User talk:TonyBallioni

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Hi

Hello. Empire AS has requested that their user page be deleted on my talk page at meta:User talk:Dreamy Jazz#Last request, and then re-created with the tag currently present on their user page. As you made the initial block and placed the tag, I'll defer to you on whether to grant this request. Dreamy Jazz ^{talk to me | my contributions} 21:32, 5 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Empire AS has requested again to have their userpage deleted and then the tag added again. I'm still letting you decide on this, and if you could say either way that would be great. Dreamy Jazz ^{talk to me | my contributions} 19:46, 29 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Dreamy Jazz, sorry, just saw this (editing less in the week these days.) No. I don't think we should delete their userpage. TonyBallioni (talk) 03:19, 7 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Page mover request

Hi Tony, I just noticed your verdict for page mover rights and would like some further clarification if possible please. To be honest, I was quite surprised.

You mentioned that I did not have experience with moves, though to date I have a total of 669 moves since my inception (2014) due to various technical reasons.

Yet from 01:05, 12 November 2007 - 00:09, 10 February 2017 Tom Morris granted you the Page Mover permission with only 117 moves. Am I missing something here?

You mentioned that I do not have a need. Please see WikiProject Haiti pre-2014 before I had resurrected it from its dormant state; it was an absolute mess. Today, it is arguably one of the strongest in the region. The only reason why I have avoided such technical requests in the past was due to an overwhelming amount of organization that needed to be done within that project which was already time-consuming, so instead, I avoided it like the plague (and got around it when I could) when in fact there are many technical requests to make. I meet with members and they ask, can you do such and such and often times I must defer them for these common requests.

In terms of bundling [common] rights, is that against policy somewhere to do? Managing a WikiProject does take some permissions that I should have requested long before I went on my Wikibreak.

You mentioned, "acquiring them for the sake of it", which I take quite a bit of offense to. Between July 2016 - October 2017 you were granted a total of 5 common rights. Should I have waited 3 months in between for each new request? Seems a bit silly don't you think? My thought process was simply to not put off to tomorrow what I could have done today. My contributions should not be ignored. I have been a member for 7 years and even during the time I have taken off I still average roughly 5250 contributions per year.

Tony, I am not trying to make this a pissing match but just know that before you became an admin, you were once one of us too and so I would appreciate it tremendously if you could reconsider my request and bestow upon me similar grace please. Thank you. Savvyjack23 (talk) 02:22, 5 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not going to argue my circumstances from 4 years ago. That was a lifetime ago in wikiyears and I don't remember them specifically enough to have that discussions.

You specifically requested page mover citing WP:RM/TR. You last had a technical request in 2017. You've also been more or less inactive since then, including this year. A few days ago you requested a significant number of user rights just having returned to the project again without really much of a recent editing history. Most admins are going to either say no or actively ignore it because they don't want to get a talk page message like this.

That being said, I'll go ahead and ping @Primefac and Anarchyte: both of whom are active at PERM/PM. If either of them disagree with me, they can grant it and I won't care. TonyBallioni (talk) 04:43, 5 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Just noting that I've seen this. I'll be able to have a look at this over the coming day or so. Anarchyte (talk • work) 09:54, 5 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

After looking at the request, I would agree with Tony's assessment. One RM/TR request, no obvious RM experience, and of all the page moves performed over the years nearly every one of them left a reasonable redirect. I do not think that Tony (or I) are questioning your abilities, and I personally never question the motivations of an editor asking for permissions, but I think I can speak for both of us in that you do not appear to have the need for the page mover permission at this point in time (and if it was not obvious, I would have declined your request as well). I would be interested to hear Anarchyte's take on the matter, should it different significantly from our thoughts here. Primefac (talk) 11:50, 5 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

——Serial 18:09, 5 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I appreciate the courtesy in your further clarification and broadening the discussion a bit for my sake Tony; I know you do not even have to respond to these after a verdict is reached. Hi Primefac, thanks for weighing in. In terms of no experience with RM/TR, do you mean these Wikipedia:Requested moves/Technical requests#Requests to revert undiscussed moves? I didn't know there was an experience in this. I just added a request. These requests are not at all difficult to make, just extremely tedious and time-wasting for what I need to do. Imagine I had to request 1% of 6000 articles for Wikipedia:WikiProject Haiti, that would be 60 separate requests. If you notice, 669 of my common moves ([1]) (not RM/TM), were majorly uncontroversial and were to maintain commonality among titles. So by not having to request moves that require suppressing redirects and then waiting on each RM/TM are a stumbling block for me. Savvyjack23 (talk) 19:57, 5 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

When it comes to requests for page mover rights, I'm usually more lenient than Primefac (I haven't seen enough reviews from TB for a valid comparison). I don't really care for experience at WP:RM/TR because as you said, it's not very hard to make a valid request. Instead, I look at general RM participation because that's where the meat and potatoes of the PM role is. RM demonstrates that the requester understands when a page should be moved and what to do when a round-robin move needs to be made, which remains one of the only times a redirect should be suppressed. However, in this case I must agree with TB and Prime. I'm not seeing any demonstrated need for the permission in this case. I have no doubt that you understand the geographic naming conventions (indeed, likely better than myself), but without showing us that your contributions would benefit from the ability to suppress redirects and mass-move subpages, I believe a rejection at this point in time was the correct outcome. If you think we've got this wrong, come back in about a month's time with some technical requests and a dozen or so closures of RM discussions and I'm sure you'll be successful. Regards, Anarchyte (talk • work) 06:23, 6 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Understood and fair enough Anarchyte; thanks for weighing in as well. Perhaps I will take you up on that in the not-so-distant future. I appreciate all of your time concerning this matter. Cheers. (cc Primefac Savvyjack23 (talk) 03:03, 7 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Possible sockpuppet?

Hello, Tony,

I was looking at sockpuppets of our young sockpuppeteer User:Zaid Zayd and found that several worked on a draft started by User:Muhammad Bin Suleman. Could this editor be another sockpuppet? It could be a case of meat puppetry though. I know you did a checkuser sweep but I thought I'd check. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 18:06, 5 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Mail

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(Possibly) stale page restrictions

Hi, I was recently doing a review of all the page restrictions I've placed or taken ownership of over the years, and I noticed that a majority of the pages were no longer battlegrounds and didn't require restrictions anymore. I was looking backwards a couple of months on the article history and talk page looking for major diputes, and for the most part things were pretty quiet. I've removed the BRD restrictions from about 70% of the articles that I had put them on, and the 1RR restrictions from probably 90% of pages.

I figured while I was at it I might as well try to track down the other pages with active sanctions and see if the admins who placed them might also be interested in doing a similar review. The following list might not be complete, but it's the best I could come up with by tracking usages of the American Politics AE template. (Perhaps you can compare it to whatever system you have for tracking your active sanctions.)

I'm hoping that removing some of these restrictions can help restore some sense of normalcy to the topic area. In any case I hope this list is helpful. ~Awilley (talk) 00:31, 9 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

1st two are worth keeping given their individual controversial status. 3rd one I'm meh on and don't really remember why I placed it. Probably an edit war or something. My general view is that sanctions working is an argument for keeping them not removing them (Wikipedia seems to be the only place on the planet that views success as a reason to end something), but since he's no longer in cabinet and was controversial amongst policy wonks more than anything else, I could go either way on him, so neutral. TonyBallioni (talk) 04:17, 9 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I just took a look, and in all 3 articles there hasn't been significant talk page activity since 2018. In each case there are only two very short talk page sections from 2019 and 2020. Looking at the article histories for the last 50 edits I don't see any significant disputes. Just an occasional bold edit and revert. Articles 2 and 3 aren't even semi-protected.

I can think of some real-world examples. When it stops raining, you put away the umbrella. When the rioting stops, you send the police home and end the 8PM curfews. When the pandemic ends you stop locking down the country (hopefully). When an incarcerated person behaves, you release them on parole. When the rogue nation dismantles their nuclear program you end the sanctions. For what it's worth, I'm not convinced the page-level sanctions even had anything to do with the decrease in disruption, or that they addressed the root cause of the disruption in the first place. It's like saying the scarecrow is working because since we put it up we haven't seen a plague of locusts. ~Awilley (talk) 14:54, 9 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I think a better analogy is saying there've been less serious accidents after guardrails have been installed on a roadway. The success of the guardrails isn't a reason to remove them. I don't see a good reason to remove these guardrails when they aren't really hurting anything and could be of potential use in the future. TonyBallioni (talk) 19:56, 9 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The sanctions are more like speed bumps than guardrails. Guardrails don't get in your way, and you only run into them if you're going somewhere you shouldn't. Speed bumps slow everybody down, and they're really annoying, especially when they're overused. Take off your admin hat for a second and put yourself in the shoes of an editor who is just trying to improve or maintain articles. You are now subject to the following sanctions: you may only make one revert per 24 hour period, and you may not revert anything that has ever been reverted in the past without first obtaining consensus. Violation of these sanctions may result in your account being blocked.^[FBDB] Do restrictions like that make your job easier or harder? A lot of good editors choose to simply stay away from articles under sanctions. Instead of trying to deal with mental load of editing under restrictions and engaging in endless circular arguments with invested POV pushers who are gaming those restrictions, people simply walk away. Every sanction has downsides and unintended consequences, and I think we should always be weighing those against the benefits. ~Awilley (talk) 21:40, 9 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I don't see any downsides to these page level sanctions. Like I said, something working (wide use of page level sanctions in AP2) is not a reason to remove them. TonyBallioni (talk) 22:07, 9 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Race and Intelligence RfC

Sorry to bother you bringing this up again. You wrote "There is consensus that the theory that a genetic link exists between race and intelligence is enough of a minority viewpoint in the scientific consensus that it falls under Wikipedia's definition of a fringe theory above." Could I ask which sources you used to determine this? I think more detail is needed. Frog Tamer (talk) 14:39, 16 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]