User talk:Fetchcomms

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Notification of pending suspension of administrative permissions due to inactivity

Following a community discussion in June 2011, consensus was reached to provisionally suspend the administrative permissions of users who have been inactive for one year (i.e. administrators who have not made any edits or logged actions in over one year). As a result of this discussion, your administrative permissions will be removed pending your return if you do not return to activity within the next month. If you wish to have these permissions reinstated should this occur, please post to the Wikipedia:Bureaucrats' noticeboard and the userright will be restored per the re-sysopping process (i.e. as long as the attending bureaucrats are reasonably satisfied that your account has not been compromised, that your inactivity did not have the effect of evading scrutiny of any actions which might have led to sanctions, and that you have not been inactive for a three year period of time). If you remain inactive for a three year period of time, including the present year you have been inactive, you will need to request reinstatement at WP:RFA. This removal of access is procedural only, and not intended to reflect negatively upon you in any way. We wish you the best in future endeavors, and thank you for your past administrative efforts. Regards, — Moe Epsilon 06:46, 1 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I'm still lurking around, just terribly busy in real life right now. /ƒETCH COMMS / 02:47, 12 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

A decline at AFC

I know this is ancient history, but some of these old declines are just coming to light as a result of CSD G13 reviews. Just in case you are still declining articles on the same basis, I would like to point out to you that the decline reason given in this decline is invalid. Formatting of references is not grounds to decline an article (it would not be grounds for deletion at AFD). Only the content and quality of references is relevant. Spinning Spark 00:55, 14 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I only placed the article on hold. Looks like a different user actually declined the article. If my memory is correct, in 2010, it was recommended (or at least regular practice) that articles without inline citations be placed on hold, especially if some of the references are behind paywalls or in print (as was in this case, it seems). The problem is that AfC reviewers don't know which references support what content in the article, so simply moving such an article, particularly a BLP, into mainspace wasn't generally acceptable under the 2010 guidelines as I remember them. I haven't been active at all in the past year, and I know that AfC has undergone quite a few changes since then, so feel free to do whatever with the article if policies now differ. /ƒETCH COMMS / 07:48, 15 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The article has been reset so that it gets a fresh review. The reason I am following up these old declines is that I believe the AFC project has played a big part in driving away new editors. Hundreds of thousands of pages have now been put up for G13 deletion. In reviewing them, I find that I am prepared to move at least one in ten of them to mainspace. There may well be a lot more that could be rescued; some kinds of articles I just pass over and leave to others to deal with. That just has to mean that tens of thousands of new editors have been blown off by AFC and in most cases are lost for good.

When there is an article in mainspace where we cannot access the sources, we assume good faith (one of our core policies). This is still the case even at reviews like DYK and GA. FA does a source check but would still not decline on accessibility grounds. AGF has always been a core policy and the AFC reviewing instructions have never said anything about inline citations (I checked back to May 2010). If it was in mainspace we would not speedy delete or AFD on those grounds. We might template it, but that option is open to AFC reviewers also. There is no excuse, and never has been an excuse, for AFC behaving differently. Spinning Spark 09:28, 15 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

My experience at AfC—and I'm speaking solely for myself during the time I was active there—does not match your characterization of the project. I was also active in the AfC IRC channel, which, at least during that time, functioned as a sort of online help desk for new users having trouble with AfC. My experience was that many of the articles submitted were by users who never seemed to check back to see if there were problems that needed to be addressed. Many others were users whose sole goal was to have a particular article created and had no intentions of "joining" Wikipedia, i.e., PR people and the like. I don't consider these users to have been driven away by AfC, merely that they never intended to be regular editors. I also interacted with many users who were genuinely interested in improving their article submissions and who were helped, through AfC, to create mainspace-appropriate article submissions. Probably the majority of these interactions for me occurred in the IRC channel.

My point about the particular article you brought to my attention is not accessibility. I've used plenty of non-online citations in articles to which I've contributed, and that's by no means a problem. The main issue is that, guidelines aside, AfC reviewers generally did not accept BLPs without quality inline citations because a list of references doesn't necessarily support all or most or even more than one assertion in an article. I could have a list of thirty sources at the bottom of an article about John Seigenthaler pertaining only to his journalism career but twenty paragraphs in the article about how he killed a president—just because there's a list of sources doesn't mean that all of the material is verifiable. And at AfC, while I was active there, such a situation was grounds to place the article on hold (not generally decline). I'm not of the mindset that AfC existed so we could move poorly sourced articles to mainspace and immediately stick some maintenance templates on them. I also think that AfC was more concerned about quality over quantity, i.e., that even if a subject is notable, that is not an excuse to create an article that doesn't meet the basic criteria of verifiability and slap a template on there so it becomes part of someone else's backlog. So in this regard, I think our opinions differ on how AfC should operate—again, I don't know how it works nowadays, but when I was involved, I recall this as the de facto consensus of how article submissions should be treated. AfC was also a much smaller, specialized operation that didn't have a backlog anywhere close to over a thousand submissions.

Perhaps inline citations was not explicitly mentioned in the AfC guidelines, but it has become the indisputable standard for verifiability in articles these days. WP:CITE says: "A general reference is a citation that supports content, but is not linked to any particular piece of material in the article through an inline citation. General references are usually listed at the end of the article in a References section. They are usually found in underdeveloped articles, especially when all article content is supported by a single source. They may also be listed in more developed articles as a supplement to inline citations." So I don't think that placing an article on hold to ask for inline citations is terribly unreasonable.

/ƒETCH COMMS / 04:59, 16 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]