Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Archive14

Special:Listusers

Can we get some user accounts deleted? Looking at just the first page of Special:Listusers isn't particularly pleasant right now. violet/riga (t) 09:11, 10 September 2005 (UTC)

yes, with all the throwaway vandal accounts, these start to clog up the database. I imagine that, likewise, all the indefinite blocks will affect performance. It would probably be safe to delete all indefinitely blocked accounts with less than 20 edits or so this would rid us of documents like [1]. dab (ᛏ) 10:06, 10 September 2005 (UTC)

it would be posible to create 50 accounts that fill the first page.Geni 15:32, 10 September 2005 (UTC)

For GFDL reasons, we can not legitimately delete any account that has made a contribution, even if they are subsequently permanently blocked. I would have no objection to deleting accounts that are old and have never been used. For the blocklist, recent inquires were made about whether the 4000+ entries are slowing down performance, and the conclusion was that checking this only amounts to a couple percent of present processing time per action, and so is not currently a good target for improving performance. Dragons flight *** 16:19, 10 September 2005 (UTC)

What if their contributions are also deleted? If they just made a user page, it can be deleted; if they vandalized an article, can't it be deleted and then every revision but the vandalism and its reversion restored? ~~ N (t/c) 16:32, 10 September 2005 (UTC)

At a technical level, such contributions should probably be removed from the database, not just deleted, if the account that made them was also going to be deleted, so that the edits could not be restored. This is a technical capacity that only developers have currently. At a legal level it would be necessary to check (probably by hand) that there were absolutely no future versions of any article or talk page derived from any edit of the person in question. This means not only checking that the edits were reverted but also that no one later put any of that material back. I think that the legal morass would plainly outweight the benefits in all but the unproductive cases of vandalism (e.g. WoW). For someone like Willy who frequently does absolutely nothing of benefit, deleting his "contributions" and those accounts is probably okay in most cases, but it would also mean erasing most records of what he had done. I am inclined to believe that having a record of his actions is probably better than removing a few accounts from Special:Listusers. However, as above I have no object to removing accounts that have never been used at all. Dragons flight *** 16:58, 10 September 2005 (UTC)

I am aware that it is not a trivial matter, but those accounts whose edits were all reverted, the edits can be safely removed from the database, and the account deleted, GFDL or no GFDL. That will need quite some churning, I imagine, but I imagine if we want to do it, such a db cleanup process could be running in the background, and slowly remove traces of those account that left no trace in article texts anyway. A better approach would be to not block vandal accounts, but block their IPs instead -- the vandals don't care if their throwaway accounts are blocked, so why burden the blocklist with those? For this, admins would need access to the IPs of logged-in vandals. This would also allow us to put temporary rangeblocks on the ISP on re-dialling logged-in vandals. dab (ᛏ) 11:53, 11 September 2005 (UTC)

What about account name squatting? — Ambush Commander^(Talk) *** 00:10, 11 September 2005 (UTC)

Perhaps the accounts could be renamed to something else though. -- Joolz 00:49, 11 September 2005 (UTC)

The first 40 or so appear to be dominated by MARMOT (talk · contribs) sock-puppets. How difficult would it be to determine which of them had no undeleted contributions left (like the one I just checked) and remove the obsolete account? —Phil | Talk 15:50, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

Having just noticed this - would it be practical to rename all permanently-banned users to BANNED-username? Stops the page getting cluttered unless you go looking for them, avoids the hassle of deletion, and is a useful identifier if you run across them in the history somewhere. Shimgray | talk | 16:15, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

There is no current way to rename a user, other than a developer actually editing the SQL table. My old username was Allyunion (notice the small u); It wasn't renamed, but the contributions were reattributed to this username. --AllyUnion (talk) 18:22, 13 October 2005 (UTC)

There wasn't. Since the big upgrade bureaucrats can rename users with Special:Renameuser. --fvw* 18:30, 13 October 2005 (UTC)

Winter Soldier Investigation -Unresolved Copyvio, opinions wanted

This article had a copyvio pasted into it a year ago. There was a revert war over it, but mostly the copyvio stayed in the article for about a year. Eventually the page was listed on wp:cp and last month the material was (kinda) refactored. The page was never reverted to the pre-copyvio version (as per instructions at wp:cp). Also, over the last year there have been edit wars, page protections and at least one other (unrelated) copyvio. I've been trying to resolve the latest copyvio for the last couple of days, it's a big mess.

My question regards derivative works. For most of the last year about eight copied paragraphs existed in the article as it was heavily edited. The copied material was then somewhat refactored. I have two problems, the work to the article that went on in the midst of and related to the copyvio, and the refactoring that was so minimal that the eight paragraphs still say the same things in the same way and are structurally similar to what they came from. I think the whole article is now derived work in two ways and should be reverted to the pre-copyvio version, per instructions on wp:cp.

Most of the feedback on the talk page has been from the anon doing the refactoring, but who claims not to be the same anon who originally inserted the copyvio (they are both Earthlink ips I think). This editor thinks I'm way off base, so, I'm asking for other opinions from editors with experience resolving copyvios (haven't got much of a response on wp:cp). --Duk 23:11, 26 September 2005 (UTC) PS- i've no interest in this article other than trying to resolve old copyvios

There's no excuse for not having reverted to the version before the copyvio tag. Revert immediately to that version and don't tolerate any edit wars. The entire article is now an illegal derivative work. Superm401 | Talk 00:51, 27 September 2005 (UTC)

We need more than that. *All* incarnations of the work after the copyvio was inserted *must* be deleted. Just delete the article and selectively restore all earlier versions. --Tony Sidaway^Talk 15:59, 27 September 2005 (UTC)

This is something that confuses me. I agree that copyvio versions should be selectively removed. However, the instructions at WP:CP (which I refactored but did not write) say it is ok to rever to the last non-copyvio versions, leaving them in the history. Apparently, if someone wants them removed they need to ask specifically and will probably be reffered to the Foundation. The exception appears to be where a copyvio is in the article from the start, but is rewritten in place — in that case, the insrtuctions are to delete the earlier revisions. Is the revert option always wrong? -Splash^talk 16:29, 27 September 2005 (UTC)

It is often impractical to delete and selectively restore when there are a very large number of old revisions. If someone added copyrighted song lyrics to say, George W. Bush, as a prank, are you really going to delete and then spend half an hour clicking little check boxes one by one? If this is to be done systematically, we need a "selectively delete" option, not a "delete all and selectively restore". -- Curps 17:03, 27 September 2005 (UTC)

Luckily there aren't all that many revisions to restore here. The article was started in February, 2004 as a stub and there are fewer than sixty edits before September. --Tony Sidaway^Talk 18:15, 27 September 2005 (UTC)

There's an easy way to do selective deletes, as opposed to selective restores. 1) Delete the entire article. 2) Restore just the versions you wish to delete from the article's history . 3) Move the article (whose history now includes only the newly-restored versions) elsewhere. 4) Delete that other location. 5) Restore the rest of the versions of the original article. Hey, presto, selective delete! :-) Noel (talk) 14:32, 28 September 2005 (UTC)

If you want to leave the deleted versions at the location of the original article, it takes a couple of extra steps. Omit step 4. Add the following steps: 6) Move the article (sans deleted versions) elsewhere. 7) Move the article consisting of the deleted revisions (created in step 3) back to the original location. 8) Delete it. 9) Move the article (sans deleted versions) back to the original location. Yes, it's a certain amount of hassle, but it's less work than clicking 999 check boxes! Noel (talk) 14:36, 28 September 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for advice. I deleted and selectively restored, but the history is showing one version, while this shows all the restored versions. I hope this is just a server delay. --Duk 17:33, 28 September 2005 (UTC) fine now --Duk 18:32, 28 September 2005 (UTC)

There's a bug which only affects the display of the history, not the history itself. See Wikipedia:How to fix cut and paste moves, which I recently updated to cover the bug. Noel (talk) 03:09, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

Talk:Munich

Talk:Munich was recently vanadalized with what appears to be a person's telephone number. These changes should probably be deleted rather than reverted. Apologies if I put this in the wrong place. DirectorStratton 02:06, 27 September 2005 (UTC)

This puts Robert McHenry's infamous analogy in a whole new light, doesn't it? :P I've reverted it, which is probably all that's necessary; if anyone thinks that a selective deletion is in order, that should be easy enough. —Charles P. (Mirv) 02:38, 27 September 2005 (UTC)

Yes, I do think a selective deletion is in order. We do not know where the vandal (for such they are) may have bragged about his little feat, and there is absolutely no place here for that kind of information, under almost any circumstance. I have excised the relevant revisions from the history. I trust that the admins are not about to adhere to WP:V and check the info they can see in the deletion log... If another admin thinks I have been too paranoid, they can of course restore the now-missing revisions to the public history. -Splash^talk 03:07, 27 September 2005 (UTC)

I don't think that's overly paranoid. Deleting the information from history does no harm (there were no intervening edits except for my rollback), while keeping it there has a small but real chance of causing trouble. (The posting, if anyone's curious, was something like "So-and-so is gay, call [his cell phone number] for a good time". This was posted (unsurprisingly) from the IP address of a high school, so I suspect it was more juvenile stupidity than genuine malice.) —Charles P. (Mirv) 03:36, 27 September 2005 (UTC)

Request for vprotection

Can the articles Adolf Hitler, Jocker City and Homosexuality all be vprotected. Vandalism on these is at a high rate. --Longboy69 09:02, 28 September 2005 (UTC)

Note that longboy69 is this morning's incarnation of the Girls Aloud/obesity vandal - see WP:VIP#Manchester_.2F_obesity_.2F_Girls_Aloud_vandal. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 09:16, 28 September 2005 (UTC)

So, who likes deleting images?

According to the new speedy deletion criterion, we should be deleting orphan "fair use" images, since we can't claim fair use on images that aren't used. Here are some lists of images that contain the words "logo" or "screen", which probably means they're fair use images.

• User:TheCoffee/Orphan images/logo (1407 images) - 95.4% deleted
• User:TheCoffee/Orphan images/screen (188 images) - 94.7% deleted

Make sure that the image really is fair use and is an orphan before deleting it. If it isn't tagged as fair use, check if it should be. If it isn't tagged or sourced at all, it can be deleted for having no source or no license. The asterisk at the left of the filename is to indicate if the file has already been deleted. Blue asterisk means the file is still there. Red asterisk means it isn't.

I've already gone through and processed orphan images containing the words album, box, cover, dvd, and poster. Coffee 18:17, 28 September 2005 (UTC)

All done. Thanks to those that helped! Coffee 04:28, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

AI Arbitration case

The Arbitration case against AI has closed.

AI (under any username) is banned from Wikipedia pending the final resolution of all legal disputes with Wikipedia. Any edits AI attempts to make until this time, under any account or IP, should be immediately reverted. AI is instructed to use only this account, and no anonymous IPs. What editing constitutes AI's is up to any sysop to decide. If AI violates this, any sysop is authorised to ban them for up to a month for one-off offences, and up to a year for repeat offences. Further, AI is banned from refactoring dialogue on talk pages, or rearranging any talk page, including material which constitutes "personal comments" or personal attacks (this applies to all talk pages except AI's own user talk page), and also banned from editing any article related to the Church of Scientology. If AI violates either of these, any sysop is authorised to ban them for up to 24 hours for one-off offences, and up to a week per violation for repeat offences.

James F. (talk) 01:12, 29 September 2005 (UTC)

What if AI simply drops the matter? What happens then? Everyking 11:48, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

Well, then "the final resolution of all legal disputes with Wikipedia" would be reached, and that part of the ruling would no longer apply. It's not rocket science. :-)

James F. (talk) 22:42, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

Rush Limbaugh

Edit war brewing over whether or not a paragraph is "clear" POV. I'm staying out of it, but an admin might wish to take a look at the situation.--chris.lawson 13:17, 29 September 2005 (UTC)

Still getting personally attacked!

Giano is becoming a menace. Have a look at my talk page at his latest comments to me - I don't particularly like being called an infant. Is dealing with personal attacks and admin matter still? - Ta bu shi da yu 23:34, 29 September 2005 (UTC)

Ummm, what is supposed to be so offensive? Here is the "shocking" passage: "Regarding : "I've gone off the air " You have not gone off the air. From the very moment you theatrically announced your departure you have been constantly popping up and down like an agitated infant. Now if you've nothing constructive to say it's better to say nothing at all." I think Ta bu was compared to an "agitated infant," not called an infant. It's way too close to a bon mot to be a malediction. (One could even wonder if this AN/I posting isn't a little, well, theatrical.) Geogre 01:33, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

Good grief. I can't actually be called an infant because my own picture would logically preclude that. If I decide to compare you to Nazi, this would be counted (quite rightly) as a personal attack. Comparing me to an infant is horrible. And so what if I wanted to come back under my account? Maybe one day I will. Right now I am under the radar as I'm editing anonymously - obviously people can see who I am because they can see the history of MDAC, but I switch around so many IP addresses that it'll be hard to track me down in a hurry: something I want. I did see the TFD, and put in my 2cents under this user account. - Ta bu shi da yu 05:55, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

• Any one with a hour to spare and an interest in bizarre history may like to follow the links backwards from here [2]. Which all result from this diff. here [[3] beginning line 349] Giano | talk 07:33, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

I deleted it all and put it into my archives. Sheesh - I'm only logging in to respond to your comments. It's absurd though that I have to do this. - Ta bu shi da yu 08:11, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

The best way for this to be handled is for TBetc. to put a brief, polite note on the talk page of the perceived finger pointer, "I consider statement X a personal attack. Please desist." Some else to put a brief note following that, "TBetc. has placed a note on WP:ANI regarding a perceived personal attack." Then everyone waits. If TBetc. gets called a baby again it's an attack.
brenneman^(t)(c) 07:22, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

Not meaning to be quarrelsome, but I still don't get how there is even an insult involved, much less a "personal attack." Giano's statement was "the activity of coming back and going away is similar to the activity of an infant that can't sit still." I take no part in the disputes going on between Giano and Tabu, which is why I thought I could comment; I really don't see where any "attack" is happening, just a simile for an action. (Not that WP:AN is the right place for this at all.) Geogre 10:11, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

I'm inclined to agree. If all criticism of a user's behaviour is to be called personal attack and forbidden, then we can have no debate at all. Alsu, Ta bu might remember Godwin's law before making comparisons like the one above. Filiocht | The kettle's on 12:30, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

So what is being said here is that I cannot come back to editing this site under this username. After all, Giano has basically said that I cannot go away and come back again — I remember the days when highly stressed out Wikipedians would leave and come back to no abuse. Evidently the project has taken a turn for the worse and this is no longer the case. Try to remember that there are two reasons why Giano doesn't like me: I added the bio infobox to several of "his" pages (yes, that's right, he was getting them to FA status so they are now owned by himself and noone else can contribute - this is the way I see it). I had no idea he was the primary author, and it was never done to attack him - however all of a sudden I found that I was receiving messages on my page asking why I was having a go at him. I had also placed one of "his" articles on FARC (at the time I had no idea it was "his") because I felt it was too like an essay. To my horror I discovered that he believed I was personally attacking him! Now I have to deal with all this crap: hence the reason I'm not as active on the site as I once was. Apparently, though I am the author of 5 or 6 FAs, the create of this noticeboard, have a considerable number of edits under my belt and have exhibited correct behaviour (except, of course, for the Dalek incident) I am still behaving like an infant by coming and going from a volunteer website. So far you'll notice that I've only logged in to defend myself.

One last thing: I didn't call Giano a Nazi. Sheesh. I was making a comparison of what would happen if I did compare him to one, as he was comparing me to an infant. I was pointing out that I still consider what he wrote to be an insult.

I guess I'm correct in not editing this website any more. It's really not worth it. No wonder people like Ambi (I am partly to blame there, I got too het up in my arguments in GNAA) and RickK left. - Ta bu shi da yu 01:23, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

I like the title of this section. It made me laugh. :)—encephalon 10:29, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

Me too. :-D Giano | talk 14:50, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

I'm glad that you find the pain of others amusing. - Ta bu shi da yu 01:23, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

I dunno, it looks like an intentional insult to me, and it looks to me like it would fall within the bounds of WP:ATTACK. At the very least it's harrassment, which we should not tolerate. This discussion seems to have gone off the deep end. Guettarda 17:02, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

Not all unkind words are insults, nor are all insults inappropriate. Sometimes we hold rational views which others might find hurtful; such views need to be discussed to determine their truth and worth, not suppressed. When a user is willing to respond rationally and substantiate their position we can not conclude that their words were made purely with the intention to hurt, only that perhaps they were hamfisted in their delivery or wrongheaded in their reasoning. Rather than yelling WP:ATTACK at someone when we think their criticism may be too harsh, it would be more productive to help them refactor their words to ones which are more constructive or provide reasoning to demonstrate them as incorrect. There is no cabal of nannys to make sure everyone does the right thing, so in each of our hands lies the responsibility to call the baby ugly. Without that we must either suffer the loss of salvageable editors when the minorly bad behavior festers long enough to force them from the community, or allow ourselves to be rotted away by negative behavior which doesn't warrant the drastic measures available through arbcom. --Gmaxwell 22:54, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

My point exactly - we can't tolerate editors harrassing other editors and trying to force them out of the project. It may not fall under WP:ATTACK, but that doesn't mean it's ok. Ta Bu's contribution is huge - if he wants to leave and go when he pleases, as he pleases, it's no business of other editors. If people want to tell him otherwise, we should call them out on it. Guettarda 01:29, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

Nice counter, but your argument could just as easly be extended to say that we should never call out a frequent contributor no matter how bad their behavior is because we might scare them away. I don't agree. I think you might misunderstand the cause for the negative comments about Ta Bu's behavior. People are not saying these things because he simply took a break and came back, but rather because he makes what appear to be repeated insincere dramatic exits, crying for users to beg his return, and while he's supposidly gone for good (for the umpenttenth time) he continues to come back to further his arguments on the wiki all the while whining about how wronged he's been. His behavior is furthering ill will around the wiki, and attracting away positive attention which is more deserved by harder working users who have stressed out and vanished without the hysterics. Because of this it is all of our business. --Gmaxwell 03:05, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

Sheesh. I'm very sorry Ta bu feels bad, I can certainly tell that he does. But if you prick Giano, will he not also bleed? Before anybody else allows themselves to talk of Giano "harrassing" and "trying to force out" an editor who was obviously bent out of shape by other things first (notably the WP:FAC debacle of the Gay Nigger Association of America article[4]), I hope they will take the precaution of reading the posts involved. This is not a matter of personal attacks! Nor is an admin matter, which makes me the less inclined to waste more space here by pasting in whole exchanges, but anybody can find them by following Giano's directions above. Please note Ta bu's edit warring at John Vanbrugh on September 6 and 7, his final and very much not administrator-worthy action before he purportedly left. Mind you, I'd be inclined to excuse him for that, in view of the extreme wikistress he was obviously suffering, but given Ta bu's history of rapidly coming to his senses after losing his temper on this site, I would also have hoped he'd be ready to condemn it himself by now. Apparently not so: he is still in "nobody appreciates me" mode, and it's all still Giano's fault. This is a distortion of what happened, and I think anybody who looks into it will see that. For a balanced, and distressed, take on the respective roles of Ta bu and Giano in the unhappy conflict over Template:Infobox Biography at John Vanbrugh, you can't do better than read ALoan's post on my page. Bishonen | talk 03:44, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

as always, I think Bishonen is spot on. It is certainly bad taste to say things to people that you know will distress them. Yet on the open forum WP is, I do think you have to be prepared to meet sarcastic and/or outspoken criticism of your behaviour. I am sorry Tbsdy is stressed, and I would certainly try to go easy on him, but obviously this is not a case for AN. I do hope Tbsdy will regain his cool, but at the moment I am afraid this isn't any different from any random disgruntled user coming here saying he has been treated without proper respect by another random user. Baad 18:38, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

SPUI and Freehold Circle

SPUI has prematurely closed the Freehold Circle AfD three times as a "speedy keep" because he believes the reason provided for the nomination is not good enough, despite a forming consensus to delete and requests from both me and the nominator to stop doing so. The discussion itself has only been going on for two days. He's got every right to defend an article he contributed to, but this is over the line. I'm about to block him for disruption, but just want input on this decision. android79 01:56, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

Blocked for violating the 3RR rule on Freehold Circle, but I'd be fine with a block for disruption too in cases like this, especially considering the fact that two people warned him. --fvw* 02:03, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

Yeah, I noticed that too. Thanks for the help. android79 02:04, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

People on vfd/afd are still pretty rude though. Secretlondon 03:10, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

Most aren't, and even if some are, that doesn't justify this kind of disruption. android79 03:29, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

"No reason given for deletion"? What's that "nn, roadcruft" given right there in the first line of the AfD supposed to be, then? Idle chatter? Sheesh. You were right to block him. If SPUI is an admin and this keeps up, it might even constitute abuse of AdministrativePower. — JIP | Talk 07:40, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

SPUI is most definitely not an admin. --fvw* 08:06, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

FWIW, I have closed the AfD with a result of delete and deleted the article. There were a couple of legit keep votes, but the delete votes far outweighed them, and I even personally think the traffic circle is non-notable. If someone disagrees, please feel free to post a Vote for Undeletion. — JIP | Talk 07:09, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

Criticism of Islam

I am seing a revert war over the addition/removal of 9391 bytes. I generally do not mention revert wars here but that article is just not stable. --Cool Cat ^Talk 11:49, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

Protected. Flcelloguy | A note? | Desk | W_S 14:36, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

White Horse Circle

I closed Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/White Horse Circle with a result of "delete", yet the page has been made into a redirect to the township it is located in. Did I ever remember to delete the article? The page history shows no deleted edits. I'm embarassed to admit this, but I don't remember everything about what I did this same day. Was it ever deleted? Who made it a redirect? If it wasn't deleted, it can't have been undeleted by User:SPUI, as he's not an admin. If I forgot to delete the article, can my closing of the AfD debate be considered valid? — JIP | Talk 16:53, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

The deletion log says you deleted it [5] David Gerard undeleted (probably should have been a selective undelete but who cares?).Geni 16:59, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

How can it be redirected? I don't even see any merge/redirect votes. Just deletes. Personally I'd rather see it merged, but that's not what people voted for. Everyking 17:15, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

Hmm, probably what happened was that I deleted it, User:SPUI kept recreating it as a redirect, and people kept deleting it again. Probably SPUI got the last word, so to speak. — JIP | Talk 17:58, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

Don't delete again. The original article was deleted but the current redirect serves a useful purpose. Remember we're supposed to be writing an encyclopedia, not playing bureaucratic games. --Tony Sidaway^Talk 08:04, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

Would like some help on a AFD

Can I just ask an admin to take a look at AFD:Built for Comfort? One of my nominations has been plagued with sockpuppets, and I believe it to have steered the debate somewhat. I have also been accused of having a real life personal vendetta against the webcomic author who I had never heard of until now, and found out that my user page had been vandalised for a day without me knowing. Is there anything that can be done about the discussion? Maybe clean up and relist?

I would also like for more comments at the talk page for WP:COMIC, there seems to be growing consensus that those guidelines are too lax, a look through AFD this past week or my contributions will show that.

Also, is this the best place to put this message? I also considered VillagePump Assistance, but decided to ask admins instead. - Hahnchen 01:07, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

Village Pump or an issue RFC would be the place to get WP:COMIC revised. As for the AFD, I dunno. - A Man In Black (Talk | Contribs) 01:36, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

I have closed the AfD debate. -Splash^talk

And it has now been listed on VfU. User:Zoe|^(talk) 22:34, 2 October 2005 (UTC)

Imposter of Uncle Ed's robot

Very recently this showed up: User:Uncle Ed's major work 'bot - it's an impostor of Uncle Ed's clean up robot, and it has moved pages to very odd places, and making cleanup very difficult to do. It would be nice if we could get some help to fix up the page move vandalisms :-) - it's created somewhat of a tricky beehive. --HappyCamper 04:02, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

Actually, rewording: I think it's an impostor of User:Uncle G's major work 'bot. In other words, we have someone who is impersonating Uncle Ed impersonating Uncle G, et cetera...very confusing! --HappyCamper 04:07, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

It's been cleaned-up-after. See WP:AN/I. -Splash^talk 04:33, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

I don't have any bots: there's nothing for this bot to be an imposter of. Thanks, everyone, for helping to clean up after it. Uncle Ed 11:36, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

User:Kswheels

This user was mistakenly blocked as being WoW, and if they choose to keep this username, please don't block it as WoW. I unblocked them after they asked on IRC. Additionally, I think some of the willy patrollers are a little overzealous, we really don't need to block all willys or anything with wheels in the name. I think some admins would probably block "Willy <somelastname>. --Phroziac^(talk) 04:52, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

I agree that overzealous Willy-hunting is a major problem - some admins will block any inactive account with a "transportation theme". Other usernameblock hunts can be overzealous too - I remember that during the spate of abusive username attacks on Linuxbeak, one admin blocked "Linux uber geek", a perfectly innocent newbie. ~~ N (t/c) 16:13, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

I now see that User:Wowo and User:Willy c have been recently blocked, with no contributions, and the only message on their talk page is 'your name sounds like Willy on Wheels' - no 'I'm sorry' or 'you might want to change it'. IMHO, this is a very rude thing to do that risks scaring off good contributors, so I'm going to unblock those users. If they are Willy, will it be such a big deal? He's easy to revert. ~~ N (t/c) 16:17, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

Having reviewed the block log, I see Essjay's been on a bit of a {{UsernameBlock}} spree: see here. Most seem reasonable, but tell me, how are "Death omen" and "AutobotNo1" inappropriate? There are also some more questionable Willy blocks, like "The Big W!!!!" (who apparently has no contributions. and has been accused of being a sockpuppet of both Willy and MARMOT...?). I won't unblock, as there may be something I'm not seeing, but this seems wrong to me. (Crossposting to User talk:Essjay.) ~~ N (t/c) 16:28, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

The semantics of usernames are far too difficult to describe precisely, and we often have to resort to the judgement and contextual interpretation of the administrators who block them. Granted, my thinking is that Essjay has implicitly taken responsibility for blocking those usernames. I suppose you could unblock them if you like. User talk:Christchurch is a similar incident that I encountered, and it was quite straightforward to resolve. --HappyCamper 17:15, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

WoW is well known for creating sleeper accounts with no contributions with the sole purpose of waiting for the prohibition on the newest 1% of users to expire on that account. -Splash^talk 17:22, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

I know. Blocking obvious sleepers is a good idea. Assuming that anything with "willy" or "wheels" or "WOW" is a sleeper is not a good idea. ~~ N (t/c) 17:35, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

Oh, and blocking the account name that clearly purports to be a bot when it isn't seems ok, though I'm not sure about "Death omen". -Splash^talk 17:24, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

You have to come at it from a newb perspective - would a newb know that accounts containing "bot" are usually reserved for bots? Of course not. And do you really think that if someone had a username containing "bot", but acted human, people would mistake him/her for a bot? Also, how are "T.Jiang" (I see some people have been creating attack acounts against User:Jiang, but this doesn't sound like one), "Nazira" (an Arabic name, even though it contains "Nazi"), and "Lupin4tonkslegolas4kendell" (pretty clear fanfic reference, a bit long but not otherwise problematic) inappropriate? I don't think I'll bother with those, though, as they were all blocked days ago. ~~ N (t/c) 17:35, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

Blocking non WoW names because they may contain "Nazi" is inexcusable. When did this guy become an admin? Secretlondon 17:52, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

I agree with you that the appearance of the character string "nazi" in an otherwise innocent, justifiable username is no reason to block, but in fairness, I just indef-blocked User:Nazi kais because using the word "Nazi" set off by spaces is so obviously a bad idea. ~~ N (t/c) 18:00, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

I strongly advise you all to read our Wikipedia:Username policy. We have a clear policy for dealing with inappropriate usernames. Secretlondon 18:08, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

(edit conflict) I might also add that the other day, I didn't block User:Four Wheels, and it turned out to be a Willy. I'm not concerned with these blocks that Essjay has done. What I would be concerned with is if he started blocking harmless nouns and adjectives without reason. That's when alarm bells will go off - at least for me. The "autobot" was probably blocked because it can be mistaken as a bot. Check out what happened with the sneaky vandalism done by "Uncle Ed's major work 'bot" above! The others, I'm inclined to feel they are Willies too. Generally speaking, I've found that if users are legitmate, they will contact you by e-mail. "Death omen" is sort of a grey area, but I'd be inclined block it. I use this rule of thumb sometimes: assume the user becomes established. Are there any existing established users with names that read like that? Not really, so after that, take if from there... --HappyCamper 17:27, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Good point on "Death omen" and the "established user" criterion. But how do you know that the users who don't email you aren't perfectly legitimate but just disgusted/scared by your blocking them? Better to let Willy run wild for a few minutes than lose a valuable contributor, I say. ~~ N (t/c) 17:35, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

I am concerned about blocking innocent users and presuming that they'll email rather than just feel unwelcome. I know if I'd been blocked I certainly wouldn't email - I'd just leave with an unpleasant taste in my mouth. Secretlondon 17:50, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

(edit conflict, before SecretLondon's response) Well, to be honest and truthful, I don't think anyone can say they know know for certain. In fact, I don't know many things for certain. This just happens to be one of them, and after some amount of deliberation, I've settled on doing something I feel comfortable with. Granted, it may not be the most optimized way of doing so, which is why I like to rotate around different sysop chores during my Wikipedian career. At least this encourages myself to re-read policy every now and then and lets me update my approch to do things on Wikipedia. "Grow" in a sense.

I think it would be pretty difficult to homogenize 100% the approaches towards defining inappropriateness of usernames; in any large complex system, sometimes an amount of stochastic activity can be healthy. It is impossible to handle 100% of events 100% perfectly everytime. But with a variety of reasonable approaches, we can approach handling, say "95%" of cases "95%" of the time unambiguously, and make our management system robust and adaptive. I think your approach would complement this quite well, really. In fact, as an aside, some of the questions you are asking are related to very deep implications in artificial intelligence... --HappyCamper 18:01, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

Perhaps Wikipedia:Username would be a good place to start? Secretlondon 18:10, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

Yup. I've wanted to twiddle with it for a while, but I haven't got to it yet. No intention of adding twiddles out of consensus though, mind you. --HappyCamper 18:24, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

I agree completely with the premise that we should be very very careful blocking just based on username, it should be pointed out that The Big W!!! was in fact a vandal all of whose contributions were deleted. The funny thing is, I had him pegged as one of Libertas'. --fvw* 18:14, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

I agree too, which is why I do it sparingly, like adding salt to my food on a restricted diet. (As an aside, isn't it interesting how this thread has developed?) --HappyCamper 18:24, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

Overzealous username blocking is a problem. Besides the ones that have already been mentioned above, a look over Category:Wikipedia:Inappropriate username blocks reveals the following username blocks of dubious justification:

• User:Accepttheownage
• User:Jesus of Suburbia
• User:Wikipediasux
• User:ThePedanticPrick
• User:Thebitch nextdoor
• User:Satan's Kitten
• User:Pothead

And I'd guess the majority of username blocks aren't added to the category, so who knows how many more there are? Why are we so eager to on the one hand point out that Wikipedia isn't censored to avoid offending anyone's sensibilities, and on the other hand so eager to censor usernames of marginal offensiveness? I'd say Wikipedia:Please do not bite the newcomers applies here. Taco Deposit | Talk-o to Taco 23:06, 2 October 2005 (UTC)

I think some people need to lay off the block button. It was noted that ThePedanticPrick was blocked by an admin called Bumm. Do we have a specific admin problem or an all-round power kick? Secretlondon 23:25, 2 October 2005 (UTC)

The latter, and it isn't solely limited to username blocks. Taco Deposit | Talk-o to Taco 23:39, 2 October 2005 (UTC)

Essjay seems to have been acting out of perfectly good faith (see my talk page). We really could use a Process for Deciding What Names Are Inappropriate, and Reviewing Such Decisions. I don't know about a general power kick, though; it's just that if you have a few overzealous admins, a lot of users will get blocked, and as I don't know anybody besides myself who does block-log patrol (and I only started that today because of this incident), it's unlikely that those blocks will be rectified. TacoDeposit, would you mind providing examples of a "general power kick" as opposed to a few dicks and well-intentioned rogues?

I'm sorry, but the line between a "a few dicks and well-intentioned rogues" and "an all-round power kick" is too subjective and not quantifiable. I have been on Wikipedia for a year and a half, and I have observed too many instances of admins overeager to exercise their block/delete/protect privledges. But alas, I'm not really inclined to to gather evidence to satisfy your request. Taco Deposit | Talk-o to Taco 00:25, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

You're right, it's subjective. And Snowspinner's actions on AFD certainly back up the "general power kick" viewpoint. ~~ N (t/c) 00:38, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

Touché! Taco Deposit | Talk-o to Taco 00:45, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

The above examples are all borderline cases. I would call most of them possibly inappropriate but not deserving of a block, except "Wikipediasux" (we don't need to to be a forum for our own disparagement, and there is zero doubt that he/she/it would be highly malicious and disruptive). This all shows the need for an Official Process for Username Blocking Review (and possibly of Other Admin Actions as well). ~~ N (t/c) 00:03, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

Wikipediasux was probably set up for no good. User:ThePedanticPrick seemed to be a fine contributor. User:Jesus of Suburbia presumably references Jesus of Suburbia. We've had drug references before User:TUF-KAT used to be User:Tokerboy but I think he only changed name when he became an admin. Secretlondon 00:16, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

Oh wait, we already have one. Borderline usernames like the above should be taken to the correct RFC area. ~~ N (t/c) 00:08, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

The many positive contributions of User:Wikisux in 2004 cast into doubt your assertion that "there is zero doubt" that User:Wikipediasux would be "highly malicious and disruptive". Taco Deposit | Talk-o to Taco 00:25, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

Hmm. I didn't know about that. I still think that Wikipedia should not allow itself to be a forum for its own disparagement in this fashion, though, and would block that username. ~~ N (t/c) 00:38, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

I think we need to bring the good ol' "when in doubt, don't delete" to the blocking policy as well - "when in doubt, don't block". Personally, I'd much rather wait for offensive usernames to start vandalising (which they usually do), and then block them for that instead. Blocking an user also takes out the underlying IP, as you probably are all well aware of - and not being able to edit anymore even without their allegedly offensive username has a most chilling effect on good-faith contributors, I suppose. Note that clear Willysocks (of which Kswheels isn't one) should still be blocked on sight. But then again, there's no doubt in those cases. -- grm_wnr Esc 12:53, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

I mostly agree, with the exception that obviously offensive usernames (like ones containing "Nazi" or "fuck") should be blocked on sight, and the observation that the username blocking policy says that IPs blocked because of username blocks should be unblocked ASAP. ~~ N (t/c) 13:22, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

New speedy criterion

We can now speedy delete some copyright infringement material! (rather than tag as {{copyvio}}). See Wikipedia:Criteria_for_speedy_deletion#Articles and Wikipedia:Criteria for speedy deletion/Proposal/Blatant copyvio material. thanks Martin 19:23, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

101-6 a while since I've seen a policy proposal so widely supported.Geni 20:02, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

Yup, wonderful news, and nice to see this so widely supported even though it's in an area as contentious as CSD. Thanks everyone who worked on this! --fvw* 03:07, 2 October 2005 (UTC)

Excellent news. Can I point out that User:Titoxd has made {{db-copyvio}} and {{db-a8}}. Can I also point out that those currently listed at WP:CP should probably be allowed to run their course since the tag does promise the editor 7 days to get themselves sorted. Further to that, can I advertise that the daily backlog at CP is comparatively small at present (only a couple of days) and that a few determined mops+buckets could eliminate it.... -Splash^talk 03:14, 2 October 2005 (UTC)

Could admin/s from the US take a look please

Could someone check User:66.142.142.4's contributions. He's been a rapid fire contributor in recent days, and I have rolled back some of his edits. However, some are genuine, but US-centric, and need someone with local knowledge to look at them. Check his edit to Six Flags Astroworld. Doesn't quite ring true to me, but then it just may be true. Moriori 20:13, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

I did a news.google.com search for "astroworld airport" and found nothing, so I reverted it. I'd say revert anything questionable he did with an edit summary stating that it was unsubstantiated. If he comes back with a link or source, great. Jdavidb 20:41, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

Request Admin to fill in

Hi. I'll be on a Wikibreak as of Monday, October 3, and I'll be back only by the end of the month. The thing is, currently I'm taking care of two articles that have been protected while editors solve their differences on the talk page: Slovakia (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) and Great Moravia (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views). From what has been written there (the main discussion is going on here), it looks like there's still some distance to go before the articles can be unprotected again: there are two sides, both claiming the other is trying to push POV (one pro-Check, the other, pro-Slovaks) and calling the other side immature or childish. Early on in discussions, one of the parties requested the unprotection of both articles, mainly because the other side was somewhat slow in replying to the user's posts on the talk page (here's the request). I did not unprotect the articles, for even then it seemed clear that, if the articles were unprotected a revert war would immediately ensue. The tone of discussion so far confirms this.
Because I'll be gone for a longer period of time, I'd like at least one other Admin to keep an eye on the developments there, mainly because it is possible that an agreement is reached, or maybe some other type of conclusion, and the articles are requested to be unprotected. Or it could be that animosity increases and some sort of "intervention", or a mediation, becomes necessary. It's just a precaution, because I don't like leaving loose ends. It may well be that the parties would come to me to request a mediation, or the unprotection of the articles, since I've been encouraging the parties to talk from the beginning, and if I'm not there... Can someone cover this? Thanks, Redux 20:27, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

Consistency

The United Kingdom, and its four 'kingdoms' or regions can be slightly confusing to foreigners, and even to some of its inhabitants.

However, for good or for bad, the United Kingdom is the name of a country. England is not. Scotland is not. Northern Ireland is not. Wales is not.

So, for example, when I was looking up Formula One drivers earlier I happened to be curious when I saw a link at the bottom of one particular driver's Wiki entry that pointed me to a list of drivers' entries per country.

This is not very well organised or consistent. To illustrate what I mean, I will point out some of the drivers in this category.

Alan McNish. This driver is Scottish. Yet he is listed in the category of British F1 drivers, and not in the Scottish sub-category.

David Coulthard is Scottish. Yet he is listed in sub-category of British drivers, and not in the main British category.

Eddie Irvine is Irish. Yet he is listed in a completely different section which isn't a sub-category of British drivers, nor is he listed in the category of British drivers.

Jenson Button is English. Yet he is listed in the British category, but not in a sub-section of English drivers.

I think that one category should be made for all British drivers, and a decision should be made as to whether to keep all British drivers together, or create sub-categories for each region of the UK. It took me longer than it perhaps should have, to find David Coulthard for example, as he is organised differently. Eddie Irvine isn't even in the British category, so people might assume this driver is missing from the encyclopedia.

I would guess that its not just Formula 1 that is affected by this inconsistency. I propose that some kind of standardisation or guideline is drawn up to help keep entries on all things British, consistant.

216.16.218.43 00:44, 2 October 2005 (UTC)

Note that much of the inconsistency follows from the ambiguous meaning of "country": in some cases it has been used as if it means "sovereign state" and in others as if it means "geographical region". There is currently no agreement on Wikipedia as to how we should be using it. -- Derek Ross | Talk 02:17, 2 October 2005 (UTC)

This specific example has been discussed previously. See Wikiproject Formula One#Flags. You may also be interested in Wikipedia:WikiProject Sports Results. (SEWilco 04:41, 2 October 2005 (UTC))

There is indeed much inconsistency across the categories. And McNish does not even appear in the general racing driver list (now added). I see no problem with a driver being listed in both British and Scottish categories, as Jim Clark already is. Such multiple category listing is common in WP and helps users find articles. The problem is to iron out inconsistencies, such as Coulthard, Irvine etc missing from the main British category. There is currently no English or Northern Irish sub category, but if someone wants to create these and categorise the drivers accordingly I am all in favour. --Cactus.man ✍ 11:47, 2 October 2005 (UTC)

• I have now resolved some of the anomolies, but there is probably still much to be done. --Cactus.man ✍ 13:26, 2 October 2005 (UTC)

Messages to me from User:Alien2, please take a look

Not long ago, I blocked the pagemove vandal Jayh2724 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · nuke contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log). I blocked the username, and as you all know, this causes the underlying IP address to be temporarily blocked as well, although the admin applying the block cannot access any information about what that underlying IP address is, or even what ISP or part of the world it is in. It turned out the underlying IP was from a Singapore ISP and various people complained that they suffered "collateral damage" [6]. I think this issue has been discussed before: should there be a way to block a username without blocking the underlying IP, or should the blocking code perhaps have a little more smarts and know which IPs are pool addresses and which aren't. This may be more of an issue for Asian ISPs, since that part of the world has fewer IP ranges available.

However, the main thing I'd like to draw folks' attention to is a couple of odd and hard to understand messages from Alien2 (talk · contribs), namely [7] [8] [9] who seems to be trying to make some connection between Wikipedia and the Bali bombing of a couple days ago, including this quote "Those terrorist started bombing on my sign" [10]. I think he's joking or being silly, but I suppose I'm obligated to bring it to everyone's attention. Take a look and maybe see if someone can figure out what to make of this user and his postings. -- Curps 01:52, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

I imagine that Wikipedia is quite low down the list of recruitment causes for islamic extremism. If we get to be as important in world affairs as Israel/Palestine and Iraq then maybe we can start to takes these things seriously.. Secretlondon 02:36, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

Obviously, I don't believe he's serious, but these are humorless times and I felt obligated to at least bring it to other people's attention. -- Curps 03:06, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

GNAA VfD exemption notice has been removed

User:Gmaxwell decided to remove it - his edit was that it is a load of "bullshit". This is incorrect. Relisting the GNAA article should be counted as a disruption of Wikipedia and editors dealt with thusly. I have readded the notice: I am asking admins to keep an eye on the talk page in case it is removed again.

Please note that the exact edit is here and the edit comment is: "Thats a load of bullshit, anyone who takes such an action against a good faith VFD would be called out for deadminship." Ta bu shi da yu 02:13, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

I think far the best thing for us all to do is panic. We should start a ForestFire, immediately. Since 8 seperate policy proposals and their talk pages were insufficient panic last time, we had better start with at least 9 proposals and blind panic this time. Supporters?-Splash^talk 02:40, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

I'm perosnally going to go use the Random Page feature to find an article to panic on. Snowspinner 02:58, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

I believe the article is at a happy medium now. People will keep it from being listed at AFD de facto and people will keep it from becoming an FA de facto. We just can never win, unless someone decides to merge it to Slashdot trolling. Zach (Sound Off) 03:17, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

Ya. Best to keep the notice on the article. Have talked to Gmaxwell on IRC and he just copy-edited the notice. All is now good. - 203.134.166.99 07:41, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

Unfree images update

It was on September 17 that Jimbo added the new speedy deletion criterion allowing unsourced and unlicensed images to be deleted on sight. He said "I am hopeful that a major push to sort through these two categories with an aim of eliminating everything in them can be completed in two weeks". In the 2 1/2 weeks since then, the size of the unsourced images category has gone down from 12603 to 10217. Coffee 05:27, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

Well then we should finish a little before Christmas. Dragons flight 05:31, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

• The Untagged images maintenance task is probably having a counter-effect at the moment. Many new images are likely being added to the categories to partially offset the gains. RedWolf 06:36, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

I suspect that the bulk of the unsourced images on the 17th weren't tagged as such - if you pick a random selection of images from that category, note that many of them were only tagged in the last couple of days. There's certainly been a lot more than 2,400 images deleted under this policy. Shimgray | talk | 07:07, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

I spent a few days not deleting anything, because image loading was so slow and unreliable. --Carnildo 07:24, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

I am however getting increasingly annoyed to find pages with broken links because someone's deleted an image but not checked where it was used. If you delete an image, you really must also edit all articles which use it, and remove the broken links. -- Arwel 13:02, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

I've been using Special:Unusedimages as my venue of choice rather than the Categories themselves. Since it is ordered by date of upload, this allows me to focus on images that are both old and unused. In any given 100 of these it seems about 1/2 are deletable under CSD I3, I4, or I5. By skipping those that indicate PD or GFDL in the edit summary, it goes fairly quickly at finding the rotten stuff. Of course, the other advantage is that I don't have anything to remove from articles and considerably less chance of pissing people off early in the process of enforcing the new speedy criteria. Dragons flight 13:15, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

You know, Jimbo has the power to dictate policy, not stop time. If it takes us more than 2 1/2 weeks to carry out his bidding, then it takes us that long. That he didn't anticipate the scope of the problem isn't something for us to get bent out of shape about. ;-) --Ryan Delaney ^talk 13:26, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

I will hazard that at least part of the reason (or, at least, my reason) for not rolling up my sleeves in these categories is/was the hoo-hah over talk-pageing users. It was/is unclear if DeletingAdmin is actually expected to drop 10,000 talk page messages, wait a week, and then start deleting images or not. It was also plain that, even when explained to them, many users were unhappy with 'their' images being deleted: admins didn't receive enough support because other admins were wanting them not to delete until talk pages had been messaged. So people aren't deleting as many of them as they might. Or, at least, I'm not.-Splash^talk 13:33, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

The problem here is that the original uploader is often the only one who has the image description page on his watch list, so when you add {{nosource}} to that page, it is not very visible. One way to correct for this is to notify the uploader; still that's only one editor (who may not be active this week anyway). Best solution is to remove the images from the articles they are on (this has to be done anyway), which will be seen by many editors, wait a week, delete image. The original uploader is not the only one with an interest in the image, who may update the source information... Dragons flight's suggestion of working from Special:Unusedimages looks like a very good idea. Eugene van der Pijll 14:14, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

Even if you have "Add pages you edit to your watchlist" ticked, your uploads only go on your watchlist if you manually hit "watch" or edit the description after upload. - SoM 14:26, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

I've also been working on image deletions at Special:Unusedimages. CSD I4 and I5 actually make the majority of those images speedyable, which is a lot of fun. In the past few weeks the number of unused images has gone done from over 43,000 to now just below 36,000 – quite a sizable dent. I've been very hesitant to actually remove unsourced images from a page to have them deleted. What we should do is get a list of the 10,000 or so images in the category, remove them all from articles with an edit summary like "rm unsourced/unlicenced images", wait for a week, then delete them if they're still unsourced/unlicensed. Coffee 14:43, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

I have started on {{nosource}} to orphan images with the edit summary "removed unsourced image; please supply source at Image:Foo or it will be deleted, and on the image description page I've noted the date that I've done this. Let's see if this gets some reaction. Eugene van der Pijll 15:48, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

Brian0918's instant blocks

Brian0918 has taken to blocking users after their first vandalism (or in many cases, newbie tests); This doesn't seem appropriate to me but his response is that I should just unblock them if I disagree. What do others think of this? --fvw* 14:29, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

This same issue, with the same response (you can unblock them yourself) has occurred regarding overzealous username blocks (like "Kswheels" and "Nazira"). Block wars are bad, as is scaring users off - which will happen. We need some sort of big reminder saying "IF IN DOUBT, DON'T BLOCK".~~ N (t/c) 14:34, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

Unblock them. Instant blocking is used on the Norwegian Wikipedia for example due to lack of admins (the few that are there have other things to do than to hand out warnings), but it is not something we endorse at the English Wikipedia. Sjakkalle (Check!) 14:35, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

Yup, I think we've consistently held here that users should always get a polite warning first. Either the lowest applicable test message or something suitably polite. Then if they do it again you have established intent and a block is fine. Usually though you'll find they won't do it again after a polite warning. Pattern vandalism/obvious sockpuppets is different of course. - Taxman ^Talk 14:39, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

Concur with the others, strongly enough that I'm going to go through and unblock anyone who wasn't warned (unless someone else has done it already). Mindspillage (spill yours?) 14:48, 3 October 2005 (UTC) (Looks like I've been beaten to the punch.) Mindspillage (spill yours?) 14:52, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

It is your choice to be kind to vandals, including the user who created a fake person and injected fake content about that person into other articles. I was simply following the Blocking Policy's statement that 'Sysops may, at their judgement, block IP addresses whose users vandalise Wikipedia'. I violated nothing. — BRIAN0918 • 2005-10-3 15:23

Sorry about the "sneaky bastard" comment. The user was trying to create a fake person and was implementing it in the encyclopedia (such as listing the person under something like "1951 births"). Since this can seriously damage our credibility, I rightly blocked the user for longer (although that's arguable if it's a dynamic IP). In any case, it has always been my choice (as the Blocking policy says it can be) to block users for 24 hours for each of their vandalisms. 24 hours for a user whose only contribution is to blank George W. Bush or John Kerry is nothing, as they were unlikely to contribute anything useful anyway. Chances are that by the time you go through sticking test templates in, their IP has already been moved on to another user, someone who might want to contribute legitimate content but freaks out at the warning left on their talk page. Blocked users can still view any article on Wikipedia. I feel and have seen others agree that we take vandalism too lightly, often attacking those who stop vandals rather than the vandals themselves, as if they weren't doing anything wrong. Feel free to attack. — BRIAN0918 • 2005-10-3 15:04

Instant blocks of anybody not obviously a sockpuppet of a banned user are inappropriate. Biting the newbies is not to be allowed. Lots of perfectly good editors started out their careers at Wikipedia with a petty vandalism. Even someone who blanks a page may have done so accidentially. Seems to me that someone is not doing a very good job of assuming good faith. Kelly Martin 15:06, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

What does assuming good faith have to do with users who blank articles or create garbled content??? That's completely unrelated. This is vandalism, not a misunderstanding. I can't assume that in the future they'll be good editors, because... I don't know the future. That is why "assume good faith" doesn't apply to vandalism. — BRIAN0918 • 2005-10-3 15:11

And we have five test templates specifically to make it easy to warn for vandalism. Work through them, then block when you give test5. Pakaran 15:15, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

Read my first comment above. — BRIAN0918 • 2005-10-3 15:18

We read them. Unless the pattern/sockpuppet is blatantly obvious, warn them politely first, then block if they keep it up. Pretty much covers all the bases of minimizing vandalism, not biting newbies, and blocking actual problem editors. - Taxman ^Talk 15:28, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

You don't know who did or didn't read them. I had added some new content which directly replied to what he said, so please don't make blanket statements. If people here seem to be in favor of blocking problem editors, why was the person who created a fake individual unblocked, or the person who has been blanking pages for the past month? This seems contradictory. Or are you just assuming bad faith on the part of the person trying to stop vandalism? — BRIAN0918 • 2005-10-3 15:41

Yes I should have used I instead of we, but you seem to be taking this too personally instead of listening to the overall message. This from an admin that thinks we are overall way too lenient with problem editors. There is a difference with new editors though. If you had politely warned all the people you blocked they would probably not get unblocked. The warning essentially demonstrates intent if they do it again and makes the block an easy call. The sarcasm below (later removed?) could stand to be toned down and so could marking your responses here as minor edits, which they aren't. That said, if someone is obviously repeatedly vandalizing, I don't support unblocking them either. They still deserve a warning or at least an explanation though. - Taxman ^Talk 15:56, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

Use caution if you unblock. In some cases the blocking admin may have more background information or context, and may be able to recognize that the "newbie" is clearly a returning sockpuppet, in which case they've already gotten their warning in their previous incarnation and don't need any new ones. However, if you just wade in and look only at that one sockpuppet's contributions without knowing the context and background and prior incarnations, you might mistakenly unblock. "Assume good faith" doesn't only apply to the vandals and newbies, it also applies to the intentions of the admin who applied the block.

I would also add that a "newbie" vandal who heads straight for some obscure page in Wikipedia or Template namespace is quite probably not a newbie at all, and again a warning may be superfluous, though usually it's best to err on the side of caution and give a warning anyway.

Finally, in a disturbingly large number of cases when it's necessary to block indefinitely, you look back at the contribution history and see some petty vandalism a month ago and they got blocked for 24 hours, then they come back and do something more serious that warrants an indefinite ban. Today's example: Obesity (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · nuke contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log), the original incarnation of what we now know to be the very persistent Obesity/Girls Aloud/Manchester/The Bad Tax Man/@John Moores vandal. -- Curps 15:55, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

• Vandals are individual people with individual intentions. They are not all on the edge nut jobs just waiting to be blocked so they can go crazy, and they are even less likely to become regular, productive contributors. I am simply going by what I see. It is and has been my choice (as granted by the Blocking Policy) to block a vandal for 24 hours for each vandalism. That people are just starting to notice this after so long is their concern, not mine. — BRIAN0918 • 2005-10-3 16:09

In the light of all this, I think it's pretty ironic how, when I blocked Brian for 3RR of GNAA, he was unblocked because I didn't warn him... ;-) --Ryan Delaney ^talk 16:02, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

• Actually, it was not a 3RR violation, at least according to the person who unblocked me. But feel free to continue spinning. — BRIAN0918 • 2005-10-3 16:09

There is nothing wrong with blocking without warning. --Golbez 17:33, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

well yes there is. It can upset people who were mearly testing stuff and you also lose all those waring messages on use talk pages that can come in handly if they continue to vandalise stuff.Geni 17:59, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

I don't block people for testing. I block people for vandalizing. Often without warning. Why should they get five warnings? Thank me for what I do, it makes this place bearable. --Golbez 18:02, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

while I feel five is excessive (I give two test and test3) warnings are an effective way of saying "oy I saw that" which can often save on blocking.Geni 00:22, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

We should all take a deep breath here (OK, one, two, three... release) and take things into perspective here. We are here to discuss the blocks, not to stress each other out, so let's try and be polite. In my opinion, it should be up each admin to decide whether an IP address warrants an immediate block, or requires warnings. For IP addresses where I clearly see malicious intent (i.e. inserting graphic pictures into main page articles), I've done 24 hour blocks without warning. However, if I beleive it is newbie testing, with no bad intentions, then I go through the "test" system. Sometimes, depending on the seriousness, I start with "test2" or "test3". In this case, though, for blanking the George W. Bush article, I would have started with a {{blanking}} template, and then escalated the warnings if s/he continued. Flcelloguy | A note? | Desk | W_S 18:13, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

I don't give any warning to people who have vandalised more than a few pages. I do give warnings to people if the vandalism was potentially a test or if it was their first offence. While there is an aruement that we don't want to scare away new editors, I do still think it is insane to give 5 warnings, how many people have been warned more than once and gone on to become positive contributors? I think firmly asserting that we do not tolerate and kind of vandalism is the only way to maintain our credibility.

Then again I think letting people edit anonymoously is crazy as well. But thats a different matter. Martin 18:22, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

In the future I will use the properly-named test templates correctly. If the edit can be construed as a test (such as sticking in Example.jpg or something similar), then I'll warn. If the edit is the blanking of a page, it is clearly not a test, and I will block for 24 hours. Anything that I don't believe can be considered a test will be considered vandalism, and individuals will be blocked accordingly. Others have different views on when/when not to block. That's fine. They can unblock anyone I block. As we have already seen, this has led to 2 repeated/sneaky vandals being unblocked, as a result of assuming bad faith on my part for following my own guidelines, as the Blocking Policy permits. — BRIAN0918 • 2005-10-3 19:05

There isn't any assumption of bad faith. I think they're saying that you are using the wrong guidelines. --Ryan Delaney ^talk 19:26, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

Would you have called this a test? Probably not. Now check the next edit. It's not always clear what is a test and what isn't. Even when a user is clearly vandalizing and we act against them with haste beyond what is required to protect the commons we often create negative emotional attachment or convert whatever positive feelings they had to strongly negative ones. Most vandals are being foolish, not trying to harm. Blocks run the risk of creating enemies, and they give people a nice puzzle to fight against. We should use them in a way which minimizes damage. The increased damage in tossing out a warning before issuing a block is small compared to the harm of even a slightly increased chance creating another long term wikipedia enemy. Also, people are incorrectly blocked all the time. For example, if they are the second one to add a {{db|}} to an article with an attack-name they might recreate it and be seen by someone else as a vandal. Our users are all volunteers, so we should treat them all with respect, even those who do not deserve respect. This doesn't mean we don't act to stop vandalism, but it means we need to respond appropriately for the threat. So, If you are not interested in wielding blocks with patience and precision, then you should leave that job to someone else who is... --Gmaxwell 20:48, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

I just became an admin within the last three days. I've never blocked anybody. Up until now, my ONLY tools to use were the warnings, manual reverts, and calling admins for help. Yet I've been waging what I felt was an effective war against vandalism. See, for example, the case from last week of 206.162.152.82 (talk · contribs) and Delmontejuicebox (talk · contribs), who I assume to be either the same person or two kids sitting next to each other in a high school (or nursery school) computer class. I found vandalism, I reverted, I warned, they got mad and vandalized some more, and eventually an admin blocked them. It was not instantaneous, but it was fairly quick and effective.

I DO want to see more prompt and certain response to vandalism, but I think that can mostly be summed up by applying the existing policies with more certainty and rapidity. While I certainly think there are times an instant block is the obvious solution, I do not think it's appropriate to skip the warnings because the warnings themselves seem burdensome. If a vandal is truly that big of a problem you will pass through all of the warnings very quickly.

It's a bit like being Shakespeare. Shakespeare could get away with violating "rules" for English poetry, but only because he was a master of those rules. People shouldn't be stepping out of the normal blocking procedure, IMO, unless they are experts at using said normal procedure.

I do not think page blanking can be assumed to be vandalism. It's the perfect example of a "test." Yes, it's destructive. But it's not too much to revert a page blanking, warn, and watch to see if the guy does it again. I would think that people who enjoy the job of fighting vandals would be glad to do it. In the same way, I think it's surely hard to assume that something is vandalism; the line between "vandalism" and "curiously pushing buttons to see if they really work" is a gradient rather than a well-defined border. Best to err on the side of caution, particularly since you can always come back and block later.

I do think it'd be nice to have a set of warning templates that do not assume quite so much good faith. When I see a user has been warned for vandalism eight times before over the past six months, it is not a time I want to say Thanks for experimenting with Wikipedia. Your test worked, and has been reverted. Please use the sandbox for any other tests you want to do. Take a look at the welcome page if you would like to learn more about contributing to our encyclopedia. Thanks.. Jdavidb 22:01, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

I tend to agree iwth what Jdavidb said in his first paragraph. We have the tools we need to deal with vandalism, except that it's often just not handled quickly enough. One of the things that frustrated me about being a user -- and I imagine frustrates others, potentially enough to quit the project -- is that administrator intervention on vandalism issues seemed glacial or nonexistent. Witness WP:VIP; it's a backwater, hardly paid attention to. Peoples' requests languish for days. On the other hand, Wikipedia:Administrator intervention against vandalism gets taken care of lickety-split. I can see why, of course -- people who go to AIV typically know when something is blockable vandalism, and are aware that people need to be warned. Lots of folks who go to WP:VIP don't know about either threshold, or somehow don't conform to the requirements of the page, so researching the claims and responding to them take a lot more time in my experience. But to me, it's just as important to be responsive to that page as it is to the AIV page, maybe more, because it's utilized more. It can be extremely frustrating, as a good faith editor, to report something to a noticeboard and feel like nobody cares or is paying attention (which certainly happened to me). Even if the solution is do nothing, it would make good faith editors feel better to know that someone's evaluated their report and said "sorry, not yet." So, all that is basically a longwinded way of encouraging admins to spend some more time at WP:VIP I guess. · Katefan0^(scribble) 22:24, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for pointing that out. I think I'm going to go add WP:VIP to my watchlist right after I get done here. Jdavidb 22:58, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

Wow, I didn't realize policy gave us so much leeway and power. In my opinion, an editor should not be blocked unless they are given a series of warnings, that is, one to let them know they're being noticed, one to teach them what vandalism is (because we bandy around the term like everyone should know what it means, which isn't always true), and one to make sure they understand that they will be blocked if they keep it up. And I think they should be at least 5 minutes apart, so we know the editor got the chance to read the warnings. That's why I originally created the test2 through test4 templates... I found myself doing this every once in a while. I find most vandalism is done by newbies unfamiliar with Wikipedia, and many of them have the potential to become valuable contributors. It's really easy to follow them around, clean up after them, and leave them test messages, so I see no hurry in blocking. But it's pretty obvious in this discussion that I'm in the minority. moink 22:32, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

Well I agree with you Secretlondon 22:46, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

Oh, so you're the guy who cursed us by creating five warnings instead of just one and a half! Just kidding. As near as I can tell, use of your warnings is policy or de facto policy, but policy certainly does grant us a lot of rules. Look at Category:Wikipedia official policy and you'll see that it includes Wikipedia:Ignore all rules. Editors including but not limited to admins can and should throw the rules out the window ... when appropriate!! This goes with what I said above, that rules should only be broken by those who are expert in following them. Looking at the discussion, I don't think you're actually in the minority. I think most people do practice warning multiple times before reverting, although perhaps not everybody goes all the way out to five warnings. Jdavidb 23:02, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

My 2 yen: I almost always give at least two warnings before blocking, but there are cases where an instant block is the only remedy. It really depends. But if a user is clearly a banned user, then it's insta-block. Same if they're on a vandalism rampage. Exploding Boy 22:43, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

Are there actually any cases of someone deliberatly (i.e. not "test" vandalism) vandalising a few pages then getting a warning and then going on to actually become a positive contributor? Martin 22:49, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

We have plenty of examples of genuine contributors being blocked because of an IP block. As well as dymnaic IP addresses we have the famous AOL and Freeserve proxies.. Secretlondon 22:54, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

Well, we do have a few editors who have been vandals, I believe this even came up in an (unsuccessful) RfA a while back. --fvw* 22:52, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

Yeah but any IP vandals who have seen the error of their ways after a {{test}}? I don't know of any, in fact most seem to carry on vandalising even after repeated warnings and a block. Martin 22:58, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

Yes, in fact I've talked to quite a few regular editors in IRC whos first edits were playing pranks on Wikipedia. The fact of the matter is that a few jokes here in there by themselves are harmless, the problem is that when you scale it up to the millions of potential editors we'd be overrun with nonsense edits. Some people don't think this out, so they decide it would be fun and harmless to insert a penis in Britney Spears. It's less obvious who started with vandals, because people often do this anonymously, then get accounts after their first postive expirence with people on Wikipedia. People also are also wise to not jump up and admit their seedy past: although there is some evidence that we forgive and forget, it isn't strong.... We're not talking about highspeed / bot driven vandalism here. I think there is a good argument for block-first and sort out later in those cases. --Gmaxwell 23:06, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

I can't think of anyone off the top of my head who went around doing active malicious vandalism for a while and then settled down (though it would be hard to tell, since much vandalism is done by anon IPs and most regulars register). Some would say User:Plato falls into that category, but I'm not sure he was all that positive an editor. There have definitely been people who did some little test insertion of silliness, and then accidentally blanked a page or two, and then figured out how everything worked and turned out to be cooperative. Really malicious people should be blocked, but it seems like Brian0918 and some others aren't assuming good faith, and are blocking very quickly some things that could be either tests or vandalism. moink 02:12, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

It does not matter if the user intended to vandalize, to test, or whatever. Intent is very difficult to determine accurately, when it seems obvious it often isn't, and even once you are sure you've pinned someone's intentions you will have little luck getting widespread agreement in the community. Without community support you will have little luck enforcing a block, or at least you'll risk more 'rogue admin' accusations. The reason assume good faith works, and indeed the reason we're able to do any enforcement at all, is because we act on actions, not intent. By acting on actions rather than intent we avoid the entire rats nest of determining intent entirely. Good users do bad things too from time to time, bad users will act in mysterious and chaotic ways... it doesn't matter, if they harm the project we can block them all. ... When we see people getting blocked without warning, when there isn't a compelling reason like speedy vandalsim, then we must conclude that someone has blocked them based on presumed intent (since when would you block a good intentioned user after one edit?). No one can accurately determine intent, so blocks based on presumed intent rather than actions are more likely to be wrong, are unlikely to be supported by the community, and they violate the spirit of our blocking policy if not the letter of law. Yes, the process says to apply judgement, but it says that because we want to be flexible and to avoid bureaucracy. It is not a blank check. --Gmaxwell 04:38, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

I must say, I think that Gmaxwell summarised it very well in the above paragraph. This question often seems to perennially come to the foreground when some admin has been found to have started a "crackdown" on vandalism by somewhat zealous banning (User:RickK jumps to mind). There is, I feel, a wider issue at play here; and that is where we consider admin discretion overrides standard policy, and when it is either appropriate or inappropriate for that to be ignored. Of course, we have IAR; but as Greg so aptly put it, it isn't a blank cheque. I think it is true to say that a lack of reasonable tolerance of initial vandalism actually tends to create more vandalism, since it turns the previously neutral user into an enemy (perhaps, in the spirit of WP:BEANS). I think that there is a delicate balance between being too relaxed on vandals (since they learn to trash the wiki as they please) or being too harsh on them (as it causes the parties to "declare war"). What we really are attempting to achieve is somehow making constructive editing more attractive to newcomers than vandalism; civility, and tolerance, are key in the process. As to how else we could achieve this process I don't know; I will give it some thought. --NicholasTurnbull | (talk) (e-mail) (cabal) 05:13, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

Original research -- advice please

An editor (editing both as an anon. and as User:Dpknauss) has been doing extensive work on Robert Crowley (printer) and a couple of related articles. I began to be worried that a lot of it looked like original research, and posted a comment on Talk:Robert Crowley (printer) asking if that impression could be remedied. Dpknauss's response has been (in between the personal abuse, and the rejection of Wikipedia policies and guidelines as "utterly stupid, incoherent, self-contradictory") to say that yes, of course it's original research, so what?

The article is very long and detailed, and I'm in no position to edit it so as to remove the original parts while retaining the rest. I thought of taking it back to a clearly non-original research version, but that's a stub. Any ideas? --Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 10:01, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

Material that is original research is useless to Wikipedia. In fact it is probably a negative. Give the user a chance to substantiate the material with valid sources, and if they choose not to, make it clear all the material will be reverted, not as a punishment, just what is in the best interest of the project. Of course the material may be correct, and if so it would be easy to verify with good sources. If the user refuses to follow policies, suggest somewhere else is a better place for their work, and carry it through the dispute resolution process if need be. An RFC could be successful, just don't give up on enforcing our policies. WP:NOR is non negotiable too. - Taxman ^Talk 12:50, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

I'll certainly keep trying — though I think that the presence of other editors might do more good than just me banging on. --Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 14:55, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

Mel, after reading your comments on the article talk page and User Talk:Dpknauss, it really appears that you are comming off hard on the guy. Had someone done this to me early in my expirence with Wikipedia there is a good chance I would have just said "screw you, I'm not going to help with your project anymore". It's clear that the user is trying to help, and it also seems clear that the user *is* able to help (i.e. they aren't some crackpot trying to add their own unsubstantiated pet theories). It would be more useful to get new participants to understand WP:NOR and why it exists and is important, rather than just bludgeon them about the head with it. --Gmaxwell 13:57, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

I don't think that you read carefuly enough (or far enough back); I've explained part of that in response to your comment on the Talk page. I've been trying to get through to him for some time; the best I've had is patronising dismissal... he usually ignores me or, as here, is outright insulting. Sweetness and light is pretty hard to keep up under that pressure. Commenting on the Talk page only to reprimand me wasn't really very helpful, though — he presumably now feels vindicated in both his disregard for Wikipedia policy and his personal attacks on me.--Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 14:55, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

Possible Willy on Wheels

I don't where I should put this or who I should inform, but a W_on_W (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · nuke contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log) was created today. I thought it looked too close to Willy on Wheels and an admin would want to check it out. One Willy on Wheels sockpuppet has already been created and block today. Psy guy ^(talk) 14:05, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

IMO, I don't think we should over-react. If he does turn out to be our friend Willy, Curp's blocking bot should catch him soon. Thanks! Flcelloguy | A note? | Desk | W_S 14:13, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

Agree with FLC, and compliments on taking it here before doing anything. ~~ N (t/c) 15:51, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

Gabrielsimon back

Gabrielsimon (AKA Gavin the Chosen), the block from his Arb case having expired, is back and editing under the name Gimmiet (talk · contribs). ~~ N (t/c) 18:12, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

Is there anything in the ArbCom case prohibiting him from doing so, or anything else that admins need to be aware of? Thanks. Flcelloguy | A note? | Desk | W_S 18:43, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

Although the one month ban is over, he still has a revert restriction. From his ArbCom case: " Gabrielsimon is limited to one revert per day per article. In addition he is limited to three reverts in total per 24 hours. He is instructed not to revert war at all and instead engage in dialogue on the talk pages of articles." Enforcement: "Should Gabrielsimon violate the revert limit imposed on him he may be banned for a short period, up to a week in the case of repeat offenses." Carbonite | Talk 18:54, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

Yes. Additionally: "If problems evidencing immaturity emerge with the new username he may be banned for up to an additional month by any three Wikipedia administrators who, based on his edits and behavior, identify him and feel an additional month's ban may aid him him in gaining maturity. This remedy shall continue until he has edited Wikipedia for 6 months without being banned. A log shall be maintained on this page of all bans." ~~ N (t/c) 18:55, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

two things. first, it should be notd that I tried to be the one annoucing myt return, but i goofed as to where to place it. second, i must say the log page will be slightly barren.Gimmiet 19:25, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

That's an excellent attitude. I can speak for everyone when i say that we'd love to see the log page completely barren. Welcome back! Theresa Knott (a tenth stroke) 19:36, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

User:BigDaddy777's talk page

BigDaddy777 (talk · contribs) is currently the subject of an arbitration. Meanwhile, he persists in removing comments on his user talk page, editing them to leave signatures of other people on his own comments and botched edits. It is my understanding that this is a violation of policy. I realize it's probably hopeless, but should he be reverted?

Also, if removing comments from one's own talk page is indeed a violation of policy, can someone point me to the policy page that says so? I can't seem to find it. Jdavidb 01:27, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

Removing coments from your own talk page is not a violation of policy, it's only generally discouraged (since it makes one look like as if he was trying to hide something). However, removing a warning from an admin is generally seen as a statement of the "I've seen it and I do not care" kind. --cesarb 01:43, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

(after looking at that page) On the other hand, if he removes a comment, he should remove them completely, instead of leaving the signatures. He did it after being warned. I will warn again. --cesarb 01:56, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

I have blocked him for 24 hours for editing other people's comments into personal attacks, and I also protected his user talk page. Since this is slightly unusual, I would like for another admin to review my handling of this issue. --cesarb 02:33, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

At a cursory glance, I would have been inclined to take similar action. Wikipedia is for transparency and is no place for misrepresentation; I think you took the adequate steps to let this user know that their edits were contrary to this spirit. --HappyCamper 02:59, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

Unblocked on email request (and WP:AGF). Feel free to block again if he continues with the misbehaviour. --cesarb 03:50, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

I think the addition of a large image of an lynching to BD's talk page is offensive, especially for someone with 777 in his user name. Guettarda 04:13, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

Hmm - actually it's User:Paul Klenk's addition. Guettarda 04:14, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

What is the relation between User:BigDaddy777, User:Gator1 and User:Derex? They all seem very active on BigDaddy777's talk page. Are they all individual users or is someone a sock puppet of some other one? Are they working in some sort of group or cabal? — JIP | Talk 17:09, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

No, they're not sockpuppets. BigDaddy777 and Gator are both conservative editors; Gator started defending BigDaddy777 at about the point when the RFC was opened on BD777's conduct, and the two of them have continued to banter back and forth. Derex was involved in a contentious article that BD777 had also edited, and has as a result become imbroiled in the entire fiasco. There's a good deal of bickering going on, that's why the talk page is fairly active. · Katefan0^(scribble) 17:13, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

Thanks. I blocked two users indefinitely on sight, because their names were obvious admissions of being straw men. They had both edited BD777's talk page, so I reverted the changes, and Gator1 reverted my changes. I let the matter drop then, because I felt I knew too little of the conflict. It just piqued my curiosity. — JIP | Talk 17:31, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

That's good, I'm glad that was taken care of. I agree with that particular block. Without putting words in Gator's mouth, I suspect he probably reverted the changes because he feels it's further evidence of BD777 being persecuted here (witness the wholly offensive comparison of BD777 and other conservative editors to blacks in the American South in the 1950's manifesto BD777 posted on his talk page). To me, it's not worth it to try reverting again -- there've been quite a lot of shenanigans going on on his talk page already so I'm just keeping away from the whole thing. For more information you can see Wikipedia:Requests for comment/BigDaddy777 and there's also an ongoing case at RFAr. Best · Katefan0^(scribble) 17:36, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

Spelling incorrect, but I can't edit it

Not quite a bug, not quite anything obvious, so I'm giving it to you guys to sort out. At Special:Upload, the licensing category "Political Event Poster" is spelt incorrectly. --Spankthecrumpet 01:38, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

Fixed. --fvw* 01:47, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

Just curious: where is that defined? I cannot find "Political Event Poster" anywhere on Special:Allmessages. --cesarb 02:10, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

MediaWiki:Licenses. Dragons flight 02:20, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

Why aren't some messages on Special:Allmessages? Earlier today I noticed that MediaWiki:Nstab-portal wasn't. ~~ N (t/c) 02:22, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

It probably should be reported as a bug. --cesarb 02:40, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

Done. ~~ N (t/c) 03:01, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

Did you mean this one? --cesarb 03:15, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

Recent e-mail exchange with Monty Sarhan, Cracked Entertainment

I have recently been in communication with a Mr. Monty Sarhan, Editor-in-Chief and CEO of Cracked Entertainment, who has taken issue to vandalism to a bio article on him, Monty Sarhan, as he felt the vandalism wasn't removed expeditiously enough. He wished that this article was protected permanently to prevent this from happening again; I informed him that it was not possible to protect the article, as per our editorial policies - the vandalism was something of a one-off, and so a page protection would hardly be appropriate. I also informed him that we don't protect pages permanently. He wasn't satisfied with my response that I would keep an eye out; his e-mails were suggestive of legal action, and he felt that Wikipedia was being complicit in libel by not protecting his page. I have forwarded these communications to the Board's e-mail address, and thought that I ought to add a note here to let people know of the scenario. --NicholasTurnbull | (talk page) (e-mail) 03:59, 5 October 2005 (UTC) Team Leader, The Mediation Cabal

• • I have also had practically identical communication with Mr. Sarhan, minus the legal hintings. Joyous (talk) 10:12, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

• I just love comments like "I don't like this article! I'm going to sue your ass!". Really, can anyone point me to any law which states Wikipedia articles about real persons have to be written in a favourable style, and have to be expressly approved by their subjects? — JIP | Talk 06:59, 5 October 2005 (UTC)
• There is extensive libel law in the United States concerning defamation of character in print that could potentially apply - if the newspaper I work for printed some of the stuff that gets vandalized into wikipedia articles, we'd be in trouble. But libel law's application to online material is in flux, and AFAIK its application to a wiki has never been tested in US courts. That would be a very interesting case! - DavidWBrooks 10:49, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

Eh. Libel law is hard to overcome. Even if something WAS a lie, unless the plaintiff can prove actual malice (and actual damage), the suit is basically thrown out. It's pretty hard to successfully sue for libel in the U.S. · Katefan0^(scribble) 15:11, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

• • The article has been pretty calm. Until my edit around the 1st of October, there was a revert of my additions, and I am changing some wikilinks now. Zach (Sound Off) 07:14, 5 October 2005 (UTC)
    • Hey! I figured out something: the whole article needs a rewrite. Before I touched it, most of the text was copied from a press release from [11] (maybe copyvio version at [12]. Zach (Sound Off) 07:23, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

Editing Mediawiki messages

How bold can one be in editing Mediawiki messages? Should it only be done by request and community consensus? Can e.g. temporarily changing "Edit this page" to "Edit this page 0M6 | 0\/\/Nz0R3D _|00" cause an immediate report of abuse of AdministrativePower? — JIP | Talk 11:17, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

Did someone actually do that? :0 Flcelloguy | A note? | Desk | W_S 13:17, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

No. It was just an extreme example of how editing of the messages could be abused. — JIP | Talk 13:22, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

Well, if someone actually did something like that, with bad intentions, I would consider that abuse. However, if someone is trying to improve something, I would say go ahead and be bold; after all, not a lot of administrators, IMO, follow the discussion pages of MediaWiki texts. However, as always, there will be a certain extent to which boldness can go — for example, if someone changed "Edit this page" to "Change this page in whatever way you want", that would indubitably raise a community uproar. I would say use your common sense and discretion. Flcelloguy | A note? | Desk | W_S 13:28, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

During last April Fools Day there were a number of admins who edited the MediaWiki messages, and there was even some edit warring with other admins who were quickly reverting those changes. I think that one admin was even AFAR'd, but the ArbComm quickly decided, at least in that instance, that it was a one-time thing and unlikely to happen again. Before next April Fools Day admins probably should be warned that this is behavior that they should repeat. BlankVerse ∅ 13:33, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

I hope that should read "this is behavior that they should *not* repeat"! Warofdreams talk 13:53, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

As a test, I briefly changed Mediawiki:Editthispage and Mediawiki:Edit to Edit this page, baby! and then instantly reverted my changes. But that didn't work, the edit tab at the top still said edit this page. What did I do wrong? — JIP | Talk 15:36, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

Cache issues, no doubt. I assure you that it worked perfectly well on April Fool's Day, when "edit this page" read "vandalize this page" for several minutes at least. — Dan | Talk 16:23, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

What's the difference between Mediawiki:Editthispage and Mediawiki:Edit? Why do they show up with a lowercase first letter even though they are stored with an uppercase first letter? — JIP | Talk 16:25, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

The lowercase thing is in the Monobook CSS. Don't know about the two different pages. ~~ N (t/c) 19:50, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

I managed to have the edit tab say edit this page, baby! by flushing my browser's cache. Changing Mediawiki:Edit changes the tab, but changing Mediawiki:Editthispage doesn't seem to change anything. Is there somekind of "Developers' noticeboard" where I could ask a developer what the Editthispage message does? Now I'll just wait for some confused newbie to write to Wikipedia:Help desk asking why the edit tab said edit this page, baby! and wondering if we were h4x0r3d... =) — JIP | Talk 08:30, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

I don't think you should be testing stuff out here, they're big, globally visible changes. There's the test wiki for that sort of thing, or you could install mediawiki locally. --fvw* 08:47, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

Well it sure did catch my attention. I have this page on my watchlist, but I was only checking Mediawiki:Monobook.js for changes. Didn't know of the Editpage page. ∞Who?¿? 08:51, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

OK, thanks for letting me know. I won't be making any more silly tests in the Mediawiki messages in the global Wikipedia. Maybe I'll try the test wiki. What is its address again? — JIP | Talk 08:56, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

http://test.leuksman.com/, you may have to ask someone for an admin account though, I suspect their mediawiki namespace isn't freely editable either. And thanks. --fvw* 09:01, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

So, who's been mucking with the Classic stylesheet? The "Save page" button text is now bolded, and it looks rather funny on every browser I've tried. --Carnildo 20:35, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

Use of brief blocks on Arvanites

Administrators who were watching WP:ANI last week may have caught the brief but very clangorous battle of words between some participants in an apparently trivial war over the Arvanites articles, and those who have watched WP:RFAR will have seen a related failed attempt by one participant to bring an arbitration case against another. The edit wars continue on the article, so I have issued a three-hour block on the three worst offenders, REX (talk · contribs), Theathenae (talk · contribs) and matia.gr (talk · contribs) for extreme incivility, personal attacks and edit warring. It's a controversial move so I invite review and possible prompt reversal of the blocks. --Tony Sidaway^Talk 14:40, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

It's part of an ongoing disagreement between those three users. Not too long ago, I protected Arvanites (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) and tried to encourage them to work towards a constructive solution on the talk page. However, most of the discussion there seems to be going in circles, and the tone of the debate is rather acerbic. Once the article was unprotected again, the old editing patterns quickly resurfaced. I have no idea what it will take to restore civility to this whole debate. --MarkSweep✍ 08:57, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

INJUSTICE

I demand a formal apology and the removal of my username from the list of the blocked users, with regards to User:Tony Sidaway's misuse of admin priviledges. +MATIA ☎ 19:18, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

Stop whining MATIA

You engaged in an edit war. You know that edit wars are harmful and yet you did. You got what you deserved; anyway, it was only [13] three hours. Just accept the punishment for what you did. I did. Don't do the crime if you can't do the time! REX 19:39, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

Archiving

This page has grown ginormous. Does anybody know how the archiving is organised? I looked but I can't make sense of it. --Tony Sidaway^Talk 17:44, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

yup. chose a cut off date cut and paste. Personaly I wait untill my system has trouble loading the page before doing anything but others may opertate a different scedule.Geni 20:04, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

Okay, I copied a load of stuff into the current archive file and just about halved the size of this page. --Tony Sidaway^Talk 22:58, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

Protection policy vs. XfD

Is it considered to be within policy to nominate protected pages to XfD, including putting the tag into the article? --Pjacobi 19:38, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

Not sure about that one. Zach (Sound Off) 19:59, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

If it's vprotected, sure. For an edit dispute protection, perhaps you'd better discuss it on talk first (not official policy or anything, just my views). --fvw* 20:03, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

I don't see any reason protected pages are not valid for deletion nominations. I disagree with fvw and think that vprotected should not be nominated. Instead, that should be handled an protected pages. As for putting the tag into the article, if you are not an admin I see no problem asking an admin to add it and doubt any would object if you've started the XfD discussion. (And it is made in good faith.) - Tεxτurε 20:18, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

I've put my concerns on the talk page for now, at Template talk:Sealand table#TfD. --Pjacobi 20:40, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

Coolcat final decision

The arbitration committee has reached a final decision in the Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Coolcat, Davenbelle and Stereotek case. →Raul654 23:30, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

Quite a few Ozemail IPs unblocked

• 203.166.96.240 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · filter log · WHOIS · RDNS · RBLs · http · block user · block log)
• 203.166.96.239 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · filter log · WHOIS · RDNS · RBLs · http · block user · block log)
• 203.166.96.238 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · filter log · WHOIS · RDNS · RBLs · http · block user · block log)
• 203.166.96.237 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · filter log · WHOIS · RDNS · RBLs · http · block user · block log)
• 203.166.96.236 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · filter log · WHOIS · RDNS · RBLs · http · block user · block log)
• 203.166.96.235 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · filter log · WHOIS · RDNS · RBLs · http · block user · block log)
• 203.166.96.234 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · filter log · WHOIS · RDNS · RBLs · http · block user · block log)
• 203.166.96.233 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · filter log · WHOIS · RDNS · RBLs · http · block user · block log)
• 203.166.96.232 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · filter log · WHOIS · RDNS · RBLs · http · block user · block log)
• 203.166.96.231 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · filter log · WHOIS · RDNS · RBLs · http · block user · block log)

All unblocked - someone reasonably higher up in TAFE asked me to unblock them as they are trying to encourage their students to contribute to Wikipedia. No thanks to Ozemail, who must have the worst security team in the world: I was informed that these IP address ranges were being used by their proxy servers. From what I'm getting, it appears that they don't know their own network. - Ta bu shi da yu 08:14, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

Ehm, going by reverse DNS they're UUNET proxies. Not sure why they were blocked in the first place though, blocking policy says nothing of blocking non-open proxies. --fvw* 08:27, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

This was discussed on WP:AN before. I had received word back from Ozemail security team that users could bypass their proxy servers and there should be minimal effect. We were literally getting nothing but vandalism and it was widely agreed that it was OK to block these IP addresses because of this advise. - Ta bu shi da yu 00:01, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

P.S. please note that UUNET owns Ozemail. - Ta bu shi da yu 00:01, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

There's no need to convince me, I've been arguing for doing this for all non-transparant proxies for ages. I'm just not sure it has community support. --fvw* 01:31, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

Just trying to explain what happened :-) Ta bu shi da yu 02:50, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

Addressing an editor having trouble being civil

I'm not quite sure where to ask this, but I thought that the AN might have some experienced editors/admins willing to provide some advice.

I had a brief and slightly negative encounter with a particular editor. I'm not going to mention his username, as I think that would just escalate things before I'm ready for it. I'm pretty immune to minor incivility at this point, so I'm not complaining about a particular incident. But I checked out the user's contributions, and he seems to very frequently break almost every rule on Wikipedia:Civility. We're talking near-constant abusive edit summaries, hostile and sarcastic comments on talk pages, vicious newbie bites, etc. However, he has also done some quite useful edits. The civility page suggests using peer pressure, but I'm afraid if I try to start a dialogue with this contributor I'll just redirect his hostility my way. Any suggestions for how to start a productive conversation? I don't feel I can just ignore him; I think he may be scaring some newbies away. moink 16:19, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

Hello there Moink - firstly, well done for taking the time and trouble to consider this, and to ask for assistance on this matter without plunging straight in. Being able to take a step back from the issue, and consider the best course of action, is always the most important thing in dealing with things like this - so you've already done the first part right. :-) Below are a few pointers on how to deal with hostile users:

1. Firstly, be prepared for them to be uncivil towards you at first when you try to raise the issue with them, and don't get mad in return. When people comment on or criticise the behaviour of someone else, that person can often feel threatened or attacked at first - but if you continue a good faith effort to reach out to them and assist them, they will eventually learn that you do not intend any malice towards them. If the user does make personal attacks against you, or behaves with animosity, politely - but not indignantly - point out what they are doing, and how they could correct it. It is important to assume good faith, and start off with the assumption that the user is not aware of their behaviour being unacceptable.
2. Try to find a point of agreement with the user. In other words, find something positive - an "olive branch", if you will, to kick the dialogue off onto a good start. It is important that you do maintain some degree of agreement with the user throughout the dialogue, as when agreement is missing understanding cannot possibly occur between yourself and the user and dialogue rapidly becomes fruitless. In all communication with the user try to find things you can agree upon, to keep the dialogue running smoothly.
3. Further to the above, try to word all discussion of what the user is doing incorrectly in a positive fashion. In other words, speak to the user in a manner as if you are assisting the user to become a better Wikipedian, rather than telling the user they aren't doing something right. Make sure you tell the user how they could improve their behaviour on Wikipedia, rather than just telling them what they aren't doing right.
4. Maintain a good communication cycle with the user. Be sure to acknowledge the user's messages to you in your replies, and remain cordial, polite and friendly at all times.
5. If you feel the user is being reserved in his or her communications to you, consider finding a more private medium for communication than Wikipedia talk pages. Often, people are either ashamed of discussing their weaknesses in public, or do not wish to mention things due to disputes that had previously occurred on Wikipedia. You may wish to offer them your e-mail address, or arrange a meeting on a messenger service (such as IRC, Skype, MSN Messenger, etc.) so that they can talk about private matters openly.

I hope the above assists you in resolving the matter with the user. If you find yourself unable to continue working on the issue, please feel free to drop us a note at Wikipedia:Mediation Cabal and we will take over the case if you wish, or provide secondary support - also, if you wish, you could direct the user in question to contact me. If you require any further advice on dispute resolution matters, please do feel free to contact me. I wish you the best of luck! Best regards, --NicholasTurnbull | (talk page) (e-mail) 18:09, 6 October 2005 (UTC) Team Leader, The Mediation Cabal - WP:TINMC

Modifications to Template:Test3, Template:Test4 etc..

I was bold and modified several {test} like templates (more precisely: Template:Test3, Template:Test4, Template:Test5, Template:Test2-n, Template:Test2a-n, Template:Test3-n, Template:Test4-n ) so they now also include links back to contribs, block page and blocklog. I don't think they hurt, but maybe someone will think it's an horrible awful idea. Open to suggestions. -- (☺drini♫|☎) 21:44, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

How is that useful? Since they are on the user's talk page you already have access to that information. Also, since you added it to the end of the message it looks like the anon is signing the message. I think it needs to revert back. - Tεxτurε 21:53, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

Definitely agree with Texture. See User:Rdsmith4/monobook.js for scripts to add tabs (next to move, protect, delete, etc) to block a user or search the block log for that user. — Dan | Talk 22:52, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

Well, I already have the tabs, and I redid the format so it looks less confusing. My point was, does it really hurt to have those links there? -- (☺drini♫|☎) 01:50, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

yes confusing to the person you are trying to comunicate with.Geni 09:45, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

Yes, the warned editor does not need to see confusing block logs or anything that would make the identity of the signer of the message confusing. Being bold was all right, though. Jdavidb (talk) 13:18, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

Final warnings

While we're on this subject, whilst a gradiation warning system is fine for newby tests, blankings and general sillyness, I'm fed up seeing 4 warnings given to folk who do things like replace biographical articles with 'IS A COCKSUCKER!' - these folk never turn into good editors after three gentle reprimands. I wonder whether we need a 'first and final warning' templet for blatent and offensive vandalism. Perhaps {{blatantvandal}} rendering

Welcome to Wikipedia. We invite everyone to contribute constructively to our encyclopedia. Take a look at the welcome page if you would like to learn more about contributing. However, unconstructive edits are considered vandalism, and if you continue in this manner you may be blocked from editing without further warning. Please stop it! Thanks.

If the vandal contuines the next act can either be a straight block or a {{test4}}. Any thoughts? --Doc (?) 14:04, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

I like this idea. It would certainly help with response time to vandalism. I've been starting off with a {{test2}} or {{test3}} for highly questionable edits, but your alternative is a lot better. Also, if we use that template, I think a {{test4}} is unnecessary. --Deathphoenix 14:27, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

I go test1 test3 test5. Test1 basicaly means "oy we saw that" and test3 is enough of a warning to block on.Geni 15:56, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

If you'd start with test2, you could say you only use prime numbers in your block messages. And how cool would that be? -Splash^talk 02:52, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

The way I tag them depends on the severity of the vandalism. If it is petty vandalism, I go {{test1}}, {{test2}}, {{test4}}. However, if it is more severe, I go {{test3}}, {{test4}}. I can't use {{test5}}, since I can't block, but {{test4}} is almost always equivalent to a listing in VIP for me. Titoxd^(?!?) 03:02, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

Good idea...it's so awesome. So awesome that I'm going to steal it. Hope you don't mind — Ilγαηερ (Tαlκ) 03:11, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

User talk:Francis Schonken

Has taken to removing NPOV lines from Category, and then making threats, to try and get his way.--Son of Paddy's Ego 13:22, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

Has Continued now making false 3RR reports.--Son of Paddy's Ego 14:41, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

User talk:Francis Schonken Continues to vandalise the Category:Terroists by removing the warnings about the content of both the Cat and the descriptin of the cat. He is removing {{NPOV}} statments without addressing the issues of the subjective nature of the category or it's description. The use editor should be blocked if they continue.--Son of Paddy's Ego 12:31, 9 October 2005 (UTC)

I'll taking up this case. This is part of a rather long dispute, and I will start by suggesting that the template be protected first. --HappyCamper 14:37, 9 October 2005 (UTC)

Extraordinarily persistent linkspam from 195.209.85.3

I just found a guy who has been persistently and perniciously linkspamming Wikipedia since August (with one attempt in April) and almost 100 edits. Almost every one of these had gone unnoticed. They are all rolled back, now (at least, all of those made from this IP).

Here he is: 195.209.85.3 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · filter log · WHOIS · RDNS · RBLs · http · block user · block log).

He made a ton of little pages about Nobel prize winners. While he did provide some information on these pages, they all seem to be advertizing free hosting services and junk. The whole thing appears to be some kind of SEO attempt.

Shoot on site if you see him. (Err, rollback and block, I mean.) Jdavidb (talk) 18:44, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

I hope you trimmed out any linkspam and ads, while retaining any valid info on these subjects he provided along the way. Certianly we ought to have articels about any and every Nobel prize winner. DES ^(talk) 20:52, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

There was no information. I didn't mean he provided information on Wikipedia. He'd just write up pages elsewhere and link to them from existing articles.

In some cases he replaced existing links. Jdavidb (talk) 21:45, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

Similar, but not as bad: need opinion

138.202.189.91 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · filter log · WHOIS · RDNS · RBLs · http · block user · block log)

I have trouble declaring someone linking only to *.edu addresses as a linkspammer. However, this person seems to be Joyce Carol Oates trying to give us links to her *.edu articles on every author in the United States. I'm going to go ahead and rollback. If someone disagrees, please give a shout here (AND on my talk page, if it's soon enough to stop me). Jdavidb (talk) 19:47, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

What the HELL is wrong with having links to one of our greatest living critics' and novelists' comments on literature and literary works? Are you COMPLETELY deranged? I really, really, really think Oates herself is too busy to be doing this, but even if it is her (HAHA!) taking the links down is the most stupid thing I've ever seen done here (and that's saying a lot, because I've seen the page David Mertz wrote about himself). The article on Oates here is disgracefully short, and in repentance for your idiotic behaviour you should research her & write a decent article. Take a look, she's the leading American cadnidate for the lit Nobel this year. Just looky here. [14] Tanya! Ravine 20:26, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

Wow. Ask me again without the personal attacks, and I might be willing to consider it. It's very interesting how on your user page you refer to yourself as "opponent of hate."

Clearly you are quite an Oates fan. It's rather interesting to see such a level of commitment. I wonder how many other Oates fans we have watching here.

I'm not much of an Oates fan, but accusing her of linkspamming was completely loony. It's like accusing John Kenneth Galbraithe of putting vanity links on the economics pages. Would anybody have paidmuch attention if I didn't go over the top (like you did) in my reply? Tanya! Ravine 19:51, 11 October 2005 (UTC)

I'm willing to be corrected by the consensus of the admins if I'm wrong, here. That's why I posted here in the first place. Is Oates the literary critic also an expert on musician Bob Dylan? Jdavidb (talk) 20:35, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

While I wouldn't go as far as the above comments by User:Tanya Ravine, Oates is indeed a very noted author and critic, and a link to her comments on a particular author or literary work seems to me to be likely to be a proper and relevant addition to articles about those authors or works, depending on the exact content of the page linked to, of course. But this seems to me to be less a case of linkspam than is adding an IMDB link to an article about an actor or a movie -- note that the IMDB is a commercial project, and contains lots of ads, but we link to it routinely and frequently because it is a highly relevant source of info. DES ^(talk) 20:50, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

Some of the pages linked to have only a few book jacket type blurbs add nothing to the Wikipedia articles that they were inserted into. Others are quite in-depth and do add to their articles. I would probably recommend looking at each on a case by case basis before deciding which to keep and which to delete. --GraemeL ^(talk) 20:58, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

Concurring with GraemeL here. Oates is indeed an important academic critic, who has written on many literary works. A link to a book jacket is silly, but a link to an actual literary essay by Oates on a given author or book is worth keeping. It is funny for an editor to be solely concerned with topics that Oates has written on, but it's not destructive to add such links where relevant. Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters 21:18, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

[Raising hand politely to be counted as Oates fan.] Apart from her stature, Oates is an incredibly productive writer and must indeed be very, very busy. Also, I don't think, if it was her doing it, that we would see such varying quality in these links, and therefore it seems more likely to be a fan/student of hers inserting them. Please don't remove any links to actual essays. The interview with Oates about Dylan (enhanced by containing video clip as well as text) is one of her slighter pieces, but I personally find it nevertheless more deserving and less spam-y than, say, this external Bob Dylan link, or this. Bishonen | talk 11:36, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

Main page redesign

The Wikipedia Usability Group is currently looking into redesigning the Main Page. Because of the importance of this page we need as many eyes as possible to get every point of view and option explored. - Trevor MacInnis (Talk | Contribs) 22:00, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

Template for WOW blocks!

I have just made a new template for WOW block messages, {{wow block}}. Use it as a block reason, just like {{username block}}. It looks like this:

---

Your account has been blocked as a suspected sockpuppet or impersonator of Willy on Wheels, in line with our blocking policy. This could be because your username is too similar to Willy on Wheels, or because you engaged in Willy-like actions. For more information about Willy on Wheels, please see Wikipedia:Long term abuse/Willy on Wheels.

You are encouraged to create a new account and contribute to Wikipedia, and in a constructive manner, if this block was a mistake. See Wikipedia:Username for guidance on selecting an appropriate username. You may also edit Wikipedia without creating an account. If you would like to discuss the block, you may edit your talk page or email the administrator who blocked you.

Due to Wikipedia's mechanism for enforcing name changes, your IP address may be temporarily blocked. Unless you have also been engaging in vandalism, we will remove that block if you email an administrator and explain the situation (see the list of administrators).

---

What do you think? --Phroziac^(talk) 02:36, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

You might want to write who "Willy on Wheels" is for those who are blocked by mistake. Maybe a wikilink to the WP:VIP subpage might do it. Titoxd^(?!?) 02:38, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

Hmm, good suggestion. I forgot about that. It'll be updated in a few minutes. --Phroziac^(talk) 02:45, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

We also have {{WoW}}. -Splash^talk 02:41, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

In my opinion, both are a good idea. That boilerplate would look odd as a block message. --Phroziac^(talk) 02:45, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

How about a {{WoWComp}} which has {{WoW}}<br>{{wow block}} ? — Ilγαηερ (Tαlκ) 03:06, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

I don't think that's a good idea. In my opinion, {{tl:WoW}} is for other people to see on the userpage, and {{wow block}} is for the blocked user to see. Only the blocked user or someone autoblocked because of them will see it. --Phroziac^(talk) 03:29, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

Great, but can you do something about the archive13 lunatic from a few hours ago? Jdavidb (talk) 03:41, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

• Explaining what a "page move vandal" (link to an appropriate page?) might be advisable - it's not going to make much sense to a new user, since they don't actually have the ability to move pages. Shimgray | talk | 10:50, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

Done. Copied the summary from VIP. :) --Phroziac^(talk) 15:19, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

One minor thought—by adding information about 'page move vandalism' and describing in detail one of our most notorious vandals, are we violating the WP:BEANS principle? That is, are we giving ideas to griefers who didn't know who WoW was, or who don't realize how annoying page move vandalism is? Should we be keeping the message shorter and sweeter? TenOfAllTrades(talk) 16:42, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

Copyright Violations

Just like to note that I have removed many copyvio logos from people's userpages including:

Image:OperaLogo.png and Image:Firefox logo 305x150.png

Please do not use these on userpages and remove these from any userpages you see them on, United States copyright law limits fair use usage of these images only to article spaces for articles directly on the topic, other uses are in violation of copyright laws. Jtkiefer ^{T | @ | C} ----- 04:02, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

You're a braver man than I. - RoyBoy ⁸⁰⁰ 05:07, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

Nonsense. We have explicit permission to do this. There's a Mozilla FAQ: "Can I put Firefox or Thunderbird banners on my website? Can I link to you?" Answer: "Thanks for your support :-) Of course you may. We have button programs for exactly this:"[15], [16]. — Matt Crypto 10:51, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

Male bikini-wearing

This article(Male bikini-wearing needs a cleanup. --Anilocra II 10:07, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

This article needs a deleting - (but that just the deletionist in me coming out)--Doc (?) 10:31, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

Speedied as patent nonsense, and protected against further recreation. I've left a comment on the user's talk page. - A Man In Black (conspire | past ops) 10:43, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

Good catch - I speedied it 8 min before you, and it had been immediately recreated --Doc (?) 10:49, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

This actually wasn't patent nonsense...just BS. Patent nonsense is a very descriptive term, which means a page that is full of gibberish, or other unreadable crap. --Phroziac^(talk) 15:34, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

"Interesting" use of the user space

Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason recently added a very nice new feature allowing us to see new pages outside of the main article space (see Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)#New_pages_by_article_space). Needless to say, "interesting" things aren't hard to find.

What does anyone think of this use of the User: space? User:64.64.138,108. It appears to be an attempt to set up POV forks of various articles which were too heavily defended to be subject to POV imposition any other way. If we just innocently leave him alone, Google will start finding these versions. While we usually allow wide latitude for what people do in their User space, this seems a bit over the line to me. Thoughts anyone? Antandrus (talk) 16:09, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

This could be particularly problematic. Take just one paragraph from this user's version of the Islam article:

Practicioners of Islam are the primary cause of Terrorism in the modern world today. Their proclamation that their religion is a "Religion of Peace" rings hollow when Wahabism, Sharia, and the general mistreatment of women and homosexuals is taken into account. In general, the religion practices gross intolerance of any behavior which does not follow it's rather strict and backward principles.

He also describes Erasure as a "homosexual" band.

I also note that all the user's contributions have been to his user page and the subpages mentioned, with not one contribution to actual Wikipedia's articles. Exploding Boy 16:22, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

The user page says "Hello, and welcome to my Wikipedia." It also states that other users should not "...change or update these articles in any way." Wikipedia is not a webspace provider. I'll leave a note on his talk page asking him to remove the pages. Carbonite | Talk 16:23, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

I deleted the POV forks. We're not dealing with a newbie's sandbox for experimenting with article rewrites. These are bad-faith trolling attempts, IMHO. --MarkSweep✍ 18:56, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

That's also a very "interesting" username - it looks like an IP at first glance, but isn't. ("...138 comma 108" not "138 dot 108") - I'd be tempted to call it deliberately misleading, but there you go. Which prompts the question - can someone register a username of the form xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx where xxx is 0-255, and if so what does the system do if that anon. comes along? Intriguing. Shimgray | talk | 17:18, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

i just tried to register the username 10.0.0.1 and it told me it was invalid so it looks like the software is checking for that. I'd be tempted to reccomend a block giving the reason: misleading username being used as free web hosting area and nothing else. Plugwash 17:37, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

Give him a chance to remove the content or list the user page at Miscellaneous Deletion. If he continues trying to use us a webhost, then {{usernameblock}} him. Titoxd^(?!?) 17:42, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

User:Anal Retentive

Anal_Retentive (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · nuke contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log)

Anybody remember this guy posting here, asking if his username was OK? [17]

Surprise, surprise, he turns out to be a vandal (pagemoves, and this misleading edit summary [18]). -- Curps 18:09, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

How deeply surprising. Good catch, Curps. -Splash^talk 18:52, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

User:210.0.177.84

This user appears to be an IP at King George V school. It was blocked for 3 months in May for repeated vandalism, with very little if any good edits- when the block expired, vandalism continued. I therefore blocked for an additional 3 months. I received an email yesterday:

I bought this secondhand PC a few months ago. As far as I know, no one using this PC now has done any vandalism on Wikipedia since I bought it. Please clear this IP address. Thank you.

The email didn't specify which IP was affected, but looking through my block log, it appears that 210.0.177.84 is the only one that could have possibly been affected. I'm curious as to what other admins think about possibly unblocking, and whether this IP really belongs to King George V school- it is a Hong Kong IP, as is the school, but I didn't necessarily find any evidence of the IP belonging to the school in particular. Ral315 W_S 18:32, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

An IP address doesn't belong to a PC, it belongs to the ISP. If they bought it from the school, they would have to change the IP to one owned by their own ISP. My opinion would be social engineering to try and get around the block. --GraemeL ^(talk) 18:38, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

I may have been a bit hasty there. The IP has no reverse DNS and is owned by Hutchison Global Communications. It could be that the school changed ISPs and that IP was re-allocated to somebody else. --GraemeL ^(talk) 18:43, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

On the principle of 'better ten guily men go free, than one innocent be imprisoned', I'd suggest, unblock and monitor. But, first sign of trouble, shut it down for a loooong time. Perhaps return e-mail stating that we will assume good faith, but to be very careful. --Doc (?) 18:50, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

That's the best alternative, unblock him. After that, encourage him to make an account, but watch him. Then, if starts vandalizing, place a 3 month block on him. Titoxd^(?!?) 19:07, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

Actually, it's "It were better that Ten Suspected Witches should escape, than that the Innocent Person should be Condemned." Nothing about the guilty<g>. - Nunh-huh 01:15, 9 October 2005 (UTC)

I've unblocked, and left a warning on the talk page for admins to consider any vandalism from the IP block-worthy. Thanks for your comments... Ral315 W_S 06:06, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

Re-sysopped myself

I'm not sure where to put this so I'll put it here.

I temp. re-sysopped myself for a few minuites to permanently ban the following users:

• User:200.191.188.xxx
• User:216.126.89.xxx
• User:256.92.5.xxx

The only reason they could exist was because of a security hole in mediawiki (that I fixed), and I didn't want to wait for admin attention while they further corrupted our database each time they made an edit. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 20:36, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

See also Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason. --cesarb 02:57, 9 October 2005 (UTC)

Speedy tags

I was a bit bold and created speedy tags for all the A and G Criteria for Speedy Deletion. I made redirects for some, but I would appreciate if you guys could look and check whether I messed up something. Titoxd^(?!?) 20:21, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

Great idea, what's the notation?

Actually, I think we should get rid of the nonspecific tag {{d}}, it's used to often by lazy editors who don't read the CSD and can't be bothered with afd. If folk can't be bothered telling me which criterion they are nominating something for a speedy, why should I have to figure it out? --Doc (?) 20:35, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

It's {{db-a1}}, {{db-a2}}, {{db-a3}}, {{db-a4}}, {{db-a5}}, {{db-a6}}, {{db-a7}}, {{db-a8}}, {{db-g1}}, {{db-g2}}, {{db-g3}}, {{db-g4}}, {{db-g5}}, {{db-g6}}, {{db-g7}}, {{db-g8}}, and {{db-g9}}. (note that I didn't make all of those, and some of them are just redirects to other CSD templates). And why do we have {{d}} anyway? {{db}} is better. Titoxd^(?!?) 20:50, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

Go futher, create templates for all the CSD, and then delete {{d}} and {{db}}. Since all possible reasons would be covered. It would force people to read and check the CSD instead of constantly placing {{db|advert}} or {{db|not notable}} or other such nonsense. --Doc (?) 20:54, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

I was thinking about that, and I'll do it later, but any help is appreciated... Titoxd^(?!?) 21:46, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

I think deleting {{d}} and {{db|reason}} are a bad idea. I remember that before I became an admin, when doing new pages patrol, there was a lot of junk being created - i.e. something like "'''[[Bold text]][[[Media:http://www.example.com link title]]]'''Insert non-formatted text here" It is quite obvious that if a page like that were created, it should be deleted — it's more common sense than pointing to the specific criteria that says "patent nonsense" or "created with little or no context". In addition, forcing someone to use a specific type of delete tag not only wastes time when doing new pages patrol, but is also confusing. Even now, I have no clue what criterion a1 is, or which one "patent nonsense" is. And I don't intend to know — it should be enough that I know those are criteria for deletion. The {{db|REASON}} also should not be deleted, because it lets users type in a reason — if someone doesn't know the specific criteria but knows that the above example is junk, they can type in {{db|newbie testing}} or something like that. In addition, {{db}} is also useful in cases of miscellanious deletion, such as a user trying to delete a user subpage. Thus, while I don't oppose the introduction of the new templates, I am strongly opposed to the deletion of {{d}} and {{db}}. Thanks! Flcelloguy | A note? | Desk | W_S 22:49, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

Fair points - I'll just have to keep droping notes to point out that 'advert' isn't currently a CSD. --Doc (?) 22:55, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

Oops, I think you thought I meant that I was thinking of deleting {{d}} and {{db}}. No, I was thinking of making the rest of the CSD tags (plus, I can't delete them even if I wanted, I'm not an admin). However, that said, I don't see the use of {{d}}. {{db}} is extremely useful, but {{d}} doesn't say anything. It doesn't tell the closing admin why the page should be deleted (and I'm not just talking about saying something like "Delete because of CSD G7", somthing simple as "Newbie test" works too). So if something should be deleted, it should be just {{d}}. Titoxd^(?!?) 22:58, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

Deleteing {{d}}

• Deleting {{d}} wouldn't be a bad idea, but {{db}} encourages more descriptive explanations as to why an article fits a certain criterion. I would therefore tend to keep that tag. - Mgm|^(talk) 13:05, 10 October 2005 (UTC)
  • I concur. I often encounter {{d}} on articles that aren't clear speedy candidates, and just end up removing the tag. {{db}} at least forces the tagger to provide a reason, whether it's a valid one or not, and it is still frequently used by those who aren't used to the more specialized templates. android79 13:17, 10 October 2005 (UTC)
    • OK, I think we've got a small consensus here - any more views? Or shall be nominate {{d}} for deletion? --Doc (?) 13:27, 10 October 2005 (UTC)
      • I don't necessarily think that {{d}} is helpful, it is definately over used, if an editor adds it for a bad reason, then that bad reason would be listed on {{db}}. As for the other templates, I know a few of them, but really only used {{db}}, mainly because when it comes down to it, knowing policies are one thing, remembering 20 template names is another. I would definately say dumb d and keep db. ∞Who?¿? 13:30, 10 October 2005 (UTC)
      • I do occasionally use {{d}}, though that's just laziness on my part when it's an obvious speedy. I use {{db}} a lot more. Getting rid of {{d}} would probably be a good thing. --GraemeL ^(talk) 13:35, 10 October 2005 (UTC)
      • If it's not clear from viewing the article why it's a CSD to an admin who knows WP:CSD, it probably isn't a CSD anyway. {{d}} is a labour saving device for non-admin RC patrollers and I don't think we should be making them type more, they have it hard enough as it is. Just give people mis-using it a quick hint that they shouldn't use it on unclear cases, should they present themselves (you could even make a template for this message if you want).
      • On the other hand, it does appear that all the arguments for and against have been made here, so if you want to TfD it go ahead, there's no need to have a strawpoll here and then have another one there. --fvw* 13:54, 10 October 2005 (UTC)
        • Good point, but I rememeber the last Tfd, sort of. Anywayz, here is the Tfd discussion for {{d}}. In case anyone wanted to see the arguments. ∞Who?¿? 14:11, 10 October 2005 (UTC)
          • Meh, looking at the previous TfD, it looks like any such nomination would fail. Maybe instead of trying to get it deleted, we should just discourage its use. Maybe some reminder text on {{d}} itself, encouraging the user to instead use {{db}} or one of the specialized ones? android79 14:34, 10 October 2005 (UTC)
            • Agreed, I've no stomach to nominate this in the face of such an overwhelming 'keep' less than six months ago. But I wonder whether a gentle worded 'please view the CSD, before tagging any more speedies' message template might be in order. I am fed up de-tagging things that aren't even close to being speedies. --Doc (?) 14:48, 10 October 2005 (UTC)
              • Good idea. Perhaps two talk-page message templates: One for the tagger who's tagging deleteable articles with {{d}} instead of the more specific ones, and one for the tagger who's tagging non-deleteable or ambiguously-deleteable stuff. I'll see what I can come up with... android79 15:02, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

(Too much indenting!) Drafts at User:Android79/CSDTemplate1 and User:Android79/CSDTemplate2. Suggested names: {{csdreminder}} and {{notacsd}}, though I suck at naming things. android79 15:25, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

You may want to add the templates page to this notice, for those who don't know about it. Wikipedia:Template messages/Deletion. ∞Who?¿? 02:21, 11 October 2005 (UTC)

• I voted to delete {{d}} when it was last up for deletion, but I don't think it will ge consensus thi time either. But when i find a page tagged with it, i always give it extra close check, adn i always leave a note on teh tagger's talk page asking him not to sue it again. {{db}} is helpful, soemtimes a more specific reason is a good idea than the standard tags give, and soemtimes a person won't know the correct specific tag. But anyone who is tagging should know db, and should be able to type a few words of reason. DES ^(talk) 16:20, 10 October 2005 (UTC)
  • I'm tempted to bite the bullet and nominate it. If someone tells me it is a really bad idea, I won't, though. So, what do you think? Titoxd^(?!?) 00:08, 11 October 2005 (UTC)
    • I'm broadly in favour of deletign - but given the previous debate was an overwheling 'keep', I'd probably advise against it --Doc (?) 00:12, 11 October 2005 (UTC)
      • Well, this is what's convincing me: Speedy creep is dangerous, A7 is already fairly (perhaps too) subjective, and more expansions are likely to be more so. But perhaps more worryingly, existing criteria are being pushed to catch ‘common sense’ deletions – which don’t fit careful rules. It is currently easier to tag nonsense, which is not patent, or things like advertising, with {{d}} and hope an admin will be flexible, than to go through the full AFD process. Increasing speedies answers the ‘deletion imbalance’, but can leave subjective and practically unscrutinised deletions. This makes me believe that {{d}} is being used to circumvent the CSD, which was not brought up on the previous TFD. However, I'd like some diffs of this actually happening. Titoxd^(?!?) 00:21, 11 October 2005 (UTC)

Well, whoever wrote what you quoted was obviously a total idiot! --Doc (?) 13:58, 11 October 2005 (UTC)
I'm confused. It comes from your page... Titoxd^(?!?) 00:17, 12 October 2005 (UTC) I know ;) --Doc (?) 01:06, 12 October 2005 (UTC)

• Too be frank, I use {{d}} in exactly that way. If I see something that's not cleanly in a category but I still think would be a slam-dunk at AfD and didn't miss out on having it's own category, I'll slap a lazy D on it and hope for an IAR admin. However, I'd support something that explicitly said "Anything not tagged with a specific CSD and that names that CDS in it's deletion comments will be restored and sent to AfD if deleted." Additionally, the rational given by most of the "keep" votes last time was very slim. (E.g. "Don't be silly"). I think that if the nomination explained very carefully why {{d}} should go but {{db}} should stay and pointed to this discussion, a second TfD might have a different outcome. (Plus, I didn't see DES's "delete" vote in the nomination linked? Was there yet another one?)
  brenneman^(t)(c) 05:50, 11 October 2005 (UTC)
• Well, the reason for the speedy (through the {{db}} template) doesn't need to quote the CSDs, but it should say something about why it is a speedy. A good example would be {{db|this is junk}} for something that would be classified as patent {{nonsense}}. Something is better than nothing, and {{d}} gives us nothing. Do we agree on this? Titoxd^(?!?) 00:17, 12 October 2005 (UTC)
  • Yes, agree there. Still think that the deletion comment should quote the criterion used or be restored, but that's a seperate issue that I am now officially shutting up on. I'm about a picosecond away from putting it on TfD...
    brenneman^(t)(c) 01:01, 12 October 2005 (UTC)

• • I'll vote for deleting d, but I think you've a snowball's chance of success--Doc (?) 01:06, 12 October 2005 (UTC)
    • Listed. Let's hope I don't get flamed because of this... Titoxd^(?!?) 01:57, 12 October 2005 (UTC)

Blatant vandalism tag

I've been a little bold myself, and (per the discussion above) created a 'first and final warning' tag for blatant or offensive vandalism. It's intended not for tests or general silliness but for folk who blank articles with obscenities etc. It warns that any more such acts may result in an immediate block (whilst leaving discression to the next admin, whether to block or warn again). I can’t find anything in the blocking policy that forbids this, but I will not use them until I see if anyone objects. They are Template:Blatantvandal , notated {{blatantvandal}} or {{bv}}. Any thoughts? --Doc (?) 20:46, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

As above, I think it is a great idea. I'll use them if no one objects too. Titoxd^(?!?) 20:52, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

I also noted above that I stole it ;) — Ilγαηερ (Tαlκ) 20:56, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

Imitation is the highest form of flattery! --Doc (?) 20:59, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

Adding the links for contribs, block, and block log, similar to Template:Test4-n, might be useful for this one since it's designed for a first and last warning. --GraemeL ^(talk) 21:11, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

dunno, but creating {{bv-n}} etc would be useful, if anyone can be bothered --Doc (?) 21:49, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

I followed your suggestion, and {{Blatantvandal-n}} and its shortcut, {{bv-n}}, now exist. Titoxd^(?!?) 01:36, 9 October 2005 (UTC)

Pope vandalism

Our pope vandal friend is back! Please be aware of any contibutions by IP addresses starting with "131.111...", which originates from the University of Cambridge. He (they?) like creating pages titled "Pope _____" (including some with references to Willy) and redirecting them to real popes (Pope John Paul II, etc.). Just be aware and on the lookout for such vandalism, and make sure to block quickly if you notice it — he's shown no signs of stopping. Thanks! Flcelloguy | A note? | Desk | W_S 00:46, 9 October 2005 (UTC)

Just so people know. I was an undergrad there. Many IP addresses are assigned centrally and statically to students' rooms for an academic year, or longer (in some cases we retained an IP for 2 years or more despite moving), at a time. Students uniformly live in their Colleges so this possible. So, if these are vandalising outside 'working' hours in the United Kingdom, blocking them is very unlikely to cause any collateral damage. Working hours in this case is largely 9am-1pm UK time since that is when practically all teaching in the Uni happens — students are not often lurking at departmental (i.e. shared) computers at a high density outside those hours (although those who are too keen are, of course). There are shared computers which are in regular, round-the-clock use, but these are in the minority and are principally in in-College computer rooms that contain plenty of other computers for an innocent editor to use. Oh, and if they turn out to be Willy, the University Computing Service will be all ears, I would imagine. Not that I can prove any of this to you, of course. -Splash^talk 01:09, 9 October 2005 (UTC)

If you can log the IPs, and file them somewhere, they can often be identified to one individual user, and a pointed complaint to the university computing service about JANET regulations - well, it can't hurt, and if the admin in question is feeling pissed off that morning someone might get a nasty email. In many colleges in-room machines have a username chosen by the student (I remember tales of the Churchill undergrad whose machine revelled in the name of pika.chu.cam.ac.uk) making it both easy to trace and easy to identify as an individuals machine - communal ones tend to be more vaguely named.

For example, the one you blocked earlier was 131.111.202.113 (talk · contribs), which resolves as kentrosaurus.chu.cam.ac.uk - it's almost guaranteed to be a private in-room machine at Churchill, and whilst I can't tell you who that is (though if it wasn't 3am I could ask around and see if anyone knew), their admin can. (I'm sure one of our active editors is at chu., but I forget who) Shimgray | talk | 01:46, 9 October 2005 (UTC)

It makes sense that it's a bored college student, especially since it took a break from vandalism to banter with me on my talk page (which is why I have a picture of Dick] on my talk page, if anyone is curious). - A Man In Black (conspire | past ops) 03:09, 9 October 2005 (UTC)

User:Coolcaesar trolling on Talk:History of the Internet

User:Coolcaesar has kicked off with another personal attack on Talk:History of the Internet#Wow_this_is_STILL_going_on, after being warned off for a previous personal attack Talk:History_of_the_Internet/archive2#More_errors. (A rather nasty slur against a disability) This comes at a time when a content dispute is in mediation, so provocative distractions are not needed. --John R. Barberio ^{talk, contribs} 10:13, 9 October 2005 (UTC)

User:69.235.*.* vandalism

This user always follows the same pattern: deleting a few entries at List of big-bust models and performers (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) and List of female porn stars (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) and also a few apparently legitimate edits, usually to American-football-related pages. Too broad a range to block, and doesn't stick around long enough for any talk page dialog. He comes back day after day like clockwork. This is a bit hard to handle by traditional means.

He first started this in May 2005. [19]

If someone feels motivated, ARIN shows these IPs are coming from Southwestern Bell Internet in Irvine, California, with abuse contacts [20][21][22][23]:

• OrgAbusePhone: +1-800-648-1626
• OrgAbuseEmail: abuse@sbcglobal.net

If reporting IPs and timestamps, remember to convert from UTC to Pacific Daylight Time (subtract 7 hours from UTC). For instance, this edit was at 00:05 PDT, October 9. -- Curps 10:48, 9 October 2005 (UTC)

Daylight saving time ends this year on October 30, for any entries after that (if we're still dealing with this issue) Pacific Standard Time (subtract 8 hours from UTC) will apply. -- Curps 11:03, 9 October 2005 (UTC)

Yuber Arbitration case

The Arbitration case centred on Yuber has closed. As a result of this:

• Yuber and Guy Montag are each placed on Wikipedia:Probation for one year from the date of closing this case. Should any sysop feel that it is necessary that either Yuber or Guy Montag be banned from an article where one of them is engaged in edit warring, removal of sourced material, POV reorganizations of the article, or any other activity which the user considers disruptive they shall place a template {{Yuber banned}} or {{Guy Montag banned}} as appropriate at the top of the talk page of the article, and notify them on their talk page. The template shall include the ending date of the ban (one year from this decision) and a link to Wikipedia:Probation. The template may be removed by any editor, including Yuber and Guy Montag, at the end of the ban. If Yuber or Guy Montag edit an article they are banned from, they may be briefly blocked from editing Wikipedia, up to a week for repeat offenses.
• Yuber is instructed to use only this account, and no anonymous IPs. What editing constitutes Yuber's is up to any sysop to decide. If Yuber violates this, any sysop is authorised to ban them for up to a week.
• For three months Guy Montag is banned from editing any article related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from the date of closing this case.

Yours,

James F. (talk) 11:34, 9 October 2005 (UTC)

New blocking policy proposal

We are trying to develop a new proposal that would, in a nutshell, mean that we have a new level of block which would allow an IP address to be blocked from anonymous, but allow registered editing.

This is impportant so please get involved!

See Wikipedia:Blocking policy proposal.

thanks - Martin 21:19, 9 October 2005 (UTC)

vandal from australian education IP

User talk:203.14.53.45(see contributions)

I have banned this IP permanently because all that comes out of it is vandalism. Just telling you guys. Sasquatcht|c 06:03, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

Nevermind that, Rdsmith4 is being nice and instituting a block until next June. Sasquatcht|c 06:04, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

This is not kosher. IPs are not to be blocked permanently unless they are open proxies, which this one isn't. I've adjusted the block to last the duration of the school year, the same as has been done with other Australian school IPs, which all seem to generate massive quantities of vandalism. — Dan | Talk 06:06, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

Sorry, the comment was meant in reply to your first one. Mysteriously, I didn't get an edit conflict notice; does MediaWiki automatically merge conflicting edits now? — Dan | Talk 06:07, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

The school year in Australia ends in December.--nixie 06:15, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

I blocked another one of these IP's but I blocked until Mid July which would be the equivalent to November, December in terms of the australian school year whatever that translates out to. Jtkiefer ^{T | @ | C} ----- 06:44, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

Well, these schools ALWAYS give us trouble. Getting very sick and tired of them. Sasquatcht|c 23:13, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

biblioweb.org

Do we really need all this? (Being unable to speak French, I'm unable to determine.) Jdavidb (talk) 14:37, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

I'm tempted to rollback the lot. It's blatant linkspam. And it links to a site in French, and this is the English Wikipedia. I don't suppose fr: would welcome this anymore than we should. -Splash^talk 14:44, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

No, this is the english wikipedia, french links (where appropriate, not mass-spammed) go on the french wikipedia. Reverting. --fvw* 14:46, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

I wouldn't revert them if it were a few. Although they are french biographies, it's blatant spam. I have seen a few articles that have multi-language links, dont see anything wrong with it normally, but this is a bit much. ∞Who?¿? 14:48, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

Thanks, guys. I know I take a really hardline approach toward link spam or even potential or suspected link spam, so I want to make sure I keep myself accountable here.

Fvw, did you get it all? The last time I hit one of these there were a lot of edits that were older and couldn't be automatically rolled back, so I had to manually remove each link. If there's any that still need to be done like that on this batch, let me know and I will gladly handle them. Jdavidb (talk) 16:52, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

User:PM Poon and User:Phronima

I've been approached by Phronima (talk · contribs) for help with the behaviour of PM Poon (talk · contribs) (whose behaviour is almost identical to that of Mr Tan (talk · contribs), for those who remember him). PM Poon is being insulting and hostile to an editor who seems to have done no more than (correctly) point out that PM Poon's copyediting hadn't been effective and that a "copyedit" template souldn't be removed, and who then copy-edited the article herself. PM Poon's behaviour is harrassing, and has extended to a minor case of Wiki-stalking. I've experienced him myself (as Poon and Tan), and he's overwhelmingly insistent.

Poon is, in fact, a bit of a problem across a range of articles. He has a habit (as he did when editing as Mr Tan) of "copyediting" articles, which usually involves at best the imposition of his sometimes odd ideas about good style, and at worst the introduction of grammatical mistakes. He then becomes aggressively defensive towards those who point this out. His English is poor, but he insists on giving advice to others, including native speakers whose English is in fact perfectly good. That's what seems to be happening here.

Partly because I'm unlikely to get anywhere with him, partly because the insults include the appalling calumny that Phronima's really me, but mainly because I'm a little tied up with other matters at the moment, I wondered if another admin would take a look and act accordingly. Thanks. --Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 18:10, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

Deletion reform

I've just launched a new proposal into this stagnant debate. See Wikipedia:Deletion reform/Proposals/Uncontested deletions. --Doc (?) 18:49, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

3RR: violating the spirit, but not the letter

How do we handle cases like Jguk (talk · contribs)? This person appears to me to be carefully timing his reverts to Jerusalem so as to repeatedly make his change against consensus while refusing to discuss on the talk page. I was ready to block him with a warning before I realized he technically had not violated the 3RR, so I wasn't sure I had the right to deal with him in that way.

I've reverted him, and I'm going to warn him that repeatedly reverting an article against such a clear consensus while refusing to discuss the edit on the article's talk page is vandalism and that if he continues he will find himself in dispute resolution and his ability to edit restricted. Any other comments? Should I just block him anyway, maybe a shorter block, as a warning? Jdavidb (talk) 19:52, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

And then he archived his talk page immediately after my warning. Jdavidb (talk) 20:12, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

wait as see if the patturn continues. If it does block him. Gameing the rule is unhelpful.Geni 20:19, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

I'm assuming good faith and have placed my warning on his new, blank talk page. If he reverts again today I'll block using 3RR. If I see him revert again after 24 hours, I may give a warning block (assuming noone here hollers and tells me that's not appropriate), or I may try to bring it to attention through dispute resolution so we could have an ironclad case for action if he doesn't concede. Jdavidb (talk) 20:35, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

Oh, and if he finds some excuse to take the warning off of his talk page, I'll act on that, too. Probably revert him back until he's at risk of 3RR on that. Jdavidb (talk) 20:37, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

There is a small number of disruptive editors going round trying to change date styles from BC to BCE in contravention of WP policy - I have been reverting them. It appears here that I erred and that the page (unfortunately for most of our readers who find BCE alien to them!) apparently was not originally BC. That's a shame - we should always use common terms over unusual ones, but I shan't revert this page again. Incidentally, where I know I have made at least one revert of any page, I always check to see whether a further revert would make me in breach of the 3RR (which seems a sensible approach). I'm not into gaming - I'm into making WP as useful a resource to as many people as possible, it's just a shame that a small number of users aren't, jguk 20:46, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

Resolved, then, mostly. Thanks for your good faith, here. I do think you (and all of us) need to realize that the present status quo on BC/BCE/AD/CE is pretty shaky. You can't go wrong if you treat it on an article by article basis and let the regular editors of that article come to consensus.

I don't think you're trying to game the 3RR system, but I do think you should think a little more about the spirit behind the policy. From experience, I get changes made more effectively when I'm discussing more and reverting less. I'll leave further comments about it on your talk page. Jdavidb (talk) 20:49, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

wait a minute

Okay, he's repeatedly removed my comments from his page. By my count he has done this four times: once through immediately archiving (now the timing is more suspicious), once for when I replaced my original comment on the new talk page, once for my next comment about the spirit behind the 3RR, and then once more after I replaced both removed comments. Is this a violation of 3RR? Jdavidb (talk) 21:31, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

Meanwhile, check his edit history and note that he is still carrying the fight about era notation to other pages. Again I contend that this violates the spirit of 3RR when you are effectively carrying on the same revert on multiple pages. I rescind my above comment that this is resolved. Jdavidb (talk) 21:33, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

He has removed my comments again. I consider this to be the fifth revert and a violation of 3RR and am blocking 24 hours. If anyone disagrees, feel free to unblock or otherwise admonish me. I think I'm doing right here ... but as a newbie admin I would like some feedback.

My understanding is that regardless of whatever control and latitude may be granted to you to control your user talk pages (which does not, according to any policy I can see, appear to be much) you don't get a free pass there from 3RR. Jdavidb (talk) 21:38, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

Jguk (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · nuke contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log)

Of course, he's continuing to remove the comments from his talk page. I'll protect the page if it persists.

Question: I'm not in violation of 3RR for replacing my warnings more than three times, am I? Jdavidb (talk) 21:45, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

Okay, User:Kelly Martin says I am in the wrong here. Jdavidb (talk) 21:53, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

I'm bewildered by Jguk's attitude to this. He is the editor who's being disruptive by going around changing pages that have been stable around this issue for months, so far as I know. There is no policy on this. The MoS says both are acceptable and anyway the MoS isn't policy, but Jguk is going around implying that using BCE/CE is somehow forbidden. For example, a recent edit summary of his read: "I'm told the MOS mandates this copyedit," [24] which strikes me as less than honest, because the MoS, as Jguk knows very well, mandates nothing about anything. I really wish he would stop it because all it's doing is creating bad feeling. On top of that, he's archiving all the comments about it on his talk page, so people don't see that quite a few editors oppose him. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 21:58, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

I'm copying this to WP:AN/I, which is where it should go, I believe. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 21:59, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

WP:CITE... policy or guideline?

A simple question. Is it a policy or a guideline? It doesn't actually say definitively either way on the page, and as a result there's some wikilawyering going on at Talk:Thomas Woods over whether or not some uncited assertions can remain in the article. I had always assumed it was a policy, but it doesn't specifically say that. Anybody? (I also left a message on the pump about this, hoping to get a good response.) · Katefan0^(scribble) 20:11, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

My opinion has always been that unverifiability (evidenced, among other ways, by information being unsourced) is a legitimate reason for removal of information from an article. Off the top of my head I'd say whoever is calling for information to be removed or sourced is within rights. I've always thought CITE was just info about how to get the formatting right and what sources were applicable and such. Jdavidb (talk) 20:15, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Verifiability is policy, however, and seems like it would be applicable. - A Man In Black (conspire | past ops) 20:22, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

Yes, I think you're both right (and TenOfAllTrades also pointed out on the pump) -- WP:CITE is the style portion of WP:V, and also WP:NOR. Thanks to all. · Katefan0^(scribble) 20:24, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

I would venture that WP:V is a policy, which directly references citation. I would therefore hold WP:CITE to be a guideline for documenting verifiability, as would also be the case for the WP:RS, the guideline for what sources are reliable for verification purposes. Buffyg 20:32, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

Pragmatically, I think one needs a source to justify getting material in and out. If something is just added and questioned, remove it to talk and request a source. That's legit, if there is no source, it doesn't get in if it is questionable. But if something is already in the article for a while, someone can't hold it all hostage and wholesale remove it unless they have a source that demonstrates it is wrong. At first, most any source above a geocities page counts, but of course higher quality sources should trump lower ones. And everyone should enforce edits in favor of the editor with the highest quality sources. Someone reverting against what high quality sources say should be dealt with through the 3RR rule or the dispute resolution process. An RFC would likely be quickly successful because Verifiability is a core policy. - Taxman ^Talk 13:23, 12 October 2005 (UTC)

A suggestion against move-vandals

Okay, from what I understand, there's the worry that some of the recent huge spate of unused newly-created accounts may be dormant sockpuppets of Willy On Wheels or similar page-move vandals, because you have to have been a user for (time X) before being granted page-move privileges.

I'd like to suggest that this be modified: not only do you have to have been a user for (time X), but you also need to have (# of edits). Not a huge number - perhaps a hundred or so, but more than it's worth doing at random in a few minutes.

Just a suggestion from a new admin. DS 01:40, 11 October 2005 (UTC)

Seems reasonable. If they're vandal edits, it gives us another chance to whack and block them before they can move pages. Titoxd^(?!?) 01:52, 11 October 2005 (UTC)

You may consider voicing your suggestions here. ∞Who?¿? 02:14, 11 October 2005 (UTC)