User talk:Iridescent

An administrator "assuming good faith" with an editor with whom they have disagreed.

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The Destroying Angel and Daemons of Evil Interrupting the Orgies of the Vicious and Intemperate scheduled for TFA

This is to let you know that the The Destroying Angel and Daemons of Evil Interrupting the Orgies of the Vicious and Intemperate article has been scheduled as today's featured article for April 23, 2018. Please check the article needs no amendments. If you're interested in editing the main page text, you're welcome to do so at Wikipedia:Today's featured article/April 23, 2018, but note that a coordinator will trim the lead to around 1100 characters anyway, so you aren't obliged to do so. Thanks Jimfbleak - talk to me? 07:26, 23 March 2018 (UTC)

An article about Arbcom is being featured on the main page? Wow! EEng 11:51, 23 March 2018 (UTC)

The opposite is featured today. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 11:54, 23 March 2018 (UTC)

EEng, you really made me laugh!! Thanks!! Tribe of Tiger ^{Let's Purrfect!} 14:19, 23 March 2018 (UTC)

Have to say, you have the best article names. --GRuban (talk) 18:58, 23 March 2018 (UTC)

No, I have the best article names. EEng 22:15, 23 March 2018 (UTC)

Lord-a-mercy. I am especially amused by the fact that your article about the specific instance has half-a-dozen paragraphs, a quotation, and three illustrations, while the generic case is one sentence long and that with a grammatical error. --GRuban (talk) 22:34, 23 March 2018 (UTC)

I forgot to call your attention to the DYK. How neglectful of me. EEng 23:08, 23 March 2018 (UTC)

Because this is a very cluttered painting and it's impossible to discern what it's about at standard TFA size (see right), I've taken a slightly drastic approach here; I've replaced the image with a crop of a small part and an "expand" link to view the whole thing, and slashed the blurb down to absolute bare bones (919 characters) to allow the image to be resized larger than is usual, to give readers at least a fighting chance of seeing what it's actually a picture of. Paging Dank to confirm this is OK, as this is something of a departure from usual practice (although we took the same "crop the image, enlarge what remains, and reduce the text" approach when the equally-cluttered Youth on the Prow, and Pleasure at the Helm was TFA). I'm unlikely to be around on the day; anyone who is, had probably better watchlist this as unless you run Pig-faced women it will almost certainly be the most-viewed TFA of the year thanks to that goofy title, and will consequently get the usual flood of vandals and good-faith 'improvements'. (To pre-empt an obvious 'improvement', the absence of an infobox here is entirely intentional; when I've written in the past about "very elaborate artworks where the importance of having the lead image at a large enough size for detail to be visible is more important than repeating information which is already in the first paragraph of the article anyway", this is one of the two articles—the other being Beaune Altarpiece—I had in mind.) ‑ Iridescent 10:06, 26 March 2018 (UTC)

Thanks Iri, David gets all image requests. Pinging David Levy. - Dank (push to talk) 13:04, 26 March 2018 (UTC)

I agree that this is the most suitable approach (and the custom code appears to have been applied correctly). —David Levy 17:21, 26 March 2018 (UTC)

Thank you for another work by William Etty who "had acquired a (deserved) reputation for thinly-disguised pornography masquerading as art, and tried to address this with The Destroying Angel…, in which assorted loose-moralled types receive a thorough smiting. The "Reception" section is slightly longer than is usual on painting articles; because it was painted specifically with how it would be received by critics in mind, the critical response on its initial unveiling is more significant than for most visual arts articles"! --Gerda Arendt (talk) 08:19, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

Roughly twice as popular as Earth. If anybody feels like cleaning up the assorted stupidity it's accreted on the day feel free, although it probably makes sense to wait until it's dropped off the main page altogether rather than try to hold back the tide. ‑ Iridescent 2 08:22, 24 April 2018 (UTC)

Well done! No. 10 at Wikipedia:WikiProject_Visual_arts/Popular_pages for this update. Over 200K over a few days. Johnbod (talk) 18:10, 9 May 2018 (UTC)

Origins of CSD G5

You'll know the answer to this, if anyone will. I'm sure there was some specific reason that G5 was implemented, and it probably wasn't "nuke any article, regardless of its merits, if somebody outsmarts our ability to kick them out". The context to this is that I declined such a tag on The Railway Detective simply because the article looked like a perfectly innocuous stub / start class effort, that deleting would be a bit of cutting off one's nose to spite one's face. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 23:32, 9 April 2018 (UTC)

For my overlong thoughts on this issue, please see my essay here. The other thing I'd like to know is why we always describe CSD categories via alphanumeric codes instead of words or even initialisms. We don't do that anywhere else on Wikipedia that I can think of. Newyorkbrad (talk) 23:52, 9 April 2018 (UTC)

• Running it down now. This is the first diff where it appears and is marked controversial even then. Previously only articles created and edited only by a banned user were speedyable. So there is clearly some trigger around Feb 2005 that required a change. User:Netoholic is still actively editing so might know. Only in death does duty end (talk) 00:04, 10 April 2018 (UTC)
• Relevant talkpage here. Although amusingly enough the main complaint was that the numbering was changed. Which probably means the referring to numbers as NYB says above, pre-dates a lot of the other conventions we have on ENWP. Only in death does duty end (talk) 00:08, 10 April 2018 (UTC)
• Also the index as a result is not terrible, given the nature of people to refer to the various criteria by their codes. Only in death does duty end (talk) 00:10, 10 April 2018 (UTC)
• In your case, the article that you declined probably would have been allowed to be deleted under the original criteria (here) as it only had like 3/4 edits of no substance by someone other than the creator. Apparantly this is Jimbo's fault. Only in death does duty end (talk) 00:15, 10 April 2018 (UTC)

• A long time ago I proposed the CSD crieria were simplified and consolidated as there are far too many of them and the numbers confusing and arbitrary to newcomers, but the idea was opposed. Aiken D 00:14, 10 April 2018 (UTC)

Just done a bit of spelunking myself - what is now G5 was written into policy on 26 July 2003, and comes directly from something added to the blocking / banning policy on 3 June 2003. This is much older than I thought! Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 00:25, 10 April 2018 (UTC)

(edit conflict) It almost certainly originated—or at least was popularized—by the war of words between Jimmy Wales and Greg Kohs. (See MyWikiBiz for a brief and rather unsatisfactory summary.) Basically, as Jimmy saw it Greg was thumbing his nose by using socks to create obviously valid articles and daring Wikipedia to delete them (Arch Coal is one that springs to mind), and as Greg saw it he was improving Wikipedia by creating neutral articles on noteworthy topics and Jimmy and his supporters were deleting them out of spite and a misguided adherence to policy at the expense of quality. To a lesser extent the Poetlister saga probably had something to do with its migration from custom to practice. Enough Wikipedia Review people watch this page that someone can probably winkle Greg and PL out to give their side of the story (Defenders Of The Wiki, if IPs from either Philadelphia or East London pop up in this thread don't blindly revert them). As regards the official Banned Means Banned line that eventually congealed into G5, there are quite a few people still about from that fight (JzG and SlimVirgin are a couple of obvious ones, or just look through the history of User talk:Thekohser for names you recognize.) Why CSD criteria have those opaque codes rather than simple names I have no idea; the only other place I can think of where that happens is the Featured Article criteria, but in that case it's legitimate to assume that anyone seeing something like "oppose, fails 1C" is already familiar with what the codes mean. ‑ Iridescent 00:24, 10 April 2018 (UTC)

I do think Guy's deletion rationale of Arch Coal on 20:06, 2 January 2008 is .... somewhat original (though I suspect it's more "I made a mistake" than "I don't like this topic"). Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 00:33, 10 April 2018 (UTC)

Ah, Kohs. I am very confident that he never thought he was "improving Wikipedia", he was exploiting Wikipedia for personal profit, and never understood why anybody would have a problem with that. Everything he ever did here after he was banned, was done in order to "prove" that his abuse of Wikipedia for personal profit was so self-evidently a good thing that only a sociopath could possibly oppose it. Naturally he didn't create obvious spam, or at least not when using obvious socks, because he was making a WP:POINT. I found his worldview hard to understand - prior to Jan 20 2017 I had never really seen anyone behave that way. The 20:06, January 2, my summary was "bollocks" because, if you look, I was trying to restore only the post-rewrite content, but fumbled it. We didn't have revdel back then. Guy (Help!) 13:47, 10 April 2018 (UTC)

I assumed that was the case, I doubt you would have really deleted an article with WP:CB as the rationale! Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 13:57, 10 April 2018 (UTC)

​​Well, sort of. Greg undeniably turned into something of an asshole constantly trying to refight the same battle in the hope of a different result (not exactly a unique situation on Wikipedia, and many worse offenders than him are still very much with us), but I do believe that when he started he not only thought that he'd worked out a legitimate way to reconcile "neutral point of view" and "conflict of interest", but that he genuinely believed that he had the WMF's blessing to proceed, and was hurt and confused when Jimmy suddenly changed his mind. As I've pointed out before, his original proposal—a noindexed dedicated spamspace where articles written by people with a potential conflict of interest could be parked awaiting assessment by a neutral third party, and only moved to mainspace when they'd been thoroughly vetted for spam, puffery and bias-by-omission—is pretty much exactly the solution that the WMF itself came up with a decade later when the present-day "create it as a draft and then submit it to Articles for Creation" process was set up. To draw a somewhat forced analogy, the difference between someone like Grawp and Greg was the difference between a dog that's mean from the get-go and keeps attacking the neighbors' kids, and a dog whose owner constantly beats it until eventually it snaps, flies off the leash and attacks the family; in both cases, the net result is a mad dog that shouldn't be kept around the house any more, but who's responsible for the dog reaching that point—and whether it's ethical to devote time and effort to trying to find the dog a new home or just to take it to the woods and shoot it—is different in each case. ‑ Iridescent 02:57, 11 April 2018 (UTC)

To Ritchie333: That line predated my work on the page, I was only reordering/organizing the items. The line I think originates here when a list of exceptions to the normal 7-day deletion discussion process was added by MartinHarper. He later coined the phrase "Candidates for speedy deletion" at this edit. -- Netoholic @ 00:34, 10 April 2018 (UTC)

I think (correct me if I'm wrong) that what Ritchie is asking isn't when G5 was created, but when it metamorphosed in common application from "articles written by a banned user can be unilaterally deleted by an admin if they feel it necessary" to "articles written by a banned user should be unilaterally deleted unless someone demonstrates a reason not to". This is a fairly recent development; there are dozens of perfectly good quality articles written in the not-so-distant past which technically violated G5 but which nobody seriously considered deleting, but which nowadays would be routinely deleted as a matter of course "because banned" regardless of whether they suffered from any issues or not (one obvious example that springs to mind). SoWhy, you probably follow this more closely than me; have you any idea? ‑ Iridescent 02:57, 11 April 2018 (UTC)

Gotcha. Even if G5 is worded somewhat stoically (along with any other CSD criteria), the policy still includes the phrase at the top of the page "at their discretion" so that adds an implied "can" to all the criteria. I can understand most admins not wanting to reward bad behavior of a banned or sanctioned user by making sure that user's defiance doesn't enshrine them as the creator of a new article. Likewise, if another admin objects to a specific deletion after checking it out and would like to restore it, they can work it out with the deleting admin. -- Netoholic @ 04:02, 11 April 2018 (UTC)

I've always understood G5 as "can" rather than "should". If I'm reviewing something, I will almost always delete it if it meets the G5 criteria, but with two exceptions, I'll always tag for G5 rather than directly delete if I come across it first: it recognizes that there is a diversity of opinion in the admin corps about the use of G5, and that someone else should review to see if they think it justified. The exceptions to that rule being an ar.wiki sockmaster who will create dozens of footballer stubs to the point where twinkle tagging would take me me a good 30 minutes and the other being any of the incarnations of A Den Jentyl Ettien Avel Dysklyver, who at this point would only use the tagging process to launch more protests with new socks or with IPs. Given, I'm "fresh blood" if you will, but this is the way I've always explained it to people who ask my thoughts on it. TonyBallioni (talk) 04:25, 11 April 2018 (UTC)

(pinged) Sorry, I cannot contribute more to this. I know that a couple of editors in recent years have emphasized the WP:DENY aspect of G5 but I cannot tell you when this started. Judging from the WT:CSD archives, this discussion from 2010 might have been one of the key moments but there have been discussions in 2013 and in 2015 about the same question. Regards SoWhy 19:35, 11 April 2018 (UTC)

• Dragonfly67 has an allegory regarding G5 pages that I've always found reasonable, and also falls in agreement with the Greg case mentioned above. Primefac (talk) 14:36, 11 April 2018 (UTC)

I tend to stay out of the way of G5 deletions in the grand scheme of things, but my general view is that if there's a reasonable chance anybody else could improve and maintain the article, we should leave it. Block the creator by all means, but if we don't leave their good work, maybe they'll just come back and write it again, and this time be even more aggravating. This reminds me of a situation a while back where a sock of Kumioko made his way onto my talk page, and since I don't know him from Adam and he was being civil and polite (if forthright and uncomplimentary about admins), I listened to what he had to say and gave a sympathetic ear and a reasonable reply - and then got jumped on by 2-3 admins for having the complete and utter chutzpah to do so. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 12:45, 12 April 2018 (UTC)

Wikidata Infobox RfC, Portals, and Wikipedia and Politics research project

I should start with an apology for the imbroglio over the recent AfD and the overspill here. I feel partially responsible in that I asked for the AfD to be kept open, thinking that it would help to have some of the community views out in the open. I had forgotten how polarising that can be at times. Talking of which... the VP infobox RfC is still open, and I somehow managed to miss that the much-trailed Wikidata/2018 Infobox RfC went live on 6 April. A bit of a monster to read through already. Another VP RfC that caught my attention was the proposal to end the system of portals. I must confess, my first reaction on seeing that (if it goes through as looks likely) was to wonder how the fight over the prime real-estate at top-right on the Main Page will pan out, and whether there will be a renewed impetus for a 'Main Page Redesign' (tm)? It makes the spam I got on my talk page look boring by comparison. A link to a page on meta and it looks genuine enough, but I wonder why they think I edit pages on politics? ("We aim to survey a set of 200-300 people who have edited Wikipedia pages related to politics"). The message even went so far as to say that I am a frequent editor of pages on Wikipedia that are of political interest. Hmm. Carcharoth (talk) 11:47, 10 April 2018 (UTC)

Huh, insisting that a discussion in which it was obvious there would only be one way it could go, which consisted of little more than people launching unsubstantiated personal attacks, and which the nominator openly admitted was started in bad faith, remain open, and as soon as it became obvious it wasn't going to go your way promptly running off to an attack site to canvass the shit-stirrers is "polarising"? Shocked, shocked, I tell you.

I wouldn't consider the "portal corner" of the main page prime real estate by any stretch—hardly anyone even notices it, and those that do tend to assume Arts Biography Geography History Mathematics Science Society Technology All portals is just another Wikipedia slogan, not a set of clickable links. 2000 page views a day is pathetic by mainpage standards; this is the first link on the second most viewed page on the internet (other than the Wikipedia link), and gets the kind of page views that would be considered poor for even the dullest space-filler of a DYK. (Portal:Arts got less than half the pageviews of Did you know ... that the mycotoxin phomoxanthone A causes fragmentation of mitochondria within minutes?.) The number of portals probably ought to be drastically slimmed down, as quite a few of them were the pet project of one or two people and are now moribund, but I wouldn't consider that a reason to get rid of the concept. That said, since the "we need to make a change, this is a proposed change, therefore this is the change we need to make" echo-chamber is in full voice the writing is clearly on the wall. I'd imagine the active ones like Portal:Trains and Portal:War will just quietly rebrand and carry on as before. (I'd argue that even the completely defunct ones like Portal:London Transport still serve a useful purpose as a collection of useful links aimed at readers, as opposed to the more editor-focused Wikiprojects, but I know which way that argument would go; Wikipedia is in one of its intermittent bouts of "delete anything I haven't heard of" "refine our focus on core content" tail-chasing. As with all the previous "we're losing focus on the core content!!!" moral panics, the best thing to do is shelter as much as possible until the crusaders get bored, rather than try to stand against the tide.)

You're getting that Politics message (I imagine) because of your recent stuff about the Parliamentary War Memorials. The software only sees you're editing articles about politicians; it isn't smart enough to see that you're writing about their military rather than their political careers. I regularly got medicine-related notifications when I was writing things like Biddenden Maids, for the same reason. ‑ Iridescent 14:01, 11 April 2018 (UTC)

Heh. I clearly need to focus more (and really try and attend to some content issues), and post less here (your talk page) and at the 'attack site' (I disagree with that characterisation for the record, but know better than to try and dissuade you of your views on that). Your views have always (to me) been a mix of really hitting the nail on the head (your comments about echo chambers and moral panics are great examples of this), contrasting with (to a lesser extent) leaving me sometimes feeling like you've completely missed the point. But then I suppose we all do that at times (I know I certainly do, and I really struggle sometimes to see when that has happened). What is the difference between being flexible enough to admit when getting something wrong, and standing your ground when you think you are right? Anyway, time to shelter from the incoming tide! Carcharoth (talk) 14:31, 11 April 2018 (UTC)

If everyone agreed all the time it would be a dull place… (I'm fairly confident I didn't miss the overall point—even if it wasn't your point—regarding Lynch. That AFD was as clear a case of "This article isn't on a topic I personally consider important, so let's throw as much mud as possible and hope that at least some of it sticks" as I've ever seen.) With regards to WP:BADSITES, I'll admit that I'm not that familiar with its recent incarnation, but from what I've seen of it it's considerably worse in its new clothes. The old Wikipedia Review was sometimes too tolerant of weirdos, but Somey in general did a decent job at keeping it as a neutral zone in which people of different opinions could all say their piece and in which people with complaints were expected to be prepared to answer "well, how would you do it better?", and at being willing to show the door to the obsessive cranks. In its Wikipediocracy incarnation it just gives me the impression of being a mutual support group for a bunch of malcontents whining at each other about how they didn't get their way in some dispute or another; on the occasions I've visited it recently it feels a little like taking a vacation inside Ottava's head. ‑ Iridescent 16:43, 20 April 2018 (UTC)

OTD

Re the Kishinev riot entry, your removal of my comment indicates you didn't get the point: Even in 1903, riots causing the deaths of 50 people, in this case Jews, would certainly not have attracted worldwide 'positive' attention (except perhaps from racist lunatics). Thus the word "positive" was redundant, particularly since the blurb refers to "persecution of Jews." Embarrassing. Sca (talk) 20:51, 19 April 2018 (UTC)

Iridescent didn't remove your comment. I did. The Rambling Man (talk) 20:54, 19 April 2018 (UTC)

Ah, so it was TRM. Look, my brief language comment re "negative" was not a big issue and I wasn't trying to make it one, but I really think you should have left it to see if others would comment. Sca (talk) 16:58, 20 April 2018 (UTC)

As The Rambling Man is too polite to say in as many words, if you're going to adopt a "righteous indignation" posture you might want to perform the most basic fact-checking before you start throwing around accusations. The nature of Wikipedia means it's not difficult to see exactly who has edited what and when, and when it takes all of two mouse clicks to see who removed your comment but you just pick someone apparently at random and accuse them of removing your comments it just makes you look either incompetent or lazy.

As regards your other point, the late 1880s and early 1900s were the zenith (or nadir) of scientific racism and colonialism, and both overt racism and more subtle notions of cultural superiority were the mainstream consensus, not the preserve of "racist lunatics". (As an obvious example, even in bastion-of-liberty cradle-of-democracy mother-of-parliaments etc-etc-etc England Jews were only permitted to enter Parliament in 1858, to become fellows at universities in 1871, and the response of the British government to the pogroms of the 1900s wasn't to threaten Russia or impose sanctions but was to ban Jewish refugees from entering British territory; the reason the US and Argentina have such a high population of Russian Jewish descent isn't because East European Jews had any particular desire to live in culturally alien countries thousands of kilometres from their homes and families, but because similar restrictions on Jewish immigration were imposed by almost every European country.) The significance of the Kishinev pogrom was that it did attract significant negative coverage in other countries when other pogroms had been ignored or in some cases tacitly or even overtly supported. (If you want a modern analogy, consider the overwhelmingly negative coverage—outside some Israeli and pro-Israel US media—of the 30+ and rising Palestinian deaths in the 2018 Gaza border protests, compared to the more usual "well, it looks bad but it's their own internal affairs and we shouldn't take sides" or "they were probably all terrorists and had it coming" attitude towards I/P violence.) If you seriously don't understand that not only have there have been periods in relatively recent European history in which the deaths of 50 Jews would have been positively received by many, but that the Russian pogroms and other Tsarist atrocities in the Pale of Settlement were—along with Ottoman atrocities in the Balkans, Japanese imperialism in Asia and Leopold II's outright lunacies in central Africa—seen at the time by many in the west as the necessary imposition of order in territories which the German–Austrian bloc and the Anglo–French alliance each feared would break away from crumbling imperial control and fall into the other's sphere of influence, then I would respectfully suggest that you're not competent to be commenting on 19th- and early 20th-century European history.

This is hardly the first time that you've waded in all-guns-blazing based on your own misreading of something rather than any actual error by anyone other than yourself, and I'd urge you to stop commenting on topics you don't understand or throwing around unsubstantiated accusations against other editors without evidence. I have no doubt you're acting in good faith, but eventually you'll waste the time of enough people that you'll end up becoming the sequel to this. Wikipedia:Main Page/Errors is a page To report an error on today's or tomorrow's Main Page, not your blog or a forum for you to offer your personal opinions of and commentary on whatever happens to be on the Main Page. ‑ Iridescent 15:30, 20 April 2018 (UTC)

Many thanks, Iridescent, for your 583 words of righteous indignation regarding my eight-word comment. You could have said everything you had to say much more succinctly without stooping to snide personal comments about my degree of understanding or cultural literacy. Good bye. Sca (talk) 16:58, 20 April 2018 (UTC)

(talk page watcher) Tbh, if one does insist on referring to other editors and/or their edits as "embarassing," then one should probably expect one's position to be forensically dissected, since one has staked so much upon it. —SerialNumber54129 ^{paranoia /cheap sh*t room} 17:23, 20 April 2018 (UTC)

What? Serial Number 54129, it was the WORD "negative" that was, IN CONTEXT, embarrassing. It was used by whoever wrote the OTD blurb, not by Iridescent. – Sca (talk) 17:36, 20 April 2018 (UTC)

PS: Charming image on your page. – Sca (talk) 17:46, 20 April 2018 (UTC)

Yes, It's a Goya, and probably one of the most famous of the Black Paintings; quite a lot of people have heard of it, actually. Some have even seen it before. —SerialNumber54129 ^{paranoia /cheap sh*t room} 18:47, 20 April 2018 (UTC)

You're too modest; "one of the most famous paintings of all time" is probably nearer the mark, to the extent that an obscure website of which even Sca may have heard uses a variation of it—without the need for explanation—as their top-level award to editors. (If you Google most famous paintings of all time you get one of their nice little carousels at the top, and yes it's there.) ‑ Iridescent 18:55, 20 April 2018 (UTC)

I think the integer's point was that when you go around to another person's user talk page, make an accusation that they did something they didn't, and end it with Embarrassing. you can generally expect a negative response. TonyBallioni (talk) 17:52, 20 April 2018 (UTC)

@TonyBallioni:, just so. It is rather—asking for it, I believe the vernacular is. —SerialNumber54129 ^{paranoia /cheap sh*t room} 18:47, 20 April 2018 (UTC)

I believe "can dish it out but can't take it" is the phrase you're looking for. ‑ Iridescent 18:53, 20 April 2018 (UTC)

Sca I suggest you read all of this seriously; your repeatedly pointed failures at ERRORS added to the concerns above really mean you're in danger of becoming a persona non gratia in these parts. After all, I should know. The Rambling Man (talk) 03:34, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

Isn't that usually Persona non grata, Rambler? – Sca (talk)

Again, this was a minor issue, and the fallout seems out of proportion. But I do apologize for mistakenly addressing my concerns to the wrong person. Sca (talk) 14:27, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

At least you got something right here, perhaps that's some positive outcome from the whole debacle. The Rambling Man (talk) 18:39, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

Q regarding Jews being allowed into parliment: would a lack of repeal affected Disraeli? Our article says he was rased Anglican from the age of 12, would this be enough or int he eyes of the "law" was he Jewish? Conversion to Christianity enabled Disraeli to contemplate a career in politics. Britain in the early-nineteenth century was not a greatly anti-Semitic society, and there had been Members of Parliament (MPs) from Jewish families since Samson Gideon in 1770. But until 1858, MPs were required to take the oath of allegiance "on the true faith of a Christian", necessitating at least nominal conversion. Thanks, L3X1 ◊distænt write◊ 03:25, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

Disraeli wouldn't have had any issue; in all four of the then constituent countries of the UK the notion of religion-by-descent didn't exist and religion was always based on practice not ethnicity, and thus a Jewish convert to any other religion immediately ceased to be Jewish. The issue was that admission to Parliament required an oath "upon the true faith of a Christian", an oath that Disraeli as a convert was able to make but Lionel de Rothschild wasn't. There's a list of the relevant dates for each country which previously had specific anti-Jewish laws at Jewish emancipation#Dates of emancipation; many of the repeals are much later than you'd think.

In recent years things are more complicated than the traditional "a Jew is a member of the Jewish religion and ethnicity doesn't come into it". The 1983 case of Mandla v Dowell-Lee set case law that a group meeting both "a long shared history, of which the group is conscious as distinguishing it from other groups, and the memory of which it keeps alive" and "a cultural tradition of its own, including family and social customs and manners, often but not necessarily associated with religious observance" as meeting the definition of an ethnicity as well as of a religious group, thus bringing Jews and Sikhs under the umbrella of racial discrimination legislation (the significance was that at the time religious discrimination was legal but racial discrimination wasn't; thus, post Mandla one could legally say "sorry, no Catholics" but not "sorry, no Jews"). The Equality Act 2006 outlawed religious discrimination and meant that discrimination on the grounds of religion and ethnicity were treated the same under UK law, rendering the distinction largely irrelevant; the 2009 Supreme Court case of R (E) v Governing Body of JFS (the first case ever tried before the Supreme Court, and consequently quite high-profile) established that it was down to the courts and government and not the Jewish community(ies) to determine who was a Jew, and that membership of a religion depended on whether the person in question was observant in that religion rather than their ethnicity.* Well, you asked. ‑ Iridescent 05:58, 21 April 2018 (UTC)
*E v JFS was a complicated case, revolving on whether a Jewish school had the right to deny admission to a child of Italian Catholic descent who was an observant Jew but who wasn't Jewish in Talmudic terms as neither the child nor his mother had formally converted; it split the Supreme Court 5–4. The text is here if you're interested in such things and have too much time on your hands.

Fascinating, especially when you factor in some of the current scholarly views of religion as a form of race (as an overly simple example, someone named Kennedy in the United States will be assumed to be Catholic by many, regardless of if they are or the time the last entered a Church. You could substitute it for something such as Qureshi in Islam in some regions, etc.) TonyBallioni (talk) 22:33, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

@TonyBallioni, you have to consider the unusual status and history of Britain. It's a country that for all practical purposes was populated entirely by mass migration (while there are probably still some genetic vestiges of the Beaker People, they'll to all practical purposes have been bred out of the population); the Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings and Normans were all invaders from Continental Europe, and the national culture is and always has been one of assimilation and absorption of waves of mass migration from Europe, with multiple mass conversions (of varying degrees of brutality) taking the national culture from Druidism, to Roman paganism, to Roman Christianity, to Anglo-Saxon/Norse paganism, to Celtic Christianity, to Roman Catholicism, to Lutheranism, to Catholicism again, to Anglicanism, to Puritanism, to Anglicanism again. Consequently, the dominant religion has for the last few centuries been Anglicanism in various forms in England, Methodism in Wales and Presbyterianism in Scotland, all of whose adherents are all by definition converts or the descendant of converts. When one takes that into account, it's easy to see why "your religion is what you personally believe (or profess to believe), and has nothing to do with descent" pretty much by definition had to become both official orthodoxy and the general popular attitude; the whole "follow the faith of your forefathers" mentality that's so central to American culture (and most Continental European cultures) would in the English context be legitimising the Roman Catholic culture to which the country has spent 500 years defining itself as the superior alternative. (For anyone wondering what British culture would look like if it did have the "religion as ethnic identity" culture one sees in the US and the Middle East grafted onto it, those shouty people across the water have helpfully volunteered to demonstrate and it's not a pretty sight.) ‑ Iridescent 15:01, 2 June 2018 (UTC)

Actually the fashion in genetic studies at the moment is to show considerable continuity in the genetics of the British (often going even back before the Beaker culture - and they tend not to be seen as a large-scale migration today), and in any case the British have been very good at entirely forgetting such immigrant status as they may actually have. The CofE doesn't accept that switching to Anglicanism involved conversion, and seems now busily to be forgetting that it was ever anything to do with Protestantism. And indeed, the religious changes you mention really mostly only affected professionals and some lay enthusiasts - the Vicar of Bray's congregation took little notice most of the time. Johnbod (talk) 15:13, 2 June 2018 (UTC)

Regarding the British have been very good at entirely forgetting such immigrant status as they may actually have, well sort of; even the most knuckle-dragging I-have-the-cross-of-St-George-tattooed-on-my-genitals members of the Tommy Robinson tendency are generally at least dimly aware both that the Anglo-Saxons and the Normans came from somewhere else originally. Whether the CofE formally considered the religious swings and roundabouts of the Tudor and Stuart eras as mass conversions or as repeated redraftings of the course of the One True Path isn't really relevant; there certainly was (and is) a strong tendency, particularly in the Low Church, that sees the RCC as continuity, albeit continuity on the wrong path, with Henry and Edwards goons and the inhabitants of the Book of Martyrs as revolutionaries. (If you happen to be in Liverpool, there's a distinctly creepy display currently in the Derby Transept of the Anglican cathedral explaining in great detail why all those not following every word of Luther are destined for the Pit.)

My main point, that British culture and religion were and are an ever-shifting (and often internally contradictory) syncretic highlights package of Western European, Mediterranean, Celtic, Nordic and more recently Asian traditions, rather than a coherent and continuous narrative in their own right, and that as a consequence "this is how we've always done things" carries less weight than in otherwise comparable countries like Spain or France, I think is sound. (Try the experiment of asking some of your friends to name a family tradition. In the (white) US you'll get regaled with stories of obscure cultural practices, recipes and religious observances brought over from the Old Country and cherished for generations; in Britain, unless your social circle consists of either super-posh old money, or a tiny backwoods village where the same families have resided since the ice shelf receded, you'd be lucky to get anything more than "Nan says 'pull my finger' when she farts".) ‑ Iridescent 18:12, 2 June 2018 (UTC)

Attention all TPS: The questions must now be, of course, of the first instanter: "Does she"?!  :D —SerialNumber54129 ^{paranoia /cheap sh*t room} 18:29, 2 June 2018 (UTC)

Perhaps the most beloved Christmas tradition in my family when they first moved to the States was taking pictures in shorts and t-shirts and sending it back to the Old Country to make snowed in relatives jealous. TonyBallioni (talk) 18:36, 2 June 2018 (UTC)

Mind you,​ those Vancouver nuclear winters might still turn out to be good preparation  :o  ;) —SerialNumber54129 ^{paranoia /cheap sh*t room} 18:43, 2 June 2018 (UTC)

A question about wikipedia religion

This is only semi- serious, but who are "The wikipedia gods"? Do they need to be appeased through sacrafices? Or is it a cult?💵Money💵emoji💵^Talk 23:55, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

That knowledge can only be gained by a Level 7 WikiWizard. Primefac (talk) 00:04, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

I refuse to erect an altar to Jimbo. Ealdgyth - Talk 00:50, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

​Would refusal to erect an altar to Jimbo cause Lares Anger? ‑ Iridescent 2 08:30, 24 April 2018 (UTC)

I can't say much, but the closest we get is a somewhat-misshapen bust in the entryway... Primefac (talk) 01:08, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

Ah, I get it. The admins are actually a cult around Jimbo- rouge admins are actually ones who are opposed to the cult. The admins consider Jimbo a god, and the "gods" Iridescent was referring to are Jimbo and the admins who have a ascended from worship of Jimbo- they are known as check users and stewards. Thank you @Primefac: and @Ealdgyth: for helping me understand Wikipedias hierarchy. 💵Money💵emoji💵^Talk 01:17, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

The fact of the matter, and this is not a joke, is that Jimmy Wales is almost completely irrelevant to the day-to-day operation of this encyclopedia, and almost nobody actively involved with administrating this project thinks much or cares much about Jimbo at this point. Cullen³²⁸ Let's discuss it 01:31, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

That is true. @Ealdgyth: So what will it be if a question will be either erecting an altar or being indef blocked? I need to assume you would chose erecting an altar. :)--Biografer (talk) 01:35, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

Indef block = path to eternal happiness, Wikivana, where one has surmounted the tribulous word-salads and Byzantine acronym-soups... —SerialNumber54129 ^{paranoia /cheap sh*t room} 09:30, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

Yes, we all hope for a day when we're far enough from this to stop dropping Wikipedia Essays into normal/real life conversation. Primefac (talk) 11:23, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

And signing billets-doux with four tildes instead of the usual... ;) —SerialNumber54129 ^{paranoia /cheap sh*t room} 12:52, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

Really? I thought that indef blocks = go hang yourself. Some Wikipedians who are deeply in love with this project might do just that. :(--Biografer (talk) 17:26, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

x

hanged, drawn and quartered

hey, i checked before i made my changes to the Hanged, drawn and quartered article... undoing my revision with "British topic, British spellings" is an extremely poor excuse... even other wiki articles linked do not have the double "l"... check your dictionaries, too... the Cambridge, Oxford, Collins and Miriam-Webster dictionaries all show one "l"... none of them other than Collins even mention two ells for a British form of the words...

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/disembowel https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/disembowel https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/disembowel https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/disembowel

in any case, I'm not going to argue about it but yeah, you're not correct...

Wkitty42 (talk) 11:28, 28 April 2018 (UTC)

• (talk page watcher) @Wkitty42: Not "an extremely poor excuse"; WP:ENGVAR is well-established within the manual of style; specifically, see WP:TIES: An article on a topic that has strong ties to a particular English-speaking nation should use the (formal, not colloquial) English of that nation, and various examples are given. So, the article about the electric chair uses American English, whilst HDQ uses British English. hope this clarifies, —SerialNumber54129 ^{paranoia /cheap sh*t room} 12:01, 28 April 2018 (UTC)

The policy you’re looking for is MOS:ENGVAR. Especially helpful is American and British English spelling differences. Ealdgyth - Talk 12:03, 28 April 2018 (UTC)

• (talk page stalker) Um, yes, @Wkitty42: The issue is that those are inflected forms, not the simple verb. See the article Ealdgyth pointed to, under "Doubled consonants". Yngvadottir (talk) 21:19, 29 April 2018 (UTC)

What they said; this is an article on a British topic and as such is written in British English. A couple of links to specifically US English dictionaries have no relevance when it comes to BrEng spelling (what did you think the /us/ in the URLs meant?). Incidentally, if you're going to tell lies at least tell lies that take more than two seconds to fact-check; the relevant entry in the OED lists only the double-l version of "disembowelled" and doesn't even give "disemboweled" as a variant. ‑ Iridescent 14:53, 2 June 2018 (UTC)

WikiProject Western Governors University

As a current or past contributor to a related article, I thought I'd let you know that I've started WikiProject Western Governors University, a collaborative effort to improve Wikipedia's coverage of WGU. If you would like to participate, you can visit the project page, where you can join the project and see a list of open tasks and related articles. Thanks! Paul Smith111977 (talk) 08:51, 6 May 2018 (UTC)

A thank you

		The Reviewer Barnstar
		Thanks very much for helping to review Mowbray—thanks to your helpful suggestions, it passed. I appreciate you taking the time and trouble to look in. Cheers! —SerialNumber54129 paranoia /cheap shit room 14:50, 13 May 2018 (UTC)

Should wrestling promotions that wrestlers competed in be listed in their infobox

Hi, I have noticed that I had seen on wrestling articles such as these The Road Warriors, The Steiner Brothers, The Fabulous Freebirds, The Bushwhackers, The Rock 'n' Roll Express, and The Powers of Pain that it had formerly listed the promotions that they had wrestled in in their infobox, but now that info has been removed. Should it have been removed or do you think it should be in their infoboxes? I personally think that it is good information to have which should be included. Davidgoodheart (talk) 06:03, 14 May 2018 (UTC)

Looking at the articles in question, it appears that the information is in fact there, but that the {{infobox wrestling team}} template doesn't support a "promotions" field and consequently it doesn't display. This is a discussion for Template talk:Infobox wrestling team or Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Professional wrestling, not for my talkpage, as changing the template will affect the appearance of 539 pages (at the time of writing). I imagine the question you need to consider is whether you treat professional wrestling teams as sports teams (for which the infobox generally only includes the competition/league in which they're currently active, not those in which they've historically participated); as actors (for which the infobox typically doesn't include a "notable works" section at all), or as performance artists (for which infoboxes can—but by no means must—include a brief no-more-than-five-at-most list of their most notable works). Wrestling isn't something in which I have the slightest interest, so I have no opinion on what the most appropriate way to handle this is. I'd caution that anything relating to infoboxes is almost certain to lead to arguments, as whether infoboxes are appropriate for any given page and if so what should be included in the infobox is one of the most contentious areas on Wikipedia, so don't make any changes to the infobox coding unilaterally without establishing that there's consensus to make the change. ‑ Iridescent 14:52, 2 June 2018 (UTC)

Religion in infoboxes

Hi, do you have any idea if this RfC has been superseded? I know time seems to speed up as I get older but I thought the consensus to remove religion from bio infoboxes was much more recent! - Sitush (talk) 16:24, 28 May 2018 (UTC)

Not that I know of...is there an issue? Ealdgyth - Talk 16:43, 28 May 2018 (UTC)

Just to add, the consensus was to remove religion from that specific generic infobox (which hasn't been superseded) there may have been subsequent rfcs to remove it from other more specialist infoboxs. Only in death does duty end (talk) 16:50, 28 May 2018 (UTC)

Thanks, folks. No issue as such - it is just something I mentioned in this thread and I want to make sure I'm not imagining things etc. - Sitush (talk) 16:53, 28 May 2018 (UTC)

My close specifically and explicitly only applied to the vanilla {{infobox person}} as that was what was being discussed in the RFC. Expanding it to cover other infoboxes would require a fresh RFC, as it's reasonable to assume that at least some of those who supported removing it as an included-by-default field for general biographies would have felt that on at least some infoboxes (clergy, politicians in places like Lebanon where there are parliamentary quotas for members of different religious groups, the leaders of the German states during the Thirty Years War…) it would still be appropriate to include the subject's religion as a key fact, and consequently would have voted differently had the RFC been understood to apply to all biographical infoboxes. ‑ Iridescent 14:51, 2 June 2018 (UTC)

Notability of engravers, painters....

Since you seem to have an expertise on the locus of paintings et al, can you please let me know about whether a biography at British Museum like this, this et al or mentions over Royal Academy like this automatically guarantees the passage of our notability guidelines? Thanks,~ Winged Blades^Godric 08:57, 5 June 2018 (UTC)

Note to TPWs; this relates (I assume) to this walled garden. See the recent talkpage history of its creator for an idea of some background here.

Certainly not; those are just generic bibliographical entries (and the Barenger one explicitly states "information provided via email", to boot). If you have specific examples in mind, Johnbod is probably better qualified than me to speak as to the notability of individuals. (As a rough rule of thumb, when it comes to figures in the 19th-century arts in England the easiest way to gauge viability in Wikipedia terms is to drop the name into Google Books. Because they have most of the arts/culture periodicals of the period digitized, if nothing substantive comes up it's usually a fairly safe indication that nobody cared enough at the time to write about them.)

In the three specific cases you link, Charles Pye arguably scrapes notability in Wikipedia terms because he's mentioned in the ODNB, albeit only as a footnote to the entry on his far more successful brother. Samuel Barenger doesn't seem to have left any trace other than the occasional one-line entry on lists of engravers, and almost certainly is non-notable. Frederick Rudolph Hay probably scrapes notability in Wikipedia terms as he was one of the founders of the Artists' Benevolent Fund, and seems to have been very successful in his business, but he would be a nightmare to source; engravers, typesetters, bookbinders etc were never documented anywhere near as well as the painters, authors etc themselves. ‑ Iridescent 09:17, 5 June 2018 (UTC)

Yes, none are listed on the Union List of Artist Names (bizarrely at AFD btw), which is pretty conclusive evidence of notability for historical artists. John Pye is there. So probably not notable (as artists). But refs like these can be used on the list at Draft:Britannia Depicta, which seems harmless. Since people have gone through the dreaded Bryan's Dictionary in the past, I think early 19th-century British printmakers is one area where we already have pretty much the right articles, & all we need (but nearly all just sourced from Bryan). Johnbod (talk) 13:53, 5 June 2018 (UTC)

Mind you, all are listed in the Benezit Dictionary of British Graphic Artists and Illustrators, Volume 1, an offshoot of the Benezit Dictionary of Artists, which (the parent) is strong evidence for notability. Not sure of the status of the offshoot. User:Ewulp? All seem to be purely reproductive engravers, mostly of topographical prints like Britannia Depicta. Johnbod (talk) 17:18, 5 June 2018 (UTC)

Even if one considers a Benezit entry to be proof of notability (questionable; we don't even consider an ODNB entry as automatic notability, and the ODNB is far more selective), most engravers other than the high-profile ones who bought the rights to renowned artists would fail the "500 word test", of "if not enough information exists that it would ever be possible to write 500 words on any given topic, it almost certainly should be an entry on a broader list rather than a permanent microstub". This may not be Wikipedia policy, but it's certainly good practice (and, as the cricket project is finding out, The Wikipedia Community is starting to lose patience with vast swathes of microstubs). At some point someone probably ought to trim the worst of the weeds at Category:English engravers, much of which appears to be verbatim cut-and-pastes from assorted 19th-century directories. ‑ Iridescent 18:20, 5 June 2018 (UTC)

Even though Britain hardly features in the history of the Old Master print, what with the once highly-collected 18th-century mezzotinters, the caricaturists, the stamp-designers, the book illustrators, not to mention lots of painters who dabbled in etching etc ("engraver" of course here means "printmaker") ... and so on, I expect most deserve articles, but better ones. I'd imagine the notability of Britannia Depicta actually depends on the road-map element rather than the extra pictures added in the 19th century. The early editions certainly don't come cheap, even in an Oxfam shop! Johnbod (talk) 21:15, 5 June 2018 (UTC)

About the Benezit Dictionary of British Graphic Artists and Illustrators ... I don't know the status of that one either, and would want to round up at least two additional RSs. Ewulp (talk) 01:44, 6 June 2018 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘Many thanks to the t/p owner and everybody else who participated in the thread, for their help as to the relative betterment of my understanding of the issues of notability.
@Iridescent:-You were absolutely correct as to the locus of my question.~ Winged Blades^Godric 10:58, 7 June 2018 (UTC)