User talk:Iridescent

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

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Brief thoughts on a current arbitration case

Have you been following the Portals arbitration case? I recently looked over the Proposed Decision page and its talk page, and was a bit surprised at the direction it is heading in (well, headed in, as it is nearly finished). I had not thought it would go in that direction, and am wondering if this new ArbCom will surprise us all (not in a good way, really). (If you think it best to comment at the case pages, rather than here, or not comment at all, fair enough.) See also the RHaworth PD talk page, where some are saying the decision there is not consistent with what is happening to BHG. Carcharoth (talk) 11:31, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Prediction: any newly-minted admin who is also an even newer-minted arbcommer will vote to desysop as first choice. ——SN54129 16:46, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

I'm loath to participate; BHG was something of an unofficial mentor to me when I first started so anything I say in support of her will be taken as WP:INVOLVED, and I also had a fairly foul-tempered exchange with her more recently so anything I say in opposition to her will be taken as WP:INVOLVED. I think SN54129 nails it; this is an arbcom with a disproportionate number of newly-minted arbs, who after the fiascos last year will be keen to send a "there's a new sheriff in town and he's not taking any shit from the locals" message. Thus they'll want to come down hard on someone to send the "nobody is safe and you'd better all respect our authority" message. Under normal circumstances I'd have said it would be Kudpung to get the kicking, but the supposed "evidence" page there largely consists of a mix of irrelevant recounting of personal grudges, and gibberish that reads like a drunk recounting a long and boring dream (permalink as I live in hope the clerks come to their senses and remove all the drivel), which leaves BHG as the only possible sacrificial victim. With any luck the cooler heads like NYB will talk the new intake off the cliff-edge and reassure them that there will be plenty of better occasions to play executioner, but the first couple of cases of any new arbcom are always a bit whacky. ‑ Iridescent 17:02, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Ah, I wasn't aware of (or had forgotten) that history. Thanks for the thoughts. Carcharoth (talk) 17:05, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Sadly Iri you can't have admins outright accusing people of lying and bad faith without at least providing a credible reason for doing so. And still have the expectation that they admins as a group are expected to lead by example. More cynical me suspects the voting patterns for the desysop have more to do with the individual admins experience with problem editors/admins rather than any overt "we must make our mark!" approach. Although it could be credibly argued that the lack of response by previous arbs over the years to just this sort of issue needs new blood to address. Only in death does duty end (talk) 17:40, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

I would also point out that in any democratic electoral process, the expectation amongst the voters is that those elected take action sooner rather than later. "More of the same please" only applies when the voters are happy with those in power. Do you think that describes the last 12 months? Only in death does duty end (talk) 18:12, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Sure, making that kind of allegation is A Bad Thing, but this is a set of circumstances where context is important. I don't understand why portals generate such intensity given that none of them have any readers. (Even Portal:Arts which is quite literally the first link on the Main Page averages less than 1000 viewers a day. As soon as you get to the portals that aren't on the main page the readership drops to effectively zero; something like Portal:Trains, Portal:Sports and Portal:United Kingdom—all top-end portals on high-interest and high-traffic topics—all consistently get fewer readers than my user talk page.) However, for whatever reason people do have irrationally strong feelings about them, and for what it can be argued are legitimate reasons; those supporting them see them as fulfilment of Wikipedia's early WP:Build the web ambitions, allowing topics that would ordinarily languish in obscurity or be dead-end pages to always have at least some incoming and outgoing links, while those against them see them as impossible to maintain and as such a permanent liability in terms of accuracy and dated statements.

The background here is that a couple of years ago the rough "don't create new portals unless there's a demonstrable demand for them" was broken by three editors using an unauthorised bot to mass-create literally thousands of portals on hyper-niche topics (anyone for Portal:Crabapples? Portal:Coatbridge? Portal:Zoophilia? Portal:Burger King? Or maybe Portal:Wang Chung (band)?) who then dug in their heels when other editors such as BHG started nominating them for deletion, leading to what can politely be described as "shitloads of pointless arguments" all over the wiki with accusations flying all over the shop. As such there's a lot more bad feeling then there usually is in such a case; sure, it's not right to call someone a liar without providing evidence, but equally we need to bear in mind that Arbcom has a long, long history of failing spectacularly badly when it comes to differentiating between genuine personal attacks, and people who've been pushed to the point of losing their temper and gotten snappy. If I were on this committee—which thank the lord I'm not—I'd be seeing this in terms of what the best result for Wikipedia is, not in terms of applying the letter of the law.

While I've always thought the "admonish" language is pointless, this is a rare case where I think it would make sense; all it needs is a straightforward "all of you, knock it off", not the de facto site ban which looks likely to pass. (Yes, no big deal and all that, but in BHG's case desysopping is effectively kicking her out, since she primarily does unsexy but necessary maintenance stuff which genuinely does require admin tools; the net result of this case won't go any way to resolving the underlying dispute over portals, but does mean that nobody will now be routinely maintaining the category trees.) ‑ Iridescent 18:26, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

(That's because your talk page is more interesting than any of the portals.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:03, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

(Indeed.) Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 08:55, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

Regarding the expectation amongst the voters is that those elected take action sooner rather than later, I disagree that this applies here. Arbcom isn't the Wikipedia Parliament, they're a dispute resolution body of last resort; while theory doesn't always match reality, in theory at least any given set of evidence, brought before any iteration of the committee, should lead to the same outcome. (This is the entire basis of the perennial proposal that only a sub-group of five or so arbs rule on any given case.) ‑ Iridescent 18:40, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

• It appears we are indeed going to lose Bhg, which is very sad. Johnbod (talk) 03:24, 30 January 2020 (UTC)
  • Damn. I had seriously thought of telling both to drop the matter & either work on something else than Portals or take a Wikibreak back in December -- BHG was showing signs of burnout -- but since NA1k was not that active, & the matter was already before the ArbCom, I figured it was wasted effort. (Or I be told to MMOB.) I should have acted. -- llywrch (talk) 18:37, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

Since I'm mentioned in this thread, just noting that I've seen it. As I'm sure you all realize, my relevant comments are on the proposed decision page. Newyorkbrad (talk) 21:37, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

Since I'm mentioned in this thread along with Newyorkbrad, because any kind of self-defense at Arbcom is characterised as 'doubling down' or whingeing, I'm not even watching my case and don't know what is going on there, but I would not be surprised at all if Iridescent's interpretation is wholly accurate. I am extremely saddened by the outcome of BrownHairedGirl's case (which I have read), but with most of the new committee members being 'new sheriffs in town' I can't see them listening much to the advice of more experienced arbitrators, such as perhaps those who are able to look at cases with the cold and neutral detachment of a lawyer's mind. As far as I know, and from emails I have received, anyone on that Committee who has worked closely with me in the past and who knows me personally and shared a glass of wine over dinner with me in NYC, D.C., HK, London, Oxford, Esino Lario, Paris, Berlin, or Bangkok, has recused themselves, so BHG may not be the only sacrificial victim in 2020 which has begun with an almost unprecedented number of cases against admins who appear to have fallen foul of either simply doing their job, or having been trolled and baited to the point of boiling over, and thence fallen out of favour. Woe betide anyone on Wikipedia who admits to having reached, nearly reached, or passed, their three-score-years-and-ten, you've all been around too long, are too old, probably too qualified, and the place for you is the scrap heap or the knacker's yard. And the two most interesting and intelligent places left on Wikipedia that dare to utter some home truths are this talk page and Carrite's user page. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 03:22, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

I haven't followed Kudpung's case; I wanted to put some sort of defence and explain why a desysop is completely out of order for somebody who has led multiple RfA reforms, campaigned a good-faith fight to stop brand new users creating articles, causing the number of A7 CSDs to plummet to a manageable level, and nominated several brilliant admins (oh, and also me). I haven't followed BHG's case and don't know much about them, but I think a desysop is a serious over-reaction. I have followed RHaworth's case, however unlike BHG and Kudpung, I have met Roger on several occasions, and I'll say this: It's very easy to post online "Abusive admin - violates policy, desysop please!" but try arguing your case politely and fairly in front of the person you want to throw under a bus to their face, particularly when that person is confused and upset as to why you're doing it. I wonder how many editors here can do that? Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 13:48, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

... try arguing your case politely and fairly in front of the person you want to throw under a bus to their face, particularly when that person is confused and upset as to why you're doing it ... applies to every editor who is blocked. Or mistreated. By admins. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:36, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

Or taken on a trip ANI and/or Arbcom based on so-called 'evidence', half-truths, and bullshit, by those having or showing a strong or lingering desire for revenge, pile-ons by those who are not even involved, and those who have demonstrated for years a general antipathy towards the corps of adminship. I have met some editors who have been cruelly desysoped who despite having been stigmatized nevertheless continue to carry out essential Wikiwork and outreach, and they are among the nicest Wikipedians I have ever had the privilege of sharing a restaurant table with. Some editors who have been blocked I would not share the same pub room with and would cross to the other side of the street if I saw them coming. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 16:13, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

The fact that they are amazing people in real life, great to share a restaurant table with, an absolute corker down the pub etc., doesn't mean that they aren't capable of becoming an arsehole when seated behind a keyboard. I've seen this all over the place, Twitter, Facebook etc. - people forget that there's another human at the other end of the wire and start meting out the most horrific vitriol, just because they happen to disagree on some topic or other. And sadly, Wikipedia is no exception to that phenomenon. It's human nature anyway - I've also been tempted to hurl expletives and personal insults at my fellow editors on occasion in the past, and when it's just typing stuff out and hitting send, rather than saying it to someone's face and seeing their reaction in real-time, it's so much easier to do. But thankfully I always have the good sense to step away and come back to it later. But I like to think that if I ever were to be called up on a civility charge, I would make my apologies and move the matter on. Because going before ArbCom and waving one's sword about is surely not productive. The arbitrators aren't stupid. If they look at the evidence against me and find fault, then I'm prepared to accept that and seek to improve the behaviour. That's all people need to do, and unless the original crime was particularly heinous, or there's a very long-term recurring pattern, that approach would mostly remove the need for ArbCom to apply more than a slap on the wrist. Kudpung I haven't studied your case at all and I don't know who's in the right and wrong but, if it bears any resemblance to the RHaworth or BHG cases, my advice (which you may or may not take any notice of) would be introspection and engaging whatever the issues are, seeking to address them, rather than the alternatives of (a) ignoring it completely, or (b) fighting tooth and nail. All IMHO of course, YMMV!  — Amakuru (talk) 17:40, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

Driveby reply - I'll reply substantively to this thread when I'm in a position to do so - but @Kudpung, your comments here about "admins who appear to have fallen foul of either simply doing their job", "those who have demonstrated for years a general antipathy towards the corps of adminship", "editors who have been cruelly desysoped" etc seem to be another variation on your "anti-admin brigade" theory laced with what comes across as a rather creepy idea that admins constitute some kind of Wikipedia aristocracy who should be treated with more respect than the peons. Whatever the intent, talking like this is doing you no favors at all. The case against you - both at the current case and on Wikipedia in general - has as its root "Kudpung acts like he thinks he's earned the right to dish it out without having to take it", and regardless of your intent it's hard to read comments like these without wincing. Sure, there are many fine people who are admins, and many horrible people who are rightly blocked; there are also many admins who are utterly incompetent and/or deeply unpleasant people, and there are many blocked and banned editors who are worthy of respect. (The latter doesn't just include those people blocked unfairly; there are many people who are blocked for valid reasons, or even globally banned, whose opinions are well worth listening to. Even if I'm not necessarily going to agree with their views, I'd take the views of someone like Eric Corbett or Greg Kohs far more seriously than I would those of most of the self-appointed Power Users who hang around at ANI, Jimbotalk, Signpost et al.)

I disagree with Amakuru's argument above in some respects - I have a strong impression that in both the RHaworth and BHG cases the committee are intentionally overreacting to relatively trivial complaints to try to send a "we're in charge" signal - but regarding you, his general point is spot on. As far as I can see the case against you boils down to "Kudpung is an unpleasant person to be around to the extent that it creates a chilling effect on other editors". I personally don't think that's the case (with the disclaimer that I don't think I've ever had any significant interaction with you other than occasional "how can we make RFA less horrible?" threads where we've generally been on the same side), but you need to ask yourself why these allegations aren't being laughed out. Enough people are complaining - and from enough different backgrounds that they can't just be dismissed as a small-but-noisy faction being canvassed on IRC - that there's obviously some reason people are finding it difficult to get along with you. Even if you never intend to touch Wikipedia again it would still presumably be valuable to engage honestly with these people and ask "what do you think I'm doing wrong?" so you don't end up needlessly offending people somewhere else; if you do intend to stay active here, it's just basic common sense to engage with people even when you don't agree with them. As I said to Malleus long ago (advice he admittedly didn't take), it's a good rule both for the internet and for life in general that if someone complains about something you do or say, even if you think the complaint is ridiculous, to not repeat whatever it was that caused offense unless you can genuinely justify it as necessary. This case is almost certainly going to end with "Kudpung admonished", but this is one instance where for once I think it would be worth taking an arbcom admonishment seriously. ‑ Iridescent 2 22:09, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

Excellent analysis and advice, Iri. Though when I read SandyGeorgia's Or mistreated. By admins., my first thought was “OMG, there is an anti-admin brigade!”

I hope it isn't improper to not ping SG here; I don't really read anything into their comments beyond “you say admins have it tough, well normal editors do too”. But the phrasing in the wider context sent my mind off into errant loops. As to why I'm here when I havent been mentioned, I was just following a link SG had placed at the Arbcom workshop.

Pelagic (talk) 13:15, 15 February 2020 (UTC)

• I'm on a bit of a break, but read through the BHG case after seeing it. See my thoughts on one of the claims. We apparently now are desysoping people for pointing out that factually incorrect statements are in fact wrong. I get the lie/falsehood distinction, but I'm honestly shocked that it wasn't pointed out that the four lying diffs cited she was correct on. Anyway, I've spent far too much time on Wikipedia tonight, and I do trust and respect many of the arbs here. I just think they got it wrong on this case. TonyBallioni (talk) 07:39, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

Belated replies to all the above

@llywrch, I think it's a great shame to lose BrownHairedGirl. I think she'll be a great loss, both in terms of the unsexy but necessary work she does which isn't easily going to be replaced (I'm not exactly seeing a queue of other people lining up to clean up Special:WantedCategories), and as one of the dwindling number of people with continuous and uninterrupted experience from Wild West days right through to the Maintenance Phase, to keep the institutional memory of previous mistakes alive. That said, I can entirely see why she feels she's now not welcome; the Arbitration Committee have taken what appear to be demonstrable falsehoods about her and given them the formal status of "findings of facts", meaning that by Wikipedia convention, people will for ever more point back to them as proven fact without feeling any obligation to provide evidence. In those circumstances I'd never try to talk someone out of resigning if they felt they needed to. As we've seen in the past in numerous other cases, once someone gets a reputation as "a troublemaker", the Defenders Of The Wiki will forever more shadow their every move looking for a pretext to report them for minor transgressions, and thus create a feedback loop where the editor in question eventually either lashes out at the people following them around, consequently gaining even more of a reputation as a troublemaker, or decides that if they're going to be branded disruptive they may as well actually be disruptive and starts deliberately being disruptive. If BHG wants to go out on her own terms rather than suffer death-by-a-thousand-cuts at the hands of Sandstein, that's a totally reasonable position.

Kudpung, I'm sure my "driveby reply" above (which turned out longer than expected) isn't what you want to hear, but I do recommend taking it on board. Most people aren't particularly familiar with you, and as such are going to judge you by their first impression, and by not participating you're allowing people with a grudge to set the narrative. (This is an inbuilt problem with Wikipedia's dispute resolution mechanisms; those with a grudge set the agenda, while those defending the conduct of the accused tend to be dismissed as part of that person's clique and as such not to be taken seriously. You've done your fair share of such dismissing yourself in the past.) Yes, I generally agree with the point you're being too polite to make explicitly—that the complaints about you appear largely motivated by a handful of New Puritan types who see anyone with a different worldview to themselves as dangerous influences who need to be suppressed—but this is a collaborative project and the California/East Coast "freedom means everyone has to be just like me and anyone who disagrees with me needs to be corrected" contingent are a large enough group that their opinions have to be taken seriously. All it really needs is a one-line "if someone asks me not to do something I'll try to avoid doing it unless I can demonstrate that I have a good reason to keep doing it" undertaking. Nobody's expecting you to be at the beck and call of every crank with a grudge, but complete non-participation just unintentionally sends the signal that you don't consider anyone else's opinions to have any validity. Besides, it's not fair on Lourdes, who as things stand is your only credible defender in the workshop section and in your absence is going to become a lightning rod with everyone who has problems with you taking it out against her.

@Ritchie333, Amakuru, I don't entirely buy the "you wouldn't say it to their face!" argument in the sense in which you're using it. In the context of Wikipedia (shitholes like Twitter are obviously different) the problem with online communication isn't really the lack of face-to-face communication, but the lack of opportunity for subtle cues. If, for instance, you and I are sitting together and I say something that offends you I'll likely sense right away that I've done something wrong and either back off or ask what the issue is; in an online environment it gets taken as a deliberate affront and leads to a feedback loop of passive-aggressiveness. WAID might be able to pop up with some facts and figures from the WMF's consultation, but to me one of the major drawbacks of Wikipedia's talk setup is that because a wiki means every comment is forever, one can make a throwaway remark but it immediately becomes permanently on display to be overanalyzed, in a way that doesn't happen to forum posts, tweets etc which soon scroll off the bottom. To take Ritchie's specific example, I've never met RHaworth but I'm sure that if I did I could explain, sympathetically and without causing offense, what the problems with his approach are and what he needed to do to avoid getting into trouble. If I tried to do the same on a Wikipedia talkpage, I'd almost certainly come across as a self-important blowhard delivering a lecture, as I wouldn't be in a position to pick up the "I understand this" and "I don't understand that" cues and consequently would end up over-emphasizing things he already knew (and thus I'd come across as patronizing), and skimming over things I assumed he knew but which he actually didn't (and thus I'd come across as arrogant and elitist). Mediawiki is a powerful and underrated communication tool—there's a reason every proposal to replace it flounders and whatever the WMF may think it's not just "people dislike change!"—but it does have a inbuilt tendency to make people appear more of an asshole than they actually are. ‑ Iridescent 13:29, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

RHaworth upload in 2008. New tricks?

Hmmm. RHaworth used to come to the London meetup & I'm not so sure. He uploaded this in 2008. He looks younger than in his other photos. Johnbod (talk) 16:08, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

• (Apologies for gatecrashing. I am surprised that you had a mentor. My impression was that you were like Gandalf of Wikipedia.) I've been wanting to say something on those cases for some time, guess I'll do that here as I'm just a wiki-child compared to y'all which is comforting for some reason.

I was shocked with what was about to happen with the BHG case. I almost left a comment saying the outcome amounted to sexism (I might have if I could be sure I hadn't missed something and if I had more than BHG's username to go by), especially when looking at it in contrast with Rhaworth's case. Looks like the better-informed people realised something wasn't right, too. Instead of undertaking the trouble to review everything again, the committee obviously took an easy way out. Rhaworth lost the bit for no reason than that Arbs c/wouldn't go back on their decision to desysop BHG, for whatever reason. I finally understand why many editors were/are so critical of ArbCom. If all ArbCom does is summarise the popular tide among the case participants, I think we are better off with the clerks.

I know the two broke the rules they shouldn't have and they should have known better than to persist, but decisions are starting to look like those we'd expect on an overcrowded lifeboat while from what I can tell the project is mostly kept afloat by a few dozen highly dedicated editors at most. So much for prevention, not punishment. Usedtobecool ☎️ 15:34, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

I came to Wikipedia relatively late; I arrived near the end of the massive growth spurt. (As with others like NYB and Risker, I had the advantage of arriving on Wikipedia early enough to witness its formative crises like Essjay, Siegenthaler, CBD, MyWikiBiz etc, and the writing of many of the key policies, in real time, but was still obscure and unimportant enough that I didn't get tainted by involvement with any particular side in those big early fights.) IIRC I first ran into BHG during the Arbuthnot Wars (a long-forgotten episode, but one which in hindsight was the point when the line between "someone is notable if they're covered in multiple sources" and "Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information" began to be formally drawn), after which she made lots of encouraging noises during the writing of Almeric Paget, 1st Baron Queenborough. ‑ Iridescent 06:04, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

Usedtobecool, I don't think ArbCom actually summarizes the popular tide among case participants. If you look over the history of cases, votes in proposed decisions frequently result in protests on the PD talk pages and these complaints do not always (and maybe do not often) lead to changes in voting that is still ongoing. But I do think arbitrators have been called on repeatedly over the years to not only be more responsive to editors' comments but also to respond more to people's comments on case talk pages.

ArbCom in the past has been criticized for not coming down more strongly in cases brought against administrators and those critiques often come up during the pre-election question periods. The perception of individual arbitrator's sense of fairness or whether they take a strong or not-so-strong line in cases of alleged admin abuse can greatly impact who receives the most votes in the ArbCom election. And really, it is the editors who care the most about these stances who take the time to vote in an ArbCom election. As the veteran editors reading this page know well, this was an unusual election in that there were more than the normal number of resignations in 2019 (5) and an increase in committee size (from 13 back to 15) which resulted in more new and returning arbitrators (11) than those continuing on with the second year of their term (4). These means that there are only 6 arbitrators who were on last year's committee serving and 9 who are new to this iteration of ArbCom.

Whether these recent cases are actually a reflection of a possible Reverse Super Mario effect or not, I'll leave to more longtime editors/admins to judge. I do know that in cases against administrators, the arbitrators are frequently stuck between giving an admonishment (which seems like too little) and imposing a desysop (which can seem like too much) and there are continually requests for there to be a middle ground option. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 16:08, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

One of the novel yet impractical ideas I've had to combat WikiBurnout is to give a volunteer each 5 years a "Get Out of Jail Free" chit, not accumulating. So when the volunteer does something that gets him/here haled in front of ArbCom, they can use it to avoid any penalties. In return, the volunteer spends some time talking with another Wikipedian they trust, who explains what went wrong & gets the volunteer to understand the issue. If needed, said Wikipedian may take some time off from Wikipedia to de-stress. (There will always be stuff to do; while there are too many portals, too much copyright violations, & too many stubs about non-notable subjects, Wikipedia won't go belly-up while you are gone for a month or three.) The whole idea this process is not to punish anyone, it's too bring the matter to a final conclusion. If the issue can be resolved without anyone being sanctioned or leaving Wikipedia, then all the better.

Of course this won't work. Too many of us long-term volunteers don't have a trusted "WikiFriend" she/he can talk with in a frank manner about these things. For example, I used to know a lot of Wikipedians in real life, but many of them either moved to another city or left Wikipedia -- or died, as in the case of Eclecticology -- leaving me with only 2 or 3 who could perform a real-life intervention. (There might be one or two more, but they live a few thousand miles away, & international phone calls tend to be expensive.) I expect I'm not unusual in this regard. -- llywrch (talk) 17:28, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

NYB will probably know better than me, as he was on the committee at the time the current jargon came into use, but as I understand it that was the original intention behind "Admonished" as a remedy; people who obviously had a history of being productive but equally clearly had done something wrong but not something so appalling they obviously needed to be banned, would be ordered to stand in the corner and think about what they'd done. It's been devalued over the years and has come to mean "there's enough of an angry mob baying for blood that we need to do something, but we can't actually find any evidence against you to justify us taking any action, so this is a compromise". It's not helped by the fact that "admonish" (a) is an archaic word most people rarely if ever encounter and are unlikely to know what it means (I've seen multiple people who are confused when a non-admin is "admonished" because they assume it's WikiSpeak for "administrator punished"), and (b) when the people who don't understand what it means do the correct thing in these circumstances and look it up, they'll find it has multiple diametrically-opposed meanings ("To exhort or urge (a person) to do something, esp. as a duty or obligation; to tell or warn (a person) that he or she should do something", "To give advice or warning, esp. by way of correction of error, or guidance as to future behaviour", "To advise or warn (a person), esp. by way of correction: to reprove or reprimand firmly", "To warn, reprimand, or rebuke (a person) for a fault or misdeed", "To recommend or urge a course of action", "To notify or remind (a person) of something","To warn (a person) of or against potential danger or future error", "To say by way of a warning, exhortation, or rebuke"[1]) and will quite reasonably not know whether the committee is ordering them to perform an action, suggesting an action they may want to consider taking, giving a "no pressure but here's what I'd do" suggestion, or giving a complete neutral "this is the current policy" reminder.

Something I suggested way back before the dawn of time—to complete uninterest—was to make the block logs asymmetric. At the moment it's possible to redact a block log (try it yourself), but doing so removes the action from the log of both the blocking admin and the blocked editor, and consequently would make it much more difficult to identify admins who were misusing the "block" button to harass editors against whom they had a grudge. Fixing it so entries remain in the admin's log for all eternity, but drop off the blocked editor's log a set period (a year?) after the block expires unless there's a subsequent block in that time and are removed from the blocked editor's log immediately should the block be determined to have been in error, would be a cheap and easy fix. It would allow genuine rehabilitation, and a genuine mechanism to address errors by admins; as things stand, once an editor has something in their block log it serves as a mark of Cain and is constantly raised as something to batter them with. (You want evidence?) The "keep your nose clean for it to be removed" would be an incentive not to cause problems; redacting blocks that didn't have consensus would kill off the "unblockables" meme, since it would be immediately apparent which editors were genuinely engaged in behavior which the community considered problematic and which had just disagreed with a member of the IRC or Discord tag teams or had the misfortune to be taken to WP:AE on a day Sandstein had decided to patrol it; and if we had some kind of immediately obvious "this action was reversed" flag in the logs it would make it much more readily apparent which admins were abusing the block/unblock functions. Of course, it will never happen; too many people get a kick from self-appointing themselves as Problem User Monitors and will resist any change that makes it harder to score a kill in their MMORPG. ‑ Iridescent 18:58, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

I spent way too much time when I first started regularly editing reading old arbitration cases and more notable old noticeboard discussions (I was interested in Wikipedia history) and I thought there was an admin who was actually desysoped over changing a block log, I believe to hide an action that they took. But I think it was a good 8+ years ago I'd be guessing if I put a name to the case. It was an unusual case so oldtimers might know what I'm talking about but the name isn't really important. I only bring it up because I'm surprised with your suggestion of altering a block log as a solution to the problem of the baggage that follows an editor around. I'm not saying that it's not possible to alter one because obviously it happened but I thought it was an act that shouldn't be undertaken without a very good reason. But, I guess that's an invitation for someone to prove me wrong! Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 03:55, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

I no longer have oversight access so can't check the logs for myself, but I believe the incident you're remembering is when someone (I think Giano but I may be wrong) was blocked for such obviously perverse reasons they complained and successfully got the log redacted. Any admin has the technical ability to blank log entries and any oversighter has the technical ability to redact them completely (this is the log-redaction interface if you want to try it out on the long-suffering User:ThisIsaTest). It's forbidden by policy at the moment except in a few exceptional circumstances ("Blocked because this user is obviously a pedophile" would be an obvious example of an oversightable block log entry), but policy can be rewritten.

At the moment the primary reason we don't redact block logs even when the admin has obviously made a mistake (the admin who thought "sycophant" was a swear word is the classic case, and yes that really happened), it's deemed inappropriate to remove the block from the log even though it's detrimental to the incorrectly-blocked editor, because we need to preserve the record of the admin's mistakes so Arbcom know whether to take action against them. My suggestion was to make the log asymmetrically editable and automatically expire on one side; thus admins who've screwed up would still be unable to hide their mistakes, but people who'd obviously been blocked in error wouldn't have shit like this in their log for people to point at and say "hey, look at the length of their block log, no smoke without fire", and the promise that the block will drop off the log (while still remaining on the admin's log should it ever need to be referenced) after a certain period of good conduct would incentivize people who'd been blocked for good reason to keep their noses clean in future.

Forgive the slight statement of the obvious, but "a record is still kept of the penalty having been imposed but it's removed from your public record if an appeal rules it to have been imposed in error, and even if legitimately imposed ceases to be publicly visible after a set period of good conduct" is the way pretty much every legal system in the world (and certainly the common-law and Napoleonic legal systems which form the background of almost every en-wiki editor's experience) handles everything from penalty points on a driving license, to the impact of default on your credit rating, to outright criminal convictions. This wasn't some wacky hippy-dippy notion of mine, but an attempt to drag Wikipedia's definitions of "justice" and "fairness" into line with reality's. ‑ Iridescent 06:04, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

It was Giano, the case was named after him, and it was an outgrowth of the pedophilia userbox wheel war. I'm about 90% certain that the block log entry was expunged by a developer, Jamesday, but I can't find any evidence of this. Graham87 09:54, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

I'm certain enough that here's a ping. I checked the server admin log archives, just in case, but no dice there, it seems. Graham87 10:07, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

I can't find any hard evidence (I'm sure I read it onwiki *somewhere*), but this is an interesting thread about it. The block logs were expunged late in 2006 and log suppression couldn't be carried out by oversighters until much later. Graham87 11:43, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

FWIW, I consider Lourdes contributions to Kudpung’s case to be admirable, reasonable and well considered. Whilst I am someone who I guess is seem to be a complainant, I would hope that Lourdes does not get targeted by anyone participating in the case. Certainly it will not come from me. Anyone who does decide to hold a grudge because of this case should consider their own actions very carefully. Speaking for myself, if I see evidence of this then I will step up to oppose such behaviour.

Incidentally, thank you for your well reasoned comments given above. - Chris.sherlock (talk) 19:49, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

I've certainly had issues with your earlier incarnations in the past (to put it mildly; it's not long since I described your 2010 resignation as "the Platonic ideal of a flounce") and opposed your unblock last year, but I will say I think your conduct throughout this incident has been exemplary. Assuming you were telling the truth about not reacting well to stress and wanting to keep a low profile and just get on with things (something I have no reason to doubt) it can't be easy from your point of view to have a third party drag you to Arbcom to use as a piece of evidence in an effort to get a third editor into trouble. Wikipedia could do with having more people who can grasp the concept that there are real people behind those goofy usernames, and that the appropriate reactions to someone doing something which is potentially inappropriate are "Is what they're doing actually inappropriate or am I being oversensitive?" and "I'm worried you might be doing something wrong, is there anything I can do to help?", not "Great, here's an opportunity to get someone who has a different opinion to me into trouble!". FWIW, the workshop has closed so I won't comment there, but I'm fairly certain Kudpung's those who use their claims of PSTD (sic) as an excuse for their behaviour to insult, harass, and bait admins in the hope of a reaction they can complain about, or get away with paid editing was nothing to do with you but was a reaction to this statement; you weren't on Wikipedia during the period in question so you may not be aware, but Missvain was one of Wikipedia's highest-profile paid editing scandals because even though what she did was relatively minor, she was an employee of the WMF when she was caught, and Kudpung has long been one of those arguing for harsher sanctions against people abusing their positions at Wikipedia/Wikimedia for profit. ‑ Iridescent 06:04, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

Thank you for your kind words. From my point of view, I was quite unwell at the time and I don't think I hold any grudges. I actually respect your viewpoint, though for obvious reasons disagree - it was an unusual situation. If anything, saying something directly, regardless of how difficult or hard it may be, holds my respect so whilst I'm not sure how I handled things at the time (it's a bit of a blur), I appreciate you said it to me directly.

FWIW, I'm trying to keep a low profile, though I probably put my foot in it with the NPP page patrol noticeboard. It was only later that I found out about Missvain's history, but actually if I had to do things again I don't believe I would change my position on her current work. I believe she does great work and I don't think anyone has highlighted or found that she has made the same mistake again.

In terms of the ArbCom case, I decided early that Kudpung is actually a good admin with a few issues. I kept my evidence to a minimum to note the issues and on the Workshop page I have tried to highlight his many good qualities and totally oppose him losing adminship. - Chris.sherlock (talk) 10:15, 8 February 2020 (UTC)

Regarding Missvain I tend to lean more towards your position than Kudpung's, but (assuming the "PTSD" remark was directed at her rather than you, which I think was almost certainly the case) I can certainly consider his comment valid and not any kind of unreasonable personal attack. It's not in doubt that she brought Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation into disrepute—here's an example of mainstream press coverage at the time—and her comment on the case page could certainly be interpreted as "the fact that I got caught red-handed taking bribes caused me stress, so from now on nobody is allowed to criticize anything I do". To someone like Kudpung, one of whose main areas of activity for the last decade has been trying to strengthen Wikipedia's safeguards against spammers, a statement like that is inevitably going to be a red rag to a bull, while this situation with Kudpung must get resolved to ensure there are more Missvain's in the future is deflection in the extreme bordering on personal attacks.

Again, I don't know how much you missed in your absence, but there's a meta-issue here which everyone is trying to avoid mentioning for fear of reopening old wounds. A few years ago a well-intentioned project to improve coverage of women on Wikipedia caused a lot of problems; people were in good faith creating thousands—literally—of extremely poorly-written and poorly-sourced biographies under the impression that they were being helpful. This in turn caused a great deal of bad feeling, as the "Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced—whether the material is negative, positive, neutral, or just questionable—should be removed immediately and without waiting for discussion" policy meant that Articles for Deletion and CAT:PROD were suddenly flooded with biographies of women, giving the impression that Wikipedia was dominated by a gang of sexists obsessed with deleting any mentions of women. This in turn got picked up by the media (there's good reason to think that the reason it was picked up by the media is that elements within the WMF were intentionally and selectively briefing the press in an effort to tarnish the reputation of editors to whom they'd taken a dislike), which meant that new page patrollers who were correctly enforcing the BLP policy, and admins who happened to be working the deletion queues, got bombarded with abuse both on- and off-wiki. The net result is that seeing an editor suddenly start producing a large number of stubby biographies of women is one of the things that raises immediate red flags to new page patrollers, and will immediately prompt the patroller to start reviewing the writer's other recent creations to see if they're potentially problematic.

Mobile uploads, 2013. Only those in blue (22.9%) were deemed non-problematic.

Snapshot of problem vs non-problem mobile uploads during a week in 2014.

Snapshots of Commons statistics during the selfie-pocalypse of 2013–14. At one point, the proportion of uploads deemed problematic reached 100%.

It happens to be biographies of women at the moment, but it could be anything; it happens whenever someone tries to stimulate editing in a particular area without getting buy-in from the volunteers who have to patrol the articles. We had exactly the same issue a few years ago when the India Education Program caused us to be flooded with poor-quality stubs about India, and Commons had it in 2013–14 when well-intentioned additions of "easy upload" features on the mobile site led to the selfie-pocalypse. ‑ Iridescent 11:15, 8 February 2020 (UTC)

Ouch! No, I wasn't around for this, that sounds extremely difficult for NPP members. I can't speak to Kudpung's motives other than what I've seen, but in the case of Missvain I can see how he might be suspicious of her but I really looked at the articles themselves that sparked all of this and whilst they are somewhat more obscure than other articles, each of them were (at least IMO) fairly well sourced and it was pretty easy to check their notability. I think to some degree we need to forgive past transgressions - from what I can see of Missvain, she is always going to be stained with what she did before, and I think that whilst this is understandable it's also unfair. From what I can tell, she won't ever do this again, and the material she does write is of good quality. There is nothing since she was removed from the WMF as an employee that she has done (at least so far as I can see) that would show she is going to ever participate in paid editing ever again.

In terms of outreach programs, this is more tricky. For the Women In Red program, my concern over this was Kudpung's response to GorillaWarfare's request to be called by her username when mentioned amongst a bunch of men — namely he said that he pulled out of the Women In Red program solely because of the request made by GW. Nevertheless, I can see why people would be extremely trigger-happy on articles about women. That seems like an unfortunate side-effect of an excellent project, along with the well-intentioned promotion of said project. It seems like the solution to this is to find a way to involve NPP members with any project that tried to reduce systemic-bias via article creation drives. Maybe an NPP editor of good reputation and influence might be able to find a way of helping such projects. It seems to me that we could be losing good articles on important topics if we aren't careful, not to mention the stress of NPP members going about their duties and getting abused for it :(

In terms of the PTSD comment, I don't think it is Missvain. I mentioned PTSD in a comment, but I also had private correspondence with Kudpung where I had to explain the situation to him as it was directly related to what happened to me after my mental health issues around Wikipedia several years ago. I also explained to him that whilst I'm not getting paid, I have a friend whose aquarium I help at (it relaxes me, I get to see spectacluar fish, I get given free fish and I enjoy my friend and the company of his employees) and I've needed to carefully explain to him about how he needs to contribute to Wikipedia as it is a bit of a landmine. I've also been contributing to articles on Bettas, which is really his specialty and he has an extensive library of reliable encyclopedias, magazines and books written by expert biologists about a variety of fish (see my declaration of interests). This is why I suspect that I was being referred to. If I hadn't been so concerned about getting into any further conflict with Kudpung, I'd probably have asked him to clarify if he was referring to me. As it was, I only talked about it because a diff was provided in the workshop page - personally I thought the outburst came from stress and initially I missed the "paid editing and PTSD" comment, but even when I was pretty sure he was referring to me I figured I would just let it go (hopefully, I did so sufficiently!). Chris.sherlock (talk) 11:56, 8 February 2020 (UTC)

A question about ArbCom's use of the term "admonished" came up recently and I checked the records at WP:RFAR/C. It turns out the Committee was already using this term by 2005, well before I got involved. (I was somewhat relieved I didn't introduce it myself.) Regards, Newyorkbrad (talk) 20:57, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

• I've seen multiple people who are confused when a non-admin is "admonished" because they assume it's WikiSpeak for "administrator punished" – So...
  • Ad-mon-ish: When an administrator is going to monitor you, but only half-heartedly, so they're going to just monitor-ish you.
  • Ad-vise: When an administrator puts your balls (or, for 10% of editors, correspondingly valued parts) in a vise.

And so on. EEng 05:46, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

Remember, we have a lot of people for whom English isn't their first language who aren't going to be aware of obscure archaic legalisms (I can honestly say that I don't recall ever seeing anyone use the word "admonished" outside of Wikipedia, and it appears to have gone out of fashion sometime around the Glorious Revolution of 1689). Given Wikipedia's habit of concatenating abbreviations to create newspeak ("arbcom" being the most pertinent example here), I'm not going to judge anyone who makes the "administrator punished" mistake. ‑ Iridescent 06:19, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

It is used in US legal talk, which is probably how it slipped into Wikipedia parlance. On that note, I remember the reaction of people outside Wikipedia -- including Ward Cunningham -- 10 years ago when Wikipedia admins were described as "wheel-warring". ("I hadn't heard that term in years, not since my old UNIX sysadmin days.") -- llywrch (talk) 00:24, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

break: Rant about unconscious systemic bias

I've no doubt at all that it came from US legal usage. I've equally no doubt that "well, you should have all been aware that we're using this obscure word in the way it's used in the US legal system" is an example of the unconscious systemic bias on English Wikipedia that equates "the way things are done in the United States" with "universal cultural values", a tendency which has always been on Wikipedia to some extent but appears to be accelerating.

If you assume that every time people complain about this they're just (right-wingers who think American values are too biased towards positive action) / (left-wingers who think American cultural values are too biased towards liberalism*) / (anti-American nationalists) / (Trump supporters and/or alt-righters who see Wikipedia as non-neutral and want to undermine it) / (hard-leftists who see anything American as inherently evil)Delete according to personal bias venting, have some actual numbers:
*"Liberalism" in the rest-of-the-world sense, not the American sense.

The WMF have hidden the "editors by country" statistics (literally; the relevant link on the Wikistats page has been replaced by a red "Data no longer available" notice), but the proportion of editors in the US is unlikely to be lower than the 40% of pageviews that come from the US. It will almost certainly be higher, since "people who understand the language enough to read English Wikipedia but aren't confident enough to edit in it" will be disproportionately higher in non-English-speaking countries, let's assume that roughly 50% of very active editors are American, something which is borne out by randomly sampling (e.g.) Special:ListAdmins, Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by featured article nominations, Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee/History#Current and former members etc.

There are six former admins listed at Wikipedia:Former administrators/reason/for cause as having been desysopped as the result of Arbcom cases in the past 12 months: Alex Shih (Taiwan & Canada), BrownHairedGirl (Ireland), Enigmaman (US), Fram (Belgium), Rama (France), RHaworth (England). In addition, Wikipedia:Arbitration/Index/Cases/2019#2019 shows four other editors sanctioned by Arbcom in the past 12 months: Curly Turkey (Canada), GiantSnowman (England), Icewhiz (Israel*), Volunteer Marek (Poland). By my reckoning that means that (excluding switch-flipping things like emergency desysops of compromised accounts), 90% of actions taken against editors by the Arbitration Committee in the past year have been against non-Americans.
*I'm not 100% certain about Icewhiz, someone I'm not familiar with, but their userpage certainly used to have a "native Hebrew speaker" userbox.

I'm sure that the existing Arbcom aren't intentionally acting as agents of systemic bias and would be horrified and insulted at the suggestion, but I'm equally sure that this is illustrating a genuine issue. I don't (pace my comments a few paragraphs above) really believe the Arbs are intentionally trying to conduct a purge of anyone who doesn't subscribe to a specifically American set of cultural priorities and values. What I do believe is that there's some serious unconscious profiling going on and that we now have enough of a dataset to demonstrate that people who don't subscribe to a specifically American set of cultural priorities and values are both more likely to have cases filed against them in the first place, to have the case against them accepted rather than dismissed out of hand, and to have the case result in sanctions. (I don't intend to conduct the same count on the morass of Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Enforcement/Archive—let alone wade in the cesspit of Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchives—but I'd be willing to bet you'll find the same pattern of sanctions being both disproportionally requested and disproportionately applied against non-Americans there as well.)

I'm not sure what we could—or should—actually do about any of this. There's a legitimate argument to be made that the whole "global project" notion is inherently unworkable (anyone remember the "how do we define offensive language?" arguments of a few years ago?) and that English Wikipedia is ultimately destined to become American Centrist Wikipedia. Unless and until that happens, our routinely defaulting to "American values" as our definition of normality, both in terms of editor interactions, in terms of deciding what constitutes a neutral point of view, and in terms of defining notability, is something that's going to keep causing problems and we're going to keep having repeats of this whole sorry episode. ‑ Iridescent 10:17, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

Huh. I did try to run a statistical test on whether 5-1 has a different mean than 687-458 and this calculator believes that any deviation isn't statistically significant on p=0.05. Perhaps Opabinia regalis knows better about such calculations. Assuming that the mathematical formulations are actually relevant, of course - in my experience debating questions of bias with statistics is not that widely accepted. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 11:07, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

It's 9–1, not 5–1; that is, arbcom took some kind of punitive action against 10 people in the past year, only one of who was American (and that was Enigmaman, a case which couldn't have ended in any other outcome). Sure, statistics aren't perfect, but when it comes to demonstrating systemic bias they're often the only tool in the toolbox. (There are more chief executives of FTSE100 companies called Steve then there are non-white chief executives of FTSE100 companies; I have no doubt at all that every selection panel in every case could provide evidence that they made what they felt was the correct decision each time, and it's only when you look at the statistics as a whole that the systemic bias becomes visible.) There's probably someone around with statistical expertise and enough of an obsession with Wikipedia to actually bother going through 16 years of arb cases (and maybe at least sampling "blocks of established editors" in general, at Wikipedia:Editing restrictions#Active editing restrictions, and at how those with "no action" or "admonished" outcomes differ from those who get blocks, bans and desysops) to see if there's a coherent trend line or if 2019 was just a blip, and whether there's a statistically significant difference between blocks/topic bans placed by the community and those placed by the committee, but that person isn't me. (This is possibly the first time in the history of Wikipedia when anyone has ever had the chance to use the sentence "This is an occasion where it would be useful if Poetlister were around".) ‑ Iridescent 13:30, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

5-1 because I only compared deadmins to an (assumed on the basis of the pageviews) distribution of admins, not all sanctions to an assumed distribution of all editors as I can't count the latter. Statistical tests aren't just about proportions, but also about the raw numbers. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 14:05, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

I think it might be better if you spelled it de-admins, since deadmins admits a startling reading. EEng 16:16, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

Another test of the US/Non US ratio is to look at the times when backlogs such as at CSD peak and trough. As an admin who is based in London it is pretty obvious that our active admin cadre has a tendency towards being least active when most of North America is asleep. Also an interesting axis to chart this on would be age, I'm struggling to think of many admins who I know to be older than me but who could be described as uncontentious. ϢereSpielChequers 14:34, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

Needless to say the WMF don't appear to make it available (for a firm who spend so much time talking about transparency, they sure do spend a lot of time hiding previously-public reports), but they'll certainly have detailed figures for activity levels at varying time periods as they need to know when to schedule maintenance to cause the least impact. If you want to watch the server load rise and fall in real-time as people wake and sleep, head on over here; thats for the WMF as a whole rather than just en-wiki, but en-wiki is so much larger than the others that the impact of North America waking and sleeping is clearly visible. There's also a clear weekly cycle in the number of active editors, for what that's worth. ‑ Iridescent 15:00, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

That's a very interesting analysis, Iri, and I think there's probably some truth in it. Certainly the issue of cultural differences came up during FramGate, in particular how the "San Francisco mindset" that dominates at WMF isn't reflective of the norms of the whole global community. That said though, I don't think it's really fundamentally the British way to shout and yell and be abusive to other people. Sure, there are some who do that, but my personal view is it's unacceptable, be it on Twitter, Wikipedia or real life. And there are plenty of examples of British admins who've AFAIK never come close to being hauled before Arbcom for civility reasons - yourself and WereSpielChequers included - so it can hardly be said to be inexorably baked into the culture.  — Amakuru (talk) 15:06, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

I don't think it's really fundamentally the British way to shout and yell and be abusive to other people...well, not if they're actually British, certainly. ——SN54129 15:10, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

(edit conflict) I had a long post that EC'd with NYB below, but basically while I agree that there is a systematic bias towards the US/Canada, I'd actually argue that from the perspective of someone in North America, I've always had the impression that British editors were the most over-represented statistically amongst the highly active editors crowd. I'm not sure how accurate the pie chart here is, but I think we likely have more than 16% of "established editors" who are British. Now, while North Americans account for approximately 70% of native-speakers you're going to have them be the majority on any project that is striving to be global in nature and uses English, so there is a need to educate on cultural norms, but if we're going off your 50% assumption, that's actually less than what you'd expect from majority speaking countries. The South Asian English speakers throw off that number a bit, and I think it'd be interesting to look at figures with them included, but my suspicion here is that we probably do have less Americans as a percentage of editors than we have Americans as a percentage of native speakers. At least amongst the old guard. TonyBallioni (talk) 15:41, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

This is probably veering off topic a little, but from my personal experience the concept of "mother tongue" isn't actually as well-defined as one might think it is... List of countries by English-speaking population gives up on the native-speaker figures at a certain point, with no figures given for countries such as Kenya. I know many Kenyans personally and a good proportion of them are actually unable to give a single answer to the question "what is your native language". Many actually grow up tri-lingual, with a mixture of English, Swahili, and whatever the tribal language of their family, ending up fluent in all three from an early age. Thus the figures for the United States may not actually be as high as the 67% implied by that list above, although you're probably right that Brits punch above their weight more generally, as the "other 50%" alluded to are I suspect overwhelmingly not from the African continent.  — Amakuru (talk) 15:56, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

Fair point, and the ubiquity of English in cross-language group communications is certainly a confounding variable.

Since English in the international context reminded me of this, I’ll go ahead and do the shamelessly allowed canvassing for the Steward Election, which starts tomorrow. There are some great candidates running and in my view some less than great ones, but having strong en.wiki turnout will be helpful. Stewards do a ton of heavy lifting behind the scenes, especially with CUs, and having more that are friendly to en.wiki and don’t think that it’s evil would be useful. TonyBallioni (talk) 16:14, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

Oh, thanks for that Tony. I will have to look at the candidates and see if I can form some opinions on them... interesting that only one of them is from en.wiki. Is that the way it usually is at the Steward elections?  — Amakuru (talk) 16:22, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

En-wiki editors usually do badly in cross-WMF elections like Steward and Board, particularly if they're monoglot and not active on at least one other project. Don't underestimate how much the other wikis hate us—we have a reputation for being a pack of arrogant and aggressive louts. ‑ Iridescent 23:57, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

@TonyBallioni: There's certainly a glaring omission from that list wrt en.wp's representation. Never mind the Dutch bod! ——SN54129 16:43, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

• On who edits from where, see this report in last November's Signpost. Prima facie, active (100+ pcm edits) are 42.9% from the US. Of course according to the Blessed Dr. Jess Wade MBE (aka User:Jesswade88), "90% of Wikipedia is written by white males in America" (interview on Woman's Hour BBC Radio 4, last 5 December). Johnbod (talk) 20:15, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

Sorry for getting it wrong, good stats. I don't have an MBE or think I'm 'Blessed'. Have a nice weekend! Jesswade88 (talk) 22:51, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

My mistake! BEM not MBE. Johnbod (talk) 23:33, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

Anything I write here will come off as apologetics for ArbCom, even though I've disagreed with several of the decisions being discussed here. (For someone who's been depicted in the press as a leader of the Committee, I cast a hell of a lot of dissenting votes.) Nonetheless, I am not convinced by that the "anti-non-American" "bias" here is too much more than a happenstance of what requests for arbitration have been brought. A statistical fluke is especially possible in an era when the Committee hears 5 cases a year (as most of you know, it used to be dozens). Also, skimming the proposed decision pages for the past several cases, it doesn't appear that the U.S. arbitrators have voted for harsher remedies against non-U.S.-based admins than the non-U.S. arbitrators; if anything, it may be the opposite (although I have to be hedge that because there are some arbs for whom I'm not sure where they're from or whether they've revealed that information on-wiki).

Returning to the word "admonish," I checked the decisions from 2005 and as Iridescent might have guessed, it appears that the word was introduced into the lexicon by Fred Bauder, who was of course an American lawyer. That said, until this conversation I have never heard anyone suggest that the word "admonish" might actually be unfamiliar to people—as opposed to being pompous or overly formal, which I have heard before. On the other hand, "wheel-warring" was a brand-new term to me when I first read it here. (When I first started looking at the Wikipedia arbitration process, the fact that a key case was captioned "Pedophile userbox wheel war" was more than a little surprising on more than one level. But I digress). Regards, Newyorkbrad (talk) 15:30, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

Re-read what I wrote; despite the fact that I sometimes give the appearance of spouting a stream of consciousness, I usually choose my words carefully. I'm not alleging that the committee is (necessarily) biased; I'm alleging that the process by which cases get as far as arbcom is biased. That is, that either non-US editors are more likely to be considered so problematic their cases need to be punted upstairs to arbcom; or that the culture of Wikipedia has such an inbuilt subconscious US bias that non-Americans are more likely to fall foul of its social conventions and thus be deemed problematic; or that the committee are more likely to accept cases involving non-Americans; or what's most likely, some combination of the three. ‑ Iridescent 23:36, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

Iridescent, that's an excellent study! However, where do you get the nationalities of sanctioned editors? BHG and RHaworth say so on their user pages, but Enigmaman, Rama, and Fram don't. Even besides Icewhiz I would be surprised if Volunteer Marek solely identified with Poland, as he's quite active in US politics. --GRuban (talk) 21:32, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

Enigmaman was (and for all I know still is) an active member of the NYC group (NYB can confirm that) and listed himself as living in the Eastern Time zone; while I suppose he could theoretically have commuted from Canada each time it appears unlikely. Rama is conceivably French-Swiss rather than French—in 2006 he said he was then living in Switzerland, but certainly is active in Wikimédia France and organised the Paris photographic contest among other France-based events. I'm not sure what "he's quite active in US politics" particularly proves—Ealdgyth and I have between us probably written upwards of a hundred Featured Articles about England but it doesn't make either of us English—and in the absence of evidence to the contrary we can only go on self-identification; in Marek's case the "This user comes from Poland" and the "this user is a native speaker of Polish" userboxes. I find it hard to believe you really need me to waste my time finding a diff for Fram—there are probably members of uncontacted tribes in New Guinea who could write a biography of Fram by now—but for the benefit of the tape here's Fram saying "I'm Belgian". ‑ Iridescent 23:31, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

Thank you! Personally, I was born in and am a native speaker of Russian (and have the userbox), however am pretty American for most intents and purposes. So naturally tend to assume there are many like me. --GRuban (talk) 01:11, 8 February 2020 (UTC)

(ec) I knew that Fram was from Belgium, but forgot how, but it's easy. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 23:34, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

That could equally be read as that he's a fan of Belgian comics, rather than that he's a Belgian who's a fan of comics. The diff I give above is unambiguous. ‑ Iridescent 23:40, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

learning English, - you are right, but I didn't even see that it's ambiguous ;) - I know only one arbcase case well, and have no interest in more knowledge in the field. 4 people were named in the decision, 2 restricted, both European, 2 admonished, one European, one Canadian. All rescinded by 2016. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 23:50, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

• I'm going to throw out a point about actual numbers proving an unconscious bias: composition of the ArbCom, the body that actually implements bans & sanctions. Looking at the people comprising that group , of the 15 members of the ArbCom, 7 live in the US, 4 in the UK (actually 3, we have one Brit expat in Denmark), 2 in Canada, & 1 each in Australia & Germany. (I admit this has a margin of error: not all Wikipedians identify which country they live in, & 3 cases I was forced to guess where they live based on times that person was active.) This works out to 47% of the ArbCom is from the US, which is roughly equivalent to the guesstimate of the percentage of US Wikipedians -- 40%, as Iridescent stated above. The Commonwealth members at any time could unite to balance any US-bias on the ArbCom, leaving it to our German representative to break the tie.
  And may I repeat myself by emphasizing that despite how it looks from the outside, the US does not have a uniform culture to oppress the rest of the world with? My home town of Portland, Oregon is so infested by overrun by supplied with strip clubs & pot shops that one might think our political & cultural views are much closer to a Dutch city than to a fellow US city such as Atlanta, Phoenix or even San Francisco. -- llywrch (talk) 22:35, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

This is an interesting thread, and seeing llywrch's numbers one thing I do want to say is that I don't think they're quite accurate. I'll leave it to individual arbitrators to disclose (or not) their origins but they're off just based on what's disclosed on-wiki already. Another thing I thought I'd point out is that over time, I think Canadians have tended to be over-represented on the committee (relative to percentage of editors from Canada), and that's relevant to the thesis that there is a systemic bias in favour of "American" values. Outside of North America, I can see how Canadians would be lumped in with the Americans, but that wouldn't necessarily happen in North America. If one lumps in the Canadians with Americans, then while the original thesis doesn't fall apart, the numbers aren't as striking. Contrast that with llwyrch's thoughs that that Commonwealth members would balance out US-bias. Maxim_(talk) 23:06, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

Yeah, I count 4 Canadians. TonyBallioni (talk) 23:58, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

TraMOOC Project

How about: "highly competent partners" or "leading researchers". The spamming is not done by the European Commission, although they are kind of responsible for it, as they require projects to publicize themselves as much as possible. Often, a Wikipdia page is one of the "deliverables" of these projects. It's the project participants that make these pages. Indeed, the major contributor here is a SPA, who had another article on an EU project deleted (that one after AfD). The sourcing is decidedly weak, too (but that is not in the remit of CSD, of course). And you know as well as I do that promotional editing occurs regardless of financial motives or current interest. So, yes, this was seriously a G11 proposal for speedy deletion. --Randykitty (talk) 18:39, 8 February 2020 (UTC)

That page clearly doesn't serve only to promote or publicise an entity, person, product, or idea, and as such there's no way G11 is ever going to apply. If you think it's an inappropriate topic for coverage in Wikipedia (I have no opinion as it's a topic on which I have no interest whatsoever), Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/TraMOOC Project is thataway. ‑ Iridescent 18:45, 8 February 2020 (UTC)

License attribution requirements

I'm looking for another opinion, in case I'm wrong:

Imagine that I merge an article. I copy some content from a stub into a section in a bigger article, and redirect the stub title to the target. I use "Copied to Target" for the one edit summary and "Copied from Stub, which see for attribution" for the other edit summary. Good?

Later, someone edits Target. The end result is that 0% of Stub's original content in any current version of any Wikipedia article.

Question: Can I (i.e., some admin) now delete Stub, since the current version of Target does not need the attribution/history at Stub? Or does WP:PATT's "must not be deleted" apply forever and without exception regardless of current content, e.g., in case someone decides to copy content from the previous revisions? And whatever the answer is, is this reliably known to any admin, or does the practical result depend upon who's asked? WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:02, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

Why delete Stub, if its title is a good redirect to Target? And if it isn't a good redirect to Target, it shouldn't've been left as a bluelink in the first place. If I were coming into the situation cold, I'd move the history into some other redirect without relevant history, and preserve attribution from there. If you're concerned about the edit summary then being wrong, well, {{merged-from}} is more reliable and flexible anyway. —Cryptic 10:22, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

There's been a story going around RFD that a redirect such as Stub should be deleted if the current version of Target does not mention the word Stub. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:28, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

Redirects are cheap, so I'm told. Besides, anyone who is concerned that a given redirect must be deleted needs a dose of common sense to understand that the matter of a pointless redirect isn't worth fighting over. If people object to its deletion -- even if they are a band of wingnuts, trolls & POV-pushers, the best course is to drop the matter, wait for a while, then reconsider whether its still worth deleting. Repeat if needed, but best is know when to move on. -- llywrch (talk) 19:21, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

@Llywrch, the "redirects are cheap" thing is good in theory, but in practice has limits and sometimes it's sensible to delete redirects if they're serving only to confuse readers. Imagine we have an biography of Llywrch but not of WhatamIdoing. Further imagine that this thread somehow gets covered by the press, and User:Alice entirely legitimately adds "in 2020, Llywrch had a disagreement with WhatamIdoing about licensing terms" to your biography. User:Bob then sees this and in good faith creates a redirect from WhatamIdoing to Llywrch on the grounds that this is the only mention of WAID anywhere on Wikipedia so it's the only legitimate target. User:Carlos then comes along, correctly decides that this thread is not relevant enough to your life to warrant inclusion in your biography and takes the paragraph in question out. We'd then be left with a situation in which three editors, all acting in good faith, have led to the creation of a wholly irrelevant redirect with no clue on the target article as to why it exists, so if in future someone is writing their term paper on "the early history of WhatamIdoing", Google will direct them to your biography with no explanation as to why.

This is obviously a strawman example, but it does arise reasonably frequently in reality. For example, it comes up quite often with session musicians who are redirected to a band with whom they played or an album on which they made a brief appearance, but when it's later decided that it's inappropriate for the target article to mention someone who had a very minor role, so the redirect is left hanging. It comes up all the damn time with ultra-minor elements or characters in TV shows/films/plays/books which aren't deemed significant enough to be mentioned in the target article but are created in good faith as redirects to whatever they appeared in. (Assuming you're not familiar with the topics, would you care to try to work out the purpose of Sneakers O'Toole, O, Draconian Devil! or Paula Ann Bland?) ‑ Iridescent 19:53, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

That was an interesting exercise. (I figured out all three in less than 15 minutes because I know how Wikipedia is created & thus know where to look. I just needed a few hours to come up with an appropriate answer.) Those three examples the first two redirects reference a matter only someone who knows the answer would go looking for. (Much like wondering why Wikipedia doesn't state anywhere how many hallocks are in a flat of strawmen strawberries. Or why Tabula Hebena doesn't link to Constitution of the Roman Empire.) As for the third, IMHO that redirect is a bad solution to what appears to be a BLP-related problem.

But I still hold to what I wrote above: make your point, & if deletion of these stubs is opposed by the stubborn, foolish, or the trolls, Wikipedia is not harmed if you drop the matter & take another of the numerous problems then return much later. Patience is an often forgotten ally in these matters. Individuals in those three groups tend not to last, so when you try to delete it much later you won't encounter the same amount of senseless resistance. Drop if another crop of boneheads try to shout you down, rinse & repeat. Either garbage like this will eventually be removed, or someone will justify adding the content back. (And accomplishing the latter is far less likely than someone adding content that explains the examples I mention.) -- llywrch (talk) 07:21, 12 February 2020 (UTC)

No. You’d need to either do a dummy edit listing the unique authors of the deleted stub as an edit summary in the history or create Talk:Foo/merge attribution with a list of authors and an edit summary pointing to it. Wikipedia attribution is done via page history, which is why the template Cryptic mentions is optional but edit summary attribution isn’t. This is all of course theoretical as to my knowledge no CC license has ever been enforced in a court and they’re probably unenforceable to begin with (how do you prove damages for something you’ve intentionally made free for anyone to use...). TonyBallioni (talk) 13:41, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

But you both think that the attribution must be preserved somehow, even if the current version of Target does not include any words from Stub, right? (TonyBallioni, you'd claim that your moral right to recognized as the author has been thwarted. Not all damages involve money.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:28, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

It depends. If the old content was incrementally edited away, the current version is usually a derivative work of the merged one even if it doesn't have any words in common. If it was just reverted back out wholesale, or was never integrated into the rest of the article, deletion might be acceptable; if someone then wanted to revert to the merged version, the onus would be on them to somehow provide attribution.

Though it's inconvenient, you can still get a list of editors of deleted pages, even without admin rights, from the database dumps or from tools like quarry (example for a page I salted sort-of-recently). The edit summaries aren't there, though, so you're out of luck if the merged-from page was itself merged-to at some point and attributed via edit summary. —Cryptic 18:03, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

Since past versions are still visible, though, I would think it would still be necessary to provide attribution for the older content. isaacl (talk) 18:10, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

Yes. You need to provide attribution for everything, making a link in the page history. If the article has more than a few authors the easiest way to do this is a subpage. I did one of these methods a few years ago when one of the ARS crowd tried to game the system on some spam AfD by merging two sentences into a new article and then claimed that we couldn’t delete it despite the consensus being very clear. TonyBallioni (talk) 18:26, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

Probably enforceable but as I imagine virtually all editor contributions are not registered for copyright (unless the editor is copying from their own registered, copyrighted work), only actual damages can be recovered, which means it's not worth anyone's while to sue over. However, takedown notices are cheap and annoying to comply with, so honouring the licensing terms is still worthwhile. isaacl (talk) 18:07, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

Yeah. This is more my point, it’s practically unenforceable in a way that would have a meaningful impact on a party breaching the license. CC licenses (with the possible exception of NC variants) amount to little more than “Please give me credit, thanks” wrapped in legalese. This is evidenced by the fact that there hasn’t been a single court case enforcing them to date. Sure, takedown notices are annoying, but if someone was trying to get these enforced and claim damages, they would spend more money than it’s worth trying to enforce them, making the license restrictions basically meaningless in a practical context. You might be able to get a declaratory judgement declaring someone the creator of the work, or other forms of equitable relief, but money damages would almost certainly not be awarded, which means no one really cares outside of the free culture movement.

That being said, it doesn’t change the fact that we should comply with the license for the moral reasons and the legal theory behind it. It’s the right thing to do. My point is more that CC licenses are much more moral documents than legal documents that have a chance of being enforced. TonyBallioni (talk) 18:26, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

The CC licenses, including the attribution requirement, have been sued over but not really past the district court level. However, other free licenses have been thoroughly litigated, including Jacobsen v. Katzer, which ruled public licenses to be enforceable. The lack of money changing hands in open source licensing should not be presumed to mean that there is no economic consideration, however. There are substantial benefits, including economic benefits, to the creation and distribution of copyrighted works under public licenses that range far beyond traditional license royalties. As Isaccl mentioned, nobody's paying the fees to register their contributions with the Copyright Office, so statutary damages probably wouldn't apply. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 18:56, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

In the context of individual contributors licensing out their contributions under a FOSS license, and so the compiled whole is reused under licensing from all of the contributors, I agree it's pretty hard for any individual to sue someone else for failing to comply with the license. (Which is why no one can really go after all of the self-published books on Amazon that simply grab a bunch of Wikipedia pages without providing attribution.) But the more usual case in the FOSS world is that contributors assign copyright to a co-ordinating person or organization, who in turn provides the license for reuse. In that case, with one entity in charge, violations of FOSS licenses can be pursued more effectively. isaacl (talk) 21:40, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

• I'm okay with doing the right thing just because it's the right thing to do. I don't generally need someone to threaten me with a lawsuit to get me to do the right thing.
• For context, aside from what appears to be an ongoing problem with RFD regulars never having read the RFD rules (Editor with a couple thousand contributions to RFD: "Wait, it says we're supposed to care about that? Since when?" Me: "Since 2004."), is that back in the day, people created articles about every little thing in Tolkein's famous books, and many of those got merged/redirected into lists or larger subjects, and those pages got edited and merged and split and re-merged and eventually redirected into even more general pages, and a couple of months ago, someone at AFD decided to blank [NB: not "delete"] and redirect Minor places in Middle-earth (formerly the List of Minor places in Middle-earth) to Middle-earth#Geography, and now RFD is filled with a bunch of proposals to delete these redirects because the minor places aren't all mentioned by name in the (unchanged) ==Geography== section. "Not mentioned" isn't officially a reason for deletion (that, too, seems to surprise the non-admin RFD regulars; WP:Nobody reads the directions), but I think that battle can only be won if we find a very stubborn editor who has time to post to every single RFD that this isn't a valid reason for deletion, until people learn, by word of mouth, not to say that. However, the license thing is a different kettle of fish. No True Wikipedian wants to screw up the license, and if this screws up the license, then (a) any redirects involved in a merge ought to be kept, and (b) I suspect that even the noms would agree that it's best to keep them.

It sounds like deleting these would screw up the license. But I'm not getting the sense that we're confident that any random closing admin would know this. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:28, 12 February 2020 (UTC)

Perhaps you should get a biggish flashing-lights notice put at the top of RFD pages for a while. I expect once the actual rules & rationales have sunk in they will be happy to adopt them. And/or target a few of the regulars & make sure they've got the thing straight. Johnbod (talk) 04:21, 12 February 2020 (UTC)

I have thought about a bot to post something like "Notice to admin: This redirect is 16 years old. Policy Says™ it's harmful to delete old redirects." With my policy-writer's hat on, the votes from some RFD regulars and the written rules are so different that I don't know which one to fix, but it does need to be fixed.

For this matter, though, I don't think it should be fixed at RFD. I think it should be fixed at WP:PATT or one of the deletion policies. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:55, 13 February 2020 (UTC)

Oh. I wasn't going to mention this here, but I see the matter of the Tolkien/Middle-earth redirects got mentioned. I raised this issue of attribution in one of the AfDs, but the point was mostly ignored. I ended up being less exercised about the attribution (though that is important) as in the fact that deletion of really old stuff is akin to rewriting 'what happened' (or making it less visible). If this makes no sense, take a look through my recent contribs (since about the beginning of the year), or see here. (For those interested, see also here and here). In the current (less fancrufty) versions of the main articles (with heroic work by one particular editor), some of the redirects will slowly get recreated and targeted where there are small amounts of information, but whether anyone cares about the edit history is less clear. Carcharoth (talk) 15:55, 13 February 2020 (UTC)

I tend to agree with Carcharoth here. I'm not too concerned with the legal aspects of attribution—realistically, nobody is ever going to take legal action over the attribution of deleted content. (@User:WhatamIdoing, I know separation of hats is a Very Important Thing, but I'm sure if you asked User:Whatamidoing (WMF) nicely she would know who to ask at Legal to get a definitive ruling on the legality of deletion in a CC/GFDL context.) What I'd say is an issue isn't the legality, but the ethical side of rewriting the early history of Wikipedia.

This is true in terms of the history of Wikipedia itself; early Wikipedia was much less sure of its boundaries and had shedloads of pop-culture articles that would now be considered either non-notable or hopelessly fancrufty. If, for instance, we delete the history of all the pages like Sandshrew, we're masking the fact that Wikipedia had a full-length biography of every Pokemon before it had an article on Chemical weapon. Wikipedia is now reaching the age where people who weren't there at the time are going to start writing papers on its history, and rewriting its history in this way hands control of the history over to the "Wikipedia was always destined to become the world's greatest academic resource and anyone who says otherwise is just jealous!" WMF ultraloyalists like this drivel.

It's also true in terms of the histories of individual editors. I'm assuming that most of those Tolkein pages were created by one or two fans back in the early days; deleting them outright, rather than preserving the histories, will distort those editors' histories, making it look like they were far less active than they actually were. (If you want a concrete example of why this is an actual problem rather than just a thought experiment, JarlaxleArtemis wrote a lot about Dungeons & Dragons before he went off the rails. Deleting outright things like this—even though it doesn't meet Wikipedia's current notability standards and serves no useful purpose as a redirect—would mask the fact that he at one point was genuinely productive and helpful, making it much harder to assess any appeal were he ever to ask to come back.) ‑ Iridescent 07:33, 15 February 2020 (UTC)

Legal has outright refused to provide advice to editors since approximately Mike Godwin's departure. I'd probably have better luck asking the CC folks to write a blog post about it.

You're right that doing this on a large scale could affect all sorts of perceptions. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:32, 15 February 2020 (UTC)

Happy First Edit Day!

Yay, I now officially join the exalted ranks of "Grandmaster Editor First-Class". Maybe we should print T-shirts. ‑ Iridescent 07:38, 15 February 2020 (UTC)

I'm sure there are already shirts :/ Only in death does duty end (talk) 08:42, 15 February 2020 (UTC)

I'll wait two years until I'm "Vanguard Editor" before I start hanging the bunting. Have you seen the T-shirt giveaway? It's one of the most peculiar circle-jerk pages on the whole of the wiki. ‑ Iridescent 09:13, 15 February 2020 (UTC)

You sent me down on memory-lane, reclining a shirt. Better read about Elke Heidenreich's Alte Liebe, - - late Valentine ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 21:56, 15 February 2020 (UTC)

Those are some interesting pages: seeing who was nominated, who accepted, who rejected, & -- most interesting -- that none have been handed out since some time in 2018. (I guess the WMF changed the criteria for handing them out. Or ran out of money.) -- llywrch (talk) 22:29, 16 February 2020 (UTC)

Wikipedia and weather.com (abusing Iri's talk page stalkers again :)

Reading through Jo-Jo Eumerus's Coropuna again, after all the work we've done there, and thinking of how very hard it is to write in convert-heavy and number-heavy topics, I am wondering why Wikipedia can't have something akin to, for example, weather.com user preference settings. You specify in your settings whether you want to see centrigrade or farenheit. Holy cow for having to write around all these blooming converts so we can show both! Why can't we have settings for our preferences with what to see, that hide the other? WhatamIdoing? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:42, 15 February 2020 (UTC)

Probably because the folks at Phabricator will run scared at the amount of reader-facing scripting this would require. And if it's only for users, upkeep/benefit ratios are likely to be an issue. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 22:00, 15 February 2020 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Why can't it be done in general? Because Ops wants to send the same page to every (logged-out) reader.

We could probably do that for our own (logged-in editor) views via CSS. You'd probably get a Flash of unstyled content on occasion, and you'll still see everything while editing. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:03, 15 February 2020 (UTC)

Unless we're going to recode MediaWiki to vastly increase the number of magic words—which would create a vast number of false-positives (we'll look ridiculous if the software is generating references to Celsius 283, 11/9 Truth movement etc)—the only way to get this to work would be through linking the items in question each time to allow the software to recognise them as discrete entities in need of processing, or by forcing editors to use the {{convert}} template every time instead of just writing out the conversion. Have a read through Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Date delinking and the shit-ton (1.12 US shit-ton, 1.02 metric shit-tonne) of arguments generated there if you want to get a feeling for why opening this can of worms is unlikely to be met with much enthusiasm.

And dates are relatively simple compared to the mess that is measurement units; the world doesn't divide neatly into "metric", "imperial" and "US" measurement systems, and in some core en-wiki markets—most notably Britain—each person has their own idiosyncratic mix of preferred units (formulations like "1 metre 3 inches" or "miles per litre" aren't uncommon, and just try shopping for something like milk where the standard bottle sizes are pint, litre, 2-pint, 2-litre); if the only options are "all metric", "all imperial" etc, it's just going to annoy lots of people who are used to (for example) using stones as a measure of body mass but kilos as a measure of weight when shopping*, or miles for long distances and centimetres as a measure of short distance. Throw in the British habit of using Celsius for low temperatures and Fahrenheit for high temperatures ("the temperature is hovering around 1° so there could be some ice on the road, but there's a heatwave projected for next week with temperatures reaching 100°") and you're looking at a recipe for pissing off a lot of people very quickly. ‑ Iridescent 22:14, 15 February 2020 (UTC)
*This describes about 90% of the population of the UK, and the other 10% are recent immigrants; even devout advocates for standardising the measuring system will stare at you blankly if you give your weight in pounds or kilogrammes, but will stare at you equally blankly if you try to sell them a pound of potatoes instead of 450g.

I've been assuming it would only get used within the {{convert}} template. Doing it everywhere sounds undesirable. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:39, 16 February 2020 (UTC)

Even within the template, I think it would be undesirable for reasons given above. Firstly, we'd need to replace all manually-formatted instances with the template (the {{convert}} template is often substituted, since it's not as if the mile/km conversion is ever going to change and substing reduces the likelihood of hitting the template limit). Secondly, displaying both measurements is a feature, not a bug; in all the major English-speaking countries people are bilingual to some degree between measurement systems, and flip between them all the time subconsciously, and I'm virtually certain that even if we gave people the option of hiding imperial/metric/US measurements, people would switch it off almost instantly. (Even the staunchest Eurosceptic will sometimes want to use SI units for scientific measurements, and even the most fanatical metriciser will still sometimes want to see the avoirdupois equivalents to understand where the apparently-arbitrary metric measurements like 1609m or 6.35kg have come from.) ‑ Iridescent 07:16, 16 February 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for reminding me of the never-ending date-delinking debacle; I get it, this would be worse. The fait accompli finding is apropos of my entire current editing experience; I wonder how often it is applied. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 10:17, 16 February 2020 (UTC)

A slight aside, but I don't totally agree with the wording of the fait accompli ruling even though I entirely agree with the sentiment behind it. There's a legitimate argument to be made that Wikipedia is nothing but a succession of faits accompli; people throw things at the wall, if they stick they become precedents and are added to the guidelines/policies, but if people complain and revert the changes it in turn sets a precedent for this being something without consensus, and the guidelines are eventually altered to formalize that nobody is to do it again. Until they redefined themselves as the Wikipedia Ministry of Public Morals and started poking their noses into the kind of user-interaction cases that were never supposed to be part of their remit, back in the day when "comment on content not contributors" was a philosophy rather than an empty slogan the purpose of Arbcom was to sort out those gray areas where it wasn't clear what the consensus was. ‑ Iridescent 10:31, 16 February 2020 (UTC)

Article: Yale against Western Art

• Yale against Western Art
• https://quillette.com/2020/02/13/yale-against-western-art/
• I dunno who holds what views or preferences or whatever, but the only arty people I know are you, Modernist, Ceoil and Johnbod. You don't necessarily have to reply, because I'm just posting as a coffeetable-article-type thingie, as I often have to different editors with articles on many different topics... I don't really know much about art anyhow, of course. Cheers ♦ Lingzhi2 (talk) 04:05, 16 February 2020 (UTC)

I'm only hearing one side of things, but I tend to sympathize with the article's writer. It's fashionable (and legitimate) to point out that art history courses in European countries (and places like the Americas whose culture is derived from European influences) tends to focus on European history, but that's just because that's what people in those countries tend to find interesting; I'm quite sure that if I attended the equivalent course at the Nanjing Arts Institute or the Tokyo University of the Arts the balance would be reversed. Postmodernism and deconstruction is a perfectly legitimate thing, and it's always worth looking at the wider context and at how the economy determined who could afford to commission art and consequently what the artists were making, but it isn't racist to point out for the last couple of millennia pretty much every significant development in artistic techniques has originated in either western Europe or eastern China so those are the places most worth paying attention to. ‑ Iridescent 07:12, 16 February 2020 (UTC)

Sad, but I'm not surprised. For a few decades this is the way the wind has been blowing in academic art history (something I've never studied formally). They also seem to do vast amounts of theory (postmodernist, queer etc etc) especially at the start, art history (especially in English) having once been very sparing with that. Apart from the undoubted global importance of the European tradition, the main underpinning of modern global visual culture, it provides a useful narrative of development across 2,800 years, and also some familiarity with the culture & history that produced it can still be assumed, if to a rather dwindling degree. Studying say Indian art requires a good deal of background knowledge that English-speaking students will mostly lack. Johnbod (talk) 14:09, 16 February 2020 (UTC)

A couple of years ago myself, Ceoil and Kafka Liz were in Manchester Art Gallery, snd found they'd painstakingly added a seperate "feminist revision" below each explanatory sign (fairly typical example). The sheer self-important dour virtue-signalling of the whole thing (Rich white men had a privileged place in 19th-century Europe? How did I not know about this!) left me by the end thinking that actually, the Daily Mail might have a point. ‑ Iridescent 14:32, 16 February 2020 (UTC)

Blimey! A temporary feature, I hope. They haven't glued them to the wall I notice. Generally, but not always, the big museums (plus of course the art trade) are bastions of old-school knowing stuff. Johnbod (talk) 14:52, 16 February 2020 (UTC)

Quillette, in case you didn't know, rocks. Sure some of it is a little fluffy sometimes, but you also get stuff like Why We Should Read Heidegger, which was part of a series on totalitarian philosophers. I always like to learn new things. Me likee. ♦ Lingzhi2 (talk) 15:39, 16 February 2020 (UTC)

Iridescent, I hope you're kidding. The last couple of millennia? While my (western) ancestors were busy making such important innovations as, ahem, nothing, the Babylonians built the Ishtar Gate. But sure, some guy in the Netherlands "invented" oil painting some 800 2000 years later. Except, of course, he didn't. But sure, nothing of any importance ever came out of what's now the Middle East, or India, or Africa. Good grief.Vexations (talk) 21:22, 16 February 2020 (UTC)

The Babylonians built the Ishtar Gate considerably further back than "the last couple of millennia"; I challenge you to give me an example of anything painted, sculpted, written, drawn or built in Babylon after 636 AD by anyone other than Saddam Hussein. For sure, the Nile Valley and the Fertile Crescent were the cradle of civilisation, but they then had cultural destruction at the hands of Greece, Rome and Persia; centuries of Byzantine rule (there are many things to admire about Byzantium but "artistic innovation" is not one of them, unless you have a particular fascination with minute differences in the depiction of Christ Pantocrator); a second wave of cultural destruction during the Islamic conquest, the complete destruction of Baghdad as a cultural centre in 1258; the disintegration of the Maghreb and the Turks sweeping up what was left and shifting the centre of Islamic culture to Constantinople. After the Mongol invasions, the Middle East was something of a cultural backwater; western Europe (both Christian and Islamic), eastern Asia, and India, were where the significant developments took place. "A couple of millennia" may be something of an exaggeration, but it's certainly true of the last 700 years or so. ‑ Iridescent 21:53, 16 February 2020 (UTC)

Fixed the date. Of course nothing was created in Bablylon after it was destroyed. Anyway, let me know when you're in the neighbourhood; I'd be happy to show you around the Aga Khan Museum. They have some item from the last 700 years too. Vexations (talk) 00:38, 17 February 2020 (UTC)

It's been a problem definitely for decades. I remember when I was at Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in the late 1980s the matter of Post-Structural Literary Criticism came up -- in much the same manner that Coronavirus being an epidemic at a favored college might. At the time I was surprised how the time-honored techniques of close reading (learned thru practical experience) was being replaced by emphasis on theory expressed in esoteric & turgid language. (Yes, I'm one of those who consider Derrida & Foucalt unreadable. Based on actually trying to read both.)

I suspect one of the reason why there has been an embrace of theory over actual experience is due to cut backs in US higher education: outside STEM expertise is often a matter of critical acumen, & even those with well-developed critical skills are wrong a significant portion of the time (e.g., Ruskin's review of Whistler's art). And since there are so few geniuses in any field -- which means most people are merely very good -- most find it hard to defend their academic qualifications based on critical skills when it comes time to consider tenure. Or even being hired for a tenure-track position. However, when based on mastery of the latest Post-Modern critical theory (which is often acquired in the same manner of mathematical skills -- rote memorization), the merely good can hope to successfully defend their qualifications. Whether or not they understand -- as an example -- why Shakespeare is an important author. Beyond the hackneyed rule that if something is written in difficult language, it must be profound. -- llywrch (talk) 01:57, 17 February 2020 (UTC)