearly everything capitalized on every topic. E.g., the theatre/acting/film/TV people would capitalize every occurrence of "off-Broadway" and "method acting" and "director of photography" and yadda yadda yadda at every occurrence in every article, and the bird people would capitalize every common name of every bird species (and – as we know from direct experience – then go around doing this to every common name of every species of everything), and the skateboarders will capitalize the names of every skating trick, and the dance people will capitalize the names of every dance, style, and step, and there'll just be no end to it. There already is no end to it, just a suppression of it via MOS:CAPS, a sea wall over which the waves frequently crest. It goes way beyond capitals, though, and includes things like mimicry of odd stylization in trademarks (backwards letters, etc.), unnecessary punctuation (like the comma in "Sammy Davis, Jr.", preferred by Americans over the age of about 50), dropping of punctuation (e.g. "St Peter Ave" when every British style guide says it should be "St Peter Ave." – British English only drops the dots from contraction abbreviations that begin and end with the same letters as the whole word, as in St and Dr for Saint and Doctor; the "just drop them all" nonsense is sloppy journalistic writing used by some newspapers desperately trying to save column space, which people them imitate, not knowing any better), and unit symbols and abbreviations (things like "2 foot six" and "2'6''" are ingrained in some styles). And on and on. It simply is not physically possible for editors to all get their personally preferred way on every style matter, because they're going to conflict in many ways and it would just lead to constant editwarring over style trivia. That's how MoS came about in the first place, so stop that constant disruption. That and the problem of letting every specialist camp write in a specialist way leads to material that looks to the average reader like it was written by the barely literate, and even when it doesn't, it results in impenetrable writing that only specialists in a particular field can understand - and even then only if the topic in question is "claimed" by just one camp of specialists imposing one weird set of styles. If you get a topic like "fauna of Madagascar", you end up with ornithologists and primatologists and ecologists and ethologists and etc., etc., all trying to do conflicting things.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:28, 12 December 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard

Disregard

 – No need; this is already a WP:SNOWBALL.

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard. Legobot (talk) 04:30, 12 December 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Partial blocks

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It’s that time of year!

Christmas tree worm, (Spirobranchus gigantic) Atsme Talk 📧 18:17, 13 December 2019 (UTC)
	Time To Spread A Little Happy Holiday Cheer!!
	I decorated a special kind of Christmas tree in the spirit of the season. What's especially nice about this digitized version: *it doesn't need water *won't catch fire *and batteries aren't required.
	Have a very Merry Christmas - Happy Hanukkah‼️ and a prosperous New Year!! 🍸🎁 🎉

Cheers

Damon Runyon's short story "Dancing Dan's Christmas" is a fun read if you have the time. Right from the start it extols the virtues of the hot Tom and Jerry This hot Tom and Jerry is an old-time drink that is once used by one and all in this country to celebrate Christmas with, and in fact it is once so popular that many people think Christmas is invented only to furnish an excuse for hot Tom and Jerry, although of course this is by no means true. No matter what concoction is your favorite to imbibe during this festive season I would like to toast you with it and to thank you for all your work here at the 'pedia this past year. Best wishes for your 2020 as well SMcC. MarnetteD|Talk 02:00, 17 December 2019 (UTC)

Thank you ...

Vision in 2020

missing Brian

... for improving article quality in December! There's a peer review open for Clara Schumann and a FAC for Jauchzet, frohlocket!, DYK? We miss Brian who would have helped. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 17:01, 19 December 2019 (UTC)

Merry Christmas!

A very happy Christmas and New Year to you!
May 2020 bring you joy, happiness – and no trolls, vandals or visits from Krampus! All the best Gavin / SchroCat (talk) 07:49, 20 December 2019 (UTC)

Season's greetings

Eris, the Greek goddess of discord

SubGenius leaders cast J. R. "Bob" Dobbs as a "World Avatar".

Hello SMcCandlish: Enjoy the holiday season, and thanks for your work to maintain, improve and expand Wikipedia. Cheers, North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 15:42, 20 December 2019 (UTC)

New Page Review newsletter December 2019

Reviewer of the Year

This year's Reviewer of the Year is Rosguill. Having gotten the reviewer PERM in August 2018, they have been a regular reviewer of articles and redirects, been an active participant in the NPP community, and has been the driving force for the emerging NPP Source Guide that will help reviewers better evaluate sourcing and notability in many countries for which it has historically been difficult.

Special commendation again goes to Onel5969 who ends the year as one of our most prolific reviewers for the second consecutive year. Thanks also to Boleyn and JTtheOG who have been in the top 5 for the last two years as well.

Several newer editors have done a lot of work with CAPTAIN MEDUSA and DannyS712 (who has also written bots which have patrolled thousands of redirects) being new reviewers since this time last year.

Thanks to them and to everyone reading this who has participated in New Page Patrol this year.

Top 10 Reviewers over the last 365 days

Rank	Username	Num reviews	Log
1	Rosguill (talk)	47,395	Patrol Page Curation
2	Onel5969 (talk)	41,883	Patrol Page Curation
3	JTtheOG (talk)	11,493	Patrol Page Curation
4	Arthistorian1977 (talk)	5,562	Patrol Page Curation
5	DannyS712 (talk)	4,866	Patrol Page Curation
6	CAPTAIN MEDUSA (talk)	3,995	Patrol Page Curation
7	DragonflySixtyseven (talk)	3,812	Patrol Page Curation
8	Boleyn (talk)	3,655	Patrol Page Curation
9	Ymblanter (talk)	3,553	Patrol Page Curation
10	Cwmhiraeth (talk)	3,522	Patrol Page Curation

(The top 100 reviewers of the year can be found here)

Redirect autopatrol

A recent Request for Comment on creating a new redirect autopatrol pseduo-permission was closed early. New Page Reviewers are now able to nominate editors who have an established track record creating uncontroversial redirects. At the individual discretion of any administrator or after 24 hours and a consensus of at least 3 New Page Reviewers an editor may be added to a list of users whose redirects will be patrolled automatically by DannyS712 bot III.

Source Guide Discussion

Set to launch early in the new year is our first New Page Patrol Source Guide discussion. These discussions are designed to solicit input on sources in places and topic areas that might otherwise be harder for reviewers to evaluate. The hope is that this will allow us to improve the accuracy of our patrols for articles using these sources (and/or give us places to perform a WP:BEFORE prior to nominating for deletion). Please watch the New Page Patrol talk page for more information.

This month's refresher course

While New Page Reviewers are an experienced set of editors, we all benefit from an occasional review. This month consider refreshing yourself on Wikipedia:Notability (geographic features). Also consider how we can take the time for quality in this area. For instance, sources to verify human settlements, which are presumed notable, can often be found in seconds. This lets us avoid the (ugly) 'Needs more refs' tag.

Delivered by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) at 16:11, 20 December 2019 (UTC)

Io Saturnalia!

		Io, Saturnalia!
		Wishing you and yours a Happy Holiday Season, from the horse and bishop person. May the year ahead be productive and distraction-free. Ealdgyth - Talk 16:37, 20 December 2019 (UTC)

Merry Merry!

Merry Christmas and a Prosperous 2020!

Hello SMcCandlish, may you be surrounded by peace, success and happiness on this seasonal occasion. Spread the WikiLove by wishing another user a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past, a good friend, or just some random person. Sending you heartfelt and warm greetings for Christmas and New Year 2020. Happy editing, ★Trekker (talk) 13:50, 21 December 2019 (UTC) Spread the love by adding {{subst:Seasonal Greetings}} to other user talk pages.

Happy Holidays

Thank you for continuing to make Wikipedia the greatest project in the world. I hope you have an excellent holiday season. Lightburst (talk) 21:39, 22 December 2019 (UTC)

Happy holidays!

Hi SMac! All the warmest wishes for this seasonal occasion, whichever you celebrate - or don't, while I swelter at 27℃ (80.6℉), and peace and prosperity for 2020, hoping that you'll join me for a cool beer in Bangkok in August when it will be even hotter! Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 10:04, 24 December 2019 (UTC)

Happy Holidays

Hello SMcCandlish: Enjoy the holiday season, and thanks for your work to maintain, improve and expand Wikipedia. Cheers, DBigXrayᗙ Happy Holidays! 17:59, 24 December 2019 (UTC)

Spread the WikiLove; use {{subst:Season's Greetings1}} to send this message

Speedy deletion nomination of Category:Cue sports external link templates

Disregard

 – No such deletion nomination by the time I got to it.

A tag has been placed on Category:Cue sports external link templates requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under section C1 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because the category has been empty for seven days or more and is not a disambiguation category, a category redirect, a featured topics category, under discussion at Categories for discussion, or a project category that by its nature may become empty on occasion.

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. UnitedStatesian (talk) 03:29, 26 December 2019 (UTC)

UnitedStatesian, I see no such CFD-speedy, listing, nor a speedy tag on the category. I do see that at least one template has been added back into the category since I last looked at it. I'm not sure we need a category for what now many only be two templates (there used to be more), but it's also an internal-purposes category, not reader-facing, and it's of use at the wikiproject level, so I would oppose deleting it. The maintenance is helps likely exceeds the maintenance it requires.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  21:10, 26 December 2019 (UTC)

@SMcCandlish: the tag was removed once the category was populated. Best, UnitedStatesian (talk) 21:45, 26 December 2019 (UTC)

Sorry, this one is on me. I populated the cat as it became empty after the deletion of the cuetracker links. I added the two external links templates we had. I always prefer templates over regular links, as they can have metadata and such added. Best Wishes, Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 21:50, 26 December 2019 (UTC)

@Lee Vilenski: Yeah, someone or other a few years ago was on the warpath against single-source citation templates and got a lot of them deleted (mainly just because TfD isn't well-watched and not always well-reasoned). This "campaign" has stopped, and various cue sports templates might be worth re-creating (in substantially better form than originally) so that the citations we keep making to the same sources over and over again are more consistent and easier to make.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  21:53, 26 December 2019 (UTC)

I think at the very least, an external link template to the snooker.org entry for tournaments would be beneficial. I might spend some time in the new year on this.Best Wishes, Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 21:59, 26 December 2019 (UTC)

In case you weren't aware

Resolved

Your name was recently invoked on ANI, with the implication that you were promoting the fringe content that (from where I'm reading your comments, anyway) you had actually been arguing against. According to the above comment (in which you weren't pinged) you had become "not too sure" about your original support for version C over versions A and B, but I'm really not seeing that.

In case you actually interpreted my reply as "bludgeoning" you, I should apologize. I meant merely to clarify why I was asking your opinion on later developments in the RFC.

Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 06:40, 26 December 2019 (UTC)

@Hijiri88: I don't agree with either of those interpretations by Francis Schonken, and said so at the ANI thread. I don't think your case for blocking the other editor is good, though a T-ban might actually be appropriate. I do think your decision to back away is wise, though. When one gets too worked up about a topic here, it can make one seem like the real problem, as I've had to learn the hard way myself. :-) 21:03, 26 December 2019 (UTC)

So, what happened to that break?  :-/  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  17:27, 2 January 2020 (UTC)

RfC notice (low priority)

Based on your participation in an earlier discussion, you are invited to comment at WNGH-TV#RfC about TV and radio station style variances. Thanks. – Reidgreg (talk) 19:11, 27 December 2019 (UTC)

                                                 

• 
• 
• 

Happy New Year!

• 
  MMXX Lunar Calendar

SMcCandlish,
Have a great 2020 and thanks for your continued contributions to Wikipedia.

---

   – 2020 is a leap year – news article.
   – Background color is Classic Blue (#0F4C81), Pantone's 2020 Color of the year

Send New Year cheer by adding {{subst:Happy New Year 2020}} to user talk pages.

– North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 22:33, 30 December 2019 (UTC)

Some advice?

Hijiri88 (talk · contribs) here. Posting this logged out for obvious reasons (but doing so "publicly" rather than by email so as to dispel any impression that there's any "funny business" going on).

Background: I came across the email address of the author of one of the sources that was being quoted out of context, for a point that was peripheral to their main argument and so apparently came from Wikipedia. I briefly considered emailing them myself to ask if they could recall where they actually got the information (since their cited source says nothing of the sort), but then decided that emailing a scholar in a field related to my own with a message asking/insinuating "did you get this from Wikipedia?" was not a good idea. I then figured maybe explicitly placing the burden of doing that on the four parties still advocating for the apparently-circular citation to be restored might be a good idea; then, right before clicking "Publish changes", I realized that that could potentially open the door to "Yeah, I emailed him and he replied -- he said he would never dream of getting information from Wikipedia, and his copy of McCullough has linguistic footnotes that do support his text", and the only ways for me to disprove such a lie would be to (a) contact Taylor myself to ask if he had written such an email, which would be borderline harassment far worse than just emailing him in the first place, or (b) |prove that no such edition of McCullough exists.

Long story short, I'm asking you for a second opinion on posting the following at the bottom of Talk:Mottainai#"Genpei Jōsuiki".

• I didn't notice until now, but Taylor's staff profile at the University of Memphis gives an email address for him. {{ping|Martinthewriter|Francis Schonken|IvoryTower123|Challenger.rebecca}} Since you are all apparently still advocating for our citation of Taylor for content that was in this Wikipedia article seven years before he wrote the "source" in question, would you like to contact him and ask him where he got the information? I've already checked his cited source, which doesn't say anything about mottainashi one way or the other, leading to the most reasonable conclusion being that, because it was a peripheral point to the one he was making in his essay, he checked Wikipedia and then located the corresponding passage in a translation of the Heike, without verifying that the Japanese text supported our assertion. ~~~~

Any advice you could offer on the matter (even unrelated to posting the above -- if you were in my shoes would you just bite the bullet and email Taylor yourself?) would be most appreciated.

Cheers, 211.135.108.100 (talk) 06:41, 31 December 2019 (UTC)

I would just write to him myself, but post something like the above explaining why I was doing so. (But I'm not an academic; I was a professional online activist for over a decade, so writing to important people with difficult questions wasn't something I shied away from. >;-)  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:56, 2 January 2020 (UTC)

For what it's worth, I didn't "look hard to find potential insult in every phrase" -- I looked hard at every phrase of Francis's proposed change, much of which was, yes, insulting to me (since it contained numerous grammatical errors, misreadings of sources, and outright nonsense, while he repeatedly referred to it as an "improvement" on my work), but I didn't actually mention that anywhere in my long commentary on the edit (which, as I will give you credit for not failing to notice, he admitted to not having read). I think if you change your !vote just because you want the RFC to end in "no consensus" sooner ... well, that's somewhat unsettling and bad for the project -- did you find something in all of that discussion that convinced you that either version A or version F is not inferior to version C?

Yes, I think a simple !vote count at present would probably come out to "no consensus", but a proper close would take into account the fact that several of the !votes (virtually all of the ones for version A) were clearly drive-by comments by editors acting in bad faith.

And ... well, I will seriously consider whether I intend to take your above advice. Not because I don't think it is sound on its face, but because I am really having serious doubts about whether any of this has been worth my time, and now even you are apparently saying you think the best solution would be for us to wait another month for a new RFC to be opened and then closed. I honestly don't think any good could come from that proposal, and would rather just change my !vote to version A and walk away from the article, if not the entire project, to allow me to enjoy my life again.

Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 11:49, 2 January 2020 (UTC)

Union Jack's knives in the back

IMHO, Welsh, Scottish & Irish nationalism is behind a lot of the push to use Welsh/Scottish/Irish-N.Irish/English in such UK-related articles. Anyway, just mentioning it here, as one gets blasted out there for bringing up the elephant in the room. PS: Feel free to delete this post. GoodDay (talk) 16:17, 2 January 2020 (UTC)

I'm sure that's true, but it's a common perspective and isn't "wrong". It's not any less or more righteous than a "blur away all these distinctions and let them go the way of Cornwall and the Cornish" extreme unionism. Over here in Yankeeland, we have a similar split between states'-rights advocates and fans of increased federal government authority (which also tend to align with right-wing versus left-wing politics, respectively).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  17:26, 2 January 2020 (UTC)

Except on issues where it's the other way around. Happy New Year. Dicklyon (talk) 05:27, 3 January 2020 (UTC)

Yeah. The Republicans tend to be big fans of things like the Dept. of Homeland Security, and lots of dope-smokin' liberals love the fact that California legalized pot. >;-)  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  05:57, 3 January 2020 (UTC)

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!

Hello SMcCandlish: Thanks for all of your contributions to Wikipedia, and have a great New Year! Cheers, Clovermoss (talk) 00:41, 3 January 2020 (UTC)

Send New Year cheer by adding {{subst:Happy New Year snowman}} to people's talk pages with a friendly message.

A message to all and sundry

Happy Newt Year! →

Taricha torosa

I'll refrain from delivering these on a zillion talk pages. Heh.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  05:57, 3 January 2020 (UTC)

Ha ha. I like these guys.
– North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 06:14, 3 January 2020 (UTC)

Oh, yeah! I find this variant all the time. Kept a few around (fed them fruit flies) for a while. A visitor was checking out the terrarium: "Hey! This worm ... it has legs!"  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  06:54, 3 January 2020 (UTC)

Zigbee vs ZigBee spelling

Resolved

 – Opened it as a WP:RM so it just gets decided instead of just two people having a bilateral back-'n'-forth about it. :-)

Hi, I just left a note at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:ZigBee#Capitalization:_Zigbee,_not_ZigBee about your Zigbee -> ZigBee modifications a month+ ago -- I think the changes should be the other way around. Maybe discuss this further on the Talk:ZigBee page? Vskytta (talk) 20:07, 3 January 2020 (UTC)

WP:ANI

Resolved

 – I've said all that needs to be said at that waste of time. There's clearly no consensus for sanctions in either direction, though a boomerang would've been entirely appropriate.

There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. The Drover's Wife (talk) 01:52, 6 January 2020 (UTC)

Nine-ball History

Hi Stanton, long time! I hope you are well. I've been working my way through the nine-ball article, cutting some more of the in-depth parts, and expanding some more on the game as a whole. I'm looking to do up a history section (I know it's a 1920s America thing, but outside of that I'm lost), and expand the section on tournaments. I know you have an encylopedic knowledge of these things, so if you have any sources, or ideas where to look, I'd appreciate it. I currently have the following:

• very minor mentions of history
• The Pool Bible - just says about it's preported beginnings
• - not sure if reliable
• History.co.uk basically barely mentions it.

I know A Brief History of the Noble Game of Billiards by Shamos is a good reference, but I don't see a great deal on the origins and history of the sport (I'd assume that's why we don't already have one.)

Any ideas for this one? Thanks for your help. Best Wishes, Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 10:50, 7 January 2020 (UTC)

@Lee Vilenski:. Nine-ball originated in the US, so UK sources will likely be late and dubious (like American works on snooker). Probably the best bets are:

• Shamos, Mike (1999). The New Illustrated Encyclopedia of Billiards. New York: Lyons Press. ISBN 9781558217973 – via Internet Archive. – Inexpensive, commonly available, and a real trove.
• Stein, Victor; Rubino, Paul (2008) [1994]. The Billiard Encyclopedia (3rd ed.). New York: Balkline Press. ISBN 9780615170923. – It's possible there's a later edition, but every ed. of it is very expensive, so it's better found via inter-library loan. The work is important enough some UK libraries probably have it.
• Shamos also regularly writes/wrote a history column for one of the pool mags (I'm pretty sure it's Billiards Digest). I know he did an in-depth piece on the history and development of eight-ball, so it's probable he did one on nine-ball (and likely earlier that the eight-ball piece, given the pro pool focus of the mags). I doubt back-issues are common in the UK, and I don't know if they have a full archive of back issues online.
• One way to really dig into it is to dig up past editions of the Billiard Congress of America and earlier Billiard Association of America rulebooks. The WPA's later rules are based on those (I think they are now kept in sync). BAA probably produced the first published rule set, other than maybe in booklets produced by table manufacturers like Brunswick, Balke & Collender (they produced two early rulebooks for what became eight-ball, as "B.B.C. Co. pool", around 1912 and 1925 if I recall correctly).

I no longer have a collection of these books and magazines, after downsizing about a year ago (my back could no longer take dealing with 4,000 books and 15,000 comics and magazines, and my bank account wasn't happy about paying for space to store it all). As for BAA/BCA rulebooks, they're often available on eBay for $5–10, but most are likely also available through ILL in the US and Canada (not sure every year's edition would be, though; libraries tend to divest old editions of books that are regularly updated). That likely doesn't help you in the UK, since these books would not have made their way across the Atlantic very often. I don't know what year the nine-ball rules first appeared in BAA/BCA rulebooks, though asking someone at BCA via e-mail might work. For all I know, they might even have archival PDFs now.

 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:57, 8 January 2020 (UTC)

Is that Robert Downey Jr.? No, it's Saint McCandlish chillaxin on his private jet on the way to the WPA World Nine-ball Championship!

Holy moly, 4,000 books and 15,000 comics and magazines, that's a veritable mountain. Hopefully you made some cash selling them at bookstores, even though nowadays they offer chintzy buy pricing, likely thanks in part to the internet, which has eliminated the need for books! North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 00:34, 9 January 2020 (UTC)

That, and Amazon in particular is putting local bookstores out of business.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:15, 9 January 2020 (UTC)

I've migrated my library to work, and hope that my company will take care of the 3000 volumes (many of which they paid for) after I retire, so I won't have to deal with them. Selling is hard and slow. Used booksellers that I know buy up books for about $1 at "Friends of Library" sales and such, and sell them online via abebooks.com and such (now part of Amazon, sadly). I still buy a couple of books every week via abebooks.com, because you can't argue sources without sources. Google book search is good for finding snippets, but then you need to get the book to find more. In this way the Internet has been good for used book sellers, by making their wares searchable, but instead of stores they have storage. Turnover is very low, so storage needs to be cheap. If you're in a hurry to unload, you might as well give them to the library and let someone else try to make a buck off them. Dicklyon (talk) 01:39, 9 January 2020 (UTC)

Yeah, I guess it's resulting in a general "consolidation" of bookstores; those that could adapt to the model of a storefront plus a whole lot of e-tailing survived, while traditional ones just running as storefronts have had a tendency to go under.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:47, 9 January 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for this mate. I knew you had gotten rid of the books, but thought you'd know better than me where to start looking. Something on how/why/when the game was founded would probably be enough, as it's not fantastic just saying "around 1920, America". Best Wishes, Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 09:15, 9 January 2020 (UTC)

It's been said it originated as a children's and a training/practice game. Oh! Another likely source is Robert Byrne's book series; Byrne's Wonderful World of Pool and Billiards, Byrne's Book of Great Pool Stories, and Byrne's New Standard Book of Pool and Billiards in particular have all kinds of info in them (the third of those is primarily instructional, but still contains a fair amount of background info; Byrne had a hard time not making what could have been dry, rote material into entertaining prose).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  16:57, 9 January 2020 (UTC)

conversation you may be interested in

 Done

Hi Mac, hope you are well! There's a topic at WT:SNOOKER#Power Snooker that I would appreciate your comments on. Best Wishes, Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 20:26, 13 January 2020 (UTC)

Trust me

He wasn't kidding. EEng 04:04, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

P'r'aps so, but it was an excuse to make a username joke (and "is no" ones are pretty stale at this point).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:58, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

Per your reply to me at the DRV to review the AfD for List of REITs in Canada

Hi SMcCandlish,

Per your reply to me at the DRV to review the AfD for List of REITs in Canada, where you wrote, "[s]ounds like a good talk-page discussion after closure of this brouhaha (which is really about whether there was a BADNAC, not what to do with the content, if anything)," I'm wondering, since the discussion has been relisted, should we invite MrOllie and DGG in to the discussion via pings? I thought I'd approach you first before randomly pinging them.

Cheers,
--Doug Mehus T·C 22:08, 17 January 2020 (UTC)

Well, I meant more the article talk page (and if a merge is what's going to be on the table, that would be the talk page of the merge target, the better article). However, that may be just premature until the renewed AfD closes (which might be for delete anyway). Regardless, I'm okay with some side-band discussion of it now, whether that be here, or on the AfD's own talk page, or whatever. If merge-and-redir is the goal, it could even be now, at the target's talk page, as an "If that isn't deleted, should we merge it to here?" thread. Despite being all Mr. Process when in a process, I'm anti-bureaucracy outside of one. :-) PS: I may be overdue for nap time, so I might not get back to this stuff until tomorrow, after I'm done with the two on-going RfAs.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:13, 17 January 2020 (UTC)

SMcCandlish, Thanks for the reply...I get the thinking behind a redirect or a merge, though I'm not sure a merge is necessary since all of the blue-linked REITs are at the target article (as far as I'm aware). A redirect is possible, but like I said at DRV, I'm just not thinking the need to preserve the attribution history here. Either editor could've very easily compiled this list of REITs from primary or otherwise non-independent secondary sources so I don't really see the need for keeping it in a refactored List of real estate companies of Canada combined list.

As for RfA, kudos to you for participating in that. I personally just avoid that as S Marshall described it best and most concisely for what it is, a ritual hazing. I'd kind of actually prefer the bureaucrats to have the powers to appoint administrators, similar to the processes for page mover, pending reviewer, etc., based on an extensive list of defined criteria. In exchange, I'd like to see the community develop a formalized process for de-sysoping (whether by consensus or by bureaucrat based on an extensive checklist as to whether the bar for de-sysoping had been met). I realize that sort of goes against our mantra of consensus-based decision-making, but from what I've observed, the bureaucrats we have, for the most part, shown themselves to be highly competent and neutral administrators of administrators. Doug Mehus T·C 23:27, 17 January 2020 (UTC)

Not sure I see a reason to avoid preserving the page history, but I might not really care. I'm not a "history nut" when it comes to revisions no one's going to care about anyway. I don't disagree with your description of RfA (and I kind of comment on that a bit, in different terms, at User:SMcCandlish/RfA standards). But I figure I don't have a right to complain about any "badmins" if I did nothing to keep them out of "office". We have two long-term problematic but still standing ones whom I could have almost certainly prevented being given the mop (or in one case getting it back!) with just a few diffs, but I was on wikibreak at the time (I actually wonder if that's why they RfAed when they did). And a couple of times I've seen people who'd be good admins just barely fail to pass, due to a couple of histrionic opposes over trivial crap, where just a few more supports would have mattered. We definitely need a community desysop process, because ArbCom basically won't do it most of the time, unless the need to do so is so bad that there'd be a wikirevolt if they refused to. (Reminds me of a certain president of a certain country and the difficulty of impeaching him). Would rather see RfA seriously reformed than 'Crats turned into an admin electoral college; the risks are too high, even if the current process is so very, very shite-full. Anyway, I'm getting "grainy eyes" now and gotta hit the sack. I'm yawning like the cat in my editnotice. PS: I appreciate that our debatorizationing at DRV, though grumbly at parts, remained generally aloof and not very personalilzed. Sometimes it's hard to really hash out an issue here without someone getting butt-hurt.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:52, 17 January 2020 (UTC)

• The community elects sysops but can't impeach them, and all sysop errors no matter how egregious are automatically forgiven if the sysop retracts and apologises. It follows that the only time you can ever remove a sysop is when you can show Arbcom smoking-gun diffs and evidence that the sysop has doubled-down on their error. You usually need several examples so it's basically hopeless. Once a sysop has tenure, the will to remain a sysop, and the absolute minimum of clue, the community is permanently stuck with them.

  The best model is the one we use in the real world with police officers. The community elects commissioners; the commissioners set standards and they recruit, train, monitor and if necessary, discipline, the enforcers. Our existing body of bureaucrats consists of people who didn't volunteer for this commissioner role, and the community hasn't assessed their suitability for it, so we clearly can't ask them to do the job. We need the commissioners to be a separate, elected body that's subordinate to arbcom. But I can't build consensus for that big a change -- simply put, Wikipedia's consensus model means we can't get there from here.

  On the matter of retaining people's contributions in the history, that's a terms of use issue. We don't pay our volunteers, but we do promise to give them credit for their contributions in the article history. Therefore wherever their contributions appear in the encyclopaedia, even if it's in very highly modified form, the article history needs to reflect their work. It's literally the only incentive we offer to build Wikipedia, so I feel quite passionate about not reneging on it.—S Marshall T/C 00:09, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

  On history: Sure, but if we do not retain any of the mateiral at all, there is not need to retain history. In this case, the argument is that the target page of a potential merge-and-redirect already contains all the entries we would keep, so it may just end up being blank-and-redirect. On adminship and self-governance stuff: Interesting idea, but I don't see how to get there from here without much deeper changes to how WP works, i.e. a "revolution" of sorts, or in other terms a crash and burn followed by a restart, at least at some level. This will almost inevitably happen anyway as part of the organizational lifecycle, and an argument can be made that it is already long overdue (like a decade+), both as to some of how the community operates, and as to how the WMF as a whole is still populated by people from the commercial software world and still operating like a software and online-services company instead of like a globally important NGO with a constituency (probably the largest constituency in history – everyone – though that scope is also shared by a few world health and civil rights organizations, I suppose). Many of the things wrong with WP and with WMF more broadly are not going to change until most of the board are replaced, and WMF's goals and charter are reworked, and WMF imposes some changes on the community. I've already been through this multiple times at other major organizations like EFF, which had precisely the same problem.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  11:01, 21 January 2020 (UTC)

  Even in those cases where there's no strict need to retain the history, I feel that it's good practice to do more than the minimum. We're losing our volunteers, on Wikipedia, faster than we're gaining new ones and that's because we're no longer doing enough to engage with people. Needlessly obliterating their contributions is part of that.—S Marshall T/C 18:43, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

  I don't object to the history retention in such a case (and it would happen anyway with a blank-and-redirect, unless the page were deleted first), though I don't think it has any impact at all, positive or negative, on editor retention. Noobs aren't leaving over such matters, since they're not aware of them. Long-term editors are leaving for much more serious reasons like abusive admins, entrenched PoV-pushing WP:FACTIONs with their own pet admin, ArbCom flip-flopping between a "just punish everyone make the shut up and fuck off" kangaroo court and an administrators' defense association, and so on. From an org. lifecycle perspective (even aside from such problems) editorial participation decline is inevitable. Most of the work has already been done, and certainly most of the "sexy" work has. We're just polishing the chrome, neutralizing biases, and filling in obscure coverage gaps, except when a genuinely new and notable topic arises (new blockbuster, new war, whatever), which causes a spurt of activity when then fades rapidly. WP is pretty much necessarily going to run on a skeleton crew, compared to 2005, because we've already filled in the several million most obvious gaps; meta:Eventualism doesn't exist any more; this isn't a project trying to become an encyclopedia, it's already the dominant encyclopedia. The trick to replenishing the editorial pool in the future is getting people hooked on working here when they first arrive to work on some hot new band's article, or add some content about a newly notable politician, or whatever.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:54, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

Hey, can you take a look at my colon?

Hi, SMC. I think you've given me formatting/markup advice before, so maybe again? RE: display of verse in articles, I'm aware that indenting with colons produces bad markup, but my sense is that if they are used within {{quote}} or simlar templates, they get transformed into harmless leading spaces, so they're OK. Or, to put it in terms that even I would understand:

:Indent with colon even once:
:The markup gods will curse your bones.

(archaic rhyme intended)...but...

{{poemquote|
My sense is that colons
:in {{quote}} are legit-y;
But maybe I'm wrong
:and they're totally shitty!}}

I haven't found precise direction on this, though, and I can't recall how I formulated these ideas. Any insight? Thanks. Phil wink (talk) 22:14, 19 January 2020 (UTC)

@Phil wink: Now that I have on my proctology exam gloves: The use of : to cause indentation in articles is a bad idea (even if it's a lost cause on talk pages); use some other method like {{blockindent}} or {{in5}}. (That's covered in MoS somewhere, maybe near the stuff on quotes, or at paragraphs, or layout, or accessibility.) Whether the <dd>...</dd> (the :) is inside a template or not is irrelevant; the templates aren't doing any kind of conversion on them. However, for this exact case, you can dispense with a lot of this, by just using <poem>, which preserves whitespace as-entered, or using {{poemquote|<poem>...</poem>}} if you need the template's additional features. (It's weird to me that the template doesn't use the <poem> markup internally.) Anyway, entering:

{{poemquote|<poem>
My sense is that colons
  in {{tnull|quote}} are legit-y;
But maybe I'm wrong
  and they're totally shitty!</poem>}}

will produce:

My sense is that colons
  in {{quote}} are legit-y;
But maybe I'm wrong
  and they're totally shitty!

But unless you're using the attribution features of the template, you can just remove the {{poemquote|...}} part and use only <poem>...</poem>. Hope that helps.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:26, 21 January 2020 (UTC)

Thanks. {{poemquote}} does implement <poem>...</poem> within it, so I could have been using initial spaces all this time. The reason I preferred colons (given that I thought their markup got "cleansed" via the template) was that I found them much clearer in the wikitext: since monospaced spaces are so much fatter than display spaces, you never quite get what you thought once you hit Publish; moreover (especially for the sometimes-elaborate Jacobethan and Romantic stanzas) it's so much easier to count colons to make sure each line has been indented its own special amount. But I'll stop. In fact, I'll probably go back and start cleaning up all my junk. Sigh. Sometimes I fear Wikipedia won't get finished by the deadline! ;-) Phil wink (talk) 15:49, 21 January 2020 (UTC)

Thank you ...

January

... with thanks from QAI

... for improving articles in January! Today - 20 in 2020 - is a birthday, she is pictured on the lower choir pic, enjoy listening. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 23:32, 20 January 2020 (UTC)

WP:DOGS

 Done

Hello SMcCandlish, I'm writing to you because yuor nmae is in the list of the "WikiProject Dogs" and you're one of the last still active. There's a discussion you might be interested in, here. I'd be glad to know your opinion about this matter, so I hope that you'll read the thread I opened. Thank you in advance if you decide to join. 151.64.171.8 (talk) 11:33, 21 January 2020 (UTC)

I have to thank you for replying in the thread. I've read your long answer, and I must tell you that the opinions you've expressed there are based on wrong suppositions. I'm not contesting your "no", but the reasoning you followed to get there. Please, read my answer where it's explained why your arguments are wrong and, after having been provided with correct information by it, reply on the base of that. Thank you for your time. 151.64.168.204 (talk) 08:24, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

I'll take a look, but remain highly skeptical, especially given the weird Italian nationalism perspective you've been injecting into that talk page in two threads in a row, with no one else buying into a word of it. Malta is not part of Italy, and is not linguistically, culturally, or otherwise Italian except at a minority level. I provided a very strong and researched case for the position I took, so you would have to do at least equal levels of fact-based research and reasoning to surmount it. I will take a look at it, but am not holding my breath.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:35, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

And I was right to be skeptical. Your WP:BATTLEGROUND behavior is likely to lead to a topic-ban or a block pretty soon. WP is not a forum for your unsourced pet hypotheses that contradict all the sourcing. There is no evidence whatsoever that Maltese dog is an Italian breed, and even closest known varieties are from Switzerland and southern France anyway.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  20:12, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

I wonder why replying here instead of the discussion...

1. There's nothing like nationalism in here! We could say the opposite, there's a prejudice against Italy. That pronunciation has always been in the page, nobody has ever challenged it, it was consensual, but it was removed without any discussion, which doesn't mean that to make an edit you have to discuss but that if an edit is reverted by another user you have to stop and discuss with him instead of going on with your edit, and it isn't me saying it but the consensus diagramme and the "BOLD, revert, discuss cycle". I was a victim of an older registered user o abuser his powers, and the Italian pronunciation too.
2. Malta has nothing to do with the "Maltese" dog breed, once and for all! A child might make such a connection, an adult should READ what other adults tell him! And it isn't me the adult you should read, it's an international association globally recognised like the FCI! If you'd had a look at the document I linked, you'd have read "The name Maltese does not signify that the breed originates from the island of MALTA" and "in the name Adriatic island of Méléda, the Sicilian town of Melita and also in that of the island MALTA" is found the Semitic root where also the "Maltese" name comes from...
3. Also, if you'd have read that document you won't contest the Italian belonging of the dog breed, because under the voice "PATRONAGE" it's written "Italy", while the origin, again, isn't "Malta" but generically the Central Mediterranean Sea area which includes Italy, Malta and other countries. Malta has nothing to do specifically with this dog breed, get it through your head once and for all.
4. Where on Earth would my assertion be not only "unsourced" (go and READ!!!) but even "contradicted by sources"??? I don't think you're lying knowing that you're lying, like "Magnolia677" did, you just didn't deign to read the sources before making such a statement, and it's patent you didn't because if you'd done you wouldn't have spend so many words in defense of the "Malteseness" of this dog which is all but Maltese. I apologise for being carried away earlier, but you should apologise to me for the false accusations you've written here about the sources.
5. If the English name of the breed was "Maltian" and the Italian "Maltese", I wouldn't insist in the need of its presence in the page. But since both English and Italian name are "Maltese" (while the Maltese name is another one I don't know), an indication of the Italian pronunciation of that word "IS" useful to the readers, exactly as for "pasta", because on of the most important international associations about dog breeds states that the patronage of this dog is... Italian!
6. Last but not least: take a second to read this question of mine and think in your head what could be the answer. WHY all the users who're now fighting so hard not to restore the Italian pronunciation have never tried removing in during all these years? HOW COME users from the WikiProject Dogs who've edited that page so many times and have never challenged the presence of the Italian pronunciation are now using all they have to keep it removed? What do you think could be the reason? Among these we mustn't count he who started all this, "Magnolia677", because he has nothing to do with dogs, he didn't even know that this dog existed before starting this circus, mindful that his position would keep him safe from respecting rules of Wikipedia and from any anonymous user who protests for this...

I won't force you to answer, I'm starting thinking that entering into Wikipedia community as registered users leads many good persons to the "Dark Side", I've hoped that you at least could be unbiased enough, but now I'm afraid you've chosen "your friends" in place of "truth" (i.e. an independent source linked in almost all pages about dog breeds who says exactly what I've always been saying and the opposite of what all the dog-friendly users are...). 151.64.189.26 (talk) 08:44, 24 January 2020 (UTC)

I replied here because you posted here; I also replied at the other page when you posted there. There is no "instead". To cover this briefly, and in the same order:

1. You are pushing a nationalist PoV; everything is Italy/Italian this, and Italy/Italian that. There is no "prejudice" against Italy, any more than there is against Japan or Botswana, at that page, because the subject simply has no encyclopedic to any of those countries, only to Malta (and – maybe, depending on more detailed sourcing – peripherally to Switzerland and France, though I would want to actually examine the sources in detail where they are trying to draw genetic relationships between the Maltese dogs and continental dogs from so. France and from Switzerland. Lots of breed-related sources are actually unreliable and uncritically repeat nonsense claims that breeders make up for promotional purposes).
2. "Malta has nothing to do with the "Maltese" dog breed, once and for all!" That's not what the sources are tell us. The end. Neither I nor anyone else here is going to entertain any further WP:FRINGE assertions from you, devoid of evidence. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and you not only haven't provided any, you haven't provided enough to surmount all the other sourcing that ties the breed (naturally) to Malta. You actually are onto something, though (seemingly without realizing it), and there are hints of it in the article already, and I raised it in more detail on the talk page: it's neither clear that all references in ancient sources to dogs in/from Malta (even when we're sure they really do mean Malta) have anything to do with this modern breed and its foundation stock, nor that all historical references even into the Early Modern period which have been interpreted as referring Malta actually do so; some seen to refer to other places with similar names in one language or another. If you would stop ranting at people and start researching these specific matters, you would probably both have a more enjoyable time here and actually help improve the article. However, if your current nonsense continues any further, I will definitely seek you being topic-banned from the subject, because your behavior to date has been nothing but disruptive.
3. "Patronage" is weird FCI jargon for "some later breed development done outside the area of origin using dogs from the area of origin as the foundation stock". It's not dispositive of much of anything (there's dispute at Template talk:Infobox dog breed on whether to even retain a parameter for this), no other organization makes use of such terminology (in dog breeding or any other kind of breeding), and in any cases where such concerns really did make a difference, it is not an infobox matter but something to cover in detail in the article's main text, with reliable secondary sources (FCI is a primary source). A good example would be Persian cat, Angora cat, Turkish van, and Van cat, where various confused and sometimes even deliberately confusing breeders have either been imprecise about what cats from where were used as breeding stock, or even blatantly lied about it, resulting in a lot of contradiction in the sources, over more than a century, about all four of these varieties. It's a mess (in the real world of cat writing and cat pedigrees and cat breed standardization, not just in encyclopedia writing) that is only going to be cleared up by patient and calm research, not by ranty fighting on talk pages. The last time sometime tried to engage in ranty fighting on those talk pages, he also got topic-banned, actually. Same thing happened twice last year at some dog-breed articles, too. We do not have the time or patience for angry, venting bullshit. You're just going to have to learn and accept this, or the system is going to eject you. Period.
4. I can't even make sense of that one. Look, it's simple: We have an article, and it cites sources. You have an opinion, mostly without sources, and unsupported by the few sources you do have (you are leaping to conclusions that the sources themselves to not reach – WP:OR), none of which are sufficient to surmount the sources already present in the article. That's it. There is no more to it. No one is "lying" to you. There is no conspiracy. You're just not actually competent to do encyclopedia work because you do not understand how reliable sourcing works, you are extremely uncollaborative, you are here to push a viewpoint, and your English-language skills are too sketchy to produce quality material here anyway (I would say you should focus on it.wikipedia.org, but you won't do well there, either, because of the other problems. I would not be surprised at all if you've already been banned or long-term blocked over there, which might explain your sudden appearance here trying, poorly, to lecture others on policy, and generally making a nuisance of yourself, along lines addressed by WP:NOT#FORUM policy.)
5. You're still just not getting it. The Italian pronunciation isn't relevant because it is not an Italian breed and Malta is not an Italian territory, and Italian isn't an official or unofficial-but-majority language there. There's just no connection between Italian language and culture, on the one hand, and the Maltese dog breed, on the other.
6. "What do you think could be the reason?" That's really, really obvious: It's trivia no one noticed until you start making a hell of a lot of noise about it, which has attracted lots of attention to it and to your unreasonable behavior and pro-Italy nationalistic viewpoint-pushing. While most editors would not have cared before, you've forced them to care, and to notice that you're using this Italian pronunciation stuff as a wedge to drive a pro-Italy viewpoint about the breed which does not agree with the reliable sourcing.

"I won't force you to answer." Well, yeah. Last I looked there is no means for you to do so. I've sat on this for some time, reviewed it all again, and decided one last time to try to talk some wiki-sense into you. When you say things like 'I'm starting thinking that entering into Wikipedia community as registered users leads many good persons to the "Dark Side"', you're pretty much begging to get indefinitely blocked on WP:NOTHERE grounds, as someone whose purpose in being here is simply starting shit and accusing everyone who doesn't agree with you of being in a conspiracy. Same goes if you keep asserting your viewpoint is "truth" (see WP:TRUTH and WP:GREATWRONGS and WP:BATTLEGROUND). If you keep up this behavior, I bet real money you'll be blocked within a week or less (probably dependent on how quickly I or someone else bothers taking the case to WP:ANI). I'm disinclined to get involved in WP:DRAMA, but at this point I'm not sure there's any option but asking ANI to at least topic-ban you. I invite you to prove me wrong by sticking to reliable sources and avoiding any more accusatory outbursts against other editors. Address the content not the contributors.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  05:34, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

MOS:COLON entry

Hi SMcCandlish, I didn't see any pushback to your suggestion at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style#MOS:COLON entry. What is the standard for determining consensus in a project page? Does silence imply consensus here? I'm certainly comfortable with your suggestion, and feel that you should be the one to implement it, if consensus has been achieved. Cheers, HopsonRoad (talk) 15:52, 21 January 2020 (UTC)

@HopsonRoad: I would think lack of objection is sufficient in this case, since what's proposed isn't a substantive rule change, but simply a clarification of the wording and a merger of colon material into a single place (from MOS:TITLES to MOS:COLON), as well as trimming of semi-colon "rule mongering" at MOS:TITLES that's not encyclopedically pertinent. It would be rare for someone to insist on retaining obvious WP:Instruction creep in a guideline or desiring the material to be scattered instead of consolidated and simply cross-referenced. That said, the last time I did major revise-and-merge at MoS, even after considerably more discussion some people belatedly tried to object (not on the merits but on an iffy "you didn't ask enough first" basis) just because not every relevant talk page had been notified. I think the most useful approach would be notifying WT:MOSTITLES of the discussion, then at the discussion saying something like the above (i.e. "should we proceed, or are there any objections?" and let it sit for a week. There's no hurry, after all, and I'd rather avoid WP:DRAMA if possible. It's probably better if I don't personally do this all this, since I didn't open the thread, and some MoS-skeptics tend to complain that my personal input into its text/processes is more frequent than they'd like. Just more silly drama (the WP:Fallacy of the revelation of policy), but it's heartburn I don't need.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  16:27, 21 January 2020 (UTC)

Your input is requested

 Done

 – Sorta.

at Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Next issue/Community view before Friday.

Only 100 or so words. It should be fun and serious at the same time.

All the best,

Smallbones_(smalltalk) 00:24, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

I'm actually skeptical this is a good idea, as explained at Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/Newsroom#Deadline +1 day, 6,000,000 likely already written [now archived here].  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  21:16, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

Discussion at Talk:Project M (video game)#Requested move 23 January 2020

 You are invited to join the discussion at Talk:Project M (video game)#Requested move 23 January 2020. SMcC, I am neutrally notifying you to the above discussion as it is more suited to your area of interest and/or expertise. I will reserve sharing any personal thoughts on the matter until you either (a) participate or (b) decline to participate, in which case you and I can have a discussion on your talkpage. Doug Mehus T·C 01:07, 24 January 2020 (UTC)Template:Z48

email

Just wondering if you had any thoughts on the recent email I sent you. Regards, Cinderella157 (talk) 23:49, 24 January 2020 (UTC)

Not seen it yet. Will go look-see.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  03:39, 25 January 2020 (UTC)

gmail Cinderella157 (talk) 03:53, 25 January 2020 (UTC)

@Cinderella157: On JOBTITLES?  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:04, 25 January 2020 (UTC)

Yes Cinderella157 (talk) 04:16, 25 January 2020 (UTC)

Hopefully I addressed it all (I tried to keep is brief for once!). If not, lemme know. I'm about due for naptime, though.  :-)  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:21, 25 January 2020 (UTC)

Flyer22 Reborn and WanderingWanda

You speak wisdom. I have lost good friends because they have hitched their wagons to the TERF wars. This is a uniquely divisive issue. Guy (help!) 00:12, 25 January 2020 (UTC)

@JzG: I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, so it's all around me. Can be painful to see/hear. This and various other instances of the left tearing itself apart, and in parts tearing itself farther off from the center, are much of why I quit Facebook, Twitter, and other general social media. I was in danger of losing dozens of friends over numerous doctrinal/factional disputes (and would have lost some no matter which position I took on any of them), so it was better to just abandon the whole affair. Happily, it also netted me a lot more free time!  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  03:38, 25 January 2020 (UTC)

WP:MEDMOS

Unresolved

 – Go fix the WP:FOO shortcuts to MOS:FOO ones, to match practice at other MoS pages. This only applies to the MoS section there; like WP:SAL, part of that page is also a content guideline that should not have MOS: shortcuts.

You had previously asked that protection be lowered on WP:MEDMOS which was not done at that time. I have just unprotected the page and so if you have routine update edits to make you should now be able to do so. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 06:42, 25 January 2020 (UTC)

Thanks. I don't remember what it was, but maybe it'll come back to me.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  12:17, 25 January 2020 (UTC)

Now I remember.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  06:53, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

A cookie for you!

SMcCandlish, thank you for this edit and edit summary where you note that <center></center> hasn't existed since the 1990s. I guess I'm still using outdated tags. lmao :P Doug Mehus T·C 01:12, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Thankee. WP:LINT, WP:HTML5, and WP:CHECKWIKI may be of interest. If you'd like to help with cleanup, see Wikipedia:Linter#User CSS tool: lint.css for a handy utility to install in a few seconds.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:44, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Infobox Nationality

The RFC look like it is headed for no-consensus. I started writing this in the discussion section:

Pius Fasinu and Viet Pham are two examples I just ran across, while fixing other things, that misuse |nationality=. In the first case, there are no sources that discuss his birth or nationality. He went to college in Nigeria, then South Africa, then worked in the US. He was probably born in Nigeria, but to say his nationality is Nigerian-American is unsubstantiated. Viet Pham says his nationality is Vietnamese, but he was born in Malaysia and lived in the US since age 5. He is probably an American. |nationality= is rarely used with sourced information. There are usually sources for a person's birthplace. When nationality is used, it is usually wrong or WP:OR (derived from birth place).

Which got me thinking... while it safe to say where a person was born (with a source), why should we permit nationality to be used without a source. If we can't expect a reader to infer nationality from birthplace, why should we allow an editor to infer nationality from birthplace and put it in the nationality field. So instead of saying don't use it when it is redundant with birthplace, shouldn't we just say don't use it without a source. This would disallow its use in most cases, except when it is discussed in the article (usually when it is different than birthplace). Your thoughts? MB 03:11, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Two examples of obvious nonsense which can simply be fixed doesn't equate to anything like "When nationality is used, it is usually wrong or WP:OR". If we have so few sources on someone that no consensus exists between them on what the person's nationality is even in a general sense, then that person probably is not notable and shouldn't have an article here. No one said anything about permitting anything to be added without a source. You seem to be mixing some basically unrelated concepts like "Do we have a reliable source for this claim?" (which is about inclusion in an article anywhere, and has nothing to do with infoboxes in particular) and "is it sensible to use a particular infobox parameter?" which is going to have more to do with context than with anything else.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  17:05, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Those were two more egregious examples that certainly can be fixed by just removing the field. But the common case is Joe Politician is born in Columbus, and |nationality= is filled out with American, or Andre Author is born in Paris, and nationality is filled out with French. While there is usually a source for the place of birth, there usually isn't for nationality - it's just inferred by the editor (a form of OR). Isn't this another reason to discourage using the parameter in the infobox. I'm trying to say that if we emphasize and enforce existing policy on sourcing, nationality can be removed from most infoboxes today anyway on that basis. Or is it OK to make assumptions about nationality from birthplace and use the field in that way? Fields in infoboxes should be concrete and not based on interpretation - which is why I don't think it should be used if all we really have sourced is birth place. And if existing policy on sourcing/OR suggests |nationality= should rarely be used, we should state it more clearly. MB 03:51, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

Then the template documentation should be updated with an instruction to not add things for this parameter (or for |citizenship=) without reliable sources. The problem is lazy editor behavior, not the template. That said, "nationality" has multiple meanings, and is clearly the easiest to source. (And is very, very easy in some cases; e.g., it is not possible in most US jurisdictions for someone who is not at least a legal permanent resident, and usually a citizen in particular, to hold elected public office). I think there's been some confusion here though, in all this discussion of "can be inferred from birthplace". It wasn't about "can be inferred by editors from birthplace, and filled in as nationality". It was about "can be inferred from birthplace by the reader, whose common sense we need not try to contradict unless sources tell us the obvious inference is wrong". By way of analogy: in almost all cases, the reader can infer that a biography subject has a nose (or did while living). We do not need a parameter stating that they have a nose, nor do we need to state anywhere that they have/had a nose, nor address the question at all, except in the rare case that someone was born noseless or lost their nose through some kind of medical issue, violent incident, etc. Rather (though not perfectly) similarly, if someone was born in France and is notable for "stuff" in France, and lives and raises their family in France, we need not state that their nationality is French. If we're going to do it anwyay, then yes we should have a source somewhere that says they're a French singer or French botanist or French serial killer or whatever. In most cases it should not take longer that 30 seconds to find one via Google, and only a couple of minutes to properly format it as a source citation.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:51, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

PS: I just remembered an NAC I did in 2017 that gets to pretty much the same stuff, and my take on it hasn't changed (not so much my personal views, but my assessment of the community's and its lack of patience in continuing to dwell on and squabble about such matters): permalink to discussion and closure The article text (including lead and i-box) still comply with it, with almost surprises me.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  08:34, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

Want to do some clerking at MfD, SMcC?

Hey SMcC,

I don't know how often you usually assess the consensus and close RMs or XfDs (probably more the former), but as an experienced editor, would you mind clerking the old business at MfD that can be closed as anything other than delete? It's been fairly neglected by the administrators, and we've got old business piling up for nearly two weeks in some cases.

I would, but am involved in all of them, and I'd to see my closes go to DRV by an opposing editor and be overturned or relisted on that basis.

Comment: I've requested closure on one of the MfDs over a week ago, and yet it sits, and sits...

Thanks,
--Doug Mehus T·C 01:23, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

Not my usual thing, but I've been uninvolved in MfD lately, so I guess I can take a look at it. Most days I'm backlogged myself, on one cleanup job or another.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:38, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

Yeah...I know you don't usually close XfDs, but honestly, I see you being excellent at it because of your knowledge and application of our policies. You can (usually) accurately assess and apply our policies correctly and see who is just vaguely pointing at policy shortcuts. ;-) Doug Mehus T·C 01:48, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

So one hopes. I'm in middle of patching up a pool-league article right now, though.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:12, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

Okay, no worries. Maybe admins just don't likely to touch userbox and userspace deletion requests because they're somewhat controversial.

Anywhoo...I'm sooo upset with ArbCom today. Doug Mehus T·C 02:52, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

I'm not sure "today" belongs in that sentence, ha ha. Seriously, I have not been paying attention to that WP:DRAMA firehose lately, so I'm not sure what pooch has been screwed lately. To badly mix some metaphors.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  07:22, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

I did one of the MfDs (the "toy portals" essay); that was pretty cut-and-dry from a policy reasoning standpoint, even if the headcount was split. I'm not touching the Bryan.Wade one, since opinions are very divided (i.e., an NAC would likely be controversial). I tend to agree that there's a commingling of ANI conduct stuff in there, while the actual deletion case appears to be IAR-only, with a tinge of IDONTLIKEIT and SURMOUNTABLE problems, but I don't care enough to comment (at MfD; I think I would at ANI, on WP:SPA, WP:NOTHERE, WP:NOTWEBHOST, WP:OWN grounds). I !voted in the BNP one, which was also split and about which I feel strongly (so, controversial + supervote if I closed it). John Eben/Books is nearly a 50/50 split, and I don't know about about "WP Books" to weigh the arguments well (it's a feature I've totally ignored, other than noticing that its existence has badly polluted Amazon, by leading to a firehose of bogus "books" for sale that are simply WP content with covers on them). If anything I'd be biased in a delete direction because of that. Gabbie Hanna: I can't close that, since the only valid result is history merge but only an admin can perform that action; I !voted instead. Sebby Frazer would have to close as delete, but only an admin can do that, and it appears to qualify for CSD anyway. What's with these weird names? I half expect the next one to be "Pooki Frufru". Anyway, I think that's the entire backlog, so there wasn't much for me to do.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  07:17, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

I'm on a short break now, demmit

Been meaning to watch that new-ish Terminator movie (crappy as the reviews say it is). WP has sucked out all the blood it's going to get from me today. [slurrrp] PS: Actually, I have a lot of Things 'n' Stuff^™ going on until ca. 3 February, so I'm not sure how much I'll be checking in.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  08:24, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

Wow, what a strange Terminator flick, and that's saying a lot given what several of the intermediary sequels have tried. Had its moments as an action flick, and some of the curveball ideas were "interesting", but I tend to agree with the criticism cited toward the bottom of our own article, Terminator: Dark Fate.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  07:43, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

Yeah, as a result of that movie I am thinking of initiating my personal Skynet Activation Protocol and bringing civilization to a close........ William Harristalk 06:31, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

I kinda knew it was over when they cancelled that badass TV series without even resolving the plot. [sigh] Lena Headey and Summer Glau in one show? Day-um. At least Picard is back. And The Expanse gets at least one more season. All is not lost. >;-)  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:49, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

Books & Bytes – Issue 37

Hiding the projectspam.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:15, 4 February 2020 (UTC)
The Wikipedia Library Books & Bytes Issue 37, November – December 2019 #1Lib1Ref Wikimedia and Libraries User Group Read the full newsletter

On behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 07:10, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

Template:R from subsidiary

 Done

@SMcCandlish:

In an unrelated RfD discussion, I noticed you created the {{R from subsidiary}} template redirect for the overly broad {{R from subtopic}}. It's already got 50 built-in transclusions, and, in the spring, I would undertake a large-scale project to retag various redirects from current and former subsidiaries of notable companies with this rcat. We've got literally thousands of potential redirects that could be appropriately tagged with this redirect. In short, it's wasted as a redirect, and with the dab talk page header now finalized, I was wondering if you wanted to create this rcat? It's certainly within your level of expertise (i.e., you could probably do it blindfolded)

We'd have to let the creators of various rcat tagging scripts like Archer, Capricorn, and Sagitarrius (are there any others?) to add this rcat to the script, but that's not overly problematic.

What do you think?

Cheers,
--Doug Mehus T·C 16:58, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

I'm all for it, but don't want to deal with it all myself. I pay no attention to any of those software tools, so you already have a better handle on who to tell about it. I can certainly create the Category:Redirects from subsidiaries subdirectory (and we need a lot of other split-offs of Category:Redirects from subtopics and a few other excessively vague ones). If you want to deal with talking to the tool authors, let me know and I'll go do the subcat. PS: You need not wait for a subcat. while rcat tagging; I regularly apply the more-specific rcat names (redirects) to the applicable redirects, on the expectation that they'll eventually fork off and instantly populate the applicable subcats).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:14, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

+1. Sounds good; I'll take care out of the outreach to the script creators. And, there's no rush since we have no deadlines...can work on it over the next few months amongst other things either us might be doing or editing. Doug Mehus T·C 22:51, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

@Dmehus: [Gasp! He used ping!] I'm done with template, documentation, category, yadda yadda. Kinda got sidetracked for a while; there's a whole lot of mess in rcat space. I'm not done with CfD/CfM and TfD/TfM on that stuff yet, but am running out of steam for the day.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  12:39, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

PS: There's also a new {{R from subdivision}} (from neighborhood, from borough, and various other redirs) and category. Also, {{R from subsidiary}} has various redirs now.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:52, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

Disambiguation link notification for February 5

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Ooh...potential WikiGnoming activity...

@SMcCandlish:

I stumbled upon Category:Editnotices whose targets are redirects and there are ~100 pages whose pages have been moved, but the editnotices are still targeted to the redirect page. Seems like a great, and sort of fun, WikiGnoming activity for a template editor such as yourself. I'd do it, but I'm not a template editor. Not sure if that's really your thing, though. ;-)

Cheers,
--Doug Mehus T·C 22:30, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

Argh. I would've hoped some bot fixed that kind of stuff. I'll consider it, but it's a lot of work for low benefit (the page names may be wrong, but the redirs still get there), and it's been my experience that a lot of editnotices (especially in mainspace) are PoV-pushing crap that needs to be deleted anyway.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  07:20, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Kudpung/Proposed decision

Hello SmCCandlish. I'm Cameron11598 and I'm one of the Arbitration Committee Clerks I hatted your section on the Kidpung Proposed Decision talk page as it didn't pertain to the proposed decision. Note this page is not for re-litigating your point of view, but is to ask for tweaks and changes to posted proposed decisions. This phase is not for the introduction of additional evidence. Please note this was done as a clerk action and should not be reverted without the permission of an Arbcom Clerk or a member of Arbcom. Feel free to reach out to myself or any of the other clerks. Additionally you can contact us at clerks-lwikimedia.org --Cameron₁₁₅₉₈ ^(Talk) 01:49, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

@Cameron11598: If the workshop phase is closed, does that mean the workshop talk page is also closed? That was my assumption, and is why I moved to the final talk page. I found it disconcerting that the workshop was closed while the "desysop" option under proposed remedies was completely devoid of any Arb comments, pro or con. I did not participate in the case at all, so I was not "relitigating" anything, just providing some rationales for "no" on the open question of desysopping, and also indicating support for another proposal, about user-talk behavior, since the final draft has not been posted. It would be good if there were a clearer indication of where to comment on what the final draft should say, if the workshop page is closed but the final draft is blank or incomplete.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  07:17, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

Your Venn diagram is broken

[It] is not an anti-X sentiment to wonder whether someone identifying as X is bringing an anti-Y viewpoint that is demonstrably common among those identifying as X.

Some gay women may be misandrists, just as some Southerners might be racist, some tobacco smokers might be fat, and some Wikipedians might be crazy. According to your argument, it is “demonstrably common” that crazy people edit Wikipedia, fat people smoke cigarettes, people from the South are racist, and gay women hate men. Your claim is demonstrably false. Might as well claim that Jews are greedy and black people are thieves while you are at it. “All gay women hate men” is a stereotype, and is logically fallacious. Is there a good reason I need to tell you this? Viriditas (talk) 02:22, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

@Viriditas: But this isn't about "gay women", it's about lesbian feminist activists, who are an affinity group with a socio-political viewpoint, whose well-documented history (both as that slice in particular and as the broader feminist activism group) includes a good deal of anti-male messaging, which began seriously, turned satirical, then humorous, and in some subsections (especially TERFism) has turned serious again (nastily so). See thread below for details and some easily findable sources. I applaud you for focusing on reason and fallacies, but I'm not making the argument you thought I was, and your analogies are not actually analogous. It isn't besmirchment-by-stereotype to wonder whether someone from the Tea Party/alt-right movement – a cis-hetero and overwhelmingly white socio-political viewpoint and affinity group – shares the well-documented anti-feminist-leaning, anti-minority-leaning, and very firmly anti-gay, anti-trans, and anti-immigrant viewpoints common to participants in alt-right activism. It may not be a great idea to publicly air such a question on Wikipedia about another editor, but doing so doesn't make one a cis-hating, het-hating, white-hating bigot. PS: Since I actually confused GW's complaint and related backstory with someone else's in the evidence/workshop stuff, in this case it isn't even a X/Y Venn diagram involving lesbian feminism, but simply feminism.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  07:08, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for the reply. My time is limited (and I’m assuming, so is yours), so I’ll keep it short and sweet. You are welcome to disagree with my reply and adhere to a vastly different opinion. I will not try to deplatform you for it. :-)

1. Feminism is human rights. There’s no debate.

2. Treat people as individuals, not groups. We are not talking about organized groups of lesbian feminist activists who hate men. We are talking about individual Wikipedians who have their own thoughts and minds of their own. Anything less, is a stereotype. Thanks. Viriditas (talk) 07:23, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

I don't disagree with the spirit of either point, but have quibbles with their on-site implementation. One point 1, "feminism" has splintered repeatedly, and doesn't just mean one very specific doctrine. For this question, that mightn't've mattered even a few years ago, but the recent-ish TERF fork is deeply divisive, with both sides convinced they are making a "human rights" argument (one for broad acceptance and tolerance of apparently innate differences, one for protection from infiltration and subversion by members of the dominant patriarchal class). Only one of them can be right. On Facebook or whatever, I have no problem vocally siding with the former, but WP isn't the place to do that. It's not even the place to take up the more general proposition in point no. 1, though we can take some measures, like excluding typical far-right sources. as unreliable because they ignoring basic standards of integrity and fact-checking; and we can cite lots of high-quality sources coming to the conclusion in your point no. 1. We are not bound to give an UNDUE level of weight to right-wingnut material, including anti-feminism, but nor are we in a position to treat feminism (under one definition or another) as excempt from WP:GREATWRONGS and WP:NOT#ADVOCACY (and the community doesn't always fail in this regard; it's just that the level of activistic disruption has to get very, very high for the community do anything about it if the messaging is left-of-center, while it will crack down almost instantly on right-of-center PoV pushing).

On point no. 2, this is much like "address content not contributor"; it's ideal behavior, but failure to do it 100% of the time shouldn't result in desysopping. Ask any Republicans (in the US sense), libertarians, other right-of-center editors, or even centrist Christians who are not extremists, just not secular leftists, if they feel that your principle no. 2 has been extended to them consistently by other editors, and I bet the answer will uniformly be "no". Most of our editors are urban/suburban, at least middle-class, progressive, secular, rationalistic, neophilic, tolerant (except of intolerance :-) people, and it is easy for us to forget that the vast majority of the world's population are rural, pauperized, traditionalist/conservative, religious, driven by reactive emotion and cultural "truths", neophobic, and xenophobic. They're always going to find that our material contradicts their views, on a wide range of subjects (and not just because reliable sources have a tendency to do so). We have a lot of systemic biases even after DUE/FRINGE considerations, so it is natural for some socio-political friction to arise. People don't need to be punished/restricted for it unless they persist in it and will not learn to, as you say, treat people as individuals, not groups.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  08:14, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

Denouement of that ArbCom thread

Since I was asked for sources, explanations, etc. from some of you, I'll ping you here, as the original thread was hatted as not the right kind of discussion for the talk page of that phase of an RFARB. So much for WP:NOT#BUREAUCRACY.

@GorillaWarfare and Amorymeltzer: First, apologies to GorillaWarfare for the mis-identication [9]; I must have confused details in one evidence/workshop thread with those from another. Sorry about that. Anyway, I didn't say anything about queer people as a class (which includes me, BTW), nor say the other things either of you suggest I did (including "generalizing for an entire group" [10], which is in essence what I'm objecting to in the first place myself). Please read people's actual words [11] without imagining what they might have meant if you rearranged the words and cut bits of them out to stick with other words, or if they said something different because someone else whom you ideologically oppose wrote something in their place to offend you. [sigh] This kind of willful mis-spinning to create a spectre of X-phobia to attack and to demonize someone with is precisely what I was talking about in the original thread. I don't want be right about Wikipedia having a disturbing trend of people trying to "manufacture enemies" over interpretational and doctrinal-wording questions, without even asking whether one's interpretation bears any relation to actual intent and meaning. Anyway, I'm happy that Lourdes got it, though.

Sources: Spend a minute on Google and you can find more material on anti-male messaging in feminist and lesbian activism than you'll need, including its serious origins in revolutionary first-wave feminism, its use as satire (against men, and first-wave feminists, and "polite" proto- and quasi-feminists) in second-wave messaging, and now outright humor in third-wave/millennial feminism, yet also a renewed actual serious form in trans-exclusionary radical feminism (presently a hotbed of dispute on Wikipedia, and not going away any time soon).

I'll collect some immediate finds and why I think what they're telling us matters here:

A good overview is probably Jillian Horowitz's piece in Digital America [12]; it's worth re-quoting its own pull quote: "Many feminists ... have re-deployed misandry alternately as an elaborate joke, a rhetorical weapon, a model for resistance to patriarchy, and as a survival strategy. Particularly on the Internet, they have done so with all of the inventiveness and strength that man-hating requires." That last bit is tongue-in-cheek of course. Some of the rhetorical/resistance material is less so (e.g. here, in Slate). Another Slate editorial, by Lena Wilson [13] (self-described as a millennial cis-lesbian), ties the anti-male (and anti-transwoman) stances to second-wave feminism ("sex-segregated activism and spaces" ... "these second-wave practices come from lesbian feminists, women who were determined to separate themselves from men romantically, historically, and politically. To many of them, that meant (and still means) defying medical and social abuse against those with vaginas, fighting against male violence, and re-centering women in all narratives."). Scholarly material often focuses on ethnic-minority-specific misandry concerns [14][15][16]; these seems to be the only context in which the exact words misandry/misandrist have much acceptance in that register, due to baggage the terms have accreted. But the more general notion appears pretty often in feminism and gender-studies material, including critiques of modern feminism. A controversial one was Janet Halley's Split Decisions. I'm not finding [legal!] full free text of it, being a 2006 book from Princeton U. Pr., but this review covers the gist [17], and curiously enough relates to TERF vs. trans-inclusion concerns (see reviewer's footnote: CEDAW "should centre on gender not 'women'."), which are deeply tied to the matter, at least inasmuch as WP in 2020 is apt to have internal issues relating to anti-male PoV or perceptions thereof. WP will be wrestling with that for a while, and the heat is enough that RFARB is probably imminent. The intersection of feminism and misandry (as concept more than practice) has received plenty of mainstream media attention, e.g. in Time [18] and with counter-pieces like this one [19]. A good point in the latter: "Misandry has gone mainstream, and unfortunately the irony seems to be lost on men." While it's a shame that's true, it mostly is, and that has implications in the WP environment. I'm not going to trawl through newsy publications or the blogosphere for more like this; that pair is a fully illustrative example. Interestingly, a Journal of Lesbian Studies piece as far back as 2007 [20] remarks on "the strongly anti-male stance of Lesbian Feminism", in a piece on the eroding border between "butch" lesbianism and trans-masculinity (F-to-M), years before the breakout of the TERFwar. This journal in particular is a ripe field for harvesting references to both broad social perception of anti-male stances (especially in second-wave feminism) and narrow feminist and lesbian messaging that explicitly fits the description (albeit often said to be satiric). However, it's almost all paywalled. (I don't presently have WP:LIBRARY-provided access methods through any of those journal walls; forgot to renew them). "Women's Histories of AIDS", a well-known piece by Nancy E. Stoller [21], reprinted since 1995 in half a dozen feminism/gender-studies and AIDS-related anthologies, also suggests there's a generational divide on the matter, between second- and third-wave feminists (specifically lesbian ones in this piece's exact context): "The younger generation of lesbian AIDS activists carries a different psychology, culture, politics, and sexuality from those who came to the movement in the early eighties. These activists are connected to the older women by the term 'lesbian' and by some similarities of sexual practice. Many, however, see their elders as sexually repressed, conservative, and somewhat anti-male." See below for more about a possible "wave split". And feminists have written before about institutions moving away from "women's studies" to "gender studies" from 1970s onward (i.e. shortly after the establishment of such programs) not primarily for trans inclusion but for distancing from already common public association of radical feminism with man-hating. Bell Hooks's Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (2000) doesn't mince words about it: "When contemporary feminist movement first began there was a fierce anti-male faction." While this is a summary work, not an in-depth history, the follow-on material is correct that moving away from this reactive position to a more nuanced philosophy of resistance to patriarchal social structure was an actual doctrinal struggle within the movement and one that did not have a unanimous result, nor perfectly consistent results even among those largely making that viewpoint transition. There is of course the really obvious false-equivalence matter: in a male-dominated and still too LGBT-hostile culture, over-generalized anti-male commentary (and especially "make a point" usages that are intended to provoke reaction and thought) aren't directly comparable to an inverse use of misogynist messaging as a dominance mechanism. And not even all sources we'd think should get this do get it; cf. this 2016 piece in Psychology Today [22] which seems almost stubbornly clueless. But this brings me back to the point I led to in the second bullet in the original post: Supposing that everyday permissiveness toward anti-male (like anti-white, anti-Western, anti-any-dominant-group) sentiment, for false-equivalence reasons, should translate into on-Wikipedia permissiveness regarding internal behavior and content-bias evaluation is itself a false equivalence of a different sort, of equating how matters are argued out there in wild 'n' wooly land, with how they can permissibly be discussed in a collegial environment. Daring to even suggest that anti-male sentiment (serious or satirical) and concerns regarding it can be a factor in on-site behavior, and in our analyses of editorial and sourcing biases, seems to raise umbrage simply because the terms misandry/misandrist tend to be associated with "manosphere" echo chambers [23], at least by people who follow online trends and wallow in social media. The fact that an extreme of misogynist-leaning "men's rights advocates" likes to use the terms doesn't rob them of plain-English meaning (especially since they came into any currency to begin with in feminist writing in the early 1970s; the notion was popularized by Joanna Russ to parody "polite" first-wave feminists and their sensibilities [24]). Nor does that recent connection to online sources of the proverbial "male tears" indicate anything negative about people willing to discuss such matters on more sensible terms. (Some of the academic material [25] is also clear to distinguish between the crazy-MRA scene on Reddit and 4chan one the one hand, and on the other, more rationale men's-issues concerns that co-evolved with mainstream feminism, as a pro-feminist men’s liberation movement in the 1960s–1970s.) That the MRA crowd may exaggerate out of all proportion, and obsess over and verbally weaponize, some concerns doesn't mean the concerns have zero basis and no implication for WP:NPOV or inter-editor behavior on this site (especially when use of anti-man messaging is explicitly being spun as a patriarchy-fighting tool on the other side). WP isn't Facebook, and our output (and internal discourse about it) is necessarily as meta as we can muster about the world we're editorially observing. WP's editorship is surely and rightly dominated by sex/gender-egalitarians, but we still have to separate our causes from our writing about causes and examining of how we're writing about causes. Feminists in particular are in a position to be especially mindful of straw-man/equivocation/guilt-by-association fallacies, being damned tired of having to defend feminism as not meaning "female-supremacism"; so please don't try to suggest that someone raising concerns about anti-male sentiment as an influencing factor is somehow a "masculist" and a "misogynist". Cf. previous material on falsely labeling people "transphobic" simply because they don't buy into non-neutrally using invented recently coined pseudo-pronouns in WP's own voice. This isn't the time or place to get into it in detail (I'm sure it'll be its own RfArb soon enough!), but all of this is tightly bound up with trans-exclusionary vs. -inclusionary feminism today. The TERF debate has given the matter a whole new set of legs, since the root of TERFism is anti-male sentiment in first-wave revolutionaryism and especially in second-wave separatism (on two levels, even: against transwomen for "being men" and against transmen for "abandoning womanhood" – remarkably similar to "separate but equal" and "race traitor" lingo, and to "Christendom versus heathens" and "apostasy" long before that; it's all highly ideological). Given that the "TERFwars" are already rolling over WP in waves of PoV-pushing and ugly battlegrounding, it's essentially inherent in the very observation of it that the underlying overgeneralized male-critical perspective is by very definition a factor in it. Analogy: if there were a wave of emotive promotion of creationism washing over the 'pedia, it would be obvious that faith-based reasoning was part of it. Observing that connection is not equivalent, either, to saying that everyone espousing religious faith is a creationism PoV pusher either, just like observing the (sometimes actually serious) anti-male views of TERFs and some other feminist camps is no way a suggestion that all feminists or all lesbians are anti-male. The mischaracterizations of what I said, like this RfArb itself, and the overall debate that spawned it are rife with affirmation of the consequent.

That's actually enough material with which to write an article on feminism and anti-male messages (especially if replacing Hooks with a more in-depth history of feminism). Or, rather, one-third of an article, the rest being about patriarchal attempts to dismiss feminism in general as "man-hating", plus the recent Internet-enabled MRA "myth of misandry" and its relationship to incels and other online misogyny). But, we already have a page at Misandry, and it is not exactly ideal. I'm not sure the title is either given the baggage of the word. But, I would rather light my own hair on fire than try starting or overhauling any article in this issue-space, due to all the drama surrounding it.

I'll repeat that Kudpung probably shouldn't've wondered aloud whether something like a casually or actively anti-male position was part of the subcultural background of another editor in a particular instance, but that it's not really plausible that Kudpung hasn't learned from this. ArbCom (and desysopping) aren't a punishment/vengeance mechanism, but preventative. Is Kudpung really likely to do it again? Unless there's some other and much more objective reason to desysop Kudpung (wheelwarring, abuse of tools to push a viewpoint, etc.), then that case should close without a desysop. The emptiness, pro or con, of the "Comment by Arbitrators" section under "Kudpung desysopped" in "Proposed remedies" on the workshop page is reason for concern about the outcome; we usually have a much clearer idea where a case is going by now. (And I didn't post to the workshop talk page because the workshop has been closed since 4 February.)  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  06:31, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

PS, @Chris.sherlock: The only parts of this you got correct were "Kudpung was [not] disrespectful to deceased editor Brian Boulton", "FAC is a ... clique", "Kudpung has been unfairly labelled a misogynist", and "Kudpung is being “railroaded'". All the other material in your "summary" is distortion, which appears intentional as an attempt at argument to ridicule. See what I said up top about people not reading what others actually wrote while instead taking little parts of what they wrote and combining that with extraneous stuff to manufacture a transparently fake bogeyman.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  06:31, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

You’ll have to forgive me but there was so much material you wrote that I was struggling to follow your argument. I believe you would have been better if you had participated in the workshop phase though. - Chris.sherlock (talk) 08:01, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

@Chris.sherlock: I'm sure that's true; I didn't realize the case was going on, due to a general avoidance of dramaboards lately. I had perhaps unwisely trusted that ArbCom would be wrestling with things like grossly uncivil behavior, en masse, in various hotbed topic area (like ... drum-roll ... TERF). Instead I see three back-to-back desysopping cases all of which look at least somewhat dubious and one of which has already closed in a way that almost all observers think is wrong, and which is going to cost us that long-term editor. BrownHairedGirl is someone I've had intense disagreements with in the past, including about things related to this very thread, yet I'm still hopping mad ArbCom blamed BHG one-sidedly for "portal-war" stuff and falsely "Finding of fact"-ized an abuse of admin tools when BHG simply used the tools to do what consensus – what other editors – determined should be done. That this housekeeping also happened to be in agreement with her own views on portal deletion is irrelevant and incidental; she wasn't making the delete decisions. I'm thus quite alarmed at what I see as an "admin shooting gallery" approach, exacerbated by the Arbs' dead silence on the desysop question in this particular case's workshop phase. It's like there's a big secret or something. Argh.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  08:24, 11 February 2020 (UTC)