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STICKTOSOURCE

I am seeking the wisdom of the collective. The context is a discussion mostly about sex/gender in one of my sandboxes. I don't think you will want to read it; at the moment, it is approximately the length of As I Lay Dying but even less intelligible.

Here is the story:

Imagine that you are reading a scholarly source, which you want to use to source for a substantial part of an article. The scholarly source gives a technical term for a group of people (e.g., "46 X,Y males"). After that, it uses a common word (e.g., "men") to describe this group of people.

Should editors be allowed to pick which term they want to use? If so, are there any unacceptable reasons for choosing one vs the other? (For example, "Sure, you can pick any term used in the source, but not if your choice goes against the community's value of _____"). A sub-question here is whether choosing a less-common term is a violation of UNDUE.
Should editors be allowed to use a third word (e.g., "genetic male") that isn't in the cited source, but that any person with basic familiarity with the subject matter would agree is a synonym/matches the intention of the cited source? Is it a violation of NOR to use a synonym? (Assume that this synonym wouldn't be disputed, except that an editor feels that it's on the wrong side of including/excluding trans people.)

I would particularly be interested in what you all think should happen vs what you think would happen. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:09, 25 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

OK, I'll go first:

In general I'd always stick to the term general readers are most likely to understand ("men"), but include an explanatory footnote the first time it's used ("In this article the term 'men' is used to mean…"). WP:UNDUE is a distraction; the issue is that Wikipedia articles should be as comprehensible as possible. Editors should be allowed to choose which term they want to use within reason. If they insist on using a term which it's not reasonable to assume readers will understand (if you have a long memory, you may recall the editor who insisted we use 'decollation' in place of 'decapitation' or 'beheading' because it was 'technically more accurate'; as far as I'm concerned this is no different), or where there's a reasonable potential that the use of the term will lead to confusion, then no; likewise, we shouldn't be using neologysms like womyn-born womyn if we can avoid it unless it's unavoidable.

Analogy is sometimes risky but in this case I think it's valid; to take a less hot-potato topic, would you insist on our not using the word "train" to describe the image to the right because technically it only constitutes a "train" if at least two separate vehicles are coupled together and this particular model was built as a single long unit? Unless there's a very good reason not to, we should always be using the terminology readers will understand, not the terminology the subject specialists use.

I would have no issue with synonyms that aren't in the cited source provided any reader would understand what you meant by it (or you explained how you were using it if there was any potential for confusion); it's no different to the way music articles will mix up "song", "composition", "piece" and "work" to reduce the repetition. Even on a hot-button topic like trans issues, I don't think there's an issue provided you acknowledge that you're aware of the issue ("In this article the term 'men' does not include trans males because…").

All things being equal, what should happen is probably no different to what would happen. You and I have been jaundiced by long exposure to problematic areas, but in general the vast majority of Wikipedia editors understand that we're writing for readers and not for ourselves. Trans and gender identity issues on Wikipedia were poisoned for a long time by one particular crazy who would try to turn everything into a fight, but that editor (and their socks) was kicked out some time ago now and touch wood the out-kicking appears to have stuck. I suspect that as long as you're willing to explain what you've done and why you're doing it in a particular way, most people whatever their personal preferences are going to be reasonable. ‑ Iridescent 05:21, 25 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

In my opinion, this partly goes to editorial judgment about whether or not the choice of language is contentious. If the choice of words is just a matter of professional technical language in the source, versus readability for our readers, it's fine to focus on what is most helpful to readers, and not sweat the OR details. But if it's something like whether to call something "terrorism" or "a riot" or some technical term used by the source, it's probably best to use the exact term used by the source, with attribution. So if it's "XY males" versus "men", it's fine to go with "men", but if the context is something specific about trans people, then editors might need to be more precise. --Tryptofish (talk) 15:01, 25 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Yes. Plus there's our old friend ENGVAR to consider. It isn't such an issue on sex/gender as that's an area where words have pretty much the same meaning everywhere, but in some areas like ethnicity and nationality what seems like the most straightforward terminology can be very confusing. ("Less than 1% of the Chinese population is of Asian descent" and "3⁄5 of the population of Europe live in Europe" both make sense in BrEng, albeit anyone actually using either in print would likely be fired for inexcusably sloppy writing.) Even on sex/gender, I'll be willing to bet that at least some of the terminology which appears perfectly acceptable and non-contentious is considered grossly offensive by someone, somewhere. ‑ Iridescent 15:22, 25 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

That's a good example. One of the complaints about the choice of sex/gender words is that there is more than one meaning for the words. We could adopt a rule that says "Strictly observe the sex and gender distinction" (I wouldn't recommend such a rule myself), but even if we adopted such a rule, that wouldn't make the sources strictly observe the distinction.

The community has a lot of experience with how to describe people who are nationals of one country but not ethnically/racially associated with that country's history. In some respects, this should be no different: just as Chinese person could indicate that the person is a "citizen of China" or a "person of Chinese descent" (and often means both), then woman could indicate that the person is a "adult female human" or an "adult human with a feminine gender identity" (and often means both).

A couple of years ago, I attempted to convince editors that Woman should say that different definitions existed (e.g., psychology, biology, sports, law, feminist scholars). The idea was rejected. I have wondered since then whether some opposing editors thought that admitting to the existence of different definitions would undermine gender identity as the One True™ Definition. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:44, 26 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@WhatamIdoing I doubt anyone would argue against the words "XY human" unless they were in the fishbowl of ~~sausage making~~Wikipedia editing. Only the unreasonable would argue the fact that genetic humans were being talked about if the article is written clearly. I suspect only Wikipedia editors and a few others care about policies like WP:STICKTOSOURCE. The people reading our articles would be grateful if we were more accurate than tabloid media, and wouldn't be as detail orientated as we are. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 19:37, 25 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@I dream of horses, I can imagine a lot of people arguing against "XY human". Can you imagine anyone saying "I went to the store yesterday, and this XY human was complaining that the lines were too long"? WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:47, 25 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@WhatamIdoing I thought we were talking about scientific (or "scholarly") articles where primarily the genetic configuration matters. Did I misunderstand? I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 19:51, 25 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

That's actually a good example of another way that context is important. An article about genetics might well be a place where the "XY" terminology would be preferable, but it would be undesirable in a page about sex differences in the prevalence of a non-genetic medical condition. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:43, 25 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Tryptofish Exactly. In the context that WhatamIdoing was talking about, I might use they/them pronouns and "person" if I was remembering to not assume gender. But we're talking about genetics, and so it makes sense to be clinical. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 22:47, 25 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Oddly, I didn't make the same assumption. WAID's OP says it's a scholarly source that says "XY" the first time and then says "men" after that. There's obviously something genetic about the source, but I don't know how focused on genetics it might be. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:52, 25 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

5α-Reductase 2 deficiency

@Tryptofish: Perhaps it'd help to have access to the source (which, granted, may or may not be possible, a lot of medical sources are woefully paywalled). Not all XY people have, for example, penises or two testicles, and gender affirming surgery isn't the only reason why that would be. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 22:58, 25 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

(No need to ping me, I watch here.) Yes, it would depend on the source, and the context. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:00, 25 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

That particular example was inspired by 5α-Reductase 2 deficiency, about which scholarly sources refer to the affected people as:

46X,Y males
46,XY individuals
genetic males
karyotypic males
males
men
females (usually in the context of women's sports; cf. Caster Semenya)
women (ditto)
girls (usually in reference to gender of rearing)
male pseudohermaphrodites

This is an intersex condition. Affected individuals are believed to be female at birth, but most develop male external anatomy during puberty. Many of them transition their social gender during puberty as well. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:30, 26 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@WhatamIdoing In that circumstance, "intersex" makes the most since. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 01:33, 26 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I can see problems with "intersex"; it's such a vague term that we'd need to keep a constant "on this occasion, by 'intersex' we mean…" running commentary.

As a more general point, remember that although we tend to give more leeway on highly technical topics we're writing for people with wildly different levels of background knowledge. (Although it's fair to say nobody without a fair amount of background knowledge is likely to search for "5α-Reductase 2 deficiency", it's perfectly possible that someone could land on the page via Special:Random or via an internal link.) To the hypothetical "bright 14 year old with no prior knowledge" or "girl in Africa who can save the lives of hundreds of thousands of people around her but only if she’s empowered with the knowledge to do so", a term like "46,XY individuals" may as well be written in Japanese. It's no good holding endless RFCs to determine the perfect terminology to use on each and every occasion in the article, if it ends up making the article so incomprehensible that we end up having to do what we did at Introduction to gauge theory / Gauge theory and write an entirely separate version of the article for the benefit of people who don't understand all the jargon. ‑ Iridescent 18:31, 26 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

For me, it helps to know that the example page is specifically 5α-Reductase 2 deficiency. This is a page that I would regard as both (1) highly focused on genetics, and (2) dealing with contentious issues of sexual and gender identity. I'm not bothered by the 46,XY terminology, because it's explained via a blue link at the beginning of the first (Presentation) section of the main text. I think it's necessary to use technical, genetic language for most of the page, because "men" or "women" are oversimplifications and misleading. But there is an interesting exception to that: in the Society and culture section later on the page, it talks about "four elite women athletes", and that's the correct way to say it. "Women athletes" are a thing in the same way as "college athletes" or "professional athletes".

As for gauge theory and related physics pages, that's a pet peeve of mine. I've complained repeatedly that they are written for physics grad students, and not general readers. The response I get is that mathematics is the only way to describe it precisely enough (not really true, if one has sufficient writing proficiency), but I just don't have the motivation to argue with that. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:04, 26 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

5α-Reductase 2 deficiency is the source of my example. However, the primary reason I'm asking is because of the number of new editors who are editing traditional topics in women's health, such as Pregnancy,[1][2] Breastfeeding,[3] and Premenstrual syndrome [4][5], in ways that are usually accurate and verifiable (though not always).

If this turned into a big dispute, the main options (that I can see) are either an IDONTLIKEIT argument or an ostensibly policy-based argument. I am not sure how, exactly, we would make policy-based arguments. Would editors accept that NOR's "Rewriting source material in your own words while retaining the substance is not considered original research" includes using words that have multiple meanings (e.g., "women") when one of those meanings matches the substance? Is there a valid DUE argument against a choice of synonyms?

We don't seem to have a policy that requires editors to write brilliant prose with a minimum of technical jargon. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:27, 27 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@WhatamIdoing It's probably impractical to poll people who have 5α-Reductase 2 deficiency themselves, but has that been done by any other organization? I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 04:23, 27 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

So far as I know, the answer is generally "men". I don't see an issue with using "men" in the article.

This is generally a topic that frustrates me; much of my medical writing brushes right up against both it and the absurdly wide definitions some advocates use of 'intersex'. (I got consensus to remove the "notable people" list from Klinefelter syndrome composed of serial killers and transgender porn stars, but I have not yet successfully removed things like trisomy X or XYY syndrome from our various decentralized lists of intersex conditions, because no matter how many people agree you only need one dissenter to edit-war.) Fundamentally, it is neither an accurate description of most people in a cluster nor even particularly friendly to the cluster's exceptions to fold and spindle language here. (Diffs like that PMS one always amaze me -- someone who carries around the belief that every person with XX chromosomes menstruates clearly isn't being trans-inclusive, because one of the whole points of medical transition in that direction is it stops someone from menstruating!) The intersex disputes I sometimes get wrapped up in are genuinely confusing to me, as sex chromosome aneuploidies have no meaningful association with either physically ambiguous genitals or cross-sex gender identity, but they rage on while I just try to improve the damn articles. I dread the day I go mad enough to try fix the KS article and spend the rest of my life reverting people trying to add that it makes you gay. Vaticidalprophet 05:38, 27 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

IMO a key audience for the 5α-Reductase 2 deficiency article is parents of affected children, so "men" is probably the wrong age group. A majority, but with a sizeable minority, socially transition and identify as men after puberty.

I assume that the PMS editor, whom I suspect of repeating these same edits for more than five years now, is trying to include non-binary, female-bodied people who are not doing any sort of hormonal transition.

It sounds like KS needs a well-sourced statement along the lines of "There used to be a myth about KS making people gay, but it's not true". Addressing the subject directly tends to discourage people from putting falsehoods in an article. Otherwise, the article has a lacuna, and nature abhors a vacuum. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:52, 27 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

This is totally outside my area so I don't know if the sources have been subsequently debunked, but here's a paper in Nature reporting Regarding sexual function, significantly more men with KS than controls reported being homosexual or bisexual, for what it's worth (albeit it looks like a relatively small sample). ‑ Iridescent 18:28, 27 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Taking a look, yeah, that's four gay XXY men and one gay XY man, and eight bi XXY men with three bi XY men -- not really the sort of thing people are thinking of when they try to posit Klinefelter's as some sort of Intersex Condition that makes men More Womanly. In fact, both are much lower than the current estimates of bisexual orientation amongst young adults.

This shades into OR, which is one reason that article will probably suck forever (because the sources to make it not suck don't exist), but there are two big confounders here. The first is that sex chromosome aneuploidies have basically negligible diagnosis rates compared to their prevalence -- KS is much higher than most, which is to say about a quarter of men with it are ever diagnosed in their lifetimes. Because the presentations of them are so mild, people only tend to get diagnosed if they have unusually good reasons to suspect they might be, and historically having any sort of sexual habits that diverge from sociocultural norms (including but not limited to homosexuality) has been a major driver for that.

The other is that they're all fairly strongly associated with various common forms of neurodivergence, and those absolutely do have associations with non-heterosexuality, completely independent of anything to do with chromosomes. Autistic adults are very strongly less-likely-to-be-straight as a group, for instance, and autism rates are elevated for all of the major sex chromosome aneuploidies. "KS makes you autistic, and autism makes you gay" might actually be an accurate statement, but it's definitely not the one people are picturing when they have the original thought. Vaticidalprophet 02:35, 28 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@WhatamIdoing Is there a policy about "We should respect the identity of most people with a diagnosis, with a footnote that there's inevitably going to be exceptions?" Probably not, but I'm starting to realize that's my opinion in this specific situation. It seems like most people with this particular hard to spell diagnosis start out in life identifying as girls, and then identify as boys/men after puberty, so maybe the article we write should reflect that. Not startling parents would be a secondary priority.

Then again, perhaps there's a bias that's preventing me from being reader-centered; if most of the people reading the article are parents, perhaps we should think about their feelings more. I acquired multiple diagnoses in childhood and adolescence (not anything that would bring up a debate like this, but still). I was also a pre-teen/teen with a very narrow interest in disability and medical information. I spent a lot of time looking up medical information and about disability rights activism online. I'm imagining about how I would want my disabilities written about if a similar debate came up for anything I'm diagnosed with, but a difference audience would feel respected with a different terminology. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 19:45, 27 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

We have a rule that says we prefer individuals' self-identification over society's gender assumptions. If you don't contradict society's assumptions, then (due to an absence of higher priority information) we go with society's assumptions (meaning: editors don't need a tweet from Queen Elizabeth about her gender identity to refer to her as "she" in an article).

We also tend to prioritize gender over sex. We tend to write that heart disease is the leading cause of death in "women", not in "biological female adults". However, I'm not sure that the reason for this stylistic preference has anything to do with the sex/gender distinction. It could be entirely about a desire for non-technical language.

In the case of 5α-Reductase 2 deficiency, IMO the solution is simple: we refer to "genetic males"

The wording of your first sentence ("respect the identity of most people") could be read two ways. Should we:

respect the identity of the majority ("breastfeeding women"), or
respect the identity of as many people as possible ("nursing parents")?

I am curious what you think of these choices. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:56, 29 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

In this specific example, I'd always avoid "nursing", as it has far too much potential to be misunderstood. Particularly in a medical context, I'm certain a significant proportion of readers would interpret it as "parents caring for a child who's ill or disabled". In the more general case, I'd tend to go with "respect the identity of the majority" provided it's made clear why we're doing so—in an area with so much nuance it's never going to be possible to come up with a wording that pleases everyone, so we sometimes need to accept that whatever we say is going to annoy someone so our goal should be to cause the least offense. ‑ Iridescent 16:48, 2 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

MOS:JARGON thoughts

We might not explicitly have a policy that requires editors to write brilliant prose with a minimum of technical jargon, but we do have a widely-publicised and well-followed guideline of

Some topics are intrinsically technical, but editors should try to make them understandable to as many readers as possible. Minimize jargon, or at least explain it or tag it using {{Technical}} or {{Technical-statement}} for other editors to fix. For unavoidably technical articles, a separate introductory article (like Introduction to general relativity) may be the best solution. Avoid excessive wikilinking (linking within Wikipedia) as a substitute for parenthetic explanations such as the one in this sentence. Do not introduce new and specialized words simply to teach them to the reader when more common alternatives will do. When the notions named by jargon are too complex to explain concisely in a few parenthetical words, write one level down. For example, consider adding a brief background section with {{main}} tags pointing to the full treatment article(s) of the prerequisite notions; this approach is practical only when the prerequisite concepts are central to the exposition of the article's main topic and when such prerequisites are not too numerous. Short articles, such as stubs, generally do not have such sections.

which is essentially the same thing in slightly fancier language. (We also have Wikipedia:Make technical articles understandable even though that's so well-hidden nobody knows it's there or pays much attention to it.) ‑ Iridescent 05:22, 27 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure that the usual disputed words (men/males/people/individuals) are considered "technical". The biggest problem isn't people trying to repeat "46X,Y make" throughout an article; the biggest problem is people wanting to use common words that have multiple meanings. Is this men like gender identity, or men like biological sex? WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:54, 27 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

They're flip sides of the same coin. Either we use a term which is understandable by readers but open to misinterpretation, or we use a term knowing that at least some readers aren't going to understand it at all. Personally I'd go with "genetically male" and "externally male", with an explanatory footnote the first time each is used to explain precisely what we mean by the term on this particular article. As long as we explain why we're using a term which may not be some people's preferred term, there shouldn't be too much of an issue. (Yes, the Faes of the world are going to argue, but to be frank they're going to argue whatever you use.) ‑ Iridescent 18:12, 27 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

So if we phrased it as a principle, it might sound something like this?

"Sometimes editors will have to choose between a word (e.g., men) that is understandable by readers but which might be open to misinterpretation due to multiple meanings (e.g., people with masculine gender identities vs biological adult males) and a word (e.g., non-intersexed 46X,Y adults) that is not understandable by most readers. In such cases, it may be helpful to primarily use the simpler word and to explain in the article which meaning is intended."

Does that sound about right?

In terms of practical implementation, editors might add a footnote that says "In this article, men means..." or a parenthetical note that says something like "seen in men (i.e., in non-intersexed 46X,Y adult males)" or "seen in premenopausal women (i.e., biologically mature female humans, regardless of gender identity)", probably at the first reasonable opportunity in the article.

If I gave that advice to an editor, and it resulted in the "wrong" terms being used, what would you expect the wikilawyers to say about it, other than my "practical" examples sounding remarkably extreme? WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:38, 27 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Both the wikilawyers and the identity-politics-warriors (on both sides) are going to complain whatever you do, so put them out of your mind. What to consider is which position best serves readers. My personal feeling in this particular case is that "46 X,Y" is going to confuse too many people, "intersex" is too ambiguous and "men" would need too much explanation, so the least worst solution is "physically male"/"genetically male" (with an appropriate explanation at the first available opportunity), even if they're not the preferred terms in academia. ‑ Iridescent 19:44, 27 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I'd be careful of WP:CREEP. But then again, I stay away from MOS. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:51, 27 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I'm no fan of the micromanagementy In the case of coursed instruments such as the twelve-string guitar, courses should be separated by dashes, and string notes adjacent, so the twelve-string guitar tuned to octave G tuning is eE–aA–d′d–g′g–bb–e′e′ in Helmholtz notation parts of the MOS. That said, just because it's absurdly overspecific and some people have a tendency to give it way more significance than it deserves, doesn't mean the whole thing is invalid. Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Technical language may be a highfalutin' name, but the whole section could be summarized as "be comprehensible", which as far as I'm concerned is far more important than any one of the alleged "five pillars". ‑ Iridescent 22:15, 27 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Sure. I didn't mean it very strongly, just sort of had a reaction that it was trying to spell out stuff that's just, well, come to think of it, not comprehensible. But don't mind me, if I don't like MOS, I probably don't like lichen either. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:19, 27 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Manuals of style in the real world exist to stop arguing about stylistic choices that are often arbitrary. The problem on English Wikipedia is that its consensus-based decision-making process is a poor fit for making arbitrary choices. isaacl (talk) 22:30, 27 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

But if we can agree on something to write down, that actually addresses the problem, it does tend to reduce the size and intensity of subsequent disputes. "Hey, I can see where you're coming from, but Wikipedia decided to do it the other way" can stop problems. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:59, 27 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

This is Wikipedia, not reality. In my experience, it just shifts the debate to a different venue, where instead of engaging in endless pointless disputes about what to do in a particular situation, the style warriors and POV-pushers just engage in endless pointless disputes about why the policy ABSOLUTELY MUST be changed, or why it shouldn't apply to a given page. You presumably don't think the 2000 pages (at the time of writing) of archives of arguments over the precise wording of the Manual of Style (and those are only the ones with a Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/ prefix, not the discussions that took place on wikiprojects, article talk pages, Village Pumps, Wikipedia noticeboards, off-wiki mailing lists, etc) represent a project working well? ‑ Iridescent 16:48, 2 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

See also Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Words to watch#Close reading of LABEL, which is your bog-standard WP:PGCONFLICT problem. Policy A and Guideline B say to do this; Guideline C says to do something different. But we must make Guideline C continue to say the wrong thing, because when it says the wrong thing, I can use it to force editors to do the right thing. When I want them to include in-text attribution, I tell them to follow C; when I don't, I tell them to follow A and B. Very simple, and the whole thing will fall apart if you make all the rules say the same thing. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:08, 2 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

As with so much else that's wrong with Wikipedia, it ultimately comes down to:

We're operating under an underlying set of rules that were drawn up for a niche hobbyist website inhabited by a small group of bros who all knew each other and all had similar values;
The rules that are appropriate for a small group of people with a shared background, shared social circle and shared values,—and where even the most serious mistake has almost minimal real-world impact—aren't appropriate for a major institution where mistakes can have immediate and serious real-world consequences;
Because "we've always done it this way" is so entrenched and because there are vocal groups who have something to lose as a consequence of any change, it's virtually impossible to fix the problem even when everyone knows it's there.

I wouldn't hold my breath. At some point we should really be having serious discussions about whether "Assume good faith" and "Ignore all rules" are still appropriate 20 years later and on whether we should start considering a formal written constitutional mechanism for how and when to impose bright-line hard limits on editorial discretion even though it will mean imposing apparently harsh sanctions for breaches of trivial rules as the only way to force people to follow them. ("If you don't agree to use unspaced en-dashes to hyphenate page ranges within citations, you will be blocked".) Unfortunately that would likely be the most heated and foul-tempered debate in Wikipedia's entire history, so few sane people would want to take part and we'd end up with a written constitution drafted by the sort of crazy people who hang round WP:ANI, Meta, WT:MOS et al, and which the broad editor base would (rightly) ignore. ‑ Iridescent 07:35, 3 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thoughts on "Assume Good Faith"

Amusingly your rotating picture at the top is "Arbcom assuming good faith" for me at the moment... AGF is one of the most abused guidelines there is, and routinely abused by long-term established editors as they wikilawyer. Its an excuse for bad behaviour. The reality is that if your contribution and noticeboard history shows a habit of being misleading, expecting people to give you the benefit of the doubt in similar situations is just idiotic. Likewise when you have a topic ban from say, religion broadly construed, and get caught repeatedly, expecting people to AGF whatever bullshit is the latest excuse... frankly ABF would be far more productive in the process of resolving problematic behaviour. Only in death does duty end (talk) 11:49, 3 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I personally think that AGF is inappropriate for modern-day Wikipedia—the idea is nice, but what was suitable for a website with a dozen editors and a few hundred readers doesn't scale. We know that we're under constant attack from spammers, vandals and POV-pushers; when I see User:Widgetomatic adding reams of cut-and-pasted press releases to [[Widgetomatic]], I'm not going to operate on the assumption that this is all some fantastic coincidence and I should consider whether a dispute stems from different perspectives, and look for ways to reach consensus, whatever policy says.

With regards to your specific example, it's not so cut-and-dried, and I personally hate the "broadly construed" wording even more than I hate "admonished". To stick with your example of "religion, broadly construed", if either Arbcom or the community imposed such a sanction it would be because the editor in question was disruptively editing articles on theology, or changing people's religion in biographies without appropriate sourcing. Under the "broadly construed" wording, it would technically be a breach of the sanctions if the editor in question subsequently corrected a "cathlic" mis-spelling, or if a place formally changed its name, they (correctly) renamed the category to reflect the new name, and in the subsequent bulk search-and-replace of [[Category:Buildings in Bombay]] → [[Category:Buildings in Mumbai]] (or whatever) they happened in passing to make utterly non-controversial and unquestionably appropriate edits to the local church/mosque/temple. (It would even technically be a breach of "broadly construed" if they were consciously trying to avoid breaching their sanctions and went to someone else saying "I'm unable to directly edit pages on churches (or whatever), I've done everything else but can you do those particular pages", because in mentioning those pages they'd still be talking about "religion, broadly construed".) You can guarantee that in these circumstances there will be some wikilawyer type who will be scrutinizing their edits, eagerly waiting to point out "See! They edited an article on religion, broadly construed! BAN THEM NOW!!!". Sanctions on Wikipedia—be they anything from ultra-niche topic bans to full-scale global locks—should always be about preventing disruption, not about point-scoring. ‑ Iridescent 16:27, 3 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I think that when you see someone adding cut-and-paste information from what's apparently their own press releases, you really should assume good faith – namely, you should assume the person genuinely believed that these self-promotion efforts would help Wikipedia, and then you should prevent them from providing any more such assistance. I don't see the point of thinking that such efforts are meant to harm Wikipedia. They did harm Wikipedia, but it's more like a clueless but friendly neighbor who "helped" mow your lawn and accidentally killed several plants in the process. He meant well, and now we have to clean up the mess. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:39, 3 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Nah. Some, certainly, but head on over to Category:Candidates for speedy deletion as spam at any time when it hasn't been emptied for a while, and it's obvious that a significant proportion are outright spammers.

For over 30 years, [company] have been providing exceptional bareboat yacht charters in the tropical paradise of the Whitsundays. There is plenty of activities to be enjoyed, both offshore and onshore this includes swimming, fishing, snorkeling, bushwalking, exploring the islands, and kayaking. No license is required for a Yacht Charter in the Whitsundays. You will just need to have sailing experience and be competent in handling a sailing vessel. You can be a captain of your own adventure.

and

[Videogame includes] Over TEN types of enemies and hard-fought bosses Find your strategies to fight each of them off. Prepare yourself for the fight of your life.

and

At [company], we aim to disrupt the local market with cutting-edge technologies and solutions. Innovation is not a lavish term that can be used to describe businesses, but it’s the action or process of innovating and that’s what we do at [company]. Our approach is unique. We enable our customers to take control of their data across the broad, leveraging existing investments to increase visibility and provide actionable insights. [Company] provides an operational optimization that utilizes the previously under-utilized data. Thus, we offer a range of products and services to accelerate our partners journey from data to well informed actionable insights. Our team members are passionate about being part of a company that can solve actual tough problems and create innovative solutions to help our partners. We believe in taking the best idea regardless of the owner of the idea as we have a flat architecture, where our people can be fearless and feel empowered to always do the right thing.

are all among pages I've deleted just in the last few days (and those are just the first three I looked at, I could give you a dozen more in less than a minute), and I'm most definitely not among Wikipedia's most active admins.

I know you're wearing your Wikipedia hat rather than your WMF hat currently, but the consistent apparent inability of the WMF to appreciate just how high the volume of spam that the Wikipedia community has to deal with has become—in particular the strain the ever-rising volume of spam puts on the ever-shrinking groups of new page patrollers to do the tagging and admins to do the deleting and blocking—is to my mind an entirely valid criticism of the WMF. Regardless of what the intentions of the WMF actually are, it often gives the impression that it doesn't care how much of a problem paid editors cause, provided they keep on creating new accounts and thus keep the sacred {{NUMBEROFACTIVEUSERS}} figure artifically inflated so the engagement figures continue to look good on the glossy reports. ‑ Iridescent 22:57, 3 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The thing about AGF...the first word is "assume," meaning when there's evidence either for or against good faith, it no longer applies and you should be able to be able to act according to the evidence. At least, that's my approach to it. Unfortunately, I'm aware other people are more rigid. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 00:38, 4 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

"You need to assume good faith about me!"

Dunning–Kruger effect is linked on almost 600 talk pages, so apparently we are reaching good-faith explanations. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:56, 4 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Don't be a dick (the OG wording, not the bowdlerized "don't be a jerk") is linked on 1191 talk tages. People's reserves of good faith aren't infinite. Yes, fans of a product or person can in good faith think they're being helpful by copy-pasting press releases or the subject's own website, but that doesn't extend to people writing obvious ad blurb like The company is known for its quality service and excellence in customer service. The company provides excellent services in Website Designing, Mobile App Development (Both Android and iOS), Search Engine Optimization, Branding Services, UI/UX Design, Package Design and Label design. The company reached its zenith by its dedication and superiority in services. who are clearly just trying to use Wikipedia as a SEO tool. (Seriously, don't underestimate how many spammers are out there. And those are just the freelance sock-farmers, not the in-house PR people.) ‑ Iridescent 06:02, 4 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

WMF vs Wikipedia

Since there's (hopefully?) no Wikipedia:Template limits on this page, I just want to highlight an Iri keeper here, that pretty much sums up why and how the WMF has made editing so unpleasant for the relatively few editors who actually write content (something they don't seem to acknowledge or value):

I know you're wearing your Wikipedia hat rather than your WMF hat currently, but the consistent apparent inability of the WMF to appreciate just how high the volume of spam that the Wikipedia community has to deal with has become—in particular the strain the ever-rising volume of spam puts on the ever-shrinking groups of new page patrollers to do the tagging and admins to do the deleting and blocking—is to my mind an entirely valid criticism of the WMF. Regardless of what the intentions of the WMF actually are, it often gives the impression that it doesn't care how much of a problem paid editors cause, provided they keep on creating new accounts and thus keep the sacred 118,185 figure artifically inflated so the engagement figures continue to look good on the glossy reports.

Where the "rest of us" stand in relation to the phenom Iri explains has become more and more clear over the decades. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:05, 4 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The WMF ... is a gravy-train for folks. It no longer is meaningfully in touch with the main source of its gravy either - lets face it, en-Wiki is the engine that keeps that gravy-train moving, not all the feel-good crap the WMF keeps slinging money into. When I get discouraged, though, I do something like look at the page views for ... The Holocaust, and realize that getting things right MATTERS. Since I cleaned that article up in August 2017, there have been 17.4 million views, and at least they are getting a reasonably accurate article. So, I keep plugging away here ... not because of, but in spite of the WMF. I'd be a lot less cranky about the WMF if they actually supported their editors (and I don't consider the insanity that is the UCoC to be the support that is most needed for editors). If various WMF folks who are reading this REALLY want to support the editors - here's some things they could be doing - (1) spend a bit more supporting the projects on the community wishlist (2) get some folks who actually resolve bug issues with the software (3) get competent developers to do the mobile side stuff so we don't have the issues with it (4) cough up some more money for grants to editors for sources (5) expand the wikipedia library - I'd kill for access to Routledge, Boydell, etc. More academic press access would be a gift from the gods. (6) Get wikiEd to stop being stupid. Of course, none of these things will ever happen - we'll just keep stumbling along... Ealdgyth (talk) 15:37, 4 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I'd like to endorse this. And add Elsevier and GeoScienceWorld to the pile, too. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 15:51, 4 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

A me-too in the endorse department. (Not that the WMF cares in the least what I think.) There's a saying that "you treasure what you can measure", that is usually applied to dysfunctional organizations that measure something that seems good but misses the real point. Here, the WMF is measuring those sacred engagement numbers. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:01, 4 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Ealdgyth and Jo-Jo Eumerus, the "better TWL" of those is actually doable. TWL is going through an expansion driven by an actual human being you can have a genuine conversation with about the process (rather than some faceless bit of the WMF). You can tell Samwalton9 (WMF) that you want X added to TWL, get a human response and an email from a human to the relevant wing of the thing you want added, and you can ask him what the process of adding something to TWL is like (and why it's sometimes quick and sometimes drags out forever) and he'll tell you. There have been new TWL additions in the past couple days. Vaticidalprophet 01:33, 5 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks Vaticidalprophet - it's true, we're continuously trying to expand The Wikipedia Library. We just added Wiley and re-enabled Cochrane. We're also now in the process of reprioritising all our outstanding requests so that we can continue pitching the program to more publishers. We just had a new team member join who is taking the lead on this. Let me know if you have any questions :) Samwalton9 (WMF) (talk) 15:03, 10 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Ealdgyth, just gonna put meta:Wikimedia Foundation salaries here. As of 2019 when the figures stop being made public, the ED of the WMF paid herself roughly twice what the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom earns (US$218,410 at todays rates), but at least had the decency to only value her own job at 97% of that of the President of the United States. (I'd also draw readers' attention to the "cost per employee" figure, and ask if these figures bear the least resemblance to any real-world employer you've ever seen.) ‑ Iridescent 16:10, 4 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Um, the entire tech industry? Glassdoor announced this week that the median base salary for tech workers in the US was $145,000, not including "other compensation" or "employee benefits" (which average 30% of total compensation in the western US). If the median base salary is $145K, then total compensation would be expected to run around $207K. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:14, 4 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think you're making the point you think you're making. Since—as the WMF never tires of telling us—Wikimedia is a global movement, there's absolutely no reason for all those jobs to be in the most over-heated market in the world. Even in Central London, the second most over-heated market in the world, the equivalent figures are roughly half what they are in the US (which is why Google and Apple are both currently engaged in building London offices the size of small cities), and if the WMF were willing to move some functions to India, Africa or even Eastern Europe they could literally reduce costs by orders of magnitude. (Just to put this in perspective, in 2019—the last year before the pandemic drove salaries down—the median compensation for chief executives at the UK's hundred largest charities was £155,000, and these are billion-dollar operations like Save the Children and Oxfam, not relatively minor players like the WMF.) ‑ Iridescent 07:53, 5 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

But only US staff are "employees", and therefore only US compensation appears in that column. The non-US staff (a little less than half the total staff?) get reported on a different line.

Because of differences in tax and healthcare systems, it's really difficult to compare employee compensation across countries. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:32, 5 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@WhatamIdoing: Soon we'll have the WMF once again asking 150,000 people in India to donate $2 each, so some manager in SF can earn $300,000. And if the Italian emails are anything to go by, people will once again be given the impression this money is needed to "keep Wikipedia online", rather than to finance 1,000% growth. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Fundraising Are you fine with that? --Andreas JN 466 20:26, 16 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

As for the apparent $191,000 cost per employee, note Maryana Iskander's comments here on Meta: meta:Talk:IRS_tax_related_information/2019_Wikimedia_Foundation_Form_990_Frequently_Asked_Questions#WMF_salary_costs and related mailing list threads, e.g. [6]. Thanks for the island of sanity on this page ... it reminds me of why I got involved in Wikipedia in the first place. Andreas JN 466 18:35, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Huh, she does not want to answer that question, does she? The irony of course is that the evasion just makes the WMF look incompetent and shifty—that question could literally have been batted away in a single sentence with "yes, we pay a lot because we want to recruit and retain the best". (I still wouldn't agree with the reply—there's little to no benefit to the WMF being physically located in the most expensive job market in the world and massive downsides—but it would satisfy most questioners, particularly if anyone ever managed to come up with a convincing answer as to why the WMF needs to be in San Francisco.) ‑ Iridescent 20:12, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I got a t-shirt (which I gave away), while acknowledgement of the value of the few contributors who keep highly viewed articles accurate and representative of "Wikipedia's best work" remains abundantly absent, to the point of mockery of our efforts. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:26, 4 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@SandyGeorgia, the few contributors who keep highly viewed articles accurate and representative of "Wikipedia's best work" is something to which the WMF is never going to admit. People like you keep Wikipedia accurate. Readers verify the facts. is official Wikimedia Foundation dogma, to the extent that it's almost the first statement on the WMF's public-facing website. There are some honorable exceptions at the WMF who have actual experience on the wikis, I think that in general most of the people there collectively genuinely believe that it's The Wisdom Of Crowds that writes and maintains everything as opposed to individual people, and that consequently losing ten experienced subject-matter experts is more than mitigated by recruiting eleven new editors, even if those new editors are vandals, spammers, or just good-faith new editors who don't do anything more than make three edits before they get bored. ‑ Iridescent 07:53, 5 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

And we know that all too well. Why we leave is not a mystery; why we stay is. I have largely reduced my editing to two areas: those that make a difference in the real world (faulty medical information and POV warriors), and those that are fun (right now, that is FAR saves). SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:24, 12 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The example I always use when talking about the sock policy is that if there's one user that creates 10 serial accounts within the span of 90 days, makes a few hundred edits a piece, and then abandons them to "clean start" or whatever you call it, its inherently disruptive and more likely than not is an LTA who changed ISPs or moved. At some point, the creation of a new account every 10 days becomes disruptive in itself if you get involved in the social aspects of either the community or content creation, and I also don't have enough good faith left in me to believe that someone with a legion of serial accounts isn't under an indefinite block on 1 or more stale accounts. (Also, I'm sure you know this but noting it for the record so no one digs this diff up out of context, the policy specifically says the list at ILLEGIT is non-exhaustive and I'm not advocating anyone be blocked outside of policy.) TonyBallioni (talk) 03:21, 4 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I agree with you, although there are exceptions to I also don't have enough good faith left in me to believe that someone with a legion of serial accounts isn't under an indefinite block on 1 or more stale accounts. I know of at least one very high profile editor who would deliberately switch between accounts every few days "because it's technically not sockpuppetry if I'm only using one account at a time", and who appeared to genuinely believe he wasn't violating even the spirit of policy let alone the better and seemed genuinely hurt and confused when he was called out for it. That particular case dragged on for literally years. ‑ Iridescent 06:40, 4 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

"After a while, it gets wearisome and demotivating"

Regarding you should prevent them from providing any more such assistance, the problem is it can be hard to get to that point, as some editors invariably turn up saying they did similar things at first, and now they're super klewful editors, so you should spend a lot of your effort to help the editors in question. There are many who seem to expect conciliatory editors to invest significant time to work with unaccommodating editors. After a while, it gets wearisome and demotivating. isaacl (talk) 08:15, 4 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Isaacl: After a while, it gets wearisome and demotivating.

That above quote is probably how every retired editor, whether or not they leave a paragraphs-long retirement essay, feels when they finally decide to leave for good. Concerning. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 08:31, 4 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I very much disagree. In most cases, the reason is just "it got boring". The big divaquits are more noticeable, but the overwhelming majority of former editors are people who just gradually drifted away, and most of the rest are people who left owing to lifestyle changes (ranging from "I got a new job which doesn't give me time", to "I got a new hobby", to "I have medical issues which leave me unable to concentrate", to "I've moved to China", to "I'm dead"). Because none of these people leave big notifications on their userpages or rambling manifestoes on the admin noticeboards as they leave, one doesn't notice their disappearance until one goes to ask them a question and notices they haven't edited for six months, or (if they're admins) the bot flags them for inactivity and desysops them. ‑ Iridescent 14:58, 4 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Life changes seem to make a big difference. High-volume editing requires lots of time, and when you go from "bored student" to spending 50+ hours a week at work, married, with a baby, that really cuts into time for editing. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:20, 4 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I am not so sure on that, Iri. Every time I have quit editing, it has been because I found something better to do because of my disgust at onsite issues, and those almost always point to the WMF or site administration. That's similar to what I most often hear from people.

One thing I am really curious about is the group-think that resides in WMF circles. I don't know if it's worse than in other similar endeavours, but it seems so, and it seems to matter not where an editor started-- everyone who comes under the WMF umbrella seems to succumb. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:22, 12 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think you or I are particularly typical. For most editors, even fairly active ones, both the WMF and the on-site administration are largely a vague presence in the background of which one is vaguely aware, rather than something that has a significant impact on day-to-day activity. Because you and I regularly run up against areas of active dispute, it's easy to forget that most editors are just working away largely undisturbed on whatever their preferred topic happens to be and don't keep getting dragged into arguments. When people in that position leave, it's generally either suddenly leaving as the result of a change in circumstances, or gradually drifting away either because they're getting bored, they feel they've said all they have to say about their preferred topic, they're beginning to feel unappreciated, or some combination of the three. (To put it a bit more bitchily, the first hundred or so entries at Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by number of edits#1–1000 reads like Who's Who of Wikipedia's Ongoing Disputes, but then you get into a long tail of people you probably never heard of because they never get into arguments.)

On the group think at the WMF, I don't know, but I would have thought it's fairly self-reinforcing. The WMF has two fundamentally incompatiable roles: their official job to "empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally", and their self-appointed job as a political lobby group. I'd assume that anyone applying for any kind of job there who didn't agree with the political advocacy side would be unlikely to make it onto the shortlist (and even if they got the job, wouldn't last long); when you rinse-and-repeat the same cycle of reinforcement over 20 years, you end up with a group all of whom share that particular niche world view, even though it's completely unrepresentative of either the participants on the wikis or the world in general. ‑ Iridescent 06:50, 14 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

"broadly" vs "reasonably"

Regarding one aspect of the above discussion, I once tried to change the wording to "interpreted broadly but reasonably." I was voted down because "reasonably" was "too vague." Newyorkbrad (talk) 08:31, 4 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

You of all people should know that Wikipedia institutionally doesn't do "reasonably". Unless a rule is spelled out in minute detail, people will find "technically this doesn't apply in these circumstances" loopholes and brandish them triumphantly. (See also "technically that's a guideline not a policy", "it's not explicitly mentioned" and "I've seen someone else do it and not be sanctioned so applying the rules in my case would be unfair".) If Wikipedia does have a collective consciousness, it's the consciousness of a tax avoidance accountant. ‑ Iridescent 14:50, 4 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Newyorkbrad: the problem with "broadly construed" is that there is no limit to "broadly". I could find a link between polar opposites for no other reason that they are polar opposites. I applaud your efforts and bemoan that your common sense has fallen on deaf ears. Iridescent is absolutely correct: "institutionally" doesn't do "reasonably" and WMF is clueless on that front. Buffs (talk) 21:59, 4 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

To be fair, it cuts both ways. Without the 'broadly' it provides too much scope for "technically that isn't covered by the ban" wriggling. To stick with the original example of a ban from "religion, broadly construed" it could potentially lead to endless "technically Buddhism isn't a religion because it doesn't require the belief in a particular god or set of gods" style arguments. By the time someone gets to the stage where we're enacting topic bans, AGF no longer applies and it's reasonable for us to assume that they're at least potentially going to try to push the envelope. ‑ Iridescent 08:07, 5 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Then "reasonably construed" should be the standard. If in doubt, they should ask for clarification. From the religion example, "broadly construed" could be used to attempt to ban a user who edits Vince Lombardi's page just because he went to a parochial school before coaching. I was personally blocked via discretionary sanctions based on "broadly construed" when neither the edits in question nor the subject even pertained to the ArbCom-approved discretionary sanction allowances (later overturned for that very reason). Buffs (talk) 22:33, 9 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Buffs Alas, as iridescent says above:

[...]Wikipedia institutionally doesn't do "reasonably". Also, I have a rant inside me that our entire society doesn't do reasonable, but that might derail the conversation. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 22:50, 9 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

My Wikipedia institutionally doesn't do "reasonably" isn't just (or at least, isn't entirely) my being bitchy. On a site with a userbase as diverse as Wikipedia's, there will always be disagreement over what constitutes "reasonable". Treating Vince Lombardi as 'religion, broadly construed' because he went to a parochial school sounds ridiculous, yes—but if an editor who's banned from 'religion' is making huge numbers of minor edits to the members of Category:Alumni of religious educational institutions, does that fall under "reasonably" if the edits in question don't themselves pertain to religion and are undoubtedly legitimate and non-disruptive, but it's obvious that the editor has only chosen to target this particular topic as a way to push at the limits of their topic ban? I won't name names—there's no point dredging up past unpleasantness—but I can think of quite a few cases of editors deliberately nibbling at the edges of topic bans when the wording of the ban is ambiguous (it's why we have the "broadly construed" wording in the first place).

(One could even argue that since we know Wikipedia has a significant number of editors on the autistic spectrum some of whom may genuinely need rules spelled out explicitly, that wording like "reasonably" breaches California's discrimination laws. Such a case would IMO go precisely nowhere—the concept of Reasonable person is well-established in US law—but I can easily imagine the WMF getting tied up in knots over the potential bad publicity.) ‑ Iridescent 06:25, 10 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Given the attitude prevalent among US football fans, Vince Lombardi may, in fact, be a religion. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:32, 10 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Tryptofish: isn't wrong, but they keep saying "cult" like it's a bad thing... — Preceding unsigned comment added by Buffs (talk • contribs) 18:16, 15 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

We in the Cabal have determined that cults are indeed bad. Respect my authority. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:06, 15 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

There Is No Cabal. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:08, 16 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@WhatamIdoingThat's what "they" want you to think. ^[Joke] I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 06:26, 16 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Long aside about high-functioning autism

There's a recognizable cycle of "problematic editor who happens to be autistic kicks at the edge of a sanction constantly; sanction is extended to a point that makes this impossible; editor declares that because they're autistic they didn't understand this was unacceptable; the very large population of autistic editors who are not kicking at the edge of sanctions death-glare through the computer screen". Looping back to where we started, it's a real messy situation for AGF. (The really tricky part is that because high-functioning autism diagnosis more or less did not exist before the past twenty years or so, most people the term could be applied to don't apply it to themselves, so sorting by who actively discloses gets all of demographic biases/"people pulling out all the stops before a sanction" biases/"people willing to disclose stigmatized personal details to a community that smells weakness like blood" biases.) Vaticidalprophet 06:41, 10 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

To be cynical, a self-diagnosis of "high-functioning autism" is rapidly becoming the new ANI flu. I've lost count of the number of times someone who's never previously either mentioned autism or displayed the slightest sign of it, suddenly announces "I'm autistic!" when facing sanctions like it's Wikipedia's equivalent of a Get Out Of Jail card. As you say, it doesn't fool the admins and all it does is antagonize the genuinely autistic editors who manage to get on perfectly well without playing the "how far can I push the envelope?" game. ‑ Iridescent 06:51, 10 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The thing I find weird about it isn't spuriousness; to put it one way, in no case where I've been familiar with an editor's pre-existing behaviour has it come as a surprise. (I'd expect most non-problematic autistic editors not to display the slightest sign of it onwiki. An environment where "intense interest in and knowledge of niche subjects, preference for written communication and information-gathering rather than face-to-face, video, or spoken/auditory, and the willingness to go catch up on a lot of background on your new favourite topic" are basic survival minimums is going to have a lot of built-in accommodations for things that correlate with those even if it was never consciously intended to have them.)

It's the very weird auras that surround everything. More-than-occasionally people running cover for a problematic editor have tried to use it as a mitigating factor without that editor necessarily wanting it; in one case, I remember someone diffing an incredibly backwater discussion months before to ANI and horrifying the editor who hadn't intended his disclosure of it there to end up elsewhere, eventually trainwrecking the thread.

The eventual consequence is most discussions of neurodivergence on Wikipedia end up in the context of sanction discussions, which to me seems to be of a kind with how most discussions of women or ethnic minorities et al on Wikipedia are in "the community is broken because Demography" discussions; the intersection of "this is an environment where other people only know what you tell them, and not only do you not have to tell them anything, but it's near-impossible for them to find out things that are integral parts of your IRL daily life if you don't tell them because the structure hides it" with "it's very important to create detailed demographic profiles so we understand our systemic biases" fundamentally doesn't work, with this issue as with any other, and people have very good reasons to want to preserve the "I don't have to tell you I'm X" part and damn the latter. I need to use fewer semicolons. That's a 153-word sentence. Vaticidalprophet 12:55, 10 February 2022 (UTC) Addendum a few hours later, because I assumed it was assumed here of all places but a reread is ambiguous: this is a criticism of the demography obsession, not a support of it. Vaticidalprophet 15:57, 10 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

"[Whichever group I'm a member of] deserves special treatment!" discussions have been a part of Wikipedia since the very beginning. It's a probably-inevitable result of the combination of a culture of anonymity in which people can claim to be whatever they want, and a well-intentioned managerial class who collectively feel diversity can excuse even obvious obnoxiousness or incompetence. (Most of our regular sockmasters and spammers have long-since noticed this and play to it.) ‑ Iridescent 18:35, 10 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Here's a thought: Maybe the "self-diagnosis" isn't a genuine self-diagnosis. Maybe it's from someone who can pass as the majority (that is, pass as a white, cis-heterosexual, abled man), or at most, passes as the majority-except-autistic. They also tend to be professionally diagnosed as children. It would seem that the form of discrimination these men face come in the form of low expectations from literally everyone, including their parents and the school system, causing them to be irritating at best and harassers (often sexual harassers) at worst when they grow up to be adults. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 03:27, 11 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe in the case of younger editors, but—despite the "group of children" stereotypes—the active hardcore of the Wikipedia editor base splits disproportionately towards the over-40s. (In my experience, the image to the right is fairly representative.) As Vaticidalprophet says a little way further up, the concept of "high-functioning autism" is a relatively new concept (it was popularized circa 2001) and is also not recognized as a legitimate diagnosis by either the World Health Organization nor the American Psychological Association. A typical active Wikipedia editor couldn't have been diagnosed as a child, since when they were children the diagnosis just didn't happen. Yes, there will be some cases in which a medical professional has used HFA as verbal shorthand to explain things to a patient (or parents), but in most cases—both on Wikipedia and IRL—when someone describes themselves as HFA it's because they've self-diagnosed on the basis either of a self-adminstered AQ test, or because they've read a list of symptoms and thought "hey, that sounds like me". ‑ Iridescent 08:10, 11 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps my use of Discord has skewed my perception of the demographics somewhat. However:

Professionals using HFA as shorthand is common enough that I personally don't see it as a 'red flag' for self-diagnosis, though perhaps I might think that the diagnosis pre-current edition DSM.
Some people with autism like myself would be disinclined to attend Wikipedia meetups. I feel the need to overemphasize that this, of course, doesn't apply to everyone with autism, but perhaps I don't have to in this particular conversation.
Can you imagine, as a kid or teen, trying to convince your hypothetical parents, who hypothetically don't edit Wikipedia, to a Wikipedia meetup? Some parents would probably do it, especially if their kid has trouble socializing but my parents would've, at most, done it once, looked around the over-40 men-dominated crowd, and never done it again; more likely, they wouldn't have done it to begin with, not understanding why I'd be interested.
I was once informed by a couple of oversighters that children sometimes edit in a surprisingly grown-up fashion; they'd know better than us, since they have to oversight disclosures of childrens' ages.
I was using a broad defination of "adult". There are 20 year olds who would've been diagnosed as having ASD level 1 during childhood who might describe themselves "high-functioning", then there are 80 year old who are forced to self-diagnosis due to autism clinics not accepting new patients over 21, and then there are people around my age who might've been diagnosed as having "HFA" at the age of ten-or-so.

Believe or not, though, I do partially agree with you, that's there's at least a possibility that there's an over-enerepresentation of a crowd older than I in the "active Wikipedian" scene. I just think there' more age diversity than what I think you think there is. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 08:50, 11 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

That picture above is from a London meetup in 2016, I don't think I look particularly old in it compared to some of the others, and I'm sure I'm not one of the two eldest in the shot. My first meetup was in the same pub eight years earlier, I was clearly one of the two eldest attendees on that occasion. I.E. my experience is that the average age of the London Meetup attendees has been rising by much more than a year per year.. No comment as to how many autistic Wikipedians who I've met at a London meetup, but I concede the probability that as we've accumulated a regular cadre of greybeards so we've have become a less attractive option for those under forty. Question is, is it the whole community that is greying, or just the part of it that likes to meet in pubs? Ϣere SpielChequers 10:29, 11 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Not all Wikipedians are too old for an ASD diagnosis, just for the record. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 11:07, 11 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Jo-Jo Eumerus In fact, if there's evidence that symptoms started before the age of two, there's no age limit to diagnosis. This evidence might simply be a parent or older sibling corroborating the fact that the symptoms are, for all intents and purposes, lifelong.

Of course, school or medical records from childhood are more ideal, but they're both are likely to be thrown out at some point. Sometimes, memories are all you have.se, good luck getting that evidence gathered when you've outlived your family, or if your family has a poor memory for things that have happened decades ago. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 11:27, 11 February 2022 (UTC) (typo fixed on 11:29, 11 February 2022 (UTC))[reply]

Just ignoring the "autistic people who fit X demographic characteristics grow up to be either annoying or rapists"... HFA in and of itself certainly didn't pop into existence in the 2000s -- the "undiagnosed autistic dad" is an entire meme, and certainly many middle-aged people without autistic children of their own to spot the characteristics have them too -- but diagnosis is biased; becoming significantly less so, but adult diagnosis itself tends to depend on having children or grandchildren who are identified as such. WRT meetups, I've seen prior discussions of that here that lean towards the "older people and men are more comfortable at them for time/money/context/etc reasons, which in turn creates a cycle where younger people and women don't attend because they're the odd ones out" that sounds plausible enough to me. What stands out to me in the editor base as a whole, when I know ages, isn't that it represents particular age groups unduly but that it doesn't -- that it's an unusually flat curve. There are heuristics for individual subsets of editors, but they don't necessarily work either; I can think of at least one case where I assumed based on all the demographic correlations that a given editor was probably old enough to be my (23) parent or grandparent and found out they were younger than me. Vaticidalprophet 12:38, 11 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

It didn't pop into existence in the 2000s, but the cultural change in thinking around it very much did. That particular change, in which it suddenly became something which people would boast of with pride, we can date precisely—it comes from an article Wired published in 2001 called The Geek Syndrome which made a garbled argument that there was a genetic link between autism and ability (as opposed to the far more likely "people who have difficulty in social sitations are statistically more likely to have time to spend studying"), and tied in almost perfectly with the Randroid "some people are just born better" crankery of the clique who were building what would become Big Tech. ‑ Iridescent 06:50, 14 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Vaticidalprophet Maybe I wasn't communicating the nuance clearly enough, perhaps I'm a bit hypersensitive after a particularly weird and rude interaction with a new editor who was pulling WP:OSE about a bizarre fringe theory, but I wasn't attempting to do a #YesAllWhiteAutisticMen, but was talking about a subset of them. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 13:14, 11 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Some people are autistic; some people are jerks; some people are both; some people are neither.

I think if someone said "I'm bipolar, and it makes me screw up on wiki", we'd point to Wikipedia:Wikipedia is not therapy and send them on their way. We should probably be a little more willing to do the same for people who say "I'm autistic, and it makes me screw up on wiki". WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:57, 11 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I've come to hate NOTTHERAPY, not so much for what it actually says, but for how it's typically invoked, which is as a facile thought-terminating cliché in response to anyone acknowledging that their mental health affects their editing. Which, if nothing else, is just a great recipe to punish people who are honest, since I think we could all armchair-diagnose certain users who choose not to disclose anything about their health. I wrote User:Tamzin/Guidance for editors with mental illnesses a while ago in an attempt to present a healthier way to look at mental health, focusing more on what the exact circumstances are in which an editor's mental illness becomes a liability to the project. If someone's misbehavior is the result of mental illness, in many cases that's better than the alternative, because it means they have a realistic chance of working through it... whereas if someone has reached adulthood and is just a complete jerk, and there's no condition influencing that, then most of the time they're gonna stay a complete jerk for life. Personally, I did make mistakes as a newer user that had to do with being bipolar and otherwise neurodivergent. Then I got on meds and worked through some stuff, and while I'm far from perfect, I can't think of any mistakes I've made since my return to editing that have been because of mental illness.

The main problem with people trying to blame their mistakes on autism, bipolar disorder, or anything else, is that if your condition really is that serious, the rest of us have certainly noticed, and so if there was any extra AGF to give you, it's already been spent. It's one thing if someone's explaining a miscommunication by saying "Oh, I'm sorry I misunderstood. I'm autistic and sometimes don't catch subtleties." But when it's "I'm sorry for blowing through every second, third, and n-plus-oneth chance I was given and never listening to a word of advice. I'm autistic"... well, it may be the case that autism is to blame, or it may not be, but either way competence is required, and I don't think one needs to bring out the specter of NOTTHERAPY to say that. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 21:03, 11 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that it's cruel and inappropriate to cite NOTTHERAPY in that context. On the other hand, it can be useful when someone (for reasons unrelated to personal diagnosis) acts out in a way that is disruptive. It's sort of like, just as one should not disrupt Wikipedia to make a WP:POINT, one should not disrupt Wikipedia to get something out of one's system. In other words, don't make your off-site problems become other editors' problems. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:17, 11 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I think it can be appropriate to cite NOTTHERAPY in the very specific situation of someone saying "Please let me keep doing this disruptive thing. It's like therapy for me!" Which does happen from time to time. That's why I made my third guiding principle in that essay "Don't let your mental illness hurt Wikipedia", which I feel is a more constructive way to frame things than "Wikipedia is not therapy". Because, like, do we actually care if people are editing for their own therapeutic benefit, if they're doing a good job? Or do we really mean "Don't editing Wikipedia badly for your own therapeutic benefit"? -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 21:27, 11 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I suspect that NOTTHERAPY was created specifically because of people editing Wikipedia, doing a poor job, and begging for extra chances to continue doing a poor job (although hopefully a slightly less-bad job).

I have wondered occasionally whether it ought to be renamed "Wikipedia is not occupational therapy". WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:32, 11 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, occupational therapy isn't therapy about workplace mental health or how one occupies oneself. It's about dealing with daily tasks after a disability. For example, how to put on one's socks when one is no longer able to bend over far enough to reach one's feet. (No reference to WP:SOCK intended.) It differs from physical therapy in that it focuses on how to master new ways of doing things, as opposed to regaining the physical ability to do so. --Tryptofish (talk) 18:23, 12 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Also: practice using a computer, practice following directions, practice interacting with people, practice setting schedules and goals, practice coping with anxiety, etc. OT services aren't just about the obvious ADLs. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:22, 12 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Tryptofish, having gone through occupational therapy myself in childhood plus a short stent when I was 19, WhatamIdoing is correct. A lot of the occupational therapy I did as a kid dealt with typing, handwriting, and sensory intregration. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 23:04, 12 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Both of you are, of course, correct. My use of the phrase "daily tasks" was poorly chosen, although daily tasks are certainly part of it. What I intended to convey is that it is not about how one occupies one's mind, and that it differs from (while being closely related to) physical therapy. --Tryptofish (talk) 18:51, 13 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@WhatamIdoing Right, I don't disagree. How you experience systemic discrimination can affect how you're a jerk. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 01:49, 12 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks Tamzin for the link to thought-terminating cliché. I had been looking for a name for that sort of thing. Can I reword your opening sentence more generally to "I've come to hate WP:UPPERCASE, not so much for what it actually says, but for how it's typically invoked". A line in that article -- "Person 1 makes claim Y. Claim Y sounds catchy. Therefore, claim Y is true." -- also seems relevant. These shortcuts get used to make some point, which may deviate somewhat or entirely from the what the guideline text actually says, but they are catchy and have authority merely for being WP:UPPERCASE, so end-of. There's an awful lot of pressure on the shortcut label or guideline/essay title. -- Colin°^Talk 13:12, 12 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

WP:UPPERCASE shortcuts have legitimate uses, the trouble is when they're used wrongly. For internal communication between people who already know what they mean they're perfectly sensible—it's a waste of my time and yours if I type out "this has been referred to Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Clarification and Amendment" rather than "WP:ARCA". The problems come when we use them to people who aren't familiar with the system—to new or newer editors, it just looks like we're talking a weird private language as a means of confusing them. ‑ Iridescent 06:50, 14 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Or if the shortcut's name doesn't communicate the contents. Wikipedia:What editors mean when they say you have to follow BRD is almost never that they actually want you to follow WP:BRD. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:31, 15 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

We're all on the spectrum, that's why they call it a spectrum. ;-) --MZMcBride (talk) 20:09, 11 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@MZMcBride We're all socially awkward sometimes, but that doesn't mean everyone is on the spectrum. It's kind of like how we'll all experience back pain, but that doesn't mean everyone with a little back pain is "a little pregnant." I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 01:40, 12 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I think that depends on how you define "the spectrum". If you're talking about the whole spectrum of human experience, then we're all on it. When you're talking about only the spectrum of autistic people, then we're not. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:03, 12 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@WhatamIdoing I mean, you're technically correct, but I've encountered that saying enough times to understand what was being said by @MZMcBride; they most likely meant the autism spectrum, not the human one. It's often feel-good puffery along the lines of "God won't put you through what you can't handle,"; well-meaning but ultimately useless. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 19:48, 12 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

MEDRS being re-interpreted in cite journal documentation

Iri, you and I have discussions about how the citation templates are managed going back about a decade. Now this has impacted MEDRS, and if the recommendations on a backwater page of the project are enacted, we'll be citing medical content to the laypress. I am wondering if your thinking on how things happen at those pages has changed.

Following on the latest update to the citation journals, WP:MEDRS is being re-interpreted by a number of editors on the talk page of a help page of a citation template. Background and discussion starts at:

User talk:SandyGeorgia#Apparently someone's been dicking around with the citation templates again

I recommend reading that long discussion on my talk, as the RFC that led to this was problematic, although there was sensible input from User:Thryduulf, User:Nikkimaria, User:Fram, and others.

Now, more concerning problems are unfolding at:

Help talk:Citation Style 1/Archive 82#Lay-url

where the discussion is heading towards a re-interpretation of MEDRS to provide for citing medical content to the lay press-- a discussion that belongs at WT:MEDRS. The "RFC" did not endorse this change that affects MEDRS.

On my talk page, disgruntled editors are suggesting we need a noticeboard where others can be made aware of citation template issues before they are rolled out and generate thousands of error messages. I don't think a noticeboard will be effective, because one of the problems in interacting with the citation template editors is getting through the technical lingo to understand what they're saying or proposing. I think we need instead some restriction placed on their ability to make broad changes without a WP:CENT or talk-page notified discussion, where the proposals are hopefully written in plain speak before they go up. But we need some way to address these problems, as they've been happening for as long as I can remember. I was about to help a friend start converting their FA to sfns, and after they saw the latest mess created by the citation template editors, they said, "thanks but no thanks, I'm sticking with manual citations". I had manual citations at Tourette syndrome for over a decade, to avoid precisely these problems. I converted last year, and now here I am. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:03, 28 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

You know my thoughts. As far as I'm concerned we should have a unified citation format to which we can add specialst fields to deal with edge cases like MEDRS and legal citations, rather than the upwards of 3000 different citation templates we actually have coupled with countless personal-preference hand-formatted citation formats. Unless and until we rationalize the system, discussions like this about individual cases are just a deckchairs-on-the-Titanic exercise. Even the infobox people are making serious steps to clean up the zillion different variants of {{infobox person}}, and if even they can appreciate that template proliferation is a genuine problem rather than an academic exercise to discuss, surely on something as fundamental as "how do we make sure readers know where our information comes from?" the rest of us should be able to come up with something. ‑ Iridescent 16:49, 2 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Iri, I raised this more about the interpersonal dynamics that affect that area of editing-- something you and I used to discuss eons ago. Things like this. My stance on the interpersonal issues has softened, yet the issues continue. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:26, 12 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

This obviously comes with the usual "just my personal opinion, not policy" qualifiers. It looks to me like the dispute here is a reflection of the ongoing split between "content editors" and "technical editors". Because you have two competing viewpoints, both of whom can legitimately say they have policy on their side, there is no right answer here. I may be wrong but I've had the feeling recently that the line between "reader-facing editors" focusing on readability and accuracy and "editor-facing editors" focusing on internal functionality has got a lot sharper in recent years than it ever used to be. There used to be a lot of people like RexxS, Anomie and Gimmetrow—even Merridew—about, who had their feet in both camps and could act as intermediaries between two groups of people acting in good faith who had completely different visions, but most of them have left or drastically reduced their participation—the only person in this position who still comes to mind is Enterprisey, and because he's currently on Arbcom it's not reasonable to ask him to take an active position on a dispute that has such high potential to turn into a wheel-war should people get fed up with discussion and start unilaterally locking or deleting the templates.

Let me take the opportunity to once more bang the drum I've been banging for more than a decade. Although nobody likes "add another layer of bureaucracy" as a solution, Wikipedia needs and always has needed an elected committee, separate from Arbcom, with the authority to issue binding and enforceable closures to Requests for Comment. In situations like this—where there are two possible solutions, both of which have reasonable arguments to be made in their favor, both of which have a degree of support, and where compromise isn't possible because we genuinely need to go one-way-or-the-other—the consensus model doesn't work. As it stands, the only ways this kind of situation get resolved are "whoever shouts the loudest wins", "the WMF imposes something" or "it degenerates into a full-scale conflict and eventually enough people either get blocked or resign in disgust that the 'winner' is whoever's left standing", and none of those are exactly ideal. ‑ Iridescent 06:52, 14 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

A Wikipedia that ends like Reservoir Dogs? Cool. "You block me in a dream, you better wake up and apologize"... and the last guy standing can pump out 100 stubs on English cricketers a day in peace :) SN54129 08:38, 14 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

This is exactly the way this kind of thing usually plays out. If you ever want a really dispiriting experience, dig through the history of infoboxes, the chain of events leading to and following Raul654's resignation at Featured Articles, or if you really want to go back in time the Userbox Wars. ‑ Iridescent 17:23, 14 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Iri, it's unclear to me why you mention "Raul654's resignation at Featured Articles"; Raul654 did not resign (although I did)--he was forced out.

Here is the 2012 RFC that ratified Raul as director (one of many), and here is the RFC launched a little over a year later by Tony1, without prior discussion, that removed Mark/Raul (apparently because of a period of absence, when he had delegated authority to others).

Along with the other fallings out of this decision (namely that FAC has never regained the stature it had when it the overall process had a leader and the pages worked together and were recognized as the best functioning process on Wikipedia), there are multiple ironies in the situation:

Tony1 later became the victim of a leaderless FAC, in ways that Raul never would have countenanced or tolerated, and so today, FAC does not have the benefit of Tony1's prose reviews. I long warned what would happen if mob rule was allowed at FAC, and the irony was Tony1 himself becoming a victim of that (valid reviewers can be chased off by those who don't want their work critiqued, and we've seen that in both prose and sourcing reviews). In fact, what I warned Tony1 about for years came to pass ... to him.
For all the times Raul was accused of being a "dictator", there was no back-channel direction while he was director, and his apparent "crime" was being a strong delegator. He turned over the reins and never told a delegate how to do their job. He was a strong believer in the Wikipedia way.
And for all the "dictatorial" charges, FAC has now a Coord who has served longer than Raul did.
The arb who undermined Raul and me as we tried to expose the socking at FAC later left not under the best of circumstances (while history showed us right about the socks); how unfortunate that her trends were not exposed soon enough to help the socking situation that affected FAC.

Since you aren't prone to mistakes with choice of words, why do you say Raul resigned?

Related to our other discussions, I would never presume that Merridew isn't still affecting the citation templates; it would be folly to think they would walk away from that cash cow (perhaps you know something I don't know), having done away with Gimmetrow. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:59, 19 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Raul made precisely one edit between Feb 2013 and Jan 2015. They had either retired or quit as far as anyone knew, not least in part to increasingly more common issues escalating to the drama boards like their blatant abuse of page protection to enforce their own arbitrary view on pages they were in conflict on with other editors. The characterization of looking to resolve the issue of an absent editor in a (perceived) position of absolute power because of someone who doesnt edit for 5 months as 'forcing them out' is as misleading as your use of 'a little over a year later'. No it was 17 months. A similar misleading statement made by Hawkeye at the second RFC btw where they described the interval as 'a few months'. Raul's position was abolished because people like you were holding the position and Raul's 'rules' as not subject to community consensus. In short, you got exactly what every editor gets when they think a single person is above the rest. Had you and some of the other hardliners not been so draconian in propping Raul up as a dictatorial figurehead, you would likely have had a different response when he disappeared. Also its 2022. Get over it. Only in death does duty end (talk) 09:06, 20 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, look, a(nother) Merridew ANI. The RFC that "fired" Raul was July 2013; no wonder he stopped editing. Re "hardliners propping up Raul", see the 2012 RFC for all those "hardliners". The issue in 2022 is whether the process is working; if competing with DYK is the goal, then the answer is yes. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 10:21, 20 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Raul stopped editing in February 2013. The director position was abolished in July 2013, 5 months later. The RFC was a result of him stopping editing. He didnt stop editing as a result of the RFC. So again, you are being deliberately misleading when you make comments like 'no wonder he stopped editing'. Whatever his reasons for stopping editing, the RFC to remove/reform the position he held took place after a significant period of inactivity by his choice. Only in death does duty end (talk) 10:31, 20 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

"He didnt stop editing as a result of the RFC" ... and, you know this, how? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 10:37, 20 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

You are right of course, the RFC echoed backwards in time and caused them to stop editing 5 months before the RFC started. Or he was on an extended months long break with no indication when he would return. Only in death does duty end (talk) 13:51, 20 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

It goes back much further than that. This TLDR discussion on FAC talk began on 12 November 2012 with "Surprisingly, the Wikipediocracy people have raised a good point. Raul hasn't edited Wikipedia since August 25th. Isn't it about time to consider the position of FA Director to have been left derelict and a new one should be appointed? ...." It isn't true that the Tony1 Rfc was launched without prior discussion - there'd been lots, and the natives were revolting. Johnbod (talk) 17:42, 20 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I think we're talking about opposite sides of the same coin here (re my remark about the "ironies"). On the one hand, Raul was/is frequently referred to as a "dictator", but when he delegated and went away for a few months, he is then brought up as derelict. Apparently, no way to win? Have a look at that full discussion, remembering that Raul was an arb and had enemies, who were happy to take pot shots when/if the opportunity presented itself. Also notice on point responses from Truthkeeper at 03:54, 13 November 2012 and Coordinator Ian Rose at 10:04, 13 November 2012, along with Raul654's own response at 22:30, 13 November 2012. With the exception of a few editors with a bone to pick, there was no problem identified. That is, (non-dictatorial) delegation was working as intended. The troops were not restless; one or two agitators raised an issue, and it was answered.

And, yes, the 2013 RFC was launched unannounced. By the time of the 2012 RFC, FAC had well learned its lesson about how to craft a useful RFC, based on considerable prior discussion, so that the outcome would yield useful results. (Something it seems to have forgotten since.) The 2012 RFC was well discussed and wording planned; the 2013 RFC was launched unilaterally, unplanned a little over a year later.^a No surprise that the result of six proposals at once was a disputed RFC and GIGO (garbage in, garbage out). We all know what you get on Wikipedia when you launch an RFC of that type: pitchforks. So, because the RFC wasn't well thought out, the result was that the things that made the FA process work were dismantled, and yet, nothing to replace them was envisioned or enacted. And that is the status quo today. OID has referred to me as one of the "hardliners"; whatever that means, if it means I think that FAC worked then and doesn't now, guilty as charged. And by "worked then", I mean that Raul's position as director was constantly, multiple times, ratified by community-wide consensus and enjoyed consensus beyond the FA process.

I'm still curious to know, though, why Iri mentions Raul "resigning", as he may recall something I don't. I was hoping OID had a reason for their statements or some inside knowledge about events in Raul's life between February and July, but it appears they have no first-hand information to offer.

How did we get from citation template issues and MEDRS to Raul and FAC? Through the common denominator of losing good technical editors like Gimmetrow through the efforts of socks. We allowed the same to happen to FAC. Perhaps my timing on resigning was unwise, as it left Raul to fend for FAC alone, because it's easy to see how fickle Wikipedia is when it comes to turning on its own: dictator one day, derelict the next because you delegated, but no one helped him deal with the socks, as far as I can tell. I wouldn't expect anyone not to be discouraged under those circumstances. If FAC had first discussed whether an FA director was needed, and then launched an RFC only on that topic, rather than rolling six proposals into one, would FAC have been taken apart with no plan for how to put it back together? We'll never know.

^a Yes, 17 months in the 20-year span of FAC history is a little more than a year; context, and a sense of history, pls. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 01:19, 21 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I'll reply to all this properly when I have time, but regarding my use of the term 'resignation', a reminder that on this particular issue I'm not someone who's just fallen off the turnip truck but am literally the person who set the original precedent for Wikipedia's collectively considering 'inactivity without prior explanation' as constituting resignation. It's not something I've just plucked out of the air. ‑ Iridescent 07:28, 21 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I imagined you had a reason, as you don't use words casually. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:55, 21 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Iridecent: Just so I'm clear...when you say "technical editors," you mean/are including WikiGnomes, not (or at least, not exclusively) people who code templates, maintain bots and stuff, right? If so, it's the first time I've heard of "technical editors" used in that context, so I just wanted to double-check what you meant. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 08:51, 14 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

No, I mean by "technical editors" what is normally understood (on Wikipedia) by the term: the people who primarily work on bot design, template markup, Lua modules etc. To oversimplify slightly, the dispute SandyGeorgia is talking about is an argument between a "people who focus on Wikipedia technically functioning smoothly and consistently" who want a particular set of templates always to behave in a consistent manner, and "people who focus on Wikipedia articles being as informative as possible" who want to ensure the output of the templates is as accurate as possible, even if it means them being formatted idiosyncratically on some articles.

As I say, both groups are in the right; the problem is that years ago when standardizing Wikipedia's citation formats wouldn't have meant manually re-formatting c. 5 million articles (at a conservative estimate), we couldn't agree on a standard and collectively kicked the can down the road, so we now have around 3000 different citation templates—all of which are equally 'correct' as far as policy is concerned. Changing the design of any one of these templates cascades down to affect the output of thousands and in some cases millions of articles, but because there are so many of them it's impossible for anyone to monitor them all. ‑ Iridescent 17:23, 14 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

One would hope that we'd be as reader-centric as possible; alas, the difficulty of change along with the difficulties you've already mentioned could very well result in no change happening. I hope I'm proven wrong. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 22:37, 14 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, but there's no clear definition of what "reader-centric" means in the context of the display of information, and we've spent the past 20 years fudging and dodging the issue of whether Wikipedia is ultimately a giant dataset formatted as 6,453,617 pages, or a collection of 6,453,617 individual articles from which information is extracted individually either by humans or by scripts. Is it better for the reader:

to have information formatted as consistently as possible so they know exactly where to look for it, even though it means that potentially readers will see misleading statements without their accompanying explanations, and that having a totally standardized approach to what is included/excluded potentially gives undue weight on individual articles, since "what's normally important" and "what's important in this specific case" don't always overlap; or
to have information written as accurately as possible so readers aren't misled, even though it means that potentially readers will be confused as a piece of information isn't in the place they normally expect to see it so they assume it isn't included, and readers who are just looking for a particular piece of information will have to spend more time looking for it since there isn't a single standard way in which the information is formatted (and the side issue that not being consistently formatted makes it harder for algorithms to extract information from Wikipedia pages, meaning such things as Google Knowledge panels and Wikidata are more likely to show incorrect data)?

As I was alluding to in my reply to SN54129 above, this argument is a very very very well-plowed furrow on Wikipedia. As you may know, the Infobox Wars began with a thread on this talkpage so although I wasn't involved with them myself I was very aware of all their twists and turns. As far as I can see, this is exactly the same "is it more important to be consistent or to be accurate?" question, just transposed from the top of the article to the bottom. ‑ Iridescent 05:46, 15 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

How are the non-technical editors supposed to deal with a small group pf technical editors being able to effect such broad changes, and not have to un-do them when consensus is against them? Where do I go to revert the removal of a useful parameter from a citation template where it was in use for over a decade and where there is no consensus for its removal? How does one restore that in the "encyclopedia anyone can edit"? Some of the dynamic there has improved over the years (there is at least some communication now), but the overall dynamic hasn't changed, which is that once the fait accompli is installed, it can't be removed. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 10:46, 20 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

There's no right answer—as per my previous comments, both the "technical" and "non-technical" editors can reasonably claim to have policy on their side. I know it's an unsatisfactory answer, but sometimes "a well-publicised RFC" (with the emphasis on "well-publicised") is the only practical way to go, even though it invariably leads to people ranting at each other. Cases like this are where RFCs as a process are A Good Thing; you actually want the opinions of people who aren't involved and don't particularly care, as they're the people who are best-placed to dispassionately judge who is making the better case and whether any middle road is possible. ‑ Iridescent 05:38, 6 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

This obviously comes with the usual "just my personal opinion, not policy" qualifiers. It looks to me like the dispute here is a reflection of the ongoing split between "content editors" and "technical editors". Because you have two competing viewpoints, both of whom can legitimately say they have policy on their side, there is no right answer here. Thanks for spelling out the reasons why I have conflicted feelings on this particular issue. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 09:17, 14 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

This is something that I think gets overlooked by a lot of Wikipedia editors: consensus decision-making is only effective when the participants have strong alignment in goals, but as a group grows in size, its members rapidly have diverging aims. One is not more right than the other; they just prioritize different things and thus weigh choices differently. That's why organizations generally use either straight voting or some kind of hierarchical structure to make decisions. isaacl (talk) 15:24, 14 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, exactly. Since there are a lot of legitimate reasons not to use straight voting—it would both cement Wikipedia's reputation as Californiapedia into immutable reality, and lead to open season for sockpuppetry, for starters—some kind of Govcom is the only way to cope over the long term, even though everyone instinctively grates at a hierarchical structure. The thinking behind WP:ACPD was in some ways both valid and ahead of its time; the issue there wasn't that such a committee wasn't needed, but that the existing Arbcom so blatantly tried to stack it with their friends that it ended up tainting the entire concept of "governance committee" for a decade. ‑ Iridescent 17:23, 14 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I admit I've never quite understood the "3000 citation templates" argument—my impression is that the vast majority of them are wrappers that fill in a few parameters on some other template, usually from the CS1 family. There are a few other established styles (Category:Citation templates not conforming to an established style suggests about 5), of which I think I've seen CS2 and Vancouver in the wild, and of course hand-formatted by citations of no particularly consistent style. So the changes being debated here to the CS1 Lua module in practice bubble up to most of those 3000 templates. Choess (talk) 21:47, 14 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

A lot of them are but a lot of them aren't. There are plenty of frequently-used templates like {{cite court}} which are either completely independent of Citation/core, or have so many addenda tacked on that they may as well be. Even with the ones that purely are wrappers, a well-intentioned change to one of them can still have very confusing effects on the reader experience; since it's unlikely any given article is only going to use a single citation template throughout, changing the way one of the wrapper templates outputs will have the knock-on effect of making the reference formatting inconsistent on every article on which that template is used. ‑ Iridescent 06:00, 15 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

FA Mentoring request

Do you have time to Mentor on an FA? Buffs (talk) 03:40, 2 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

My editing is probably too intermittent at the moment to do 'true' step-by-step mentoring—at the moment, due to real life I tend to operate in bursts of frenetic activity lasting a few days, punctuated by disappearances with little or no warning. If you let me know the article in question (I'm assuming Texas A&M University), I'm more than happy to engage in an informal (or formal, if you prefer) peer review, and I assume assorted talkpage watchers would be happy to do likewise. Assuming the page in question is Texas A&M, you really want to prod User:Karanacs to see if you can coax her out of semi-retirement if you've not done so already. Someone like the Rambling Man might be a good bet as well, as you really want at least one person involved to be someone with a lot of experience writing FAs but with absolutely no interest in or knowledge of the topic, to see it it actually makes sense to people without prior knowledge.

(Higher education is a subject area where Wikipedia has something of a problem, as there's not only an endless flow of well-intentioned current and former students and faculty members trying to 'improve' the pages, there's also usually a steady drip of Wikipedians In Residence encouraging all kinds of inappropriate conduct. Of the six people I'd really trust to write—or help in writing—a high-quality neutral article two are indefblocked, two are retired, and two are dead.) ‑ Iridescent 16:47, 2 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

A nod to Lord Palmerston there perhaps...? "Only three people have ever really understood the Schleswig-Holstein business – the Prince Consort, who is dead – a German professor, who has gone mad – and I, who have forgotten all about it." ;) SN54129 17:40, 15 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoDKh1EAZjI Buffs (talk) 05:36, 16 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Buffs: Fantastic stuff :D SN54129 08:06, 16 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I'd be happy with a formal peer review as-able. I'm well-aware of the problems with Higher education articles, but the A&M page is in way better shape than most. It was an FA until VERY recently and I've been maintaining the page for over a decade. While I'm irked at the ill-defined process and lack of actionable feedback, failing to at least attempt the process as requested would simply be unnecessarily obstinate.

I've worked with Karanacs before (we're both A&M grads) and, until just a few days ago, she'd been offline since 2020. I'd prefer not to bug her at this point, but I may ping her later. Let me know when you want to begin. Buffs (talk) 17:27, 2 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Easier if you just let me know when you're ready, and I'll go through it top to bottom. Given the circumstances, my inclination would be to review it with nitpicking turned up to max—essentially as if it were already at FAC. ‑ Iridescent 07:11, 3 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I'm ready whenever you are. On a scale of 1-10, if you could turn up the nitpicking to a 17 it would be appreciated. Feel free to make said notes in whatever forum you deem fit and just let me know. Buffs (talk) 22:26, 3 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Speaking of maximum nitpicking, can I ask for one of TRAPPIST-1 too? <puppy eyes> Among other things, I am looking to write something that is at least understandable to laypeople. JoJo Eumerus mobile (main talk) 17:52, 5 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I'll do it as soon as I get the chance. Because I'd prefer to review it in one sitting—it makes it easier to spot inconsistencies that have crept in if one reads it top-to-bottom in a single sitting—it may not be for a few days. ‑ Iridescent 23:00, 3 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I'm sure it's probably not high on your priorities...any ETA? Buffs (talk) 17:22, 15 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Real world permitting, hopefully Friday, otherwise next week. Will try to do it by the 25th (i.e. next Friday) at the latest. ‑ Iridescent 18:07, 15 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. Buffs (talk) 05:34, 16 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Reviews

I'll put the reviews here to avoid cluttering up article talk pages/peer reviews/FACs etcetera (collapsed for the benefit of the scrolling finger of all other talk page watchers). Feel free to copy-paste my comments anywhere else if you think they'd be useful elsewhere. Per the above, I'm intentionally being as obnoxiously nitpicky as possible so some of this may not be actual "issues", and I'm trying to approach as best I can from an "absolutely no prior knowledge of the topic" position.

Texas A&M University

The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.

Special:PermanentLink/1071355284 is the version on which I'm commenting. I'm only reviewing for sense, and have done no checking either of sourcing nor of MOS compliance.

Lead

"Public flagship land-grant research senior military college" in the infobox and "a public land-grant research university in College Station, Texas" are both somewhat WP:SEAOFBLUE. (I personally don't have any particular issue with having links next to each other, but some people—and in particular, some FA reviewers—really hate it.)
Gonna stick with it for now, but will address it if it becomes an issue in FAR. Buffs (talk) 21:03, 21 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
This is purely a personal preference thing, but I'd personally drop It has projects funded by organizations such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Office of Naval Research. from the lead. Hosting government-funded projects isn't particularly interesting—governments have their fingers in so many pies and try to spread their funding geographically to avoid accusations of pork-barrelling, that pretty much any research university in the world with a reasonably large science, medical or engineering department is hosting multiple government-funded projects. As such, to me giving this such prominence in the first paragraph of the lead makes it look like the article is trying to artificially puff up the institution's reputation.
Done. Buffs (talk) 21:03, 21 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Originally, the college taught no classes in agriculture, instead concentrating on classical studies, languages, literature, and applied mathematics. After four years, students could attain degrees in scientific agriculture doesn't make sense to me. If the college didn't teach agriculture, how and why were the students granted degrees in agriculture after four years? It doesn't appear to be explained in the body of the article either, as far as I can tell, and the citation is to a print book so there isn't an easy way for a reader thinking "that doesn't make sense" to clarify the situation.
Fixed. Short version, the initial profs all came from classical institutions and wanted to pursue a "classical" education. They didn't want to do what the school had been established to do. 3 years later, farmers raised hell at the state government and the focus on Ag & engineering was firmly re-established. Buffs (talk) 21:03, 21 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
There's a sudden jump to Under the leadership of President James Earl Rudder in the 1960s, A.M.C. desegregated, became coeducational, and dropped the requirement for participation in the Texas A&M Corps of Cadets. without prior background. That these would have been unremarkable in an institution in the South is something that's self-evident to US readers, but to most readers elsewhere it will immediately bring up a "huh?" reaction.
Fixed Buffs (talk) 21:03, 21 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Beginning years

"Public" has a specific meaning in the US of "funded by the federal or state government", which doesn't translate to other countries where it can mean "open to all groups rather than restricted to members of a particular profession or instutution". For the state's first public institution of higher education it should probably be spelled out in full or at least have an explanatory footnote. (I've lived long enough in the UK—where public school very definitely does not mean "state-run"!—that my initial reaction on seeing this sentence was "what about Baylor?".)
Put in a note. Baylor is a private school and the state has no say in it whatsoever. Buffs (talk) 21:03, 21 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Other than the fact that Brazos County donated land, have we any idea why they chose the location? Even today Bryan is still the middle of nowhere; back in horse-and-buggy days it must have been very hard to get to from Dallas, Austin, Houston and San Antonio, which are presumably where the potential students were mostly coming from.
I've not found much that says why. It WAS along main rail lines...in fact that's where the name "College Station" comes from. The US Mail designated a stop "College Station" mail could be properly delivered...and so cadets would get off where they were supposed to... Buffs (talk) 21:03, 21 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Although originally envisioned and annotated in the Texas Constitution as a branch of the University of Texas seems confusing to me, since UT didn't exist when A&M opened. This probably needs clarifying.
I suppose that's a matter of debate as the "established" date of the school has a bit of play (when was it established in law vs when it opened its doors). rephrased anyway. Buffs (talk) 21:03, 21 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
A.M.C. also expanded its academic pursuits with the establishment of the School of Veterinary Medicine in 1915; up to this point, you haven't said what any of the existing departments or subjects taught were.
Expanded that Buffs (talk) 21:03, 21 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

World Wars era

In 1948, the state legislature established the Texas A&M College Station campus as the flagship of the Texas A&M University system is going to be quite confusing to readers, unless they're already aware of the existing setup. No site other than those at College Station has been mentioned up to this point, so to a reader unfamiliar with the current setup this reads akin to "Germany is home to many Germans".
rephrased. Buffs (talk) 21:03, 21 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

University era

The various mentions of George Bush should probably specify which one. I suspect to most people, GWB is much more closely associated with Texas than GHWB, so they'll make the wrong assumption. (Yes, "click the link if you're not sure" is Wikipedia dogma, but it doesn't hold in this case since someone assuming you mean George W. Bush already knows perfectly well who he is so isn't going to feel the need to click.)
addressed Buffs (talk) 14:42, 22 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
The Association of American Universities inducted Texas A&M in May 2001 is another that probably needs clarification. Any reader who's not already familiar with the AAU is going to reasonably assume from the name that it's an umbrella group for all universities in the US, and will just be confused as to why TAMU wasn't a member from the beginning.
added a descriptor for clarification. Buffs (talk) 15:01, 22 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
For anyone not familiar with US sports—which is, everyone in the world not in the US—Texas A&M left the Big 12 Conference for the Southeastern Conference on July 1, 2012 literally reads like a bunch of random words thrown together. There isn't even an indication in the text that this is something to do with sport, and that's not something a non-US reader would guess. (The concept of organized college sports doesn't really exist anywhere else.)
Well, while the SEC is known for athletics, it is more than just that and includes academics. That said, point taken. I don't think this article needs to go over such intricacies in any sort of depth and conference alignment is later discussed in the athletics section. Removed.
I'm not convinced the paragraph about the protests about the statue warrant inclusion. I'm sure that over a 150-year history there have been numerous protests and disputes; it appears to me to be hugely undue weight to devote an entire paragraph to one relatively minor dispute over a single statue. (University of Oxford doesn't mention the protests about the statue of Cecil Rhodes, for instance.) This is a dispute that's well above my pay grade—I've no doubt if you remove the paragraph you'll immediately be besieged by an angry mob screaming about "censorship" and "revisionism"—but I'm fairly certain it's something that will be raised at any future FAC, since the appearance of undue weight is something people there are rightly always on the lookout for. (Ditto for the even longer section further down beginning In 2016, the university was targeted by animal rights group PETA, who alleged abusive experiments on dogs.)
I too am not convinced these sections warrant inclusion either. They are relatively minor annoyances in the grand scheme of things (several prominent University events are boiled down to a single sentence). However, I am also not interested in the inclusion of only positive attributes of the school and ignoring criticism. History is history. Good, bad, ugly, disliked...it's all part of the history. So, while WP:RECENTISM is certainly a concern as-is WP:DUE weight, I'm willing to take those to FAC and let the chips fall where they may. It is much easier to simply delete them by WP:CONSENSUS than it is to re-add them; I'd rather have too much info than be accused of whitewashing. Buffs (talk) 15:01, 22 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Administration and organization

a ten-member Board of Regents, nine appointed by the governor—is this the Governor of Texas, or a senior member of the faculty with the title "governor"? It should be clarified either way.
Gov of Texas; fixed. Buffs (talk) 14:51, 22 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Rankings

I can understand why Times Higher Education the QS World University Rankings The Wall Street Journal etc are relevant, but why should readers care what Shanghai Jiao Tong University has to say about TAMU, and particularly why are they so important their opinion gets given first?
Because the Academic Ranking of World Universities is published by the Center for World-Class Universities at that school. Rephrased for more clarity. Buffs (talk) 15:10, 22 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Research

I already raised this when talking about the lead, but Texas A&M works with state and university agencies on various local and international research projects to develop innovations in science and technology that can have commercial applications could equally be said about pretty much any research university.
I would highly disagree on that subject. There are many schools that spend billions on research that is strictly for scientific gain/knowledge or governmental applications. Such a focus on commercial applications is definitely unusual. Buffs (talk) 15:10, 22 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Campus

Texas A&M maintains the RELLIS campus formerly, Texas A&M Riverside Campus or Bryan Air Force Base seems to have gotten garbled along the way. Normally I'd just fix something like this myself, but I'm not 100% sure what the exact meaning should be and I don't want to introduce potentially wrong information.
fixed Buffs (talk) 16:57, 22 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Student life

Northside consists of seventeen student residence halls, including the three university honors halls—I honestly have no idea what a "university honor hall" is, and if I don't know readers who aren't familiar with its educational system certainly won't.
fixed Buffs (talk) 16:57, 22 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
The school also has four major Apartment Building complexes—does "Apartment Building" form part of a proper name, or is the capitalization in error?
Caps in error; fixed. Buffs (talk) 16:57, 22 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
The Corps Arches, a series of twelve arches that "[symbolize] the spirit of the 12th Man of Texas A&M" appears to have lost something along the way. Although what's meant by "the 12th Man" is explained much further down the article, readers can't reasonably be expected to know to look for it, and without context it makes no sense.
It's wikilinked for that very reason. I'm a little confused. Buffs (talk) 16:57, 22 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
The Corps welcomed female members in the fall of 1974 seems a bit press-releasey to me, since the military most definitely did not universally welcome the admission of women. "Began admitting" would probably be more neutral.
The Corps is not part of the military, so that's not exactly the same issue. However, I concur that "welcomed" is probably too strong. This was brought up in the FARC and changed then. This part of the FA process is infuriating. We're literally talking about a single word and I cannot satisfy both you and the person who objected to the previous phrasing and suggested this. However, I will defer to the most recent criticism and have made the requested changes. Buffs (talk) 16:57, 22 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Some band drills are so complicated that they require band members to step between each other's feet to complete the maneuvers. These drills must be drawn by hand as computer marching programs return errors without disabling safety features; their calculations require two people to be in the same spot at the same time. Yes, I get that the university is proud of its marching band, but literally nobody reading this article cares about the technicalities of band drill.
The Corps of Cadets was, at one point, the entire student body. While it no longer is, it is a sizable and prominent portion of the student body. A section dedicated to it is not out of line. Likewise, a few sentences (4) dedicated to a quarter of said organization is appropriate. #biased. However, criticism noted and will pare it down should there be any other suggestions. Buffs (talk) 16:57, 22 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
My usual long-standing complaint about the use of "Greek" on articles about American academia. The concept doesn't exist anywhere else in the world; to 95% of the world, readers will just be confused at why you're mentioning the clubs for people from Greece when you're not mentioning clubs for people of any other nationality/ethnicity. (The same refutation of "but people can just click the wikilink!" applies as for my earlier comments about "George Bush"; since readers will think they already know perfectly well what "Greek" means, they're not going to click through to see that it's actually a reference to Greek Letter Organizations.)
Point taken; rephrased. Buffs (talk) 16:57, 22 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Traditions

the school's history has instilled in students "the idealized elements of a small-town life: community, tradition, loyalty, optimism, and unabashed sentimentality" reads like a press release. Is there any evidence that these attributes actually apply to every student, or is this just a claim by someone and if so who claimed it, when, and why?
It was stated in Texas Monthly as noted by the citation. Moreover, of course it doesn't apply to every student, by definition. That's an absurd standard to attempt to attain. However, as a general statement, yes, it is part of the culture at A&M. Buffs (talk) 17:20, 22 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
The event received worldwide attention during World War II, when 25 Aggies "mustered" during the battle for the island of Corregidor sounds questionable to me. I've no doubt that it was reported in the Texas press, but is there any evidence that the rest of the world paid any attention?
Well, it was sent out over the United Press wire during WWII...and its commemoration in 1946 was on the cover of LIFE magazine... Buffs (talk) 17:04, 22 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Notable alumni and faculty

Notable faculty include nine Nobel Prize laureates, among them [eight Nobel Laureates]. You should either list all of them, or explain why the ninth isn't included, as to me the fact that there's a single one not mentioned makes it look like there's something being hidden here (e.g. he turned out to be a prominent Nazi or something).
There was one included inadvertently on one list. There are actually 8...fixed. Buffs (talk) 17:28, 22 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Buffs, I did warn you it would be nitpicky! @JoJo Eumerus, I'll do yours when I get the chance but may not be for a few days; this kind of sentence-by-sentence nitpick needs a solid block of time as it works best to do it in a single sitting. ‑ Iridescent 11:39, 18 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Absolutely LOVE it. If anything, you could have been more nitpicky! (I love humble, actionable criticism! Gives the best chance for improvement) Lol! Thanks for the feedback! I'll be addressing those points as soon as I can dedicate some time to it (hopefully this evening) or tomorrow. Buffs (talk) 17:59, 18 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Iridescent: I think this addresses everything. Your replies would be helpful. Buffs (talk) 17:28, 22 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

(talk page watcher) @Buffs: It is good to show eagerness :) but there is no need to ping someone on their own page! (Although, incidentally, they won't get the ping as it has to be added at the same time as your signature, not subsequently as happened here. A right old PITA I know!) SN54129 18:18, 23 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I was mostly just specifying whom I was addressing since there were multiple people in this thread and wanted to be clear. Clarification appreciated though! Buffs (talk) 05:08, 24 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Iri, you noticed early on in this thread the absence of Karanacs, whose steady and knowledgeable hand contributed to the FA status of the Aggie suite of articles, and it would be wonderful to preserve the status of these articles in her honor, but it doesn't seem like she's coming back, and Buffs does need a mentor (they expressed early on not knowing how to establish reliability of a source).

What you supplied was a prose review, although both the FAC and the FAR ran into trouble over sourcing: specifically, source-to-text integrity, old sources trying to cite current text, and failure to use reliable sources. I haven't looked to see if those considerable issues were corrected (and don't plan to), but I'm concerned that it Buffs only smoothes out the prose per your suggestions, without taking on board the more significant sourcing issues, they will be sorely disappointed at FAC. FAC reviewers are slowly rebounding from the years of absence of Karanacs, Laser brain, and Ealdgyth (where the trend was for endless nitpicking of prose without consideration of sources), and realizing again that sourcing has to be considered. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:31, 19 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

At this point, your input is neither welcome nor desired. I take extreme exception in your mischaracterization of me and request that you strike your disparaging remarks. I never expressed early on not knowing how to establish reliability of a source. Likewise, I addressed each and every point your brought up and/or asked for clarification. You never replied and instead applied your own standards of a "reliable source" without demonstrating that anything in the cited sources was incorrect...you assumed unreliability without any evidence to back it up. Moreover, literally every sourcing issue you brought up was addressed over a month ago. Rehashing that criticism here seems pointless to me unless you are doing so to disparage me personally.

You asked for me to seek out reviews. After 2 months, this is the only person who's said "yes". Telling the sole respondent "not what I want" is not helpful. If you aren't willing to do such a review yourself or help me find someone else willing to do so, kindly step aside. Buffs (talk) 21:10, 21 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

As I said, I'm only reviewing for sense, and have done no checking either of sourcing nor of MOS compliance.; that is, this is explicitly a prose review. Obviously if I were to notice something cited to a supermarket tabloid or to an obvious personal blog I'd raise a concern, but the nearest copy of A Pictorial History of Texas A&M University, 1876–1976 (is the 1975 publication date for that correct?) to me is probably a six-hour flight away.

While we obviously want to be accurate, speaking in terms on personal opinion rather than in terms of WP:WIAFA compliance I don't consider absolute source-to-text integrity, ensuring every source is the most current, et al to be essential provided there's a high degree of confidence that all reasonable steps have been taken to ensure that nothing untrue has been included and that anthing potentially contentious has a source. This isn't a biography of a living person, a medical guide, a sensitive political topic, or anything else where it's important ethically and in terms of legal liability to prove that all possible steps have been made to reflect current thinking—it doesn't matter that there's a statement cited to a press release.

Still in Personal Opinion Mode, this is something I've always thought was a problem with the FAC process. Because it (rightly) has a collective "nobody and nothing deserves special treatment" mentality, it means there's little scope for "this is technically against usual practice but it's not causing any issues" application of common sense. That in turn means the process self-selects for policy-and-process obsessives who think a Manual of Style so bloated it has to be split into 150 separate subpages is perfectly normal, since regular editors see the walls of text at WP:FAC* and quite reasonably think "no, this isn't a sensible use of my time".
*At the time of writing WP:FAC clocks in at 101,870 words, or to put it another way the first page people taking a tentative step into the FA process see is slightly longer than To Kill a Mockingbird.

(This is not some revelation to which I've belatedly come; this is the same argument I was making 15 years ago. Re-reading that discussion, I think The FAC process – like all our other allegedly broken processes—was designed by and for people with an expectation that they'd have an in-depth knowledge of the policies involved. However, there are some people at FAC who couple a strict "rules are there to be enforced" mentality with a lack of understanding of exactly what those rules say and what the legitimate reasons for disregarding them are … at FA level, so many people are involved that it's very likely that at least one "despite having a 25-1 aspect ratio there's no justification for forcing this image width" or "this book is not in my local library, therefore it is not a reliable source" opposer will latch onto any given candidate … it's an unpleasant experience for anyone having their work ripped to shreds for no good reason, and to a newcomer who's not familiar with the personalities involved they have no way of knowing which of the opposes are valid concerns and which are petty nitpicking is just as true now as it was then. All Wikipedia's assessment processes have spent so many years accruing pre-emptive measures against potential failure points, that they're losing sight of their original purpose. This isn't unique to article assessment processes—the same "we need to look out for any potential problem even if there's no indication that in this case it's actually a problem" issue affects our processes for assessing other editors such as RFA, and our processes for assessing other processes such as RFC, in just the same way.) ‑ Iridescent 05:32, 6 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@SandyGeorgia: Last request to strike your misquote/disparaging remark. Buffs (talk) 18:15, 9 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Which remark is that ? If you are referring to "they expressed early on not knowing how to establish reliability of a source", here are some diffs. But this does not belong on Iri's talk, so if you want to further pursue it, please do so at my talk. (It might be a good strategy to avail yourself of the help of those who offer it to you.) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:17, 9 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

22:17 24 July equates reliability with accuracy while not addressing reliability (eg, "brazosgenealogy.org Do you consider this unreliable? All the facts I see are accurate.")
09:22 4 Jan, equates reliability with accuracy, and states that the source "is not listed as an unreliable website anywhere in Wikipedia". Neither of these are final determining factors in establishing reliability.
01:55 5 Jan Still equating accuracy of text with reliability, not demonstrating knowledge of how to establish reliability beyond that separate fact ("The reliability of largest.org wasn't challenged in any way until November and only then it only vaguely said there were 'issues with reliability'...I can't possibly address that sort of vague 'issue'; the information seems to be accurate as well.")
04:24 9 Jan After multiple requests over many months to establish reliability of largest.org, someone who has previously written FAs brings the article to FAC with ... still ... largest.org as a source, still not evidencing knowledge of how reliable sources are determined, how to establish a source as reliable, and still equating reliability with accuracy. Same for "GenomeWeb appears to be a viable independent news agency with no specific reason to distrust it (though I may indeed be wrong). What's wrong with this source? How is it used inappropriately in this article?" And, wants to use a dubious source in an FA: "biography.com is listed as a source of frequent debate, but there is nothing concrete that states it is not a reliable source. What facts does it cite in this article that even the least bit contentious or inaccurate?"
01:28 11 Jan In response to all of the above, "It would be helpful if you point out what makes a source a "high-quality reliable source" in your eyes. I see no such definition."
00:40 13 Jan Still asking same questions.
20:34 13 Jan Six months after reliability concerns were first raised, asks at WT:FAC how to determine reliability, and still failing to establish reliability of sources used: "How would it be best to demonstrate that a source has such a reputation for accuracy?" "How can I possibly prove it's an accurate and a reliable source."

Summary: not knowing how to establish reliability of sources, in spite of having several FAs, and which continues for months at both FAC and FAR, and FAC and FAR talk, and in response to at least four different reviewers. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:22, 9 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

"this does not belong on Iri's talk...[here's 6 examples encompassing half a page, but don't respond]"

Asking you for clarification as to what you personally deem to be a reliable/unreliable source is not synonymous with "Duuuuuuhhh, I dunno what a ree-lie-uble sorce is". Usually, if something is unreliable, you can usually point to what makes it unreliable, nominally, what is inaccurate about their statements/claims or that they have a history of unverifiable claims. If a source's claims are accurate, they are at least reliable for those claims (by definition). Example: Facebook/Twitter are not generally reliable, but they are reliable for statements made by individuals/entities "On [date], XYZ stated on Twitter/Facebook '[quote]'". I contend that largest.org (a publication with an editorial board and published journalistic standards that are followed), GenomeWeb (another publication with an editorial board and published journalistic standards that are followed), and brazosgenealogy.org (a recommended resource by the National Genealogical Society, Family History Daily, The Frugal Genealogist's Guide, Ancestral Findings, Education World and other genealogical channels) are certainly reliable enough for the facts stated in the article. Biography.com is on the list of perennial sources (sources that are routinely debated for reliability) as "there isn't consensus". Arguing that it shouldn't be used as a matter of fact is simply substituting your personal preferences of what sources are reliable with what the WP community as a whole has discussed (in effect, you're saying that your opinion trumps everyone else's); as such, it's inappropriate. Reasonable people can disagree with what sources are reliable. That doesn't mean I've stated "I'm incapable of figuring out what a reliable source is"

It might be a good strategy to avail yourself of the help of those who offer it to you. I've literally begged you for help and you've adamantly refused. I've asked at least a dozen people for help. Iridescent was the only one kind enough to reply...and your response was effectively "that's not enough". Why the hell would anyone help if FAC are just going to poo-poo every attempt? Why would anyone bother to seek help or give help if you are only going to hound them with every request for assistance.

[we get] very little readership in return. Perhaps it's because you're being way too bureaucratic and unreasonable in your standards to the point that people don't believe the effort for FA is warranted. One reviewer of the Texas A&M article stated FA was synonymous with perfection and anything short of that shouldn't be FA. You want pages that are more-viewed? A&M was at nearly a million views last year...but you junked it rather than review it.

BUT EVEN AFTER ALL OF THAT you've decided to come back and disparage me personally over your issues with multiple sources that are no longer in the article! Of course, you wouldn't know that because you've stated I haven't looked to see if those...issues were corrected (and don't plan to). If you aren't going to bother to look at the article and you won't review it and you're going to refrain from further reviews, I see little to conclude other than that your entire intent is to inject disparaging remarks about me personally and/or discourage reviews. Again, I ask you to retract/strike your baseless remarks; I never made such a claim (specifically 1d and 2e). Buffs (talk) 02:16, 10 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Iri, shall I respond to this here, or would you prefer that I copy it to my own talk to continue? Not wanting to abuse of your hospitality here ... pls let me know. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:45, 10 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

It probably makes more sense to keep it here unless there's a reason not to. If it's on your own talkpage Buffs (or any potential TPW who wants to disagree with you) may feel uncomfortable doing so on your own talkpage, and if it's on some Wikipedia:space noticeboard it will potentially attract the attention of some of the more self-important Defender Of The Wiki types who can't distinguish between disagreement and genuine incivility. ‑ Iridescent 11:43, 11 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

With your permission then, will do (when not iPad typing). SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:33, 11 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Abusing of Iri's talk page (with his permission), there are three aspects of your (Buffs') response to be addressed: 1) your claim that I refuse to review the article; 2) your interpretation of what I wrote about establishing reliability of sources; and 3) why I posted in response to Iri on this page to begin with.

FAR reviews of TAMU

Buffs wrote: I've literally begged you for help and you've adamantly refused ... That's not how I see it. There are a lot of people in the FA process who hold Karanacs in high regard and are willing to go the extra mile to make sure articles that she valued are kept as FAs, and I'm one of those. But there is a limit to how many times one can revisit an article when the nominator becomes combative, REPEATEDLY HOLLERS AT REVIEWERS, and when issues that are raised are not being addressed. One of the points at which the TAMU FAR became difficult was when you entered two sections that included declarations for another editor copying in their signature. Those were removed by FAR Coord Nikkimaria with a followup reminder from FAR Coord DrKay. There are other examples where your behavior was difficult, but I'm not going to further that on Iri's talk.

I (again) acknowledge that the FAR close was very upsetting to you, which you seem to attribute at least partly to me, as you claim that I "adamantly refuse" to review. The history of reviewers revisiting the TAMU FAR is:

Sdkb reviewed and revisited in July, August, November and December.
Z1720 reviewed and revisited in August, September, October, November and December.
Hog Farm reviewed and revisited in November and December.
Other than bookkeeping edits, I reviewed and revisited on November 1, November 4, November 10, November 14, December 3, and December 20. On December 23 I stated that I would revisit after Christmas guests left. (Aside: relatives all got COVID, cancelled at last minute, so I was left with no Christmas on 25 Dec, and was able to review sooner than expected.) On 25 December, Hog Farm did a lengthy review on FAR talk followed by a declaration to Delist. When I revisited for the seventh time, I resumed from the sections where Hog Farm left off. It is true that I did not re-review what Hog Farm had already reviewed; I instead reviewed several other sections, and found more of same.
On a seventh revisit, five months in to the FAR, it's time to call it. I don't find that your statement about literally begging me to review reflects the reality of the amount of review this article got at FAR.

Establishing reliability of sources

Please take a look at this section of Ealdgyth's suggestions about how to respond (and how not to respond) to the "what makes this reliable" query. Being asked "what makes this source reliable" is a commonplace query at FAC, FAR and content review processes; the question invites the nominator to establish the reliability of a source. If you want to use a questionable source in a Featured article, it's up to you to put forward your best argument about why the source is reliable. You never did that; you instead stated repeatedly that sources were "accurate", and gave little else to establish reliability. From your subsequent responses here, I am sensing for the fist time that there is a disconnect between what I am writing and what you are interpreting, I wrote: they expressed early on not knowing how to establish reliability of a source. You respond with" ... not synonymous with "Duuuuuuhhh, I dunno what a ree-lie-uble sorce is" and doesn't mean I've stated "I'm incapable of figuring out what a reliable source is" I never said you don't know what a reliable source is; what I am saying is that you failed to answer the queries on FAC or FAR in a way that established that the sources were reliable. Oddly ... for the first time since October ... you have done some of that (only partial, but a start at least) here on Iri's talk, in the second paragraph of your post of 02:16, 10 March 2022. That's the first time I have seen you address the question of how to go about establishing the reliability of a source. I stand by what I wrote; I feel badly that you interpreted it differently, and I hope that reading Ealdgyth's essay will help you understand what one assumes that repeat FA nominators already know, and how you should address such queries in the future.

Why I responded to Iri

Now speaking of disparaging remarks (along with a busted AGF-ometer), you wrote above: ... I see little to conclude other than that your entire intent is to inject disparaging remarks about me personally .... I responded to Iri here not only because we have illuminating discussions on his page, but more to point out that since his intent was to help you, if he was not aware of the broader problems, and if you did only what he said but had not corrected the other issues, then you would have another rough go at a new FAC. That was an attempt to help Iri help you. And to discuss with Iri that a growing problem at FAC is its failure to examine source-to-text integrity, as reviewers increasingly look only at prose.

Since you now have two of the four FAC Coords recused from the nomination, it might be wise to start seeing some good faith in attempts to help you achieve a Featured article. A little less combativeness would not be remiss. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:38, 11 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

At this point, it very much does not feel like you are trying to help. It feels like you are re-hashing old arguments with your own personal spin to make your actions look better while taking jabs at me personally. AGF has long since passed with you (not everyone else, just you). None of these remarks pertain to Iri's review but are disparaging comments implying I'm not intelligent enough to understand:

One of the points at which the TAMU FAR became difficult was when you... This has nothing to do with Iri's review whatsoever, but you sure as hell seem to want to rehash it for no good reason. How exactly am I supposed to AGF in conversations with you when you keep bringing up past disagreements slanting them to make me look bad? Read the link. I clearly marked where such notes came from and noted they were a summary of what was above. There was no attempt at deception.
I hope that reading Ealdgyth's essay will help you understand what one assumes that repeat FA nominators already know... reads as "You should already know this" while looking down your nose at me.
I never said you don't know what a reliable source is You're splitting hairs. You stated "Buffs does need a mentor (they expressed early on not knowing how to establish reliability of a source)....
There are other examples where your behavior was difficult, but I'm not going to further that on Iri's talk. Hasn't stopped you thus far. To state that there are "lots of other problems" (paraphrasing) without citing them is a baseless claim and a purely disparaging remark designed to denigrate me/my credibility.
I don't find that your statement about literally begging me to review reflects the reality of the amount of review this article got at FAR. When I claim you didn't review, I'm referring to you specifically, not everyone else. When I say "you didn't do the work you said you would" and get a reply of "lots of people did lots of work", it demonstrates clear obfuscation on your part.
That was an attempt to help Iri help you. I don't want/need your help. Iri is perfectly capable of handling himself. I have repeatedly asked you to stop butting in and you've said you'd leave me alone. Yet here you are...again...

To claim that you reviewed it several times is more than a little misleading. Your own cited examples show no actual full review (as promised multiple times)...

1 Nov: Some bits of OldAg's concerns will be an "FA hangup" for me when I do my read-through (which I won't start until others like Z1720 indicate they are ready)...Let me know when some of OldAg's commentary has been completed, along with Z1720's work, and I will read through.
4 Nov: I will revisit the article thoroughly once all issues raised have been addressed (Note that the issues he refers to here that were allegedly unaddressed from 24 July were addressed less than 4 hours later). If she'd stated what issues she had with them or perhaps clarified that they weren't addressed to her satisfaction, perhaps we could have avoided weeks of back & forth...
10 Nov: Still not a review just complaining that I haven't done anything for a week (I was out of town from 6-12 Nov on a business trip).
14 Nov: not a review
3 Dec: a limited review of a few things
20 Dec you finally clarified that you had no intention of doing your review until everything was done so I addressed the sourcing.

When you allegedly got around to a review after 5 months, you reviewed two things, exaggerated issues ("By the way, some numbers have commas, others don’t, eg 1000 compared to 1,000"...there was ONE comma missing, not "commas". You made it sound like it was a widespread issue), stopped immediately, and swiftly declared it unfit (hardly the promised "thorough" review/read-through). Then you fast-tracked it to delist when you knew a lot of people wouldn't be around. Like a fool, I believed you when you reassured me at each step of the way that this was procedural and you wouldn't nominate it for deletion while changes were still being made. You blew any good faith remaining right there.

Continuing to claim "issues that are raised are not being addressed" is absurd and grossly misleading. I addressed them rapidly, in most cases within 24 hours. You keep using that word as if it isn't ambiguous. "Addressed" can mean "gave a response" and/or "changed/fixed". In most cases, it was both, but I adjusted or gave my rationale for keeping them as-is for every instance. You did not reply to those remarks or explain how I was in error until December. If you're going to be hyper nitpicky about sources & text (to the point of absurdity), you need to be far more precise in your language. You are expecting a level of perfection/precision even you can't obtain.

From this point on, reply to your heart's content. I have no intention of listening to any more of your condescending "advice". Iri, I apologize for taking up your talk page. If you have any further input or could spare time to review the aforementioned alleged sourcing concerns that somehow still exist even though they've been removed, it would be appreciated. Buffs (talk) 00:06, 12 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

No interest in continuing to reply; you asked me to strike a "disparaging" remark, and this is what it took to sort out what you meant, what you wanted struck, or what/why you interpret as "disparaging". I responded here at your insistence that I had made a "disparaging" remark. And when I offer an explanation (that I may have missed an opportunity earlier to explain what was expected in terms of establishing the reliability of a source, as I didn't think you needed for someone to explain what Ealdgyth's essay says, as I assumed you were already familiar), then I'm "looking down my nose". And so it goes. Good luck with your FAC. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 00:40, 12 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

No interest in continuing to reply...[replies anyway] No explanation was necessary. Just strike your unnecessary remark, say "sorry", and move on. Instead, you took your time to lecture/belittle me when I asked for help as you requested. This isn't helpful. Buffs (talk) 15:46, 25 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you SO much for your feedback and you're SO right.

Indeed, it was published in 1975...probably an issue with Aggie math... Buffs (talk) 16:27, 8 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

It sounds like the FAC process has room for yet another layer of bureaucracy: a policy obsessive whose role is to correct the reviewers' incorrect or exaggerated claims of policy/guideline violations. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:34, 8 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Unfortunately, yes. I've increasingly taken on that role (as have others), but I'm not nearly obsessive enough. Johnbod (talk) 19:44, 8 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Back in the old days, the FA delegates used to perform the task of slapping down inappropriate opposition. This is another "no right answer" area—one could certainly make the case that the present-day practice of the delegates trying to stay out of the reviews is the lesser of two evils. (To someone not intimately familiar with the background to a given case, it can easily be mistaken for favoritism when one sees an article by an established editor waved through despite apparently ignoring the MOS, while an article by a new editor gets nitpicked to shreds.) ‑ Iridescent 20:08, 8 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Problems at FAC

Iri, glad you're back. There's a rather big flaw in your logic. The bloat at FAC (which has been going on since about 2017) is not at all related to MOS or policy-obsessiveness. (In fact, MOS is rarely even reviewed for these days.) It is almost all prose nitpicking (at a level that should not be present at FAC), and the page size is almost all a direct consequence of four things: a) the absence of Opposes, as making friends seems to be a priority, b) the absence of User:Tony1 and other strict prose reviewers, who quickly shut down deficient prose, combined with c) the absence of User:Ealdgyth's strict source reviewing, and d) the decline of WP:PR, and the acceptance of FAC as a replacement for peer review. It is the nitpicking of prose only that has bloated the page, while reviewers fail to look at sources and fail to oppose early on the truly deficient. Take a look at the amount of work it took to bring Socrates Nelson to standard when all it got at FAC was prose nitpicks, and in fact it contained numerous false statements, along with marginal prose when it was promoted. Now, you may argue that Nelson is long dead and the numerous and blatant inaccuracies weren't harming anyone, but what happens when the same blatant inaccuracies slip through in an article where it matters, eg a BLP? If no one is checking sourcing, that's where we end up, and big red flags at Nelson were not even checked. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:11, 8 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The bloat goes back to the earliest days (have a look at FAC circa 2005!)—it's more that there was a relatively brief hiatus between 2009-2013 when the delegates were more willing to quickfail so the list got culled faster. The lack of people able and willing to do in depth source reviews is probably inevitable—the articles are longer and better sourced than they used to be, so what used to be a case of checking 20-ish sources most of which were online is now a case of checking 100+ sources most of which are paywalled or in obscure books (the articles sourced to easy-to-find books have already been written).

As I've said previously, I think FA/GA (and the stub–start–C–B–GA–A–FA scale more generally) are no longer fit for purpose in Wikipedia, and we should seriously consider replacing GA and FA with a more general "well-written and tells you everything a reasonable reader would want to know" and "no obvious way this could be improved". The days when we were selecting material worthy of being included in the eventual Print Wikipedia are well and truly behind us; as long as we're taking all reasonable efforts (as opposed to every conceivable effort) not to be misleading and to make it verifiable where information has come from, I don't think perfection is something for which we should still be aiming when it comes to either prose or sourcing. We have 6,464,308 articles; we should start accepting that on even the best-researched article problems are going to occasionally sneak in, and the focus should be on correcting them rather than trying to prevent them. ‑ Iridescent 20:22, 8 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

It's no secret I've cut back my time at FAC - partly it was moving but partly it's that I think my time is better spent at GA... at least trying to get things to a "decent enough" level rather than the increasingly nit-picky-prose-but-no-worries-about-sourcing attitude at FAC. GA doesn't eat my time to the extent that a contentious FAC on a pop culture figure/band/etc will. I just don't review GANs on things I don't want to deal with, but there is plenty to look at and help newcomers improve ... Ealdgyth (talk) 21:19, 8 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I can't exactly disagree with either of you that FAs and GAs seem to be converging to the same place. Which is not a high place. But I can still regret that happening. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:22, 8 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not saying I particularly like the way things are going, but equally I don't think the existing FA and GA processes have scaled very well, so the sensible thing to do is to look at how best to decide what we mean by 'quality' and how we assess it. There's no point having a process that enforces the highest standards if it becomes so cumbersome nobody bothers participating in it and/or nominating to it any more, and present-day FAC is a hot mess of bureaucracy and jargon.

The article assessment processes haven't really changed in the past ten years, and it's the fact that they haven't changed that's unusual; to re-bang a drum I've banged before, our standards were never intended to be set in stone. At one point this was a Featured Article, while back in 2006 the FAC process looked like this and was an RFA-style mess of "support, looks OK to me" mutual back-scratching. Since Wikipedia 2022 has a much broader scope and wider reach than Wikipedia 2012 let alone Wikipedia 2002, I don't think it's unreasonable to ask whether FAC and GAN are still serving their intended purpose.

As an obvious example that springs to mind, at all levels of the stub–start–C–B–GA–A–FA scale we review articles against the same set of standards (with the partial exception of the extra safeguards for medical articles and BLPs) even though as Wikipedia grows the notion of what's appropriate for a standalone article has hugely widened (and as more sources become digitized, it becomes easier to write longer articles on ultra-niche topics). At the lower levels that's not such an issue—a one-line stub is a one-line stub whatever the subject matter—but it means that at FA level we're treating pages like Paper Mario: Color Splash and 1994–95 Gillingham F.C. season as if we were reviewing submissions to the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. I couldn't really blame any potential reviewer for thinking "checking the sources, prose, consistency of internal formatting, and compliance with whatever the arbitrary style guidelines happen to say this week, for an article that gets 500 readers per year, isn't a sensible use of my time". (I'm not singling that article out, it was just chosen at random from the current FAC page to show that my comments about low pageviews aren't hyperbole. I've certainly written my share of low-traffic pages as well.) ‑ Iridescent 14:14, 9 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Each time you bring up this issue, I scratch my head over how to craft a new proposal or scheme that would address this. I have long defended short and niche articles at FAC, and maybe that is part of the problem. Perhaps they shouldn't be FAs at all, and I've been making the wrong arguments all these years. We are increasingly seeing 1,500-word FACs, by nominators in the pursuit of Wikicup points, and each one of those is taking a disproportionate share of reviewer resources, and for very little readership in return.

This data about readership at FAC v FAR may interest you (a response to Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2022-01-30/WikiProject report).

Just as Ealdgyth has found her reviewing time is not best used at FAC, I am finding I can work on more higher-impact articles at FAR than those that appear at FAC, which is a better use of my time than correcting factual inaccuracies that cleared FAC at Socrates Nelson or reviewing tiny articles at FAC with prose and sourcing problems, that should be escorted quickly to Peer Review. I try to review FACs for those editors who have selflessly helped save old stars at FAR, or for articles requiring Spanish or that are within my topic area, but other than that, I have well and given up, as there seem to be no limit to how long and hopeless a FAC will get before it is shut down. Without Ealdgyth's enforcement of sourcing standards at FAC, the star has lost meaning (FAR at least is restoring some, and the FAR Coords don't let one through until it's done). And it now appears that the quality of the star was dependent on a limited number of key editors, so today, what is the difference between an FA and GA?

But absent Mally and Gguy, I don't see how a GA-type process is the solution either. Remember their sweeps? What does GA mean? Unless it has a top-notch reviewer like Ealdgyth, it's just reward culture points. I have always recognized your concern, but have never seen a clear path for addressing it. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:52, 9 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I can think of a few ways it could be done if there were a will. An obvious one that springs to mind is using a beefed-up version of the WP:Cite Unseen script, possibly in conjunction with some variant of {{ref supports2}}, to highlight potentially problematically-sourced statements in the article itself so readers are immediately aware of which parts of an article to treat with caution. (We've used {{citation needed}} for years; readers and editors are already familiar with the concept of flagging unsourced material, this would just roll it out to cover poorly-sourced material as well and partially automate the process.) It would need some kind of manual override—even the most dubious sources are sometimes legitimately used, and even normally-watertight sources can be problematic when used to cite some things—but it wouldn't be insurmountable.

It would be a monumental effort to retroactively apply this, or any other process that involves changing the wikicode, to Wikipedia's existing articles, but if someone were to write the script we could test it on a limited subset (new FA candidates on medical topics flagged as high-importance, say) and see if it works. If it does work we could then gradually work backwards, and make it a condition for new nominations at GA and FA, in the same way we gradually replaced inline parenthetical referencing with the separate reference section. The normal (and entirely valid) argument against code based on the {{ref supports}} structure is that it makes the Wikitext a mess, but as we approach the point where VisualEditor is actually usable that will become less of an issue.

(I'm at least in part serious here: if you want ideas on how to improve assessment processes you could do worse than ask for suggestions at Wikipediocracy et al. Given the number of people who dedicate hours of their time year-after-year to bitching about how unreliable Wikipedia's existing processes for maintaining accuracy and prose quality are—and given that even the most vitriolic hater presumably concedes that we've passed the point where "just close it down and start again" is a viable option—one would like to think that they've had at least some thoughts on how those processes could be improved.) ‑ Iridescent 07:39, 10 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Interesting discussion here!

At the time of writing WP:FAC clocks in at 101,870 words, or to put it another way the first page people taking a tentative step into the FA process see is slightly longer than To Kill a Mockingbird. This made me lol. An obvious step it points to is to not list out every single FAC on the main page. We would never do that for e.g. AfD, so we need to recognize the scale at FAC, too.

On arduousness of process/use of time, I think that FA is necessarily an arduous process—there's no easy shortcut to affirming that a page comprehensively covers a topic at a professional level. That said, I absolutely agree it's a poor use of our time to be focusing on niche topics. A possible remedy could be to incentivize bigger FAs by listing them first at FAC or making it easier to get them to the Main Page.

I think you make a great point about the notion of what's appropriate for a standalone article has hugely widened. This is a less-discussed manifestation of the ever-present deletionism/inclusionism debate: even as our sourcing standards get tighter, if there are more easily accessible sources online, our topic standards may be lowering. When I look at the average length of an Encyclopedia Britannica article vs. one of ours, it's clear just how much more detail we expect. For some major topics, that's a good thing, but when the topic is The Bus Uncle or Amastra subsoror, I think an ideal encyclopedia would have an entry a paragraph long. SandyGeorgia mentions above 1500-word FACs, but that only goes so far: there's no way to get a paragraph-long entry past FAC, so what do we do for topics like that? FA sets the standard for what Wikipedia should be, so it's a problem when there's a giant group of articles that could never pass FA (because sourcing is too weak) or could only pass by going into excessive detail.

On {{ref supports2}}, that's one of those things where, if we'd thought of it in 2001 and built it into the software early, we'd be so much better off. I agree it'd be a huge lift to implement it now, but also that the advancement of VisualEditor is gradually opening up possibilities for it. Do we have any FAs that use it throughout to showcase as a test? That'd be very worthwhile, since we can't discover the kinks with that system until we experiment with it. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 00:45, 12 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Somewhere in ancient history I seem to remember a proposal that would create a separate process for short FAs; I could be misremembering. At this point, anyway, such a thing would never gain consensus as there are too many FA Frequent Flyers who are in it for WP:WIKICUP, and demand their niche short FAs so they can earn as many imaginary internet points for a 1,500-word article as if they had written the History of the British Empire.

If problems aren't correctly diagnosed, effective solutions are not likely. Iri mentions somewhere above that people aren't nominating. No, the nominations keep coming; it's the reviewers that, for various reasons, stopped coming or were chased off. And when those reviewers are as varied as from Ealdgyth, to Fowler&fowler, to SlimVirgin and SandyGeorgia, to Tony1, that says something. As good prose and sourcing reviews dropped, and reviewers became scarce, more and more FAs were promoted on a slim three Supports, so both prose and quality are affected. The volume at FAC is not (as is often portrayed) MOS-obsessive nit-picking; it's ridiculous line-by-line looking at prose that belongs at peer review because ill-prepared FACs are allowed to languish. Everybody wants everybody to like them, so they will support each other FACs, as the FA process goes into the dustbin with increasingly lower pageviews at TFA. When FAC was processing triple the number of FACs it now pushes, the page was not stalled because ill-prepared FACs were shut down right away, or once a FAC became a peer review, it was shut down. (You can also see in that data the peak at 2017, when the Oppose button was lost and anything that came to FAC got a few prose nitpicks and up the line it went, often buddies supporting buddies.) And FAC delegates considered it "their job" to know what an independent review was so we didn't end up with buddies pushing their buddies FACs up the line in a quid-pro-quo. These days, a Support is a support, even if it is not an independent, third-party review. FAC is not stalled today by volume; it's stalled by apathy and affected by quid-pro-quo.

If I am understanding the ref supports proposal, it won't solve most problems. First, we've got just this month two FACs that I know of that were sailing (or did sail) through with blatant false statements that had refs attached to them, but the refs said no such thing. How will ref supports stop that from happening? That is, if reviewers aren't checking source-to-text integrity, how will ref supports address that? And the main problem one sees at FAR is that article simply become inaccurate over time if they aren't constantly maintained; how will ref supports address that? I don't think it solves either of these problems, which are substantial.

I started a proposal a few years ago to convert FAC to a two-stage process like FAR (which works quite well), with the idea that you didn't get to the second stage without a source review. That, of course, failed because there are only so many Ealdgyths and Nikkimarias, and no one wants to do the real work.

And in another absurdity clogging the page, have a look at this. For some reason, the current crop of FAC regulars, don't seem to understand what talk pages are or how to use them; that's why FAC is clogged. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 01:50, 12 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Replies, and an ease-of-scrolling break

@Sdkb: Giving some kind of priority to "bigger topics" wouldn't be workable in any way that I can think of. What makes an article "important" is whether it contains the information you were looking for in that particular case, not whether it gets a particular average number of daily pageviews, is of a minimum length, and especially not is someone has arbitrarily decided that it's "high importance" and slapped a tag on it to indicate as such. As I've said many times, I think the whole concept of "core topic" is fundamentally misguided when it comes to Wikipedia—to me, our most important task is to provide information that readers can't easily find elsewhere. As such the purported "vital articles"—almost all of which are topics which readers would have no trouble finding quality coverage of if Wikipedia disappeared tomorrow—are to me our lowest priority.

Likewise, I don't feel any special treatment should be given to longer articles. I've argued in the past that we should have a ruthlessly-enforced minimum length requirement for a stand-alone article and if a topic fails the "is it possible to write 500 or 1000 words specifically about this topic, not including background and fluff?" test it should only be covered as an entry in a longer list, and I stand by that. What I don't believe is that such a process should be attached to quality assessment; if an article is a valid topic to be covered then it's a valid topic.

I also disagree with you that there's a particularly strong relationship between "article length" and "nicheness of topic". The summary style model means that articles on big topics are quite often shorter than the corresponding articles on niche topics, since when it comes to big-sweep articles we actively encourage authors to split off material into separate subpages. 2018 World Snooker Championship, The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. and Ceilings of the Natural History Museum, London—all topics about as niche as one can get—are all longer than Monarchy of the United Kingdom, History of biology or Association football, and that isn't a problem.

There have been a couple of experiments with the {{ref supports}} template, but not on anything substantive; to the best of my knowledge the only article that uses it throughout is the very short Psychical school. As the template stands, it wouldn't be a sensible use of anyone's time adding it in to existing articles. It works by "hover your mouse pointer over the reference to see what it supports"; not only does no reader know to do this on the handful of articles on which it's in use, but the recent uptick in mobile readership means that more than half our readers can't see the output even if they knew it was there. What I'm talking about is actively highlighting "this particular statement is sourced to a potentially unreliable source" in the article text to allow readers to approach it with caution. (It's not an alien concept—the {{cspan}} template for actively highlighting unsourced statements is in use on around 3000 pages.)

@SandyGeorgia, I'm not convinced that more and more FAs were promoted on a slim three Supports or articles being waved through without source reviews are necessarily an indication of a problem. In a lot of these cases, the articles in question form part of a series of articles on related topics, all by the same author or group of authors and all using the same set of sources. When you see (e.g.) an article by Casliber on a banksia species, or an article by Wehwalt on a coin, being apparently waved through without a full source review, it's not shoddy standards or an old-boys club in action; it's simply recognition that it's not a sensible use of time re-checking sources that have already been repeatedly checked.

Increasingly lower pageviews at TFA is an artefact of the changing nature of the internet, not of declining standards at FAC. As more and more readers navigate direct to articles from search results or from direct links on other websites or in social media posts, fewer people see the main page so fewer people see the TFA. (Think about it; article quality can't have any significant impact on the TFA's readership, since by the time readers see the article's poor quality they've already clicked on it and thus counted as a pageview.) What's more of an issue is that the art of writing an engaging blurb is dying out so readers don't consider it a good use of their time to click the link—if you write an interesting blurb that makes the reader want to know more, you still see a spike in pageviews as large as any we saw in the 'golden age' on even the most niche of topics.

I'm also singularly unconvinced that there's any significant negative correlation between "niche topic" and "number of views it gets at TFA". If one looks at Wikipedia:Today's featured article/Most viewed and disregard the 'current events' and 'major anniversaries' ones that would have had a viewspike whether they'd been TFA or not, there are some impressively niche topics there. (I hold the all-time record for "author of the most articles to appear on the WP:TFAMOSTVIEWED list"; I'm not some rando offering opinions on a topic about which I know nothing.)

I don't see the refsupports proposal as a universal panacea, and I agree it wouldn't address those instances when a legitimate reference is used but it doesn't say what it's claimed to say. I see it as a stepping stone on the route to our recognizing that at our current size we're not maintainable, and that absent a major reduction in the number of articles (my prefered option but one for which there's no will), Wikipedia is eventually going to need to move to the Facebook model of reactively patrolling problems as they're flagged rather than actively trying to search for all the problems, and on increasingly relying on scripts and algorithms to flag potential issues even though that will mean some false positives and some issues slipping through un-noticed. At the time of writing English Wikipedia has:

55,396,306 pages in total
6,466,815 mainspace articles
39,854 active editors by the loosest "five edits in the past month" definition
5262 active editors by the "100 edits in the past month" definition
3818 active editors by the probably most relevant "non-bots with 100 edits in the past month to content-related pages" definition
458 active administrators (by the very loose "30 edits in the past 60 days" definition; the number who are genuinely active is even lower).

These numbers aren't sustainable as the total size of the wiki continues to grow, particularly since we're likely to see a small but measurable drop in the number of active editors and a larger drop in the number of admins once UCoC is imposed. If we don't start addressing the fact that the processes of the 2000s aren't viable in the 2020s, we're just going to head into a spiral of a limited number of people being expected to do ever more work, burning out and resigning, thus leaving even fewer people to do even more work. ‑ Iridescent 06:12, 13 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Re the Facebook model, that would effectively be the death of Wikipedia as we know it—by the time a reader puts in the effort to flag a problem and wait for it to be addressed, it's already been seen by enough others to do damage to our reputation. That would be an unfortunate outcome. I'm curious, if you didn't have to worry about consensus, how would you have us go about trying to implement a major reduction in the number of articles? {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 06:57, 13 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I alluded to it already; a minimum length and a mass merging of articles that don't meet that length requirement into long list-type articles (so 18th century English cricketers instead of Gilbert East, William Palmer, Jack Small et al). Nothing of value would be lost since the information would all still be there, but it would drastically reduce the number of obscure unmaintained articles and would arguably be of more value to readers than separate pages since it would put the subjects into a broader context. There's a proof-of-concept page of mine at Infrastructure of the Brill Tramway if you want a concrete example of the kind of thing I have in mind. ‑ Iridescent 07:06, 13 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I think that approach could work in many situations, e.g. upmerge Amastra subsoror to Amastra. But how would you upmerge The Bus Uncle? Or something like Mikko (restaurant)? Readers of those articles aren't particularly likely to be interested in other parts of Hong Kong internet culture or other D.C. restaurants, and not having a dedicated page would likely be quite bad for Google rankings. Another question: Would it actually meaningfully reduce the maintenance burden to have fewer longer articles rather than more shorter articles? {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 07:24, 13 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I wouldn't upmerge The Bus Uncle, as that's long enough to justify a stand-alone article, but hypothetically I'd probably have Notable 2006 YouTube videos as the parent article with a very brief synopsis of TBU and a {{main}} link, but fully merging in (e.g.) Kiwi!, Little Superstar, Lo que tú Quieras Oír etc unless and until standalone viable articles are written on them. Mikko (restaurant) I'm singularly unconvinced is actually a legitimate topic given that as far as I can see it's 'sourced' solely to five press releases, but if forced to keep it I'd probably merge—along with a bunch of others—to a single Restaurants in Washington, D.C. article. (I haven't checked, but I wouldn't be surprised if the only restaurant in DC which actually warrants its own stand-alone article is Comet Ping Pong, and that genuinely is a sui generis topic.)

Sticking with Infrastructure of the Brill Tramway just because it's one I know, compare the differing treatment given to Quainton Road, which is a genuinely complicated topic in its own right and thus gets a brief synopsis and a link to a full-length article; Church Siding which was literally just a heap of mud at which trains would stop and about which it's impossible to say more than a hundred words, and as such doesn't get a stand-alone article as it would serve no useful purpose; and Westcott which currently has a standalone article owing to the "these all need their own page!" hardliners but where there's nothing of any great interest to say and as such the reader would actually be better served by being redirected to the appropriate part of this list, where they can read about it in context and thus see how it fits in to a broader picture.

I frankly couldn't give a damn about Google rankings; our job is to cover these things, not to help marketing departments wih their SEO techniques. Google probably monitor what we do more closely than the WMF do themselves, and their business model relies on users consistently finding what they want since it costs nothing more than a couple of mouse clicks to change default search engine. If any change we made were actually adversely affecting their user experience, PageRank would be amended to take account of that change in about twelve minutes.

Yes, it would definitely meaningfully reduce the maintenance burden. If twenty people each write about a DC restaurant, that's twenty articles each on one person's watchlist, and if that person happens to leave, to lose interest in that particular topic, or just not check their watchlist on a particular day, then vandalism or spam doesn't get reverted and the page gradually gets more and more out-of-date. Under my proposed model, the same twenty people each writing about a DC restaurant will result in one page which is on twenty watchlists; mistakes, vandalism and spam are much more likely to be spotted and reverted, entries going out-of-date likewise, and readers are more likely to find related topics about which they might be interested. (Unrelated to maintenance, but one long article rather than 20 short ones also means the potential for Featured Article, Featured List or DYK, meaning hyperniche topics that would never ordinarily make it to the main page get their moment in the sun.) ‑ Iridescent 14:57, 13 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure the "twenty articles on one person's watchlist -> one article on twenty people's watchlist" effect is quite that dramatic, actually. When creating an article, you automatically get the article on your watchlist unless you explicitly choose not to, whereas when adding a section to an existing article you have to explicitly opt in. And if you are only interested in a small section of a much longer article, you very well might decide not to bother. (Additionally, IPs can add sections to existing articles but do not have watchlists). On the other hand, if you are interested enough in a particular topic to create an article on one aspect of it, and are an active enough wikipedian that you actually use your watchlist, you probably add a bunch of relevant articles which you didn't create, and aren't even necessarily a substantial editor of.
On the other hand, there's an additional maintenance benefit from not having to include all of the background and explanatory material multiple times – if we have (to take an example from my own pet topic) a stub on every single fragment of a poem by Sappho included in the standard edition, for instance, we have to explain what a Sapphic stanza is fifty times over, and there are fifty opportunities to get that definition wrong, or for someone to come by later and introduce errors either deliberately or through well-meaning incompetence. If we just have Poetry of Sappho plus articles on the few unquestionably notable poems which have been the subject of multiple scholarly papers and can have 1,000 word articles written on them without significant difficulty, we only have to write that same explanation half a dozen times. Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 15:39, 13 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Caeciliusinhorto, for your Sapphic stanza example, one possible solution is {{Excerpt}}s, which I think should be a lot more widely used than they are. Their biggest benefit is that allow reused information to be stored centrally, reducing the maintenance burden. The main drawback is that it's currently fairly difficult to make slight tweaks to them between articles (e.g. when excerpting a lead, include references in the destination but not the original), and because editors aren't familiar with them yet they often destroy things like inclusion control. I'm curious what you, Iri, or others here think about their viability. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 17:18, 13 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I hate {{Excerpt}} and think it should be made to not work in mainspace. I think anyone who uses it deserves that their articles get messed up when someone improves the article they are excerpting from (and then it is difficult to figure out what went wrong). In article space, you should be able to edit a page without having to worry about messing up others. (Anything difficult to edit or with the option to mess up other pages should be in template space; there are some recent trends to use {{excerpt}} to re-use tables between articles instead of just using templates). —Kusma (talk) 18:10, 13 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I am aware of the existence of {{Excerpt}}, but I've never used it. I suspect the requirement to excerpt whole sections significantly limits its utility; the bits which are duplicated between articles in my experience often do not neatly fit into a single easily excerptable section. I'd also worry about having to remember to make sure that when changing an excerpted section, it still makes sense everywhere the relevant {{excerpt}} can be found. And it's another extra complication in the wikitext, which as someone from the write-all-the-markup-by-hand school doesn't feel super appealing. Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 19:12, 13 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I'm probably in the same camp as the two above me; {{excerpt}} is nice in theory, but in practice it causes more issues than it solves. Even for something like an untranslated quotation where the text itself has no potential to change, there's still the possibility that someone will change the font, highlight a key phrase etc in the 'original' which will subsequently have a knock-on effect on anything that excerpts that text. Even if every editor were aware of {{excerpt}} and the fact that when editing an article using it they need to check the knock-on effect on every other article excerpting it, we have to work on the assumption that it won't always happen. Wikipedia has three major editing interfaces (Wikitext, VisualEditor, AWB) plus numerous more specialist scripts, and it's nigh-on impossible to create "this section needs special treatment!!!" flags that will be visible to editors using all of them. (Just look at how many good-faith editors try to 'improve' wording that's the result of painstaking negotiation, or 'fix typos' where it's actually the correct spelling.) ‑ Iridescent 05:26, 14 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Let's see where the handy-dandy "reply tool" parks this comment. Iri, on your paragraph above directed at me, I don't disagree with you on those cases (eg Casliber). They aren't examples of what I'm talking about. (And no, I'm not going to give specific examples of where the waving through has been problematic, but one thing those examples have in common is a long series of prose nitpicks by a prose-nitpicking group of reviewers who reviewed nothing else, that resulted in FAs with still deficient prose, combined with other problems beyond prose. When I returned to FAC in about 2018 ... I think ... from a long hiatus, I saw some shocking FAs on TFA, and when I went to WP:WBFAN, I found that the same editors had accumulated up to a dozen FAs with similar deficiences! Best I could tell it was more or less a 2016 to 2019 thing going on. What is going on now is different; what gets reviewed and how it is reviewed is tied to quid-pro-quo ... something we fought to keep out of FAC for many years.) On the rest of the issues about length et al, we've been around on all of that so many times, and I still don't see how to solve it. I do know that the strength of an FA, just like the strength of GA, is dependent on the quality of the review, and it is the lack of reviewers at FAC that is the bigger problem these days, and that is impacting quality, whether of short, medium, long, niche, core or broad articles. One can waste crazy amounts of time on tiny articles, while long articles on significant topics sit there without review. Relatively easier work is rewarded, while much harder work is neglected. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:20, 13 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I think we're on the same page talking past each other, rather than disagreeing. I agree that the issue at FAC—as with so much on Wikipedia—is the unsustainable article/editor ratio leading to corners being cut. (I disagree that the problems started in 2016, or that a particularly problematic group is responsible, though. The most notorious shoddy review of them all took place in 2013 and was largely conducted by reviewers whom I assume you'd agree are correctly highly regarded; everybody can have a bad day and sometimes the bad days of multiple people unfortunately align and things slip through.)

Where I think we disagree is how to address the issue. My feeling is that as long as the number of articles keeps rising and the number of editors doesn't, no Wikipedia process is ever going to be able to go back to the days when participants had the luxury of time. Since there's no indication that we're going to see a sudden boom in recruitment and retention, if we want to maintain and improve quality we need to think about how to either drastically streamline processes to make them less time-consuming for participants, how to prioritize processes so editors don't waste their time on processes that have minimal impact, or how to bring the article-to-editor ratio (which is currently 1200-to-1 and steadily rising) down to a manageable level. ‑ Iridescent 05:26, 14 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I wonder whether the key metric is the article-to-editor ratio or the edits-to-editor ratio. mw:Neil's spreadsheet has the relevant numbers over the last several years. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:39, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Useful link, thanks. My instinct is that edits-to-editor ratio isn't going to mean much, as it will be so skewed by the impact of scripts and by people running unauthorised bots on their editor accounts. ‑ Iridescent 04:27, 16 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Intended purpose

Starting another section to pick out part of a comment above: "I don't think it's unreasonable to ask whether FAC and GAN are still serving their intended purpose". I don't think you could get consensus at WT:FAC on what the intended purpose of FAC is, or even whether it matters. There are regulars who have no interest in supplying the main page with high-quality articles, which was perhaps the clearest original "intended purpose"; and I doubt many regulars believe that any form of FAC, or of any quality process, could ever raise more than a small fraction of Wikipedia's articles to a high standard. I think the different visions of what FAC is for stem from different beliefs about how FAC can work. I believe the effort available from editors interested in quality articles is the primary fact about FAC. If that's right, we ought to figure out how to get the best results with the existing pool of editors, and their existing motivations.

That doesn't mean turning a blind eye to problems, but to pick another quote from the discussion above: "I don't think perfection is something for which we should still be aiming when it comes to either prose or sourcing. We have 6,464,308 articles; we should start accepting that on even the best-researched article problems are going to occasionally sneak in, and the focus should be on correcting them rather than trying to prevent them." I largely agree with this. Sandy and I agree on a lot re FAC, but this is where I think we differ: Sandy was most active at FAC when there was more editor effort available to do reviews, and the standards were (initially) lower. With fewer reviewers, and higher standards, the old process is impossible to replicate. Something has to give -- length of time at FAC, quality of reviews, number of supports needed to pass. I think FAC is coping pretty well with the lower resources. No doubt it can be improved, but any realistic suggestion can't rely on reviewers putting in much more work than they are now. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 01:16, 14 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

As usual, I can find little in Mike's writing with which to disagree; except one little thing, where I suspect I disagree with both Iri and Mike. I believe the reviewers would come back if a number of the conditions were different (that is, returned to what they once were). And I believe that would solve a lot of what ails FAC today. FAC has never been without problems; no Wikipedia process is, and bad FAs will always get through and always have, because FAs are only as good as their reviews. I think the things that have to give to get better reviewers are a) quicker archiving of the ill-prepared, b) no more peer review at FAC, c) call out the faulty reviews as we did in the past, d) empower the Coords to again disregard supports from reviewers with a proven poor track record, and e) encourage them to stop promoting FACs with those kinds of issues at three supports. (There is nothing that says a Coord has to promote an article at the magical three.) I believe if we did those things, FAC would begin to thrive because editors who did/do take FAs seriously would come back. But when the process is chasing off the best prose reviewers, the best source reviewers, the best all-round reviewers, why would anyone want to go there. Why would anyone work so hard on a quality article to have to sit there and watch it languish because there are no reviewers (or maybe just none that will review an article that is longer than 2,000 words)? What's the value for the writer? Clear message there when you scan down the page and see what's getting reviews and what's not, and there's no reason for that one to be sitting there, getting ignored, when it's not a specialist or technical or difficult topic. People who have limited time are not going to spend it at FAC, if that means being drawn into endless back-and-forth with nominators of ill-prepared articles, so the standards go lower and lower. This is not just a few mistakes slipping through; it is very poor prose, and rife with plainly false unverified statements. And it's not alone in that regard. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 01:37, 14 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

As you suspect, speaking as one of those former regulars who's no longer active I disagree with I believe the reviewers would come back if a number of the conditions were different (that is, returned to what they once were). "What they once were" wasn't a golden age, and I don't think recreating it would be particularly desirable even if we could—you may remember FAC as it was in 2008 as better times, but I remember it as being dominated by a small clique of schoolyard bully types who would randomly descend on nominations by people who weren't members of their gang and try to bludgeon the nominator not just out of FAC but off Wikipedia altogether. Don't forget that for every Geometry Guy or Moni3 back then, there was a Mattisse or a Tony1.

I know I've said it about four times in this thread but I'll keep repeating it as it's the fundamental issue—Wikipedia has fewer editors than it did in 2007 and that number is going to drop even lower as the artificial lockdown-induced bounce of the last two years wanes. Unless there's a commensurate drop in the number of nominations, Wikipedia can't go back to the processes of 2007 even if we wanted to. ‑ Iridescent 05:50, 14 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I agree. Sandy, of your list of five points I'd say (d) and (e) are already in place -- I'm quite sure the coords know they can disregard supports, and they often wait to promote until there are more than three supports. Of the oldest ten FACs still open right now, seven have four or more supports. Your (c), calling out faulty reviews, was always a rare event, and I think had little effect. For what it's worth it does still happen; a regular recently told a reviewer on the FAC page that they were going to ignore the review as it was faulty. And (a) and (b) are largely the same thing, and that's where the point that Iridescent and I are making applies -- we have less reviewer time available to go through PR and FAC, which leads to longer FAC durations, which makes it less productive to kick out a FAC which can be resolved and promoted in a single pass. I think prose nitpicks are a red herring -- "move this comma from here to there" is not that common and in any case doesn't indicate a fundamental problem with the article. I don't want to digress into a discussion of types of prose review, but it's possible to have a long list of detailed comments that are not nitpicks without implying the article is a mess. More to the point, that long list isn't going to be generated anywhere but FAC, for most articles.

One thing that actually does help throughput at FAC is when pre-FAC reviews have been done by experienced reviewers -- e.g. Dudley has reviewed a couple of articles on Neolithic sites that I've worked on, and so at FAC he has supported fairly quickly, after an additional read-through. The problem with that is if it becomes too frequent it will look like quid pro quo -- regulars showing up at FAC and getting four quick supports would look clubby, even with links to the article talk page reviews. The coords would want to leave the FAC up for a while anyway, to get more input from a wider group. And it wouldn't actually generate more BTUs of effort from the reviewers, it would just move that effort pre-FAC, in a way that is not very accessible to newcomers. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 08:14, 14 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I've very occasionally made "move this comma from here to there" type comments, but it's invariably in the specific case of "it's not totally clear to me where this should go so I'm not going to fix it myself". In my experience, if a minor fix is obvious the reviewer will invariably fix it themselves unless it's in the context of "this article contains too many formatting errors, oppose until you fix them". ‑ Iridescent 05:49, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know how common that is at FA, but in the GA process, there are reviewers who seem to consider it unethical for them to edit the article at all, even to fix trivial typos.

@Ealdgyth, hearing that you're spending time at GA is one of the most hopeful things I've heard this month. Last I checked in, they were having pretty significant problems with made-up rules (e.g., ordering noms to have all references consistently formatted, even though citation formatting is given in the Wikipedia:Good article criteria as an example of something that is not required). Is that still a challenge? WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:48, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I haven't run into it with my noms. I'm (obviously) not doing my reviews at GA to the rigour that I would at FAC - I do check sources but I don't require the quality of FAC nor do I get into the minutae of formatting unless I can't figure out what the source IS from the given citation. For a few editors, I'll go ahead and treat the GA as a "pre-FAC" and make suggestions for stuff they'd want to fix for FAC, but I really try to keep the fact that GA isn't FA in mind most of the time. It's been mostly good - but I'm also not one of the reviewers that won't fix typos in a GAN. I did run into one nominator who seemed a bit upset that I did a copyedit on the GAN but that's been it. Most folks haven't been upset or cranky about my reviews. (Of course, I'm not reviewing sports or pop culture noms either... heh.) Ealdgyth (talk) 19:52, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I will make straightforward copyedits, but if I know the nominator is an excellent writer it makes me more cautious about anything that is not an obvious error -- their phrasing or punctuation may be intended to convey or manage something I'm not seeing. It also takes a fair amount of confidence in one's own writing ability to edit someone else's prose in a high-profile context such as FAC, and I'm sure for some reviewers it can feel less aggressive to suggest the change in the FAC. It bloats the FAC, but it's not actively harmful, just inefficient. Every now and then a poor editor will be bold and make good prose worse; I recall that happening at Shakespeare authorship question, where Qp10qp had to revert the changes and tell the reviewer why. Some editors won't want to risk being reverted.

What can look like a long list of nitpicks, but isn't, is what happens when you read an article and try to genuinely understand it, and the context. A reviewer can find plenty of places to ask why things are phrased a certain way or why something is missing or in a certain order, when they are struggling to understand material that is not presented in the clearest way. I recall Maury Markowitz's articles as places where the FACs could get like this: see Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/AI Mk. IV radar/archive2 for an example. A long list of comments, few of which could be described as nitpicks, but I wouldn't say the article was unprepared. It was just a complicated topic with a lot of work needed to clarify it as much as possible. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 22:25, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

16 years of iridescence

Thanks! ‑ Iridescent 08:05, 18 February 2022 (UTC) (Side note, but once you get back before 2007 "first edit day" isn't much of a metric. That spike of account registrations in 2006 wasn't (or at least wasn't wholly) owing to Wikipedia becoming more popular, but that a wave of reforms post-Siegenthaler made it harder to perform some routine functions like page creation without creating an account. Many of the people who registered accounts in 2006–07 had already been editing for some time; prior to that, there wasn't much benefit either to creating an account or to logging in to it if you had one unless you were engaged in behind-the-scenes discussions where it was necessary to keep track of who was saying what. ‑ Iridescent 08:05, 18 February 2022 (UTC))[reply]

I was more enthusiastic about first day milestones when I was younger, tbh.

(Also, for some reason, the "reply" link didn't work for this particular comment.) I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 20:37, 18 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps we were all more excited about birthdays when we were young. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:12, 26 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@WhatamIdoing I think that's what happened. We've all become old. ^[Joke] I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 05:29, 26 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

It beats the alternative. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:01, 26 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

celebrating the magic of the word iridescence --Gerda Arendt (talk) 22:12, 18 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I took a pic in 2009 that was on the German MP yesterday, with the song from 1885, in English Prayer for Ukraine. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 11:18, 6 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Southeast Toyota

I tried to view the page for Southeast Toyota Distributors and found it had been deleted. I looked up Gulf States Toyota Distributors and it is still active. These two entites are the only private Toyota Distributors in the United States and are extremely similar. Why is SET deleted? Mgrē@sŏn (Talk) 22:43, 17 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Mgreason, the log entry says "Unambiguous advertising or promotion". Presumably it was filled with stuff closer to "Buy from us now!" instead of the expected encyclopedic content. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:07, 18 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Mgreason, It had "Backed by high-quality dealer services from Southeast Toyota and other JM Family companies, Southeast Toyota dealers continue to establish new sales records for Toyota. Southeast Toyota dealers are No. 1 in total dealer profits and represent the No. 1 region in the country in Toyota Certified used vehicle sales." in the lead, and then continued for over 1000 words that had clearly been cut-and-pasted, or at best paraphrased, from the corporate website, to give a glowing summary of each part of the company's operations ("The Southeast Toyota Accessory Center reproduces the expertise and quality of the existing Southeast Toyota Port facilities, on a smaller scale, to offer nearly 30 area dealers greater flexibility in satisfying customer personalization requests closer to the point of sale"). I've no doubt the topic meets Wikipedia's notability guidelines, but Wikipedia articles also need to be both written from a neutral point of view and fully cited to reliable sources, and that was as true in 2016 when I deleted it as it is now.

If you want, I can undelete the page and submit it to AfD for a full consensus "do we collectively think this is salvageable?" discussion. (I'd recommend against that, as if if the page does get a consensus to delete at AfD it becomes more difficuly to recreate it subsequently; New Page Patrollers reflexively assume there's something questionable when they see the "A page of this title was previously deleted at AfD" warning.) Or, I can restore it as a {{noindex}}ed draft article if you think you can turn it into something sourced and neutral over a reasonable timescale. Let me know if you want me to do either, or if I'm not active post a request at Wikipedia:Requests for undeletion including a link to this discussion to confirm that I'm happy for any other admin to restore this without consulting me. ‑ Iridescent 08:05, 18 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Iridescent, thanks for looking into this issue. I originally created the article many years ago when I was active. I wasn't aware that it was turned into a promo piece. I recently retired and have time for interests like Wikipedia again. I would appreciate it if you could restore it as a draft; I'm certain I could clean it up in a couple of days. Thanks again. Mgrē@sŏn (Talk) 22:19, 20 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

A good start to said cleanup would be to revert back to the version before Sheba.munn (talk · contribs) rewrote several parts of it in 2013. Still not the most rigorously verifiable article, but it was that account that introduced the text that is quoted above. Uncle G (talk) 15:40, 27 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Mgreason, I've reverted it to the last version before it was tagged for deletion, and restored the full history to allow you to go through in your own time to see which elements are worth keeping and what if anything should be deleted. As I say, the company itself is unquestionably notable in Wikipedia terms so you don't need to worry about notability issues, but the version I deleted was the very embodiment of "unsourced advertorial". ‑ Iridescent 05:44, 6 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
(Adding) If the link stops working, that's because someone else—not me—has moved it out of the article space to Draft:Southeast Toyota Distributors. At the moment they've left a redirect from Southeast Toyota Distributors → Draft:Southeast Toyota Distributors, but that's technically a cross-namespace redirect and as such will be procedurally deleted under WP:R2 when the systems notice it. ‑ Iridescent 13:27, 9 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Universal Code of Conduct

Morning Iri and page watchers

I'm being asked to cast a vote on the Universal Code of Conduct, but I have to say I'm not entirely sure what it entails. I'm very late to this party and haven't been following the drafting or earlier phases of this at all, and to be honest in general I don't pay that much attention to what's going on at the WMF - my focus is on what I can do to make the encyclopedia better for readers. But since I've been asked to vote, I suppose I should give it some consideration. Is there any sort of big en-wiki meta thread or forum where people are debating the pros and cons? Outside of a slight sense of exasperation that the WMF are focusing so heavily on this and not on improving resources for editors or expanding the Wikipedia Library (as some have suggested), the high-level language at m:Universal Code of Conduct looks superficially harmless, but I fear the devil might be in the detail and that this could have a practical negative effect on the way we conduct ourselves. Any thoughts? Cheers — Amakuru (talk) 10:56, 14 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Strictly speaking, the vote is about the enforcement guidelines of UCoC and not the UCoC itself. The enforcement guidelines are being discussed at meta:Talk:Universal Code of Conduct/Enforcement guidelines and meta:Universal Code of Conduct/2021 consultations/Roundtable discussions/Questions and meta:Talk:Universal Code of Conduct/Enforcement draft guidelines review, their actual text is at meta:Universal Code of Conduct/Enforcement guidelines. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 11:14, 14 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Oh right, yes. Enforcement. Thanks... still looks a bit too much to read, so I might just move on for now! — Amakuru (talk) 16:10, 14 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

My rather rambling thoughts on UCoC are at User talk:Iridescent/Archive 45#UCoC—it was a few months ago, but my opinion hasn't particularly shifted. The TL;DR summary would be "I understand why they're doing it, to allow the WMF to impose control on smaller wikis in the event that they get hijacked by cranks. However I don't think they appreciate how much blowback they're going to get when they inevitably try to use it to impose their own extremely US-centric value system on any of the big wikis, nor do I think the proposed mechanisms contain adequate safeguards against people using it as a score-settling mechanism. (Compare how often "civility" is used as a pretext to silence opponents in arguments as opposed to genuine behavioral issues.) I also have extreme issues with some of the wording; in particular I think forcing Wikipedia participants to endorse The Wikimedia movement does not endorse "race" and "ethnicity" as meaningful distinctions among people is offensive, in some jurisdictions probably illegal, and would have unintended consequences such as making participation in something like Wikipedia:Black WikiHistory Month a blockable offense. As such I'd encourage everyone to oppose it as things stands, even though this vote is largely meaningless since the eligibility criteria allows the WMF payroll to block-vote so it's almost certain to pass even if there's overwhelming opposition from the actual editor communities." ‑ Iridescent 16:12, 14 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Amakuru I'm doing the same. To be fair to us, I think most people aren't voting. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 16:13, 14 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I voted no, and if it passes, will be resigning my admin bit. I tend to agree with Iri on this, and find the meddling into encyclopedia affairs by the WMF to be them yet again forgetting what they are supposed to be about. Talk about scope creep! Ealdgyth (talk) 16:27, 14 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Ealdgyth, the cynic in me says that's part of the thinking behind it; they know this paragraph is going to force mass resignation of admins and functionaries across the entire ecosystem, thus giving the opportunity on the bigger wikis to force a 'temporary' lowering of requirements and the packing of RFA, Arbcom etc with True Believers, and on the smaller wikis to declare an emergency and impose direct rule by the stewards. I'm not conspiracy-minded enough to think this was the reason this is being forced through—the WMF has a long track record of coming up with stupid ideas through the best of intentions—but if the thought has occurred to me, I'm sure it's occurred to them. ‑ Iridescent 18:11, 14 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The problem for them, of course, is that if they mass-force an admin resignation on en-wiki, I'm not sure they could get any new ones elected. You'd think they'd have figured out from the Fram-mess that much of en-wiki is very ... jaundiced .. towards WMF "initiatives". They may think that because Fram didn't succeed at a second RFA that the majority of people on en-wiki were on the "WMF side" in the dispute, which is the wrong message to have taken from that mess. Heh. It'll be "interesting times" that's for sure. Ealdgyth (talk) 02:01, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

They don't even need to force a mass resignation; if you read the wording of the paragraph I linked, it gives them authority to conduct a purge of heretics a year after ratification (i.e. March 2023).

Remember that, aside from a handful of people like WAID who are still active on the wikis, WMF-ers are either outsiders who never had an idea what goes on, or former editors whose experiences are out of date. Their knowledge of how we actually operate is going to be second-hand (and to be clear, this isn't necessarily a criticism; for at least some positions at the WMF it's completely reasonable that the person doing the job doesn't have any strong on-wiki relationships). Since the people passing on that knowledge are going to be either (a) the type of people who attend WMF events, (b) the type of people who submit reports to Trust & Safety, (c) the type of people who hang around on Meta or (d) those editors they know in real life, I don't see how they couldn't get a skewed view of what we actually do, particularly when you multiply it by the fact that they're having to perform the same "what impact is this going to have?" assessment across around 600+ different projects.

The regular people who just get on with things aren't by-and-large the people who ever come to their attention. The people who come into extended contact with the WMF are a mix of diehard true believers telling them what a great job they're doing; people trying to get WMF funds and/or technical support for a pet project (or latest scam); and problem users so problematic that their cases have been escalated to the highest level. It would be more of a surprise if the WMF didn't have the collective impression both that the wikis were full of argumentative obsessives who need to be kept in line, and that there exists a substantial caucus of people who think the WMF is doing a fantastic job. ‑ Iridescent 05:19, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

re. the WMF skewed perspective part: weren't the UCoC, and its enforcement guidelines, written by volunteer editors though? I know the enforcement guidelines drafting committee included Barkeep49, Vermont and MJL, for example, and I think all three are folks with a good understanding of how Wikipedia, or at least English-language Wikipedias, work. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 16:12, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

These are the people who wrote UCoC. By my count there were five paid WMF apparatchiks (one of whom was using their personal rather than their WMF account so is listed under 'volunteers' rather than 'staff'), three hyper-insiders from the WMF's byzantine world of makework committees, and one actual non-greasy-pole-climbing Wikipedia editor. Trying to pass it off as "written by volunteer editors" is stretching the truth at best. ‑ Iridescent 18:27, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Fair enough. I remember the makeup being more representative, but I guess I was misremembering. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 20:56, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The enforcement guidelines were written by a broader selection of editors. isaacl (talk) 03:28, 16 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

This myth that WMF staff don't edit just won't die. A couple of months ago, I tested some polling software, and I picked volunteer edit counts as a handy subject. Here were the results:

9 – no edits as a volunteer
11 – one to nine edits as a volunteer
19 – enough to get auto-confirmed
6 – more than 100 edits
20 – more than 1,000 edits

Out of the 65 respondents before we reached the polling software's limit, 86% of staff had made at least one edit as a volunteer, and 20 WMF staff members have made thousands of edits. That's 30% of respondents in that top tier.

After that, 17 more staff posted that they had made 1,000+ edits; including several who have made more than 100,000 edits. Two more posted in the 1–9 category and two more in the 100–999 category. I don't think the proportions are reliable (this was not an anonymous pool, and it's easier to brag that you've made thousands of edits than to admit that you've only made a few or none), but I do think that it's reliable to say that at least 37 WMF staff members have made more than 1,000 edits. If you remember your numbers from Template:Registered editors by edit count, you'll remember that this means that there are dozens of WMF staff who have more editing experience than 99.9% of all registered editors. In other words, it's not just me.

Also, if anyone seeing this happens to be looking at the job openings, then I recommend putting your username in your application. The old rule about hiring 50% of staff from the communities is no longer in force, but it is still a significant factor for all jobs, and a near-requirement for some (e.g., my team). WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:11, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

It may well be the case that the perception that WMF staff don't edit just won't die, but then neither will the perception that WMF staff keep coming up with stuff that is at odds with en-wiki community norms. I don't think that the answer is that en-wiki is full of editors who are cranks, or that it's only the cranks who criticize WMF. It seems to me that, even when WMF staff are engaged with content editing, they become constrained by (1) a corporate sense of wanting the editing community to appear like an inclusive HRM paradise, and (2) a corporate sense that it's all-important that the numbers of editors and edits must always be increasing. As much as inclusiveness is indeed a good thing, this mindset leads to blindspots about the things that experienced editors have come to learn from experience. @WhatamIdoing: do you disagree with what I said here? --Tryptofish (talk) 21:44, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

So many thoughts, but let me start with one: I wonder what causes you to think that the WMF thinks the number of editors and edits needs to always increase. What communications from the WMF are you seeing that gives you that impression? WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:07, 16 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Highlights include increasing monthly active editors by more than 18 percent since 2016, which continues to grow", "Grow Wikimedia's communities", "a growing Wikimedia movement", "growth has been fueled by a global volunteer force and donors who explore and visit the site regularly"… ‑ Iridescent 04:54, 16 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

^That. --Tryptofish (talk) 17:21, 16 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@WhatamIdoing, as Jayen466 has just indirectly pointed out a few threads up, the WMF has literally just rolled out a massive spam campaign with the strapline "If you donate as little as [insert local currency] today, Wikipedia will continue to grow for years to come". ‑ Iridescent 20:58, 16 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

"Wikipedia" can grow without the number of edits or editors growing. The other sources talk about different kinds of growth, but aren't talking about the WMF having a goal of increasing the number of editors. I didn't note any of them talking about an increase in the number of edits, but maybe I missed that. Some of them (e.g., train-the-trainers programs) seem to be talking primarily about growing the non-editing parts of the movement.

Also: Spot the enwiki admin among those blog posts' authors. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:58, 18 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Firstly, the WMF is exponentially growing its own staff numbers. Salary costs are now ten times what they were a decade ago (partly also because C-level salaries are now twice what they were ten years ago). This whole effort is financed by telling the public, year after year, that money is needed to "keep Wikipedia online", which is risible.

Secondly, it is surely without question that the WMF is trying to grow volunteer communities in the Global South, and is investing heavily in this. See, e.g., the budget increases related to "thriving movement" here. Like Abstract Wikipedia (which is teetering on the edge of a CC0 licence to keep Big Tech happy, contributor rights be damned) the ultimate aim of this effort is in part to ensure that the likes of Google, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft have free ("free" as in they don't have to pay for it) content in Asian and African languages to feed their infobox panels and voice assistants with to conquer markets (representing tens of millions of speakers in some cases) that are currently still closed to them because of language barriers – all on the basis of unpaid volunteer labour. (An added kicker is that those companies are by and large tax dodgers – they don't like paying tax in the countries they operate in – so helping them gain control of markets in the Global South actually deprives those countries of tax income needed to fund education and health systems.)

Thirdly, official WMF strategy is that "By 2030, Wikimedia will become the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge, and anyone who shares our vision will be able to join us." Growing both edits and editors is implicit in that. Andreas JN 466 11:47, 18 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

(ec) I am currently looking at the vote log and it says 903 votes cast. That's a small portion of all Wikimedia users, I think, but I am not sure how many of the "active" participants. Looks like I am #160 and there are a lot of regulars on enwiki there. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 16:30, 14 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

We have until March 21 to vote, right? The WMF has so lost their way (if they had ever found it); the level of group think and impenetrable writing is still mind-boggling (and for as long as their writing has been pure gibberish, one would think they would have done something about it by now). Easy to see why a sensible admin like Ealdgyth would turn in the bits of this sort of thing. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:13, 14 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

This type of bug on a secure voting site really inspires confidence: phabricator:T303735. --MZMcBride (talk) 21:24, 14 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

In case anyone wants to validate Iridescent's theory that the WMF payroll [will] block-vote so it's almost certain to pass even if there's overwhelming opposition from the actual editor communities, there have been a total of 28 votes by (WMF) accounts so far, including several by people I've never heard of before even though I'm very into obscure WMF geekery. And only two of them (SOyeyele (WMF)/Jamie Tubers, Zuz (WMF)/Celestinesucess) meet the first set of voting requirements considering only their volunteer account. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 01:28, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The Universal Code of Conduct is a bit of a Curate's egg. It certainly does have some good parts, and some of the sillier features were fixed during its long gestation. But at heart it reads like a blurb from a company HR department for how you treat colleagues after the recruitment process has filtered some people out. Take two examples where I have tried and failed to influence the process, age and linguistic ability. In the past I have supported RFAs of teenagers who I thought were ready for adminship, my tests for such candidate's include questions such as "Do your parents or guardians trust you with an internet account that you can't tell them the password of". But I'm aware that there are others who don't think that anyone should be an admin until they are legally adult. I suspect that the WMF and all the chapters will quickly exempt themselves from this one, leaving us with the practical issues that come up when children of surprisingly young ages start editing. No age discrimination is a very different thing when your HR department is only recruiting university graduates. Language fluency is another area, these days I spend as much time on commons as here, and of course Commons is one of our multilingual projects. Wikipedia however has 300 or so seperate wikis based on different languages, it makes absolute sense that we require some fluency in English for most roles here and in Scots for people who write the Scots Wikipedia. As a monolingual Brit who has worked for a chapter and might apply for some WMF jobs, it would be in my interest if the WMF weren't able to prefer multilingual candidates when recruiting. But as a Wikipedian I absolutely see that it would be an advantage for those WMF staff who interact with the community to have at least a working proficiency in more than one language. A rule against discrimination on language fluency in our multilingual projects would make sense, as would a ban on age discrimination among community members who are legally adult. But the code still contains "This applies to all contributors and participants in their interaction with all contributors and participants, without expectations based on age, mental or physical disabilities, physical appearance, national, religious, ethnic and cultural background, caste, social class, language fluency, sexual orientation, gender identity, sex or career field." As usual with the WMF one comes away from any interactions thinking that for a twenty year old organisation with only a few hundred employees, it has somehow acquired the inflexibility and ossification of an organisation several orders of magnitude larger and older. Ϣere SpielChequers 11:05, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I learn something every day. I had never heard the phrase "curate's egg." I have no interest in Wikipolitics but I would like to do my bit for the survival of Wikipedia. So, O Wise Curator of Eggs and Others of Esteemed Opinion, should I vote yes or no on the enforcement guidelines of the UCoC? I will likely take your advice.Smallchief (talk)
- I have voted No, but then used the comments box to give two or three examples of where I disagree with the current proposal. My hope is that this leads to the proposal being further improved. I would suggest that you only vote if you have the time to read the code, if you then vote "No" please give some pointers as to where you think the code needs improvement. Feel free to echo mine if having read the code you agree that each language version of Wikipedia would benefit by continuing to be allowed to require some fluency in that wikipedia's language for at least some roles in the pedia. Ϣere SpielChequers 15:37, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  - I'd encourage anyone who isn't sure both that they want this and that both UCoC and the enforcement guidelines in this form are what they want, to oppose. This is a vote on a change that's effectively going to be irrevocable, since any change to it will itself require a consultation exercise across the whole of the WMF ecosystem. (Ever tried to get the wording to WP:ARBPOL amended? Multiply that by the 325 languages in which we currently operate.)
    If you're not certain that both that UCoC is something we need and that this particular wording is the wording we need, the only rational choice is to tell them to reconsider it, preferably with an explanation of exactly which aspects you consider potentially problematic but if not, a simple "no" is fine. Wikipedia isn't going to fall apart if we go a few more months without something we've got along without for 21 years, but Wikipedia potentially is going to fall apart, or at least become unrecognizable, if we're plunged into a permanent civil war of wikilawyering over whether any given comment potentially violates something or other. ‑ Iridescent 18:40, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    - Somehow I doubt my oppose of 'this policy is both structurally and procedurely racist in its wording and intended implementation' is going to make much difference to the WMF staff there. Anyone who can with a straight face support the 'do not recognise' section (which isnt even the most problematic of the document as a whole) despite it being blatantly discriminatory and outright illegal in various countries is already way past the point of rational argument being a useful approach. The only options left realistically are to amend WP:ADMIN to explicitly forbid enforcement of UCoC provisions (where they are not supported by ENWP's existing policies) with removal of tools if not followed, and to forbid advanced tools (admin/crat) from WMF staff members/contractors due to the conflict of interest. Only in death does duty end (talk) 18:53, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      - The WMF have already anticipated that one. All admins and arbitrators (and their equivalents on other projects) are going to be required to affirm (through signed declaration or other format to be decided) they will acknowledge and adhere to the Universal Code of Conduct. This is why the talk of mass resignations isn't just hyperbole; if this passes, we're putting people in a position where it's literally the case that the only honorable course is resignation. (I suppose I—or anyone else—could point-blank say that I'm not going to adhere to UCoC and challenge Arbcom to come and take it, but I doubt Arbcom would thank us for dumping an existential crisis onto their collective doorstep.) ‑ Iridescent 19:24, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
        I've considered that option (not doing it and seeing what happens) also. We'll see. It would get interesting if a group of admins with a lot of social capital on en-wiki all took the "we aren't going to affirm, so come and take it from us, ArbCom" attitude. @Dennis Brown, Cullen328, and Hog Farm:... Ealdgyth (talk) 19:33, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
        Well, you've definitely nailed the camp I'm in although I think you overestimate my ability to persuade others. I've discovered that after 57 years, two divorces, and 16 years of this place, I'm not as soft spoken as I once was. I absolutely will resign before "affirming" my allegiance to the WMF (cue USSR style music). Or it may be better to let them take it from me, although 100 admin piled up in Arb might be one hell of a backlog. I joined a movement, a project, I didn't sign on to be slave labor for a corporation. And of course, I will vote in every RFA, and if there is any concern about the candidate that is legitimately troublesome, I would politely oppose with a reasonable rationale, because it would be wrong to stuff the ranks with unqualified candidates. Don't underestimate that portion of our combined strength. Dennis Brown - 2¢ 20:11, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
        It will come as no surprise that I'm not going to take a loyalty oath. Nor an indoctrination program. Unfortunately I think I used up my social capital during Framgate. Or, maybe that gave me more?! I don't really know how these things work. Surely threatening to resign loses it's power the 3rd or 4th time I try to use it. If nothing else, I'd be the only person to have ever been desysopped twice by WMF (I hold out some hope that the en.wiki arbcom would never desysop for this themselves).--Floquenbeam (talk) 20:17, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
        We need box better than the lame box I'm using on my talk and user page. And maybe matching shirts. Dennis Brown - 2¢ 21:34, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
        I refused to sign the confidentiality agreement required to become an Arbitration electoral commission person, although I think it was more that I wanted to thoroughly understand and appreciate what I was expected to adhere to, and just couldn't do it. And I can pinpoint several fuck-ups in my life that I can trace back to signing things thinking they would be a good idea but turned out not to be. So you can imagine what my response will be to sign anything - procrastinate and hope it goes away. I'm mindful to oppose, but like WSC, I would like to put some constructive reasons why first. Ritchie333 ^(talk) ^(cont) 11:54, 16 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
        
        Ealdgyth, I think you're probably overestimating the amount of social capital I have here, or even the percentage of editors who would recognize my username. But yes, I will NOT be swearing fealty to the WMF, nor undergoing the "training" program. Like Dennis, I'm not sure if it's best to just resign and not fight it or to make the WMF and/or ARBCOM take it. Would likely depend on how much energy I have at the time, which is something that I've been in short supply of the last several weeks ... I would hope that conditions would still be good enough for me to stick around even after the mess, but if the WMF screws stuff up too much, I guess there's always Missouri Historical Review. Hog Farm _Talk 23:43, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
        
        Ah you misunderstand me Iri, changing WP:ADMIN is specifically to counter that. Its largely irrelevant if an admin affirms their allegiance or not if an ENWP community policy explicitly denies admins the authority to take an action. At that point the WMF will have to overtly take control of ENWP. Essentially its putting policy in place to prevent anyone other than WMF Staff accounts from enforcing UCoC (specific) violations. The end result of such a policy is this: Admins take their oath of bullshittedness and sit through the re-education camps and then either: never actually enforce the UCoC and so the WMF de-tools them, or they enforce it and ENWP de-tools them, or they dont enforce it and nothing happens because the WMF are not actually interested in hiring the staff and paying them to do all the jobs advanced tool using volunteers do because it would upset their gravy train. The alternative is actually a lot worse, in that all the admins of character (eg, everyone who refuses to kowtow) leave, and we are left with a bunch of WMF yes men. What happened to Fram will seem like a happy memory once the ideological purges start with checks in place. Dont get me wrong, I dont think in the long run it will stop the WMF from doing whatever it wants to do, it will just force it out into the open a lot sooner. RE Dennis and any other admins thinking of resigning. Dont do it, force the WMF to de-tool you. Why make it easier for them? You gain nothing and they get an easy ride. Only in death does duty end (talk) 21:37, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
        You misunderstand: I'm not pledging loyalty to anyone, least of all the Foundation. Even if they offer free puppies. The place is full of power hungry asshats with too much of other people's money and no understanding of the community. I won't sign as a matter of principle. I will walk away. Dennis Brown - 2¢ 21:58, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
        I voted “no” on the basis that the text is so longwinded that I was exhausted by it before finding anything of substance. I also haven’t been able to find a page to offer feedback. SmokeyJoe (talk) 22:07, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
        I'm pondering how they will define holders of advanced permissions. I think I might be OK with requiring checkusers and oversighters to sign the affirmation. We're assuming that administrators will also be included, but would it necessarily stop there? Template editors? Autopatrolled? Rollback? There's an awful lot of room for a lack of common sense in determining who would have to swear fealty. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:43, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
        Since the oath is to uphold and enforce the UCoC, one would think they mean admin bit. But I've learned to never underestimate the silliness that comes from the Foundation, so who knows. Dennis Brown - 2¢ 10:27, 16 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
        I agree entirely. I've been thinking about this some more, and I'm toying with proposing something in the event this thing passes. We could have an RfC at Village Pump Proposals, in which the community could choose to define the meaning of "advanced permissions" at this project for these purposes. And the criterion could be, rather reasonably, permissions that require identification to the WMF. That would mean checkusers, oversighters, and arbitrators (the last because they typically get the other two permissions). It would thus exclude administrators, which I think would be entirely a good thing. I find the reasons that admins would resign to be honorable and appropriate, but I'd much prefer that they wouldn't have to do it. Of course the WMF might object to the community deciding this, as it wasn't what they would have wanted us to do, but I like the idea of putting them in the position of saying no to a community consensus. --Tryptofish (talk) 17:20, 16 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
        As far as I'm aware, there are no longer any permissions that require identification to the WMF other than (for obvious practical reasons) those that create an actual contractual relationship. It was always a stupid requirement—I could knock up an ID document in about ten minutes in any name I like that would be adequate to fool the WMF (who obviously don't have access to the biometric data etc that genuine ID documents contain). ‑ Iridescent 20:08, 16 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
        Doggone it. We'll just have to say CHU, OS, and ARB. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:21, 16 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
        
        I'm reading the proposal now, in preparation to vote, and I see that it says: "Designating functionaries will be done, whenever possible, by local communities, following the principle of subsidiarity that online and offline communities across the world should make decisions for themselves whenever possible." That would actually make it very practical for us to make such a consensus stick. --Tryptofish (talk) 17:32, 16 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

So far this discussion seems to have come with no reasons at all to support the enforcement guidelines. The UCoC itself seems mostly harmless, and certainly includes things I support, but given that our informal standards of conduct here aren't that far away from the UCoC, what arguments are being made in support of having enforcement for it? What bad things happen if we don't have agreed enforcement guidelines; if we continue to expect each wiki to manage these issues themselves? The only argument I can recall is that small wikis need some such mechanism. I can see that -- there have certainly been some horror stories about small wikis -- but the larger wikis are quite different kettles of fish. Are there legal pressures on the WMF to have enforcement? I could see voting for something that applied to small wikis (maybe less than 100 active editors/month) but not for en-wiki. I have little interest or involvement in WMF politics, and I usually find myself silently disagreeing with the vocal majority on WMF issues (e.g. Framgate) but this seems misguided and I plan to oppose it. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 22:08, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I can't really argue that the UCoC enforcement guidelines are the correct solution, but a review/adjustment of conduct enforcement seems valuable in theory. Surely at least some people here agree that conduct dispute resolution on enwiki can be dysfunctional? For example: I don't think requiring people facing actual harassment, especially non-experienced editors who might even be using real names (as in some past cases), to show up at ANI for widely-attended public discussion is an effective way to deal with those problems. I can't imagine any company having a 'reporting harassment in the workplace' policy that functions analogously to enwiki's ANI route - it would be widely denounced. So I like the ideas in meta:Universal_Code_of_Conduct/Enforcement_guidelines#Recommendations_for_the_reporting_and_processing_tool and the technical tools suggested there.

While there aren't any reasons to support expressed here, I don't see any real disadvantages either. The main point of contention above seems to be that the UCoC requires admins to affirm their 'acknowledgement' of, and 'adherance' to, the UCoC. I don't know why that clause was inserted, but I don't see why it's a big deal either. As a practical matter, AFAIK almost everything–if not everything–disallowed by the UCoC is already disallowed by local enwiki policy and practices, either as-written or as-applied, and the enforcement guidelines leave most enforcement to local admins. So personally I'm curious what exactly people feel is bad about it? ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 22:52, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I want to question your characterization of ANI as the place we want reporting of harassment to be conducted. (Although ANI is certainly an easy target for criticism.) We have ways of privately contacting ArbCom, for example. I don't dispute that inexperienced users can be unaware of the best options available to them, but there is no reason to assume that they would be any more aware of the WMF. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:03, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I will also take a stab at answering the question that you asked. Not too long ago, there was a widely noticed example of a problem where the UCoC might have been substituted for community practice, if enforcement were in effect: [7]. On the one hand, there was a class assignment, bringing in new student editors. And there was an instructor who was very interested in a topic that can reasonably be described as related to inclusiveness. And there was even a vivid case of a young editor facing considerable off-site harassment. But on the other hand, there were some minor concerns about canvassing, and major concerns about our content rules about notability. The community did not do a perfect job of dealing with it, but I think anyone who felt compelled to be guided exclusively by the UCoC would have been inclined to violate our own policies and guidelines. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:15, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Highly visible and public reporting of harassment is not necessarily comfortable for victims.but there is no reason to assume that they would be any more aware of the WMF True but the WMF isn't doing enforcement. I understood the plan being a prominent/easy-to-use reporting tool that forwards reports to the appropriate place, though I don't think the details are ironed out yet.

but I think anyone who felt compelled to be guided exclusively by the UCoC would have been inclined to violate our own policies and guidelines how so? Specifically, how do you think the issue would've been dealt assuming the UCoC enforcement guidelines had been ratified at the time? ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 23:24, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe we edit-conflicted, but I answer that just below. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:43, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

We did EC, however, why do you think the UCoC mandates the deletion (or non-deletion) of an article? ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 00:08, 16 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I'm about to logout, and the indenting here is getting strange, but what I mean is that the content was related to inclusiveness, and deletion could be construed as insensitive to inclusion. If we're going to be generally accepting of women and minorities (which of course we should), but as a matter of overriding policy, policy that overrides our current norms on notability and neutral point of view, then deleting content that reflects cutting-edge theory about that would be excluding stuff the UCoC wants us to welcome. It's like treating WP:RGW oppositely to the way that we currently do. This is what can happen when a simplistic corporate formula tries to replace what editors have developed through years of experience. --Tryptofish (talk) 00:19, 16 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Putting that another way, that class project resulted in content that was AfD-worthy, but it might well have been contrary to the UCoC to delete that content. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:22, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I've now read the enforcement proposal in its entirety. (Gee, what a novel idea! Read something before giving an opinion about it, rather than after!) Now, I have to say that I'm less bothered by it than I expected to be. It does a better job than I expected at deferring to local wikis and at staying out of purely content issues. There are still issues for me, and the reasons that I will vote no, in that I think that it goes too far in requiring oaths of loyalty rather than just awareness, and it opens up (at larger projects) too much risk of disconnects between the centralized U4C and local consensus about how policies should be applied. --Tryptofish (talk) 17:44, 16 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Per my comment above, my reason for opposition and for advocating that others oppose isn't that I consider most of it particularly problematic. Rather, it's that once it's passed it will be effectively set in stone given that we can't subsequently amend it without consultation once it's been translated into 325 languages and I assume nobody wants to give the WMF carte blanche to amend it unilaterally. Thus, the usual wiki model of constantly tinkering until we find something that will stick doesn't apply—if we're not confident that this is genuinely the best we can do, we shouldn't be approving it. ‑ Iridescent 20:11, 16 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Funny that you put it that way. In my comment along with the vote, I also said something approximately like "Wikimedia has always relied on the local communities to develop content policies through experience, and Wikimedia should likewise trust the communities with conduct policies", or something like that. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:21, 16 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for articulating those thoughts. There's something there I agree with and am going to amend my vote accordingly, but making clear I would vote yes if the amendment process was adequete. (I don't think U4C Committee-proposed changes or WMF-facilitated reviews are adequate.) I do note as an example that WP:ARBPOL is hard (though possible) to change directly by the community, and as such it's never had a community-proposed modification made to it, so a high bar to change is not a disadvantage IMO, but there needs to be the possibility for direct community change. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 20:59, 16 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The process last time we made a significant change to ARBPOL was formal ratification by every member of the then-committee followed by a full vote of anyone who cared to comment, and ARBPOL is an extremely inside-baseball process affecting a single project and about which 99% of editors don't care, whereas this affects every participant on every project. If we end up approving something—either UCoC itself or the enforcement guidelines—and end up accidentally creating something that fundamentally changes Wikipedia's internal dynamics, or even makes one of the projects potentially illegal somewhere, it will be virtually impossible to get it right. (The idea that the WMF could unintentionally introduce an initiative that makes a project illegal isn't hyperbole. Check out the unhappy history of the entirely well-intentioned Wikipedia Zero scheme, for instance.) ‑ Iridescent 20:07, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The UCoC looks like plain and simple common sense. However, many policies and guidelines started out as what people thought was common sense, and turned out to be distorted and browbeaten into something else over time. So I don't trust that people will enforce the guidelines properly and in a sensible manner. For example, consider everybody who didn't !vote "keep" at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Marina Ovsyannikova - I don't think there's any regular editor who didn't think they were all commenting in good faith, and a lot of replies from inexperienced editors were not the sort of comments the AfD process typically uses, but would a random WMF staffer with no experience of this read comments like "Fully agreed and people speaking out against war and for peace should never be censored! Why is this page even considered for deletion? While not every country sees free speech as a key value, and that should be respected, the internet is a place of free speech, in these times please keep this! She is a voice for peace!" and see it the same way? Ritchie333 ^(talk) ^(cont) 12:01, 16 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Ritchie, further above you ask for reasons to oppose; your first three sentences here sum up why I am opposing. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 12:05, 16 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks Mike; I have now opposed giving a variation on that. Ritchie333 ^(talk) ^(cont) 12:09, 16 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

It isn't just the delete !votes in that one, several keep votes accuse the delete !voters of being pro Putin. In normal times we wouldn't sanction a bunch of newbies and IP editors for making such aspersions, but with the UCOC, we'd be obliged to hold them to the same standards as we hold the regulars. Where is John Cleese when we need him? Ϣere SpielChequers 13:37, 16 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

They took his mic away. Dennis Brown - 2¢ 18:44, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, I'm voting no, because I don't think the English Wikipedia is broken and, thus, why mess with it? I have no idea what's going on with wikipedia in other languages, so maybe the enforcement mechanism is needed there. But I'm not persuaded.Smallchief (talk) 15:40, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

My take would be slightly different. I do think that English Wikipedia is if not broken certainly strained, because we have policies on civility and neutrality but no definition of what 'civility' and 'neutrality' actually mean. I don't think UCoC in its current form answers either question, though; all the current wording of both UCoC itself and the proposed enforcement mechanism will do is transpose the endless "where I come from this isn't considered an offensive term", "is it racist to point out that non-speakers can't rely on machine translation?" and "what do we actually mean by 'maturity'?" arguments into a different venue. ‑ Iridescent 08:55, 18 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Good discussion and needed for voter clarification (although I voted "no" awhile back due to not wanting the foundation to force "our-way-or-the-highway" admin signings). A question: As presently written are administrators who sign on (signed in visible ink, blood, or invisible ink) required or encouraged to report an editor who voices an opinion off-Wikipedia which, if said in print, would be a code violation (i.e. daring to act as if free speech were still a thing)? 'hanks. Randy Kryn (talk) 12:13, 18 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

As a general reminder to those who may not have read Meta:Universal Code of Conduct/Enforcement guidelines/Voter information in full and thus missed the part the WMF has tried to slip through, a "no" vote here doesn't mean what it does everywhere else. If a simple majority votes "yes", it moves on to ratification; if the "yes" vote fails to meet the 50% mark then the enforcement guidelines (not UCoC itself which is inviolable) are reworded and the vote is held again; the vote is repeated until it passes. (Personally, I could make a case that even if I thought the wording were perfect, the sheer arrogance of the WMF holding an 'election' in which the only choices are "Yes" or "Yes but not yet" would be grounds enough to come back and oppose it every time until they give up, just to discourage them from trying to pull this fake-legitimacy stunt in future.) ‑ Iridescent 14:52, 18 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Randy Kryn: As written, the UCoC forbids you quite categorically from "sharing information concerning [another contributor's] Wikimedia activity outside the projects" without their prior consent. Whether this is in print or not doesn't come into it. It includes sharing such information verbally in the privacy of your home, in the pub, on Twitter, Facebook, Discord, by email to ArbCom, on the phone or in correspondence with a reporter or academic researcher ... sharing information concerning another contributor's Wikimedia activity anywhere, by any means, violates the code as written. This would even include quoting what someone has said on Wikipedia. See related discussions here and here. Andreas JN 466 18:04, 18 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Jayen466 As I read it, Randy Kryn is asking the opposite question; that is, whether the civility provisions apply to someone's activity elsewhere—e.g. if I make a comment in real life that constitutes "name calling based on perceived political affiliation" or "implicitly suggesting the possibility of unfair embarrassment", and it's possible for someone to join the dots between my Wikipedia account and my real-life identity, can I be sanctioned for it on Wikipedia. The wording of UCoC on the matter is vague; it's not clear whether The following behaviours are considered unacceptable within the Wikimedia movement translates as "these are things you can't do on Wikipedia" or "people who do these things aren't permitted on Wikipedia".

I'm fairly certain the drafters meant the narrower "these are things you can't do on Wikipedia" definition. If they genuinely meant "nobody can say anything in any context which any other person might find objectionable" it would essentially be a carte blance to block every single editor whose real-life identity could be connected to their Wikipedia account; as worded, it would mean a parent could be sitebanned if it could be demonstrated that they'd threatened to punish their child for being naughty. ‑ Iridescent 14:27, 19 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I meant if I ever become friends with an admin, God forbid, and text them "I believe that ______ has the home-grown manners of a _________ ___ and if only the sheep could talk she'd say '______ ___ _____, buddy!'" does the admin have a contractual duty to block me on Wikipedia or just on their phone. Randy Kryn (talk) 14:59, 19 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Me, I'd ask why they say "Wikimedia movement" rather than "on Wikimedia websites and physical spaces" but that's like knitpicky. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 15:08, 19 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

That line at least I think is reasonable—there's more to Wikimedia than just Wikimedia websites and physical spaces, even though the websites account for 99.9% of it. This particular wording reduces (albeit doesn't remove) the gray areas over whether (for instance) comments made over Zoom, or at local meetings which aren't held on WMF property, still get covered. Think of it as finally clarifying the 20-year-old question over whether the IRC (and now Discord) channels are exempt from the rules. ‑ Iridescent 03:05, 22 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Right. I did get hung up on the "if said in print" bit, given that the UCoC doesn't differentiate between "print" and "non-print" and just sticks with "sharing". Thank you for the correction, Iridescent; and I see what you meant now, Randy Kryn. You were talking about the UCoC's considered opinion that anyone who calls another person, say, a "murderous dictator", or a "pure thug", or a "war criminal", based on the other person's politics, thereby marks himself out as the kind of low-life we wouldn't want to have in the Wikimedia movement. Got it. Andreas JN 466 18:58, 19 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Well, not in so many words. I was talking about a sheep or Wikimedia pulling the wool over its eyes or something. Randy Kryn (talk) 19:20, 19 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Andreas JN 466 20:21, 19 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Pardon the new subheader...

Here's a vote count so far, courtesy of Xeno (WMF):

enwiki: 564 (37.3%)
dewiki: 168 (11.1%)
frwiki: 90 (6.0%)
eswiki: 69 (4.6%)
ruwiki: 71 (4.7%)
plwiki: 65 (4.3%)
metawiki: 50 (3.3%)
zhwiki: 46 (3.0%)
jawiki: 44 (2.9%)
itwiki: 45 (3.0%)
commons: 29 (1.9%)
arwiki: 20 (1.3%)
cswiki: 19 (1.3%)
ptwiki: 18 (1.2%)
nlwiki: 17 (1.1%)
kowiki: 17 (1.1%)
trwiki: 15 (1.0%)
cawiki: 11 (0.7%)
idwiki: 10 (0.7%)
78 others: 144 (9.5%)

Seems like it's the big wikis dominating so far, although I wonder how much off-home wiki voting (i.e editors mainly active in project A voting through project B) there is going on, I saw a few such votes. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 12:18, 18 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

If I recall correctly, SecurePoll determines your home wiki based on what is identified as your home wiki on Special:CentralAuth. Everyone has to vote from Meta. Risker (talk) 13:26, 18 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

IIRC CentralAuth tends to over-represent en-wiki as it's based on the wiki where the account first edited, and a lot of people start off on en-wiki even if it's not their native tongue just because it's so much bigger and thus more likely to have the article they were looking for and (importantly) more likely to be accurate and up-to-date. A lot of the wikis outside the big global languages are essentially just collections of pages on the interests of the half-a-dozen people who've declared themselves that site's owners. ‑ Iridescent 14:25, 18 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Reputable reliable accurate sources

Forever ago, @SmokeyJoe suggested that WP:N refer to "reputable" sources rather than "reliable" ones, and he recently reminded me of this in one of our ongoing arguments. After noticing that there are at least 30 references to accuracy on this page, I've decided to (surprise him by) bring this idea here, with the hope that you all could tell me whether this makes any sense. The idea is that we (re)define a few bits of wikijargon to separate some concepts:

reputable – has a favorable reputation as a purveyor of information (e.g., due to using peer-review, being a typical daily newspaper).
- Good editors will have no trouble turning reputable sources into reliable ones by writing suitable content. Reputable sources will generally be accurate, to the extent that they deal with facts instead of opinions. Reputable sources may or may not be independent.
- Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Perennial sources (RSP) gets renamed to "Reputable sources".
reliable – is a source editors believe is sufficient to support the specific content in question.
- Reliable sources might be disreputable (e.g., social media posts), inaccurate (denials issued by who were caught red-handed and convicted of their crimes) and/or non-independent (every autobiography ever).
- People trying to claim that a source is reliable without comparing that source to a specific bit of content will be encouraged to use the word reputable instead.
accurate – gets the facts correct. Does not require being unbiased, but it does require not lying (so, e.g., it might write "Lee Liar says ____" but not "Lee Liar tells the truth when he says ____").
- May or may not be reputable; may or may not be reliable; may or may not be independent.
independent – not getting paid by the subject (directly or indirectly). An independent source that gets information from a non-independent source is still producing an independent source.
- May or may not be reputable; may or may not be reliable; may or may not be accurate.

My questions: What have I missed? ("Unbiased", maybe?) Would this distinction be helpful, assuming that it could be accomplished (which is doubtful)?

As for implications, if you follow it all the way to the end, I think that the scariest scenario is this: If the source can manage to reprint part of a corporate press release and still remain reputable (doubtful), then that reprinted content, even though it was originally authored by a non-independent person, becomes an independent reputable source which could be used to demonstrate notability and be cited as a reliable source in articles. Essentially, the source is transformed into an independent source through the decision of an independent editor at an independent publication to make that content available to the public.

What do you think? WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:28, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I'm going to say this with respect, and I don't want you to think I'm trying to say that making definitions clear isn't important, but this strikes me a classic "policy-wonkery-for-the-sake-of-policy-wonkery". And it really does appear to be designed by someone a bit too captured by corporate-US-process-over-substance behavior. Those of us out in the trenches dealing with writing articles aren't going to be helped by this (unless it's a side benefit of having the people who enjoy bickering over this sort of thing out of our hair). I can't see how this makes any improvement in the actual ability to write articles with good sourcing easier. But ... what do I know? I'm just out there writing and reviewing content... heh. Ealdgyth (talk) 21:34, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Harsh, Ealdgyth. I think it helps everyone, especially newcomers, to use words according to their standard meanings.

To be more specific, I suggest that “reputable” is the appropriate adjective for secondary sources, and “reliable” for primary sources. While a good secondary source contains primary source material, the secondary source content includes things like the authors opinions, which are not really well described as “reliable”. SmokeyJoe (talk) 21:46, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The problem is... you can come to some sort of agreement with the people who might edit some policy page, and that's fine. It's not going to have much effect on the folks who don't bother reading policy pages or discussions. And the ones pushing a POV will just use whatever you come up with to try to win their battles. I'm not saying don't try - but I don't see that it's going to be a great help. Yes, I'm cynical these days. Ealdgyth (talk) 21:51, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I appreciate that I'm being somewhat inconsistent given that I regularly plug WP:Cite Unseen, but I've always had problems with any attempt to draw "good source/bad source" lines. There are sources that are inherently unreliable, but even the most reputable of sources can make glaring mistakes (this is my usual example), and particularly when you get into politically contested areas sources are always going to have an inherent bias.

On the whole I'd lean slightly more towards Ealdgyth here. Discussions over the difference between "reliable" and "reputable" are something of an angels-on-pinheads exercise—ultimately editors are going to use the source that says what they want it to say. (On at least one occasion I've caught a well-established editor citing a 'fact' to a novel when their Google Books search obviously didn't come up with a legitimate RS to support their point of view.

Regarding your specific example of the reprinting of a press release by a source considered reliable, I'm not sure I see that as as problematic as you. Provided we trust the source doing the re-publication, to me it's essentially just a variant of the kind of "I've reviewed this for myself and concluded that I'm happy to have my reputation attached to it" calculation that goes on in every academic peer review. ‑ Iridescent 05:20, 16 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

"Essentially, the source is transformed…"

Essentially, the source is transformed into an independent source through the decision of an independent editor at an independent publication to make that content available to the public. Isn't that a feature of our policies rather than a bug!? The point of reporting what Independent Reliable Sources say is that you have some indication that the claim is likely to be both true and important; if Independent Reliable Sources are quoting a press release uncritically, that seems to me to be an obvious indication both that they consider the press release important enough for their readers to know about, and true enough to stake their reputation on quoting it uncritically. If a "press release->notability" pipeline became a major issue, it would probably be easier to simply add a clause to WP:N noting that a press release doesn't count towards notability, even when reproduced in what would normally be considered an Independent Reliable Source.
TBH, if someone were to want to spend the substantial effort required to redefine a well-established Wikipedian term of art, I think their time would be better spent coming up with a better word than "notability". I don't think our use of the term "reliable source" is all that confusing, and if we need to distinguish between "generally has a reputation for reliability" and "reliable for a particular claim", then "generally reliable" and "reliable for foo" are already part of the Wikipedian idiom. On the other hand, people who are encountering how the sausage is made for the first time are often confused by what we mean when we say someone is notable. Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 08:28, 16 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I basically agree with you (that this is a feature, not a bug), but this appears to be a point of dispute among editors. Other editors will look at a bog-standard source (e.g., typical article in the local daily newspaper) and say "Ah, ha! The reporter wrote in the sixth paragraph that this local business has 250 employees, and the only way to find out how many employees they have is to get that information straight from the company, so I hereby declare the entire newspaper article to be non-independent, and the entire source is completely unsuitable for demonstrating notability". (See also variations like "uses some of the same words as the 'About us' page on the corporate website" or "presents a completely positive view of the subject".) WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:14, 18 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I think part of it is a disconnect between "notability" and "reliability", and the difficulty some people have in distinguishing between the concepts. If I start a business in a city big enough to have multiple local media outlets and send out a press release to each of those outlets, I'll immediately have the independent coverage in multiple non-trivial sources, and provided we're satisfied that each of those sources has fact-checked the press release before reprinting (or paraphrasing) it those sources will also be reliable in Wikipedia's terms. However, they won't have any particular bearing on notability. (Two decades of efforts to clean up the "but it was mentioned in the newspaper so it must be notable!" problem have definitely not been helped by the number of people who should know better—reaching right to the very top—who don't appear to grasp the difference between "I can prove it exists" and "this topic is appropriate for Wikipedia".)

This disconnect has always been an issue, and it's surprisingly difficult to articulate just what the difference is between "trivial or ephemeral topic that happens to have been mentioned in multiple sources because their PR department has a knack for catchy press releases" , "potentially notable topic but there's actually only a single source because a bunch of different papers cribbed from the same article on a wire service" and "actual repeated non-trivial coverage in multiple independent reliable sources demonstrating that the topic is actually potentially significant". The brief paragraph at Wikipedia:Existence ≠ Notability#Don't create an article on a news story covered in 109 newspapers is probably the least-worst attempt at it I've seen.

The elephant in the room is that the significant coverage of the topic directly and in detail, in reliable sources that are independent of the subject mantra, which supposedly forms the bedrock of Wikipedia's notability policy, doesn't actually describe how we determine notability. I could find Wikipedia-compliant sources for articles on 2021 water leak in Oxford Road, Manchester^[8], Cancellation of flights from Billings Airport owing to weather conditions^[9] or List of children bitten by Yorkshire terriers^[10] with no difficulty, but if I were actually to turn any of those redlinks blue I'd rightfully be pilloried. In reality, "notability" and "reliability" both consist of a series of judgement calls based on precedent, and precedent is notoriously difficult to codify particularly in a context like Wikipedia where so many decisions are based on "this feels right" rather than on written policy.

(For what it's worth and to unify the threads on this page somewhat, I also think this is why UCoC isn't going to work unless it's watered down to such a vague "try to be nice to each other" set of platitudes that we may as well not have it at all. Trying to codify cultural norms is virtually impossible—I'd challenge anyone to explain clearly exactly where the line between "telling someone to stop repeatedly disrupting Wikipedia by inserting extremist propaganda" and "critiquing someone's political affiliations in such a way that upsetting them would reasonably be considered the most likely outcome" lies, or to define what politeness in behaviour and speech amongst people, including strangers actually means. Upsetting and annoying other people is a fundamental part of editing—either on Wikipedia or anyone else—since by its nature 'editing' means telling other people that they're wrong and saying things other people don't want to hear. It doesn't even need to be contentious topics; as I write this the latest instalment of an eight year argument is currently playing out over the weighty matter of whether commas should go before or after quotation marks.) ‑ Iridescent 07:32, 18 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Iridescent wrote If I start a business … and send out a press release to each of those outlets, I'll immediately have the independent coverage in multiple non-trivial sources

Absolutely not. Nonsense. Repetition of the information from press releases is not independent. The GNG requires an independent person to create commentary (or analysis etc) on the content of the press release. Consider the information. Who made it? Wikipedia works with information, not who pressed the photocopier button. SmokeyJoe (talk) 07:58, 18 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I disagree with that. It won't necessarily be neutral, but neutrality isn't a synonym for reliability. Provided the re-user is someone we collectively trust to fact-check rather than blindly re-use, then in their re-use they've created a reliable source in Wikipedia's terms. This happens all the time for some topics—for instance, when it comes to sporting transfers our sole source for "Carlos Kickaball has been signed by Fulchester United from Midtable Town for a transfer fee of €3,000,000" will be assorted newspapers citing press releases from the two teams' PR departments or the player's agent, but we still treat them as reliable sources because we trust the newspapers not to be printing it unless they'd verified that the press releases were genuine. ‑ Iridescent 08:37, 18 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The example assumes that five press releases = five newspaper articles, but this is likely optimistic. The more likely outcome is a couple of sentences in one paper. But let's imagine that your business is the sort that is especially well-suited to the publications' different editorial goals (perhaps a Water park). Any newly opened business would still have a problem with Notability's WP:SUSTAINED rules, but presumably the business hopes that both coverage and the business will continue over time.

The act of "creating commentary" is transforming information into a secondary source. It would be very easy for the independent source to turn a basic press release full of boring factual things like "Iri's Waterful Wonder Park will open next week" into a secondary source by adding something like "and it will be a welcome addition to the city's entertainment options, especially for families with teenagers".

As for what editors actually do, rather than the theory from more than a decade ago, I offer these quotations from recent AFDs:

"a single source which is not much more than a recycled press release" (I wonder how this editor knows that?)
"That is a routine annoucement of the man leaving his job. How is that notable and it is a press-release." (The source in question is an article in Bloomberg News.)
"The apnews ref is yet another copy of the same press release." (I assume that's a reference to the Associated Press's website, which is https://www.apnews.com Apparently we don't all know the difference between one of the most respected wire services in the world and a company-generated press release.)
"just rehashed press releases (e.g. the Interesting Engineering article copies whole bits straight from the Cnick Teslaring homepage), not actual independent, journalistic bits" (I guess you can always tell it's a press release when you can prove word-for-word copying of "whole bits" from something that's not a press release.)
"articles derived heavily from press releases...are not considered independent" Straight-up claim about what the rules are, and it matches with SmokeyJoe says.
"press release regurgitated by The Toronto Star ("are thrilled to announce")" The parenthetical leads me to believe that this is declared to be a press release because the editor doesn't think the style is proper for a newspaper, rather than because the editor has seen the alleged press release and compared its contents. The Toronto Star is the biggest daily newspaper in Canada, which is not generally the type of publication that I'd expect to see moonlighting as a press release aggregator.

OTOH, I would not be surprised if we have a double-standard here. Self-promotion efforts by athletes and certain other kinds of celebrities are welcomed by editors. Identical self-promotion efforts by businesses are not. It might well by the case that a rehashed press release in the sports section of a newspaper would be accepted as highly reliable and indicating notability, while the same situation in the business section of the same newspaper would be rejected as dubious, unreliable, tainted, and never contributing to notability. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:14, 19 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

User:WhatamIdoing, I'm feeling the need for the historiographical, information-focused, primary/secondary source typing and matching information-independence classification approach to be written into an essay. I am completely confident that it is the right approach as a theoretical basis, and cannot deny that many good editors reject it while mismatching it to other concepts like reliability and bias/POV.

The starting explanation is that Wikipedia is (meant to be) an encyclopedia, and an encyclopedia is a tertiary source, meaning it is concerned with information and knowledge above data. Accordingly, "Wikipedia as an encyclopedia" belongs squarely in the field of historiography, not science, not journalism, and then, for the sake of sensible communication, let's adopt the language of historiography (as is largely the case in Wikipedia policy, WP:PSTS especially, if not always in practice (eg NSPORT)).

The consequence of the above is that it is essential to consider the provenance of the information. Who wrote it, and why, and to what audience? Note that "information" is "secondary sourced", as distinct from data, which is pure, testable, or provable. Information and knowledge is interpretive, subjective, depends on perspective, and not necessarily subject to being tested or proved. If an interpretation of the data becomes testable and reliable and provable, that interpretation becomes data.

The association of the word "reputable" with unprovable secondary source interpretations, contextualisations and opinions is logical, but will not in itself fix any simple problem. "Reliable" is not a bad word, indeed, quality secondary sources are expected to be published in publications, by publishers, and editors, with a reputation for reliability. Never discard "reliable", Wikipedia does not want to open a door to analysis of unreliable data. -- SmokeyJoe (talk) 01:08, 19 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Is this blue or green?. Answer: No. We have a terminology definition problem. SmokeyJoe (talk) 03:27, 19 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
#008888

I don't think that it's so simple to separate pure, testable, provable data from interpretive, subjective, perspective-based information. If it were, the entire world would agree on whether the color here was blue or green – or even agree on whether blue and green are separate colors, which they don't. The color itself is absolutely "pure, testable, provable data". You can get out a spectrometer and measure the wavelength to the exact nanometer, if you want to. But when you decide to call that wavelength "blue" or "green", you are already interpreting that "pure, testable, provable data". And yet I don't think that you would be satisfied if a source said "They sell a blue-green widget" that you were looking at a subjective interpretation and therefore a secondary source that demonstrated notability. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:43, 19 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The blue-green transition can be subjected to an agreed criteria. The subjectivity of a person's blue-green distinction is different to subjectivity on the widget. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 03:27, 19 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Even if the color is the most important fact about the widget? WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:16, 20 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The importance of a fact does not remove the importance of using a common language to talk about it. SmokeyJoe (talk) 06:03, 25 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

People can have genuine disagreements about which "common language" applies. Remember The dress? You're not wrong if you happen to perceive a color different from the color I perceive. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:06, 25 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Absolutely I know The dress, and see also one of my favourite images. There is a difference between “it is blue” the asserted fact, and “I perceive that as blue”, a personal account. SmokeyJoe (talk) 02 (UTC)

But when the source says "It's blue", in your model of evaluating sources, an editor can say "Oh, I've personally decided that this statement is just his personal perception of the color – primary, no evidence of notability". WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:47, 26 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The colour of a widget is trivial information. I thought we agreed that a separate condition was that the coverage required is 100 to 500 words. I think it is pointless to try to explain source typing, independent vs non-independent, on a trivial mention. SmokeyJoe (talk) 01:02, 27 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The color of this particular subject is not trivial, and hundreds of words were expended on it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:26, 27 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

User:WhatamIdoing, I’d need to see the hundreds of words to meaningfully comment. Hundreds of words on a perception would be a non-trivial secondary source. SmokeyJoe (talk) 08:09, 31 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@SmokeyJoe, the test to which I assume WAID is referring is fairly well documented. You can see the hundreds of words in question just by googling blue or green. (We have a truly appalling article at Blue-green, but it's literally one of the worst articles I've ever seen on Wikipedia and I've seen some stinkers.) ‑ Iridescent 13:10, 31 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I am not appalled, but delighted to discover stuff I’d not encountered before. Blue-green is technical, but useful and not offensively to me. Blue–green distinction in language is more interesting, new to me but aligns with something I already knew: When people have words for something, it affects how they think about about it. SmokeyJoe (talk) 23:41, 31 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

'Orange' is the most interesting example of that particular phenomenon. Until the Portuguese reached India and brought back orange trees, the concept of 'orange' as something other than a shade of red literally didn't exist in Europe—thus European languages have things like 'redhead' and 'red deer' that are clearly orange rather than red, because at the time they were named the concept of 'orange' didn't exist. ‑ Iridescent 07:11, 4 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Essentially, the source is transformed into an independent source through the decision of an independent editor at an independent publication to make that content available to the public is scholarly bastardisation. It’s technobabble, like Star Trek science, like YouTube COVID misinformation. It’s using scholarly words foolishly. “Transformation” is something that happens to information, by a new author’s creative addition and the creation of a new secondary source. Independence of an original source is inherent in its origin. An independent editor who decides to publish something has not created anything beyond their judgement that something is to be published, and if that editor’s criteria for publishing is something other than the independence of the source, then this new information has zero relevance if you want to reevaluate the question of the ordinal source’s independence. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 05:58, 25 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
"Independence" is not a scholarly word. The non-independence of the original text is inherent, but the true independence of my decision to share this original text with the world at large is also equally inherent. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:08, 25 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
In context, “independence” is absolutely scholarly. Whether you perceive Wikipedia to be of the field of historiography, or journalism, or science, “independence” is a scholarly meaningful term. To the extent that “independence” can be used non-scholarly, it’s use is not appropriate anywhere on Wikipedia, because Wikipedia seeks to be of scholarly reputation.

The non-independence of an original document is inherent. No buts. The “true independence”(?) of your decision is a matter for you, and does not change the nature of the original document. A press release does not transform an independent source by re-publication. “Transform” is a scholarly term that does not apply to a source, but to information and knowledge. You could publish your decision to republish a press release, but is that decision “significance coverage”?

We know that collaboration and mutual back scratching is common in journalism. You cannot be independent of your collaborator An editors’ decision to publish is not an indicator of independence. SmokeyJoe (talk) 01:41, 26 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
A term can have meaning in scholarly circles without being a scholarly term.

If the goal of notability is to identify subjects that "gained sufficiently significant attention by the world at large and over a period of time", then me freely choosing to re-print someone else's work, of my own volition (and possibly without even the knowledge of the original author) is a signal of attention from the world at large.

We don't know that "mutual back scratching is common in journalism". On the contrary, we know that journalistic independence is highly prized in that field, and the collaboration normally takes the form of collaborating with other journalists. Bylines with multiple journalists' names, or a footnote that says "additional reporting by..." are fairly common. Bylines that say "Jo Journalist and Sam Subjectmatter" are not at all common. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:54, 26 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
The goal of notability on borderline notable topics is to ensure that Wikipedia only hosts content that others have previously written about. “Others” implies independent. “Written about” implies the generation of a secondary source and excludes mere repetition.

Republishing another’s work is not writing.

An editor choosing to re-publish a company PR release is an indicator of attention from the world at large, maybe, but it is not sufficient to meet the WP:GNG. No independent person has written about the topic. You also make the extremely dubious assumption that the editor is independent of the company when choosing to republish their PR release.

You may not know mutual back scratching is common in journalism, but I know personally that it happens. Not the NYTimes, but a national newspaper. “You write the story, I’ll visit and then publish the story”. Do you actually doubt that it is not commonplace?

Trivial mentions are below the threshold for being worth consideration. Consider the example you previously offered me: The AVA Mediterranian, Winter Park, Florida [11]. There is enough material in that to analyse writing styles and information content. The indicators are overwhelming (not “proof” but overwhelming indication) that the content from the 3rd paragraph on was written by a different person to the author of paragraphs 1 and 2. Commonplace, I say. Maybe not commonplace in NYT journalism, but commonplace is single-product review articles. SmokeyJoe (talk) 01:17, 27 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

"Independent" = "free from conflict of interest" and that is highly relevant, and much argued about, in medical scholarship, and no doubt many other fields. Johnbod (talk) 03:31, 26 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I agree.

One potentially resolvable question: If the author has a COI, but the publisher does not, does the resulting document ("A") always have a disabling COI for notability purposes? I think – despite my argument to the contrary above – that it might be so.

If it does, then the next question is: If an author without any such COI reads this document ("A"), and a Wikipedia editor believes that this author without any such COI used information from that document ("A") to write another document ("B"), then does the resulting new document ("B") ever have a disabling COI for notability purposes? My initial thought is that this never happens. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:02, 26 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I also agree, that a lack of COI is a necessary condition of independence. But it is not a sufficient condition. The collaborating source may have no conflict, but if the source sources all information, comment analysis and option from the subject, then the source is not independent of the subject. SmokeyJoe (talk) 01:23, 27 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Nah, this is far too tough on intermediary sources like journalists - they have to get their initial information from somewhere, and very often the subject is the only feasible place. Johnbod (talk) 05:16, 27 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Johnbod, I inserted some necessary words. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 05:50, 27 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
It’s perfectly fine to get initial information from the subject, but they have to do something with it. SmokeyJoe (talk) 05:52, 27 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

If the *only* information is the subjects’ creation, if the journalist does not even add their own opinion, then it does not meet the GNG. I am not saying that the information from the subject poisons the journalists contribution, but what counts, for the GNG, is what the journalist contributed.

If the journalist did create and add their own secondary source content, the question then is whether the amount of content created by the journalist amounts to significant coverage. Look at [12]. The journalist wrote the first 121 words, and was given the rest (happy to explain the deduction, but if you just accept it for now). Does the source meet the GNG? SmokeyJoe (talk) 05:45, 27 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
However: when (you believe that) some of the information comes from the subject, then you disqualify all of the information that you believe came from the subject, and then the independently-written source doesn't meet the GNG either, due to a lack of SIGCOV. To use the restaurant review, the source has more than 1,000 words, but you throw out all except the first 121 words. Many editors do not agree than Wikipedia:One hundred words is significant coverage; almost everyone agrees that 1,000 words normally is.

A very few editors take an even more extreme approach. I have seen two editors claim at AFD that when they believe that any information in the source came from the subject (e.g., a quotation from the CEO, a sentence about their earnings report), then the entire source is unusable for notability purposes, which is a standard that would basically mean never having any articles about people, governments, or organizations of any type, because even when whole books exist on the subject, because there are very few books written about, e.g., US Presidents without including at least one quotation from the subject. I have also seen editors argue that newspaper articles are unreliable (for facts) if any information in the source came from the subject. (This latter argument appears only when the news article has the "wrong" POV, however.)

I don't think this is correct. If the independent author is selecting which of the subject-supplied facts to present, then the source is still independent. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:32, 27 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Indeed - what I meant above, more clearly and fully expressed! Fortunately, no one tries to apply these nonsense arguments to say paintings in museums, where basic information such as the size, pigments, underdrawings shown by x-rays etc, is only available from the museum itself, since even the most distinguished art historians are not allowed to bring ladders and tape measures, nor take samples for analysis. The same in essence apples to almost all government and business financial numbers and statistics, not to mention census details and election results, all of which come exclusively from the "subject". Johnbod (talk) 16:41, 27 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I disagree that “selection” is a creative input that makes a secondary source. To make a secondary source, information must be transformed. If there is not creative processing of the information, then it is just repetition. Repetition is never enough. Repetition of selected things is not enough.

You have to distinguish between facts and comment. Dealing in facts, primary source material, that came directly or indirectly from the subject, is never a problem per se. Repeating the subject’s comments as your own comment, that is the problem.

I have consistently been saying that I only reject the non-independent information. Clarify now, that “non-independent information” means unprocessed information, although I take a very dim view of paraphrasing of quotes.

Rejection of the entire source can occur, if it is judged that the “journalist” is being secretly paid to write an advertorial.

The sort of topic matters. This borderline paranoid approach to source independence applies to actively advertising companies, their products, and their CEOs. It does not apply to distant history, or natural sciences, because these subjects do not pay journalists to fake an interest.

Does it apply to art? Co-incidentally I was looking at AfD’s longest open discussion, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Itzchak Tarkay. Is this art? I’ve searched out and read reviews. It’s been described as “decorative art”. The prints are for sale. It sounds like art, and it sounds like a product for sale. SmokeyJoe (talk) 22:25, 27 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Unless I'm misreading this, you're veering from the point. I think most reasonable people would agree that material originating from the subject is rarely if ever valid to demonstrate notability, but what myself, Johnbod and WAID are saying is that this shouldn't necessarily affect its usability as a source for non-contentious facts.

If Delta Air Lines sends out a press release announcing that they're going to start direct flights to Sumburgh from August 2022, then it's not a breach of Wikipedia policy to add "Sumburgh commencing August 2022" to List of Delta Air Lines destinations, even though (a) any third-party coverage of it will almost certainly just be reprinting of the press release (since it's a routine announcement that isn't worth a journalist's time to rewrite), and (b) there's a potential benefit to Delta in our mentioning it since it might encourage people who weren't aware of the direct flight to choose them. However, what we couldn't include is anything along the lines of "their flight is more convenient and their aircraft is more comfortable" unless it was from a genuinely independent source and attributed as opinion rather than fact.

(I don't really get the point you're trying to make with It sounds like art, and it sounds like a product for sale. The tortured artist in a garret making art for art's sake is a myth; aside from a handful of dilettantes and an even smaller handful of religious devotees, virtually every piece of art ever created and certainly virtually every piece of art created in modern times was created either because the artist was commissioned to create it or because the artist hoped to sell it. Plus, as Johnbod says the overwhelming majority of individual artworks that would be considered notable in Wikipedia terms are in museums and much of the information about them will come from those museums—not just the basic facts like measurements, but books published by that museum's publishing arm, exhibition catalogs etc. Even in countries like the UK where museum entry is free, the museum still has an obvious financial benefit from Wikipedia covering items in their collection—if our The Sirens and Ulysses article prompts even one person to visit the Manchester Art Gallery to see it for themselves, that person will potentially eat in their canteen, buy something in their gift shop, or just count towards the visitor numbers next time MAG is applying for a grant and needs to show that they're providing a public service. It doesn't mean we can't use statements originating from MAG as sources in the article, just that they don't count towards notability.) ‑ Iridescent 03:44, 28 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I'm sorry if veering or distracting from the point. I certainly agree that material originating from the subject is rarely if ever valid to demonstrate notability, but that this shouldn't affect its usability as a source for non-contentious facts.

The point of discussion on "independent" with WAID is about the two GNG-complaint sources, a critical question at AfD.

My further tangential point in "It sounds like art, and it sounds like a product for sale" reflects my perception of a community low threshold for inclusion for art, and high threshold for inclusion for commercial products, and it's interesting to see what happens when these come into conflict. SmokeyJoe (talk) 04:53, 28 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
You really mean "for artists" (like your example), and I have some sympathy with your "perception of a community low threshold for inclusion for art, and high threshold for inclusion for commercial products", but the great majority of relevant articles are for artist bios on the one hand, and companies on the other. I'd imagine we have many more Afd removals of artists than products, but ones for specific artworks are rather less common. I do think industrial designers are hard done by in WP notability terms, but this mostly reflects RS coverage and perhaps editors' interests. Johnbod (talk) 12:54, 28 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
SmokeyJoe, I think you veered from the point when you said "I disagree that “selection” is a creative input that makes a secondary source." We're only talking about whether the source is INDY, not what makes it SECONDARY.

Also, if "selection" is never a creative input, then Collage can't be an art form, SYNTH can't involve creating material that isn't present in the cited sources, and the polished-up half-truths of advertising copy represent a purely mechanical, uncreative endeavor. We'd even have to reconsider whether a Literature review is a secondary source, because selecting what to highlight and what to omit is the creative, transformative action that makes them such valuable sources.

Using the Delta Air Lines example, SmokeyJoe has been arguing that if Delta says there will be a price increase, and Aviation Week & Space Technology adds an article saying that Delta said there will be a price increase, then no information in that article that SmokeyJoe (and/or any other editor) believes originated from Delta can count as "attention from the world at large" in Wikipedia:Independent sources for notability purposes. Even though "the world at large" decided to pay "attention" to whatever Delta said, and even though AWST has been considered an independent source by editors every time I've seen it discussed, SmokeyJoe seems to be arguing that every fact they obtain from Delta and freely choose repeat is evidence of their non-independence.

Actually, looking more closely, it seems to me that SmokeyJoe is trying to argue that facts are irrelevant, and that only opinions/judgments confer notability. In that situation, a long source reporting only objective facts ("This film was created in 2021, starred these people, and has won the following 12 awards") doesn't matter, but a short one sharing an unimportant opinion ("This is an exciting film") does. We'd still running into the problem of Wikipedia editors deciding that the author's opinion is fake on the basis of the Wikipedian's personal beliefs about what the opinions ought to be (because it's just impossible for a truly independent author to share the same opinion as the subject, right?), but the idea that "attention from the world" at large must ignore all the attention that the world gives to objective facts is strange. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:46, 28 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I am defending WP:SIRS. A WP:CORP notability-attesting source has to be simultaneously all of: Significant, Independent; Reliable; and Secondary. It’s pointless to examine cases of Independent where it is a clear failure of another criteria.

A collage and a literature review are secondary sources if the author has injected any creative input. Mere selection not being a creative input does not poison creative input. To “highlight” is to make creative input. A tag cloud, as a collage example, if a computer generated with no creative input, would not be a secondary source.

“SmokeyJoe seems to be arguing that every fact they obtain from Delta and freely choose repeat is evidence of their non-independence.” That would be very poorly stated. Facts obtained from Delta are irrelevant to the notability question. “Delta airlines March 22nd airfare increases” is unlikely to meet WP:N WP:CORP or WP:SIRS. This is about standalone articles, not article content. A Seattle-based webpage that lists every Delta fare increase that involves Seattle is not a secondary source. A lengthy introduction discussing the appearance that Delta appears to no longer consider the Seattle market as a priority, that would be a good secondary source, significant independent and reliable, with it being irrelevant that every fact came from Delta published airfares.

Facts are sort of irrelevant to deciding whether a source is a notability-attesting SIRS-compliant source. Facts obscure the question more than they help. The facts may be used to show that the source is unreliable and not worthy for that reason, but this is where it would be better for WP:N to speak to the reputation of the author of the new secondary source content.

”This is an exciting film” is unworthy of consideration because it is not significant, below the absolute-minimum never-disputed 100-words or two-running-sentences. A worthy example is >100 words (500 words?) expanding on how, who, found it exciting. SmokeyJoe (talk) 22:48, 28 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
It’s pointless to examine cases of Independent where it is a clear failure of another criteria.

When the primary goal is to figure out what contsitutes "independent", then it's pointless to even consider any other criteria. I'm still trying to figure out how you know that 90% of the restaurant review was written by someone whose name does not appear in the byline. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:35, 4 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Exactly. If sources which we agree are neutral and independent deem something worthy of repetition and we trust them to have verified its accuracy, then those constitute reliable sources in Wikipedia terms even if they aren't using their own words. ‑ Iridescent 11:10, 6 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
The Wikipedia-notability standalone article inclusion criteria is not about verified accuracy. It is about whether others have taken the trouble to write about it before, as opposed to a Wikipedian writing original material. SmokeyJoe (talk) 12:17, 6 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Independent, as applied to the information itself, requires that there is non trivial information. To address clues of independence of the information, more material is needed. 100 words minimum, 500 words good.

The restaurant review? Seriously? Really? You can read it through without noticing the abrupt change of voice at paragraph 3? Writing style, tone, cadence, voice, perspective. Paragraphs 1-2 are innocent, tentative, simple-observational. Paragraphs 3 onwards are confident, assertive, value-laden, and the cadence is almost poetry. SmokeyJoe (talk) 12:15, 6 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I believe it's supposed to be an independent source, not independent information.

The first sentence includes phrases like "rainbow of fresh, vibrant ingredients" and "sunshine on a plate". That's not my idea of tentative tone or simple observations. Compare it to some other reviews Ayling has written for the same magazine (e.g., [13][14][15]). Are you finding the same confident, assertive, value-laden, poetical qualities in those? WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:25, 6 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Reputability/reliability/trustworthiness

I think the comment 'I suggest that “reputable” is the appropriate adjective for secondary sources, and “reliable” for primary sources"' summarises the problem right there. This project is too mature, with guidelines like Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources (medicine). This is attempting to redefine words in a way that makes two decades of discussion confusing to the point of being "wrong, if you use the 2022 definition of 'reliable'". One problem we have in medicine is that many would say primary research papers are reliable (leaving aside the problem that the peer review process seems broken and fraud rampant). And they are reliable (we hope) but only for what they say they did and found. We instead rely on secondary literature, not really because we think it's reputation is higher, but because in medicine it is actually far more likely to "to support the specific content in question" without engaging in OR and supported by WEIGHT and more likely to reflect the NPOV. Any attempt to narrow down some novel definition of "reliable" that contradicts longstanding editor usage is a battle nobody needs.

I don't think the above redefinitions are going to help us educate newbies that, yes, Nature and The Lancet are "reliable" but not all their articles are equally reliable for any kind of claim we might write. -- Colin°^Talk 10:23, 16 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I think I sometimes say "weighty" or "sufficient" or their negations to differentiate between reliability and due weight. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 13:51, 16 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I like the idea of replacing "reliable sources" with "reputable sources." "Reliable" is an exaggerated claim of accuracy, in my opinion. "Reputable" means only that the source has a good reputation for accuracy."Smallchief (talk) 14:46, 16 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

"Reputable" still has the same problem as "reliable", in that there's no such thing as a truly trustworthy source—even the most reputable sources get things wrong all the time, particularly (but not exclusively) when they mention in passing something that isn't relevant to the point being made. (If for instance an eminent medical journal mentions an experiment that was conducted in Strasbourg, France in 1910, it has no bearing on the validity of the medical data so the fact-checkers won't necessarily spot it, but it doesn't make it a reliable source for the fact that what was then the German city of Strassburg was a part of France at the time.) Even when it is directly related to the subject matter, highly reputable sources make mistakes all the time—it's now more than a decade since I first pointed out that the ODNB entry on William Huskisson describes him as "the first fatality of the railway age" while in fact he wasn't even the first railway fatality in Eccles.

I also agree that trying to change the language would be a mission doomed to fail. We've been using "reliable source" for so long, and it's so ingrained in the wording of so many pages, unless we started blocking people for using the term (which is obviously not going to happen) I doubt it would be any earlier than a decade before it dropped out of common usage. ‑ Iridescent 20:04, 16 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I have a mental image of editors discussing sources of ill repute. (Maybe Bomis?) --Tryptofish (talk) 20:09, 16 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

What about calling Congress a house of ill repute?Smallchief (talk) 15:32, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Of course there's a truly trustworthy source; it's this talk page. ;-)

The thing that appeals to me about dividing reliability and reputability is that we could separate the task of "figure out whether this is relevant for notability" from the task of "figure out whether this supports a specific claim". The GNG requires reliable sources. Okay, but how do you figure out whether a source is reliable when there's no content to compare it to? Donald Trump's tweets are cited in several articles. Are they reliable sources? Well, um, I guess. Kind of. Sometimes. Yes. But they're only "reliable" when we're talking about the WP:V kind of reliable and not at all when we're talking about the WP:N kind of reliable. Since those two things are different, why not use different words for them? (Aside from the impossibility of getting editors to change their terminology.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:49, 18 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

we could separate the task of "figure out whether this is relevant for notability" from the task of "figure out whether this supports a specific claim": don't we already at least try to do this? I don't think it's controversial that e.g. a source which is reliable for a statement of fact about the source itself doesn't count towards notability. Which goes into your Donald Trump tweet example: Trump's tweets are reliable for claims that Trump tweeted them, and essentially nothing else – I suspect in the case of Trump, you might even get pushback if you tried to use a tweet as a source that he believes the thing he tweeted! They don't count towards the notability of Donald Trump's Twitter or Donald Trump's statements on $Topic not because they're not reliable for claims made in those articles, but because they are neither independent nor secondary. Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 08:32, 18 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Trumps tweets were not reliable for claiming that Trump tweeted. It was conjectured that Trump was tweeting only very late when his daughter was likely asleep, and the grammar and tone descended quite a notch. SmokeyJoe (talk) 08:36, 18 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Well, whatever they're reliable for (call it "reliable for claims that Donald Trump's twitter account tweeted X" if you prefer) it doesn't alter the fact that they don't count towards notability for perfectly good reasons unrelated to what they are reliable for, and I can't see that anyone who believes that they do or should count towards notability is going to be persuaded otherwise by introducing a distinction between a reliable source and a reputable one. Those people are already way outside the mainstream consensus our policies and guidelines mean; fiddling about with those policies and guidelines isn't going to affect them in the slightest. Caeciliusinhorto-public (talk) 09:16, 18 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Since we use the term reliable source in both cases, we could have someone write that "Keep this statement, which is sourced only to Trump's tweets. His tweets are reliable sources" in a discussion on a talk page and also write "Delete this article, which is sourced only to Trump's tweets. His tweets are not reliable sources" in an AFD – with no actual conflict in meaning. You just have to know that the first refers to reliable-for-WP:V and the second refers to reliable-for-WP:N. Maybe if we fiddled with the policies and guidelines enough to change the wording (but not the underlying concepts), it would not appear that my hypothetical editor was contradicting himself. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:20, 19 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

More on reliability vs reputability

I prefer Reliable over Reputable. To my mind "reliable" focuses on the objective issue, is this a source that tries to be accurate and issues corrections when mistakes seep through? Reputable is more subjective, and even in the era of "alernative facts" is way more variable, one person's reputable site is another's disreputable one. And not even necessarily for the same reasons. Here in the UK the BBC has been castigated as the "Bolshevik Broadcasting Corporation" for years by some rightwingers, as the Brexit Broadcasting Company by some Remainers and as obsequiously pro monarchy by anti monarchists. Also as long as our focus is on the facts rather than the spin they are given, "Reliable" fits the judgment calls we make better than reputable. Ϣere SpielChequers 16:43, 20 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Do you differentiate conceptually between the kind of source that is useful for supporting a specific statement (e.g., "Big Corp announced that they had hired Bob as their new CEO") and the kind of source that is useful for demonstrating that Wikipedia should have a separate article about that subject? WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:14, 20 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I'm aware that the latter is a big deal in deletion debates. I tend to steer away from such discussions, partly because we put so much emphasis on people who represent a country, especially in sport and politics despite countries varying in population by at least four orders of magnitude. The Borough I live in is a bit on the small side, but it has a larger population than several countries that have their own teams at the Olympics and Paralympics. Ϣere SpielChequers 11:22, 21 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I think the notability/deletion concept needs a different word from the verifiability/source–text integrity concept. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:32, 21 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Yes of course. They are two different spectra. One where we have few problems, outside some areas such as fringe theories and alternative medicine. The vast majority of us want our content to be true. Though many, perhaps most of us, have looser standards for truth in areas where we know certain things to be true. Where we have huge disagreements is over where to draw the line as to what merits inclusion in a global encyclopaedia. We can probably all agree that if we decide that a particular topic merits an article we can include details that wouldn't merit their own article. But that does mean that the test for whether a fact is notable varies according to whether it can be fitted into an article. Ϣere SpielChequers 23:46, 21 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Re does mean that the test for whether a fact is notable varies according to whether it can be fitted into an article: yes, absolutely, although 'notable' probably isn't the best term to use as it means something else on Wikipedia ("worthy of a stand-alone article"). ‑ Iridescent 03:55, 22 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

No, "notable" certainly isn't the best term for facts on WP. WP:UNDUE is the policy governing the inclusion of facts, so I suppose "due" is the word. Though it's not "facts" that cause the most trouble in my neck of the woods, but analysis/assessment/RS opinions. Johnbod (talk) 04:04, 22 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

To expand slightly on the notability/due weight distinction with an example, "A new footbridge was installed in 2016 at Brigg railway station, replacing an earlier footbridge from the 1890s" is a perfectly legitimate thing to include on Brigg railway station. If for some reason nobody had gotten around to creating that article it wouldn't mean Footbridges of Brigg railway station or 2016 Brigg station bridge replacement would become legitimate topics in their own right even though it is actually possible to provide evidence of coverage of the bridge in multiple independent reliable sources (ref 2, 3 & 4 in the current article). If gray areas were clear, they wouldn't be gray areas. ‑ Iridescent 03:55, 22 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Context and reliability

I think @WhatamIdoing: has hit the nail on the head here. We are writing articles based on what "reliable" sources state as if such sources are complete monoliths and they are either reliable or unreliable. The fact is, most sources are on a continuum. The suppression of Hunter Biden laptop is probably one of the more recent scandals against the right that comes to mind when WP:RS outright ignored/suppressed/minimized the story in order to push a political agenda.

We SHOULD be evaluating whether a source verifies the claim in question. Apologies for US-centric analogy and leaving WP:N out of the discussion, but it illustrates a point...If we stated that "<a Republican or Democrat> stated 'XYZ'" in their speech to ____ and then cited that to the video of the speech, there should be little in question that the statement is accurate and is therefore verifiable. This lends zero weight to the accuracy of the claim, merely that the statement was made. It is neutral and accurate. People can verify by the link that it indeed happened. Instead of such a myopic focus on WP:RS, we need to focus on verifiability. Trump's tweets are an excellent example, though it could just as easily be Obama or Biden's tweets too. Indeed Trump/Biden/Obama made such a statement. That fact is completely verifiable. We should also encourage first-party sources so people can see original statements within context (where possible); currently, it is discouraged. Buffs (talk) 18:53, 21 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Trump is much more famous for tweeting than any other president, so he makes a fine example. The thing is, I think those kinds of sources (e.g., Trump's tweets, the video of the politician making a speech) are reliable in the WP:V sense for claims that "<Person> said <this> on <date>", but they aren't useful at all for determining notability, and they are only barely useful for DUE purposes. But we use the same word for all of them: We just say "The source is (or isn't) reliable", when reality is more like "Trump's tweets are relia-verifiable for the purpose of writing a sentence about what he tweeted that day but not relia-notable for the purpose of deciding whether to have an article on what he tweeted that day." WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:29, 21 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

But we already have words for why Trump's tweets don't count towards notability: they are primary sources, and they aren't independent of the subject. Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 21:01, 21 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I think what WAID is saying is, how do we resolve the blurred line that arises when one of those tweets is quoted; what degree of independent analysis is necessary before it they count towards "received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject"?

If you want a less recentist example, consider if a previously-lost work by Shakespeare or Aristophanes were found. Would it be notable in Wikipedia terms:

the moment the announcement of its discovery was made;
the moment of its authentication;
the point at which it is reproduced;
the point at which the first academic articles are published on it?

And then, repeat the same exercise with something that's potentially notable—e.g. instead of a lost Shakespeare play, it's a previously-unreleased Prince song or an unpublished Roald Dahl short story. Does the answer change, and if so why/why not?

And then, repeat the same exercise again with something more ephemeral like a routine political speech which doesn't contain anything of particular note, but is dutifully covered in newspapers at the time because that's what newspapers do, and is eventually included in The Collected Speeches of President Foo. Are those newspaper reports primary or secondary sources, and when if ever does notability kick in?

There are excellent reasons why Wikipedia has so few bright line rules—"do what works, not what the letter of the law says" is in large part why we've survived (and why attempts to impose bright line rules tend to get such a frosty reception regardless of their validity). However it does have the unfortunate drawback of making it virtually impossible to codify even the most fundamental of our basic concepts like "notability" and "civility". ‑ Iridescent 03:49, 22 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I'll have a go: in the case of the Aristophanes/Shakespeare play, assuming they aren't already notable (hello Cardenio), technically the point at which two reliable independent sources have covered them in depth - so not the announcement, but probably within the days after. (Authentication is somewhat irrelevant: if an academic, especially a well-regarded one, announces a newly discovered play as being by Aristophanes or Shakespeare, it's going to get a bunch of commentary whether or not it is ever authenticated. The serious doubts over the authenticity of Salvator Mundi don't stop it from being notable). If an Eminent Scholar announced the discovery and someone immediately created an article, we should keep it anyway as IAR, though; even if the Eminent Scholar turns out to be wrong, there will almost certainly be significant coverage. If for whatever reason nobody has written about it in say a year, then we could consider merging to a broader article or deleting. With Prince or Dahl, the threshold is the same but my tolerance for IAR immediate article creation is not - not every song by a popular musician, even by a major artist such as Prince, gets sufficient coverage to write an article about. Nonetheless, under current rules the amount of press coverage this would get would likely technically make it notable, even if I agree with your comments elsewhere that we should be stricter about news reporting counting towards notability. (As for the politician's speech, the relevant question is whether the news coverage is anything other than routine. Something like Zelenskyy's much-reported on address to the UK house of commons the other day might have gained enough non-routine coverage to count as notable, but a random MP's or Congressperson's stump speeches don't, even if the local news reports on them. I think the threshold for what is non-routine coverage is probably another one of those "I know it when I see it" situations, however.) Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 07:15, 22 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

WP:N isn't exactly a factor. Let's say WP:N is established for the subject at hand about Trump/Biden/Obama (doesn't really matter who). Including his twitter reply on the subject should clearly meet the criteria for inclusion as an official statement. Some are arguing that the source of the statement (twitter, facebook, personal website) makes the statement unreliable because it isn't a "reliable source". I think it's reliable enough for what was stated; it doesn't make any assessment for the accuracy of any claims. While I think the general subject should be restricted by WP:N, public statements should be simply verified to be from official accounts and presented without bias or prejudice. Buffs (talk) 15:29, 22 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I think you may have meant to reply somewhere else?

I don't know that I agree that either twitter comments by a politician should be considered or treated in the same way as official statements, or that simply because a politician (even the US president) makes an official statement we should assume that it's worthy of inclusion. Caeciliusinhorto-public (talk) 15:57, 22 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Caeciliusinhorto, I think (if I'm parsing it correctly) that the point being made isn't that we should always cover politicians' statements, but that statements that have verifiably been made by a particular politician are a reliable source for that particular politician having made that statement, and as such are legitimate to use as sources even if the statement in question hasn't received significant coverage, if there's a legitimate reason to do so. (I can see a few cases where it could arise. A politician issuing a routine statement welcoming the decision of Universal Widgets to build their new factory in Fooville might not get any significant coverage, but could legitimately be used for "the local congressman supported the decision to build the factory" should the factory ever warrant an article of its own.) ‑ Iridescent 16:21, 22 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

About "two reliable independent sources have covered them in depth": My question is how you can determine whether an independent source is actually "reliable" before you know what sentence/content the source is supposed to support. I don't think it can be done.

Examples:

Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine is the sort of thing that editors will say is a "reliable source". But it is an "unreliable source" for nearly all of Wikipedia's contents.
Trump's Twitter account is the sort of thing that editors will say is an "unreliable source". But it is a "reliable source" for certain content.

We don't have (AFAICT have never had) an actual definition of reliable source. One of the realistic definitions is that a source is reliable if experienced editors accept it for the specific content in question. Harrison's is reliable (=accepted by editors) for disease symptoms but unreliable for what a politician said; Trump's tweets are unreliable for disease symptoms but reliable for what that politician said.

The problem with this definition is that WP:N says "reliable sources". If this is the definition of reliable source, then we have a problem. Under this definition, it is not actually possible to determine whether a source is reliable before you have content to compare that source against.

There are ways around this problem, but they all involve using different language in WP:N and WP:V (e.g., changing to WP:GNG from "reliable sources" to "sources that are likely to be reliable for the expected content in the proposed article" or "reputable sources" or any number of other options). WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:26, 22 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

See I use "sources with a reputation for fact checking and accuracy for a given statement". I don't think we need to discuss secondaryness or due weight in the definition of "reliableness". Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 16:29, 22 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Jo-Jo Eumerus, technically, you don't. You cite too many peer-reviewed articles for that to be true. Fact checking is a different process. ;-) WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:30, 22 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The official word is Source reliability falls on a spectrum: No source is 'always reliable' or 'always unreliable' for everything. However, some sources provide stronger or weaker support for a given statement. Editors must use their judgment to draw the line between usable and inappropriate sources for each statement., and it can't really be any other way. Any attempt to draw up a formal rule would have so many exceptions, the policy page would look like a pipe roll.

If I ruled the world we'd apply the is generally unreliable, and its use as a reference is generally prohibited, especially when other sources exist that are more reliable. As a result, it should not be used for determining notability, nor should it be used as a source in articles. It may be used in rare cases in an about-self fashion. ruling from the Daily Mail RFC to all newspapers and all social media—except in a few cases about genuine current events when the books have yet to be written, I can't imagine any circumstances when news articles written by journalists who are unlikely to have access to all the information in question, or social media comments taken out of context, are ever going to be more reliable for our purposes than sources that aren't written to a deadline and where the authors have the benefit of hindsight. Plus, if once the books and the academic papers are written none of them see fit to mention the fact in question, that's a massive red flag either that the newspaper in question got it wrong, or that nobody considers it important and there's no reason for us to mention it. Unfortunately (a) I don't rule the world, and (b) this would be such a huge cultural change there would never be consensus for it. ‑ Iridescent 18:05, 22 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

To the extent that the rule is about using your judgment "to draw the line between usable and inappropriate sources for each statement", then WP:GNG's requirement for reliable sources cannot be met in advance of writing "each statement".

The other day, I was wondering whether we could have an article about a journalist. Her name is Livia Albeck-Ripka, and here's a link to her website. Her work is cited in about 50 articles, and we sometimes find it convenient to have articles about people and books that we cite a lot. She seems to do film/documentaries as well as print. I've no idea what WP:NJOURNALIST says, so I poked around for GNG-style sources for about five minutes. I came up empty, because search engines can't differentiate between "article she wrote" and "article about her".

What does the GNG want? Reliable sources. What's a reliable source? One that's evaluated for each statement. What doesn't exist yet? Any statements to evaluate the source's reliability against.

Now, I know how we do this. I've written more than a couple of articles (though none about journalists, as far as I know). But from a theoretical standpoint, it is suboptimal to say that reliability depends on the statement, and yet we need to make sure that the sources are reliable ones before we have the thing that's necessary to evaluate their reliability against. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:15, 23 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

If you really have a blinding urge to dive into the history from the Wild West days that created the precedents that in turn gave us the tangle of policies and guidelines that determine 'notability' and 'reliability', take a deep breath and start following links from Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Cold fusion. That was the closest we ever came to trying to resolve the "how do we deal with the scenario where the preponderance of sources on a particular topic are sources which any sane person would consider prima facie unreliable by their very nature?" question. (We never really did resolve it; the question arose again in equally fun forms at such places as Historicity of Jesus and Shakespeare authorship question.) There's no right answer; on a lot of topics by far the most trustworthy sources are technically self-published sources, for instance ‑ Iridescent 16:47, 23 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

[ECx3] Nope, I meant to reply here.

I would also say that this would apply to everyone, not just politicians. I would not say that every statement warrants inclusion. The subject at hand (WP:N) is what would make such statements inclusive (WP:N wouldn't be a factor and the only criteria in question would be WP:V...the assertion is that twitter, et al are reliable enough for the statements at hand. Direct links would be appropriate and credibility should not be assigned).

Example: In response, Trump/Biden/etc stated on Twitter/Facebook/their website "<insert verbatim quote>".<references go here>. That alone is a statement of fact that is easily verifiable. Saying that it shouldn't be included because no WP:RS reported on that specific quote is unnecessary. Buffs (talk) 16:32, 22 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

WAID, spot on. Buffs (talk) 16:32, 22 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Recentism and reliability

The news cycle is not a great source (even the best quality news sources don't have all the info). Avoid Google News and instead rely on Google Scholar. Wait 50 years and we'll have a much more balanced assessment of all current events :) (t · c) buidhe 23:31, 21 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I totally agree about the news cycle. It's too late now, but if I were founding Wikipedia I'd make it explicit from that start that newspapers (and their equivalents) can be used when appropriate as sources but don't count at all towards notability, and that the notability standard should from the start have been "A topic is presumed to be suitable for a stand-alone article or list when it has received significant coverage in published books or academic papers that are independent of the subject, or in the case of current events when any reasonable observer would agree that the topic will in future receive significant coverage in published books or academic papers".

There are perfectly legitimate reasons to use newspapers as a source for content—they're a very good resource for illustrating how people perceived something at the time. However, the "it's been covered by a newspaper so that makes it notable!" fallacy that arises from the ambiguousness inherent in Wikipedia articles should be based on reliable, published sources is the reason Wikipedia is now filled with ephemera like We not only saved the world which becomes undeletable because it was mentioned in more than one newspaper at the time (hence "multiple reliable sources") so just sits around forever. ‑ Iridescent 03:26, 22 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Buidhe, I don't think that we can realistically delete (nearly) all of the popular articles. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:36, 22 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

No, but I could certainly make a case for a two-tier system in which those articles based on actual academic sources are flagged as such (or even in which those articles not based on actual academic sources are {{noindex}}ed, although that would cause wailing and gnashing of teeth). At the moment the binary "RS/non-RS" distinction means that unless readers check the reference sections carefully, there's no easy way for readers to tell how seriously they should take any given statement, or even any given article. (See my comments in the other thread musing on how to flag potentially questionable content; they apply just as much here.) ‑ Iridescent 04:44, 22 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

One of the things we know for certain is that readers do not check the reference sections carefully. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:29, 22 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Some do, some don't, you can't generalise. If I doubt a particular claim I check the reference, and I'm sure I'm not alone.2A04:4A43:46CF:BE44:0:0:10A4:D349 (talk) 10:18, 23 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Most don't though. We have actual genuine data rather than anecdotes as to how many people actually click both the ^[1] links to the reference section, and the external links within it, and both figures are so low they may as well be zero. ‑ Iridescent 16:37, 23 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Huh - we do? Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 16:44, 23 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, the WMF forked out for some actual research on which links get clicked and how far down long articles people scroll. Don't ask me to find it, although if you're interested I imagine a (WMF) account will pop up here within the next few days with a link to it. ‑ Iridescent 16:50, 23 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I think this (and the studies linked from it) is what I was thinking of. Readers consistently ignore the ==References== section, regardless of the topic. ‑ Iridescent 16:55, 23 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

That's been a draft since 2016 - way to go, WMF! I don't think you are quite representing the findings fairly. For a start this appears to be on Android app users only, & a visual read of some of the graphs suggests ~5% opened the refs section (on Obama was it?), which I'd think pretty high. Vast numbers never look at anything beyond the lead, which is expected (by anyone who has ever had anything to do with the dead tree press anyway). Plus they can access the refs via the text links; the research mentions that, but doesn't seem able to capture it. The Wikimania presentation (first image) is rather clearer, if not very clear. Both highlight that almost no one looks at "External links", rather than mentioning "references". For the vast majority of readers, knowing the refs are there is a comfort, but they very reasonably don't actually want to check them out. Johnbod (talk) 19:54, 23 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

What Johnbod said; those who are busy trying to create and improve content need to stop being affected by this kind of spin. I click on way too many references when I'm looking for information outside of my level of knowledge (that is, when I am in consumer mode rather than editor mode) to ever believe this sort of thing from the WMF, particularly given its track record.

RE reliable v. reputable, I am in the camp with Ealdgyth 21:34, 15 March 2022; Iridescent 05:20, 16 March 2022; Colin°Talk 10:23, 16 March 2022; most particularly Iridescent 20:04, 16 March 2022 (I can always find plenty wrong in anything from The New York Times, as but one example); and ϢereSpielChequers 16:43, 20 March 2022 (sums up the NYT issue, as it is reliable but not reputable in everyone's opinion). Ealdgyth, you are not sounding like a cranky old woman :) :) This sort of thing, when there is so much that needs attention, destroys one's will to edit. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:13, 23 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I agree wholeheartedly with your last sentence. To repeat myself, We've been using "reliable source" for so long, and it's so ingrained in the wording of so many pages, unless we started blocking people for using the term (which is obviously not going to happen) I doubt it would be any earlier than a decade before it dropped out of common usage. Since (1) the fact that reliability is context-specific means that while we can on rare occasions declare a source always unreliable (those websites that have a reputation for going back and retrospectively editing their content rather than issuing corrections spring to mind) and (2) 'reliable' and 'notable' are both so embedded in Wikipedia culture that we'd never get consensus to deprecate the language, the only way this is ever going to be addressed is if we were to start over from scratch. In situations like that, the discussion to be having is how we work around the problematic structures and mitigate the problems they cause, not how to enact a 'solution' that would inevitably boil down to "dismiss the community and recruit a new one". Making some less-incomprehensible guidelines on "what constitutes a reliable source in given situations" (a handful of attempts have been made, but they're few and far between) would be the obvious place to start. ‑ Iridescent 16:22, 24 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I don't want to have editors stop using the word reliable. I want them to use it to mean just one thing. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:43, 25 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Unfortunately that's probably not possible unless the just one thing is "a reasonable observer would conclude that this particular source is usable to support this particular statement in this particular article". The whole concept of 'reliable' is too dependent on circumstances to start writing broader rules. ‑ Iridescent 03:45, 28 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

That is exactly what I would like to see: A reliable source supports a particular statement in a particular article. The other things (e.g., publications that have qualities that suggest they are highly likely to be usable to support particular statements in articles about the subjects most relevant to their subject matter) need different names. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:49, 28 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, I'm with you, I thought you meant trying to codify when a given source is or isn't reliable in a given situation.. Yes, I agree that "Reliable source" should only mean "supports this particular statement in this particular instance".

The point I'm trying to make is that because English Wikipedia is so culturally dominant and English Wikipedia has collectively been using a different meaning, we've literally altered the language; in the context of online information curation. "reliable" has been redefined to mean "not wholly discredited, and of a relatively consistent standard which allows one to assess the probability that a given statement will be accurate". This in turn leads to problems because some people are using the "able to be trusted; in which reliance or confidence may be placed; trustworthy, safe, sure" definition while others are using "probably trustworthy in a particular area", which leads to endless "but this source is reliable, why can't I use it?" confusion.

In an ideal world it ought never to have happened—when the English language and our policies clash, it's certainly not our place to start redefining the English language. Unfortunately reversing this will be like doing a three-point turn in a 737, as our warped definition of 'reliable' has escaped into broader online culture (when Facebook, Twitter et al put warnings on content, it's our definition of 'reliable source' they're using, not the dictionary's). Short of deprecating the use of "reliable source" altogether, replacing it with something like "appropriate source", and using an edit filter to actively suppress the phrase "reliable source"—none of which is going to happen—we're not going to get this particular toothpaste back in its tube.

The discussion to be had is how we come up with and enforce a new "source appropriate for a particular fact on a particular page" label, and make the WP:RS definition irrelevant. Given the unpleasantness surrounding WP:MEDRS—which only deals with a tiny subset of articles on which there's a general understanding both that there's a need for Wikipedia to be accurate, and that even normally trustworthy sources can sometimes be inappropriate in particular contexts—I would not want to be the one trying to roll out a similar "don't use any source unless you're willing to justify if challenged why this source is appropriate for this statement" into topics like pop culture or sports. Just look at how many people at FAC—where by definition everyone has at least some degree of experience with both writing and sourcing on Wikipedia—take exception to the routine "what makes [$website] a reliable source for this statement?" question. ‑ Iridescent 05:43, 29 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Clickthrough rates

I don't see anything in the article you referenced regarding the reference sections, Iri (how many bothered to read it?). Have any other research? Buffs (talk) 16:21, 24 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Pinging @Whatamidoing (WMF) with her official hat on, who should either know or know who to ask. Meta:Research:Improving link coverage (the original study on which the draft I linked was based) is the dataset showing that the clickthrough rate for links at the bottom of the page (i.e. notes, references and See Also) drops sharply. (To belabor the point perhaps, but even with no research this is exactly what I would expect. On the mobile interface a reader would need to manually open the collapsed-by-default reference section and in most cases will have no reason to, and on the desktop interface the reader always starts at the top of the article and likely has found the fact they were looking for before they've scrolled that far, so never even has the chance to see that the reference section exists.) ‑ Iridescent 16:29, 24 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

That particular statistic comes from mw:Wikimedia Research/Showcase#June 2020. (Also, @HaeB is usually the right person to ask.) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:34, 24 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. We find that overall engagement with citations is low: about one in 300 page views results in a reference click (0.29% overall; 0.56% on desktop; 0.13% on mobile). Matched observational studies of the factors associated with reference clicking reveal that clicks occur more frequently on shorter pages and on pages of lower quality, suggesting that references are consulted more commonly when Wikipedia itself does not contain the information sought by the user. is the line in question, given that we've now established that statistically only 1.91 of this page's watchers will bother to click the link. ‑ Iridescent 17:48, 24 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

For clarity, that means clicking on one of the little blue clicky numbers, not clicking on a link within the ref. AIUI this count includes actions like accidentally clicking on a ref number and clicking on a ref that doesn't have a URL, but excludes actions like scrolling down to read the entire ref list or hovering over it with NAVPOPS enabled.

There might be some information elsewhere about how many external URLs are clicked on (it seems like an obvious thing to study), but offhand I don't recall having seen it before. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:49, 25 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for that info. Buffs (talk) 15:42, 25 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

One thing I would be very interested in is figures on how many people use the links in nav-box templates, though I believe these don't show to mobile viewers. They have been proliferating for years, mostly created by serial templaters who enjoy doing this, with little or no thought of their utility to readers. Johnbod (talk) 15:58, 26 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I've never seen any research on that, and I agree that it should be done.

The only thing I can tell you is this: Navboxes are hidden to all readers on mobile, and nobody complains about their absence. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:56, 26 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I can also tell you that when we remove navboxes, I've never seen anyone other than the creator of that navbox complain about its removal. I do think that navboxes with a very specific and well-defined "if you're interested in this topic you're very likely to be interested in these topics as well" remit, like {{Acne agents}} or {{Walter Scott}}, serve a useful purpose to readers even if they're not widely used. The only purpose of bloated nonsense like {{History of Retail in Southern California}} and {{Tourism in the United Kingdom}} is to act as a fuckwittery heatsink to divert the editwarriors and POV-pushers into a ghetto where they can slug it out in a venue that's essentially invisible to readers. ‑ Iridescent 04:04, 28 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Not a realistic proposal, just a consideration of how to write high-quality articles on at least some topics. (t · c) buidhe 04:45, 22 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Alice Ayres

Hi, I've just come across your 2009 article on Alice Ayres and wanted to thank you for it. Fascinating and inspirational in use of sources. Best wishes, Tacyarg (talk) 18:28, 24 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you, I'm pleased with how that one turned out. She's surprisingly difficult to write about because so little of her life is documented other than the manner of her death and so much of the contemporary coverage was by people wanting to co-opt her as a symbol for some cause or another; it's closer to writing about a medieval saint than to writing a more traditional Wikipedia biography. ‑ Iridescent 02:59, 28 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Question

Hiya, fairly sure User:Appleson88 is an autobiography. It also contains BLP violations such as the DOB. I understand that you as an admin must agf more then other folks but maybe this one was a good nom? I'd suggest making it into a draft personally. Unbroken Chain (talk) 18:56, 30 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Contrary to what some of the more overzealous new page patrollers seem to think, Wikipedia does not have and never has had a policy against autobiographies even in article space (although we do discourage it, as it's difficult to write neutrally about yourself). We certainly don't have a policy against people writing about themselves on their own userpage given that the entire point of userpages is to tell other editors about oneself, provided it doesn't slip over the line into Inappropriate or excessive personal information unrelated to Wikipedia (my emphasis); nor do we have nor ever have had a policy against people using userspace as a place to draft articles. (There are occasionally circumstances in which it's appropriate to move something from article space to draftspace; I can't imagine any circumstances in which it would be appropriate to move someone's userpage to draftspace, which is what you appear to be suggesting.)

This was clearly an inappropriate use of WP:U5, which has an intentionally very narrowly defined and specific remit; if any admin had actually deleted it on such tenuous grounds, any other editor would have been entirely within their rights to haul them off to arbcom for admin abuse. Speedy deletion is only for material which unambiguously meets one of the categories listed at Wikipedia:Criteria for speedy deletion; if you feel a page ought to be deleted but you can't find an appropriate category, the answer is to send it to MfD/AfD as appropriate for discussion, not to try to shoehorn it into a category which doesn't apply. ‑ Iridescent 21:03, 30 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Guess I caught you on a bad day. Thanks for the response, I still disagree but you are the boss. Hope the afternoon treats you better. Unbroken Chain (talk) 21:19, 30 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

That's a pretty patronizing response. To be fair, I imagine "Guess I caught you on a bad day" was an escalation to "Contrary to what some of the more overzealous new page patrollers seem to think..." (which, if I thought was directed at me, would have annoyed me too). But everything Iri said after the first 14 words is spot on; I'd hate to see you write off the whole comment because Iri got your back up. FWIW, if I had seen that U5 tag, I'd have removed it too. Whether I was having a good or bad day. --Floquenbeam (talk) 21:40, 30 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

There is reasons you both are admin and I am not. I accept this, that was just my nice way of saying their response was a bit acerbic. Molehill in the scheme of things. Have a great day Floq. Unbroken Chain (talk) 21:43, 30 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Unbroken Chain (Non-administrator comment) I agree with Floquenbeam above. Having run into the "You can't write autobiographies on Wikipedia" myth repeatedly, I entirely understand Iris' reponse and almost entirely agree with their response. Floquenbeam has already bought up my one critique about said response. The userspace is more or less blalantly designed for Wikipedia editors to talk about themselves.

You, on the other hand, are lacking in perspective, and are being hypersensitive to criticism to the point of bordering on being rude. You asked for advice, and Iri gave to you. The only entirely polite response to solicited advice, even if given a bit harshly, is "thank you."

I should follow my own advice about responding to advice more often. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 23:35, 30 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Let me be explicitly clear, for me this issue is resolved. I appreciate the that you feel the need to protect an admin but my comment about Flow and Iri and admin was a genuine one. Consider Philippines 2:3 "Do nothing out of contentiousness or out of egotism, but with humility consider others superior to you" I'm open to being offbase and I recognize my failings in judgement at times. I didn't like the comment about over zealousness because it was acerbic and to me ABF. That being said, again I accept the rationale (don't agree but accept) and I acknowledge administrators have to balance more then just my perspective. Unbroken Chain (talk) 23:44, 30 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Unbroken Chain I don't see any ABF at all. I do see you personalizing a statement directed at an anonymous group of people (the overzealous statement). I hope you realize that it wasn't likely directed at you personally. Like, I'm pretty sure that's why you're reacting the way you are; it could be entirely because you misinterpreted a comment. In fact, if the bible quote is there to imply that other participants in this discussion are acting out of contentious and egotism, that's an ABF on your own part.

As an aside, the Bible quote seems out of nowhere, so forgive me if I'm misinterpreting the context in which you're using it.

To be fair, I've done the same as you. Usually I do it when I'm enthusiastic and passionate about something. One might say that by some standards, I'm overzealous when I take things personally. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 00:07, 31 March 2022 (UTC) (edited at 00:08, 31 March 2022 (UTC) because of keyboard lag)[reply]

I'm done. I'm not going to pick a fight here. I disagree and that's all, feel free and view this however you want but I won't waste anymore energy. I've attempted to explain myself more in depth here [[16]], if 500 words is too much here's your forewarning. Unbroken Chain (talk) 00:15, 31 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

You seem to have misinterpreted Contrary to what some of the more overzealous new page patrollers seem to think as being directed at you, which it really isn't—it was an expression of general exasperation at the fact that this situation keeps occurring. As any admin who's spent any time working CAT:CSD will testify, doing so means spending an inordinate amount of time removing misplaced deletion tags placed entirely in good faith by NPP-ers who've picked up the idea that Wikipedia has a rule against autobiographies. To pick up on your comments here (apologies in advance for the length):

There were reasons to what I was saying what I did. I didn't explain them explicitly because admin should understand those, at least in my mind.
If you're not going to give any kind of explanation, you can't then complain when people have to try to guess what you mean. This is particularly true in a case like this, where you're asking that another editor invoke WP:IAR and override policy to delete a page out-of-process.
The page made was an autobiography and in my opinion an attempt to self publicize. Especially in Userspace I think this is a bad idea.
Writing about oneself is literally the point of userpages. We routinely delete blatant promotion from userpages, but I don't think one could reasonably describe that page as such. In those circumstances, where it isn't immediately obvious that the page meets one of the criteria for speedy deletion (emphasis on 'immediately obvious'; speedy deletion only applies to unambiguous cases), if you feel a userpage is inappropriate the correct thing to do is take it to MfD.
My ideas aren't always in line with the communities and I try and accept that where it happens
This isn't a case of you having a different opinion either to me or to the community. This is a case of your opinions contradicting Wikipedia policy (and actual formal written policy, not the usual "guidelines and community standards" Wikispeak that allows wiggle room).
Describing the work that I like to volunteer. as overzealous, and then kinda go hyperbolic with the straight to arbcom bit was theatrical, in my opinion.
"Overzealous" wasn't directed at you. The 'straight to arbcom' bit wasn't hyperbole, theatrical etc; for an admin to delete a page out-of-process is admin abuse unless the admin in question can explain themselves, and while the big cases are the part of arbcom that gets the most notice, they're also the body to which allegations of admin abuse need to be directed. (Even if I deleted it and someone complained, all that would happen would be a one line "Iridescent is admonished for inappropriate deletions and advised to be more careful in future.}}" announcement at WP:ACN—or even just a quiet word by email—unless someone demonstrated that it was part of a pattern of conduct, but arbcom is where these things go. Dealing with the endless stream of "an admin did something that contravened policy!" complaints is one of the many arbcom functions that one doesn't appreciate how much time it wastes until one's actually been on the receiving end of the arbcom-l mailbox.)
You can consider what I did ABF
Nobody is saying this. I consider it a good-faith misunderstanding—or more likely, misremembering—of what Wikipedia's deletion policy says; it would only be ABF if I thought you knew that this page wasn't eligible for speedy deletion and deliberately tagged it anyway.
That page would have been deleted by another admin
No, it really wouldn't. Certainly different admins will have different responses to marginal cases as to whether something crosses the "unambiguous promotion" line, but this case wasn't marginal; the page in question doesn't contain any promotional language and is in a {{noindex}}-ed namespace so is essentially invisible.
With a draft there is a time limit to how long it can sit without editing and then it gets deleted.
But why would you want to put another user—against their will—into a position where their userpage gets deleted after six months? Either the userpage is non-problematic in which case keeping it indefinitely isn't a problem, or it's problematic in which case it should go to MfD?

As I said, apologies for the length of this but I thought it important to explain it in full, as I think your whole complaint is based on a misunderstanding. Nobody here is saying that this page should be immune from deletion; what every person here is saying (and what any other admin you choose to ask will say) is that this page is ineligible for speedy deletion which can only be used on userpages in a very few narrowly defined circumstances. (It's only been a couple of years since the RHaworth case. Admins being sloppy with out-of-process speedy deletions is something that's taken much more seriously now than it was in earlier times.) ‑ Iridescent 06:25, 31 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for your response Iri and I'm sorry this issue became more time, effort and drama then what it was worth. You make good points about RHaworth. I always thought R did a good job personally but there are plenty that come in to pile on when the time comes to it. Thank you for the time you invested writing the response and reading my own to this. Unbroken Chain (talk) 13:46, 31 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I've updated some of the documentation.

What I think would be most helpful (long-term; documentation is always a long-term solution) is to get some examples of blatant promotionalism into CSD. "Buy this excellent widget for the lowest prices at our website now!" is the kind of thing that was meant to be covered. "Alice Expert is an award-winning cryptanalyst" is not. The first is something that never belongs on Wikipedia. The second is a plain statement of the facts – facts that happen to be extremely positive, but still just the facts. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:21, 2 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Primefac reverted this change, because he understands WP:FAKEARTICLE as meaning that it is "not acceptable to have "article-like material" on a user page". Primefac, I think you could contribute significantly to this discussion (sorry that you're now going to have to read a couple thousand words here to catch up). WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:28, 3 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

While I can’t help but find Primefac an inherent contradiction, and we seem to rub each other wrong, he’s basically always right. In this case, no, drafts do not belong one one’s main Userpage, except for when your are a newcomer who’s created an account in the name of your desired article, and you draft it in the obvious place, and we try to not bite the newcomer. In these conflicting cases, policy should reflect ideal practice, not tolerated bad practice. SmokeyJoe (talk) 12:33, 6 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I don't agree with policy should reflect ideal practice, not tolerated bad practice. Wikipedia is essentially a common-law system; guildelines reflect "the way we usually do things" and if we always follow the guideline other than in rare IAR situations, it becomes a policy. That is, our practice dictates the policy, we don't write policies to prescribe a particular practice. I agree that using one's main user or user talk page as a drafting area should be strongly discouraged as it confuses anyone else visiting them, but given that we've tolerated both for 21 years and counting, we can't just unilaterally announce that it's no longer allowed without going through all the stages of a full community consultation. ‑ Iridescent 20:02, 6 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Agree with the broad point, but unfortunately, a lot of absolutely-not-marginal bad-U5s do get deleted by other admins. (A good off-wiki friend of mine who I tried to get into editing made a userpage full of userboxes but never quite got into making content; the page popped up on my watchlist as U5ed a while back.) There are distinct geographic patterns to this; a nasty amount of CAT:U5 at any given point is "rule-abiding autobiographical userpage of South Asian editor". Vaticidalprophet 20:07, 2 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Interesting concepts, the page I was speaking bad wasn't crazy bad, more of a borderline case IMO. I'm probably too far on the delete line then others may be. It really is a hard road to hoe because of the subjective nature of deletion. Probably better to err on the preserve side of things I suppose. I did now know that User pages weren't indexed for search either. You learn all sorts of stuff on this site. Unbroken Chain (talk) 21:09, 2 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

U5 is grossly overused, yes. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 08:30, 3 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

User:Jo-Jo Eumerus, is it grossly overused? As opposed to overused? I am interested, because I was a key proponent of U5, and am active at DRV where deletion complaints are reviewed. If there are gross misapplications, why do they not go to DRV? Is it because DRV requires that the deleted page should not be deleted, and the U5-ed page was worthless but not quite U5-eligible? SmokeyJoe (talk) 12:39, 6 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Overused in the sense that I keep seeing drafts and brief description pages about oneself being tagged. I am willing to bet that most people won't realize that DRV exists. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 14:00, 6 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with I am willing to bet that most people won't realize that DRV exists, and I'd go a stage further and say that even when people are aware DRV exists, most people actively avoid it. DRV has a small enough group of regular participants that even though there are only a couple of crazies there, the odds of encountering one are quite high, and many people (including me) would take the view of "even though I fundamentally disagree with this outcome life's too short to get involved in a month-long argument with a gaggle of obsessives". It's the same reason people avoid other processes that have been hijacked by a clique, such as FAC. ‑ Iridescent 20:06, 6 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Vaticidalprophet, to be honest while I wouldn't have tagged your friend's userpage for deletion had I randomly come across it, I would have accepted the deletion request had it appeared in CAT:CSD. The issue isn't that it was a userpage full of userboxes, it's that it was a userpage full of joke userboxes. Ultimately, the purpose of all pages on Wikipedia is at least nominally to be for material that potentially benefits Wikipedia. People writing about themselves in the context of what skills and languages they have: absolutely fine as that's obviously relevant; people writing about their interests and preferences: usually acceptable since it allows other people to get a sense both of their potential biases and of whether their opinions on a given topic are worth listening to; regular contributors writing about themselves more generally: acceptable within reason as it allows people to get a better sense of the Wikipedia community and the spectrum of people who participate; people using their userpage to draft articles: not great as they should ideally be using subpages rather than their userpage for drafting,* but getting an article right before releasing it into the mainspace is an obvious benefit to the project and we can't reasonably expect new editors to be aware of the confusing technicalities of userspace subpages. A page consisting entirely of jokes falls squarely into "substantial content on your user page that is unrelated to Wikipedia", since there's nothing any reader will learn about the editor in question by reading it. ‑ Iridescent 19:15, 3 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
*There are often entirely legitimate reasons to draft in userspace rather than draftspace. While technically "anyone can edit" applies to all pages, there's a well-established convention that pages in userspace are left alone by others without good reason. Having a page in draftspace is saying "I've started this, anyone else jump in and add to it"; having a page in userspace is saying "this is a very rough beginning, leave it alone for the moment while I work on it",

That is the best explanation I've seen on this subject. That is more clear to me thanks. Unbroken Chain (talk) 22:28, 3 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Vaticidalprophet There are distinct geographic patterns to this; a nasty amount of CAT:U5 at any given point is "rule-abiding autobiographical userpage of South Asian editor". I don't make a habit of watching CSD categories, but if this is true, it's unfortunate that literally everyone who writes with a South Asian "accent" gets suspicion because of many non-native English speakers we first encountered online during the 2000s' were spammers/scammers. The law of first impressions resulting in microaggressive racism. Ick. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 04:53, 4 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@I dream of horses, Ind/Pak/Bang has always brought a unique set of problems to Wikipedia. For historical reasons, all three—particularly India—have significant populations who prefer to work in English rather than their native language because it reaches a wider audience, but aren't as fluent as they think they are and consequently often have difficulty both in understanding all the rules and guidelines and in writing comprehensible English. (Head on over to Special:RandomInCategory/Villages in India by state or territory and see for yourself the sheer volume of "it is inhabited by a majority of Brahmin population and it is a quiet village with simple scenic beauty" and "The village has no gym and no playground, time to time youngster requests Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) for gym and playground but every time he makes fool of them" type stuff that's accumulated.) It in turn means the majority of Indian editors here who do follow the rules get treated with suspicion because everyone has seen so many examples of Indian editors who don't.

There is no right answer. As with so much that's wrong with Wikipedia, it's an artefact of the editor/article ratio slipping beyond manageable limits. As such, those patrolling new pages and recent changes need to work in terms of probabilities and concentrate on changes likely to be problematic rather than fully check everything in detail. I can't really blame anyone at NPP who comes to the conclusion that because Indian topics and Indian editors are more likely to be problematic, that's where they should focus their attention, even if it potentially introduces a degree of institutional bias. ‑ Iridescent 07:35, 4 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Iridescent I've observed this phenomenon myself with regards to India specifically, and agree with your statement. I'm unsurprised that Bangladesh and Pakistan, being nearby, is also somewhat of a problem area. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 08:00, 4 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I dream of horses, I think one way we could resolve it is to get more admins from the Asian subcontinent who can recognise these patterns and manage them. Or, simply put, we need a bunch of Vanamonde93s. Ritchie333 ^(talk) ^(cont) 13:53, 4 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Surprised to see your answer to bullet 4. I don't personally think U5ing that is admin abuse. It may be an error, and the admin may be misunderstanding policy, but for that there's DRV. I would hope ArbCom wouldn't accept a case on this kinda thing unless there's either a pattern showing generally poor judgement, or an error so egregious that no reasonable admin could've made it combined with a complete communications failure. RH is given as an example above, but the FoF (Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/RHaworth#RHaworth_and_deletion) cited 24 instances of deletion concerns, referencing evidence supplied by 6 editors, and 9 instances of communications failure. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 05:33, 4 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Re-read what I actually wrote, particularly Even if I deleted it and someone complained, all that would happen would be a one line "Iridescent is admonished for inappropriate deletions and advised to be more careful in future." announcement at WP:ACN—or even just a quiet word by email—unless someone demonstrated that it was part of a pattern of conduct, but arbcom is where these things go.

Case requests are the visible part of arbcom's activity, but they're a tiny tip of a very big iceberg. For every situation where processes have failed and something either turns into a sprawling thread on a drama board or a he-said-she-said arb case, there are a dozen "I have concerns about what this editor is doing but I'm reluctant to make a big deal of it publicly" private requests (cue my traditional screenshot of what an arb inbox looks like) that are usually resolved with a discreet "stop doing what you're doing unless you can provide a good explanation" request. Contrary to popular belief the arbitrators may on occasion be incompetent but they're very rarely malicious, and when a problem is brought to their attention they do their best to stop it escalating—the nature of the system means the only part of their activity one generally sees is when the process fails and things blow up into a full case.

An admin who was unfmiliar with the deletion policy would unquestionably count as admin abuse and thus fall into the arbcom remit. We don't expect admins to be super-users familiar with every policy, but Wikipedia:Criteria for speedy deletion is about as core as core knowledge gets for an admin. (If you want a real-world equivalent, if a beat cop was unfamiliar with the precise wording of corporate fraud law they'd be unlikely to get in trouble even if they got something wrong, but that same cop ignoring the posted speed limits and instead issuing tickets to cars because they "looked like they were driving fast" would be hauled in front of their superiors in fairly short order.) It's why every RFA has that daunting-looking barrage of "in which of these hypothetical situations would you block/delete?" trick questions; when it comes to the basic admin policies like blocking, deletion, civility etc we want admins who will apply what the policy actually says, not what they think it says.

As I say, "this would be admin abuse" doesn't equate to "this would warrant a full case", but if I deleted a page out of process anyone who wanted to would be quite within their rights to complain to arbcom about it given that they're currently the only body (other than the WMF itself in exceptional circumstances) with the authority to take action in such cases. I think it's a stupid setup and every arbitrator thinks it's a stupid set up—they signed up to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve, not to deal with an endless stream of low-level whining every time an admin does anything another editor doesn't like—but nobody's yet managed to come up with a viable "administrative actions review" process that doesn't degenerate into a "which side's friends can shout the loudest?" slapfight. ‑ Iridescent 07:01, 4 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The idea I had behind Wikipedia:Administrative action review was to provide a venue for exactly that sort of mild complaints against administrative actions, to help get some more accountability into the place and reduce the workload that Arbcom have to face. However, it appears to have crashed and burned by the majority of people treating it as "ANI 2", which generates a self-fulfilling prophecy. I suspect XRV will be closed as a failure at some point in the not too distant future. Ritchie333 ^(talk) ^(cont) 14:00, 4 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

It's a flaw that's so built into Wikipedia's design that not even do we tend not to notice it let alone discuss it, Wikipedia's critics tend not to notice it let alone discuss it. Everyone in any given area on the wiki is there because they either directly or indirectly choose to be. Thus those involved in that area are almost always going to be those who consider that area important, and the remainder will be those who just drifted into that area but have convinced themselves that it's important. (Only a crazy person would devote hours of their life to something they weren't being paid for if it wasn't important, and I'm not crazy…)

Thus, every process has a tendency to be dominated by people who think (whether or not people have a few relatively trivial extra permissions) / (the precise difference between dashes and hyphens) / (serial commas and when they should be used) / (where an article sits on a quality scale of whose existence literally no reader is even aware) / (whether the word 'dickhead' is sexist and if so whether it's offensive to men or to women) / (under which circumstances punctuation goes inside and outside of quotation marks) is Very Very Important, since involvement in most processes is quite time-consuming and people are quite naturally unlikely to invest their time in something if they don't care about the outcome. Thus the entire site ends up being a series of echo chambers dominated by the tiny minority who consider that particular niche area important.

TL;DR: the nature of Wikipedia means there's no such thing as "a mild complaint", since the only people who'll bother to comment in any given situation are those who think the issue is serious. (On the occasion someone does bring a mild complaint on Wikipedia, they'll invariably be chided for time-wasting precisely because the complaint is mild.) Thus, any proposal that aims to reduce the drama is doomed to fail since any given process becomes dominated by those with a vested interest in keeping the drama level high to justify their own participation in that process. (For expanded thoughts of mine on the phenomenon from a few years ago, see the "The parable of the shitty early-2000s website" thread.)

I can't see a way to resolve the issue without drastically changing the nature of the site. The usual way mass-participation sites get around it is paid moderators who are rewarded financially rather than via the warm fuzzies of convincing themselves they're doing something important (I assure you Facebook/Meta's moderation team doesn't actually give a shit whether your Instagram post is sourced to The Canary). That's not really an option here, even if the WMF were willing to release enough from its hoard to fund paid proofreaders and dispute resolution teams. ‑ Iridescent 11:05, 6 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I have to admit that there is no minor complaints on Wiki is spot on. This very thread is an example of that, to me this was not something that should have ended up being a long long conversation. It's been interesting no doubt but I have to admit about the "hyperbolic" nature I may have been wrong. Unbroken Chain (talk) 15:44, 6 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Linking best practices

Hi Iridescent! Have there been any discussions here in the past about best practices for linking, and how to balance MOS:EGG/MOS:SEAOFBLUE/etc.? I recently opened a discussion at WT:LINK on how to handle potential seas of blue, and a while back I asked about weighing eggs vs. specific links, but I feel like both topics could potentially benefit from the type of extended conversation that happens here. Cheers, {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 17:35, 6 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@@ Line 1,008: / Line 1,008: @@
 :::::[[User:Jo-Jo Eumerus]], is it grossly overused?  As opposed to overused?  I am interested, because I was a key proponent of U5, and am active at DRV where deletion complaints are reviewed. If there are gross misapplications, why do they not go to DRV?  Is it because DRV requires that the deleted page should not be deleted, and the U5-ed page was worthless but not quite U5-eligible? [[User:SmokeyJoe|SmokeyJoe]] ([[User talk:SmokeyJoe|talk]]) 12:39, 6 April 2022 (UTC)
 ::::::Overused in the sense that I keep seeing drafts and brief description pages about oneself being tagged. I am willing to bet that most people won't realize that DRV exists. [[User:Jo-Jo Eumerus|Jo-Jo Eumerus]] ([[User talk:Jo-Jo Eumerus|talk]]) 14:00, 6 April 2022 (UTC)
+:::::::I agree with {{tq|I am willing to bet that most people won't realize that DRV exists}}, and I'd go a stage further and say that even when people are aware DRV exists, most people actively avoid it. DRV has a small enough group of regular participants that even though there are only a couple of crazies there, the odds of encountering one are quite high, and many people (including me) would take the view of "even though I fundamentally disagree with this outcome life's too short to get involved in a month-long argument with a gaggle of obsessives". It's the same reason people avoid other processes that have been hijacked by a clique, such as FAC.&nbsp;&#8209;&nbsp;[[User:Iridescent|Iridescent]] 20:06, 6 April 2022 (UTC)
 :::@[[User:Vaticidalprophet|Vaticidalprophet]], to be honest while I wouldn't have tagged your friend's userpage for deletion had I randomly come across it, I would have accepted the deletion request had it appeared in [[CAT:CSD]]. The issue isn't that it was {{tq|a userpage full of userboxes}}, it's that it was a userpage full of {{em|joke}} userboxes. Ultimately, the purpose of all pages on Wikipedia is at least nominally to be for material that potentially benefits Wikipedia. People writing about themselves in the context of what skills and languages they have: absolutely fine as that's obviously relevant; people writing about their interests and preferences: usually acceptable since it allows other people to get a sense both of their potential biases and of whether their opinions on a given topic are worth listening to; {{em|regular contributors}} writing about themselves more generally: acceptable within reason as it allows people to get a better sense of the Wikipedia community and the spectrum of people who participate; people using their userpage to draft articles: not great as they should ideally be using subpages rather than their userpage for drafting,* but getting an article right before releasing it into the mainspace is an obvious benefit to the project and we can't reasonably expect new editors to be aware of the confusing technicalities of userspace subpages. A page consisting entirely of jokes falls squarely into "[[Wikipedia:User pages#What may I not have in my user pages?|substantial content on your user page that is unrelated to Wikipedia]]", since there's nothing any reader will learn about the editor in question by reading it.&nbsp;&#8209;&nbsp;[[User:Iridescent|Iridescent]] 19:15, 3 April 2022 (UTC)<br>*<small>There are often entirely legitimate reasons to draft in userspace rather than draftspace. While technically "anyone can edit" applies to all pages, there's a well-established convention that pages in userspace are left alone by others without good reason. Having a page in draftspace is saying "I've started this, anyone else jump in and add to it"; having a page in userspace is saying "this is a very rough beginning, leave it alone for the moment while I work on it",</small>
 ::::That is the best explanation I've seen on this subject. That is more clear to me thanks. [[User:Unbroken Chain|Unbroken Chain]] ([[User talk:Unbroken Chain|talk]]) 22:28, 3 April 2022 (UTC)