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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by SMcCandlish (talk | contribs) at 20:04, 12 October 2020 (→‎Looking for your advice: r). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

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 User talk:SMcCandlish/IP

Old stuff to resolve eventually

Cueless billiards

Unresolved
 – Can't get at the stuff at Ancestry; try using addl. cards.
Extended content

Categories are not my thing but do you think there are enough articles now or will be ever to make this necessary? Other than Finger billiards and possibly Carrom, what else is there?--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 11:12, 18 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Crud fits for sure. And if the variant in it is sourceable, I'm sure some military editor will fork it into a separate article eventually. I think at least some variants of bar billiards are played with hands and some bagatelle split-offs probably were, too (Shamos goes into loads of them, but I get them all mixed up, mostly because they have foreign names). And there's bocce billiards, article I've not written yet. Very fun game. Kept my sister and I busy for 3 hours once. Her husband (Air Force doctor) actually plays crud on a regular basis; maybe there's a connection. She beat me several times, so it must be from crud-playing. Hand pool might be its own article eventually. Anyway, I guess it depends upon your "categorization politics". Mine are pretty liberal - I like to put stuff into a logical category as long as there are multiple items for it (there'll be two as soon as you're done with f.b., since we have crud), and especially if there are multiple parent categories (that will be the case here), and especially especially if the split parallels the category structure of another related category branch (I can't think of a parallel here, so this criterion of mine is not a check mark in this case), and so on. A bunch of factors really. I kind of wallow in that stuff. Not sure why I dig the category space so much. Less psychodrama, I guess. >;-) In my entire time here, I can only think of maybe one categorization decision I've made that got nuked at CfD. And I'm a pretty aggressive categorizer, too; I totally overhauled Category:Pinball just for the heck of it and will probably do the same to Category:Darts soon.
PS: I'm not wedded to the "cueless billiards" name idea; it just seemed more concise than "cueless developments from cue sports" or whatever.— SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ Contribs. 11:44, 18 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I have no "categorization politics". It's not an area that I think about a lot or has ever interested me so it's good there are people like you. If there is to be a category on this, "cueless billiards" seems fine to me. By the way, just posted Yank Adams as an adjunct to the finger billiards article I started.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 11:57, 18 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Cool; I'd never even heard of him. This one looks like a good DYK; just the fact that there was Finger Billiards World Championship contention is funky enough, probably. You still citing that old version of Shamos? You really oughta get the 1999 version; it can be had from Amazon for cheap and has a bunch of updates. I actually put my old version in the recycle bin as not worth saving. Heh. PS: You seen Stein & Rubino 3rd ed.? I got one for the xmas before the one that just passed, from what was then a really good girlfriend. >;-) It's a-verra, verra nahce. Over 100 new pages, I think (mostly illustrations). — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ Contribs. 13:41, 18 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
If I happen to come across it in a used book store I might pick it up. There's nothing wrong with citing the older edition (as I've said to you before). I had not heard of Adams before yesterday either. Yank is apparently not his real name, though I'm not sure what it is yet. Not sure there will be enough on him to make a DYK (though don't count it out). Of course, since I didn't userspace it, I have 4½ days to see. Unfortunately, I don't have access to ancestry.com and have never found any free database nearly as useful for finding newspaper articles (and census, birth certificates, and reams of primary source material). I tried to sign up for a free trial again which worked once before, but they got smart and are logging those who signed up previously. I just looked; the new Stein and Rubino is about $280. I'll work from the 2nd edition:-)--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 14:16, 18 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Hmm... I haven't tried Ancestry in a while. They're probably logging IP addresses. That would definitely affect me, since mine doesn't change except once every few years. I guess that's what libraries and stuff are for. S&R: Should be available cheaper. Mine came with the Blue Book of Pool Cues too for under $200 total. Here it is for $160, plus I think the shipping was $25. Stein gives his e-mail address as that page. If you ask him he might give you the 2-book deal too, or direct you to where ever that is. Shamos: Not saying its an unreliable source (although the newer version actually corrected some entries), it's just cool because it has more stuff in it. :-) DYK: Hey, you could speedily delete your own article, sandbox it and come back. Heh. Seriously, I'll see if I can get into Ancestry again and look for stuff on him. I want to look for William Hoskins stuff anyway so I can finish that half of the Spinks/Hoskins story, which has sat in draft form for over a year. I get sidetracked... — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ Contribs. 14:29, 18 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
It's not IPs they're logging, it's your credit card. You have to give them one in order to get the trial so that they can automatically charge you if you miss the cancellation deadline. Regarding the Blue Book, of all these books, that's the one that get's stale, that is, if you use it for actual quotes, which I do all the time, both for answer to questions and for selling, buying, etc. Yeah I start procrastinating too. I did all that work on Mingaud and now I can't get myself to go back. I also did reams of research on Hurricane Tony Ellin (thugh I found so little; I really felt bad when he died; I met him a few times, seemed like a really great guy), Masako Katsura and others but still haven't moved on them.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 18:31, 18 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Ah, the credit card. I'll have to see if the PayPal plugin has been updated to work with the new Firefox. If so, that's our solution - it generates a new valid card number every time you use it (they always feed from your single PayPal account). — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ Contribs. 18:37, 18 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
PayPal Plugin ist kaput. Some banks now issue credit card accounts that make use of virtual card numbers, but mine's not one of them. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ Contribs. 19:49, 8 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for trying. It was worth a shot. I signed up for a newspaperarchive.com three month trial. As far as newspaper results go it seems quite good so far, and the search interface is many orders of magnitude better than ancestry's, but it has none of the genealogical records that ancestry provides. With ancestry I could probably find census info on Yank as well as death information (as well as for Masako Katsura, which I've been working on it for a few days; she could actually be alive, though she'd be 96).--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 04:52, 9 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Sad...

How well forgotten some very well known people are. The more I read about Yank Adams, the more I realize he was world famous. Yet, he's almost completely unknown today and barely mentioned even in modern billiard texts.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 13:47, 21 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Reading stuff from that era, it's also amazing how important billiards (in the three-ball sense) was back then, with sometimes multiple-page stories in newspapers about each turn in a long match, and so on. It's like snooker is today in the UK. PS: I saw that you found evidence of a billiards stage comedy there. I'd never heard of it! — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ Contribs. 15:17, 21 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Jackpot. Portrait, diagrams, sample shot descriptions and more (that will also lend itself to the finger billiards article).--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 01:34, 22 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Nice find! — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ Contribs. 06:07, 27 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Some more notes on Crystalate

Unresolved
 – New sources/material worked into article, but unanswered questions remain.
Extended content

Some more notes: they bought Royal Worcester in 1983 and sold it the next year, keeping some of the electronics part.[3]; info about making records:[4]; the chair in 1989 was Lord Jenkin of Roding:[5]; "In 1880, crystalate balls made of nitrocellulose, camphor, and alcohol began to appear. In 1926, they were made obligatory by the Billiards Association and Control Council, the London-based governing body." Amazing Facts: The Indispensable Collection of True Life Facts and Feats. Richard B. Manchester - 1991wGtDHsgbtltnpBg&ct=result&id=v0m-h4YgKVYC&dq=%2BCrystalate; a website about crystalate and other materials used for billiard balls:No5 Balls.html. Fences&Windows 23:37, 12 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks! I'll have to have a look at this stuff in more detail. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ Contribs. 15:54, 16 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I've worked most of it in. Fences&Windows 16:01, 17 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Cool! From what I can tell, entirely different parties held the trademark in different markets. I can't find a link between Crystalate Mfg. Co. Ltd. (mostly records, though billiard balls early on) and the main billiard ball mfr. in the UK, who later came up with "Super Crystalate". I'm not sure the term was even used in the U.S. at all, despite the formulation having been originally patented there. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ Contribs. 21:04, 17 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

WP:SAL

Unresolved
 – Not done yet, last I looked.
Extended content

No one has actually objected to the idea that it's really pointless for WP:SAL to contain any style information at all, other than in summary form and citing MOS:LIST, which is where all of WP:SAL's style advice should go, and SAL page should move back to WP:Stand-alone lists with a content guideline tag. Everyone who's commented for 7 months or so has been in favor of it. I'd say we have consensus to start doing it. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ   Contrib. 13:13, 2 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I'll take a look at the page shortly. Thanks for the nudge. SilkTork ✔Tea time 23:19, 2 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

You post at Wikipedia talk:FAQ/Copyright

Unresolved
 – Need to fix William A. Spinks, etc., with proper balkline stats, now that we know how to interpret them.
Extended content

That page looks like a hinterland (you go back two users in the history and you're in August). Are you familiar with WP:MCQ? By the way, did you see my response on the balkline averages?--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 15:54, 6 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, I did a bunch of archiving yesterday. This page was HUGE. It'll get there again. I'd forgotten MCQ existed. Can you please add it to the DAB hatnote at top of and "See also" at bottom of WP:COPYRIGHT? Its conspicuous absence is precisely why I ened up at Wikipedia talk:FAQ/Copyright! Haven't seen your balkline response yet; will go look. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖ⊝כ⊙þ Contrib. 21:34, 6 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Hee Haw

Unresolved
 – Still need to propose some standards on animal breed article naming and disambiguation. In the intervening years, we've settled on natural not parenthetic disambiguation, and that standardized breeds get capitalized, but that's about it.
Extended content

Yeah, we did get along on Donkeys. And probably will get along on some other stuff again later. Best way to handle WP is to take it issue by issue and then let bygones be bygones. I'm finding some interesting debates over things like the line between a subspecies, a landrace and a breed. Just almost saw someone else's GA derailed over a "breed versus species" debate that was completely bogus, we just removed the word "adapt" and life would have been fine. I'd actually be interested in seeing actual scholarly articles that discuss these differences, particularly the landrace/breed issue in general, but in livestock in particular, and particularly as applied to truly feral/landrace populations (if, in livestock, there is such a thing, people inevitably will do a bit of culling, sorting and other interference these days). I'm willing to stick to my guns on the WPEQ naming issue, but AGF in all respects. Truce? Montanabw(talk) 22:40, 6 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Truce, certainly. I'm not here to pick fights, just improve the consistency for readers and editors. I don't think there will be any scholarly articles on differences between landrace and breed, because there's nothing really to write about. Landrace has clear definitions in zoology and botany, and breed not only doesn't qualify, it is only established as true in any given case by reliable sources. Basically, no one anywhere is claiming "This is the Foobabaz horse, and it is a new landrace!" That wouldn't make sense. What is happening is people naming and declaring new alleged breeds on an entirely self-interested, profit-motive basis, with no evidence anyone other than the proponent and a few other experimental breeders consider it a breed. WP is full of should-be-AfD'd articles of this sort, like the cat one I successfully prod'ed last week. Asking for a reliable source that something is a landrace rather than a breed is backwards; landrace status is the default, not a special condition. It's a bit like asking for a scholarly piece on whether pig Latin is a real language or not; no one's going to write a journal paper about that because "language" (and related terms like "dialect", "language family", "creole" in the linguistic sense, etc.) have clear definitions in linguistics, while pig Latin, an entirely artificial, arbitrary, intentionally-managed form of communication (like an entirely artificial, arbitrary, intentionally managed form of domesticated animal) does not qualify. :-) The "what is a breed" question, which is also not about horses any more than cats or cavies or ferrets, is going to be a separate issue to resolve from the naming issue. Looking over what we collaboratively did with donkeys – and the naming form that took, i.e. Poitou donkey not Poitou (donkey), I think I'm going to end up on your side of that one. It needs to be discussed more broadly in an RFC, because most projects use the parenthetical form, because this is what WT:AT is most readily interpretable as requiring. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖ⊝כ⊙þ Contrib. 00:12, 7 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I hate the drama of an RfC, particularly when we can just look at how much can be naturally disambiguated, but if you think it's an actual issue, I guess ping me when it goes up. As for landcraces, it may be true ("clear definitions") but you would be doing God's (or someone's) own good work if you were to improve landrace which has few references, fewer good ones, and is generally not a lot of help to those of us trying to sort out WTF a "landrace" is... (smiles). As for breed, that is were we disagree: At what point do we really have a "breed" as opposed to a "landrace?" Fixed traits, human-selected? At what degree, at which point? How many generations? I don't even know if there IS such a thing as a universal definition of what a "breed" is: seriously: [6] or breed or [7]. I think you and I agree that the Palomino horse can never be a "breed" because it is impossible for the color to breed true (per an earlier discussion) so we have one limit. But while I happen agree to a significant extent with your underlying premise that when Randy from Boise breeds two animals and says he has created a new breed and this is a problem, (I think it's a BIG problem in the worst cases) but if we want to get really fussy, I suppose that the aficionados of the Arabian horse who claim the breed is pure from the dawn of time are actually arguing it is a landrace, wouldn't you say? And what DO we do with the multi-generational stuff that's in limbo land? Montanabw(talk) 00:41, 7 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not really certain what the answers are to any of those questions, another reason (besides your "STOP!" demands :-) that I backed away rapidly from moving any more horse articles around. But it's something that is going to have to be looked into. I agree that the Landrace article here is poor. For one thing, it needs to split Natural breed out into its own article (a natural breed is a selectively-bred formal breed the purpose of which is to refine and "lock-in" the most definitive qualities of a local landrace). This in turn isn't actually the same thing as a traditional breed, though the concepts are related. Basically, three breeding concepts are squished into one article. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖ⊝כ⊙þ Contrib. 00:52, 7 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Side comment: I tend to support one good overview article over three poor content forks, just thinking aloud... Montanabw(talk) 23:01, 7 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Sure; the point is that the concepts have to be separately, clearly treated, because they are not synonymous at all. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖ⊝כ⊙þ Contrib. 02:07, 8 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Given that the article isn't well-sourced yet, I think that you might want to add something about that to landrace now, just to give whomever does article improvement on it later (maybe you, I think this is up your alley!) has the "ping" to do so. Montanabw(talk) 21:55, 8 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Aye, it's on my to-do list. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖ⊝כ⊙þ Contrib. 22:25, 8 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Although I have been an evolutionary biologist for decades, I only noticed the term "landrace" within the past year or two (in reference to corn), because I work with wildland plants. But I immediately knew what it was, from context. I'm much less certain about breeds, beyond that I am emphatic that they are human constructs. Montanabw and I have discussed my horse off-wiki, and from what I can tell, breeders are selecting for specific attributes (many people claim to have seen a horse "just like him"), but afaik there is no breed "Idaho stock horse". Artificially-selected lineages can exist without anyone calling them "breeds"; I'm not sure they would even be "natural breeds", and such things are common even within established breeds (Montanabw could probably explain to us the difference between Polish and Egyptian Arabians).
The good thing about breeds wrt Wikipedia is that we can use WP:RS and WP:NOTABLE to decide what to cover. Landraces are a different issue: if no one has ever called a specific, distinctive, isolated mustang herd a landrace, is it OR for Wikipedia to do so?--Curtis Clark (talk) 16:21, 7 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I have been reluctant to use landrace much out of a concern that the concept is a bit OR, as I hadn't heard of it before wikipedia either (but I'm more a historian than an evolutionary biologist, so what do I know?): Curtis, any idea where this did come from? It's a useful concept, but I am kind of wondering where the lines are between selective breeding and a "natural" breed -- of anything. And speaking of isolated Mustang herds, we have things like Kiger Mustang, which is kind of interesting. I think that at least some of SMc's passion comes from the nuttiness seen in a lot of the dog and cat breeders these days, am I right? I mean, Chiweenies? Montanabw(talk) 23:01, 7 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The first use of the word that I saw referred to different landraces of corn growing in different elevations and exposures in indigenous Maya areas of modern Mexico. I haven't tracked down the references for the use of the word, but the concept seems extremely useful. My sense is that landraces form as much through natural selective processes of cultivation or captivity as through human selection, so that if the "garbage wolf" hypothesis for dog domestication is true, garbage wolves would have been a landrace (or more likely several, in different areas). One could even push the definition and say that MRSA is a landrace. But I don't have enough knowledge of the reliable sources to know how all this would fit into Wikipedia.--Curtis Clark (talk) 01:01, 8 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Landraces form, primarily and quickly, through mostly natural selection, long after domestication. E.g. the St Johns water dog and Maine Coon cat are both North American landraces that postdate European arrival on the continent. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖ⊝כ⊙þ Contrib. 20:16, 9 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I see some potential for some great research on this and a real improvement to the articles in question. Montanabw(talk) 21:55, 8 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Yep. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖ⊝כ⊙þ Contrib. 20:16, 9 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Redundant sentence?

Unresolved
 – Work to integrate WP:NCFLORA and WP:NCFAUNA stuff into MOS:ORGANISMS not completed yet? Seems to be mostly done, other than fixing up the breeds section, after that capitalization RfC a while back.
Extended content

The sentence at MOS:LIFE "General names for groups or types of organisms are not capitalized except where they contain a proper name (oak, Bryde's whales, rove beetle, Van cat)" is a bit odd, since the capitalization would (now) be exactly the same if they were the names of individual species. Can it simply be removed?

There is an issue, covered at Wikipedia:PLANTS#The use of botanical names as common names for plants, which may or may not be worth putting in the main MOS, namely cases where the same word is used as the scientific genus name and as the English name, when it should be de-capitalized. I think this is rare for animals, but more common for plants and fungi (although I have seen "tyrannosauruses" and similar uses of dinosaur names). Peter coxhead (talk) 09:17, 3 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

  1. I would leave it a alone for now; let people get used to the changes. I think it's reasonable to include the "general names" thing, because it's a catch-all that includes several different kinds of examples, that various largely different groups of people are apt to capitalize. Various know-nothings want to capitalize things like "the Cats", the "Great Apes", etc., because they think "it's a Bigger Group and I like to Capitalize Big Important Stuff". There are millions more people who just like to capitalize nouns and stuff. "Orange's, $1 a Pound". Next we have people who insist on capitalizing general "types" and landraces of domestic animals ("Mountain Dogs", "Van Cat") because they're used to formal breed names being capitalized (whether to do that with breeds here is an open question, but it should not be done with types/classes of domestics, nor with landraces. Maybe the examples can be sculpted better: "the roses", "herpesviruses", "great apes", "Bryde's whale", "mountain dogs", "Van cat", "passerine birds". I'm not sure that "rove beetle" and "oak" are good examples of anything. Anyway, it's more that the species no-capitalization is a special case of the more general rule, not that the general rule is a redundant or vague version of the former. If they're merged, it should keep the general examples, and maybe specifically spell out and illustrate that it also means species and subspecies, landraces and domestic "types", as well as larger and more general groupings.
  2. I had noticed that point and was going to add it, along with some other points from both NCFLORA and NCFAUNA, soon to MOS:ORGANISMS, which I feel is nearing "go live" completion. Does that issue come up often enough to make it a MOS mainpage point? I wouldn't really object to it, and it could be had by adding an "(even if it coincides with a capitalized Genus name)" parenthetical to the "general names" bit. The pattern is just common enough in animals to have been problematic if it were liable to be problematic, as it were. I.e., I don't see a history of squabbling about it at Lynx or its talk page, and remember looking into this earlier with some other mammal, about two weeks ago, and not seeing evidence of confusion or editwarring. The WP:BIRDS people were actually studiously avoiding that problem; I remember seeing a talk page discussion at the project that agreed that such usage shouldn't be capitalized ever. PS: With Lynx, I had to go back to 2006, in the thick of the "Mad Capitalization Epidemic" to find capitalization there[8], and it wasn't even consistent, just in the lead.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  11:11, 3 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  1. Well, certainly "rove beetle" and "oak" are poor examples here, so I would support changing to some of the others you suggested above.
  2. I think the main problem we found with plants was it being unclear as to whether inexperienced editors meant the scientific name or the English name. So you would see a sentence with e.g. "Canna" in the middle and not know whether this should be corrected to "Canna" or to "canna". The plural is clear; "cannas" is always lower-case non-italicized. The singular is potentially ambiguous. Whether it's worth putting this point in the main MOS I just don't know since I don't much edit animal articles and never breed articles, which is why I asked you. Peter coxhead (talk) 21:55, 3 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  1. Will take a look at that later, if someone else doesn't beat me to it.
  2. Beats me. Doesn't seem too frequent an issue, but lot of MOS stuff isn't. Definitely should be in MOS:ORGANISMS, regardless.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  00:46, 4 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Worked on both of those a bit at MOS. We'll see if it sticks.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  01:18, 5 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Note to self on WP:WikiProject English language

Unresolved
 – I think I did MOST of this already ...
Extended content

Finish patching up WP:WikiProject English language with the stuff from User:SMcCandlish/WikiProject English Language, and otherwise get the ball rolling.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  20:22, 17 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Excellent mini-tutorial

Unresolved
Extended content

Somehow, I forget quite how, I came across this - that is an excellent summary of the distinctions. I often get confused over those, and your examples were very clear. Is something like that in the general MoS/citation documentation? Oh, and while I am here, what is the best way to format a citation to a page of a document where the pages are not numbered? All the guidance I have found says not to invent your own numbering by counting the pages (which makes sense), but I am wondering if I can use the 'numbering' used by the digitised form of the book. I'll point you to an example of what I mean: the 'book' in question is catalogued here (note that is volume 2) and the digitised version is accessed through a viewer, with an example of a 'page' being here, which the viewer calls page 116, but there are no numbers on the actual book pages (to confuse things further, if you switch between single-page and double-page view, funny things happen to the URLs, and if you create and click on a single-page URL the viewer seems to relocate you one page back for some reason). Carcharoth (talk) 19:10, 12 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Carcharoth: Thanks. I need to copy that into an essay page. As far as I know, the concepts are not clearly covered in any of those places, nor clearly enough even at Help:CS1 (which is dense and overlong as it is). The e-book matters bear some researching. I'm very curious whether particular formats (Nook, etc.) paginate consistently between viewers. For Web-accessible ones, I would think that the page numbering that appears in the Web app is good enough if it's consistent (e.g., between a PC and a smart phone) when the reader clicks the URL in the citation. I suppose one could also use |at= to provide details if the "page" has to be explained in some way. I try to rely on better-than-page-number locations when possible, e.g. specific entries in dictionaries and other works with multiple entries per page (numbered sections in manuals, etc.), but for some e-books this isn't possible – some are just continuous texts. One could probably use something like |at=in the paragraph beginning "The supersegemental chalcolithic metastasis is ..." about 40% into the document, in a pinch. I guess we do need to figure this stuff out since such sources are increasingly common.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  20:29, 13 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Yes (about figuring out how to reference e-books), though I suspect existing (non-WP) citation styles have addressed this already (no need to re-invent the wheel). This is a slightly different case, though. It is a digitisation of an existing (physical) book that has no page numbers. If I had the book in front of me (actually, it was only published as a single copy, so it is not a 'publication' in that traditional sense of many copies being produced), the problem with page numbers would still exist. I wonder if the 'digital viewer' should be thought of as a 'via' thingy? In the same way that (technically) Google Books and archive.org digital copies of old books are just re-transmitting, and re-distributing the material (is wikisource also a 'via' sort of thing?). Carcharoth (talk) 23:13, 13 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@Carcharoth: Ah, I see. I guess I would treat it as a |via=, and same with WikiSource, which in this respect is essentially like Google Books or Project Gutenberg. I think your conundrum has come up various times with arXiv papers, that have not been paginated visibly except in later publication (behind a journal paywall and not examined). Back to the broader matter: Some want to treat WikiSource and even Gutenberg as republishers, but I think that's giving them undue editorial credit and splitting too fine a hair. Was thinking on the general unpaginated and mis-paginated e-sources matter while on the train, and came to the conclusion that for a short, unpaginated work with no subsections, one might give something like |at=in paragraph 23, and for a much longer one use the |at=in the paragraph beginning "..." trick. A straight up |pages=82–83 would work for an e-book with hard-coded meta-data pagination that is consistent between apps/platforms and no visual pagination. On the other hand, use the visual pagination in an e-book that has it, even if it doesn't match the e-book format's digital pagination, since the pagination in the visual content would match that of a paper copy; one might include a note that the pagination is that visible in the content if it conflicts with what the e-book reader says (this comes up a lot with PDFs, for one thing - I have many that include cover scans, and the PDF viewers treat that as p. 1, then other front matter as p. 2, etc., with the content's p. 1 being something like PDF p. 7).  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  08:07, 14 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]



Current threads

WP:MEDMOS

Unresolved
 – Go fix the WP:FOO shortcuts to MOS:FOO ones, to match practice at other MoS pages. This only applies to the MoS section there; like WP:SAL, part of that page is also a content guideline that should not have MOS: shortcuts.

You had previously asked that protection be lowered on WP:MEDMOS which was not done at that time. I have just unprotected the page and so if you have routine update edits to make you should now be able to do so. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 06:42, 25 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. I don't remember what it was, but maybe it'll come back to me.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  12:17, 25 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Now I remember.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  06:53, 11 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]
SMcCandlish, thank you for this edit and edit summary where you note that <center></center> hasn't existed since the 1990s. I guess I'm still using outdated tags. lmao :P Doug Mehus T·C 01:12, 29 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Thankee. WP:LINT, WP:HTML5, and WP:CHECKWIKI may be of interest. If you'd like to help with cleanup, see Wikipedia:Linter#User CSS tool: lint.css for a handy utility to install in a few seconds.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:44, 29 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Ooh...potential WikiGnoming activity...

Unresolved
 – Do some of this when I'm bored?

@SMcCandlish:

I stumbled upon Category:Editnotices whose targets are redirects and there are ~100 pages whose pages have been moved, but the editnotices are still targeted to the redirect page. Seems like a great, and sort of fun, WikiGnoming activity for a template editor such as yourself. I'd do it, but I'm not a template editor. Not sure if that's really your thing, though. ;-)

Cheers,
--Doug Mehus T·C 22:30, 6 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Argh. I would've hoped some bot fixed that kind of stuff. I'll consider it, but it's a lot of work for low benefit (the page names may be wrong, but the redirs still get there), and it's been my experience that a lot of editnotices (especially in mainspace) are PoV-pushing crap that needs to be deleted anyway.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  07:20, 11 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I'm going to pass for the nonce, Dmehus. Working on some other project (more fun than WP is sometimes). I'll let it sit here with {{Unresolved}} on it, in case I get inspired to work on it some, but it might be a long time.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  07:46, 18 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Note to self

Unresolved

Don't forget to deal with: Template talk:Cquote#Template-protected edit request on 19 April 2020.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  14:48, 20 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Now this

Unresolved
 – Open question.

Not sure the ping went through, so noting here. Just spotted where a now-blocked user moved a bunch of animal breed articles back to parenthetical disambiguation from natural disambiguation. As they did it in October and I'm only catching it now, I only moved back two just in case there was some kind of consensus change. The equine ones are definitely against project consensus, the rest are not my wheelhouse but I'm glad to comment. Talk:Campine_chicken#Here_we_go_again. Montanabw(talk) 20:14, 25 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Montanabw: Argh. Well, this is easy to fix with a request to mass-revert undiscussed moves, at the subsection for that at WP:RMTR. Some admin will just fix it all in one swoop. While I have the PageMover bit, and could do it myself as a technical possibility, I would run afoul of WP:INVOLVED in doing so.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:30, 4 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@Montanabw: Did this get fixed yet? If not, I can look into it.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  08:13, 20 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Possible job

Hi @SMcCandlish: How are you? How do you feel about doing a couple of small jobs? I'm reviewing two articles for GA, at the moment and thought of yourself for the WP:MOS review. I'm not the best at it and generally rely of other people, the Gnomish folk, when I write my own articles. Your input would help greatly. Your ideal for it. scope_creepTalk 08:04, 2 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Scope creep: Can you link to the GA reviews? I'm not sure I have time for this, but we'll see. This is the first time I've been on in over a week. Not sure what your schedule is for this stuff (and whether it'll align with when I might get back on).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:33, 4 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Hi @SMcCandlish:. How are you? Thanks for getting back to me. I noticed that after I posted this message and thoughts were flashing through my head, as they do now. Glad to see you back. They are at: Talk:Mitsuharu Misawa/GA1 and Talk:Manned Orbiting Laboratory/GA1 (MOL). They are quite large. scope_creepTalk 07:23, 4 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Schedule wise, fairly loose. I can work on the other aspects at the moment, for at least the next two weeks. scope_creepTalk 07:31, 4 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I doubt I'm going to have bandwidth for this sort of stuff any time soon. I barely get on here any more.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  08:13, 20 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Template:char

I was more impressed and concerned by your reference to MOS:ACCESS than any of the other "I just don't like it" bluster. One of my motivations for contributing to the development of the template was a concern that the existing markup (a fairly random collection of {{code}}, single and double straight quotes, italics, parentheses and brackets) was disabling to visitors with some sight impairment. So it really annoys me that I failed to spot the implications for screen readers.

So before I do anything about an RFC, I want to resolve this issue first. As far as I am concerned, it is a complete show-stopper: if I can't resolve it, I will vote to delete.

MOS:ACCESS gives some clues: I'm sure you have better things to do than give me a tutorial but if you could point me at something that explains how readers deal with span style tags, where I might find more detail, I would be most grateful. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 14:37, 8 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@John Maynard Friedman: It just shouldn't rely on color and/or font alone; if it's marked up with <kbd>...</kbd> (which indicates keystrokes or other textual input, and is more loosely spec-defined than <code>...</code>), that's a sufficient HTML/CSS handle for anyone with a screen reader to tell their software to do something specific when encountering that element. But if there's no specific element, just some CSS coloring and/or font-family on a span, all screen readers will ignore it as irrelevant visual fluff. That would mostly be a problem when the content coincides with an English word like a or I, though it would probably also affect punctuation characters. We need them to be interpreted as characters in and of themselves in these cases, not as part of the regular flow of the sentence; I think by default most screen readers would just ignore one as mis-placed punctuation (a typo), though some might even do something more wrong, e.g. misinterpret a single-quote or double-quote character being presented as a glyph, as instead indicating the beginning of a quotation. While not everyone with a screen reader will do something to distinguish <kbd> markup, at least they have the option, and it won't be dependent on using a unique-to-WP CSS class, either, so easier to deal with on their end.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:08, 9 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you, that is really helpful, it gives me a good foundation for further reading. For reasons that needn't bother you, I have decided to walk away from the debate around the char template, so won't be pursuing this particular instance of the question any further. I will however refer to it elsewhere so I trust that you won't object to my copying this to info to my user page. Best wishes. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 22:28, 9 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Whatever you need.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:35, 9 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]


WP:RS/N

I read your 21:48, 9 July response in WP:RS/N to the 03:59 comment. I think you might want to be made aware that you attributed the "[sic] " comment to the wrong editor. This particular statement in the tag team belongs to 01:10. Pyxis Solitary (yak). L not Q. 06:37, 10 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Pyxis Solitary: I was addressing both of their back-to-back and effectively indistinguishable comments at once; I've made that clearer now. Yesterday, I also left them both (and two others, for essentially the same gender-issues WP:BATTLEGROUND behavior, over at ANI) a {{Ds/alert|gg}}, in case they're thinking of escalating it. For what I think is the first time in 7 years of Ds/alerts, I have not received a revert notice, angry response on my talk page, "go hate on SMcCandlish" canvassing at a wikiproject talk page, silly attempt to ANI me for "making threats", or any other form of indignant grandstanding in response to a DS notice, despite having left four of them back to back. I take this as a good sign that they know they're not in the right to bring this kind of behavior here, and are going to tone it down. This may be overly optimistic.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  20:26, 10 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I'm glad that you did not take offense at my bringing it to your attention. As for Ds/alerts, I've found that some Wikipedia people are quick to point fingers and attack, then bitch and moan when it boomerangs. Pyxis Solitary (yak). L not Q. 10:15, 11 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@Pyxis Solitary: I was definitely being over-optimistic in at least one case [9]. It's grounds for seeking a topic- and interaction-ban at AE, but I don't have much stomach for drama right now.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:18, 16 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Comment quote: "I hope to never interact with you again." Missing obvious: "..., and again, and again, until I get the last word." Pyxis Solitary (yak). L not Q. 10:26, 16 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, he even doubled-down on that, getting the last word on top of his own last word: When he self-reverted that post as unlikely to be productive, he couldn't resist adding another barb in the edit summary while doing so. So, the self-RV was an obviously WP:SANCTIONGAMING (though self-sabotaging) attempt at CYA, not an actual retraction.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:44, 16 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Look, the sentiment I expressed in that comment was unduly aggressive, and I unreservedly apologise for calling you a "nasty piece of work" and the interaction comment which was uncalled for and clearly a unjustifiable, unwarranted personal attack. I am unsure why I even made the comment in the first place, which is why I swiftly removed it (even if I apparently did stand by it's sentiment?). However, sending out discretionary sanctions templates because you were upset after being called out was innappropriate (though admittedly much less so than my subsequent comments). The initial comment wasn't meant in a nasty way, I didn't call you transphobic, I simply said that comments had been "widely considered" as such, which was true and ultimately the comment was meant with good intentions about a sensitive topic. I found your reply and discretionary sanctions template to be condescending, which is why I initially replied in the way I did. I wish you well Hemiauchenia (talk) 23:05, 20 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
It never entered my mind that you were an aggressive editor, Hemiauchenia. I am so disappointed and saddened by this revelation. Please don't ever show us that side of you again. Atsme Talk 📧 00:31, 21 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Hemiauchenia, let there be peace between us then. If I'd thought there was a definite battlegrounding pattern existing or likely to appear, I would have simply gone to AE, since your post in question appeared after the DS notice. But I don't actually see evidence that it's a long-term pattern. See also other thread on this page; I tend to just let matters drop after a week anyway, and clear my memory buffers of who was saying what (if you hadn't posted here today, I would have already forgotten your username).

Like various other editors, you seem to misinterpret DS notices as weapons, threats, attacks, or some other form of aggression. They are not. They are simply notices that WP:AC/DS applies to a particular topic and that one should be more mindful of civility and PoV in them, because admins have discretion to impose "drive-by" sanctions if they see something they don't like. ArbCom insists that these notices be left, in user talk, for anyone who appears to be crossing WP:ASPERSIONS, WP:CIVIL, WP:EDITWAR, or other lines in topics to which AC/DS applies, so that they are not subjected to discretionary sanctions they didn't even know about. To the extent that they have a warning-like "aura" about them, though, it is probably actually a good thing; anyone who becomes aware they can be sanctioned for disruption in the topic and doubles down anyway needs to be removed from the topic; meanwhile, the average editor will actually cool it, and discussion will be better for everyone as a result. And anyone who leaves a DS notice is automatically "aware" of the DS by doing so; leaving one has the effect of giving one to yourself. So, they are not one-sided.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:51, 21 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

On cite

Regarding cite, I thought it might be prudent as an aside to point out that the W3C no longer maintains an active fork of the WHATWG spec. (It does create versioned documents e.g. 5.1 5.2 etc., but these are solely for the use of baselining the document for all.) As a result of the great re-merge, it appears that the use of cite allowed by W3C has been swallowed whole and in fact that the WHATWG editor maintaining HTML has doubled-down on deprecating <cite> as an element for anything but works. Contrary to the discussion surrounding the removal of the W3C version, as there were to be some amount of discussion related to merging the differences into the WHATWG version, no amount of which I was able to find online. Just to let you know. :) --Izno (talk) 18:37, 15 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

That's unfortunate and stupid, and is unlikely to have any real-world impact, because it's hard-coded in a lot of blog packages, webboard software, and other content-management systems for what WP would call UGC, as the element surrounding all attribution details for reply-quoted material (most often a linked username and a date, sometimes also a # URL to the original post's location, and sometimes other information like the original writer's user level/status on the system, etc.). I've also seen it used for more typical citations in more than one bibliographic software package's HTML output. So, if the isolated and unresponsive, exclusionary echo chamber at WHATWG cannot convince the producers of all this software and more to change how they use that element, the (apparently now just de facto) use of it for citation information in general is going to continue indefinitely and as the overwhelming majority usage. It's stupid for other reasons, the most obvious being that not all citations are to works (though they are on WP of course, since what we cite must be "published"), and not all cited works take italic markup, and it breaks backward/forward basic compatibility with HTML 4.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:15, 16 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@Izno: I should probably ping, since you're not likely watchlisting my jabbering page.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:19, 16 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Of course I watch your talk page :^). I think this is a case of "we want it to match the default styles" rather than "we want it to match how people are using it", which totally defeats the purpose of why we have semantic HTML and not styled HTML and also defeats the purpose of having a living specification (to wit: that it is the use that comes first, not the specification). We should propose a <work> (along with proposing some suggested classes like <work class="lesser"> just to see what would happen. I'm sure the editor's brain would explode. :^) --Izno (talk) 14:19, 16 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I've written to them about this problem many times over the last 6 or so years, and the one time I got any response, it was extremely testy, and was basically just a defensive rant against W3C. Probably the most childish thing I've ever received from a formal organization other than FSF (lesson: do not put people with a temperament like Stallman's in positions of authority). I noticed that a lot of people (including some other Wikipedians and colleagues I know from other circles) were regularly updating WHATWG's wiki with various implementation and spec-conflict notes, so I registered to become an editor there, and document this "spec fork" and that actual usage is mostly the broader W3C definition of this element. My registration was blockaded, presumably by the same personage who flamed at me. So, forget those people. We all just have to work around them until they are replaced. If one wanted to change this, it would probably be more constructive to contact the right people at the browser makers, and get them to pressure WHATWG from inside its own little reality tunnel. It is not really plausible that the browser makers want their software incompatible with actual dominant usage. The spec was originally broad to begin with, so the change to something very narrow (and stylistically wrong and impractical anyway) is an brain-fart they should just undo.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 

2nd opinion

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.
One party is now under a topic-ban, so this thread should not remain open as a place that could lure them back into discussion of that topic.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:48, 22 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

You're more familiar with this issue than I am. I've only looked back the last couple days and tried to fix two recurrences, but was reverted. I'm not willing to get involved any more with it than that at this time. -- Netoholic @ 03:04, 18 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Just so you're aware, Netoholic followed me to two articles hed never edited before simply to revert my edits there. I reported this to Bishonen, and I left a message on Netoholic's talk page, where El C warned him again following me around. This is just another piece of WP:HARASSMENT from him. He comes to you with dirty hands. Beyond My Ken (talk) 03:15, 18 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Netoholic, you are not coming across as particularly communicative. Anyway, if you identify a pattern of problems with the edits of an editor who is otherwise in good standing, please just submit an ANI report rather than following them around to different articles. El_C 03:30, 18 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@Netoholic, Beyond My Ken, and El C: Hmm. Without wading deep into this (or applying my own judgement about particular images in particular edits), I have to observe that when an editor is or recently was under a community-imposed restriction, and it appears they are returning to the proscribed behavior, it is actually normal to investigate this behavior and revert it where it appears to be unconstructive. So, I don't not agree that this is ipso facto, necessarily, automatically any form of harassment. (However, using our standard operating procedure as cover for just following someone around and interfering with their editing that doesn't have to do with the restriction or which isn't unconstructive might indeed be harassing/wikistalking/hounding/battlegrounding).

Next, given that BMK is or recently was under such a restriction, if one or more editors object to something he's doing that is within the ambit of that restriction, the onus is on him to stop and seek consensus. [I learned this the hard way, with one of the only temporary topic bans I've ever received (a three-month move ban several years ago). It was for failure to hear out objections and use due process to rename articles; the long-format RMs ultimately went they way I said they should, just as they had before the ANI against me. But it was not good enough that I knew I was right and had both policy and RM precedent/patterns on my side; it is not an excuse to ignore the objections of other editors.]

Also, "articles he[']d never edited before" is not any sort of argument. See WP:EDITING, WP:OWN, WP:VESTED, etc. I routinely (like, nearly ever time I log in and do something in mainspace) edit articles that I have never edited before. Anyone doing a lot of WP:GNOME work does that.

On the other side of the matter, though, it is not Netholic's "job" to solo and subjectively enforce restrictions that BMK is supposedly crossing the line of. El C is correct that this is probably an ANI matter, if user talk, or discussion at the talk page of the affected articles doesn't resolve it. And if Netholoic is off-base, then there's boomerang potential. Again, I have not pored over the specific image placements and the revert warring over them in these instances; I'm just speaking of the principles and procedures.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  05:08, 20 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

SMcCandlish: All I can say is that it's flawed thinking and bizarre analyses such as this that had prevented you from becoming an admin, and an arbitrator, and that will continue to do so for as long as you edit Wikipedia. There is, essentially, almost nothing you said here that is appropriate or supported by the facts or the circumstances. It's really quite, quite amazing to see how wide of the mark you shot.
If you reply, please do not ping me, I have no interest in anything you might have to say. Beyond My Ken (talk) 05:15, 20 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not sure why you're being so testy about this, other than you apparently didn't read the last part. I'm not taking either side in this. To summarize, in reverse order: If someone is inappropriately reverting constructive edits by you, in a targeted manner, that's an ANI matter. If editors are objecting to something you're doing in relation to image placement (or whatever), you should slow down and hash it out in discussion (learn from my experience!). If you have actually returned to the pattern you were barred from by ANI, then that is also an ANI matter, and unconstructive edits in that vein should actually be undone. Though as I hinted in closing, if someone wants to make an ANI case [either of you!], you'd better have good evidence and present it rationally.

PS: No, my policy and processual analysis and any fault therein aren't why I'm not an admin. I'm not an admin for three reasons: 1) I was a WP:HOTHEAD in my earlier years, and pissed off a lot of people, then sought adminship too soon. 2) I'm one of the main shepherds of MoS, and everyone (even me) disagrees with multiple things in MoS; consequently, I and the few other custodians of MoS take all blame for everything that any editor ever doesn't like in MoS. (Never underestimate how angry and resentful many people can become over trivial stylistic quibbles they grew up with or got habituated to at work.) 3) I noticed what adminship tended to do to productive editors (make them less productive, more bureaucratic, more cop-like in behavior, having less fun, and doing less to actually build an encyclopedia, while being mired in drama all the time); I decided I did not want that, so I have not run for adminship in something like a decade. I just act rather like an admin (with a bit more freedom to speak my mind), and that is sufficient. Probably for everyone. As for ArbCom, I actually received more support votes than some who "were elected". The ArbCom elections have a broken double-vote system, in which you get to vote for who you like and vote against who you don't like. Pretty much only angry people figure out this loophole and take advantage of it, including lots of people who have been WP:BATTLEGROUNDing against MoS peccadilloes for years.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  07:08, 20 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

A side comment to both parties: Try cultivating a habit I forced myself to pick up – respond to stuff at face value, and try not to notice or remember the username of the other party/parties. E.g., I recognize "Netoholic" in a vague way just from years of familiarity and a general sense of goodwill (and would likely remember a lot of specific threads if pointed at their diffs). But I had completely forgotten we had a dispute that went to ANI only about a month ago (archiving old threads from my talk page just now is what reminded me); so, I responded to his post here completely neutrally, not with any "politicking". My wikilife is about 10x less full of drama after I picked up this "selective forgetfulness" technique. There are many tempers and moods and polarizations and such floating around (especially in these times), but I'm highly unlikely to take any of them personally, or get involved in some kind "enemies" stance with anyone long-term. It's hard to battleground if you don't remember where the ground is, who is on which side, or what the fight is about, after a week. I think a lot of people would be happier on WP if they took this approach. I once heard someone say (well, saw someone write) that, similarly, they treat each stretch of WP editing and interaction like playing a MMORPG; one might be competing against this username and that on one today, but at some point you run into them on a different server on a different day and maybe you're allies in the same league/team; having fragged each other 24 hours earlier need not impede that. So, whatever it takes to keep content disputes containerized and away from personalizing them into long-term clashes.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  08:13, 20 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I have to say that I completely agree (although often I think my "forgetfulness" is not as intentional). As I recall, SMcCandlish, you and I bump into each other often enough on RMs, and occasionally in RFCs and other similar discussions. I've sought you out for specific feedback before on such issues, and yes had a pretty heated disagreements in the past and on the naming of some haunted lists recently, but that wouldn't stop me from seeking you out in the future (as done here) if I think you have a valuable viewpoint. Ebb and flow. What concerns me is that this sentiment is rare here. -- Netoholic @ 09:04, 20 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Digging back a bit, I find that BMK and I have both agreed and disagreed (sometimes strenuously in either direction). It would be easy to take one or the other really personally, and it kind of takes some work not to, but once the habit sets in, it's long-term easier. Just let it all slide after a few days. Next week is a fresh start. E.g., I was prepping an AE request last week, but got distracted by arrival of a bunch of my new PC parts, and started my build. Back on WP now, I consider it both too late and of no actual urgency/necessity. A week further from now, I probably won't recall the other username. Interestingly, several folks I once has long-term, repeating disputes with I actually get along with fine now. Even if they hold onto things longer than I do, it seems hard to perpetuate from one side when the other isn't coming from the "let's wrestle some more" angle. Maybe this also means I also make fewer "wikifriends", but that's also less enticement toward tagteam/cabal stuff, or anything that could be mistaken for it. I've also backed out of regular involvement in most wikiprojects, due to balkanization / echo-chamber effects they have.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:38, 20 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
And cheese.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:54, 21 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I'm closing this thread because a topic-ban is now involved; while the thread moved on to more general matters, the fact that it started about edits at a page covered by that ban makes the entire thread potentially a hazard for one of the participants. PS: Beyond My Ken, I know you were not looking to be pinged back into this, but I hope you'll read it and reconsider your take on what I wrote and why. I was not aware of the now-closed ANI thread (neither of you mentioned it), and approached the entire question from an if viewpoint without siding with either of you. I apparently did not make that clear enough at first, and you felt I was siding with Netoholic. Sorry for the confusion.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:48, 22 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Thank you in July

July
pale globe-thistle above the Rhine

Thank you for improving articles in July! --Gerda Arendt (talk) 21:20, 20 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

CSD G10

Just a heads up that I have nominated User talk:SMcCandlish/It for deletion under WP:G10. Best, Darren-M talk 17:01, 30 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

This CSD has been declined, and I can understand the reasons for doing so (i.e. the talk page itself is not solely concerned with an attack). However, I would urge you to remove this edit which appears to constitute a WP:PERSONALATTACK. Thank you, Darren-M talk 17:30, 30 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Except it is not one, which the declining admin told you in very clear terms ("not an attack page") which you've badly distorted above. No, I will not be self-censoring, and it's a silly idea anyway, since it would remain in edit history. MfD was declined. CSD was declined. It's time to WP:Drop the stick. The page and its talkpage are moribund, but should be retained because there was considerable disputation about it, which would become meaningless in the absence of the actual material that was the subject of the discussions. See also Streisand effect; you are simply drawing more attention to something everyone else has moved on from and which you wish didn't have anyone reading it. Please do not post here again unless it pertains to actually working on the encyclopedia. My talk page, like the rest of Wikipedia, is not a social-media forum for politicized debate or activism-pressure behavior. It's ironic that I have to say that, given that this is also the unmistakable message of the post you're out to censor.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  11:45, 31 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
PS: Just for you, I tweaked the closing text to be less dismissive. That should be sufficient.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  11:57, 31 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Feedback request: Social sciences and society Good Article nomination

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If you think that's bad...

Moved to Template talk:Infobox drug § Log of significant changes

{{circa}} has nothing on the bottom of {{infobox drug}}... worth the fight to have it removed as well? Primefac (talk) 13:22, 4 August 2020 (UTC) (please ping on reply)[reply]

@Primefac: Let's give it a shot.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  13:27, 4 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I've actually been thinking to start a collection of patch notes for our citation templates, but those would be placed on a subpage and subsequently linked prominently rather than in a hidden comment... --Izno (talk) 21:45, 4 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@Izno:. See the {{To do}} idea I posted here. With an additional parameter instead of an embedded list, it can pull the changelog you want to do from a subpage, which would probably be the cleanest way to do it (i.e., just have a collapsed log box on the talk page, but the actual log entries not bulking up the amount of material in the page if you edit the talk page, since it would be transcluding the list from /changelog or whatever).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  11:18, 7 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

re Infobox edit

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.
One of the participants in this thread is subject to an editing restriction the bright line of which this discussion keeps crossing, so it should not continue.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  11:18, 7 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

re this edit you made: You did not discuss it. IOW, you had to use your WP:TPE rights to push your point (other quotes from the TPE apply). So I propose (strongly) that you revert, and then start a proposal talk here. -DePiep (talk) 19:03, 4 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not "pushing a point", I'm doing normal cleanup. Enormous piles of edit history is not the sort of stuff we put directly into template code. But I'm never averse to discussion. Nor did I even notice the page was partially protected. Do you not also have the TE bit? Would have been simpler to just WP:BRD it.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  16:40, 5 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
DePiep does not have TPE. Primefac (talk) 18:27, 5 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
That's weird, given how much template work DePiep does.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  20:39, 5 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
It has been removed previously. See his user rights log. --Izno (talk) 02:59, 6 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
(And you might be able to figure out why it has not been reinstated. --Izno (talk) 03:00, 6 August 2020 (UTC))[reply]
) for you
Anyway, you trolling does not undo my argument. Have a nice edit. -DePiep (talk) 03:06, 6 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Simple: I state that you did not do a "normal cleanup", I state that you (ab)used your TPE top perform an edit, by now obviously disputed/controversial/undiscussed. Please revert, then start a talk. -DePiep (talk) 22:29, 5 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Are you disputing because you disagree with the edit, or because SMC didn't discuss it first? Primefac (talk) 23:00, 5 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
OP. -DePiep (talk) 23:07, 5 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Disputing an edit purely because it wasn't discussed beforehand is disruptive. Under WP:TPECON, the main criteria that SMC's edit matches is Changes that don't affect the result when the template is transcluded, which is in the can almost always be made unilaterally section. In addition, plenty of reasons were given when they made the edit, and they all make sense. Primefac (talk) 23:12, 5 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
No that is not "disruptive". It is taking a TPE-editor to account. But hey. By now, Primefac, you are threatening me with severe repercussions, enwiki-level wise or worse, and you know. While protecting a fellow editor. What is wrong with my OP? -DePiep (talk) 23:19, 5 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Oh and if you did not get my OP, there is my second post, you missed. -DePiep (talk) 23:27, 5 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Saying something is disruptive is not a threat; when I "threaten" someone (i.e. warn them from continuing such behaviour) I use the phrases "administrative action" or "sanctions." All I was saying is that disputing a change purely because it wasn't discussed first (and not because of the content of the edit) is problematic. And clearly I saw your second post because I was the one that replied to it. Primefac (talk) 23:46, 5 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
"disruptive" is a threat, especially when I said so. -DePiep (talk) 23:51, 5 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
FFS: Not purely as you turn it, Primefac. I said "before", aka "without" talking. In other words: I refuse to start a 'discussion' while under TPE ignorance. As this editor's behaviour, whose talkpage we use, shows. -DePiep (talk) 00:39, 6 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Not nice anymore: before. -DePiep (talk) 02:21, 6 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Golly jeepers! I go take a nap, and my talk page asplode! I'm not sure why this has turned tooth-gnashy. I'm not sure I would go so far as to say disputing an edit simply because it wasn't discussed is disruptive, but if it's habitual, stubborn, or otherwise not rooted in a genuine concern about the content, then it is contrary policy, guidelines, and very well-accepted essays we treat like guidelines (WP:EDITING, WP:OWN, WP:NOT#BUREAUCRACY, WP:VESTED, WP:FILIBUSTER, WP:AADD, WP:BOLD, WP:BRD, etc.). No one has to have any individual editor's or a general consensus's prior permission to make edits, to any page (well, actually, there are some exceptions: we're not supposed to make non-WP:GNOME changes to WP:OFFICE or WP:ARBCOM pages, as a matter of Foundation rules, and doing it to the front page is strongly discouraged and almost always reverted). Anyway, what I did was gnoming ("can almost always be made unilaterally"). I don't fault DePiep for wanting discussion; we do a lot of that, and opening it on the template's talk page has actually produced good results, like informative links in the material, and at least two ways to set up a more appropriate changes log, which may come in handy for Izno's planned citation template changes-tracking, too.

However, I do take exception to the WP:AGF problem of strange accusations like "I state that you (ab)used your TPE". (I do this kind of editing all the time, and if it were against WP:TPE, I would have lost that bit long ago.) I'm not butt-hurt about it, but it seems rather out-of-the-blue and unreasonably hostile. Next, "obviously disputed/controversial/undiscussed" is not accurate. There is no dispute or controversy about the edit itself (the content change); rather, DePiep is unreasonably disputing my personal actions in a particular role and within the rules of that role (i.e., raising a behavioral not content claim – we are on the right-hand side of "address the edits and the content, not the editor and the person" – not to mention toward the grimy bottom of Graham's Hierarchy of Disagreement). And one editor's objection even about content doesn't constitute a "controversy" (see WP:CONSENSUS: does not require unanimity), nor a "dispute"; a dispute is what happens when two or more editors are failing to get along, whether that be over content or anything else, and are in need of dispute resolution. Yet this pseudo-dispute is one-sided. I'm not angry or anything like that; the whole exchange just seems kind of silly. That the edit was initially "undiscussed" is irrelevant per the previously cited policies etc., and is moot per discussion now ongoing (in two places). See also #A side comment to both parties in previous thread; I make a point of clearing my mental buffers of who said or did what, and it's a good way to avoid WP:DRAMA. I have vague memories of frequently agreeing with DePiep, and sometimes disagreeing, but cannot for the life of me recall disputation so acrimonious that would inspire this level of assumptive hostility, especially over something so patently trivial. To the extent I get a "feeling" when I see DePiep it has been positive; I get a sense of "this is one of our more tech-competent regulars" (which is why I though the editor already had template-editor permissions).

While it was written to Primefac, not me, I also have no idea what "you are threatening me with severe repercussions, enwiki-level wise or worse" means. I think we have a WP:MASTODON moment happening, and someone needs to take a little wikibreak perhaps. There's certainly nothing real or important here that warrants this sort of flaming. This is making a mountain out of a dust mote on a molehill.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  03:32, 6 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

PS, @DePiep: If after all of this you are still convinced you are right and that I'm abusing advanced permissions, you're free to raise a de-TemplateEditor-ing case at WP:TPE. Be aware that this is just a notch below a desysopping case at ArbCom (i.e. you should probably re-familiarize yourself with WP:BOOMERANG). Now, I'm going to go back to the mainspace work that all this weirdness interrupted.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:03, 6 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

So, after absence & ridicule & deviation, now your latest argument is 'boomerang'? How or why is 'boomerang' a motivation for your editorial behaviour? Please take note: what you just wrote, invoking 'boomerang', sounds like a threat to me. -DePiep (talk) 00:46, 7 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
That makes no sense, in any part of it. No one's been "absent". I have not "ridiculed" you; I've been insulted and accused by you and took it in stride, and disagreed with you. That's not what ridicule means. "Deviation" does not appear to have any sensible referent. WP:BOOMERANG is not an argument, it's a page of well-accepted community advice you were referred to. BOOMERANG and my mentioning it has nothing to do with my "motivation" or "behaviour"; that's a completely separate segment of the discussion. It has to do with happens when people with bogus and inscrutable grievances abuse the WP:DR systems (including trying to get people's permissions removed without proper cause). Informing you what the probable result will be is not what threat means (a boomerang result is a consensus the community comes to, so it simply isn't possible for me to "threaten" you with it, unless you believe I have magical mind-control powers and can bend all of Wikipedia to my will). To the extent that "threat" could ever even be applied to discussions of behavior and noticeboards and predictable outcomes, it has nothing to do with WP:HARASS, to which you linked "threat" for some reason. However, if you persist in making false accusations, even after you've been refuted by multiple parties, and in engaging in bizarre outbursts of unwarranted hostility over trivia like HTML comments in template code, it's likely that the HARRASS policy (and WP:CIR) would be applied to your own behavior. I think we're done here, unless you want to let me in on whatever it is that has you angry with me in the first place (since it clearly isn't an HTML comment in a template), so we can resolve that. Otherwise, this discussion is clearly not going to go anywhere.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:19, 7 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I would suggest reading this before engaging further. IMHO from DePiep's first post: "you had to use your WP:TPE rights to push your point" is a blatant violation of his editing restrictions at WP:RESTRICT. Specifically "DePiep is placed indefinitely under an editing restriction, in which he is subject to immediate sanction (including blocks) if he makes any edits which are judged by an administrator to be uncivil, or personal attacks, or assumptions of bad faith" - bolding mine. Only in death does duty end (talk) 10:43, 7 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Ah, I see. Thanks for letting me know, Only in death. I also had not noticed the link to User talk:Primefac/Archive 28#Infobox drug, which reveals similar DePiep "abuse of TPE" accusations against Primefac – and they make even less sense than the ones here (Primefac made an edit DePiep asked for, then fixed another error DePiep pointed out, and DePiep accused him of abuse of TemplateEditor. WTF?). Well, this should prove to DePiep that I have no ill will toward him (just no more patience for this quixotic time-waste, nor any clue why he's up in arms in the first place): I could just take this to WP:AN right now as an obvious violation of his AGF restriction, and he would be blocked or otherwise sanctioned further – but I will not. There's enough WP:DRAMA going around for everyone, and the world is kind of on fire, so we don't need more of it here at our hobby.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  11:18, 7 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Feedback request: Language and literature Good Article nomination

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Feedback request: Language and literature Good Article nomination

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 Fixed

An automated process has detected that when you recently edited Red team, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page Social engineering.

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Happy First Edit Day!

Hey, SMcCandlish. I'd like to wish you a wonderful First Edit Day on behalf of the Wikipedia Birthday Committee!
Have a great day! Megan Barris (Lets talk📧) 06:17, 11 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@Synoman Barris: Thank you. I didn't even realize!  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  12:03, 12 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Invitation to join the Fifteen Year Society

Dear SMcCandlish,

I'd like to extend a cordial invitation to you to join the Fifteen Year Society, an informal group for editors who've been participating in the Wikipedia project for fifteen years or more. ​

Best regards, Chris Troutman (talk) 14:11, 11 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Chris troutman: Thanks. I am now officially a WikiFossil. Heh.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  12:03, 12 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Happy First Edit Day!

Happy First Edit Day!

Have a very happy first edit anniversary!

From the Birthday Committee, CAPTAIN RAJU(T) 22:19, 11 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@CAPTAIN RAJU: Thank you. "What a long, strange trip it's been."  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  12:04, 12 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Feedback request: History and geography request for comment

 Done
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Feedback request: Media, the arts, and architecture request for comment

Moot
 – RfC was already closed by the time I got there.
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August

August
Sunflowers in Walsdorf

Thank you for improving articles in August! --Gerda Arendt (talk) 15:39, 20 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

A first for me today: a featured list (= a featured topic in this case) on the Main page, see Wikipedia:Main Page history/2020 August 21, an initiative by Aza24 in memory of Brian. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 13:36, 21 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Sweet! I've not tried for featured anything.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  16:33, 21 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Try it, though, - it's not hard if you have a neat small topic where you can manage to collect most available sources. If you need a reviewer for your first GAN, I recommend to ping Aza24, - such a sweet experience, that last one! - Today just a DYK: Rhythm Is It! - I expanded that stub on my dad's birthday because we saw the film together back then, and were impressed. As a ref said: every educator should see it. Don't miss the trailer, for a starter. - A welcome chance to present yet another article by Brian on the Main page, Le Sacre du printemps. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 13:59, 31 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I have GAs, just not FAs. I really has more to do with "wikipolitics" than with writing/research time. I don't think I need to get back into the grotty history on that.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  06:23, 1 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

"Domesticated" red fox

 Done

Hello Mac, I seek your advice on yet another perturbation. Back in the past you were involved in this move: Talk:Domesticated red fox#Requested move 28 September 2017. So we have an article on the Domesticated red fox which covers the "domestication" experiment. Unfortunately, the fox that was "domesticated" was the melanistic form of the red fox, the fur-traded Silver fox (animal) that already existed (but you were not to know), which also covers the experiment. We have a content fork. Now to add a complication, the scientist that undertook the experiment was Dmitry Belyayev (zoologist), which also covers the experiment in great detail. Triple fork. We also have an article on the Red fox#Taming and domestication which gives a brief overview. Do you have any views on an approach to consolidate some of this stuff? William Harristalk 11:09, 23 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@William Harris: Yeesh. Yeah, that really does need a merger. I think it should probably be moved to Domesticated silver fox (with more specific wording), and the mostly redundant material in the three other pages compressed ruthlessly per WP:SUMMARY and hatted with a {{Main}} tag. The topic itself has more than enough non-trivial coverage to exist as a stand-alone article. We just don't need to tell the same story in detail in four places, which will produce conflicting information, possibly even a WP:POVFORK, and is apt to confuse readers into thinking two kinds of foxes have been quasi-domesticated.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:00, 24 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks Mac, that is a good starting point. A stand-alone article on the farm fox experiment was one of my thoughts as well. William Harristalk 08:02, 25 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Coverage of domesticated red fox.
@William Harris: Well, I'm meaning that Domesticated red fox is that article already, but should just be moved to Domesticated silver fox to be more WP:PRECISE, and then the overabundance of material about this in other articles should be merged into it, aside from highly compressed summaries and {{Main}} cross-reference hatnotes.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:37, 25 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Good plan, leave it with me, we are underway: Talk:Domesticated red fox#Proposed page move William Harristalk 09:52, 26 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I've chimed in there, with a summarized version of what I recommended above.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:16, 27 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Hope I'm not interrupting this friendly parlee between you & William Harris, but the paw prints caught my eye when I arrived here to recruit your help. When I saw the topic was domesticated red fox...well, the devil made me do whatever happened next. ^_^ Atsme Talk 📧 21:42, 29 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
[10] I actually knew a guy who bought Redd Foxx's custom kit car (looked like a mutated '70s Corvette, kinda), and used to drive it around San Francisco. It had a custom plush dash in the shape of a stylized red fox, and the whole car was of course red.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  05:33, 30 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Sometimes I do not receive pings for some technical reason, and did not receive Atsme's ping above. Crikey girl!!
The move template is now formal. Someone has suggested simply "Domesticated fox" - what is your view on that one, it may be a more WP:COMMONNAME or do we stay with WP:PRECISE? If we go with Domesticated fox, it opens it up for every attempt at domestication of the fox in history (which may, or may not, be a bad thing). And then to add complication there is the Fuegian dog which is a "fox" of a completely different genus. William Harris (talk) 23:47, 2 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]
The move is complete, thanks for your advice, now for some consolidation across other articles. Then the latest update to this story - these were never "wild Siberian foxes", they were silver foxes originally bred in Canada for the fur trade says their DNA - they had already been in the human environment for quite some time before their sale to Russia. It is beginning to look as if "domestication syndrome" is more associated with living in the human-made environment - whatever that brings to the table - rather than "selective breeding based on behaviour". (It makes you wonder what living in a man-made environment has done to us compared with our "wild" ancestors.) William Harris (talk) 22:31, 9 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Well, we started killing each other less (in frequency, if not in total number - we've obviously has some terrible wars in modern times), and we came up with language, and culture in the big sense. Somewhere around the 40K to 70K years ago range, a whole lot of stuff happened in comparatively quick succession (early art, larger groups of people, technological improvements, better health, extinction of competing hominids, etc.). The prevailing theory seems to be that it all depended on an explosion in language complexity from not much better than ape noise-making to "language proper" with the ability to handle abstract concepts like time and relationships. That in turn was surely due to a brain mutation, which would only have been a favorable adaptation under intensifying social behavior (indeed, they're basically a positive feedback loop). So, humans self-domesticated each other/themselves slowly over a zillion generations (even australopithecines were pretty darned social, like a lot of modern primates), until the equilibrium was punctuated and we became entirely human not just proto-human in the space of just several hundred generations (if not faster). It's hard to prove this stuff, of course, since "anatomically modern" humans from before that era mostly just leave bones. But too much of the dating of sea-changes in the palaeo-archaeological record back to that specific period.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  12:12, 11 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Category:Defunct newsletters of wikiprojects has been nominated for renaming

 Done
 – Opposed change to "WikiProject" as unnecessary capitalization.

Category:Defunct newsletters of wikiprojects has been nominated for renaming. A discussion is taking place to decide whether this proposal complies with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. Soumya-8974 talk contribs subpages 13:46, 23 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Feedback request: Wikipedia policies and guidelines request for comment

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But of course...

Don't worry, I'm well aware of what eventually happens if any editor seeks a consensus against the usage of diacritics. No one ever accused Wikipedia of being 'open minded'. GoodDay (talk) 14:59, 25 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I almost did a spit take with my coffee when you suggested that attempting to suppress diacritics, which you feel are "un-English", is an example of open-mindedness. To quote from The Princess Bride: "I don't think that word means what you think it means."  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:31, 25 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Really not interested in going over old arguments, so I won't bother you any further about the topic, here. GoodDay (talk) 23:02, 25 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
You guys are funny. Not spit-take funny, but funny enough. Thanks for the light entertainment during this time of smóke and döòm. Dicklyon (talk) 05:20, 26 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Döòm – that's so METAL!!! <insert thrash riffs here>  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:17, 27 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Would appreciate your expertise

Hi, Mac - I'm working on Timothy Drury, and trying to figure out the best formatting to use for the material I'd like to add to the article, a rough draft of which you can see in my sandbox. I'm working on finding the sources I need to cite so any help in that department would be most welcome. I'm thinking a table, or possibly individual tables, or would prose be better? Atsme Talk 📧 21:24, 29 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Looing through User:Atsme/sandbox, my initial thoughts would be that "Album credits" should be a subsection of "Discography" (probably at the end, maybe something like "Guest-appearance credits", or something? "Album credits" seems to imply credits he gave to others on his own albums). The "Discography" section is already leaning otherwise inclusive, with TV appearances, guest roles with the Eagles and others, commericial jingles, etc. To the extent this might not all fit within the usual definition of "Discography", then "Discography and other musical works" would be fine; there's no rule to always use the exact heading "Discography". Next, three world tours don't make much of a list, so better integrated into prose. If kept as a list, adding "world tour" to each entry is redundant. Similar with the photography stuff; two isn't a good list, so it'd be better to have a paragraph (maybe a section) on his work as a photographer, and anything else not directly connected to his music. Comparing to the original article, I think it could use some additional structure, of different career phases, instead of one monolithic "Career" section. But at present, we don't even have that, but a confused/confusing "Early life and career" mega-section, which is commingling two things that should be separate sections. Hope that helps. :-)  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  05:43, 30 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Mac, please...perform your magic. I have a little bit of a COI there and don't want anything coming back at me over my contributions. I can't think anybody I know on WP who knows the industry better than you. Atsme Talk 📧 23:48, 30 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Alright. Let me know when the sourcing is in place, and I can squiggle the arrangement around and merge the material in, I guess.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  06:21, 1 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Ok...thank you! Atsme Talk 📧 13:03, 1 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Feedback requests from the Feedback Request Service

 Done
 – (Both – but why is this suddenly putting two unrelated RfCs into one WP:FRS notice?  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  12:45, 1 September 2020 (UTC))[reply]
Your feedback is requested at Talk:Arameans on a "History and geography" request for comment, and at Talk:999 (emergency telephone number) on a "Politics, government, and law" request for comment. Thank you for helping out!
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Editing news 2020 #4

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Reply tool

The number of comments posted with the Reply Tool from March through June 2020. People used the Reply Tool to post over 7,400 comments with the tool.

The Reply tool has been available as a Beta Feature at the Arabic, Dutch, French and Hungarian Wikipedias since 31 March 2020. The first analysis showed positive results.

  • More than 300 editors used the Reply tool at these four Wikipedias. They posted more than 7,400 replies during the study period.
  • Of the people who posted a comment with the Reply tool, about 70% of them used the tool multiple times. About 60% of them used it on multiple days.
  • Comments from Wikipedia editors are positive. One said, أعتقد أن الأداة تقدم فائدة ملحوظة؛ فهي تختصر الوقت لتقديم رد بدلًا من التنقل بالفأرة إلى وصلة تعديل القسم أو الصفحة، التي تكون بعيدة عن التعليق الأخير في الغالب، ويصل المساهم لصندوق التعديل بسرعة باستخدام الأداة. ("I think the tool has a significant impact; it saves time to reply while the classic way is to move with a mouse to the Edit link to edit the section or the page which is generally far away from the comment. And the user reaches to the edit box so quickly to use the Reply tool.")[11]

The Editing team released the Reply tool as a Beta Feature at eight other Wikipedias in early August. Those Wikipedias are in the Chinese, Czech, Georgian, Serbian, Sorani Kurdish, Swedish, Catalan, and Korean languages. If you would like to use the Reply tool at your wiki, please tell User talk:Whatamidoing (WMF).

The Reply tool is still in active development. Per request from the Dutch Wikipedia and other editors, you will be able to customize the edit summary. (The default edit summary is "Reply".) A "ping" feature is available in the Reply tool's visual editing mode. This feature searches for usernames. Per request from the Arabic Wikipedia, each wiki will be able to set its own preferred symbol for pinging editors. Per request from editors at the Japanese and Hungarian Wikipedias, each wiki can define a preferred signature prefix in the page MediaWiki:Discussiontools-signature-prefix. For example, some languages omit spaces before signatures. Other communities want to add a dash or a non-breaking space.

New requirements for user signatures

  • The new requirements for custom user signatures began on 6 July 2020. If you try to create a custom signature that does not meet the requirements, you will get an error message.
  • Existing custom signatures that do not meet the new requirements will be unaffected temporarily. Eventually, all custom signatures will need to meet the new requirements. You can check your signature and see lists of active editors whose custom signatures need to be corrected. Volunteers have been contacting editors who need to change their custom signatures. If you need to change your custom signature, then please read the help page.

Next: New discussion tool

Next, the team will be working on a tool for quickly and easily starting a new discussion section to a talk page. To follow the development of this new tool, please put the New Discussion Tool project page on your watchlist.

Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:48, 31 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Feedback request: Biographies request for comment

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Feedback request: Wikipedia proposals request for comment

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Feedback request: Maths, science, and technology request for comment

 Done
 – Also fixed mis-classification of the RfC, and suggested it be moved to the proper page.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:11, 6 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]
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ACE stuff

Hi SMcCandlish, I know we had a lot a back and forth on the ACE RFC so far, and I think you have some good ideas - if your proposals don't pass and you want to re-explore for the next year, maybe we can workshop them a bit sooner? I think some of your intent (especially about the "voting system") may be getting lost in the mechanics. One thing that I know would help me would be to start with a mission type statement (what are all of the goals of the election) - then a description of the system, perhaps an example vote table with winners identified for the "old" and "new" mechanics - always ensuring that the mechanics support the goals. Would be willing to workshop with you if you want to. Best regards, — xaosflux Talk 14:08, 4 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Xaosflux: Sure. I honestly did not expect this to get traction on a "first run". WP is unusually resistant to changes in voting/selection processes even when they have proved problematic. The fear is that any change will automatically be for the worse. Anyway, the "mission" of a voting system change would be for Arbitrators to be elected honestly, transparently, and with less potential for manipulation of the outcome by users who carefully study the mathematics of the system and/or who collude.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:04, 6 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry, I guess I didn't really mean "mission" (though it is good to have one), more defining the measurable components. For example, the way I see the current election structure, there are some measures that occur:
  1. Ensure that no candidate is elected that does not have an individual majority support of those who express an opinion about them.
    This is in part to fulfill global policy requirements for checkuser and oversight admission
    This also allows for the current situation of allowing less than all seats to be filled even if there are sufficient candidates (and in fact allows for no seats to be filled)
  2. Determine a ranked order of candidates
    This is because we often actual are trying to fill more than one type of seat (2-year terms, 1-year terms) and this is the discriminator
So I would think the first steps would be to review those components, see if they fit the mission, and determine if those should be changed or not. Once that part is settled, system mechanics should be reviewed such as: Must voters make a countable decision about each candidate? (This can have a huge impact on the 50% rule above)? How should people record their votes? (e.g. approval voting, ranked choices, etc). I'm a bit weary of system changes that will break that 50% rule, so careful evaluation of how things will count for that purpose are important (e.g. in "support" only type votes, if "% support" is #supports/#voters - we'd need to be very clear to voters about the impact - basically letting them know they may not abstain from expressing an opinion on a certain candidate). This is just one example, and there are LOTS of ways it could be adjusted for sure! (Even with the current mechanics there could be a "2 round" counting process, for example round one finds % using the current formula as a gating exercise, round 2 ranks winners solely based off their support count) Sorry for the long wall of text here - just throwing around some ideas! — xaosflux Talk 14:45, 6 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I see what you're getting at. Will cogitate on this when I'm more able to do so. I'm California, where it's so hot (I don't have air conditioning) I can hardly think or sit still. My initial comment is that this kind of list is good for clarity, but this specific one is missing the two points I'm most keen to make: the current system is too mathematically complex for most editors to understand, even after one tries to explain it several times; and it is manipulable to "shape" outcomes, especially by people with a maths/statistics background, and by people with a content PoV-pushing and collusive axe to grind (most especially of all when the editor in question fits both categories). Also, omething that occurred to me last night is the value of charts/tables/graphics. I was poring over nested RAID levels both on- and off-site, and the diagrams were very helpful. It's a quite analogous situation, since RAID is yet another of those mathematically complex areas where the results are not what one would expect if one did not have that background. To drive the point home, our otherwise quite in-depth article is missing a key fact about RAID 1+0 versus RAID 0+1 which to most eyes seems interchangeable; the former is actually more robust and can under 2/3 of circumstances tolerate one more component disk failure than can the latter. It's information you really have to trawl around for, provided by people who have carefully worked out the statistics of RAID-failure scenarios.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:05, 7 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Interesting! Being able to communicate complexities of voting systems is certainly challenging when the audience is wide, I think for this case tables would be the best, such as a few tables labeled (current) (proposal A) (proposal B) that will clearly illustrate how the outcome would change based on factors that don't (e.g. "if we remove the oppose column", "if you only get x approval votes", etc). — xaosflux Talk 14:28, 7 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Yar. Well, at least there's a long time to work on it. I'm swamped with other stuff right now, but am not likely to forget. Every time I think about ArbCom, almost, I grind my teeth about this ucked fup voting scheme.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  12:15, 11 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Feedback request: Media, the arts, and architecture request for comment

 Done
Your feedback is requested at Talk:Involuntary commitment on a "Media, the arts, and architecture" request for comment. Thank you for helping out!
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Article Superstition in Judaism has been nominated for deletion

 Done

Hello,

Since some editors are contesting existence of articles associating religions and religious communities to superstitions, One of the article which concerns topic has been nominated for deletion. You can support or contest the deletion at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Superstition in Judaism by putting forward your opinion.

Thanks and regards Bookku (talk) 05:02, 7 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Feedback requests from the Feedback Request Service

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Books & Bytes – Issue 40

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 40, July – August 2020

  • New partnerships
    • Al Manhal
    • Ancestry
    • RILM
  • #1Lib1Ref May 2020 report
  • AfLIA hires a Wikipedian-in-Residence

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --10:15, 10 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Feedback request: Wikipedia technical issues and templates request for comment

 Done
 – I already did that one before I saw this.
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Nomination for deletion of Template:Language with name2

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Template:Language with name2 has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. Gonnym (talk) 08:20, 14 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

"Serbo-Croatia" listed at Redirects for discussion

 Done

A discussion is taking place to address the redirect Serbo-Croatia. The discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2020 September 15#Serbo-Croatia until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. Soumya-8974 talk contribs subpages 12:18, 15 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Feedback request: Society, sports, and culture request for comment

 Done
 – and then some. We had a WP:TALKFORK trainwreck. Someone removed the RfC tag, and started a duplicate discussion on the other involved article's talk page. I've now soft-redirected the one to the other, put an RfC tag back on it, and made sure it's properly listed at WP:PM.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:52, 23 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]
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Dots in "U.S." at Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Abbreviations

I just discovered (to my surprise) that you recently swapped the dot usage for Georgia (U.S. state) and Great Northern Railway (U.S.) in the article title discussion in Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Abbreviations. I have a problem with that. The MoS is discussing the article titles, and I believe it should use the titles that are actually used for the articles. Although it might be stylistically better in article space to consistently omit the dots if discussing a group of topics in which some topics omit the dots, this is the Wikipedia MoS, not an article. It should stick to the facts as they exist. It should describe the actual article titles that are used, not alter them in a way that might imply that something it is referring to should be changed. —BarrelProof (talk) 15:09, 18 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Fine, though they actually should be changed, per WP:CONCISE and because use of "U.S." on Wikipedia is effectively doomed in the long run for reasons I've been over many times before. The short version: MoS permits "U.S.", but not in a context in which "UK" is also used, which rules out innumerable – probably the vast majority of – cases of "U.S." And this will just increase over time; as articles about the US develop more, and as articles on various topics that, in stub form, only mention the US are developed more, they are more and more likely to contain other country acronyms like UK and PRC and so on. In turn, this makes their text, with "US", conflict with the titles if they contain "U.S.", which is undesirable (we have a guideline against that, too). In the very immediate short term, I agree that the guideline examples should represent article titles the way they actually are as of that writing (or replace them with "US" ones, or use made-up examples). But that short term should in fact be short.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  18:45, 23 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Pix file

One for you main page, perhaps? File:The wikipedias serious.jpg William Harris (talk) 08:35, 19 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Will save for special seriouser okkashion. Like cheezburger day.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  18:47, 23 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Feedback request: Maths, science, and technology request for comment

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September

September
Dahlias in Walsdorf

Thank you for improving articles in September! --Gerda Arendt (talk) 07:45, 21 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

DS alerts

Hey. Came across an old proposal of yours to autodeliver DS alerts. Unfortunate AC decided to outlaw it. The community sanctions system isn't in sync with the ArbCom one in terms of policy, and doesn't have the prohibition, so it could still be done for community sanctions I think. They cover less and smaller topic areas (COVID is probably the largest), so the effects are on a much smaller scale, but I suppose that proposal, or some amendment of it (eg summary talk/edit notices counting as awareness) can be implemented in the WP:GS system? Thoughts? ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 01:02, 25 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I don't see why not, but I don't think that GS require anything like {{Ds/alert}}. The "notice" templates are only required, by ArbCom (and consequently by AE) for DS matters. GS and DS are different regimes. It might not be a bad idea for topics covered by the comparatively rare GS (as topics; GS are more often applies to individuals, I would think) to have a corresponding template, which the community might want auto-delievered. The "tech" to do that was never developed, of course, but I think it's probably not a not terribly complicated scripting job. I will note that in my original DS-related proposal, the support was around 50/50, and much of the opposition was based on the bogus idea that the community can't tell ArbCom to do anything. Templates and notices for GS wouldn't have that cognitive dissonance, so I would expect the support level for auto-notice to be even higher. That said, I have no idea what the community reaction would be to a proposal to have a "{{Gs/alert}}" in the first place.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  03:33, 25 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]
{{Gs/alert}} does exist (along with identical templates to talk/edit notice templates), but (strictly speaking) I'm unsure if all community sanctions require it (I think recent ones do, at least). I'd imagine most admins would probably look for awareness before sanctioning, but not sure in practice. It currently looks the same, but it's within community purview to change, of course. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 03:51, 25 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Oh! I had not noticed. I must have missed whatever discussion led to the GS template. In that case, by all means propose it be auto-delivered. Feel free to crib as needed from the original proposal. If it were accepted, and if it worked well, it would lead to additional leverage to do it with DS alerts.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  03:42, 27 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]
There probably wasn’t one, if I had to guess. The community DS system just seems thrown together over time, with not too much cohesiveness between parts (some more after my changes, but still) — it’s not very well maintained. I’m thinking your bot idea was a way to achieve the objective of better alerting without changing the process (which the community can’t do with ArbCom’s system), but since the rules of the community system can be modified maybe it’s better just to create a better/different set of awareness rules? Who knows, AC may take note and apply the changes to their system. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 14:34, 29 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Sure, and even if there are not formal awareness rules for GS, people should be aware anyway. WP's rule set is complicated, especially for new users. Hell, I didn't even know GS had an alert template all and I've been here more than 15 years!  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:50, 10 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Feedback request: Wikipedia style and naming request for comment

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Pichenotte

Hi SMcCandlish. Since you appear to be one of the primary contirbutors/editors of Pichenotte, perhaps you can help this person asking at WP:THQ#Greetings, I am new at this and would like help editing a page about the boardgame called PICHENOTTE about improving it. -- Marchjuly (talk) 07:36, 28 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the note. I've offered, over there, to review and, as appropriate, integrate appropriate and sourced userspace draft material.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  07:20, 29 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for taking the time to try and help this editor out. -- Marchjuly (talk) 07:25, 29 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Adding Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Pichenotte in case you haven't noticed yet. FWIW, it hadn't yet been nominated for deletion when I posted here yesterday. -- Marchjuly (talk) 07:32, 29 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I commented in the AfD. I think a merger is possibly feasible, but I also don't think proper WP:BEFORE has been done, just some perfunctory WP:GOOGLE.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  08:09, 29 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Hello Scott, please see my suggestions and references at [1]ThreeVictors (talk) 16:18, 29 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I have made a draft of changes for Pichenotte

Hello SMcCandlish I have made a draft at [2] Do you have time to look at the suggestions and give some feedback ? Thank youThreeVictors (talk) 02:24, 30 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I have not yet had time to pore over it in great detail, but the feedback on your talk page hits the high points: what we really need are independent (non-manufacturer) sources that cover this game in non-trivial detail, to even salvage the article at all. I think that will most likely be paper books, about games and about Quebec folk-ways and pastimes.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:32, 1 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

And the AfD has been relisted for another week.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:57, 10 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

References

  1. ^ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:ThreeVictors/Draft:Pichenotte
  2. ^ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:ThreeVictors/Draft:Pichenotte

"MOS:QUESTION" listed at Redirects for discussion

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A discussion is taking place to address the redirect MOS:QUESTION. The discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2020 September 28#MOS:QUESTION until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. –Deacon Vorbis (carbon • videos) 13:03, 28 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Feedback request: Biographies request for comment

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Nomination for merging of Template:Being merged

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Template:Being merged has been nominated for merging with Template:Merging. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. Thank you. JsfasdF252 (talk) 01:52, 29 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Feedback request: Wikipedia policies and guidelines request for comment

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Feedback request: Religion and philosophy request for comment

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Looking for your advice

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When you're able to, I would appreciate you reading my comments in this ANI thread. I'd like you to be aware of this because in your comment here, you were the one user who agreed with me that it was probable the user behind the "race and intelligence" RFC was a parody account. I'd like you to be aware that I knew more about this than I initially let on, because I was a member of the Slack server where the parody trolling was being coordinated. I posted a link to the Slack server in the ANI thread, although the server has been deleted now. I'm sorry for not disclosing this detail earlier; in the earlier arbitration request I was hoping I could present a case for what I knew what was going on without betraying any private information.

You might be interested to know that when the same people were doing the same thing at RationalWiki, there was a nearly identical situation involving someone else. There was one user, who called himself "Concerned", who knew exactly what was being done to these articles and tried to stop it, but nobody else listened to him. You can see an example of that in this discussion, as well as the subsequent discussion directly below it. Like me, "Concerned" was blocked for making what everyone else assumed to be a false accusation, eventually permanently.

It isn't all that important to me whether I get blocked again at ANI, but I'd like to know what I should do with the information I have from Slack about what's been done to these articles. While the parody material was being inserted I made every effort stop it, and my efforts were both futile and widely regarded as disruptive. A few users are telling me that I should email ArbCom about what's been happening, but I know emailing ArbCom will result in no action, because that's always been the result when other people have emailed ArbCom about similar issues in the past. Is there any other course of action you'd recommend here? 2600:1004:B150:FD91:ED6E:C62F:3958:DF62 (talk) 19:09, 6 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I've commented in that thread. TLDR: Send the private evidence to ArbCom's e-mail address. Your t-ban is still extant. And, I'm generally opposed to broad IP-range blocks.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  21:27, 7 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks. I need some time to think about how to best approach this issue. I remain convinced that if I email ArbCom out of the blue I'm unlikely to receive a response, but perhaps there's some way for me to raise the issue with them in public first (not with any private information; just with a general summary of what I would like to email them about). 2600:1004:B118:7657:E86C:A065:4028:3E46 (talk) 22:01, 7 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
You could bring it up at WT:ARBCOM. However, I tend to agree with respondents at the ANI that bringing this up on-wiki at all is a violation of your T-ban, so just using ArbCom-L is the most sensible approach.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:48, 10 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Well, I know from from observation that most messages sent to the ArbCom mailing list by non-arbitrators get no acknowledgment or response. Other times, ArbCom says they'll discuss something and get back to you, and then you never hear from them again. I was in Kirkegaard's Slack server while he was trying to correspond with ArbCom about their having blocked him indefinitely without giving a reason, and he was sharing his emails with the Slack, so that's how I know what it's like to try to discuss this type of issue with ArbCom via email. If I'm going to present email evidence to ArbCom, it will only make a difference if I do it in a way that minimizes the odds of it being ignored or forgotten about.
ArbCom almost opened a case about some of these issues back in May. If there's eventually an arbitration case, I think ArbCom is much more likely to look at email evidence if it relates to a case that's open, so that's the thing I've been waiting for. 2600:1004:B114:CC1A:DC4:E0D3:7759:CF73 (talk) 02:12, 10 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Well, it is the procedural path open to you. And if they came close to taking a case about this in May, then more evidence will only make it more likely they'll do so next time it comes up. I guess what I would suggest is sending a summary of what evidence you have and why it matters, then sending the evidence, and not waiting for them to get back to you before you send the evidence. Even if it doesn't trigger a case, it's at least in their ArbCom-L box, and will be there when someone else brings up the issue again later. Which is pretty much certain to happen. Hotbed topics go to RFARB more than once.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  07:34, 11 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Based on the discussion at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligence_(2nd_nomination) it seems that there might be an arbitration case related to this topic in the near future. Or at least, I think there ought to be one. Perhaps I'm being overly optimistic. What I'll probably do is wait and see whether a case happens so that I can present my evidence in that context. And if eventually becomes clear that there won't be a case, I'll send it to ArbCom anyway so that they can at least have it, even though I know they're unlikely to do anything in that situation.
When there was a similar set of issues on these articles a few months ago, you agreed with me that there needed to be an arbitration case, but didn't want to request one yourself. Do you still feel that way? It seems unlikely to me that anyone else is going to request one, so the reality might be that the only way for there to be a case is if you do it. 2600:1004:B10D:344F:A91F:1AAC:4633:6C5F (talk) 19:14, 12 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I think it's more likely there'll first be a new string of WP:AE filings and other "noticeboardings", and some WP:ARCA requests, since there is already a decided WP:ARBRI case about this which already authorized discretionary sanctions. It would basically take failure of AE, ANI, NPOVN, etc., to resolve renewed disruption in the topic area for ArbCom to open an all-new case about it. (Well, absent something unusual, like administrative misbehavior in the topic that called for a desysopping.) ArbCom these days is very resistant to taking cases at all, and especially resistant to taking ones that it sees as "redundant" or "unripe". The existing avenues will likely need to be exhausted more first. But ya never know! If a good enough argument can be made that something crucial was missing from the original RI case, that might be good enough grounds for an RI2 case. I don't want to file such a case request myself. I can barely tolerate forays into RFARB and ARCA. Just the last couple of days of WP:DRAMA at ARCA have been enough for me for months. :-/  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  20:04, 12 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Feedback request: History and geography request for comment

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Small text for scientific authorities

Small text has been used for scientific authorities in taxoboxes since 30 May 2004 (well before I started editing here!). The style seems very consistently used in article text as well. But in response to a query at Template_talk:Speciesbox#Small_text, I tried to find the convention in the MoS. Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Text formatting#Scientific names is the obvious place, but it's not there. Do you know whether it is written up, and if so where? Even if it is elsewhere, it could usefully be added to Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Text formatting#Scientific names (which could also usefully have a short cut). Peter coxhead (talk) 07:56, 11 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think it's ever been codified, except maybe in MOS:ORGANISMS. I kind of forgot about that. Now that the breeds capitalization debate is over, that page can probably be finalized for the WP:PROPOSAL process. Anyway, yes, it's clearly an established (even if not written-down) convention here, i.e. already has consensus. So it should probably be added to MOS:TEXT#Scientific_names as suggested. Might as well just go insert it, using that rationale. If people want to argue it out, then so be it, but they probably won't.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  08:04, 11 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Ok, thanks. I added a bit (with wording largely taken from MOS:ORGANISMS). It's not quite the right place, because Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Text formatting#Scientific names is under "use of italics", but it will do until MOS:ORGANISMS is accepted (do move on with this, though I still don't agree about breeds!). Peter coxhead (talk) 08:30, 11 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Oh, I'm not sure I do either. It just went back and forth for so long, with so many detailed and equal-but-opposite pro and con arguments, that I went neutral and and ended up just RfCing it. It's one of those myriad things that can't please everyone no matter which option was chosen. A decade from now we might undo it; depends on whether more non-specialist sources like newspapers lower-case or upper-case breed names (besides those that contain or are clearly proper names). As for placement for now, I'll add a cross-ref. from the section on small text, maybe. I think that's in MOS:ACCESS.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  11:34, 11 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Update: done.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  11:39, 11 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Re-sysoped

Resolved
 – via e-mail. Short version: the ARCA discussion itself mentions several, and links to a page listing them.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  16:53, 12 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Hi. I would be curious to know who those two admins are who regained their bit. I'm sure the circumstances are very different and in the case of BHG, I and many are of the opinion that her desysoping was a heavy-handed remedy even if, according to some, it was a close call. You can email me in confidence if you don't want to make it public. I won't use it anywhere - my discretion is still something I can be trusted for. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 12:39, 11 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I've done my own homework in the meantime (it took an hour) and I only came across 2 admins who have been resysoped by RfA in the last 5 years. They were both returning after their bits had expired for lack of activity. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 13:36, 11 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Italicization of climbing routes

Thanks for all of your work here. Did anything ever come of it? My eyes were just assaulted by an italicized climbing route title, so I was wondering. —  AjaxSmack  14:35, 11 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@AjaxSmack: Forgot about it completely. I would de-italicize it, since nothing in MOS:TEXT or any other part of MoS says to use italics for this. If people want to fight about it, open an RfC on the matter at WT:MOSTEXT. A clear consensus should emerge (based on treatment in reliable sources, including non-specialist ones like newspapers and other encyclopedias) that MoS is correct to not list them as something to italicize, or that MoS is lacking in this regard and should say to italicize them. I think you can guess which way I think that will go. If my dimming memory about this is serving me correctly, the idea of italicizing them was a novel introduction by a climbing-oriented editor, on the theory that a climbing route was somehow "more like" a creative work (book, movie, etc.) than like a hiking trail or a bridge, which of course it is not. The italics idea is not based on any sort of convention established by standards or style manuals outside Wikipedia, nor by any consensus to do it that was arrived at within Wikipedia.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  11:39, 12 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks. —  AjaxSmack  18:47, 12 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Feedback request: Wikipedia style and naming request for comment

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