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Use the closure requests noticeboard to ask an uninvolved editor to assess, summarize, and formally close a Wikipedia discussion. Do so when consensus appears unclear, it is a contentious issue, or where there are wiki-wide implications (e.g. any change to our policies or guidelines).

Do not list discussions where consensus is clear. If you feel the need to close them, do it yourself.

Move on – do not wait for someone to state the obvious. In some cases, it is appropriate to close a discussion with a clear outcome early to save our time.

Do not post here to rush the closure. Also, only do so when the discussion has stabilised.

On the other hand, if the discussion has much activity and the outcome isn't very obvious, you should let it play out by itself. We want issues to be discussed well. Do not continue the discussion here.

There is no fixed length for a formal request for comment (RfC). Typically 7 days is a minimum, and after 30 days the discussion is ripe for closure. The best way to tell is when there is little or no activity in the discussion, or further activity is unlikely to change its result.

When the discussion is ready to be closed and the outcome is not obvious, you can submit a brief and neutrally worded request for closure.

Be sure to include a link to the discussion itself and the {{Initiated}} template at the beginning of the request. A helper script can make listing discussions easier.

Any uninvolved editor may close most discussions, so long as they are prepared to discuss and justify their closing rationale.

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Non-admins can close most discussions. Admins may not overturn your non-admin closures just because you are not an admin, and this should not normally be in itself a problem at closure reviews. Still, there are caveats. You may not close discussions as an unregistered user, or where implementing the closure would call to use tools or edit permissions you do not have access to. Articles for deletion and move discussion processes have more rules for non-admins to follow.

Technical instructions for closers

Please append {{Doing}} to the discussion's entry you are closing so that no one duplicates your effort. When finished, replace it with {{Close}} or {{Done}} and an optional note, and consider sending a {{Ping}} to the editor who placed the request. Where a formal closure is not needed, reply with {{Not done}}. After addressing a request, please mark the {{Initiated}} template with |done=yes. ClueBot III will automatically archive requests marked with {{Already done}}, {{Close}}, {{Done}} {{Not done}}, and {{Resolved}}.

If you want to formally challenge and appeal the closure, do not start the discussion here. Instead follow advice at WP:CLOSECHALLENGE.

Other areas tracking old discussions

• Wikipedia:Requested moves#Elapsed listings
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• Wikipedia:Proposed article splits

Requests for comment

Talk:Awdal#RFC - Habr Awal/Isaaq clan

(Initiated 143 days ago on 24 December 2023) ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 21:17, 24 January 2024 (UTC)

RfC: Tasnim News Agency

(Initiated 93 days ago on 12 February 2024)

Closure request for this WP:RSN RfC initiated on February 12, with the last !vote occurring on March 18. It was bot-archived without closure on March 26 due to lack of recent activity. - Amigao (talk) 02:33, 1 May 2024 (UTC)

RfC: Change INFOBOXUSE to recommend the use of infoboxes?

(Initiated 61 days ago on 15 March 2024) Ready to be closed. Charcoal feather (talk) 17:02, 27 April 2024 (UTC)

Before I try to close this I wanted to see if any editors believed I am WP:INVOLVED. I have no opinions on the broader topic, but I have previously participated in a single RfC on whether a specific article should include an infobox. I don't believe this makes me involved, as my participation was limited and on a very specific question, which is usually insufficient to establish an editor as involved on the broader topic, but given the strength of opinion on various sides I expect that any result will be controversial, so I wanted to raise the question here first.

If editors present reasonable objections within the next few days I won't close; otherwise, unless another editor gets to it first, I will do so. BilledMammal (talk) 04:43, 13 May 2024 (UTC)

Talk:Russo-Ukrainian War#RFC on Listing of Belarus

(Initiated 61 days ago on 16 March 2024) Hello, this RFC was started on 16 March 2024 and as of now was active for more than a month (nearly 1,5 month to be exact). I think a month is enough for every interested user to express their opinion and to vote at RFC and the last vote at this RFC was made by user Mellk on 15 April 2024 (nearly two weeks ago and within a month since the start of this RFC). The question because of which this RFC was started previously resulted in quite strong disagreements between multiple users, but I think there already is a WP:CONS of 12 users who already voted at this RFC. Since the contentious topics procedure applies to page Russo-Ukrainian War, I think this RFC must be closed by uninvolved user/administrator to ensure a valid WP:CONS and to prevent further disputes/edit warring about this question in the future. -- Pofka (talk) 09:50, 27 April 2024 (UTC)

Will an experienced uninvolved editor please close this RFC. If there is a consensus that Belarus should be listed, but not as to how it should be listed, please close with the least strong choice, Robert McClenon (talk) 17:08, 27 April 2024 (UTC)

I think it should not be closed with the "least strong choice", but instead with a choice which received the most votes (the strongest choice). The most users chose C variant (in total 6 users: My very best wishes, Pofka, Gödel2200, ManyAreasExpert, Licks-rocks, CVDX), while the second strongest choice was A variant (in total 5 users). So I think the WP:CONS of this RFC question is C variant. -- Pofka (talk) 18:33, 27 April 2024 (UTC)

 Doing... —Compassionate727 ^(T·C) 01:22, 15 May 2024 (UTC)

Talk:Whadjuk#RfC: Inclusion of Noongar words

(Initiated 60 days ago on 17 March 2024)

No new posts for over a month. Legobot auto-removed the RFC tag, but I'd like a definite outcome. Mitch Ames (talk) 08:12, 16 May 2024 (UTC)

Strong objection - there is no such thing as a definite outcome in this particular issue, it is unresolved and likely to remain that way. JarrahTree 09:45, 16 May 2024 (UTC)

 Done Soni (talk) 11:10, 16 May 2024 (UTC)

Talk:Libertarian Party (Australia)#Conservatism

(Initiated 47 days ago on 29 March 2024) RfC template expired. TarnishedPath^talk 01:22, 29 April 2024 (UTC)

Talk: Elissa Slotkin#Labor Positions and the 2023 UAW Strike

(Initiated 47 days ago on 30 March 2024) RfC expired, no clear consensus. andrew.robbins (talk) 04:05, 30 April 2024 (UTC)

WP:RSN#RFC:_The_Anti-Defamation_League

(Initiated 39 days ago on 7 April 2024) Three related RFCs in a trench coat. I personally think the consensus is fairly clear here, but it should definitely be an admin close. Loki (talk) 14:07, 6 May 2024 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Enforcing ECR for article creators

(Initiated 38 days ago on 8 April 2024) Discussion appears to have died down almost a month after this RfC opened. Would like to see a formal close of Q1 and Q2. Awesome Aasim 00:11, 8 May 2024 (UTC)

Talk:Brothers of Italy#RfC on neo-fascism in info box 3 (Effectively option 4 from RfC2)

(Initiated 38 days ago on 8 April 2024) Clear consensus for change but not what to change to. I've handled this RfC very badly imo. User:Alexanderkowal — Preceding undated comment added 11:50, 1 May 2024 (UTC)

Talk:International Churches of Christ#Request for Comment on About Self sourcing on beliefs section of a religious organization’s article

(Initiated 30 days ago on 15 April 2024) No new comments in eight days. TarnishedPath^talk 01:33, 11 May 2024 (UTC)

Talk:Havana syndrome#RfC on the presentation of the Havana Syndrome investigative report content

(Initiated 21 days ago on 25 April 2024) No new comments in 12 days. {{u|Gtoffoletto}}  ^talk 08:52, 13 May 2024 (UTC)

Talk:2024 United States presidential election#RfC: Define the threshold in national polls to include candidates in the infobox - new proposal

(Initiated 1 day ago on 15 May 2024) An RfC on exactly the same matter was literally closed a few days ago. Prcc27 (talk) 15:44, 15 May 2024 (UTC)

 Closed by editor Redrose64. P.I. Ellsworth , ed. ^{put'er there} 04:01, 16 May 2024 (UTC)

Deletion discussions

XFD backlog

V	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Total
CfD	0	0	19	12	31
TfD	0	0	0	0	0
MfD	0	0	1	3	4
FfD	0	0	2	4	6
RfD	0	0	22	48	70
AfD	0	0	0	0	0

Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2024 April 8#Medical schools in the Caribbean

(Initiated 56 days ago on 21 March 2024) HouseBlaster (talk · he/him) 20:38, 4 May 2024 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2024 April 8#Category:French forts in the United States

(Initiated 55 days ago on 22 March 2024) HouseBlaster (talk · he/him) 20:38, 4 May 2024 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2024 April 10#Category:19th-century Roman Catholic church buildings in Réunion

(Initiated 53 days ago on 23 March 2024) HouseBlaster (talk · he/him) 13:39, 13 May 2024 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2024 April 24#Category:Asian American billionaires

(Initiated 22 days ago on 24 April 2024) HouseBlaster (talk · he/him) 20:38, 4 May 2024 (UTC)

Other types of closing requests

Talk:Maersk Hangzhou#Second merge proposal

(Initiated 112 days ago on 24 January 2024) Merge discussion involving CTOPS that has been open for 2 weeks now. Needs closure. The Weather Event Writer (Talk Page) 04:46, 8 February 2024 (UTC)

@WeatherWriter: I would give it a few days as the discussion is now active with new comments. GoldenBootWizard276 (talk) 00:00, 3 March 2024 (UTC)

As nominator, I support a non consensus closure of this discussion so we can create an RFC to discuss how WP:ONEEVENT applies in this situation. GoldenBootWizard276 (talk) 21:56, 9 March 2024 (UTC)

Talk:1985_Pacific_hurricane_season#Proposed_merge_of_Hurricane_Ignacio_(1985)_into_1985_Pacific_hurricane_season

(Initiated 106 days ago on 30 January 2024) Listing multiple non-unanimous merge discussions from January that have run their course. Noah, AA^Talk 13:50, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

Talk:Pharnavaz_I_of_Iberia#Requested_move_6_February_2024

(Initiated 100 days ago on 6 February 2024) Requested move open for nearly 2 months. Natg 19 (talk) 17:46, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

Has now been open for three months. 66.99.15.163 (talk) 19:23, 10 May 2024 (UTC)

Talk:12 February 2024 Rafah strikes#Merge proposal to Rafah offensive

(Initiated 93 days ago on 13 February 2024) The discussion has been inactive for over a month, with a clear preference against the merge proposal. CarmenEsparzaAmoux (talk) 19:35, 24 April 2024 (UTC)

Talk:Rupert_Sheldrake#Talkpage_"This_article_has_been_mentioned_by_a_media_organization:"_BRD

(Initiated 29 days ago on 16 April 2024) - Discussion on a talkpage template, Last comment 6 days ago, 10 comments, 4 people in discussion. Not unanimous, but perhaps there is consensus-ish or strength of argument-ish closure possible. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 07:24, 23 April 2024 (UTC)

It doesn't seem to me that there is a consensus here to do anything, with most editors couching their statements as why it might (or might not) be done rather than why it should (or should not). I will opine that I'm not aware there's any precedent to exclude {{Press}} for any reason and that it would be very unusual, but I don't think that's good enough reason to just overrule Hipal. —Compassionate727 ^(T·C) 01:01, 13 May 2024 (UTC)

Talk:Forest_management#Merge_proposal

(Initiated 18 days ago on 28 April 2024) As the proposer I presume I cannot close this. It was started more than a week ago and opinions differed somewhat. Chidgk1 (talk) 13:46, 10 May 2024 (UTC)

Talk:Press_Your_Luck_scandal#Separate_articles

(Initiated 13 days ago on 2 May 2024) Please review this discussion. --Jax 0677 (talk) 01:42, 11 May 2024 (UTC)

Talk:Agroforestry#Merge_proposal

(Initiated 13 days ago on 3 May 2024) As the proposer I presume I cannot close this. It was started more than a week ago and opinions differed somewhat. Chidgk1 (talk) 13:46, 10 May 2024 (UTC)

Pengo issues block on bot, no reason given or warning.

My bot, BG19bot has been blocked by Pengo saying the bot has malfunctioned. They added {{nobots}} tag onto their articles without following the instructions, one of which is to contact the bot owner. I and Magioladitis have left a message on Pengo's talk page before they blocked the bot. Instructions say on the bot's page to leave a message on the talk page to stop the bot. The bot has not edited in 2 hours and won't again till ~4z tomorrow.

Pengo has just written on their talk page, I've asked you to stop making edits to these pages before. Bots are meant to be useful, not waste everyone's time. Pengo has never left a message on my talk page. Pengo is now adding {{nobots}} to pages again. I still haven't a clue what they are objecting to.

Summary:

1. Pengo abused admin privileges by blocking the bot... no warning and no discussion and bot hasn't edited in awhile.
2. Pengo applied {{nobots}} without discussion
3. Pengo has never left a message on my talk page before and I've never contacted them before.
4. Pengo is refusing to discuss what in the world is going on.

Bgwhite (talk) 08:33, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

• Well your bot made this edit which is what I assume kicked it off - and on the face of it, appears to do nothing. Likewise the recent edits of the bot on other articles can be described at best, as having zero negative effect on the article. But no positive either. The relevant part of NOBOTS is "These templates should be used carefully outside userspace to avoid blocking useful bot edits." As far as Pengo is concerned its not making useful edits. Only in death does duty end (talk) 09:03, 12 July 2016 (UTC)
  • It's Checkwiki error #16, remove invisible Unicode characters. It is an approved task. Still does not excuse the bot being blocked, absolutely no discussion and addition of template without discuss. Not sure if that is the problem Pengo is having. Bgwhite (talk) 09:09, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

I'll unblock the bot in a short while, unless I hear some good reason not to do so here. On the face of it, the block reason given by Pengo, "Bot malfunctioning", is patently wrong: the bot was doing exactly what it was supposed to be doing, and approved to do. Pengo's claim that he had previously "asked [Bgwhite] to stop making edits to these pages" (besides displaying a form of "ownership" attitude in its wording) seems to refer to an exchange with a different bot owner, about a different bot task [1]. Fut.Perf. ☼ 09:39, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

Looks like Pengo is running his own bot as well. Interestingly enough he states here that he's waiting for a bot flag and | over in this report his bot appears to have not been approved. Further, there appears to be no interaction between Peno and Bgwhite until he blocked him. He appears to have had issues | with Yobot | a few times in the recent past . I'd say he has a bit of explaining to do. KoshVorlon 15:51, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

That bot was active circa 2006, and has only made one edit since. I think we can safely say that whatever else is going on, Pengo is not currently running that bot. Dragons flight (talk) 16:16, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

What an incredible waste of my time this bot is. But now I have to present my point of view, so I will do so.

I've created and have been maintaining around 57 pages of IUCN Red Listed species. Most of the pages are listed here: User:Beastie Bot/table. The IUCN recently updated their listings for the first time this year, and I've been working to update the pages, which is tedious partly because there any many issues to fix around how they are presented and how to select common names, and partly because I attempt not to clobber edits from other users. This can be a time consuming process. (Beastie Bot does not do any edits because I paste them in myself to check over the changes) Many of the user edits to the pages have been helpful, such as finding typos and mistakes in the data, some of which I've relayed back to the IUCN, sometimes it's been neutral such as choosing a different common name for species (e.g. an IP editor changed African wild ass to African wild donkey, which I've kept when regenerating the pages). And sometimes I'm bombarded with utterly useless or deleterious edits from WCW bots, especially BG19bot and Yobot. At one point Yobot started breaking the pie chart graphic [2]. I reverted its changes and it did it again. Honestly? At this point I am literally having a revert war with a bot which is repeatedly re-breaking a page. I cannot go and update any other pages which I was about to update because the bot will go and break those pages too as they have similar wikicode. So now I'm stuck and I have to confront the bot owner, Magioladitis, whose broken bot is messing up. Literally, it's an automated tool to mess up a page in an attempt to something that has absolutely no purpose other than to rack up edits and bloat the Wikipedia database. If you haven't guessed, by now my opinion of these WCW bots is not high. Magioladitis claims his bot is "not malfunctioning" and refuses to fix it. He does not stop its edit warring behaviour, and does not fix its behaviour with the template it breaks, but he instead works around the problem by moving the wikicode that his bot can't deal with to a separate template where his bot will leave it alone. Ok, fine, whatever. He also says "Pengo please read the instructions. You could add a tag on the pages to avoid Yobot revisiting till the issue is handled." Read the instructions, he says. "till the issue is handled" he says. It's not being handled. He is not handling it. There's no link to any instructions. I don't care for this bot. I just don't want this bot to go around messing up pages. But I file away in the back of my head for later that there are "instructions". So he graciously applied a work around to a number of pages, but there are many more pages that I haven't updated yet that I will have to do the same workaround for or else his bot—which he apparently cannot control—will mess up those pages too, repeatedly, even if its edits are reverted. So I spend my time making these changes, making a bunch of separate templates for these charts, which I did admittedly plan to do eventually but not just because PointlessBot is broken and is threatening to break any page that I don't fix in this way. I did have a lot of higher priorities for things to fix with the lists (e.g. there are none for threatened plant species yet). While I'm making edits, I decide to change non-breaking spaces on the pages to use a Unicode non-breaking space instead of the   code, as as to make it more readable in the wikicode. And now BG19bot decides it doesn't like this and starts replacing them with ordinary spaces. I don't know if there's a preferred way of including nonbreaking spaces on Wikipedia, and I really don't care, but this bot is not doing it, it's just stripping them. So, given my previous experience with WCW bots, I started adding the code to stop BG19bot. Sorry, I do admit I did get the two bots mixed up, as they both make many completely useless edits and are both part of the same project. I would have included both bots in the bot-deny tag if I had realized sooner. But anyway, the next thing I know Bgwhite removes the bot-deny tag from the page. Now, not only is his useless bot going to fuck up every page I upload, he's personally going to make sure of it by removing the tag to stop his bot from doing so. His edit comment was "Follow the instructions". Well I'd already spent quite some time looking for those instructions previously to work out how to format this bot-denial tag as there isn't an obvious link to it on his bot's page (And I'm not sure even has any effect as his bot is listed as ignoring it) but I immediately went back to User:BG19bot again to look for any "instructions" to follow, and the only instructions were for how to shut it off so I followed them as requested. Can I ask you and your WCW friends to kindly refrain from editing or vandalizing any of the pages listed currently or in future on User:Beastie_Bot/table. I have zero interest in helping you fix your bots. You cannot simply demand editors help you with your malfunctioning garbage, as you have demanded from me. Please stop your bots from continuing to vandalize these pages. I don't like having to write your dumb bot's name on pages to stop it messing things up but it's the only automated way I know how. Apologies again for getting the two of you, and your bots which do identical things, confused. I'll leave it to someone else to reinstate your automated user harassment tool if it hasn't been already. —Pengo 19:59, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

• • Look, is this an approved bot task? If not, then support it being blocked and getting approved. If not, then I'm fine with Pengo going to the approval page and making an objection that this is useless or to ask for it to stick to mainspace or better yet to ask that it only do when there are other tasks to do. Given that there is some opposition, then the bot should stop and we can further discuss what it can or should not be doing. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 20:22, 12 July 2016 (UTC)
    • I believe the relevant request would be this one. So yes it is approved. I think Pengo can be forgiven for mixing up the two bots as they do actually perform the same functions and the bot requests for BG's bot does say it is meant to be a backup/additional to Yobot. However being approved for a bot-task just means that task is approved for completion by automation. It doesnt mean it necessarily should be done, or override editing consensus at an article. Saying that, bot is working as expected according to that BFRA. As Pengo has posted a lengthy explanation above as to why he doesnt want it editing that particular group of articles, apart from excluding the bots from the pages, or blocking the bots (which Pengo did sequentially) is there a realistic way to prevent them from editing an article when you do not want them to? In a quick and easy manner that doesnt take days of talking? Only in death does duty end (talk) 21:25, 12 July 2016 (UTC)
• I will say the bot policy does have a bit of a blind spot on this, it deals with approval of bots, what bots should and shouldnt do, but doesnt really address what happens if you as an editor disagree with a bot-task. The key parts relevant to this situation I feel are 'bots should only do tasks for which there is consensus', '(bot operators may wish to include) Providing some mechanism which allows contributors other than the bot's operator to control the bot's operation is useful in some circumstances', and possibly the bit on cosmetic changes. The bot is 'exclusion compliant' which means it is set up to specifically respond to the exclude template. If the bot operator then goes and removes the exclude template, whats the point in making it exclusion compliant in the first place? I can see *why* pengo took the route he did, once the template was removed there was nothing protecting the article from what they perceived as disruptive editing, as an editor that would be amazingly frustrating, as an admin there is always the option of blocking the bot. There really should be something in policy somewhere that means bot-exclusion templates shouldnt be removed without discussion first. Only in death does duty end (talk) 21:37, 12 July 2016 (UTC)
  • • • It is an approved task to fix Checkwiki problems. I'm highly offended that I'm labeled being a vandal and being useless, especially since Pengo levels the charge without ever asking what I'm doing.
        1. Pengo abused his admin privileges by blocking, never contacting, no warning and not following instructions. Messages were left on Pengo's talk page before they blocked. Never once did Pengo talk, discuss or saying anything else.
        2. Instructions on {{nobots}} clearly state one must contact the bot owner first and not use the template as a blunt instrument. Pengo has added it again without discussion.
        3. Invisible characters is listed at MOS:RTL. The correct way to produce nonbreaking spaces is either  , {{nowrap}} or {{spaces}}. Having invisible Unicode characters makes it is impossible for one to see and causes other problems. Pengo owns their pages and does not see other people editing. Removing invisible characters is also done by AutoEd. Examples of the problems they cause. Invisible Unicode on Pengo's articles are not limited to text. The nobot templates was added twice for making this edit. This has nothing to do non-breaking spaces.
        4. Previous problem Pengo had with Magioladitis was the article had a wikilink to itself. The discussion that Future Perfect mentioned says Pengo is not following the examples given in the module page. I changed the article to reflect the example and the page was identical to the reader. I was reverted. Magioladitis did it another way and Pengo hasn't reverted.n
        5. There is a whitelist feature of Checkwiki. Checkwiki will not detect an error for the article and page number listed. Offer was refused
        6. Pengo is going to add (fifth item down) {{nobots}} to every one of his pages. Other bots besides BG19bot and non-AWB bots do the same thing. That means Pengo is going to exclude all bots from every page they own. Offer refused.
        7. The bot is not broken. It is following MOS. Pengo wants to go their own route, everybody else is a vandal. We've shown how to avoid wikilinking to itself.
      • Summary: It is an approved task. It is following MOS. Pengo is reverting, adding nobots without discussion to articles in which there is non-breaking or any other invisible character in the article's text. Pengo is not following examples to work around a wikilink to itself. Bgwhite (talk) 21:40, 12 July 2016 (UTC)
        • Again BRFA only states that a task can be done by a bot, it doesnt address if it *should* be done. Just because an editing task is approved for a bot - it does not therefore make it supersede or avoid consensus discussion when someone disagrees on an article. And the entire MOS is a guideline and not policy - if the bot is making edits to comply with the MOS rather than fixing an outright error, thats a cosmetic change and should only be done in conjunction with substantial edits. Only in death does duty end (talk) 21:48, 12 July 2016 (UTC)
          • Again, we told Pengo how to fix one issue, one answer was to follow the examples. Offer refused. I've gotten no messages or anything else. How in the world do we do anything when Pengo refuses to communicate. MOS should be followed unless there is a good reason not to. No reason was ever given. There isn't any reason to have an invisible character in a category, but it was reverted anyway. Bots are allowed to make some non-cosmetic changes. They are used to remove obsolete infobox parameters, fix defaultsort parameters and remove duplicate parameter is in templates. As stated above, invisible Unicode characters do cause problems. Great I get blocked, I communicated, I'm not showing ownership, I followed BRFA and followed MOS... I'm the one in trouble. Bgwhite (talk) 22:03, 12 July 2016 (UTC)
            • Fix one issue? What issue? The issue was with the bot. The page was fine. It loaded fine. It displayed fine. The issue was that Yobot was unable to deal with it. The bot made a mess of the page so it displayed an error message in place of a pie chart. Your "fix" involved removing information content from the chart and making it inconsistent. Why? Because the dumb bot would automatically fuck it up again and again otherwise. You seem to think each page is an individual case, but they all use the same underlying script, which I cannot use if your bots keep fucking everything up. And you wonder why I have to put {{bots|deny=BG19bot,Yobot}} on every page I generate? —Pengo 03:50, 13 July 2016 (UTC)
              • Pengo The bot is following MOS. You are not. You are not following examples given in module. You didn't follow instructions on a template. You abused you admin powers. For four years nobody complained about this issue to any bot owner that I'm aware of. You are the only one doing it your way. Bot is behaving fine, you are the one perverting things. You need to change it to {{nobots}} and deny all bots. There are atleast 20 different bots that does the same thing. Bgwhite (talk) 04:59, 14 July 2016 (UTC)

(outdent) No one is "in trouble" or at least that's the best possible outcome. I'm a generalist and not a bot or subject-matter expert but let me see if I can at least frame the issue. It seems we have a bot, doing an approved task in cleaning up unhelpful hidden coding. The allegation is that in making these constructive but invisible-to-the-naked-eye edits, the bot-edits are messing up the visible formatting of a class of articles. If I've correctly described the situation, then the questions worth discussing are (1) is there some change that could be made so that the bot will fix the formatting without harming the articles; (2) if yes, what; and (3) if not, what should we do? If I've incorrectly described the situation, someone please correct me. Thanks, Newyorkbrad (talk) 22:29, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

• It is not messing up the visible formatting in some instances. For example, there is no change of visible formatting in this, which Pengo has added nobots twice to. Last edit made by a bot was February 22, nobots was added on July 11.
• In this discussion, bot is removing a wikilink to itself. As coded by Pengo, this did cause a visible problem. Following the module's example or use fix given my Magioladitis solves the issue.
• In this case, bot is removing invisible non-breaking spaces. Following normal standards of   or {{nowrap}} solves the problem and tells the editor of their presence. The bot removes the invisible character and replaces it with a standard space. Bot cannot add   because non-breaking spaces are found in categories, defaultsort and other spots where adding in a &nbsp can cause problems. Bgwhite (talk) 23:20, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

• • As your bot cannot understand whether the non-breaking space should be removed or replaced then it should not be automatically making the edits. Please, leave it alone. —Pengo 03:50, 13 July 2016 (UTC)
    • And all the other articles that don't have non-breaking spaces that you have or will apply nobots? The articles that have wikilinks to itself and the all other reason reasons? Simple fact is you don't want people touching your articles. You have abused your admin powers and the nobots template. You have said a total of four sentences in two discussion to Magioladitis and me. I hadn't a clue what you objected to until your message above... after the block and addition of nobots. All of this didn't need to happen if you would actually communicate, not bark orders and use standards. Bgwhite (talk) 05:09, 13 July 2016 (UTC)

A general rule of thumb is that, if a particular kind of cleanup requires manual review, that cleanup should not be attempted by bot. Bots are limited to situations where the correct fix can be determined without manual review. Deciding which white spaces should be non-breaking does require manual review, so bots should not try to perform that kind of cleanup. --- Because bot owners can be slow to make changes that only affect a few pages, there is no reason I can see to prevent users from putting the nobots template on particular pages to prevent particular bots from editing them. In particular, the MOS is intended to guide editors, not to be enforced as a set of hard-and-fast rules automatically implemented without human review. — Carl (CBM · talk) 04:00, 13 July 2016 (UTC)

• Wondering when you would show up. Pengo has applied nobots to pages with no problems and which the bot hasn't edited in months. Pengo has applied nobots without discussion. Pengo has blocked the bot without discussion. Pengo has refused offers of whitelisting and doing a module per examples or other means. Pengo has refused all discussion. One side blocking, applying nobots and not saying anything is the problem. This is a two-way street here and one side is refusing to talk. We are "slow" to make changes, but how do we know what changes? Bgwhite (talk) 05:09, 13 July 2016 (UTC)
  • From Pengo's explanation above he applied nobots as a preventative measure. Arguing the bot hasnt edited a particular article in months doesnt really scan unless you can also gurantee it wont edit that article again in the future. Generally editors should not have to jump through excessive hoops to prevent automated bots from interfering with their work. Only in death does duty end (talk) 06:55, 13 July 2016 (UTC)
    • Only in death Of course you *only* listen to Pengo. You don't add nobots as a preventive measure, period. You don't use the template as a blunt instrument. You remove the template when there is no problem. These are in the instructions for the template. The added template to the article that hasn't been visited by a bot in months and no objection or revert was done. I manually looked at the article via the bot and there is no errors. Therefore the template has no place. BTW... the template was later removed by someone else saying no reason was given and Pengo reverted again. I followed the rules, therefore I'm being punished and ignored. Pengo doesn't communicate, didn't tell use what is wrong, didn't follow our advice, abused admin privileges and is being praised. What a fucking joke this has been. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Bgwhite (talk • contribs) 04:59, 14 July 2016 (UTC)

Bgwhite If you didn't have a clue what I objected to, then why did you remove the tag which specifically requested your bot cease? That was my communication to you and your bot. You still don't understand that is the reason your bot was blocked. That should have been a tip off to you that something was wrong but you deliberately chose not just to ignore it, but to deleted it. This was your communication to me that you didn't give a fuck. That you wanted your bot to continue its rampage of edits that needed to be reverted. Changes made after your bot's messed-up edits needed to be checked for and re-merged in. You acted as if I had not attempted to communicate to your stupid bot in its stupid bot-specific language that it was unwanted and doing harm. You deleted the message that was specific to your bot, telling you that something is wrong, and your bot continued to make useless and erroneous edits. Why do you think your bot is so important that it should ignore editors who specifically request that it cease? Do you have any idea how much time your bot, which does nothing useful at the best of times, has wasted? I have 50+ pages to update. I cannot spend a lifetime reverting changes that your bot erroneously makes each time I update one of those pages, nor am I duty bound to explain to each bot owners want is wrong with their specific bot and why it should not be editing, especially as both you and Magioladitis have been disinterested in fixing your bots, but instead defend their actions which are clearly in error in these cases, and have offered me no apology for wasting my time in having to revert your bots' changes, make numerous time consuming changes to prevent your bots further breaking my otherwise functional pages, and spending time checking for and re-merge changes that were made after your bots messed up, not to mention the time wasted defending against your braindead attacks. If someone indicates in any way that your bot is doing the wrong thing, do not ignore them. Do not delete their message, or obviously your bot will be blocked again in future. I'm still waiting for your apology. —Pengo 05:17, 14 July 2016 (UTC)

• Support Pengo I noticed BG19bot making an edit to an article I had created recently. I looked at what it was doing and observed that it was fiddling with the white space in a category tag. This annoyed me so I looked to see how to prevent this and found that the bot was not exclusion compliant. My understanding is that it was this sort of vexatious content-free edit which got Rich Farmborough sanctioned – a penalty which has only just been relaxed – see above. Perhaps those sanctions should now be considered for this bot. Anyway, if it's causing disruption then I endorse Pengo's action in shutting it down. Andrew D. (talk) 06:58, 14 July 2016 (UTC)

Because the bot runs with AWB, it may actually support the nobots template even though it is not documented as doing so. In fact, I suspect it does, because otherwise the operator wouldn't care if Pengo added a nobots template... — Carl (CBM · talk) 13:19, 14 July 2016 (UTC)

Pengo block of Bgwhite

Pengo appears now to have blocked Bgwhite for disruptive editing. Is that acceptable, given the initiation of this thread and INVOLVED? - Sitush (talk) 07:28, 14 July 2016 (UTC)

No, it's an abuse of the tools. The Rambling Man (talk) 07:42, 14 July 2016 (UTC)

Technically yes, but since Bgwhite was messing around over the nobots template *while this discussion is going on here* it was certainly a disruptive and pointy edit. Only in death does duty end (talk) 07:49, 14 July 2016 (UTC)

Not only is this a violation of WP:INVOLVED, it's abuse of the blocking policy. It's scary how someone who thinks that they can go around blocking anyone they get into a content dispute with has access to the admin toolset. Omni Flames (talk) 07:52, 14 July 2016 (UTC)

There is no content involved as Bgwhite has made no edits to visible content. He continues to make disruptive edits to the pages he's specifically been asked to stop editing, seemingly just to make a WP:POINT in edit comments. How else am I meant to get him and his bot to stop editing these pages with useless, disruptive and deleterious edits? —Pengo 08:05, 14 July 2016 (UTC)

That's not remotely okay. Pengo cited this edit as a violation of WP:POINT, in his block message. I get how that edit could be seen as pointy given the above dispute and the less than gracious edit summary, but I doubt it justifies a block. More importantly, given the ongoing dispute, Pengo certainly shouldn't be the one deciding whether or not an edit like that deserves a block. Dragons flight (talk) 08:09, 14 July 2016 (UTC)

• I hadn't seen this thread, I just saw the block. It was a blatant violation of WP:INVOLVED and I have unblocked. I'm seriously concerned by Pengo's fitness for adminship by the horribly dictatorial approach I'm seeing here. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 08:26, 14 July 2016 (UTC)

PS: @Pengo: If you do anything like that again, I will be blocking you and then seeking an emergency desysop. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 08:28, 14 July 2016 (UTC)

He made nine edits in total to the pages which I've asked him specifically to stop editing in an attempt to make some kind of WP:POINT and harass me: List of data deficient birds‎‎, List of data deficient fishes‎‎, List of endangered amphibians‎‎, List of critically endangered mammals‎‎, List of least concern fishes‎‎, List of critically endangered fishes‎‎, List of vulnerable fishes‎‎. No one can spend all day reverting his childish nonsense. 24 hour ban is appropriate. —Pengo 08:29, 14 July 2016 (UTC)

I don't care if he made nine hundred edits - it is a dispute between you and him, and your blocking of him to try to win the dispute was a gross abuse of your admin tools. The fact that you cannot see this is seriously making me consider requesting an ArbCom case for your desysop, even with no further violations. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 08:35, 14 July 2016 (UTC)

@Pengo: Harassing you? That's ridiculous. In no way did he ever harass you. Blocking him when the two of you were in the middle of a dispute was totally uncalled for and you have still made no effort whatsoever to explain why you decided to use the block button despite quite obviously being involved. Omni Flames (talk) 08:39, 14 July 2016 (UTC)

@Pengo: Not to restate the obvious, but you cannot block someone when you are WP:INVOLVED. Report and let someone else make that call. If you cannot understand this principle, then it's time for you to hand in the bit. And it's not a "ban", it's a block. If you don't know the difference, why are you even an admin? Softlavender (talk) 08:39, 14 July 2016 (UTC)

As I said before, there are more bots than BG19bot and Magioladitis doing the exact same edits. For example, any AWB or WPCleaner bot will make the edits Pengo does not like. There are other bots fixing checkwiki errors including Josvebot, Menobot and Frescobot. I changed it to nobots to stop any bot from making the same edit. I was being proactive. Pengo, do you want other bots making the same edits or to stop them? FYI... I'm not a bot, so adding my name into nobots does no good.

This is now the 2nd block by Pengo I've gotten this week that has been quickly overturned. What happens when I edit one of Pengo's article's that I'm not aware of? Bgwhite (talk) 08:43, 14 July 2016 (UTC)

You can't just simply throw {{nobots}} onto a page without explicitly listing which bots you want to block because you effectively blocked my bot which combats WP:LINKROT on articles, and ClueBot NG, which we all know what that does, and numerous others. Pengo may be currently abusing the block button, but you're abusing an exclusion template. I would hate to have to remove compliance from my bots as a result of nobots being spammed on pages needlessly and abusively.—^cyberpower_Chat:Online 11:59, 14 July 2016 (UTC)

• Declaration: I'm not at home with bots, and don't understand the conflict very well. Regardless, Pengo's block of BGWhite was atrocious and policy-violating. Checking out the logs, I see Pengo has been an admin since 2003, a pretty inactive one, especially as regards blocks. Their block log for those 13 years contains only ten blocks in 13 years. That's less than one block per year, and this is the first time ever that they have blocked anybody other than IP vandals and bots. It reminds me of other cases where oldtime inactive admins who haven't kept up with the blocking policy or the blocking culture suddenly appear and place one block — an inappropriate one. I wouldn't normally have thought one such foray was cause for desysop, but Pengo's response in this discussion — "No one can spend all day reverting his childish nonsense. 24 hour ban is appropriate" — makes it worse. I would urgently like to hear from Pengo that he has now familiarized himself with WP:INVOLVED. That's really all we need here, IMO. Bishonen | talk 08:54, 14 July 2016 (UTC).

• Adding: Pengo has continued to edit without addressing my request above. @Pengo: please take the time to respond here about WP:INVOLVED as a matter of priority. Bishonen | talk 09:49, 14 July 2016 (UTC).

• I'd add reading WP:OWN and fixing the non-standard coding in the pages he created to the list... MLauba ^(Talk) 09:01, 14 July 2016 (UTC)

I will familiarise myself with the policies before placing any more blocks. —Pengo 10:23, 14 July 2016 (UTC)

Thank you. With that, I think we're done. Bishonen | talk 10:38, 14 July 2016 (UTC).

@MLauba:. I have gone to lengths to explain that I have not taken ownership of content. There are only two bots which have repeatedly and persistently made detrimental edits to pages which I have created and I've been very specific in preventing only those two bots from editing, or from their owners removing the tags so they can continue making detrimental edits which are incredibly time consuming to revert over 50+ pages. I have welcomed edits from all other users and bots, and have gone to lengths to incorporate their changes into the script which generates the pages in question (including the less detrimental edits made by said bots) so their changes will not be lost when the data or formatting is updated. I find it awful that you would suggest WP:OWN. —Pengo 10:45, 14 July 2016 (UTC)

And... INVOLVED? Other administrators have also accused you of that. Is that "awful" as well? Doc talk 10:51, 14 July 2016 (UTC)

No, I did not mention INVOLVED in my response to MLauba. —Pengo 10:59, 14 July 2016 (UTC)

Hmm. Well, it would seem that the charge of INVOLVED is more serious than the charge of OWN. I could be completely mistaken about that, of course. Doc talk 11:08, 14 July 2016 (UTC)

I think Doc9871 was comparing the 'awfulness' of WP:OWN with the ¿awfulness? of WP:INVOLVED... _Muffled ^Pocketed 11:10, 14 July 2016 (UTC)

Not the first time (and won't be the last time) that Bgwhite makes all these pointless disruptive edits with their account and/or bot account. About time someone seriously looks into this. When it's brought up on his talkpage, he thinks the person raising it is in the wrong. The sheer arrogance is appalling. Lugnuts ^{Dick Laurent is dead} 12:57, 14 July 2016 (UTC)

To be honest, I think there was far too much shouting and talking past each other here from both sides, and nowhere near enough listening. (I don't know enough to comment on who is right or wrong about the actual bot dispute.) Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 13:11, 14 July 2016 (UTC)

Blocking without issuing a warning and while involved is a serious act. Moreover, Pengo seems to be in confusion to whom thy have talked with. I would expect more responsibility when using the admin tools. The dispute itself is not as important as this. The admin tools can't be used as a weapon. -- Magioladitis (talk) 17:55, 14 July 2016 (UTC)

xeno Bgwhite's account was NOT blocked for doing bot edits. It was blocked by an admin who had a conflict with them. The big problem here is NOT the bot block (which IS a problem) but the block on Bgwhite's account. Any other discussion is misleading. -- Magioladitis (talk) 20:55, 14 July 2016 (UTC)

Well, the previous issue was a block of the bot account... Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 21:00, 14 July 2016 (UTC)

Jo-Jo Eumerus true. I try to understand that. An admin gets upset with bots messing with some articles they created, blocks a bot thinking it's another and the hell gets loose. This is serious already because the block is a serious action and should be well justified. Still, some people like to block bots till the issues are resolved one way or another. I get that somehow. The greatest problem is the second block. It was not stop a bot. It was against an editor of doing an action the admin did not like. -- Magioladitis (talk) 21:05, 14 July 2016 (UTC)

I've just glanced on this conversation. I don't mind the sort of gnomish edits Bgwhite makes, I might find them annoying, but that's my problem not theirs. I certainly think the one that puts punctuation and references the right way round is incredibly helpful when you have a large list of items in prose, all with individual citations, where seeing the wood for the trees is hard for a human editor. In any case, Pengo should absolutely not be calling good faith edits "vandalism" (and that was an hour ago, after all the above discussion), especially over something that so utterly trivial and pointless. That should be obvious. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 16:18, 15 July 2016 (UTC)

I agree with you on all points, Ritchie333. I am seriously doubting Pengo's competence to retain admin status now. - Sitush (talk) 10:58, 16 July 2016 (UTC)

• It appears the block in question in this section was both inappropriate in general and because the blocking admin was involved.—Godsy^(TALK_CONT) 21:46, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

Bot edits

In general, many editors are aware that bots should not make trivial edits such as [3] unless there is some more significant edit to be made at the same time. Yet we have bot operators who claim to have bot approval to make such edits. It may not be clear to casual observers here how or why the bot approval group could have approved a task like that.

Here is the history of this situation as I understand it. There is a project, "Check Wikipedia", which scans for various "errors" (even though the space removed in the linked edit was not actually a syntax error, they consider it as such). A handful of bot operators obtained relatively vague bot approvals, such as Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/BG19bot 7, which don't specify in any detail the changes that will be made, but just refer to the Check Wikipedia project in a general way. This has the effect of making an end-run around the usual bot approval process, because the actual, specific tasks the bot will make are dictated by the whims of the Check Wikipedia project and the bot operator, and can change over time without any additional bot approval. This is how the situation of bots approved to make white-space-only edits came about.

The vague bot approvals also had the effect of authorizing AWB bots to do something the AWB rules disallow specifically for human editors: making inconsequential edits such as [4]. This is something that the bot approvals group really should revisit, to bring these bots back into line with general Wikipedia practices about bots not making trivial edits. — Carl (CBM · talk) 13:25, 14 July 2016 (UTC)

MBisanz could you comment on the bot approval in question? It does appear that it would grant somewhat unlimited scope to expand the bot's tasks without BAG oversight. –xeno^talk 13:56, 14 July 2016 (UTC)

It's from 4 years ago (referencing something from 6 years ago), so I don't have perfect recall. I believe it was my understanding that BG19bot 7 was a transfer of the task granted in Yobot 16. The BotOp in the Yobot 16 approval said he would set it so that it would ""Skip if only minor genfixes" and "skip if only whitespace changed" will be activated. I don't think there will be any insignificant changes." There was some discussion of whether all of the changes made were significant, but he explained why they were (e.g., DEFAULTSORT) and no one objected to the list he added. There's always been a tension regarding how much a BotOp can change their code before a new approval is needed. I believe I would have read the link to the CheckWiki page in the context of the BotOp's statement that "I'd rather not do any CheckWiki errors that may be controversial." to mean that he would only make significant changes that had been tested and implemented by the AWB coding team. MBisanz ^talk 12:16, 15 July 2016 (UTC)

Would you expect the bot to conform to the AWB rules? (No inconsequential edits without substantial etc etc) Only in death does duty end (talk) 13:38, 15 July 2016 (UTC)

I would expect the bot to comply with WP:COSMETICBOT, which is a current policy (I'm not opining on what the policy said in the past or what which of the AWB general fixes are inconsequential v. substantial). MBisanz ^talk 14:44, 15 July 2016 (UTC)

Sorry I may have been unclear, I meant from that BRFA it appears the bot is effectively running off/incorporating AWB code - so its edits are for all intents and purposes AWB edits - regardless if its the Bot doing it rather than (a user manually using) AWB. So would you expect all the specific AWB stuff to apply to a bot that is running/composed of AWB code? Only in death does duty end (talk) 14:49, 15 July 2016 (UTC)

I wouldn't necessarily expect an AWB Bot to mirror AWB 100%, if only because a BotOp might have a good reason for modifying the AWB code to produce the same results as AWB. I haven't followed this entire discussion, but if could you flag for me the place where a BotOp is running an AWB Bot and is deviating from AWB code, I could comment on a concrete example. MBisanz ^talk 23:56, 15 July 2016 (UTC)

Nothing much wrong with that BRFA as it stands, it did exactly what it is supposed to do. The problem is editor perception. Some people seem to think because something has been BAG approved, this means it has 'authorisation' to do whatever its task is. All bot approval does is say 'yes this task can be done by a bot and is unlikely to break anything'. The rules of consensus editing and (as Carl has noted above) making trivial edits apply. If a bot encounters resistance to its task, it is up to the bot-operator to demonstrate consensus to make the changes before resuming the task. This may sometimes mean stopping the task/run entirely, or just excluding articles from the Bots run. It is *not* up to other editors to conform to the bot-operator. It is the bot that must conform to editors. In the above situation (which escalated far too quickly frankly by everyone involved) once the bot was prevented from editing an article, the bot operator should not have removed the template that was excluding the articles from the BOT. Firstly the reason why there is an exclusion compliant field on the BRFA is to ensure that bots can be prevented from editing specific articles. Thats why it exists. If the bot operator is just going to ignore when someone has excluded the bot, it is a completely worthless part of the process. Secondly - if you are removing the template that prevents your bot from editing, you are defacto stating your bot will continue to do its tasks on that article, essentially announcing your bot is going to edit war. Had Bgwhite not removed the nobots template, we wouldnt be in this mess.

Regarding the scope of the bot, at the moment it (and other bots, yobot etc) essentially has authorisation to 'fix' anything logged at WikiProject Check Wikipedia I dont think its entirely great that a single wikiproject can essentially operate multiple bots to 'fix' anything the wikiproject logs there regardless of how trivial or un-needed. Only in death does duty end (talk) 14:17, 14 July 2016 (UTC)

And the BRFA is pretty much a monopoly run by Bgwhite and Magioladitis. The latter who has had more warnings and blocks about his bot that anyone can count. Some people just don't like playing by the clear rules of AWB. Lugnuts ^{Dick Laurent is dead} 14:21, 14 July 2016 (UTC)

Remark: The edit in question was not done by AWB but by WPCleaner. -- Magioladitis (talk) 17:58, 14 July 2016 (UTC)

Exclusion compliance isn't enough. There also needs to be anti-edit-war measures, and awareness of edits from other bots. An editor must already be frustrated to go to the lengths to include a nobot tag (which is inelegant, difficult to find the documentation for if you haven't used it before, apparently makes you the target of further harassment by bot owners, and is clearly ineffective if you wish to just continue editing in peace). Bots which make a large number of edits, especially ones which are mostly trivial (purely trivial edits should never be made automatically), should be required to detect when they have been reverted. i.e. They must be proactive in not edit warring and be aware of each instance that their edit is rejected. Perhaps even compiling a public report of such instances. They should cease editing a page until the reverted edits are manually reviewed by the bot owner or several years has elapsed. If they feel it necessary, the bot owner can ask the editor why they reverted the edits. This is the reverse situation to what BGWhite expects: he expects editors to be responsible for engaging in lengthy debate with multiple bot owners who are all in denial about their bots objectively degrading a page, which is clearly not workable. It's like writing an essay each time you want to opt-out of spam. Simply reverting a bot's edit should be the end of the story from the editor's perspective unless the bot owner wishes to spend time actively looking into it. In fact, the bot should be automatically giving the user who reverted their edits a list of ways to "opt-out" of its edits in future. Although I've only had to deal with two malfunctioning bots (which both could successfully detect a problem but overestimated its importance and their capacity to solve it), BGWhite repeatedly claims there are over 20 other bots which would also do the same thing (seemingly this is an excuse for his actions, although I have not seen evidence of these other bots on the 50+ pages he defiled). If there are a large number of bots with overlapping purpose, especially if they are part of the same project (WCW) then they need to be aware of each other, and not edit-war-by-proxy (i.e. editing a page which recently had another bot's edit reverted). There should also be a wiki-wide bot report which shows how many edits of what kind each bot is making, and give metrics such as how often the bot was reverted, stopped by users, etc, so a larger perspective can be gained, and more heavily reverted bots reviewed. If all this seems like too much of a burden for bot owners, then they shouldn't be running bots. A bot goes very quickly from being marginally helpful to extremely frustrating.

—Pengo 01:31, 15 July 2016 (UTC)

Finally someone who can see what a massive pain and detriment to the project this really is. Bgwhite is the classic example of someone who is seemed to be untouchable with their admin role, but isn't actually doing any good, and blames everyone else when his bot continues doing this shit time and time again. If a non-admin was doing this crap, they would have been blocked long ago. Lugnuts ^{Dick Laurent is dead} 08:41, 15 July 2016 (UTC)

Sorry, but I don't understand what the problem is. I'll take this edit as an example - can somebody explain to me in very simple terms how that is worse to the reader of the encyclopedia than the version immediately before it? All I see is "I hate Bgwhite - he's extremely annoying!" which just isn't enough to pull sanctions on an editor. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 16:38, 15 July 2016 (UTC)

It's his edits that are annoying. He might be perfectly sound. However, his complete lack of understanding of what he is doing and failure to admit he has a problem is the crux of this. Multiple editors have flagged this up, but he dismisses them and makes that editor feel that they are the problem! His complete lack of grasping the basics of what the rules of AWB say and the failure to implement them need to be addressed. Thankfully, there are lots more people now watching what he's up to. Lugnuts ^{Dick Laurent is dead} 18:02, 15 July 2016 (UTC)

Its not a question of 'worse' it is that it is trivial/unnecessary. AWB rules (#4 at WP:AWB) and the Bot policy (see 'cosmetic changes') basically prohibit that sort of stand-alone edit (indeed users access to AWB has been revoked in the past for it), trivial/unnecessary edits clog up the history logs, watchlist changes etc, large amounts of trivial edits *do* use up server resources (although I dont think thats a problem in this case) and so on. Its why all the rules/guidance say trivial edits of that sort have to be made in conjunction with substantial edits. Although I am not sure that is what Lugnuts problem is. Only in death does duty end (talk) 16:45, 15 July 2016 (UTC)

What do you mean by "clog up the history logs"? If anything dominates the history logs, it is the determined effort of multiple editors to improve an article to GA / FA standard (example), and the typical bot edit stands out like a stripogram at a vicarage tea party. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 16:50, 15 July 2016 (UTC)

Thats not a reason that bothers me personally, I was just providing you with some of the reasons people object to it. I also gave you some of the others. But it is largely irrelevant as policy (linked above) mandates that sort of edit is not to be performed by itself. Only in death does duty end (talk) 16:54, 15 July 2016 (UTC)

Well my immediate response to "rules" is the obvious - unless somebody can provide me with an absolute and concrete example of how the bot edits harm or degrade the encyclopedia that isn't "it's annoying", perhaps the rules should be changed. All I see, I'm afraid, is people getting upset over things that really don't matter in the grand scheme of things.

At least when I see nuclear warfare arguments about infoboxes, there are clear and obvious merits for or against them depending on specifics. FWIW, I don't even know how to use AWB and aside from making AfD nominations a little simplier, I give Twinkle a wide berth. The only time I can remember kicking back against automated edits was when a bot kept adding a full stop at the end of a {{sfn}} tag without me noticing, and I kept accidentally introducing harv errors into articles until I figured out what was happening. I end up changing the footnote to something different, and the problem went away. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 17:03, 15 July 2016 (UTC)

Maybe one should discuss whether the policy needs to be loosened or repealed, it isn't the first time that drama has erupted at AN over that provision and I wonder if its benefits are worth these troubles. I thought that the bot userright existed precisely to avoid the swamping of RecentChanges with automatic edits.Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 17:08, 15 July 2016 (UTC)

I again repeat that the edit was not done by AWB. In order to optimise our work we now use a mixed tactic: We run AWB using the rules agreed and then WPCleaner which has the ability to remove pages fixes from the lists. This helps so the page is not revisited after being fixed. A year ago I was revisiting the page twice using AWB. Now the second pass is done by WPCleaner and this has helped in having less "trivial edits". Still we are missing the point in this discussion... again. -- Magioladitis (talk) 03:57, 16 July 2016 (UTC)

This isn't an open issue. The community has long decided on WP:COSMETICBOT.

Before and after of bot messing up, which was then repeated by the same bot on the same page after being reverted.

Ritchie333 I've also pointed out multiple places where these bots have repeatedly made harmful edits to the same page or to a group of pages, such as this one by yobot which prevented another 40+ pages from being updated under threat of the same thing. I've already spoken at length on it so I fear I'm repeating myself. You can find references to it above. I also already gave the example of BGWhite's bot removing nonbreaking spaces instead of replacing them with a different code, as it has no way of telling the difference between wanted and unwanted non-breaking spaces, a job which generally requires a human. While Magioladitis (yobot's owner) did make efforts to work around the issue himself, the underlying issue was not fixed so other pages were threatened with the same treatment unless they also applied a work-around to a non-existent problem. In BGWhite's case he has yet to admit there was even an issue, let alone attempt to make amends. I've now wasted many hours because of these bots. —Pengo 04:18, 16 July 2016 (UTC)

Pengo... and then you blocked a person, not just a bot, while edit warring with them. Do you understand that this was not OK? The bot issue can/could be fixed/handled/discussed. I am not worried about it that much. Your use of the block button was not OK though. Let's be clear. -- Magioladitis (talk) 04:31, 16 July 2016 (UTC)

Stop changing the topic. I've addressed that already. —Pengo 05:14, 16 July 2016 (UTC)

"The bot issue can/could be fixed/handled/discussed." - Not with Bgwhite - he seems incappable/unwilling to do so. I see very little from him in this very thread, for example, which speaks volumes. Lugnuts ^{Dick Laurent is dead} 09:28, 16 July 2016 (UTC)

Fixing the pie chart

Now the heat has died down, I have picked through the above discussion and isolated the one obvious problem that we have. In summary:

• List of least concern reptiles uses Module:Chart to draw a pie chart
• According to the documentation at Module:Chart#Drawing Pie charts: "pie chart", each slice has the syntax ( Value1 : Name1 : Color1 : Link1 ). The final parameter, Link1 must be a link
• However, Yobot removes these links as part of an agreed series of CheckWiki codes. I cannot see the code in question (12020) on that list. What is code 12020 on that list and where is it documented?
• Although it is not clear, I understand that Bgwhite has a diff that can be applied to the Lua code in Module:Chart that will enable it to function properly without mandating a link. I'm not au fait with the mw.text namespace in Lua, so I couldn't hazard an immediate guess why the code fails without a link just by looking at it. In any case, this does not look like a terminally difficult problem to solve.

I believe that's the state of play at the moment - have I missed anything? I am happy to go forward and see if we can fix it, but I'll warn you now - if I see any more name calling or aggression from anybody I will drop this like a stone and walk off to do something else. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 09:34, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

Note: 12020 is the SVN revision of AWB the bot was running when it made the edit. — JJMC89 (T·C) 04:56, 20 July 2016 (UTC)

I put a simulation of the problem and the only solution I can think of at my sandbox (permalink). The error message in the chart is coming from <imagemap> and fixing it by removing the imagemap item with no link has a problem, as shown in the sandbox. It looks like having a link would be best, despite the problem that it would be a "self-link", that is, a link to the page which displays the chart. The fact that the chart is now at {{IUCN reptile chart}} has probably solved the bot problem because there are no self-links on the template page. Perhaps it's all over, until next time. Johnuniq (talk) 11:12, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for looking into it. But if you really want to fix the pie chart, you might want to look at it on Wikipedia's iOS mobile app where it's completely broken regardless. A proper fix might be to make a way to export it to an SVG image map. —Pengo 05:40, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

Neelix redirects

I am tired of Neelix redirects. I have processed hundreds of the deletion requests, but I have stopped.

It is incredibly inefficient for one editor to review an entry, decide it ought to go, nominate for CSD or RfD, then have an admin review and decide. Even though each step takes seconds, there are many thousands left.

• List with almost 3000 remaining
• List with almost 5000 remaining
• List with over 5000 remaining
• List with over 5000 remaining

At a time when it is a struggle to keep the CSD nominations under 100, this is an absurd drain on resources.

I get that some of the redirects were useful. However, I suspect that most of the truly useful ones have been reviewed and removed from the lists.

I propose:

• That we allow a period of time (a week, 30 days?) for interested editors to go through the lists to see if any useful ones should be removed from the list. I think that is a monumental waste of time, but if editors want to do it, go for it.
• At the end of that time, mass delete the rest.

I think a week is long enough, but will defer to a longer time if someone really wants to waste their time this way.

Note that this will inevitably delete some useful redirect. My main point is that if you can think of a useful redirect, you can recreate it in far less time that it is taking to review these items. We aren't talking about deleting an article with even minimal content, we are talking about deletion of an article containing a single word.

Let's end this madness.--S Philbrick(Talk) 13:50, 16 July 2016 (UTC)

I agree. This situation is essentially mass vandalism that went unchecked. Instead of devoting hundreds of editor hours to solving this we should soft delete them, and allow recreation by any user in good standing. If anyone misses them then they can be returned. Worst case scenario is we end up in the situation we would have been in if Neelix never made a redirect. HighInBC ^{Need help? {{ping|HighInBC}}} 14:54, 16 July 2016 (UTC)

I support the proposal. It is a waste of time to handle several thousands of thee redirects individually given that a chance any of them are useful is low.--Ymblanter (talk) 15:20, 16 July 2016 (UTC)

There are useful ones in there but there are significantly more that are not. Is there a way for a bot to go through and remove from the lists any that are more likely than not to be useful. Specifically:

• redirects to other capitalisations
• redirects that differ only by the presence or absence of diacritics
• redirects where the title of redirect appears in bold in the lead of the target
• redirects that receive a significant number of page hits (defined as receiving at least 20 hits in the last 30 days).

If that (or at least the first three) is possible, I oppose this until after the bot has been run and we can see how many are left. Iff that is not possible, then I will reluctantly support this. Thryduulf (talk) 15:43, 16 July 2016 (UTC)

Oppose based on the comments below after looking again at some of the redirects that are left I was able to find 2 that were correct and one that required a simple retargetting in about 2 minutes. Yes the process is slow, but the vast majority of these are doing no harm at all so there is no rush. Thryduulf (talk) 17:39, 16 July 2016 (UTC)

Indeed. There is no deadline and most of the redirects do no harm.—Godsy^(TALK_CONT) 17:45, 16 July 2016 (UTC)

I agree that two salvaged redirects, AAC (airport) and CID (airport), have some value. If someone starts typing AAC and follows with (airport) assuming they know our convention, they will arrive at the airport. But if they type in AAC, they will arrive at the DAB which includes the airport. Similarly, if you type in CID, you will see the DAB which also includes the airport. So if the redirect didn't exist, it is almost certain they will find the article they want. The AAC DAB had 3894 views in the last 90 days. The AAC (airport) had 8 views in the last 90 days.--S Philbrick(Talk) 18:07, 16 July 2016 (UTC)

Absolutely support. There's enough backlogs on the project without allowing a single user to create a backlog that takes over 1000 editor hours to address. And I don't think that's an exaggeration. In response to Thryduulf, the diacritic ones are often not useful. I've seen plenty where he created a redirect where one letter had a diacritic but another had it removed. These mixed diacritic redirects aren't useful at all. Such a bot might be feasible, but again, it's dedicating extremely valuable editor time to save a very small number of useful redirects among a sea of dung. WP:Bot requests has a perpetual backlog. ~ Rob₁₃^Talk 16:36, 16 July 2016 (UTC)

Comment Creating a bot to go through it might not be feasible. I'm going through these Neelix redirects, speedy nominating the ones I'm sure that should be deleted, nominating some that I'm not sure or that needs to be retargeted, and leaving a lot of them alone if I don't know what to do with them. The temporary speedy delete for this redirect was made to preventing people from wasting the RFDs time, but if it's not useful anymore, then I'm fine with having another alternative. --MrLinkinPark333 (talk) 17:02, 16 July 2016 (UTC)

• Nuke them from orbit This should have been done at the outset because of the demonstrated, shall we call them... "poor choices", made by Neelix in creating redirects. While some may be good it is simply not worth the time or effort to sort the good, from the bad, from the puerile, from the just plain silly. If nuking them breaks something it is still far less time and resources to fix those individual instances, should they occur.

  This case has caused enough stress and conflict. It is time for it to be cauterized and done with. Jbh^Talk 17:09, 16 July 2016 (UTC)

• Strong oppose - The community already decided on a process to deal with these redirects. Some of the redirects are useful and valid.—Godsy^(TALK_CONT) 17:11, 16 July 2016 (UTC)

Comment If these redirects are creating a backlog in CSD, perhaps create a separate speedy for these redirects. Creating a bot could be useful BUT only after all of these redirects are reviewed. Tag the ones that are to be deleted (or create a list) then have a bot delete them. I disagree with having a limited time to salvage redirects, because there are not a lot of people going through the lists, and it would be (in my opinion), impossible to review them all and agree which ones should be kept or deleted in that timeframe. --MrLinkinPark333 (talk) 17:22, 16 July 2016 (UTC)

There's a simple solution for the timeframe issue - a copy can be made in a user subpage, or a WP page, and then, any editor who wishes can go through and recreate any they find useful.--S Philbrick(Talk) 17:36, 16 July 2016 (UTC)

There's no need for a bot. --S Philbrick(Talk) 17:43, 16 July 2016 (UTC)

• Oppose. I have great admiration for the editors who do the dirty work by going through these, but I think they should be filtered through the WP:RFD process to give the community an opportunity to discuss the merits of the redirects on an individual basis. -- Notecardforfree (talk) 17:28, 16 July 2016 (UTC)

• Question: If the redirects are mass-deleted, is it possible to list the deleted redirects in a central location in case someone wants to go through them latter looking for those few that are worth restoring? --Guy Macon (talk) 17:30, 16 July 2016 (UTC)
  • Answer Yes, I noted this about the same time you asked - easy enough to copy the lists, or even leave them in Anomie's subpage (if they don't mind). They would simply be red instead of blue.--S Philbrick(Talk) 17:40, 16 July 2016 (UTC)

• @Sphilbrick and Guy Macon: The fatal flaw with retaining just the lists, is that they contain only the title of the redirect, not the target.—Godsy^(TALK_CONT) 17:58, 16 July 2016 (UTC)

• Surely ^{(Stop calling me Shirley!)} we could create a page with the targets as well. --Guy Macon (talk) 19:40, 16 July 2016 (UTC)

off-topic

Comment: Those who drove Simon Trew away should be made to return and explain how their actions improved the encyclopedia. Muffled Pocketed 17:36, 16 July 2016 (UTC) Nobody "drove" SimonTrew away. He was blocked for making WP:Legal threats. He should know that he'll be unblocked if he renounces his threats. -- Tavix (talk) 18:33, 16 July 2016 (UTC) @Tavix: MRDA Muffled Pocketed 18:47, 16 July 2016 (UTC) Thanks for teaching me about the Men's Roller Derby Association. I appreciate it. -- Tavix (talk) 18:51, 16 July 2016 (UTC)

• Oppose: I have to oppose because it has been 8 months since this temporary speedy has been made and only half of the list has been gone through. Creating a deadline to salvage redirects isn't the best idea, in my opinion. Also, @Sphilbrick:, your idea of mass deleting all of the redirects and going through and recreating the redirects that are acceptable seems wrong to me, because, either way, all of these redirects would have to be reviewed in order to be sure if the deletion of the redirect was correct or not. --MrLinkinPark333 (talk) 17:38, 16 July 2016 (UTC)
• Oppose. This will create even more work. The worst offending redirects have already been deleted, most of the remainder are either useful ones or pointless ones. —Xezbeth (talk) 17:48, 16 July 2016 (UTC)
• Comment (edit conflict) Who of the current and future opposes to this suggestion are willing to help do the work. I strongly suggest that those who have chosen to take on this Sisyphean nay Augean task are the ones best able to judge the effectiveness of how we initially chose to address this matter - they are saying it is not working, please listen to them or dig in. Jbh^Talk 17:54, 16 July 2016 (UTC)

I bet I've deleted more of them than you. It's not a competition. —Xezbeth (talk) 17:59, 16 July 2016 (UTC)

I am sure you have. But when someone deeply involved in the clean up comes here and says it is too much. I listen to them. The conflicts resulting from the clean up seem to have caused more problems than the "event". At this point those involved should either decide to keep them by default, and look only for the purile and offensive or nuke them. I would nuke them because, from what I have seen they seldome rise above useless but redirects are funny things and people seem to find the oddest things "plausible". Jbh^Talk 18:47, 16 July 2016 (UTC)

I am digging in and of the random selection I've reviewed so far, I'm seeing more good redirects than bad redirects. Thryduulf (talk) 18:08, 16 July 2016 (UTC)

From what I am seeing there is nothing (once they are confirmed not to be articles per Thryduulf below) that the loss of, even in agregate, that would cause the same harm to the encyclopedia as the loss of editor hours reviewing them. It is a case of the best being the enemy of the good. Best=1000's more editor hours expended; Good less than a tenth of that. The made up word forms -ing -Ed -es, spaces, no spaces, hyphens etc. search engines can handle and who knows what Easter Eggs there may be. Jbh^Talk 18:25, 16 July 2016 (UTC)

Note not all the links listed are still redirects so a bot must check this if tasked with deleting them. Thryduulf (talk) 18:06, 16 July 2016 (UTC)

Can you provide some examples? It purports to be a list of redirect. Is that in error, or did someone convert a redirect into an article title and fail to remove it from the list?--S Philbrick(Talk) 18:15, 16 July 2016 (UTC)

Taranta is an example. It was a redirect that Rigadoun converted to a dab page on 1 January this year, but which remained in the list until my edit of a few minutes ago. Whether Rigadoun was even aware of the list or of its purpose I have no idea. Thryduulf (talk) 18:18, 16 July 2016 (UTC)

That's a good observation, but easily addressed. When doing a mass delete, this list identifies whether it is a redirect or not. Whomever does the delete has to watch and uncheck non redirects. (I just checked in my sandbox to confirm it would work).--S Philbrick(Talk) 18:54, 16 July 2016 (UTC)

For the record, I was not, and I imagine many others may have made similar edits to these pages, but that shouldn't matter if there is a final confirmation that they are redirects, as Sphilbrick says. (I'm neutral on the issue at hand.) Rigadoun (talk) 22:47, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

• Oppose picking a few from one of the lists at random I'm seeing plenty that are perfectly valid redirects. For instance:

• A. J. Broomhall redirects to Alfred James Broomhall: the article says that he is sometimes known as A. J. Broomhall, so this is a perfectly good search term.
• John the theologian redirects to John of Patmos: again the article says that's one name the subject is known by, so it's a perfectly good search term
• Michael's Harbour redirects to Michael's Harbour, Newfoundland and Labrador: I assume the article has to be at that title because of a naming convention but that's clearly the best target for this search term
• Five Lanes End redirects to Kensington, Prince Edward Island: that's an old name for the area, so it's a plausible search term

There are plenty of others I could list here. Deleting these ones would actually harm the encyclopedia, and that's what would happen under this proposal unless someone went through the list to remove them and all the other numerous ones like them. Even in the cases where the redirect is not a particularly helpful search term it's hard to make the case that the redirect is actually harmful rather than just useless. Given that I don't think summarily deleting thousands of redirects is a good idea here. Hut 8.5 18:24, 16 July 2016 (UTC)

• Do everyone a huge favor and remove those from the lists. It's impossibly slow if we have to re-do the work again and again. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 18:32, 16 July 2016 (UTC)

• Meh. As the editor who proposed the splitting and organization, I'm far from a fan of these but we could use more eyes, preferably from admins to cut down the CSDs. I think the problem is that these are in a incoherent order (a cause of it just being a list based on creation) but man was this a miserable mess created. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 18:30, 16 July 2016 (UTC)
• Oppose The ones I sampled seemed quite reasonable. Andrew D. (talk) 18:54, 16 July 2016 (UTC)
• Support some kind of deadline, was thinking of proposing a year myself (this November). That way people would only have to remove redirects that are "good" and leave the questionable ones in place. CSD/RFD wouldn't be bogged down this way and the ones with value will still be removed. -- Tavix ^(talk) 19:02, 16 July 2016 (UTC)
• Oppose. As an admin who's processed some of these, even the ones nominated for deletion are sometimes correct redirects and end up being saved. It would do more harm to the project to nuke good ones than to retain bad ones.  — Amakuru (talk) 19:47, 16 July 2016 (UTC)
• Oppose per Thryduulf (as revised) and Amakuru|. I also oppose stopping the present system, as sending them to RfD wouldn't help in terms of work. There are some that are OK as they stand, and some that can be retargeted to a more appropriate article. I have seen lot that are very unlikely search terms. but haven't seen many that were really harmful. Peridon (talk) 20:43, 16 July 2016 (UTC)
• Support - I'm not going to be liked one iota for this but the amount of time being wasted on these is ridiculous, Neelix should've been indeffed and these should've been mass nuked regardless of their usefulness, If editors believe certain words are useful then they'll get recreated as Redirects over time ... As it stands there's thousands upon thousands of redirects to go through and quite frankly we all have better stuff to do with our lives than to sit infront of a computer sifting though 500 redirects a day!. –Davey2010^Talk 21:09, 16 July 2016 (UTC)
• Oppose per Thyrduulf. The most problematic have been dealt with, the rest are mostly useful or harmless and shouldn't be summarily deleted in this way. If we do want to have a way of more rapidly moving through them, a better plan is needed. ---- Patar knight - ^chat/_{contributions} 04:03, 17 July 2016 (UTC)
• support deleting all. Why wasn't this done in the first place surprises me... It is plain simple vandalism. Suppose someone creates a "redirect creating bot" which simply picks every wikipedia page title and then makes semi-random dictionary replacements, word shuffling, case changing, turn words into initial, and so on. It creates a million redirects. I am sure that thousands of those would be perfectly good ones. I am also almost sure that the near unanimous solution would be to delete them all. Sure, some good redirects would be (and will be) lost, but the time spent saving them is best used re-creating them and creating something useful. - Nabla (talk) 13:07, 17 July 2016 (UTC)
• Oppose as most of these are harmless and the danger of deleting some useful things is far more damaging than keeping around some useless things. We'd still have to check them to see what should be re-created. Time is better spent elsewhere. — Earwig ^talk 17:34, 17 July 2016 (UTC)
• Oppose as we are at the point where most are harmless. I have deleted quite a few and declined to delete some as potentially useful. We should spend our time doing something productive now that the harmful stuff is gone already. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 22:06, 17 July 2016 (UTC)
• Tentative support I'm fairly confident of two things about this plan: 1) it would eliminate many non-harmful redirects; but 2) it would do more good than harm. I would request that after deletion, the list pages stay up for a while—I'm thinking a year or so. As long as there's that trail that others can follow in case any are worth recreating, I think we can definitely come out ahead on this. --BDD (talk) 15:55, 20 July 2016 (UTC)

Alternative proposal

It is clear that my proposal is going down in flames. After review, I see I made some assumptions which were not warranted, so suggest the above section should be archived as failed, and I will propose an alternative, attempting to address the concerns of those opposed.

My unwarranted assumption was that editors have concentrated on salvaging the good redirects, so the quality of the remaining entries should be dropping. That doesn't appear to be the case. Instead, some of the more egregious, "inappropriate" redirects were nominated for deletion, and the remaining ones are more benign.

That still means many thousands of nominations for CSD, so I will suggest an alternative process which:

• Eliminates the timeframe problem - it will be done whenever it is done
• Eliminates the need to make a CSD nomination.
• It doesn't save the time needed to do an assessment, but the community message is that this should be done. (The community is right, even when wrong :)

In short, the proposal is to add a section to the bottom of each list, with a heading "Redirects to be deleted"

Any editor can look at any entry in the top list, decide it is worth saving, and remove from the list, or decide it should be considered for deletion, in which case it would be moved to the lower list.

Any editor who sees an entry in the lower list can either override it by removing it from the list (effectively, keeping it) or nominate it at Rfd and remove from the list

Eventually the top list will be empty and the only remaining entries are in the "Redirects to be deleted" section, and can be mass deleted.

I'll illustrate how this might happen with an initial list of four items, collapsed for readability.

Specific example of how this might work

Initial configuration (A list of all redirects for consideration, and a blank section for ones to be deleted ==Existing redirects for consideration== * Foo * Bar * Crappy crap * Good crap ==Redirects to be deleted== An editor looks at the "Foo" entry, decides it is a valid redirect, so simply removes it form the list Now the page looks like: ==Existing redirects for consideration== * Bar * Crappy crap * Good crap ==Redirects to be deleted== An editor looks at "Crappy crap" and "Good crap" and thinks they should both be deleted. The editor simply moves them to the bottom section. Now the page looks like: ==Existing redirects for consideration== * Bar ==Redirects to be deleted== * Crappy crap * Good crap Next, a different editor either decides that "Good crap" should be saved, in which case it is simply removed, or thinks it is worth discussing so writes up an RfD and removes it from the list. Now the page looks like: ==Existing redirects for consideration== * Bar ==Redirects to be deleted== * Crappy crap Next, an editor decides "bar" should be saved. Now the page looks like: ==Existing redirects for consideration== ==Redirects to be deleted== * Crappy crap Finally, the redirects to be deleted are mass deleted (taking care to make sure that they are all redirects, and none have become articles or DABs.

--S Philbrick(Talk) 21:59, 16 July 2016 (UTC)

It might work, but there are a few problems. For instance, say someone removes a redirect from the consideration or deleted sections. I think they should provide an explanation why the redirect should be kept before it gets saved. Might look like

==Redirects to be deleted==
* Crappy crap
* Good crap - Singular name for good craps

If this proposal does work, then the temporary CSD for Neelix redirects should be closed then? --MrLinkinPark333 (talk) 22:08, 16 July 2016 (UTC)

• I don't see why this is necessary. If you want, if there's a set you think should just be junked, copy that to the talk page and ping an admin working on it like me and I'll review it. Better yet, we can create a separate page for those if you'd like. From there, it'll be either delete, RFD if I'm a maybe or keep by admin review. Just be glad we still aren't stuck with that stupid single one page listing of them all that crashed every browser it was on. I have no idea why people insisted on that system for months. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 22:12, 16 July 2016 (UTC)
• I like this idea a lot. This would be so much more efficient than tagging and deleting all of these one by one. I'd actually take it a step further by saying that an admin can clear that section if (s)he wants. -- Tavix ^(talk) 22:21, 16 July 2016 (UTC)
  • That and if the redirect is being sent off to CSD, remove it from the list. It'll be deleted and removed or rejected by an admin so you'll either end up doing it again or just moving on. If it's off to RFD, remove it. It literally should just be a first cut, no one has checked list to clear this out quickly. There should be zero related changes on any of those pages. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 22:46, 16 July 2016 (UTC)

• All of that is currently being done. The difference with this proposal is that non-admins wouldn't need to tag every single bad redirect. Instead, they'd put in the "to be deleted" section (although I'd prefer a separate page covering all 4 lists, to enable d-batch) so it bypasses the need to go through CSD. That way, the CSD admins no longer have to deal with these redirects. As far as RFD goes, borderline redirects would still go there (as what's being done currently). -- Tavix ^(talk) 23:03, 16 July 2016 (UTC)

• They can still go to CFD. The point is to clear them from pages 1-4. Either way, we can just make a new page right now and just use that as a clear-out ground for admins to review. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 23:17, 16 July 2016 (UTC)

• Better still lets stop wasting time and having these stupid threads and just nuke the lot ..... There's been countless threads on these redirects and there's going to be countless more if someone doesn't grow a pair and just nuke the fucking lot, We're here to build an encyclopedia ..... and sifting through 20k worth of Neelix redirects is sure as shit not helping the project nor is it helping to build an encyclopedia ..... If they're useful someone will recreate it. –Davey2010^Talk 23:40, 16 July 2016 (UTC)
  • Corollary: Better still lets stop wasting time and having these stupid threads and just accept that almost all of the redirects are harmless at worst and useful at best ..... There's been countless threads on these redirects and there's going to be countless more if someone doesn't grow a pair and just accept that they aren't doing any harm, We're here to build an encyclopedia ..... and sifting through 20k worth of Neelix redirects is sure as shit not helping the project nor is it helping to build an encyclopedia ..... If they're harmful someone will nominate them for deletion. Thryduulf (talk) 00:50, 17 July 2016 (UTC)
    • But that's my point ... if some are completely harmless then can and will be recreated as redirects by many different editors ..... I don't mean this in a dickish way but it's a complete waste of editors time doing this task and they could better spend their time improving the site .... –Davey2010^Talk 02:03, 17 July 2016 (UTC)
      • I actually think that deleting harmless redirects is actively harmful to the project as it wastes time and requires duplication of effort down the line and who knows how many people wont benefit from them before the first person with the time, ability and knowledge to recreate them does so? Improving the project includes making it easier for readers to navigate to the content they want, and preventing the nuking of beneficial redirects from people who think that will someone improve the project. So far since the start of this discussion, I've speedied 2 redirects, nominated 2 more at RfD and kept about 60 that were good or harmless - that's not a very good advert for nuking being at all necessary. Thryduulf (talk) 02:55, 17 July 2016 (UTC)
• A reminder to everyone but WP:G6 states explicitly that the temporary Neelix criteria "will be rescinded when the community concludes the problem has been brought down to a more reasonable level and can be handled by Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion." Now, it seems like we aren't at the stage where it can be handled by RFD. As such, I think any further discussion should be taken to WT:CSD for a revision to G6 rather than another system implementation via an ANI discussion. Policy wonkery and all but it's a resolution for now. Strike that, I forgot the inclusion was by ANI in the first place. I think the question is whether we have met the reasonable level criteria within these months. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 04:30, 17 July 2016 (UTC)

  I have put at least 100 Neelix redirects up for deletion using the Neelix G6 criterion within the past week. RFD would be unhappy with me if I dumped them all in their lap. We might be able to get rid of the criterion in 2-3 months, but it would disrupt RFD if we did it now. Tazerdadog (talk) 08:36, 21 July 2016 (UTC)

The Curious Case of SST Flyer

I think it's worth mentioning that SST Flyer was recently "tried" and "found guilty" by "the community" of inappropriate creation of thousands of redirects (May 2016). The net result was all the redirects were deleted. Lets end this embarrassment right now and just do the same with Neelix so we can draw a line under this mess and editors can move on. Lugnuts ^{Dick Laurent is dead} 09:40, 17 July 2016 (UTC)

I don't know what SST Flyer's redirects were like, but the majority of the Neelix ones that are left are good redirects so I strongly oppose mass deletion. Thryduulf (talk) 09:48, 17 July 2016 (UTC)

That's super - now get cracking with the Neelix lists and clean them all up. Lugnuts ^{Dick Laurent is dead} 10:02, 17 July 2016 (UTC)

WP:NODEADLINE, but they are being worked on and the job would go a lot quicker if there weren't the need to repeatedly defend against people wanting to harm the project by nuking them all. Thryduulf (talk) 10:06, 17 July 2016 (UTC)

Nice essay. Do you have any policy to save all this crap from deletion? No, didn't think so. Lugnuts ^{Dick Laurent is dead} 10:14, 17 July 2016 (UTC)

WP:DP. The guideline WP:POINT and essays WP:WIN, WP:DDH, WP:DLC and WP:FENCE are also very relevant here. I'd also like a citation that the redirects are all "crap" - based on what I've been seeing the past day or so there are at least 20 good redirects for every bad or potentially bad ones. Thryduulf (talk) 12:10, 17 July 2016 (UTC)

Linking just to WP:DF is WP:VAGUEWAVE. Anything a bit more solid? Chop, chop! Lugnuts ^{Dick Laurent is dead} 12:22, 17 July 2016 (UTC)

The deletion policy makes it clear that the person wanting to delete something is the person who needs to justify how it meets the deletion policy - i.e. you need to justify why these redirects should be deleted, I don't need to justify why they shouldn't. Also, I find the tone of your comment very uncivil. Would you please kindly and civilly respond to the points raised without implying that there is any kind of deadline upon me to do what you are failing to do. Anyway, I've got to go offline now, so you have plenty of time to figure out how policies and guidelines can be used to justify intentionally harming Wikipedia. Thryduulf (talk) 12:31, 17 July 2016 (UTC)

Well when you come back online, no doubt the Neelix pile o'shite will not have decreased by many (if at all), so there's plenty of pointless busy work for you to fill your boots with. Shame that effort can't be used into building an encyclopedia, instead of cleaning up the shit of an admin who snaked away after creating a huge mess. Lugnuts ^{Dick Laurent is dead} 13:04, 17 July 2016 (UTC)

• Not a helpful comparison. SST Flyer's redirects were all of the form "List of people named X" redirecting to the disambiguation page on X. Since they were all basically the same situation it makes sense to delete them all once we determined that we shouldn't have a redirect in that situation. Neelix's redirects do not follow any kind of common pattern and were not created through an automated process. Again the vast majority of these redirects are either helpful or harmless and there's really no problem that requires such drastic measures as mass deletion. Hut 8.5 10:27, 17 July 2016 (UTC)

I know! As SST was a civilian and not a former admin. How dare we destroy the "good" work of an admin! For shame. Lugnuts ^{Dick Laurent is dead} 12:23, 17 July 2016 (UTC)

How about you address the actual arguments instead of making up sarcastic insinuations? Hut 8.5 13:27, 17 July 2016 (UTC)

The argument is all of Neelix's redirects need deleting. The whole point of him being dragged through AN/ANI and being desyopped means they should be deleted, to save everyone time and effort clearing up his mess. Or do you condone his behaviour? Because it sounds like you do. Lugnuts ^{Dick Laurent is dead} 16:53, 17 July 2016 (UTC)

It is not true that all of his redirects need deleting. Plenty of them are fine and constitute useful search terms. I gave some examples above, there are plenty more and a large fraction of the remaining redirects fall into this category. The really silly ones which prompted this to flare up (Tubular titties, for instance) appear to have gone. The remaining ones which are problematic generally fall into the category of unlikely search terms rather than things which are actually harmful or misleading. Wikipedia doesn't gain anything in particular from having a redirect from Consecrationally to Consecration, but I don't see how it's actually harming anything to have it there either. Do I condone Neelix's behaviour? No, but that's beside the point. The issue is whether at this stage deleting all the redirects which he created would be a net positive to the encyclopedia, and I don't think it would be. On the contrary deleting a load of useful redirects to get rid of a load that are merely a bit pointless would be counterproductive. Nor do I agree with the unspoken assumption that we have to get rid of all the useless redirects. I don't think it's worth experienced editors spending time working through them. Hut 8.5 18:26, 17 July 2016 (UTC)

Offtopic bickering - Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 17:34, 19 July 2016 (UTC)
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
"I don't think it's worth experienced editors spending time working through them" - Doesn't that just contradict everything you've just said? You don't think it's worth time working through them? Maybe not your time, but seeing as you only make 2 or 3 edits per day, that's not exactly end of the world stuff. Lugnuts Dick Laurent is dead 07:30, 18 July 2016 (UTC) Well gee, if you only care about input from editors who have hundreds of edits per day, then you should have gone to Wikipedia:Administrators who make lots of daily edits noticeboard. You might have a point about the redirects, Lugnuts - but when you start criticizing editors who disagree with you, it really makes me not care what you think we should or should not be doing. UltraExactZZ Said ~ Did 13:42, 18 July 2016 (UTC) Oh, I see you're another "admin" who crawls out every couple of days, takes a look at the sun, then crawls back inside, and does nothing to address issues on this board, or indeed, add any meaningful content. Correct me if I'm wrong. Oh yes, I'm not. Your RFA states - "I'm willing to assist with any backlogged area of the project, and I know that there are several areas more backlogged than others." - Just give a rough number of how many Neelix redirects you've looked in to? Is it zero, per chance? Lugnuts Dick Laurent is dead 18:04, 18 July 2016 (UTC) You looked up my RFA (from 8 years ago) just to find something to beat me over the head with? Jesus Christ, is this Reddit? If you want me to resign as an admin because I don't edit all that often, say so. No one is keeping score, except you perhaps. I did, however, go over to the list and look at half a dozen redirects or so, finding only one that needed to be deleted. I get the impression that you're not finding more editors willing to help because, honestly, you're kinda being a dick about it. And I don't want to take edits away from your score. UltraExactZZ Said ~ Did 18:34, 18 July 2016 (UTC) Also - Lugnuts, you seem to have 0 edits to any of the six lists of Neelix Redirects (4 linked above and 2 complete). So honestly I don't really understand what you're on about, since you appear to have done less than nothing to improve the project in this area. UltraExactZZ Said ~ Did 18:41, 18 July 2016 (UTC) Far from it - I've already explained my solution, but I guess you were to busy to read it. So I'll say it again for your benefit - delete all of them. There. Job done. Now your precious time can be devoted to whatever it is you do. Which isn't a lot from your contributions here. Just another admin who doesn't want to help out. Shame on you. Lugnuts Dick Laurent is dead 06:54, 19 July 2016 (UTC) I read it. Since it has repeatedly been rejected as a viable option, I correctly assumed it was not worth further consideration. Just like this discussion, which seems to be going nowhere. UltraExactZZ Said ~ Did 12:48, 19 July 2016 (UTC) Thanks for that. You've done your four "contributions" for the day, so have a well earned lie down and see you same time tomorrow. Maybe you could delete a Neelix redirect then. Lugnuts Dick Laurent is dead 13:36, 19 July 2016 (UTC) Boy, you just don't get it at all do you? UltraExactZZ Said ~ Did 14:08, 19 July 2016 (UTC) That you essentially lied to become an admin and don't actually fix problems? No, I get it. Lugnuts Dick Laurent is dead 14:10, 19 July 2016 (UTC) Well, that's a bold statement - and says more about you than me, I think. Should I step down as an admin because I disagree with you? Any other admins not active enough for you? Going to go crack the whip? Where's your proposal to desysop admins without x actions per day? This is a volunteer project, run by volunteers. If you really think that I shouldn't be an admin because the little number under my name isn't as high as you think it should be, I don't know what to tell you. You've certainly got a lot to say about other editors, but you're so concerned about the Neelix redirects that you've done absolute sweet fuck-all to address them. So head over to VPP and get a consensus to desysop less active admins, and we'll talk. Otherwise, try being constructive instead of whatever it is you think you're doing here. If I offended your delicate sensibilities, I apologize - but I don't think such an apology is necessary in this case, because you're out of line. UltraExactZZ Said ~ Did 17:16, 19 July 2016 (UTC) May be a good time for all involved to take a nice break and calm down. TimothyJosephWood 17:24, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

I think it's also worth mentioning that the deleted redirects were later mass recreated via bot, along with others. Omni Flames (talk) 23:03, 17 July 2016 (UTC)

Not quite, you're thinking of a different set. The redirects being discussed here were deleted at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2016 May 10#List of people named Henry Lopes. -- Tavix ^(talk) 23:20, 17 July 2016 (UTC)

Oh, I see. My bad. Omni Flames (talk) 23:30, 17 July 2016 (UTC)

• It would be good is to find some way of groping the almost identical ones at a single AfD. Beyond that, if here remain 16,000, at 50 a day it would take us about a year; at 25 a day, two years. CsD can deal with that, and the time frame is realistic. In part years there were routinely 150-200 CSDs at a day, and we managed it. 'What we really need to think about , is how to deal with future problems of that sort before the reach a scale like this one. DGG ( talk ) 08:34, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

I suspect someone will say you can't send redirects to AfD and the whole thing falls down, but I agree with the solution in principal. Two years to fix this mess. And some people don't want them all nuked now. Baffling. Lugnuts ^{Dick Laurent is dead} 13:39, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

I also see people keep quoting WP:NODEADLINE, which is, of course, an essay. It was November last year when this was first addressed, and editors are still wasting their time on this. Keep the clock ticking on the man-hours. To hell with adding content. Lugnuts ^{Dick Laurent is dead} 18:23, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

Streamline the process?

Could we make the lists more accessible and the process of dealing with them less labour intensive? It would help if the lists included the target for each redirect, allowing it to be considered without having to click through to the actual page. Also, could a script be used to automate the process, so that there are options for each redirect to: Delete/RfD/Keep? WJBscribe (talk) 16:23, 20 July 2016 (UTC)

I don't think you'd get any objection to that, but the problem is implementation. I'll ping Anomie to see if that's something he'd be interested in. -- Tavix ^(talk) 22:53, 20 July 2016 (UTC)

Running a script over it to add indications of the link targets wouldn't be hard. Adding links for action=delete too wouldn't be hard, but I don't know whether a prefill for RfD would work (anyone have an example?) and a "keep" link would need a custom userscript of some sort which is more work than I want to put into it. Anomie⚔ 02:14, 21 July 2016 (UTC)

Is it possible to link to the RfD Twinkle dialog box? I don't think a "keep" link is necessary, just remove the line. -- Tavix ^(talk) 02:23, 21 July 2016 (UTC)

Perhaps some version of {{la}} that includes what, History, Links, and the Delete command? Seems like it'd be simple for a bot to go through and add such a template to the lists. UltraExactZZ ^Said ~ Did 19:28, 21 July 2016 (UTC)

Yes, Please! Even seeing the redirects as Honest Abe --> Abraham Lincoln would be a vast improvement. Tazerdadog (talk) 19:48, 21 July 2016 (UTC)

For some reason, I already made a template like this - {{lan}} - when the Neelix thing first came up. Let me see if I can add a target to the template. I know {{rfd2}} fills in a target, but there it's user-specified, and if we're manually adding this template to the lists we might as well just review them outright. UltraExactZZ ^Said ~ Did 20:07, 21 July 2016 (UTC)

OK, if we use it with one of the redirects, we get Template:Lan, where the delete action auto-fills "G6-Neelix" into the rationale for deletion. Does anyone know how to transclude the first link from a specified article (which would be the target, here)? UltraExactZZ ^Said ~ Did 20:17, 21 July 2016 (UTC)

I've managed to find a Lua module that extracts this information: Taking the first entry in list one:

# [[:Teip Council of Elders]] -->{{#invoke:redirect|main|Teip Council of Elders}}

Produces:

1. Teip Council of Elders -->Teip

I'm sure you could wrap this in whatever you need to to get this done. Tazerdadog (talk) 00:40, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

That works beautifully - the template now gives us Template:Lan. UltraExactZZ ^Said ~ Did 00:49, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

Excellent, now we just need to add it in everywhere. Tazerdadog (talk) 00:59, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

User:Anomie/Neelix_list/4 is done. Let us know if anyone wants a change, I'm planning on doing the rest in an hour or so. Tazerdadog (talk) 01:53, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

Self reverted on the last two lists (3 and 4), didn't add to the first two. Error was that I was making too many expensive lua calls. It worked fine for about 10 sections, so splitting the pages might be an option. I could also leave it, and have people just work from the top of the lists. Either way, I'm not going to futz further for now. Tazerdadog (talk) 03:50, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

Didn't think about those. But this seems like a good start, and it really does speed the work. UltraExactZZ ^Said ~ Did 05:38, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

Ok, I will leave it up to everyone else to decide what exactly you want me to do with these. I could split it into on the order of 15 subpages instead of the current 4, which would solve the problem, or I could just add in the templates and have people work from the top, or I can get rid of them. If anyone wants to implement this, the easy way I found was to copy and paste the wikitext into notepad, and then do two find and replace operations to insert the template instead of the link. It also looks like the way I found to do the Lua has been depricated, see here. Tazerdadog (talk) 06:25, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

You're right - that code seems to have ended up at Module:Redirect and target, which I added to the template to get Template:Lan. If I'm reading the changelogs correctly, this should be much less expensive, function wise. Also, now my head hurts. UltraExactZZ ^Said ~ Did 12:45, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

Nevermind, it's still throwing errors. Let me play with it later. For now, lets work that list from the top. UltraExactZZ ^Said ~ Did 12:53, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

You can also edit a later section and preview that. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 23:01, 23 July 2016 (UTC)

I have updated the first list to resolve the LUA call and page load time issues. The only issue that I introduced was that the list of redirect targets is now static. This is OK, because if we are retargeting a redirect, it has more or less always been resolved. Let me know if you want me to do the other lists. If you want to know exactly what I did, check my contributions, or else talk to me on my talk page (Warning:template gore) Tazerdadog (talk) 02:32, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

Is it odd to delete content from other wiki by G5

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It's odd to me that content that is created on other projects is treated as suspected because one admin has an isolationist view of the English project. This kind of admin conduct requires a review and a reminder that this is an international project not an English centric one. Any thoughts? We should have all the content restored and then people can suggest problem ones for deletion not the other way around. Alakazam Kalazam (talk) 23:31, 17 July 2016 (UTC)

Despite Ricky's words, G5 is not a hard-and-fast thing; it's permission to delete stuff added by banned users, not a requirement, and refusing to delete good stuff is fine. WP:IAR always applies, as well. However, you need to consider the reason for the ban. If someone's been topic-banned from an area because he's always causing dissension, and then he goes and writes a fine article in that topic, deleting would be absurd, and the IAR policy would demand that we ignore the G5 rule if it were a rule, which it isn't. Conversely, when someone's been banned for persistent copyright infringements, such as here, deleting regardless of quality is the only safe thing to do: we can't AGF for "self-written" claims by copyright infringers. Minus solid proof that a piece of content is WP-compatible (basically, it's taken from a CC-BY(-SA) site, or it's demonstrably in the public domain), it needs to be deleted on legal grounds. Same thing with a hoaxer: if you're repeatedly introducing false content, deletion is the only safe course unless the content is solidly referenced from something easily online, something that can be checked immediately by other editors, since we can't AGF about print sources or password-protected sources. Nyttend (talk) 00:42, 18 July 2016 (UTC)

@Nyttend: Not sure what happened there but a sock of a banned user complaining about G5 probably doesn't deserve an explanation. I already deleted the thread once but your edit brought it back. --Majora (talk) 00:43, 18 July 2016 (UTC)

Ironically, my response to this question is basically the same as the first. Someone searching the WP:AN archive for this issue may get guidance from my words, so unless you think I've reached the wrong conclusion, I don't think there's a good reason to object. It makes no sense without the question by the banned user's sock; it's not as if I just left a random piece of text somewhere, all by itself. Nyttend (talk) 00:48, 18 July 2016 (UTC)

This discussion has been conducted at [[WT:CSD}] repeatedly. I'm aware of when it's appropriate to IAR and not G5. Largely allegedly translated content from another language that has almost zero additional contributions other than formatting changes from other editors that are almost all orphaned and somewhat qusetionably notable have been deleted and if someone think these all deserve a second look, I will restore all of them to draftspace for review and return if someone else confirms their accuracy. Otherwise, anything more is just WP:BEANS for sockpuppeters in terms of avoiding G5 for their stuff. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 00:59, 18 July 2016 (UTC)

• There's nothing odd here. User:Arcituno was blocked as sockpuppet of User:Slowking4 and the content was deleted under G5. The second block was for sockpuppetry so violating that block with another sockpuppet is a violation that can only be resolved with deletion. The slight wrinkle is the editor claimed that the content created was not new content but translations from other languages. On that basis, one could technically argue that the sockpuppet has zero content created here since the content was actually from another language but this was their allegedly accurate translation. Otherwise the vast majority (90% or more) of each page's contributions belonged to this editor translating pages from other places. As noted, there's no evidence that the translated text is in fact accurate and I see no zero reason we should take the word of a copyright-abusing, blocked user's sockpuppet that their text is accurate, in particular about the citations for obscure foreign-language sources about BLPs. It's been deleted under G5 and as I have expressed to an admin and two non-admin editors, if asked I will restore the content to draftspace akin to Draft:Rita Montero where someone else can review the translation and simply move the page back to mainspace if they confirm that this is an accurate translation. It seems like this is considered "isolationalist" or "impractical" but that's preferable than either (a) ignore the content that a copyright abusing editor just picked up and started again under the belief that they reformed on their own; (b) make this somehow the deleting admin's responsibility to police all this; or (c) conduct another copyright investigation and other discussion about whether a repeated sockpuppeting copyright violation in this account was also doing the same antics. As such, if people think that these pages are worth keeping, my talk page is open but one other admin has expressed interest as well. Otherwise I think people can see here why people have little interest in joining the admin corps. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 00:49, 18 July 2016 (UTC)

• As I said above, Ricky81682, I agree that we need to take a hard line on creations by folks who are banned on copyright grounds; it's radically different from ban-violating creations by someone who's been banned "just" because they can't get along with others editing in the same topic. Nyttend (talk) 00:56, 18 July 2016 (UTC)

• Thus G5 is for content created in violation of their ban. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 01:02, 18 July 2016 (UTC)

• (edit conflict) Majora was right to remove this. I would have but they beat me to it. The OP is  Confirmed, blocked, and tagged. BTW, they've been on this noticeboard before ranting.--Bbb23 (talk) 00:51, 18 July 2016 (UTC)

• The OP is not a sock of Slowking4.--Bbb23 (talk) 00:52, 18 July 2016 (UTC)

• I've said it before (in last year's ArbCom election), but "being eligible for CSD" doesn't mean "has to be CSD'ed" (except for special cases, BLPvios, copyvios, etc.), and anybody who deletes a batch of otherwise acceptable content strictly per G5 is putting rules before content, which directly contradicts one of Wikipedia's five pillars, WP:IAR. If you're reverting/deleting quality content for the sole purpose of enforcing backstage rules, you're doing a disservice to readers and you're being destructive to Wikipedia's only goal and top priority: reader-facing article content. ☺ · Salvidrim! · ✉ 13:53, 18 July 2016 (UTC)

• I have recreated a few of the higher-quality articles under my own name so (but because doing so without preserving history would be an attribution copyvio I've also restored article history); I've gone through maybe half of their creations and recreated maybe the top third. There are dozens others to review though if anyone feels like adding some women BLPs to our content pool. ☺ · Salvidrim! · ✉ 14:30, 18 July 2016 (UTC)

• Comment: it truly is amazing how much you can pick at every single one of a person's edits and find something they are at fault with every day. Well, another day, another account and more questioning here. Hopefully someone takes the hint and finally shoves off. 107.77.229.10 (talk) 19:57, 21 July 2016 (UTC)
  • Good for you. Should this be removed? -- Ricky81682 (talk) 06:48, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

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Revdel requested

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Can someone please revdel this under the third criterion- "Purely disruptive material that is of little or no relevance or merit to the project. This includes allegations, harassment, grossly inappropriate threats or attacks" Obvious attack against me. Joseph2302 (talk) 17:24, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

Done. Next time, heed the red box right up in that there edit notice and ask on an active admin's talk page, so it doesn't receive unwarranted attention at one of the most-watched pages on the site. :-) Katie^talk 17:34, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

Thanks. Joseph2302 (talk) 17:44, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

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Brave volunteers needed

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A debate is underway about moving New York to New York (state) and placing either the city's article, the disambiguation page, or a broad-concept article at the "New York" base name. We need three intrepid souls (at least two administrators and up to one page mover) to participate in a closing panel so we can close this dispute that has been going on for 15 years. Anyone who's interested should please apply at Talk:New York/July 2016 move request#Closing panel.

For context, the move was first approved on June 18 then overturned on July 7 and relisted as a structured debate to gather wider input.

Thanks! Kylo Ren (talk) 23:50, 20 July 2016 (UTC)

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Mass Creation of UN Resolution Stubs

See-3 Pee-Oh (talk · contribs) has been mass creating stubs of United Nations Resolutions that only contain the following text "United Nations Security Council resolution xxxx was adopted in 2013." (xxxx indicates the resolution number) and no substantive content. I'm not sure if there is a policy being broken or if these qualify for deletion which is why I'm brining it here. Any advice?

A list of the articles is included bellow;

--Cameron₁₁₅₉₈ ^(Talk) 01:32, 21 July 2016 (UTC)

•  Note: the user has been notified here --Cameron₁₁₅₉₈ ^(Talk) 01:37, 21 July 2016 (UTC)

I tend to agree with the comment at See-3 Pee-Oh's talkpage, by Darylgolden, that "...there is no reason to delete these stub articles. Although it would be much better if basic information about the resolutions could be added, such [as] that found at List of United Nations Security Council Resolutions 2101 to 2200, I don't believe there is any reason to mass delete the stubs when they are going to be created sooner or later anyway..." It would, indeed, be preferable if See-3 Pee-Oh could incorporate a way to include at least the basic details into the workflow of creating these stubs, and I'd certainly encourage them to do so, if at all possible - but I don't see much need for any drastic action here. Begoon ^talk 10:41, 21 July 2016 (UTC)

Maybe a good idea to talk to the new editor instead of posting big threats about AN/ANI on their talkpage. Lugnuts ^{Dick Laurent is dead} 10:57, 21 July 2016 (UTC)

Yes. That too. Begoon ^talk 11:00, 21 July 2016 (UTC)

@Cameron11598:Concerns about a specific user should always be discussed on the user's own talk page (or by email when there are privacy issues) before going to other forums, except when there are urgent issues (e.g a bot in active operation), suspected sockpuppetry, or a blatantly inappropriate user name. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 12:42, 21 July 2016 (UTC)

If you noticed the reason I came here was " I'm not sure if there is a policy being broken or if these qualify for deletion which is why I'm brining it here. Any advice? ". I didn't want to mislead a new editor if I was indeed wrong. This was, to be honest, the place I thought I'd get the best advice and @Lugnuts: where is there a threat in the post? I certainly didn't mean to come off threatening. If I did then I apologize. And I was pointed to coming here when I asked an administrator on IRC, my apologies if coming here was inappropriate when I was referred this way. --Cameron₁₁₅₉₈ ^(Talk) 15:56, 21 July 2016 (UTC)

Posting a big ANI warning looks like threatening, esp. to a new editor. The articles may be junk, they may be fine. Maybe something along the lines of "Hey, thanks for all the new articles, but can I bring your attention to the following: WP:V and WP:RS...," etc, etc. And then explain why things to be verified and sourced. And, of course, notable. Lugnuts ^{Dick Laurent is dead} 18:12, 21 July 2016 (UTC)

I can see how that could look that way, I hadn't considered that. I'll keep this in mind in the future. --Cameron₁₁₅₉₈ ^(Talk) 18:20, 21 July 2016 (UTC)

• I can see keeping them but we may also consider moving them to draftspace as well. I'd suggest doing a requested move (either in mass or individually) to move them to drafts for now and discussing them further. I don't see a purpose in deleting them. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 23:17, 23 July 2016 (UTC)

Create new tag

Hi! Some weeks ago I got a grant to enhance the ProveIt gadget. Part of the project involves tracking the number of edits done with the gadget. In order to do this, the best way would be to mark the edits with a ProveIt tag. I'm already working on a new version of the gadget that would add such a tag to the edits done with it. I would appreciate if an administrator could visit Special:Tags and create the tag for me. Please let me know if there are any questions or concerns. Cheers! --Felipe (talk) 18:04, 21 July 2016 (UTC)

I've created the tag, technically, but I'm not sure what you need with regards to config for it to actually work. ☺ · Salvidrim! · ✉ 19:22, 21 July 2016 (UTC)

Thanks Salvidrim, I think that what you did will be enough. It may still take me a few days until I get the new code live at the English Wikipedia, so don't expect any activity on the tag yet. I'll let you know if I need some further help. Thanks! --Felipe (talk) 21:45, 21 July 2016 (UTC)

No problemo. Let me know if I can do anything else to help. I've got a lot to learn about Tags ;) ☺ · Salvidrim! · ✉ 23:06, 21 July 2016 (UTC)

4chan [s4s] troll copys english WP articles

Could someone keep an eye of 4chan's [s4s] board? Someone is copying random articles from the English Wikipedia without respecting the license condition (attribution of the contributers etc.) Thank you. Graf Ficus (talk) 20:37, 21 July 2016 (UTC)

Yeah, somebody could admonish them about this, including yourself, Graf Ficus. But expecting anonymous imageboard users to care about copyright and licensing seems to me to be a fool's errand.  Sandstein  09:46, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

Reminder announcement about blocks based on private information

The committee would like to remind administrators of the following provision of the blocking policy:

If a user needs to be blocked based on information that will not be made available to all administrators, that information should be sent to the Arbitration Committee or a Checkuser or oversighter for action. These editors are qualified to handle non-public evidence, and they operate under strict controls. The community has rejected the idea of individual administrators acting on evidence that cannot be peer-reviewed.

If a situation arises in which private evidence (e.g. emails) is relevant, please refer the participants to arbcom (arbcom-llists.wikimedia.org) or to the functionaries list (functionaries-enlists.wikimedia.org) for review.

For the Arbitration Committee, Opabinia regalis (talk) 21:50, 21 July 2016 (UTC)

Discuss this at: Wikipedia talk:Arbitration Committee/Noticeboard#Reminder announcement about blocks based on private information

File cleanup

Some of Ds9426 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log)'s files that they have uploaded have meaningless/random names. Can a file mover/admin fix this? Thanks, Feinoha ^Talk 01:11, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

ok Sure i will stop.

Feinoha (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log)

— Preceding unsigned comment added by Ds9426 (talk • contribs) 01:19, 22 July 2016

@Ds9426:Please edit these image description pages, and add a description of what they are, so that we can give them reasonable names. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 03:45, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

Blocking role accounts

Do we have a user-block template specifically for role accounts that haven't done anything else obviously problematic? Something comparable to {{uw-ublock}} for bad usernames? I blocked an account for an entire school class whose edits were nothing to warrant sanctions, and I ended up going with the default {{tl|uw-block|indef=yes}} with an handwritten explanation after the template, explaining basically that ROLE was the only issue and suggesting that they create their own accounts. We have tons of block templates, including lots of indef-block templates, but if there's anything that would apply to non-disruptive ROLE violations, I couldn't find it. Nyttend (talk) 12:40, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

Note that this is a different issue from {{uw-softerblock}}, which is for accounts that appear to represent a company, usernames that appear to be promotional. Nyttend (talk) 12:47, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

This case (where there are no problems beyond the WP:SHARE thing) is not common. Myself I'd refrain from using a template entirely and just use a handwritten note to create separate accounts instead.Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 12:54, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

He must be blocked, User talk:83.6.167.30

Wikipedia talk:Tutorial#HEY HEY RECENT CHANGES PATROLLERS, READ AND REPLY AND SPAM THIS AROUND!!! Talk spam. Thx, Charizardmewtwo (talk) 13:55, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

@Charizardmewtwo: I've reverted your addition of a block template to their talk page and notified them of this discussion. More importantly, this edit was made in 2014... -- samtar ^{talk or stalk} 14:07, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

I suspect Charizard is trolling at this point. Registers and straight away shows knowledge of process and makes edits like this Only in death does duty end (talk) 14:13, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

Looks like you're right.. shame, because their new article Trichodesmium erythraeum was a pretty decent start. We'd value your input here Charizardmewtwo -- samtar ^{talk or stalk} 14:22, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

I am very regretfully sorry, because his syllables looked so random, I immediately suspected they were vandalism. I promise I'll be more careful next time. Sorry, Charizardmewtwo (talk) 14:34, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

Well I'm prepared to assume good faith here - if you're ever unsure or need any help with anything, please consider leaving me a message or dropping by The Teahouse. Please bear in mind Wikipedia's "five pillars" when editing -- samtar ^{talk or stalk} 14:38, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

User:JohnLloydScharf

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User:JohnLloydScharf is currently blocked for one week for repeatedly posting an image from the anti-Muslim hate site TheReligionofPeace.com. He posted it multiple times at Wikipedia talk:Articles for deletion/2016 Ramadan attacks. The image was deleted by unanimous consensus at commons:Commons:Deletion requests/File:Ramadan-Bombathon-2016 Final Score Black.jpg. I can't find the original, but it was a version of this with a black background instead of the photograph.

He continued to use his talk page to promote the same web site, and I revoked talk page access because of it and I warned him here.

His latest was this delightful offering, posted logged out, and I have now semi-protected the page to stop any more of it.

At the very least I'd say the block should be escalated and I was tempted to just up it to indefinite, but I can't help feeling something stronger is needed. Community consensus would be a lot stronger than the judgment of just one admin, so I propose a full site ban.

Site ban proposal

• Support as proposer. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 14:42, 22 July 2016 (UTC)
• Support - not someone we need on the project, and with their latest edits it seems unlikely they're going to going to be anything other than a negative. Its looking likely they will attempt to evade though -- samtar ^{talk or stalk} 14:47, 22 July 2016 (UTC)
• Support Seriously? Deleting an edit that violates Wikipedia's rules is now "supporting terrorism"? I'm trying to be civil here, but don't let the door hit you on the way out. RickinBaltimore (talk) 14:49, 22 July 2016 (UTC)
• If we held a vote before site banning every bigot we run across, we'd become paralyzed. And give them more time and attention than they deserve. Just indef block with no talk page access, permanently semi the talk page, instablock any block-evading IP's, play whack-a-mole if necessary, close this thread as unnecessary, and move on. Don't let them become a timesink. --Floquenbeam (talk) 14:52, 22 July 2016 (UTC)
• Support Only because I want to be on 'The Great List'... Only in death does duty end (talk) 15:03, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Salt (some) IP address in the private network range?

At Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2016 July 22#User:192.168.1.1 there is a discussion about a user page for an IP address in the private network range. These IPs can never be valid IP users.

Just to avoid future mischief, I propose that we salt the following pages (and associated talk pages) as being the most commonly-used private IP addresses.

• User:10.0.0.0
• User:10.0.0.1
• User:10.1.1.1
• User:10.1.2.3
• User:10.10.10.10
• User:172.16.0.0
• User:172.16.0.1
• User:172.16.1.0
• User:172.16.1.1
• User:172.16.16.16
• User:192.168.0.0
• User:192.168.0.1
• User:192.168.1.1
• User:192.168.168.168

--Guy Macon (talk) 21:15, 23 July 2016 (UTC)

Would it make more sense to have an explanatory template applied to these IP addresses, rather than salting? Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 21:40, 23 July 2016 (UTC)

Something explanatory applied there, yes, and if it is only those listed above a template or similar is practical. If it is for all private network ranges then a page would not be practical (there several times more addresses than there are currently articles, and just one page for each would comprise ~30% of all pages on the English Wikipedia). Rather I think some MediaWiki space page that the software automatically shows on private network range addresses would be better, but that I presume would need a developer to write something. I oppose salting as completely unnecessary. Thryduulf (talk) 21:53, 23 July 2016 (UTC)

Besides being impractical, anything involving all private network ranges would be ineffective. The above list covers well over 99% of the instances where a private IP address leaks unto the Internet (usually through some kind of misconfiguration, sometimes from a spammer attempting to hide his IP).

A reasonable alternative to salting would be to create a page with a short explanation about private IP addresses and then fully protect the page and associated talk page. --Guy Macon (talk) 22:13, 23 July 2016 (UTC)

Nice attack AfDs

Please could someone look at the two open AfDs and look to close? Both have gone past their seven days, with not really much more input happening in the last 24/36 hours? Note I voted in one, but not the other. Thanks. Lugnuts ^{Dick Laurent is dead} 08:36, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

 Doing.... Thryduulf (talk) 11:38, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

 Done. Thryduulf (talk) 13:11, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

Thank you. Lugnuts ^{Dick Laurent is dead} 14:11, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

Longterm BLP, sockpuppetry, vandalism in edit-warring at Juha Sipilä

I hope AN can deal with this multi-faceted issue rather than having to spread it out over several boards. In a nutshell, the problem is this: somebody has been violating WP:BLP for months at the article Juha Sipilä. As Sipilä is the prime minister of Finland, it is an article of some medium importance. Today, several non-constructive edits have been done by the WP:SPA Electric Lars Levi, an obvious sock of the spa Lars Levi Wealhgathering, and other spas turning up to do the same thing are Hypocrisy Crisis Minister, Spawned Greedy Bunch and Friedmanite Handshakemachine. All of these five accounts perform identical edits, consisting of inserting inflammatory material and personal speculations. As this has been going on for months already and parts of it is obvious slander in violation of WP:BLP, I propose that:

• The five accounts are indeffed. I don't think anyone disputes they are socks, and even if they weren't, they clearly are WP:NOTHERE to contribute.
• The article Juha Sipilä is semi-protected for six months. As this has gone on for more than three months already, there is little point in protecting it for just a few days. Jeppiz (talk) 19:07, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

I've protected Juha Sipilä for a month. None of these accounts are auto-confirmed, so that should take care of the immediate issue. You can report the socks at WP:SPI if you care to or possibly someone will indef them here; I'll leave it to others to evaluate the behavioral evidence more thoroughly. ~ Rob₁₃^Talk 19:23, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

• I've indeffed them. there has to be a limit to keeping such fly-by-nights around. Bishonen | talk 21:34, 24 July 2016 (UTC).

Admin attention please

Could an admin please have a look at this thread, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Huma_Abedin#Lesbian_rumors which perhaps needs to be revdel'ed and considered in light of Arbcom American Politics sanctions. Thanks. SPECIFICO talk 20:17, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

I've removed the section per WP:BLP. Whether the edits should be deleted and whether the OP of the topic should be sanctioned I'll leave to others.--Bbb23 (talk) 20:32, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

I wonder if this fellow JoeM is cruising for some kind of topic ban - they were rather generically advised about not airing their political POVs and the existence of discretionary sanctions in US politics, which this article seems to pertain to, two days before this incident.Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 20:48, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

And successfully persuaded Jimbo to un-ban him, with a promise to follow NPOV.--S Philbrick(Talk) 21:05, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

I was just asking a question on Huma Abedin. I apologize about the fact that it was off base, and offense was taken. Noticed that I dropped the issue before this report was posted. It won't happen again. Thank you, JoeM (talk) 21:11, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

The message from Jimbo is dated 2005, so is likely not relevant to the current issues. — Ninja Diannaa (Talk) 15:53, 25 July 2016 (UTC)

I have topic banned JoeM from all articles and pages related to Hilary Clinton, broadly construed, for six months. --NeilN ^{talk to me} 04:55, 26 July 2016 (UTC)

Protected template merge

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Per Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2016 March 23 "The result of the discussion was "merge {{Nfurd}} into {{nrd}} for the various reasons stated below. Leave nfurd as a redir." nfurd is protected. Related: the same reasoning why nfurd was protected (high-risk template) would seem to apply to nrd, so please consider adding protection after the merge. --Guy Macon (talk) 01:01, 25 July 2016 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Dated deletion categories

is backlogged again. Most of these are very easy deletes; admin help would be much appreciated. -FASTILY 09:07, 25 July 2016 (UTC)

RfC close review please

Hi, all. On Friday I closed a RfC concerning Isaac Barrow and implemented the consensus as I saw it. This morning, an IP user has reverted that edit, posted a colossal screed on my talk page, and added two extra votes to the RfC.

I would tend to understand these edits as a challenge to my close, and I would therefore be grateful if some experienced, uninvolved users could please review it. Did I make a mistake in my assessment of the consensus? If I did, please do overturn me and implement the correct result. However, on the off-chance that I got it right, then I would be grateful if a sysop could take this user in hand and offer some support and direction.—S Marshall T/C 16:52, 25 July 2016 (UTC)

Those walls of text.... I agree with your close, barring that I would find there is only a rough consensus (rather than the absolute 'no' used) not to include the person in the "influences" section of the infobox (seeing as there were only 4 or so commenting on that piece of it). That yields the same result as your close of it regarding the article at this time. --Izno (talk) 17:32, 25 July 2016 (UTC)

dear @Izno and S Marshall:, while you feel there was a consensus, as i had stated on the talk page: there was hardly any consensus. One opposed (biased editor), One approved, and two (three?) abstained out of clear distaste towards my style of discourse (which is their right); however to interpret the latter's abstinence as contributing to the opposition of the edit is disingenuous, User:Izno.

further, the opposition did not provide any evidence to counter my claims. i did not care to close the RfC after User:Hgilbert had gotten back to me, which is where i suspect the problem began, because those who peruse RfC don't seem to like my approach (again, that's cool).

when S Marshall decided to close the RfC, i had not "voted" (my fault). even so, i have found sufficient evidence in Gregorie's own words that would justify inclusion of Barrow as an influence on *him*. determining the sufficiency of evidence for the inclusion requires analysis of the six (!!!) sources i've used. i thought User:S Marshall was going to do that, but i guess not.

this is not about the RfC outcome, which was at best indeterminate and absent of evidence (except from me), but rather the contents of the argument and their respective merit. i have persistently stated that Gregorie was an influence on Barrow, and there seems to be a disingenuous reluctance to accept this fact because it's not as verbose as some would like.

however, if you guys want to play that game, Gregorie *is* verbose about the influence of Barrow on his work and such sources should be sufficient to include Barrow as an influence on him in the infobox.

so it's up to you guys if you want to take the scholarship of the fundamental theorem of calculus seriously. if you do not want to objectively analyse the evidence presented, which i had spent many hours gathering (where the opposition literally spent no time), you are going to lose good contributors (ahem).

hate to do this to you dr @David Eppstein:, but i figured if someone wants to involve administrators, i may as well try to recruit someone whose (rare, not enough of "us" out there imo) decision-making, experience, and expertise i can feel confident in deferring to 174.3.155.181 (talk) 18:40, 25 July 2016 (UTC)

This is not the place to discuss content. The close looks ok to me — I might have taken the view that the consensus was less clear than what S Marshall wrote but what they wrote was reasonable. And whether they are an admin (I think not?) S Marshall is a highly experienced editor who was until closing this completely uninvolved. So at this point we have an established consensus on how to edit the article going forward: put sourced connections between the two in the article text but not in the infobox. That doesn't seem like a particularly difficult constraint to follow. The only issue for an ANI should be that we have an editor being unwilling to follow the result of an RfC and improperly reverting the close — for which you, 174.3.155.181, get a trout and an admonishment not to do that again. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:42, 25 July 2016 (UTC)

i don't understand dr @David Eppstein:, why is the connection not strong enough for an infobox insertion? no one has really answered that. where does the provided evidence fall short of establishing the relationship that is infobox-worthy?

also, i never said User:S Marshall wasn't impartial. rather, what i said was that *he* said it was a consensus to remove from infobox, to which i (again) said only one person made that recommendation. he was impartially assessing the comments on the page where two others abstained, and Gilbert/Mawr yay/nay'd, respectively. may i ask how that is a consensus?

lastly, i do not understand why no one is acknowledging that the *entire* basis for the RfC was that mawr reverted on the basis of insufficient/inadequate sources. i provided ample sources to override that argument, and i feel enough information has been provided WARRANT the insertion. there was no constructive discussion on this matter in the RfC by Mawr; instead they gave vacuous one-liners. the RfC then went to a "vote" (because i didn't close it, and thought the issue was handled after User:Hgilbert chimed in) well-after my response and that was that. can we clear this up? thanks. 174.3.155.181 (talk) 22:46, 25 July 2016 (UTC)

like i am quite upset dr @David Eppstein:. people invest time on this site hoping they are contributing to the truth, but look at what has happened in this entire situation. seriously.

it's cool if you don't want to read wall of text; but to say that the original reversion was justified in light of the ALL the evidence provided, to which the REVERTER NEVER provided ANY proper counterclaim suggesting otherwise, is outrageous.

the whole reason i opened it to RfC was to get opinions from *experts*, and even though the vote was taken in my absence, the result was *inconclusive* (1 yay User:Hgilbert, 1 nay, 2 abstain, 1 stating a non-infobox insertion). it is hard to see how there is any semblance of a consensus on that RfC page when accounting for the fact that the initiator of the RfC (me) was absent and would have voted to "keep".

essentially what is being stated is "higher body count wins, regardless of how much EVIDENCE one person provides." is knowledge now void of facts? or just on wikipedia? i am glad this happened sooner rather than later. 174.3.155.181 (talk) 23:04, 25 July 2016 (UTC)

@David Eppstein: come on dude: TAKE CHANCES, MAKE MISTAKES - MS FRIZZLE

The grammar used by 174.3.155.181 is also concerning. MPS1992 (talk) 21:02, 25 July 2016 (UTC)

hahahahahahahaha okay @MPS1992: "upgradation" lol.

Content translator tool creating nonsense pages

Could admins (and editors) keep an eye on this feed, please?

Alternate view at the NewPages feed. — xaosflux ^Talk 14:35, 26 July 2016 (UTC)

An editor was blocked today for creating too many nonsense articles using this tool (Link). Apparently, this superb piece of software has been rolled out on Wikipedia with the intent of making it easier for people to translate articles into a Wiki that an article currently doesn't exist in. Apparently 100,000 articles have been "written" using this tool; let's hope that most of them were better than the utter rubbish that the tool is flooding enwiki with. Astonishingly, a number of Wikimedia people were celebrating this mass creation of crap.

Why? Because this "tool" has had the effect, certainly at enwiki, of creating large amounts of nonsense - either unsourced, non-notable, or in completely unreadable gibberish. Here are the last 500 edits tagged with it, though this is unrepresentative as many of the articles created have been speedy deleted or redirected on the spot.

This tool is utterly useless. It is creating masses of work for new page patrollers, editors and admins. It needs to be turned off, or at least only made available to experienced editors (clicking the link above, you will see some perfectly acceptable edits by people such as Rosiestep). Black Kite (talk) 21:20, 25 July 2016 (UTC)

Definitely needs some fixes like warning users if there is already a page at the target to prevent things like this unhelpful "rewrite" of the Hannah Arendt page [5]. There also should automatic conversions of parameters in citation templates to avoid the red mess like the bottom of this page [[6]]. Maybe access to the tool should be given out like some of the user rights at WP:PERM?---- Patar knight - ^chat/_{contributions} 21:52, 25 July 2016 (UTC)

• No. You need to actually disable it. Anyone can copy/paste from google translate. They shouldn't. Machine translations are dangerous because as well as producing horrible Yoda-speak that's incredibly time consuming to clean up, they can also misrepresent or even invert the meaning of the original text.—S Marshall T/C 21:59, 25 July 2016 (UTC)

• Absolutely. Here is the link to the tool, by the way. "By providing a more fluent experience, translators can spend their time creating high-quality content that reads naturally in their language." Hahahaha. Further, there's no bar on creating articles in the wrong language. I deleted Polidaktili earlier, which was a copy of the English version of Polydactyly. And a number of articles are (bad) versions of ones we already have, under different names. Black Kite (talk) 22:03, 25 July 2016 (UTC)

• I agree that it should at the very least be restricted to people who can demonstrate a use for it. I can see it would be genuinely helpful for bilingual editors to bring a rough draft across with all the citations in place already, but it shouldn't be used to bulk-create gibberish. Also, it probably ought to output into some kind of draft space until the articles are in a fit state to move across, rather than directly into article space. With my cynical hat on, the WMF probably got a grant for this and need to demonstrate to the donor that it's actually being used, regardless of how much hassle it creates for the peons. ‑ Iridescent 22:22, 25 July 2016 (UTC)

• (edit conflict) I notice that the blocked editor has over 3,000 edits on es-wiki but only 8 on en-wiki before s/he started to use the Content Translator tool last month. It seems likely that s/he is not a native English speaker. If this tool is to be used at all it should only be used by people with good enough English to be able to clean up the result. That could be achieved by making its use subject to the granting of a user right, like AWB; but I am inclined to agree with S Marshall that it should be disabled as causing more trouble, disruption and garbled articles than it is worth in extra content. This seems typical of the WMF's "quantity rather than quality" attitude, which is arguably appropriate for smaller WPs, but not here.

Does anyone know what translation algorithm is used - is it Google Translate, or have they developed their own? JohnCD (talk) 22:30, 25 July 2016 (UTC)

I believe that strictly speaking we also need to go through all those creations adding {{translated}} to the respective talk pages, which will automatically sort them into correct "pages translated from the xxx wikipedia" categories. I expect we'll be needing a bot.—S Marshall T/C 22:39, 25 July 2016 (UTC)

I have browsed some entries and while some are not problematic at all, my overall impression is that this tool (and it's usage) gives the expression "shit storm" a whole new meaning. Kleuske (talk) 22:48, 25 July 2016 (UTC)

The are tagged and can be tracked, this utility isn't coming "from" enwiki - we could possibly stop these edits with the edit filter (or stop them for new users...) but we would need consensus about how to deal with these first. — xaosflux ^Talk 23:24, 25 July 2016 (UTC)

Amir E. Aharoni please read this discussion. -- Magioladitis (talk) 23:34, 25 July 2016 (UTC)

• I posted over on mediwiki about this too, not sure if we will get anyone. — xaosflux ^Talk 23:35, 25 July 2016 (UTC)
  • Thanks for bringing this to our attention. Please allow us some time to go through the conversation to understand the problems being reported. --Runa Bhattacharjee (WMF) (talk) 04:15, 26 July 2016 (UTC)

• Anyone reading this may also be interested in phab:T138711 - a request to "Enable Machine Translation in English in the content translation tool". — xaosflux ^Talk 00:22, 26 July 2016 (UTC)

  I put a "community consensus needed" tag on that phab request, it will at least require someone justify why it isn't needed to remove. — xaosflux ^Talk 04:30, 26 July 2016 (UTC)

I would just mass-delete everything created with the tool and block edits from it if the WMF doesn't say anything within a couple days. That might get their attention. If they then make a fuss, I would agree to reverse things just as soon as they agree to help clean up the mess they've made. Based on the past history of the WMF's "response" (if you can call it that) to community requests, polite requests tend to be ignored. --71.110.8.102 (talk) 02:20, 26 July 2016 (UTC)

• I'm glad to see people realizing the gravity of this problem. Ever since receiving an e-mail inviting me to use the translation tool—which is a modified version of Google translate—to create articles on fr.wikipedia, I have felt deeply disrespected. When I was more active on the project, one of my major areas of effort was Pages needing translation into English, which perpetually has a massive backlog of bad translations needing clean-up, and where editors work their tails off trying to get well-meaning contributors to realize that a machine translation is worse than no article. It is not only generally incomprehensible, it's often inaccurate: translation programs do not actually translate, they are modified searches that match groups of words to translations of similar groups of words available online, and they tend to not only be studded with untranslated words (especially in highly inflected languages) and contextual howlers, but to translate names, to rearrange and combine elements from different parts of the sentence, and to simply omit things—including negatives. The editors doing this are well-meaning and often new to en.wikipedia, but the WMF is showing either simply massive ignorance of how languages work and what translating involves, or contempt for editors at the receiving wiki. Frankly, I gave up my last respect for the WMF when I read that e-mail, and I've been very sad not to see any protest about it. I salvaged one such translation, Autonomous Port of Abidjan (and completed the article), and I did my best to fix up the French translation of an article I'd written here, but otherwise I've just kept away in despair and a desire not to hurt the editors who are doing what the WMF tells them is right and good. Yes, there are a startling number of topics on other Wikipedias that are not covered here on en. and that I wish someone would write up. (A translation is often not the best approach anyway.) But this is most emphatically not the solution. IMO the PNT people should have a large say in what we do with the articles created up to this point with this tool. But it's urgent, if at all possible, to get the WMF to stop pushing it. (I really have no hope we can get it removed.) Yngvadottir (talk) 04:20, 26 July 2016 (UTC)

  I regret that you feel disrespected. I greatly respect the work done on WP:PNT. I test drove the automated translation tool once, with spectacularly bad results (the article created was speedily deleted as a machine translation). I thought that it could help the folks at WP:PNT if it could handle the templates, categories etc and leave them to handle the text; but it doesn't do this. Hawkeye7 (talk) 04:49, 26 July 2016 (UTC)

It's called Content Transcrapulator. This "tool" transforms content into crap. I was yelling about this mess a year ago and gave up. From a technical stand point, it produces some horrible code. 100s of span tags in an article that does nothing. ISBNs done as an external wikilinks and lovely tables. It still can't translate dates in a reference. WMF doesn't care. Tickets filed last year are still open with the bugs still happening. This is a good tool in the hands of somebody who knows both languages and cares enough to fix the article. From list of new pages done by CX, one can see the majority are done by editors with very little edits. Bgwhite (talk) 07:10, 26 July 2016 (UTC)

• If that was the main problem it would be bad. From my point of view, it's not even the main problem. I have a number of specific concerns and a major general concern about it. Specific concerns are things like How does the algorithm handle double-negatives? (E.g. stick "There ain't no way Private Smith's a Nazi, sir!" into the algorithm and see if it produces a denial or an allegation). Also, How does the algorithm cope when there's one word in one language and several in another? (German has two words for "drown", which are ertrinken and ertraenken. One is a tragedy and the other is an accusation of murder, so it's rather important to choose the correct one.) This is the kind of thing I meant when I said that machine translations can misrepresent or even invert the meaning of the original text.

  The major general concern is Who is responsible for these edits? Most of these articles are not well-sourced by en.wiki standards even when fully compliant with the policies of the source language Wikipedia. If we had confidence that the people making these "translations" understood both the text they're copying from and the text they're copying to, then that's one thing; but if they don't, then who's accountable for the problems here? And, to put a slightly sharper point on it... who's liable for any inaccuracies in the translation? Isn't it the WMF who provide the tool?

  I think this is the "I see no ships" approach to machine translation. (Translate that into Japanese with your tool and ask a Japanese person what they understand by it...)—S Marshall T/C 07:45, 26 July 2016 (UTC)

• From WP:Translation: "Translation takes work. Machine translation almost always produces very low quality results. Wikipedia consensus is that an unedited machine translation, left as a Wikipedia article, is worse than nothing." That needs to be made much clearer in the instructions.

This tool is useful only if the user is sufficiently fluent in the target language to clean up the output into acceptable prose, and understands the source language well enough to be sure that the meaning has not been scrambled or distorted. It is evidently not being used like that. I suggest that:

• Use of the tool on en:wp should be made the subject of a user right, like AWB, granted to users who can demonstrate fluency in English and who declare that they will only translate from source languages they understand well enough to be sure that translations are accurate. The right could be withdrawn from users who repeatedly provide bad translations.

• Output from the tool should go automatically into Draft space, and be put into a new category "Machine translation needing cleanup". (A list like WP:PNT would rapidly become unmanageable). The translator would need explicitly to move the result to mainspace once confident of its quality, or leave it for others working the category to do that. There might need to be a G13-like mechanism to clear out abandoned draft translations.

JohnCD (talk) 11:40, 26 July 2016 (UTC)

The tool has no utility. Someone with adequate understanding of the original and adequate fluency in English will produce a better translation, faster, from scratch than by running the text through a machine translator and then attempting to correct that text. Translating articles into fluent English often involves reordering things (different languages and different Wikipedias have different conventions) and almost always involves changing the balance of what is explained and what is merely summarized (quite apart from the issue of sourcing raised by S Marshall, which often leads me to omit or summarize passages I can't source). What the tool does for a competent translator is add an extra step of demanding checking and correction. (Even on the level at which machine translations supposedly function best, rendering individual words, it's shocking how often I find myself submitting improvements to Google.) The points about chunky code in the resulting article are also concerning. Where computerized assistance might be useful is checking the links in the original and automatically replacing them with the Wikidata-linked equivalent in the target language, or if there is none, with the ILL template (not checking where the links in the original go to—either omitting the links or leaving them as unnecessary redlinks—is one of the failures I used to run into most often when I used to work at PNT), but so far as I know that functionality is not offered. Honestly, I can't see any use for this whatsoever. It's not a crutch, it's a pitfall. Yngvadottir (talk) 13:20, 26 July 2016 (UTC)

Agreed, all automated translation should be discouraged. It helps noone.·maunus · snunɐɯ· 13:24, 26 July 2016 (UTC)

Appeal topic ban

I'm utterly shocked to see that I have been blocked from editing anything related to the 2016 Presidential election, after all of the work that I've done. Half of Donald Trump's page has been improved by me, and nobody ever seemed to complain. I've even gotten dozens of "Thank you's" for my edits there. Now I'm being told I'm banned for attempting to write the truth about him because ONE editor who seems to hate me (and has talked to me very rudely) disagrees with me?

Trump has repeatadly said that his proposed "Muslim ban" from December 2015 is scrapped, and that it is to be replaced with a ban based on territories. I have given ridiculous amounts of proof for this in the Talk page. A lot of editors have agreed with me that this "Muslim ban" needs to be taken away, as it is simply not correct anymore. But ONE editor, who based on her editing habits regurarly edited Hillary Clinton and Tim Kain's pages, seemed to consistenly want to keep the "Muslim ban" in the lead. She was pushing an insane amount of bias in the page, and I was trying to get rid of it.

Now I'm being punished for it? All the other editors agreed with me. Even Melanie who sent me a warning, which I respected, said to me in the Talk page she liked my new lead ideas to not include the Muslim ban phrase. The only person taking issue with it was ONE editor. Now, most editors were agreeing with me that the new lead without the Muslim ban thing was at least better to what we had now, so I was bold (which is encouraged by Wikipedia) and I obviously replaced that section. Than the ONE editor reverts it and tells me "we" hadn't reached consensus.

What? She was REFUSING to even discuss the new section, even AFTER I explicitely asked her to discuss it in Talk. I have worked so hard on that page, and I have NEVER tried to be inflicted in edit wars. But when people refuse to discuss things in Talk, a majority of people in Talk agree on something, I decide to change it, then that person REVERTS it and tells me there is somehow "no consensus", I change it back, so then I'm the "edit warmonger"? No... It is simply not fair.

And I'm asking you to through the surface and see that I've never tried but to HELP and IMPROVE the page, including with Talk consensus. This is devastating to me, as I've done nothing but be nice and try to follow the rules as much as possible, while other people are rude, don't follow the rules, and then attack me for wanting to help.

Please reconsider this. I did follow the advice. If you notice, I joined the Talk conversation. I asked peole about the change and people agreed with my decision to change the lead (except for one person). I followed the rules. And if you look at the revision history of Donald Trump right now, the person who was constantly against my change, has now been warned for a bold rewrite that had NO consensus. It's clear they are out to do whatever they want to change and not listen to Talk, which I actually did. Please uplift my temporary ban on the 2016 election, this is my passion, and I have followed the rules. ThiefOfBagdad (talk) 11:48, 26 July 2016 (UTC)

Um, can you please format this so that it isn't a block of text and remove the ALLCAPS, please? Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 14:11, 26 July 2016 (UTC)

• After posting this wall of text, the OP willfully violated his TBAN by editing Donald Trump several times, including one with the edit summary 'test'. Blocked one week, logged as required. He placed a crapton of unblock requests overnight while he wasn't even blocked, and I anticipate he'll do the same now. Sorry in advance about that part. Katie^talk 14:53, 26 July 2016 (UTC)

ThiefofBagdad, you were spoken to respectfully by admin MelanieN about your editing and it looks like you didn't stop because You were topic banned by another admin . To be honest, I looked at the first edit Melanie | pointed out to be honest, that looked ok.I will point out, however, he does have consensus for his removal over here and I don't see that changed anywhere after that. He doesn't appear to be strident, nor is he arguing on and on for "his way", he appears to be enforcing consensus. Not so sure about this ban. KoshVorlon 16:48, 26 July 2016 (UTC)

doing a long time Wikipedia:Witchhunt and Vandalizing and speedy deletion of my edits by User:Pahlevun without any discussion

hello, dear administrators . im a member of Wikipedia:WikiProject Iran and im improving article about that. but its a few day that one user called User:Pahlevun is after me, all the time, to hunt me and then he start to delete my edits article-by-article, edits-by-edits, without any mentioning . he will appears everywhere i was. for example see here and here and here and here and here and here . i can tell u everywhere i was he will be after me !! its really a Wikipedia:Witchhunt and not legal to delete all of the edits of a user without telling him and any discussion. its just a vandalism edit . some body said to him to find out why he is deleting and vandalizing a template that im editing . u can see it here . i didn't know him before, but i went to his talk page and i said in Persian ( because he said cant understand English enough with a userbox(here and i thought he's serious)). also he is destroying and especially about Iran project related template(here) and delete its subject article-by article without any discussion . for example he deleted national symbols of Iran Template from the article Nowruz . that is obviously an Iranian national(Iranian New year) symbol and celebration. everybody knows it. u can see his vandalizing about Nowruz here . please take right action about him cuz i cant do esaly edit like befor and i became so nervous with his vandalizing. for being good editor we need safe place. thank ya so much for hearing me . health n wealth. bye.Amir Muhammad 15:24, 26 July 2016 (UTC)

for additional information about his vandalizing u can refer to National symbols of Iran list . he just deleted all of this template:National symbols of Iran that considered all of the Iranian symbols that were on National symbols of Iran . for example Nowruz (Iranian New year) which is obviously an Iranian National symbol, cuz its Iranian New Year for over 6000 years, he delete that template from it and then he delete the term Nowruz from the template:National symbols of Iran without any discussion and legal reason!!! please help me .he vandalized all of Iranian symbols of that template and then he went to the those subject's article and deleted those article-by-article . then a day after, i went and add again those but he went again and did his vandalizing again without any reason and discussion . tnx anyway Amir Muhammad 15:44, 26 July 2016 (UTC)

Please remove

Need a quick rev del | over here . Someone's posted their phone number online on the BLP board. I've redacted it, but it really ought to be removed since we actually can't verify that the person in question is really who they say they are, and thus, this may be a sneaky way to post (perhaps) non-public info. KoshVorlon 17:45, 26 July 2016 (UTC)

•  Done Black Kite (talk) 17:53, 26 July 2016 (UTC)