User talk:Yr Enw

A belated welcome!

Here's wishing you a belated welcome to Wikipedia, Yr Enw! I see that you've already been around a while and wanted to thank you for your contributions. Though you seem to have been successful in finding your way around, you may still benefit from following some of the links below, which help editors get the most out of Wikipedia:

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I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Again, welcome! Dronebogus (talk) 16:01, 28 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

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You may not participate in WP namespace discussions in the ARBPIA topic area. nableezy - 18:18, 23 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Hi there, thanks for the message. Is this to do with being Extended Confirmed? Yr Enw (talk) 18:30, 23 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Yep, like rfc or afd, the noticeboards require ec for the topic area. nableezy - 18:33, 23 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Oh my apologies, I hadn't realised. Thanks for letting me know. Yr Enw (talk) 18:35, 23 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, sorry to reply here as it's the only place I can think to ask it - I have made edits to other articles on the ARBPIA topic that aren't EC-protected. Before I do it again, can I just clarify if that's allowed? Or have they probably been inadvertently left unprotected? Yr Enw (talk) 13:44, 10 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

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In-text attribution

I don't want to re-open the discussion, but I wanted to circle back to your comment at Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#c-Yr Enw-20231024063200-WhatamIdoing-20231024003100 ("I was envisioning the "widely recognised" sentence to have a bunch of citations at the end").

In wiki-jargon, WP:INTEXT attribution means that you put the name of the person making that claim in the article, in plain text, as part of the sentence. Thus, "was called <names> by Alice and Bob" is in-text attribution. Just adding lots of strong sources in the form of Wikipedia:Inline citation ("was a <label>.^[1][2][3]) is not in-text attribution. WP:BLP requires inline citations for contentious labels (e.g., "He's a terrorist") even if that view is universally held and undisputed. I suspect that your proposal lost its way due to confusion over the wiki-jargon. Nobody's going to object to adding multiple good sources after a label like terrorist. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:21, 5 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Hey, thanks for the comment. You could be right. As I had tried multiple times to clarify, if the guideline is actually applied as you indicate WP:INTEXT states it should, I don’t see any problem. The problem arose in the fact that doesn’t always happen in practice. Yr Enw (talk) 10:17, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

We expect, and have to tolerate, a certain level of WP:IMPERFECT content at any given point in time. Usually, though, when it's unintentional, you just have to clean it up a bit.

Sometimes, though, the problem is less about a willingness to follow the guideline, but instead is about a completely different understanding of the facts.

To give an example of this, I've got a note to clean up an article about an AIDS denialist. He is one of the most famous people in the world for claiming that HIV does not cause AIDS. When he's mentioned in the news, he's generally introduced with some version of "____, the AIDS denialist" or "the most prominent AIDS denialist, _____", exactly like you'd say "Alice, the actor" or "Bob, the CEO of Big Business, Inc."

But for someone who is sympathetic to that anti-scientific POV, first of all, he's not a "denialist"; he's an extremely brave "dissident", and secondly, since that person's media filter bubble is full of sources praising him for promoting bad medical information, then they believe (incorrectly, but genuinely) that describing him the way he is routinely described in mainstream media is "an inadvertent neutrality violation", and saying he's an AIDS denialist would be "misleading", so according to them, INTEXT requires us to say "According to <name of author for cited source>, he's an AIDS denialist". (When that article gets cleaned up, we will add more sources, and saying that it's just this one person's opinion will rapidly become untenable in this case.)

I assume that something similar is going on with the terrorist debates. Some editors genuinely don't believe that ____ is a terrorist. They wouldn't actually believe that if they didn't have some source of information that suggested this to them. The question is always whether the facts, as they exist across a wide survey of sources, support the one view or the other, or something in between. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:25, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

That example raises a very interesting point and, no doubt, lacks an easy answer, because it feels very much like we should just say “denialist” with citations, but without needing to balance for WP:INTEXT, in order not to lead to a neutrality violation or false balance.

(although I’m not convinced “widely described as” inevitably weakens a claim - but i can understand arguments that say it does).

That said, where I feel “terrorism” differs (and calls for special attention) is that nobody really questions the meaning or utility of “denialism”, even if they radically disagree on who the label applies to (which, ofc, also happens with terrorist), but that’s very much the problem with “terrorism” as a concept. Yr Enw (talk) 17:53, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Since people use the word terrorist (about a thousand times more often than denialist, according to the Ghits) in apparently successful, everyday communications, it might be a bit unreasonable for us to throw up our hands and claim that nobody really knows what the word means and so it should never be used.

There are all kinds of words that sources use without necessarily having a single, absolutely rigid, widely agreed upon definition. For example: Did you know that a benign tumor can kill you? Or that, despite school children being told that cancer is "rapidly dividing cells", some malignant cancers can have a 100% normal (or even slow) division rate? People don't need to know this to understand what it means when someone says "George VI had lung cancer". The same thing applies to the "obvious" cases of terrorism: you don't have to know exactly where the edges are, or to have 100% of scholars agree that it's a thing, to identify the obvious cases.

Labels like terrorist always ought to be sourced, though, and not just used as a passing comment or throwaway label in the sources. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:41, 7 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

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