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Thanks and... hereditary matters

Thanks for the reply to the ping. I was reading your talk page recently, as it had been a while, and I had forgotten how interesting it can be. I particularly liked what Llywrch said here back in October. Anyway, to change subject completely, I recently stumbled across Lord Great Chamberlain and clicked on 'show' in the infobox and my jaw dropped open in astonishment. Apparently it is explained at Serjeanty in the section hereditary offices in gross. Silly system. Nice to see that there is still a Grand Carver of England. I actually got there (somehow) from State funerals in the United Kingdom where the tone is a bit odd in places. It was the distinction between the role of Earl Marshal and Lord Chamberlain that hooked me further in. Looks a bit like a game of musical chairs over the years, with the different officers and officials taking on different roles depending on the circumstances or tradition. I should really finish by saying I hope all is well, and as I've been a bit out of touch over the past year, has there been any really big news that I might have missed? Carcharoth (talk) 18:52, 14 January 2021 (UTC)

I'm not aware of any big news you might have missed, but I'm not the best one to ask. Despite appearances, I've been virtually inactive for the past year for obvious reasons. What edits I've made have tended to be search-and-replace minor edits done while half-watching TV—since the first wave began I've made a grand total of 147 non-minor article edits.

As I understand it, the reason the English and Scottish systems still retain all those goofy feudal titles like Queen's Champion, Mistress of the Robes and Knight Marischal isn't that anyone thinks it a sensible system. Rather, after 746 years of accumulated law there are hundreds of references to these positions scattered through ancient laws, SIs and legal precedents which are still theoretically in force, and often written in Norman French, Middle English or Lowland Scots. As such abolishing any of them would tie up the Civil Service and Parliament for days if not weeks amending ancient legislation, for minimal benefit, so instead they just intentionally let the titles drift into irrelevance and don't nominate a replacement should they fall vacant. (Never underestimate the cultural inertia of the Establishment. The last Groom of the Stool only died in 1913.) ‑ Iridescent 02:49, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

They do purge some of them now and then—I think the latest round of statutory revision conceded that the Lord High Treasurer will never be out of commission again. Burke's "Oeconomical Reform" in 1782 and another round in 1834 got rid of some of the really atrocious sinecures like the Tellers of the Exchequer and I think curtailed many of the emoluments and fees. The Lord Great Chamberlain is probably unpaid except for the right to some scrap of coronation regalia or something, so there's no particular reason to abolish the post, and it probably qualifies as an "incorporeal hereditament" which would require compensation to the holder were it abolished.

There's a certain tendency for offices to "drift" and take on new roles, and become ceremonial, while their original duties devolve on a different office. The classic example would be the Lord Chancellor, who once had the duty of carrying around the King's seal so that he could stamp it on whatever decrees he wanted to promulgate. As the judicial role of the chancellors and the increasing fixation of Chancery made this inconvenient, the privy seal was invented and the Lord Privy Seal took over that role. As the use of the privy seal became increasingly formal and bureaucratic, monarchs began indicating their pleasure with a personal signet, which was kept by the Secretary of State...at this point, we've reached Dickens' "A Poor Man's Tale of a Patent". Choess (talk) 04:00, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

As a bit of insubordination from the colonies (not that the US has any business other than hanging our collective heads in shame at this time), I do have to say that I find the idea of purging the Groom of the Stool, well, a bit messy. --Tryptofish (talk) 17:54, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

He was unceremoniously wiped. ‑ Iridescent 2 19:25, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

So I guess he drew a royal flush. --Tryptofish (talk) 00:22, 16 January 2021 (UTC)

And the Lord Chancellor is a good case study of abolishing any of them would tie up the Civil Service and Parliament for days if not weeks amending ancient legislation, for minimal benefit; consider Tony Blair's fruitless attempt to rename it "Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs" to reflect what the modern-day Lord Chancellor actually does, which he ended up abandoning as it would have meant amending 750 years worth of "this is the responsibility of the Lord Chancellor" in various mouldering statutes. ‑ Iridescent 04:11, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

Are we still on UK time here? :-) I have Lord Milner on the brain. In more ways than one. :-( Carcharoth (talk) 04:25, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

This last year or so I've lost touch with the concept of "normal waking hours". Never heard of Milner before, he looks like an interesting character (although whoever rated an 8746-word article with a 60-word lead as "B class" deserves either to be beaten repeatedly with spoons, or commended for illustrating the meaningless of Wikipedia's 'quality' ratings). One of the more interesting talkpage histories I've seen, too. ‑ Iridescent 04:41, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

Yes, much of the recent expansion of that article (and several related ones such as Milner's Kindergarten) is due to one editor who I have been talking to (see my user talk page contribs). I fear they will run into problems (arguably already have done). I wouldn't normally mention it (especially as so many people read this talk page), but don't really have the time to do this justice. See also this draft (correctly declined, IMO). Arguably, I should ping both DGG and the editor - apologies to both if they see this, but I really have to get back to other things now, but felt I couldn't in good conscience leave this without bringing it up somewhere appropriate (and I can never seem to work that out these days). Actually, I will ping DGG, as I'd be interested to hear what he thinks about whether editing that would be declined when submitted as a draft, is not really properly caught when someone expands existing articles. Carcharoth (talk) 11:32, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

Starry-eyed

		The Multiple Barnstar
		That was a tough AN/I for everyone, and I'm unbelievably impressed by how smoothly you handled it, even having seen your name around a lot attached to good decisions. Vaticidalprophet (talk) 06:22, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

This thread-from-hell, for any confused TPW.

Thanks. As you can probably guess I'm really not happy indefblocking someone with 25,000+ edits and multiple FAs—and I think the tone of some of those calling for a block was definitely less than great—but I don't see what else I could have done. I already have one person complaining that an indef wasn't harsh enough, but I'm struggling to see what more I could have done. All the diffs in the thread were recent, suggesting someone who's having a bad day and lashing out rather than someone who's systemically unable to get along on Wikipedia; in those circumstances I wouldn't slam the door without leaving the possibility of it opening again, even if it were within the powers of a single editor to do so.

Yes, I find the views expressed repellent, but if we were to ban everybody with views some people find repellent from Wikipedia it would be a much smaller place (although it would make maintaining articles on Eastern Europe, firearm legislation, Irish history, American politics, and the Middle East considerably easier). I find it very hard to treat a set of posts which ultimately boil down to "I agree with the President of the United States" as an unacceptably fringe view, even when in this case I think this particular president is manifestly unfit for office; ultimately it's down to the community—and as a last resort the WMF but for obvious reasons I really hope we don't go that route—to decide where this particular line should be drawn and it's not something I can, or should, do unilaterally. ‑ Iridescent 07:05, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

British English sweets

I have a question for the talk-page stalkers:

In British English, strictly speaking, does a Cadbury Creme Egg or a Flake (chocolate bar) count as "sweets", or are chocolate bars properly a separate category of the confectioner's art?

I'm ultimately trying to figure out whether Sweets should redirect to Candy, which is written and titled in AmEng and includes chocolate and chewing gum (and even baklava, if you're Turkish), or if it should redirect to Sugar candy, which does not include foods (e.g., chocolate) that aren't primarily made from sugar. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:58, 10 January 2021 (UTC)

Chocolates are definitely sweets. A quick skim of all the major supermarket websites agrees with me, as does A Quarter Of which is basically the Vatican of British confectionery. (I'd go so far as to say that historically "chocolates" and "sweets" have literally been interchangeable terms in BrEng and even things like mints or fruit pastilles with no chocolate could be referred to as "chocolates"—hardly any of the products of Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory contained chocolate—although this is definitely dying out.) ‑ Iridescent 03:27, 10 January 2021 (UTC)

That (outdated?) use may explain why A Quarter Of lists the chocolate-free Caramac bar among its "chocolate sweets". WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:42, 11 January 2021 (UTC)

(adding) I wouldn't consider baklava candy in any variant of English or in any sense of the term, and if it's covered at Candy then in my opinion it shouldn't be. Adding sugar to flour doesn't transform it into candy, and "eating it with your fingers means it's a candy" (which seems to be the claim being made there) is pure bullshit; a baklava is no more "candy" than a spotted dick, a churro, or an apple pie. ‑ Iridescent 03:46, 10 January 2021 (UTC)

Yes, baklava is most certainly a pastry. And you can't buy it in sweet shops. There's a new Confectionery in the English Renaissance for those who want to deepen their knowledge. Johnbod (talk) 04:26, 10 January 2021 (UTC)

And in sweet shop we have a new contender for the coveted "Wikipedia's worst article" trophy… ‑ Iridescent 06:53, 10 January 2021 (UTC)

But, but... that History section is fascinating! Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 11:17, 10 January 2021 (UTC)

Well to be fair, it's only had fourteen years and 94 different editors; you can't rush these things. I do hope you're not questioning the Wikipedia is constantly being improved and expanded dogma? ‑ Iridescent 14:04, 10 January 2021 (UTC)

It doesn’t even describe the number of confectionary shops in Harrisburg in terms of shops per person! Perryprog (talk) 14:41, 10 January 2021 (UTC)

Having wasted my time actually reading the cited source (which is possibly the single most uninteresting academic paper I've ever read), I think that 55 figure is misleading. The source says confectionery shops at this time period sold ice cream, candy, cakes, or some combination of these so while some of the 55 confectioners will have been candy-store owners, some of them will have been ice cream parlor operators or pastry chefs. It's not inaccurate to say there were 55 confectionery stores, but only because "confectionery store" then had a different meaning to the topic of this article which is specifically about dedicated candy stores. ‑ Iridescent 15:52, 10 January 2021 (UTC)

What counts as "candy" depends upon your culture. In many Middle East cultures, baklava is considered to be in the same category as Turkish delight. In the US, these are completely separate categories. They're not wrong for holding a different opinion, even though I personally expect to eat baklava on a plate, with a fork, as a dessert course after a meal rather than with my fingers as a casual snack unrelated to a meal, which is how it has traditionally been handled in the Middle East. There have been many such differences; Thomas Aquinas thought that candy-coated seeds and spices were primarily a medicinal product. Ice cream is usually classified as sugar confectionery, but not candy, so it would seem reasonable to me to include that in any article about confectionery stores. The exact difference between cookies and candies is still a significant problem (e.g., for tax codes, with tax codes in different US states taking different approaches to the Twix candy bar/cookie), and the distinction between a chocolate-coated granola bar and a chocolate-coated candy bar may have more to do with marketing than with a significant difference in nutritional value.

In the Middle Ages, everybody thought "candy-coated seeds and spices were primarily a medicinal product", because sugar itself was considered medicinal - see tobacco, cannabis, cocaine ...... Johnbod (talk) 13:23, 12 January 2021 (UTC)

If there's an admin with a moment, could someone please split the history of Confectionery in the English Renaissance? The new article doesn't start until this diff, and before that, the contents are about women in Shakespeare and velvet worms. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:14, 11 January 2021 (UTC)

WhatamIdoing, User:WhatamIdoing/Women in Shakespeare. Do with it as you please. --Izno (talk) 02:32, 12 January 2021 (UTC)

Neither eating a pastry with your fingers, nor that something is typically eaten as a snack rather than as part of a meal, transforms it from "pastry" to "candy". (Who—in any country—eats baklava with a knife and fork? I've literally never seen that once, and I live in an area where probably 75% of the non-transient population is of Greek, Turkish or Balkan origin.) If baklava is a candy because it's sugary, eaten with the fingers, and usually eaten as a snack not as part of a meal, then by that logic Dunkin Donuts and Millie's Cookies are both candy stores. ‑ Iridescent 08:23, 12 January 2021 (UTC)

While chocolates are a kind of sweets, I have never heard of anyone using the term "chocolates" to mean sweets that don't have chocolate in/on them. Perhaps this is a regional or family weirdness. I wouldn't read too much into the title of the Willy Wonka books, given that the sequel was "Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator". The text in Candy that starts with saying chocolate is "sometimes treated as a separate branch of confectionery" seems a bit confused. I agree with it that a chocolate drink isn't a sweetie (nor is a chocolate cake, or chocolate coated cake, or chocolate biscuit, etc), but I don't understand the comment there about white chocolate. -- Colin°^Talk 19:06, 10 January 2021 (UTC)

I've definitely seen "chocolates" and "sweets" used interchangeably in British literature pre-1970-ish—if I had to guess I'd say it probably derives from rationing.

The part about white chocolate not being considered a branch of chocolate was added seven years ago by some character called "Whatamidoing". (I understand the point that section is trying to make—a specialist chocolate shop like Ghirardelli, Thorntons, Godiva etc will often sell chocolate based pastries, drinks etc which a traditional candy store wouldn't—but these places don't exclude white chocolate.) ‑ Iridescent 06:10, 11 January 2021 (UTC)

Collin's dictionary says "sweet: (often plural) British / any of numerous kinds of confectionery consisting wholly or partly of sugar, esp of sugar boiled and crystallized (boiled sweets)". This is a bit unsatisfying as "partly" could cover quite a range, but the "esp" bit hints at a tendency towards hard candy. Both white and milk chocolate are around 50% sugar. There are so many chocolate coated sweets where the inside is a toffee, nougat, fondant or fudge. If one bought a mixed bag of sweets, one might expect some small chocolates like chocolate mice or the little white discs with sprinkles on them. And you'd find chocolate bars at the "sweetie counter" in a small shop. I see that Oldest Sweet Shop's menu separates "Sweets" and "Chocolates". So maybe Sweets should redirect to Sugar candy on Tuesdays and Thursdays. -- Colin°^Talk 12:27, 11 January 2021 (UTC)

Collin's is talking nonsense if they say—or even imply—that "sweets" only refers to hard candy and boiled sweets; particularly ironic given that they share their name with one of the UK's most iconic ranges of squishy sweet. Chew bars, jelly babies, Percy Pigs, sherbert, dolly mixture, Fruitellas, marshmallows, wiggly worms, fruit pastilles, wine gums, Skittles, licorice allsorts, Fruit Salads, strawberry laces, jellybeans, cola bottles, nougat, anything made by Haribo, Blackjacks, American hard gums, space dust… ‑ Iridescent 16:00, 11 January 2021 (UTC)

Iridescent, which sherbet did you mean? Neither drinks nor frozen foods are generally considered to be candy, and I believe that holds for the UK's notion of sweets, too.

@Colin, what does Collin's give for their definition of confectionery? WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:17, 11 January 2021 (UTC)

We dont drink Sherbet in the UK. Nor do we freeze it (the frozen sherbet in the US is Sorbet). Generally it can be found sucked through a liquorice straw, or dipped into with a lolipop. Only in death does duty end (talk) 23:31, 11 January 2021 (UTC)

So it's more or less Kool-Aid powder, and originally meant to be turned into a drink, but now eaten dry? WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:05, 12 January 2021 (UTC)

Not quite—Kool-aid powder is heavily flavoured and (usually) unsweetened, whereas sherbert (or sherbet if you're a Northerner) is sickly sweet but otherwise unflavoured. You could probably make a drink by adding the powder to water but it would be disgusting—it would literally just be fizzy sugar-water. Of the two big British manufacturers, Barratts sells it with either a fruit lollipop (a dip dab) or a big stick of licorice (a sherbet fountain) which you're supposed to moisten and dip into the packet to combine the fizzy powder with the flavouring, while Swizzels puts the powder inside a block of flavoured chewy candy (a Swizzels Refresher if it's a block on its own, or a Drumstick if it has a lolly stick so you don't get your fingers sticky). Both companies also sell the powder compressed into pre-flavoured solid tablets which dissolve into fizzy liquid in your mouth (Trebor Refreshers from Barratts, Fizzers from Swizzels). ‑ Iridescent 08:00, 12 January 2021 (UTC)

(The frozen sherbet in the US is not sorbet; sorbet is usually dairy-free and sherbet must contain milk.[1]) WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:15, 12 January 2021 (UTC)

I'm surprised you associated Colin the Caterpillar with sweets, since he is most certainly a cake. I guess the sweets came later. Collins dictionary does not say "only" but I think we seem to have one of those categories with fuzzy edges and a hard boiled core. Is there a proper name for such a thing, where there are some members everyone agrees are definitely included and other members that can be in or out depending on your point of view or experience or purpose? WhatamIdoing, is Collin's dictionary blocked in the US like the BNF is? Their website has a mix of dictionary sources. Their COBUILD Advanced English Dictionary says "Confectionery is sweets and chocolates", which confirms the idea that one can separate the two concepts if one wishes. Collins English Dictionary says confectionery is "sweets and other confections collectively" but then says a confection is "any sweet preparation of fruit, nuts, etc, such as a preserve or a sweet" There are other definitions too, though they seem less appropriate. Interestingly, the COBUILD definition of sweet is "Sweets are small sweet things such as toffees, chocolates, and mints." Which means that in one sentence COBUILD includes chocolates in the definition of sweets, and in another sentence uses sweets and chocolates as though they are distinct. I gather the COBUILD dictionary emphasises contemporary usage and being easy to understand over attempting to be authoritative. -- Colin°^Talk 10:26, 12 January 2021 (UTC)

While we're on the subject of pastry

Seeing as this talkpage seems to have become Wikiproject Pastry recently, I'll just put this here seeing as the deserted lockdown streets have finally given me the opportunity to take a photo of it from an angle that doesn't distort the view to the point of illegibility. This was found hidden about 10 feet up inside the walls of an old Essex coaching inn, during renovations c. 1900. The theory is that workmen on an exterior scaffolding stole a cherry pie from a passing delivery and were subsequently caught and fined half a guinea (about £80 in modern terms—although 18th-century England has a reputation for harsh justice, when it came to petty theft the first offence just led to a warning fine and it was only for a second offence that the offender was transported or hanged), and that the workmen hid the plaque inside the walls of the building to mark the spot, never expecting it to be found. It's the little oddities like this that make living on Plague Island so interesting. A pair of quick pings to Kafka Liz and EEng, both of whom suitably appreciate weird old inscriptions. ‑ Iridescent 09:06, 12 January 2021 (UTC)

That is seriously cool. When was this discovered? User:Kafka Liz ^{a girl is no one} 10:00, 12 January 2021 (UTC)

During rebuilding works c. 1900 when they were expanding and rebuilding the pub. Wikipedia's article has a completely different explanation, that it was put there by the pub landlord to commemorate a pie the pub had served, which is unsourced and sounds like pure bullshit—if it was routine to serve these pies why would they only single one pie out for commemoration, and if they were so proud of this pie that they thought it deserved a commemorative marker why would they hide the plaque inside the wall? (The "pie stolen by workmen" story is very easy to source.) ‑ Iridescent 10:11, 12 January 2021 (UTC)

That does sound sort of bullshitty. I would fix it, but I haven't the source. Wish we had more cool things like that around here. Speaking of inscriptions, I spent a fair few hours this summer trying to find an explanation for two sisters who died three days apart, two years after their parents, in 1854. Was looking for records of a local outbreak, but found nothing. User:Kafka Liz ^{a girl is no one} 10:34, 12 January 2021 (UTC)

My BS detector is going off the scale for both stories. EEng 20:04, 12 January 2021 (UTC)

I'm fairly certain there's no possibility it's a 19th-century fake—there's no conceivable motive (I assure you nobody ever went sightseeing to Wanstead, and the George is on the main road from Chelmsford to London and directly opposite the station so it's not like they needed to drum up custom), the grammar and handwriting are convincingly mid-18th-century, and half a guinea is a very improbable sum to mention in a hoax. (If there's one thing everyone thinks they know about England while the Black Act was in force, it's that even the most trivial of crimes were harshly punished; one would be very unlikely to create a fake narrative about someone getting a slap on the wrist token fine.) Assuming it's genuine, the "theiving workmen made a joke monument to mark the scene of the crime, and buried it within the walls" theory seems plausible enough to me; it would have needed to be someone who'd worked on the construction for it to have got inside the walls in the first place, and I don't buy "the landlord was so proud of one particular pie that he hid a tribute to it for future generations to find" for an instant. Crucially from Wikipedia's point of view, "theiving workman" is the explanation one can find reliable sources for just by typing "cherry pey" into Google Books. ‑ Iridescent 21:23, 12 January 2021 (UTC)

The oldest reference to it I can casually trace is from 1874, which gives a slightly different text and "Restorat. 1858". The Essex Review of 1896 supplies yet another explanation, a party of "macaronis" arriving and demanding cherry pie out of season, which was fulfilled at an exorbitant charge. Choess (talk) 21:13, 12 January 2021 (UTC)

The Essex Review one isn't accessible here, but I don't find that very convincing either. Essex was (and still is) a major centre for cherry farming and fruit preservation has always been routine in England given the short growing season—making a cherry pie in whatever season would have at worst been a minor inconvenience that necessitated a brief trip to the grocer's. ‑ Iridescent 21:30, 12 January 2021 (UTC)

Did you try a random trawl of other peoples death certificates issued in the same county around the same time? Primary rather than secondary sourcing, but should at least give you a general idea if there was any local disease events. Ancestry is rather good at that level (if you have a membership) in that it inherantly allows you to filter numbers and compare against previous/subsequent years. Only in death does duty end (talk) 12:44, 12 January 2021 (UTC)

I didn’t try that - I spent some time leafing through a digitised local history which was interesting, but ultimately not much help. I don’t have Ancestry membership either, but these are both great ideas that I hadn’t thought of. Thank you. User:Kafka Liz ^{a girl is no one} 16:32, 12 January 2021 (UTC)

Was this in Ireland or the US? If it was in Ireland, church records are probably the best place to start; official Irish records are patchy in the 1840s–50s because the authorities had their hands full with a certain unpleasantness, but both the RCC and the CoI were generally fairly assiduous when it came to keeping track of their flocks. ‑ Iridescent 14:48, 12 January 2021 (UTC)

No, this was in the US. The headstones themselves are fairly boring - it was the death dates that caught my eye. Can send pix if you want. These are in my old hometown in one of the graveyards I don’t get to that often. User:Kafka Liz ^{a girl is no one} 16:35, 12 January 2021 (UTC)

@Kafka Liz, have you use Wikipedia:The Wikipedia Library? Ancestry.com's Newspapers.com site was added to it last year,[2] and you might be able to find relevant information in their archives. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:44, 12 January 2021 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing Thank you for this - I’m on and off wiki - mostly off - so I had no idea of this. I will investigate. User:Kafka Liz ^{a girl is no one} 18:10, 12 January 2021 (UTC)

1854 was the peak of the 1846–1860 cholera pandemic in the US. It was centered on Chicago, but there were major outbreaks in Providence and Fall River and presumably spread fairly quickly given the questionable hygiene standards and poor-quality drinking water. It might be completely unconnected, but it would certainly explain a cluster of deaths if one family (or one street, one village…) were sharing the same contaminated well. ‑ Iridescent 18:47, 12 January 2021 (UTC)

Speaking of TWL, @Samwalton9's team is planning to use Echo/Notifications to alert all qualified editors about the free sources later this year. This may cause a backlog in reviewing applications for the limited resources (others are automatically available to everyone who qualifies). I therefore encourage you all to go get your Wikipedia Library Cards now, instead of waiting. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:40, 12 January 2021 (UTC)

If they're going to start pushing it to the entire editor base, they need to make things a lot clearer first. I'm reasonably fluent in both Wikipedia jargon and the WMF's internal gobbledegook, and at literally no point at either Wikipedia:The Wikipedia Library, the TWL website, or the "Learn more" link at the top of the latter, can I find any indication (or even a hint) as to what TWL actually is.

The homepage has a "Log in" but no "Sign up" which if it confused me, is also going to confuse a lot of other people. On clicking the "Log in" button it takes me to a scary-looking "by continuing you're giving us permission to harvest your data" screen, and on grudgingly clicking "allow" it takes me to another screen full of gibberish which has buried within it that the WMF is going to be harvesting my real name, occupation, institutional affiliation, and country of residence.

This is the point at which I gave up; most of the WMF's staff and contractors are perfectly decent people but they've had more than their share of chancers, grifters, and general lunatics pass through their doors, and I'm not wildly keen on handing over my personal details. By this point, I'm still none the wiser about what TWL actually is, other than that it's "a large selection of resources". There's no indication and no way I can see to find out whether these resources are something to which I already have access, something which is of no relevance to me, or something so useful that it would justify the risk. ‑ Iridescent 07:57, 13 January 2021 (UTC)

Did someone say pastry?? Lest we forget.... [3], [4]. Martinevans123 (talk) 18:14, 12 January 2021 (UTC)

There's a name I haven't seen for a while! Hope everything's OK with you… ‑ Iridescent 18:49, 12 January 2021 (UTC)

Well he did die in 1979. I'm not too bad, thanks. And to think I have trouble putting on a duvet cover. Martinevans123 (talk) 19:03, 12 January 2021 (UTC)

Martinevans123, are you the same Martin Evans who was just on the radio talking about collecting components from telegraph poles? I'm not sure if it says more about me or you that as soon as he was introduced I thought "that sounds like something our ME would do. ‑ Iridescent 19:57, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

Ah, shucks. My cover now well and truly blown .... or maybe not?! The current front runners are:

• Former ostrich farmer turned drug trafficker.
• British biologist who was the first to culture mice embryonic stem cells.
• The Daily Telegraph's crime correspondent.

Just take your pick. Martinevans123 (talk) 20:15, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

He's all of the above! --Tryptofish (talk) 23:27, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

Talking of telegraph lines....alas yes, I am "permanently engaged". Martinevans123 (talk) 10:38, 16 January 2021 (UTC)

FAC Fear

I've read through some of the conversations you've had with Sandy and I wanted to chime in. A very brief history (because my history is, thus far, brief): I've been editing since late August, chiefly working on articles with high viewership numbers (as of now, my 4 GAs have netted 4 Million Awards): Odyssey, The Turn of the Screw, Riot Games and League of Legends. I think I can write (lowercase) good articles, and quickly and efficiently improve the coverage of 18th/19th/20th Gothic literature. I am interested in becoming a regular FAC contributor, but I do have a general fear – that fear isn't caused by the Manual of Style. It’s caused by the comprehensiveness criterion. For a book like The Turn of the Screw, I know enough that research is straightforward for me... I know what to look for, who the experts are, and therefore where to look for it. But over a thousand books exist about TTOTS; JSTOR returns 45k results. I can't include all of that (and I don't think I'd be expected to include all of that).

I've reached out to lots of FAC contributors about what the comprehensiveness criteria means and I still don't know. Here is what TTOTS looked like when I started. Instead of nominating what is my trained specialty, I delayed TTOTS a bit and took League of Legends to FAC as my first attempt (ongoing, looking good so far) because I know I can cover basically everything that has been reliably discussed re: that game, and not worry about what to include. TTOTS isn't ready for FA, but it truly isn't far off. MoS/Novels is one of the more flexible guidelines, and themes just isn't useful for that book (it does need a Style section). The meat of it is the intense, passionate criticism it's sustained over the years. My next project, Dracula, is a similar case. I've love to get these articles to FAC, but it isn't the MoS that puts me off... I find the comprehensiveness criterion confusing, and don't know where the line should be drawn about inclusion. I could go through every critical history I have and make a chart of every named critic whose views are reported in some depth, but is that a good use of my first vs getting started on another, direly in-need article? I don't know, because I don't know if I can actually get it through FAC.

PS. The MoS does have problems (to me, anyway). When I started editing I was instinctively wiki-linking things twice if it came significantly further down the page, but no, I'm not allowed to do that... Nice to meet you. I'm sure I'll look back on this after a year of editing and cringe. — ImaginesTigers (talk) 12:05, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

As the woman who took Middle Ages, William the Conqueror, Battle of Hastings, and Norman Conquest of England to FA - if you think you've consulted the important experts and you've got most of the aspects covered, you're good. Trying to meet the "comprehensive" criteria is (luckily) pretty easy ... because most reviewers can't be bothered to even worry about the sourcing, much less the comprehensive criteria. I've had FACs where I've opposed on source reliability and had reviewers come in and support the article on prose. WTF .. if the sourcing isn't sound the article isn't set in stone so no way can the prose be stable! But.. most reviewers are so totally focused on the prose that they don't care about sourcing or any of the other criteria. Ealdgyth (talk) 13:01, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

That is... Well, honestly, it's kinda depressing. I guess the onus to be comprehensive is on me, for the benefit of readers :( — ImaginesTigers (talk) 15:43, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

Iri, meet one of our most promising new FA participants. I agree with Ealdgyth in broad terms, but will add more when not ipad typing with back spasms. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:50, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

Hi ImaginesTigers take a look at Moni3 and Yllosubmarine's pages. Both are long gone but worked on novels/lit articles that are excellent examples. I've brought a few through FAC myself and am somewhat available to answer questions. I'll take a look at Turn of the Screw if you'd like (at one point it was on my watchlist but seems to have dropped off). Yes, agree absolutely w/ Ealdgyth re sources. Victoria (tk) 16:30, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

Sandy, you are too kind. Looking forward to your feedback.

Victoria, thanks a lot for linking me to those! It’s a huge shame that they're gone... I've looked so hard for editors who focus heavily on literature, and it’s been a struggle. The WikiProjects for Books, Literature, and Novels are all dead or near-death. I'd like to merge them, personally, to try and stir up some activity (each speciality could become a task force) but I'm too new to take that kind of thing on, and I'm not convinced it would even be successful. Thanks again for their profiles! Having a look over them now. I'd love for you to look over The Turn of the Screw, also!

Iridescent, sorry about you waking up to this. — ImaginesTigers (talk) 17:08, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

Long story as to why they're gone, but it has to with FAC shenanigans, to use a phrase. Those wiki projects have been dead for a decade, but I'm kinda sorta around (have brought novels and short stories through FAC, see my user page). I do answer to queries to my user talk, so feel free to ask. P.s Iri, holy crap, this is a long page! Not that I'm helping by posting here! Victoria (tk) 17:27, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

It's deceptively long as a single thread accounts for most of it—contrary to appearances the bot does actually archive this page regularly.

@ImaginesTigers don't let anything I say here scare you away from FA; the original conversation is with Sandy who I know is familiar with all the back-story, so I skipped over the usual "but provided you don't encounter the crazy people FAC works fine" disclaimers I'd have included had the conversation been in a more public-facing area. I'm the main author of 47 FAs, I don't have some kind of ideological objection to it.

I do entirely agree with your main point and it's a point I've been making for years (see #What parts of an article do people actually read? above for my most recent take on it). Because the rules say "thorough and representative" it's technically impossible for any page to comply (unless it's something ultra-niche like Britomart Redeems Faire Amoret). As such it discourages potential nominators who think they're going to have to read fifty books, and it can turn FAC discussions on broad topics quite unpleasant as it gives a ready-made pretext for people to complain that their pet author hasn't been used or that their pet topic isn't included in what they consider sufficient detail. (Ealdgyth, you're right that most reviewers are more interested in prose and in stylistic issues than source review—although I at least always try to make it clear when I haven't checked a source—but that has the potential to give undue weight to any random commenter who demands their preferred sources be used. Have you managed to blot the Bulgarians from your memory yet?)

I still think the perception that FAC is obsessed with nitpicking and stylistic compliance is more of a barrier to recruitment than sourcing. Most first time nominators are coming with a relatively obscure topic on which there are few sources, just because shorter articles are easier to write, so "OMG there have been a thousand books written about this, how do I know which ones I should be using?" is less of an issue, but the MOS nitpickers are very real. Back in the old days reviewers used to just fix these things, but there's a certain subset of reviewer now who takes great pride in posting laundry-lists of every spelling mistake and misplaced comma, and these lists in turn make FAC look much more oppose-happy than it actually is. ‑ Iridescent 19:51, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

I agree with you regarding nitpicking and prose. When I review, I try not to focus on prose. If I had to focus on prose, then I'm likely going to avoid the nomination altogether (which is bad in its own way). But FAC does have a reputation of being nitpicky, and it absolutely was off-putting (even to me). This isn't so much true for my ongoing one, but for other editors' nominations I have absolutely been frustrated by some of the nitpicking that goes on over things that do not actually matter. That isn't to say that all of the nitpicking is bad: the right reviewer and the right nominator can do wonders with nitpicks. Not all editors have that temperament.

What frustrates me is just how all-over-the place the reviews can often be. You never know what you are going to read. Different review styles is a benefit in theory, but in practice I just look at nominations and think, I don't know how the coordinators knew it was time for this to pass. Unlike the GA process (problematic though it is), nobody is tracking the criteria on the page (I understand the tech limitations with templates) . The criteria is relevant only when invoked to oppose. I don't agree with anyone who characterises the process as "hostile" to new editors, but it is, in my view anyway, at worst malignantly indifferent towards them before the actual nomination. (Gog has been incredibly kind to me, and encouraging, and I've seen his kindness towards many other editors, too.) I don't have a good conclusion. I'm both relieved that comprehensiveness isn't properly examined... and a bit saddened by it. I think the criteria might need revisited... — ImaginesTigers (talk) 20:15, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

While, I of course, have all the answers to every FAC dilemma ("she's always right, just ask her", as my husband is wont to say ... of course, not about me but others :) Yes, these are all problems that are worthy of deeper discussion than the current FAC talk environment allows for. I do see things improving after five years in the ditch, and that is because of encouraging editors like you :) Bst, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 23:34, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

A Bulgarian guide shows Hilary Clinton where the Renaissance started, in the Boyana Church

"Have you managed to blot the Bulgarians from your memory yet?" No. Just... no. And now I'm going to have nightmares. Ealdgyth (talk) 23:39, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

Please send me the secret decoder ring (was this during my absence?); I feel so left out! SandyGeorgia (Talk) 23:43, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

See Talk:Middle Ages/Archive 7, Talk:Middle Ages/Archive 8, and Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Sumatro/Archive. That captures most of it. This leaves aside the great "must have new image for Middle Ages" debate as well as the spate of accusations I got about being a fundamentalist Christian (which ... is just vastly amusing given my stated beliefs on my user page. And the fun bits on Battle of Hastings, can't forget that. And of course, my introduction to wikipedia was Talk:Gundred, Countess of Surrey and User talk:Ealdgyth/Archive 1#Gundred... for someone who sucks at sockpuppet detection, i do tend to run into them... -- Ealdgyth (talk) 00:30, 16 January 2021 (UTC)

I'd forgotten all that, but we've subsequently acquired this excellent photo of Hilary Clinton being re-educated. Johnbod (talk) 18:45, 19 January 2021 (UTC)

Sheesh, nothing like Iri's talk page to remind me of all the fun I missed (ugh) ... and since my post-tree bad back and typing issues no longer allow me to thoroughly engage, I get to commiserate from afar without committing to how to solve all of these issues (even if I Am Always Right :) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 00:37, 16 January 2021 (UTC)

If you're after "fun you missed when you were away", I'd nominate Talk:Moors murders/Archive 20#Recent edits as the place to start, with an honorable mention for the brief descent into collective insanity documented at WP:Community response to the Wikimedia Foundation's ban of Fram. ‑ Iridescent 10:09, 16 January 2021 (UTC)

I am becoming aware, in bits and pieces here and there, of what became of Eric, but for avoidance of having steam come out of my ears, I read as little as possible, and say even less. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:20, 16 January 2021 (UTC)

For what little it may be worth, I have done FAC and found it entirely pleasant, but I was brought into it by another editor, with whom I had collaborated on the page. For all the time that I've been editing, until that FAC a year-ish ago, I've avoided GA and FA for the idiosyncratic reason that I spent my adult life as an academic, and so have spent innumerable hours reviewing and being reviewed for academic papers, research grants, and tenure evaluations (not to mention grading students). And if anyone has had ugly experiences on-wiki, I can vouch that it sometimes gets even uglier in academia. So when I started editing here, I decided that I wanted it to be a hobby, and not feel like work, and having anyone review my writing would feel too much like work. That's got nothing to do with the processes or the criteria, and there would really be nothing anyone could change to have changed my feeling that way. Paradoxically, my past experience probably makes me pretty tolerant of criticism by reviewers (as a submitter), as well as to have empathy for those being reviewed (as a reviewer). Although my specifics are probably idiosyncratic and not widely applicable to other editors (although maybe subject-area experts... ), I suspect quite a few editors do prefer just not to have to be "graded" by other people. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:51, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

@Tryptofish: Damn! I really disagree. I find journals to be significantly less blunt than the way I've seen some FACs go on. At least, with style guides, I know what's expected, but my personal style is down to personal choice. I like being "graded" (though I wouldn't describe academic writing that way); I like my writing being reviewed. But writing Wikipedia articles is not like writing essays and dissertations. I have much more freedom of expression in an academic format. — ImaginesTigers (talk) 00:01, 16 January 2021 (UTC)

That's interesting, thanks. I wonder whether it's a difference between academic fields (biomedical sciences, in my case). Perhaps people in the humanities are better at using their indoor voices than people in the experimental sciences are; perhaps it's the effect of money in funding big research labs. Or maybe it's just my bad luck. But I do want to clarify one thing about what I said. It's not that I dislike being graded, so much as I've been submerged in it for so long that it feels like work to me and I want a change of scenery. --Tryptofish (talk) 00:20, 16 January 2021 (UTC)

Sandy, stooooop it, hehe. — ImaginesTigers (talk) 00:01, 16 January 2021 (UTC)

No. Srsly. This is what I meant when I told Eddie891 that most of our literary FA folks had moved on ... and then you appeared! Comprehensiveness is perhaps easier to judge in my editing area, where you can get the latest Lancet or NEJM secondary review and say, if they don't mention it, I don't need to mention it. And where most sources are similarly structured (around Diagnosis, Management, Epidemiology, etc.) But even then, someone will say, "well, why is there no information about "during pregnancy" or affecting caregivers, and you have to say ... d'oh ... and then include that. I see that this is harder in literary topics, which is why we need YOU :) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 00:28, 16 January 2021 (UTC)

On non-science topics, "comprehensiveness of coverage" is near-as-infinitely easier if there's a reasonably small (no more than three or four) published books which are very self-evidently the standard books on that topic. You don't need to necessarily cite these sources to any great extent (they're often not the best sources to use, as they provide a broad overview and there are often better sources on each individual aspect, and as they're often written as introductory texts for non-specialists they sometimes oversimplify). However, their existence allows you to refute "why didn't you include (my pet theory / my favourite factlet)?" with "none of these people deemed it important enough to the narrative to be worth mentioning". The approach doesn't work for super-broad topics like Middle Ages where people can legitimately say this approach just shifts the bias onto how you determine which overviews are important—but on something like a biography, a military campaign or a rail line it's invaluable. ‑ Iridescent 08:23, 16 January 2021 (UTC)

@SandyGeorgia: If you're still doubting my contention that the current FAC group have an unhealthy obsession with quibbling over minutiae of the Manual of Style at the expense of considering what readers actually might want to know, I humbly present Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates#MOS:LINKSTYLE question. ‑ Iridescent 14:46, 19 January 2021 (UTC)

You have just made my point about “the current FAC group” and their attitudes even better than I could have. But not perhaps in the way you intended. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:45, 19 January 2021 (UTC)

Indeed, co-ords looking after each other. The Rambling Man (Stay alert! Control the virus! Save lives!!!!) 15:59, 19 January 2021 (UTC)

Really? I didn’t quibble with the reviewers who wanted me to put more parentheticals in a medical article even though there were links. And if you should be able to comprehend the less technical aspects of Tourette syndrome, I should be able to comprehend Tim Howard. Since, “don’t force the reader to click out to understand the basics of a sentence” has always been enforced at FAC, the only thing I see new here is that one editor (you) refuses to even provide a link for the reader to click out to. On the bigger picture, it is your attitude that keeps many reviewers away from your FACs, and that is what reinforces my point to Iri; it’s not the MOS, it’s the crowd. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:08, 19 January 2021 (UTC)

Ignoring consensus, making up new reviewer requirements ("non-male" reviewer for instance), the process has gone wonky. The Rambling Man (Stay alert! Control the virus! Save lives!!!!) 16:11, 19 January 2021 (UTC)

@Sandy, without commenting on the actual issue in that thread (I haven't looked at the articles in question, although in general I'm firmly in the "if there's a reasonable possibility a bright 14-year-old won't be familiar with a concept and understanding that concept is necessary for understanding the article, put an explanation in a footnote so it's there if people need it" camp), "it’s not the MOS, it’s the crowd" is entirely my point. Having a set of standard guidelines on appearance so readers aren't surprised by things not being where they expect is a perfectly legitimate idea; my argument is that potential new participants are put off participating in FAC because (rightly or wrongly) there's an impression among Wikipedia's broader editor base that the FAC process means dealing with a bunch of bad-tempered individuals who are obsessed with making up arbitrary rules and insisting that other people comply with them. Put yourself in the shoes of a keen new editor who's just written an article they're really proud of, decides to investigate this "featured article" process they've heard so much about to see if it's for them, and lands on WT:FAC in its current state (permalink for the record). ‑ Iridescent 19:22, 19 January 2021 (UTC)

Perhaps our greatest point of agreement is about "FAC in its current state", even if we disagree (I suspect, slightly) about what led to that "current state". My Take On Recent History. Sometime after they dispensed with an overall FA process, where TFA/FAR/FAC worked together under a director, a group took over FAC whose MO was to aggressively go after anyone who gave a review they didn't like, for whatever reason they didn't like, whether it was on sourcing (Ealdgyth, SarahSV), prose (Tony1, F&f), or MOS ... or anything else that stood in the way of the pursuit of rewards. Once they succeeded in chasing out all of those reviewers (as the remnants have now also done with me), the path was cleared for them to do lengthy nitpicking of prose FAC "reviews" (sic), claiming an FA based on lengthy reviews that were just massaging their buddies' FAs up the reward culture line, while not actually reviewing all (or even most of) the criteria. Worse, even the prose reviews were glaringly deficient (but if one points that out, they scream "where's the proof" or "where's the evidence" or "give an example", but then if one does give an example, you're shot for doing just that. Having cleared the room of any resistance, and disempowered the Coords, they were able to proceed up whichever piece of the reward culture that was their motivation (WPFAN, preferred slot at TFA, contest rewards, etc) in ways that neglected a) overall FA quality, and b) mainpage diversity. Having disempowered the Coords, we were left with Coords being increasingly frustrated, and unable to really do anything but phone it in. Now, some people appear to be standing up to that. And some people are reacting with more of same. Again, it's not about MOS: it's about any issue that stands in the way of those driven by a reward culture. Apparently, because I encounter terms in football articles (even though I lived a huge part of my life in football countries, Argentina, Venezuela and Italy during a World Cup, and was married to a goalie on a national team), I am less than an intelligent 14-year-old because I encounter words that are not only not known to me-- some nominators refuse to even supply a link to a glossary. While I work hard to make highly technical medical articles as decipherable as possible, knowing that certain sections (pathophysiology for example) might not be accessible to the average 14-yo. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:47, 19 January 2021 (UTC)

In fact, it's not just newcomers being put off by a sudden urge to sporadically enforce certain elements of MOS to the minuscule letter. A level playing field is all most of us are after, but that's gone by the wayside lately, and horribly so. The Rambling Man (Stay alert! Control the virus! Save lives!!!!) 20:39, 19 January 2021 (UTC)

I'm going to stick my neck out and ask a question that I may perhaps end up regretting having asked, so I'll start by stipulating that all of this is everyone's individual opinions and everyone is entitled to an opinion (and I'm probably not going to take it personally). So here is the link to the fairly recent FAC that I mentioned earlier in this thread: link, that I described as having been an enjoyable experience for me. I'm curious what the editors here in this discussion think about that particular review in the context of the discussion here. I'm not really asking whether you think the article itself was or wasn't good enough, but rather, about whether you consider the review to have been flawed. I thought that the article got a good review on the merits, but did it get through because it had the "right" people reviewing it? --Tryptofish (talk) 20:50, 19 January 2021 (UTC)

Yes, that looks like a lovely experience compared to recent FAC expeditions. An apparent "standing up" of co-ords has led to the kind of joke scenario we're now facing at WT:FAC where consensus is no longer respected, where new rules ("non-male reviewers") are being instigated, and so on. It's funny, I've been doing FACs for years and years and it's only been the last 12 months or so that I've seen a general increase in hostility to a large number of us who are putting in hours and hours on things somehow deemed unworthy by the "establishment" or that we're "diluting diversity" or our reviews are somehow for personal profit or game points or something. That may be the case for some, but it would be really instructive, rather than to keep bandying such accusations around, to point at some of the results of such deficient FAs or deficient reviews and prove to the community that it's real. In the meantime, as I noted, a level playing field please, which is abundantly no longer the case. The Rambling Man (Stay alert! Control the virus! Save lives!!!!) 21:13, 19 January 2021 (UTC)

I’m going to again repeat that you’re selectively quipoting and leaving off some important parts. What I said was that “I'd like to see a review or two from someone who is not male and/or not necessarily familiar with sports-speak.” will you kindly stop making it seem like I required a non-male reviewer when it was a bit more nuanced. And we’ve long tried to get at least one support from someone outside the subject area before promoting...so that it’s not just subject matter experts reviewing. I’ll let everyone return to their regularly scheduled bitching ...because Frankly, I’m tired and cranky and really don’t need the negativity...Ealdgyth (talk) 22:06, 19 January 2021 (UTC)

You already had two reviews from people not familiar with sports-speak, both of whom supported. But with five supports you just opted for the oppose by your colleague and sought even more "non-sports speak and/or non-male" reviewers. Well, we're up to seven supports now, and I've asked even more non-sports speak and a non-male reviewer to look at it too, so perhaps we might even hit nine supports. Who knows. Just apply this approach even-handedly across the nominations and across the implementation of MOS and there won't be any complaints. The Rambling Man (Stay alert! Control the virus! Save lives!!!!) 22:21, 19 January 2021 (UTC)

if your aim is to be so snarky that I give up, I hope you don’t think that’ll work. And if you’re canvassing reviewers...please don’t. Ealdgyth (talk) 22:35, 19 January 2021 (UTC)

Give it a rest, the snark and pointedness is entirely yours I'm afraid. You said you wanted non-sports reviewers: you had two supports from them. I don't doubt for a second that you won't "give up" (interesting way of putting it), it's so incredibly pointy now. Give us a level playing field. Stop promoting all articles packed with unexplained technical terms. Start respecting consensus. The clamour for common sense here is growing, time to see that. The Rambling Man (Stay alert! Control the virus! Save lives!!!!) 22:41, 19 January 2021 (UTC)

Tryptofish, I took a very quick look. What is most important to remember, when faced with the kind of vociferous protest over items easily addressed, is that the vast majority of editors who are approaching FAC are still having a pleasant experience. (The real problem is that they are encountering less and less reviewers, as more and more of us want nothing to do with combative nominators.) Yours looks to be in the category of a good experience and a fairly decent FAC. In terms of the things that weren't reviewed there, it is not a content area which triggers big concerns about WP:WIAFA 1 (b), (c) or (d) wrt latest and highest quality scholarly sources, so I would not jump to calling the sourcing review good or bad (although the person I would trust to check that would be Ealdgyth). It doesn't look problematic to me, but maybe there's some major POV lurking among those roses :) . What I do see, and I see it in the article as well, is that you did not get a MOS review (which is my point to Iri-- it's just not happening). I think that did you (along with readers) a disservice, as I suspect you would not be happy about having issues in an article that a) could be simply fixed in a matter of minutes, b) would teach you something you didn't know before approaching FAC, and c) would make your article more accessible to people with vision difficulties or who use screen readers. One of the things I feel best about wrt FAs is that we aim to implement the parts of MOS that make our articles more accessible to a broad readership, whether with vision impairments or whether via addressing jargon. It was brave of you to offer your own article as an example, but part of the debate has been the repeated calls for "proof", "evidence" or "examples", but if one gives them, one is shot at for doing same, so I am not going to detail any further issues that I see with what is basically your fine FA. I am also pretty sure that if I were to go in and simply fix the things that weren't reviewed, you wouldn't get fussed. But on another FA that passed last year, when I did raise some issues on talk and attempt to fix them, the same vociferous complainers hollered that "the article had passed FAC" so the changes weren't needed-- another misconception about FAC, because the issues I was raising had not been reviewed for at all (wrt foreign language terms and other). SandyGeorgia (Talk) 23:27, 19 January 2021 (UTC)

Sandy, thank you so very much for that thoughtful and helpful reply. (And here I was, thinking that I had made a mistake in asking.) As you correctly suspected, had someone made a critical analysis of MOS issues, I (and I think my collaborator) would have been fine with going through and making those types of changes. For me personally, most MOS stuff is in the category of "as long as you can point me to what it is, so that I can understand it, it's fine with me to do it that way, and not a lot of work for me to do it". (But I'd rather lick a cactus than argue about writing MOS itself.) Visual access issues actually hadn't occurred to me until now, and if I ever get back to doing serious content work (as versus my current I'm Sick and Tired of Wikipedia^TM frame of mind), I'll investigate that and see if I can make improvements myself. And I really mean it when I say that I am very happy that you and I had this exchange, so thanks again.

Something that I'd like to believe, based on "more and more of us want nothing to do with combative nominators" is that if one is an editor nominating an article, one should be prepared to have an open mind about advice on how to improve it, and not take it personally when a reviewer points out something that can be improved upon – so long as the reviewer does so politely, which is, in turn, something that reviewers need to do. My guess is that it's easier to get enough reviewers when potential reviewers see the particular FAC as one where they will not be yelled at. (I said earlier that I had a lot of professional experience as an academic scientific reviewer and review-ee, and these are things I've come to appreciate from that experience. And at least with FAC, a bad review won't mean losing financial support for the people working in your lab...)

I'll add something that I'm going to say, not to Sandy, but more to everyone in this discussion. I've been thinking overnight about the tensions that became manifest after I asked my question, and about how that fits into the broader themes of this discussion, and I'll say something that I hope no one will holler at me for saying. It looks to me like FAC has sat for a long time somewhat outside of the rest of the en-wiki editing environment, with its own internal governance mechanisms. As a result, editors there (whether page authors, reviewers, or coordinators) have generally not been inclined to turn to en-wiki's other mechanisms of dispute resolution. Over time, that may have allowed some problems to go on and on without getting resolved. That said, I'd rather not have anyone argue with me over "well, that wouldn't have worked in my case". Instead, I see it as something that individuals, on their own initiative, will just have to do themselves. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:29, 20 January 2021 (UTC)

And I almost forgot: yes, those roses are very POV! --Tryptofish (talk) 22:54, 20 January 2021 (UTC)

So, Iri, is the picture becoming clearer yet? Best I can decipher, all of this because a nominator refuses to define some jargon or even provide links for sorting jargon ... something that has always been part of FAC and is not even remotely new or MOS-related. What a big bunch of fuss over something that could be fixed in minutes (unlike a medical article, where teasing out jargon often takes substantial effort including MEDRS sourcing). But the put-up-a-fuss until reviewers give up or are chased off strategy worked for many FACs over the last few years, so why not now? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:51, 19 January 2021 (UTC)

Here's that link to sorting jargon you are looking for. EEng 12:16, 20 January 2021 (UTC)

No, a nominator refuses to provide dictionary definitions for three cherry-picked English terms (which are linked), something which has not been enforced (and is still not being enforced evenly) at FAC, and is MOS-mandated. Meanwhile, co-ords are promoting article packed with foreign-language or highly scientific technical terms which (similarly) have no "footnote" or (parenthetical explanation). Just taking a high-level (and inaccurate) view of this issue is completely unhelpful I'm afraid. And FWIW, I have never objected in this way in any of my 38 FACs since 2007. I object to this because it is nonsensical and uneven in its application. And it's one reviewer who objects, the other seven reviewers support the FAC. Thanks for listening. The Rambling Man (Stay alert! Control the virus! Save lives!!!!) 23:09, 19 January 2021 (UTC)

This talkpage really isn't the best place for this, as this is a discussion that ought to be had somewhere where everyone will see it rather than whoever has my talkpage watchlisted. On the specific situation of whether to link and whether to define terminology, my personal opinion is that there isn't a one-size-fits all rule, but in general we ought to explain (rather than just link) anything that's actually necessary to understanding the article and that it can't be reasonably assumed everyobe will know. There are quite a few circumstances where readers aren't going to be able to follow wikilinks if they don't understand something. We use "printout" as shorthand for this even though not many people actually read Wikipedia on paper, but what we do see a lot of is partial mirroring—e.g. a museum that uses the text of the relevant Wikipedia articles on their website to save having to write their own description for each exhibit, or the various Wikipedia:Internet-in-a-Box schemes which only hold the articles in a particular category, or only have the articles above arbitrary quality/importance thresholds. (As a concrete example, on the Boat Race articles I wouldn't include definitions of "Putney" or "Chiswick Bridge" as it doesn't really matter to readers exactly where they are provided they know they're 4.2 miles apart, but I would include brief definitions of "cox" and "stroke" as a footnote as it's reasonable to assume that some readers will be unfamiliar with the terms.) ‑ Iridescent 17:30, 25 January 2021 (UTC)

ABRPIA history

Hello, talk page stalkers. I'm here for a history lesson. Can anyone tell me why a newbie editor is permitted to engage in a constructive discussion on the talk pages under Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Palestine-Israel articles 4#ARBPIA General Sanctions, but is not permitted in engage in a constructive discussion on the talk page if there's an RFC tag in the section?

I have so far come up with two hypotheses: The first is that ArbCom didn't actually mean to ban them from everyday talk-page RFCs (but did mean to ban them from RFCs that would affect multiple pages, e.g., changes to guidelines). The second is that there was a pattern of behavior in which the "constructive" part of constructive discussion disappeared when someone added an RFC tag to the page (e.g., people treated RFCs like majority-wins-everything votes instead of a discussion). Does anyone actually know why RFCs were included? WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:47, 23 January 2021 (UTC)

My recollection was that there had been a problem with very large numbers of drive-by single-purpose accounts attempting to "stack the vote" in RfCs by showing up in large numbers. I'm not confident that that's a full explanation, but it's something that I remember. In a sense, the intention of the restriction is to get away from "majority-wins-everything". --Tryptofish (talk) 20:54, 23 January 2021 (UTC)

<page-staker:> <page-stalker:> Quite. I don't know what the arb.com was thinking, but you can go back and look at virtually any vote in the IP area, and see the numerous (often since banned) socks. Same whenever an IP article came up for AfD; that used really to be a sock-party, Huldra (talk) 23:00, 24 January 2021 (UTC)

Lol, Huldra (talk) 20:29, 25 January 2021 (UTC)

Between the page stakers and the fried Martin [5] this is turning into a most unusual page. EEng 02:45, 25 January 2021 (UTC)

And don't get me started on the discussions about food! Fried marten? --Tryptofish (talk) 19:36, 25 January 2021 (UTC)

That reminds me: @Folly Mox, related to your list of why people make lattice crusts, I checked the websites for two grocery store chains. One does lattice top pie crusts only on apple pies (and on all their apple pies), and the other does fake lattice tops only on their low-sugar pies (and on all of their low-sugar pies). (For the fake lattice top, imagine something like a dough docker, except making slits instead of pricking little holes. When you stretch it, it looks sort of like a lattice crust.) So that's a third reason: to make it quicker for the staff to recognize what's on the shelf. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:01, 26 January 2021 (UTC)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Requests_for_comment#Handling_ARBPIA_related_RfCs_-_IPs_and_non-ECP_editors_may_not_participate (personally, I agree with the decision).Selfstudier (talk) 12:48, 25 January 2021 (UTC)

I wasn't involved but my understanding is the same as Tryptofish's. Middle Eastern topics in general and I/P in particular have always attracted swarms of single-purpose accounts, and we needed a mechanism to stop decisions being based on "who can canvass the most people on any given day?". (Never underestimate just how inflammed the passions get on even the least contentious Middle East topic. See the pre-protection discussions on the talk page of Hummus.) ‑ Iridescent 17:29, 25 January 2021 (UTC)

Sigh. True this. There is absolutely nothing in the IP area too insignificant to edit-war over, say, colour of info-boxes? (blue vs green?) Huldra (talk) 20:29, 25 January 2021 (UTC)

It may be the right answer. It leaves us with an awkward edge case, in which a new editor can start a constructive conversation, but get banned from that same conversation by the addition of an RFC tag, but I don't remember seeing an RFC in which this has actually happened. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:55, 26 January 2021 (UTC)

As long as people use common sense (yes, I know... ), it's unlikely to be as BITE-y as that. One should be able to know the difference between someone asking in good faith for more community input, as opposed to someone trying to flood a discussion and shout down the opposition. And what would happen well before a ban ever gets considered is simply the application of extended-confirmed protection. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:14, 26 January 2021 (UTC)

This. The thing is: as a "long-timer" in the field, you get a pretty good idea as to whether you are dealing with a genuine "newbie", or one of the many, many socks. And if I (and others) are genuinely convinced that it is a "newbie", well, then I, for sure, is interested in hearing what they have to say.

Alas, then we have things like this...Huldra (talk) 21:07, 26 January 2021 (UTC)

There are no genuine newbies. They are just better socks.... Only in death does duty end (talk) 21:17, 26 January 2021 (UTC)

I don't agree with that, actually. Eg this one gives me a definite "genuine newbie" -feeling, Huldra (talk) 21:27, 26 January 2021 (UTC)

Oh god no. Look at the first few days editing, that is not a newbie. I could buy they previously had no account, but they are certainly not new. (But my previous statement was actually meant more as a joke) Only in death does duty end (talk) 21:33, 26 January 2021 (UTC)

Ah, I had not looked closely at the non-ARBPIA-edits. Oh, well: I'll go with a newbie in the ARBPIA-area, then. And the ARBPIA-area is a "no joke-zone", did't you know? Huldra (talk) 22:15, 26 January 2021 (UTC)

I'd guess a genuine newbie. Although the various self-appointed Fearless Sock Hunters like to use "familiarity with markup" as an indicator of a sock, it's actually a fairly useless metric. Given their interests they're almost certainly (a) Israeli, and (b) interested in transport—as such, it's entirely possible they started out either on Hebrew Wikipedia or on whatever the Israeli equivalent to SABRE is before making the step up to the major league. The best way to spot socks is generally their familiarity with English Wikipedia's undocumented social conventions—your actual sock is trying not to be noticed so typically tries not to do any of the annoying things well-intentioned newbies do like requesting advanced permissions, creating a poorly-sourced article about a local business, or variants of "it's not edit-warring when what I'm saying is true". ‑ Iridescent 07:00, 27 January 2021 (UTC)

Can we talk about advertising?

Am I the only one who is getting narked at the 'Please give us cash to keep wikipedia alive?' begging? Especially since the WMF has just given a multi-million non-redundable lump sum to an organisation whose primary purpose is to obfuscate what it does with the money? Granted previously no one involved in any capacity with Wikipedia realistically thought they were spending their cash on "keeping the servers alive!" but at least they had some minimal oversight over what was being done with it. Its got to the point where I am seriously considering looking into a complaint to the Fundraising Regulator and/or TCC for disingenuous marketing. Only in death does duty end (talk) 11:53, 17 January 2021 (UTC)

I think that by this stage the fundraising appeal is more of a class-consciousness thing than an actual appeal. The WMF's income comes from big corporate donors and I doubt it would even leave a dent if all the "price of a cup of coffee" individuals disappeared overnight, but it instils an "I'm part of something special!" feelgood factor in the people who click the button, at least some of whom then feel engaged enough to become editors and thus keep the flow of fresh swill to the Board's trough flowing. It's exactly the same principle applied by every political party; the actual money comes from corporations, trade unions, lobbyists etcetera and the small donations from individuals probably cost more to administer than they actually generate, but they know that someone donating their $/€/£5 is going to from then on feel invested and more likely to show support in other ways.

In many ways—both on this and on many other issues—it makes more sense to think of the WMF as a religious cult or a revolutionary movement rather than as a traditional educational charity. Its underlying decision-making processes are based on recruitment, retention and growth, rather than in terms of how best to deliver its stated objectives. From that perspective, constant recruitment, constant expansion and constant pushing of The Message makes perfect sense. (IIRC you're in Britain, in which case you'll have experienced the exact same tactic in recent years from Momentum, Vote Leave, and the SNP, all of whom see growing the movement to the point at which it becomes to big to suppress as the key to success. If you're in the US, you have an even more obvious recent example of "never mind the policies, look at the size of the movement".)

On a similar tack, the adverts also serve as a de facto statement of values for people who aren't aware of the nature of Wikipedia. A lot of readers are still under the impression either that Wikipedia is written by a professional team of writers, or understand that anyone can edit but thinks those edits are all vetted by a paid team of moderators. The fundraising appeal is an annual pretext to deliver a lecture on how Wikipedia operates, without automatically alienating everyone.

Spending charitable donations on purposes other than those specified in the donation request (which at the time of writing is specifically "to protect and sustain Wikipedia"—my emphasis—with no indication that any of it goes to the rest of the WMF), and using surplus funds to build up unlimited reserves without making that clear to the donors, would be illegal in most jurisdictions. The WMF has a lot of well-paid lawyers, so I assume everything they're doing is legal in California, even if it's unethical. (Although the official explanation for the WMF remaining in the US despite all the "global movement" blather is that the copyright, libel, and privacy laws are less stringent, it's also true that were they somewhere like London or Amsterdam the WMF would probably last about a week before the regulators came sniffing around. Johnbod can tell you more about it as he handled the negotiations, but as I understand it when WMUK was granted charitable status in England it was on explicit condition they didn't import the WMF's attitude to money; I assume the same is true for every other independent chapter.) The now-departed Guy Macon kept a running log of the WMF's ever growing surplus here, if you're interested—the talk page when the Signpost ran a feature on it a few years ago makes eyebrow-raising reading.

If you're genuinely interested in the legal issues, you could either ask WAID, or post at WP:Village pump (WMF) (I'm yet to be convinced anyone from the WMF ever actually looks at it, but you never know). If you're willing to slum it, some of the less crazy Wikipediocracy people might have looked at the legal issues around the fundraising appeal in detail. As I say, I'm fairly confident that everything they're doing will be legal just because they have too many people watching and too much to lose; assuming that's the case then any issues are just issues of ethics, and trying to get the Board of Trustees to act ethically isn't a windmill worth tilting at. (Although, just going to put Nobel Peace Prize for Jimbo—which appears to be genuine and not an elaborate troll—here.) ‑ Iridescent 16:13, 17 January 2021 (UTC)

No, I wouldn't put it like that at all. There was a completely standard undertaking not just to hand all/most of the funds over to the WMF in the States - the CC doesn't like that at all, & wants to see UK funds largely spent in the UK, or on starving Africans etc - not bureaucrats in the States anyway. There was no restriction on UK fundraising & the then agreement that the WMF took 50% of the take from the appeal for doing the work on it was accepted without demur. WMUK is also able to reclaim donor's income tax in the usual way. But after a single year on that basis the WMF (very foolishly imo) decided to collect all money from the appeal directly in the US, so losing all that. Although they were explained to them many times, I don't think the WMF ever understood the power of the Direct Debit (even considered as inertia selling) and the value of the tax reclaim. God knows how much money they have lost from that, & continue to do. As I've pointed out here before, it used to be the official CC advice to build up reserves equal to at least 2 years spending (though they seem to have cut that now), so I doubt that would be an issue, especially in 2020/21, when charities that haven't built up reserves are getting into trouble, as so many types of fund-raising have been stopped (though the wills departments must be doing ok). From memory you needed to have reserves over 10x annual spending before the CC started to complain - the guide dogs & lifeboats were the large examples. I think you'd be surprised at what you have to do to "last about a week before the regulators came sniffing around" in the UK, let alone other jurisdictions. I remember a very funny (to me) call from a partner at our specialist charity solicitors about WPs article on one of their bad-boy clients. They must have asked him to have a word, but he hadn't read the WP article first. We both did so while on the phone & he had to admit it was all true & balanced.... Do you have figures for big donors being the main source, btw? That wasn't my impression at all when I tried to follow these things some years ago. I always thought the big donors got a lot of publicity for rather derisory donations, when the amounts were known. Johnbod (talk) 18:52, 17 January 2021 (UTC)

I may have a slightly jaundiced view when it comes to how strict the CC is. In my day they were ruthless, but I haven't worked with them (or with the voluntary sector at all) for years and I know New Labour deregulated quite a bit.

The WMF is about as transparent as diesel when it comes to money, but total donations from all sources came to $120 million last year. ("Donation processing expenses" came to a tad under $5 million.) The big corporate donors are listed here, but they're not more specific than "over $50,000" in each instance, which is going to be deceptively low (our own Wikimedia Foundation article doesn't give any up-to-date examples, but some of the previous donations have been in the millions). From the most recent annual report, as of 2020 the WMF were sitting on $180,315,725 of assets. (On a quick back-of-envelope calculation, the current donation form says that the WMF has 400 employees and the annual report gives a "salaries and wages" total of $55,634,912, so the average WMF salary is roughly twice what the highest-paid WMUK employee takes home.) I know some of the more obsessive off-wiki types have in the past tried to do some investigation into where the money comes from and where it goes, so an IP may pop up here with more accurate figures. ‑ Iridescent 19:38, 17 January 2021 (UTC)

The CC can be tough when got going, but most of the time they are a sleeping tiger, more from staff cuts than any other cause. Or that was the case. That list of "majors" (by no means all or even mostly "corporate") doesn't look like more than $20M to me, on a wild guess, perhaps a good deal less. The only one I'd heard of was the Alfred P Sloan Foundation - a search for Wikimedia at this page on their excellent website sheds some light. No Googles etc. WMF's income for the last year roughly equals their expenses, at $120M, and their reserves are 1.5x either, which is fairly modest/sensible. Johnbod (talk) 21:19, 17 January 2021 (UTC)

Google's on there, tucked between "Craigslist Charitable Fund" and "Humble Bundle". That's what I mean when I say "$50,000+" is misleading, as in their case we know the sum in question was $3,100,000 ($2 million earmarked for the endowment, $1.1 million to general WMF expenses), and prior to that they'd donated a total of $7.5 million. Yes "$50,000+" isn't inaccurate as 3,100,000 is indeed higher than 50,000, but the way it's phrased gives the strong impression that the WMF is dependent on the kindness of strangers as opposed to bankrolled by global corporations. (The WMF eventully fessed up that one of those "anonymous donors" mentioned at the bottom turned out to be the annual million dollars Amazon have given to the WMF for three years running.)

@Only in death, if you're genuinely interested the best person to talk to about the disconnect between the fundraising campaign and the actual funding is probably Peteforsyth. A lot of the discussions regarding it tend to take place on wikimedia-l rather than in public view, and AFAIK he's one of the few people who's willing to ask awkward questions despite the risk of being Frammed. ‑ Iridescent 14:32, 18 January 2021 (UTC)

To me that still looks like US 20M or less from "substantial befefactors", out of $120 M in total. Johnbod (talk) 15:21, 18 January 2021 (UTC)

FYI, only ~12% of WMF income comes from donations of over $1000, so it's not correct that funding mostly comes from big corporate donors. (Also, re spending, the Wikimedia strategy process is (in theory) going to result in a community-representative body charged with "Enforcing accountability of all Movement organizations around use of Movement funds", per the Recommendations.) --Yair rand (talk) 09:11, 1 February 2021 (UTC)

Yes, the latest funding report, put up in October, has a decent amount of information, including that $14.9 M comes from gifts of over $1,000. Johnbod (talk) 21:07, 1 February 2021 (UTC)

TFA image use

Hello! Sorry to come barging in on a talk page I've only commented on once, but I've been curious about something, and I suspect someone (or multiple someones) here will have either an answer or a fascinating enough history I won't mind not having an answer. I'm curious about image use as it relates to TFA articles, and featured articles more broadly -- specifically, if articles might be officially or unofficially disqualified for TFA on the basis of image (a) licensing (b) content.

The whole sphere of featured article madness complexity is one I'm barely even dipping a toe into yet -- I have one GAN (languishing in a topic where backlogs get to six months) and another article that will likely be nominated soon, but the step past that is still outside my concept -- but I'm beginning to get a sense for the DYK process, and free use is mandatory out that way. I took a look at Miss Meyers, one of the famous "short FAs" and one which by nature only has fair-use images, and was mildly surprised to find out it has been TFA -- but, apparently, without images. (I can't personally recall ever seeing an image-less TFA on the Main Page, but that's how it's listed, so I assume it must be the case.) Miss Meyers is of course also an atypical article in many ways, so I'm cautious to draw too many conclusions from it. Similarly, while NOTCENSORED has gotten us plenty of explicit titling, I'm unfamiliar with any cases it's gotten us explicit imagery, and I'd be interested in hearing about that/if it's happened/how it's handled.

Basically, I'm wondering how TFA handles articles that don't have free-use images to sample, and the degree to which the scope of WP:PROFANE includes "no, we will not put obscene images directly on the Main Page even though they have perfectly legitimate reasons to be the primary representative of this article". (Or how many complaints one has to handle when people click through, see the obscene images in their perfectly legitimate reason, and start crying that their children read this site and they couldn't possibly have known that the article for, oh, Tits a Wonderful Life: An Academic Investigation of Sex in Christmas Cinema would have such content.) I recognize this is sort of two different questions, but I'm curious about the general overlapping space of "What happens to articles that can't have a 'traditional' TFA image-blurb format without crashing into other parts of Wikipedia?", if that makes any sense. Vaticidalprophet (talk) 13:59, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

If you search the main page talk page archives for discussions involving images and censored and non-free use, you should find quite a few examples, such as this, this, this and this. There are probably many more such discussions (though many are POTD discussions, which you may or may not be interested in as well). You could also ask on the main page talk page, as some of those watching that will have long memories. Carcharoth (talk) 07:25, 1 February 2021 (UTC)

For technical reasons, restricting what goes on to the Main Page is much more about "bad words" than "bad images"; Wikipedia isn't censored, but equally there are words that trigger filters in American schools and we want to avoid locking ourselves out of one of our core markets if we can help it. (When obscenity is unavoidable, e.g Fuck the Millennium, we tend to run them over the weekend to minimise the disruption to schools.)

Sexually explicit imagery doesn't arise all that often as it's rarely an appropriate image to use—even if the article was about a porn actor, we'd illustrate it with a picture of their face. Wikipedia:Today's featured article/December 15, 2014 ran with a graphic of the word "Fuck" as the blurb image and nobody batted an eyelid, and there have been assorted nude artworks as the TFA and DYK images without anyone complaining. We do try to avoid gross-out injury and disease photos where possible except when it's educationally significant such as Lynching of Jesse Washington.

As far as I'm aware (one of the TFA delegates may be able to correct me), the situation where a particular image is obviously the most appropriate blurb image, but a conscious decision has been made that the image isn't to go on the Main Page, has only ever arisen on September Morn, owing to a handful of New Puritan types claiming it to be child pornography. (For what it's worth, I consider the arguments in that case completely bogus. September Morn is a wretched piece of kitsch, but it's not remotely sexual but a generic nude in a non-sexual pose; the model is clearly a grown woman and not a child; and even if she were a child "nude" doesn't translate as "pornographic" or the authorities would be prosecuting every church with a reproduction of the Virgin of the Rocks on their website for disseminating child pornography.)

We run TFAs without images fairly regularly (at the time of writing there are three lined up to run this month without an image, and I'd argue that Planet of the Apes would be better served by no image at all than by the pointless image currently lined up to illustrate it). It comes up a lot with topics like videogames where any relevant image is going to be in copyright, as well as with historical biographies where no image of the subject exists and illustrating it with something tangential like "the town where they lived" would confuse readers; it also occasionally comes up with visually uninteresting topics like roads where "this is what it looks like" would be less useful to the reader than the extra 200-ish characters of blurb freed up by getting rid of the image. ‑ Iridescent 08:40, 1 February 2021 (UTC)

The comment on school censorship triggered a memory of reading Wikipedia in class as a high schooler because it not only looked like I was doing some kind of work, but was one of few things that wasn't blocked...but Commons was blocked, so most of the images were out. Which is one way of solving the matter. (I was mostly reading about disorders of consciousness and the like, so I didn't miss them much.) The September Morn case is interesting -- I can't really see where the "child pornography" claim comes from myself. Vaticidalprophet (talk) 11:23, 2 February 2021 (UTC)

It's discussed in the article itself. The TL;DR version is that some conservative areas in the US brought obscenity prosecutions against its display and reproduction, and the ensuing publicity meant that it acquired a reputation as being far more salacious than it actually was. It was basically an early equivalent to Judas Priest in the 1970s or The Exorcist in the 1980s. (The phenomenon of "even though this clearly isn't pornographic it depicts nudity so BAN THIS FILTH" moral panics when it comes to artworks still pops up occasionally. There was a similar incident with the equally anodyne Hylas and the Nymphs just a couple of years ago.) ‑ Iridescent 15:36, 3 February 2021 (UTC)

Local politics

My wife kindly got me the complete Yes Minister/Prime Minister the other day (it has aged so well compares to other older comedy series). And shortly after watching the local government episode yesterday I saw "Handforth Parish Council" was trending on Twitter. Do a Google/YouTube search. You won't be disappointed. Only in death does duty end (talk) 10:38, 5 February 2021 (UTC)

I heard it on the radio this morning; it somehow embodies England. (Although, there's a discussion to be had about unconscious institutional sexism; if instead of Jackie Weaver and Brian Tolver it was Jack Weaver and Brenda Tolver, it would have been reported totally differently.) If you want a tip, Yes Minister/Yes Prime Minister is one of those rarities where the novelization is actually better than the screen version, if you can pick up the books somewhere; Lynn and Jay wrote them themselves instead of farming it out, and you can tell they were a labour of love. ‑ Iridescent 17:06, 5 February 2021 (UTC)

Picked those up in Hay a few years ago. When we were allows to go places.... And you are entirely right. Only in death does duty end (talk) 18:07, 5 February 2021 (UTC)

Oh great all knowing Iri...

Do you have a link to the great Tony blow up at FAC? I really should start keeping a list squirreled away....Ealdgyth (talk) 00:30, 2 February 2021 (UTC)

I can find that for you, but how about we not put that on such a highly viewed page ? I believe FAC is much less without Tony, believe he was hounded out by people who didn't want to be held to higher standards, but acknowledge that he blew up too easily, and that was unfortunately aimed at me sometimes as well. Nonetheless, we are still less without him. Even if he was responsible for the ill-fated RFC that "fired" Raul, which was FAC's biggest gaffe. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 00:44, 2 February 2021 (UTC)

• It is here, but to claim he was “hounded out by people who didn't want to be held to higher standards” is deeply untrue. 109.249.185.69 (talk) 07:51, 2 February 2021 (UTC)
  • I have to agree with 109 here. I stand by everything I said in the ANI thread a year later that resulted in the current "commitment never to comment on the FA process and those who carry it on" uneasy ceasefire, and my lengthy comment from earlier in 2018. Tony wasn't the first and wasn't the last Wikipedia editor to fall into the traps of mistaking "I'm usually right" with "I'm infallible" and mistaking "I have a circle of friends who I can count on to cover my back" with "the rules don't apply to me". As I pointed out in 2019 during one of his block discussions, on this occasion it happened to be FAC (and since you primarily interacted with him at FAC, those are the instances you happened to notice), but towards the end Tony was spewing bile pretty much indiscriminately whenever anyone disagreed with him, no matter how trivial the topic. (Lest we forget, we're talking about someone who once blew up at someone saying "Merry Christmas" to him because he claimed it was insulting to mention a "christian commercial celebration".) Decribing what happened as "hounded out by people who didn't want to be held to higher standards" is a gross disservice to everyone who was on the receiving end of Tony's abuse and bullying; someone with a smaller circle of friends would have been sitebanned for less. ‑ Iridescent 15:26, 3 February 2021 (UTC)
    • I think that an oversimplified picture, devoid of some history, and missing a lot of shoulda/coulda to retain many valuable reviewers (not just Tony), but have no intention of discussing that further here or with a certain IP editor. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:46, 3 February 2021 (UTC)
      • The history missing being they also actively discriminated against the hearing impaired, and when called out on it, spat the dummy and resorted to threats and insults. And yes, I have this particular situation bookmarked as an example of how badly disabled people are sometimes treated when daring to voice their opinion when discriminated against. Only in death does duty end (talk) 14:52, 5 February 2021 (UTC)
        • Dear god, the things I missed in my absence. That first one in particular is pretty much the Platonic ideal of what outsiders and casual editors think Wikipedia's internal discussions all look like. ‑ Iridescent 16:58, 5 February 2021 (UTC)
        • Wow. I strongly prefer to just lurk and read this page, to learn history rather than involve myself in things I wasn't there for, but as someone with auditory processing disorder, that first link made my blood pressure spike. I can't imagine someone so churlishly refusing to accept accommodations being handed to them on a silver platter. Vaticidalprophet (talk) 17:30, 5 February 2021 (UTC)
          • I think I have an explanation on how the behavior on that page could have been arrived at. My guess is that it boils down to being—to use a bit of a crude term—a control freak. Speaking from my personal experience of being one, I know I often externally present myself as either 1) wanting something to be done in one way, and one way only; or 2) wanting something to be one way and one way only—this seems to be the latter. If I created a long-form essay or blog post, I wouldn't want it to be presented as a Twitter thread—that goes against the initial goals I had for how the prose should be presented. Similarly, having a completely different form of presentation being essentially forced onto a piece I made, without originally having in my final "plan" that such a form would be needed, could be seen as somewhat obtrusive. It seems like Tony may have also thought it was a lower quality transcription than what could have been possible, even if this is a non-issue on a site like Wikipedia. I suspect this is what led to their position on wanting to keep it the way they intended it to be, and any changes to that would be because their "one way" wasn't good enough.

            Now, none of this excuses the behavior I just read—I fully believe that it is unacceptable to give preference to one's personal choices over someone else's needs. I also know essentially nothing about this situation, so this should be taken with several very large grains of salt. My only evidence is what I read on that page and my own personal experience with being (and living with) a control freak(s), and I also am (extremely) far from being a professional in this area. Perryprog (talk) 19:21, 5 February 2021 (UTC)

            • Maybe so, but "my way or the highway" doesn't mix with Wikipedia. As you've probably gathered (if not, then follow the links elsewhere in this thread), the "no transcripts" hissy-fit wasn't a one-off situation; this "I've just made up an arbitrary rule and I demand everyone follow it, and if anyone disagrees I'm going to start screaming incoherent abuse" shit has been going on for literally years. ‑ Iridescent 20:02, 5 February 2021 (UTC)
              • I kinda figured as much. Since I think it was a bit unclear, my goal in the above comment was to rationalize the behavior in order to possibly understand where it's coming from; I don't want to justify/excuse/validate it. Perryprog (talk) 20:38, 5 February 2021 (UTC)
  • As for describing the criticism as “pack-rape”... good grief.... Anyway, glad you’re ignoring me: there are several things I’ve glad to have been away from in my absence, and in the few times I’ve looked back in, things haven’t improved. Quite the reverse. - 109.249.185.69 (talk) 23:10, 3 February 2021 (UTC)

• • I don't want to rehash it at length, but I second Iridescent and the IP in disagreeing with that interpretation of what happened to Tony (and Raul). I'm reasonably confident that the latter's growing disengagement from FA in the last several years of his directorship was due to off-wiki circumstances, and was well underway when organized politicking to depose him began; I understand less about Tony1's situation, but it's quite clear from the links above that the behavior he manifested before leaving FAC was not uncharacteristic. It's not unusual for volunteers in any organization to start out enthusiastic and productive and, after several years, burn out, lose interest, or become net liabilities. I don't think it's realistic to assume that a Strong Hand at FAC or whatever would have caused either of them to contribute indefinitely in the way they did in, say, 2007, and it's a poor idea to design policy based on that assumption. (I do think the general problem of getting People on the Internet to accept criticism of their work as something other than a personal attack is real, but has very little to do with these particular cases.) Choess (talk) 05:31, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

Sources that link to Wikipedia (and Wikisource)

Is there a place to gripe about websites and other places that link to Wikipedia when I was hoping for authoritative content written by them? I suppose I shouldn't complain too much, but two examples:

• Sir George Clausen at the Tate websites, where it says "BIOGRAPHY [...] This biography is from Wikipedia under an Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons License. Spotted a problem? Let us know. Read full Wikipedia entry". Hmm. I suppose that is not too bad.
• Parliament and Northern Ireland, 1921-2021 which is a landing page to download a House of Commons research briefing (I don't think I can link direct to it), which (before I get to the gripe) is actually very good, and was an extremely useful resource for a topic I was researching (the NI centenary, funnily enough). The links in it are mostly (nearly all?) to useful websites that would be considered 'reliable'. But what I found annoying (maybe disconcerting is a better word) was suddenly coming across links to wikisource! On page 24, the link for 'Hugh O'Neill' goes to here, and the link for the King's speech on page 26 goes to here. And on page 31, the footnote numbered 128 links from 'Tim Healey' to Tim Healy (politician) (with a nice 'article issues' tag). The next link, on page 32, is to Twitter. This is a 181-page document, so I stopped there, but I thought it was an interesting insight into how documents like that are prepared - though who reads them (journalists, politicians?) I am not sure? Well, I read that one. So clearly some people read them.

So is this more or less common than it used to be, for organisations to link out to Wikipedia articles for 'further reading'? Wikisource, it can depend on whether there is a source, but you have the same problem in some senses. You will note that the Wikisource page for that speech has no source at all. It is correct (the National Archives have a copy and I think the best source is actually the official records of the Northern Ireland parliament, though the speech was also printed in full in the newspapers of the day), but still, is it worrying, or is it to be expected that this sort of thing happens, and can it lead to citogenesis and similar issues? Carcharoth (talk) 01:35, 26 January 2021 (UTC)

It was the Tate website I had in mind yesterday when I was talking about partial mirroring by other institutions as a reason we can't assume readers will be able to use wikilinks if they don't understand something. I can't really fault any institution for doing it. Wikipedia might have its faults, but one thing we are good at is summarising the basic background of any given topic. When it comes to the kind of mid-level topics which are important enough that they need to be covered, but not so important as to justify the full exhibition-catalogue treatment, it makes both economic and practical sense to copy-paste from Wikipedia rather than to write it themselves. (Professional curators are a limited resource. When institutions do write these things in-house, in most cases it's being farmed out to interns and students, who are probably just going to plagiarise Wikipedia anyway. At least doing it this way reduces the risk of citogenesis, provided they make it clear the material is copied from Wikipedia/source/quote/data/commons so if an error does creep in we at least won't have the "but it must be true, it's on the Tate website" discussion.)

I could make the argument that in the current climate, Wikipedia editors are the most important writers in the world. The public knows that journalists and historians bring their own biases with them, but wrongly think that although Wikipedia is sometimes wrong, it's inherently neutral and errors will be corrected in due course, so people feel happy copying from us when they would't dream of copying from a newspaper or even a book. To say this isn't an ideal situation is an understatement, as it puts the job of curating reality in the hands of a group of enthusiastic and largely unqualified amateurs. (I'm not convinced either the WMF or all those agencies who spend so much time investigating Twitter et al appreciate this.)

It's frustrating when you're trying to research something and what you find is copied from Wikipedia—and even more annoying when you pay for something and it's obviously paraphrased from Wikipedia—but it's inevitable. As long as we're releasing everything for unrestricted re-use, and other broad-topic sources like the Oxford Dictionaries of Whatever are either print-only or online only under "if you copy so much as a comma the lawyers are coming" licensing, this isn't going to stop. As such, the conversation to be having is about how to make sure the people copying from us are only copying material which is likely to be neutral and accurate—thus, how to make sure we have assessment processes that actually check accuracy as opposed to just focusing on prose style and formatting, and how we make that assessment more prominent to readers and reusers so readers can understand which Wikipedia articles aren't to be trusted. (This takes us into a flagged revisions vs anyone-can-edit minefield which is well above my pay grade.) ‑ Iridescent 07:41, 26 January 2021 (UTC)

There's a furious rant about the Tate bios somewhere on Bendor Grosvenor's blog. I think they do sometimes discreetly check & improve our entries before linking to them - not sure. I hope so. The British Museum used to, by an agreement made by User:Wittylama, have a link to FA articles on their objects, but no longer do that, which is a pity. I've just noticed last night that the Khan Academy is using Commons pics, but only attributing them to the uploading photographer, with no mention of Wikimedia Commons - see eg this page (both the pots) and others on the Minoan art (where both pics also appear) sequence. Is this ok/proper/legal? Should they be asked to adjust? Johnbod (talk) 09:32, 26 January 2021 (UTC)

The rules for the required attribution when reusing Commons images are at Commons:Commons:Reusing content outside Wikimedia, with a marginally less gibberish version at Commons:Commons:Credit line. As I read it (which don't take as gospel; even by WMF standards these pages are fairly incomprehensible) unless the copyright holder has specifically requested that Commons be attributed, reusers are supposed to only name the copyright holder and which CC license it was uploaded under, so it appears that however counter-intuitive it might appear the Khan Academy are complying with our wishes by not mentioning Commons. This makes no sense to me—surely if the public see useful images being clearly attributed to Wikimedia Commons it serves a triple purpose in reminding the public that there's more to the WMF than just English Wikipedia, in informing people who are familiar with earlier incarnations of Commons that it's no longer the International Dick-pic and Cat Photo Depository and nowadays actually serves a worthwhile purpose and is worth looking at occasionally, and in showing people who find the image useful where they can go to see similar photos—but trying to understand WMF Legal's thought processes is a fool's errand. ‑ Iridescent 14:14, 26 January 2021 (UTC)

Indeed, thanks - in my experience most re-users do the opposite, attributing Commons (ideally with a link) & not mentioning the photographer (who is often not named of course). That seems far better, especially as we don't normally credit the photographer on WP itself. Johnbod (talk) 14:20, 26 January 2021 (UTC)

If I had to guess, my guess would be that the practice comes from the early days of Commons when the WMF were trying to persuade assorted professional photographers and image libraries to make their collections (or at least low-resolution versions of their collections) free-use, and this practice was supposed to make it worth their while by promising that they'd get free advertising whenever one of their free-use images was used. That said I may be hugely over-thinking this, and it could equally just be that when Commons was set up they copy-and-pasted the reuse terms from somewhere else, and the "we've always done it this way" cultural inertia means it's never been changed. (Commons's internal processes make English Wikipedia look ruthlessly efficient. Any substantive change needs to be discussed in multiple languages to prevent anyone complaining of being left out, the historic issues between Commons and en-wiki mean some people reject any good practice originating here on general principle, and Commons has much more of a 'ruling class' mentality than we do which means that in practice a small group has veto power.) ‑ Iridescent 06:10, 27 January 2021 (UTC)

There's also the effect of habit for (professional/experienced) re-users. If you are accustomed to labeling every photo with "AP Photo/Fred Film" or "Fred Film/Shutterstock" anyway, then you'll try to follow the same pattern when your stock photo source is Commons, even if it's not strictly necessary. WhatamIdoing (talk) 07:06, 27 January 2021 (UTC)

Do you (with your professional hat on) have any idea why we don't ask reusers to attribute Commons? It would seem an absolute no-brainer to promote Commons (and the WMF ecosystem in general) at zero cost—as you say, reusers are used to "say where you got it" so it's not as if we'd be imposing an unreasonable condition. ‑ Iridescent 07:26, 27 January 2021 (UTC)

Can I offer my 2p. It doesn't and shouldn't matter what "Commons" or "WMF" want wrt attribution. Neither of these own the photos so have no say in the matter. The "rules" governing correct attribution flow from, typically, the Creative Commons licence, and those pages mentioned above on Wikimedia Commons aren't authoritative. CC refers to a "Licensor", who is often the photographer or their employer. This licence allows a small degree of tweaking by the licensor (such as saying how they would like to be named) and some flexibility about referring to the licence or "where you got it" with URIs. There have also been changes here from v3 to v4 (see What’s New in 4.0 section "Common-sense attribution"). See also Creative Commons FAQ. Of course there is plenty material on Commons that is is not licenced with an attribution requirement (e.g., CC SA) or indeed any requirement (e.g., CC0 or public domain works), and then it falls down to ethical best practice.

IMO that Khan academy photo attribution is excellent, particularly linking to the Commons file page and using the photographer's (licensor's) name. Strictly CC BY-SA 3.0 requires that the licence should have a URL too, nearly nobody does that and I don't see much point since Google will find it no problem. It is great and correct that they have explicitly named the licence used, as often we see "Licenced under Creative Commons" which doesn't tell you enough.

I agree with WAID that the picture editors on many sites probably think Commons is a free stock photo agency, and that is wrong. Unlike Getty, et al, neither Commons nor WMF license images (well, apart from some logos perhaps). Commons also contrasts with Wikipedia, where articles are collectively owned by everyone who has edited them: on Commons each image (that is still copyrightable) is owned by someone individually (or an employer). Remember that "someone" might not even be a user on Commons, and they got their CC BY-SA 2.0 Flickr photo copied onto Commons by someone else, and who would be a tad upset if the attribution just credited "Commons". The Wikipedia practice of linking to a separate attribution page was made more explicitly acceptable on CC4. Even Google gets it wrong, attributing some of my images to "Wikipedia" and with a link to the Wikipedia article. -- Colin°^Talk 11:37, 27 January 2021 (UTC)

Funniest attribution mistake People on Twitter Think 'Via Getty' Is the Name of a Capitol Rioter. It's a Photo Credit. -- Colin°^Talk 11:43, 27 January 2021 (UTC)

If you look at File:Kamares vases, Heraklion.jpg, at the top of the page there is a little icon of a globe with "Use this file". If you click on that it gives you some attribution HTML to copy/paste. The effect of it is equivalent to

Bernard Gagnon CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

-- Colin°^Talk 11:51, 27 January 2021 (UTC)

But what I'm saying is that they're not including the "via Wikimedia Commons" (although they do include a link), and the two Commons instruction pages I link above (which may not be authoritative but which any reasonable third party is going to assume are the instructions for reusing Commons images) explicitly says just to credit the copyright holder and not to mention Commons. We may not be able to compel people to mention Commons when attributing CC images they've found there unless the licence in question specifically demands it, but in my opinion we can and should be encouraging it. If nothing else it makes the audit trail clear should any downstream reuser need to work out why the image they're using isn't identical to the one they're attributing, as Commons editors have a habit of making "minor corrections" which are sometimes anything but.

In the case of Flickr images I'd argue it's virtually a necessity to link to Commons. Flickr's new owners have conducted a mass deletion of all but the 1000 most recent uploads for any user who doesn't pay an annual ransom administration fee. As such, anyone clicking the Flickr link on (for example) this photo I took last October will get a 404 message from Flickr, and would be quite justified in jumping to the conclusion that the attribution had been faked and I'd actually ripped it off from somewhere, whereas if they're linked to the Commons page they can see that as of 14 November 2020 it was still on Flickr and under a compatible licence. ‑ Iridescent 12:18, 27 January 2021 (UTC)

You think people read the instructions? The "Use this file" link satisfies your desire for " via Wikimedia Commons" but it is technically redundant to the URL to the Commons file description page. I agree that stating "where you got it" is important, but that can be done with a URL. Flickr was just one example. There are millions of copyright images on Commons that were not uploaded by the copyright owner and where the uploader has no rights. Lots of museum collections, for example.

I'm particularly addressing Johnbod's statement that attributing Commons and not attributing photographer would be "better". It would be illegal. And, Johnbod, the copyright owner is named on Commons for images that are under copyright and used by licence -- copyright images that don't state the owner will be deleted. There also isn't really such a legal thing as the "uploading photographer". The act of uploading doesn't confer any rights to the uploader (though does expose them to legal risk if the image isn't theirs). -- Colin°^Talk 12:45, 27 January 2021 (UTC)

Nonsense - and as I say, this is in fact the normal situation. The vast majority of images on Commons "are under copyright and used by licence", and most only have a username for the owner, like mine, yours and Iridescent's. Johnbod (talk) 15:18, 27 January 2021 (UTC)

I think it is unlikely that "most" Commons images that are under copyright were created by a "user" of Wikipedia or Commons. There really are millions of images uploaded by bots that scrape images from other sites, and huge donations by GLAM. Perhaps someone has the stats. But even considering just user-generated content, the fact that you wish to be credited as Johnbod is entirely your decision. The CC BY licence demands attribution of the creator by name -- identification of the creator(s) of the Licensed Material and any others designated to receive attribution, in any reasonable manner requested by the Licensor (including by pseudonym if designated) -- and is quite happy if you wish to use a pseudonym. -- Colin°^Talk 15:41, 27 January 2021 (UTC)

On the very unscientific "click Commons:Special:Random/File ten times" test, I get photo by uploader, photo by uploader, photo by uploader, bot upload from a photo library, photo by uploader, copy from Flickr, photo by uploader, photo by uploader, photo by uploader, photo by uploader. It's obviously possible that I just hit an atypical streak, or that the algorithm is biased against images scraped from other sites, but that's a rate of 80% "photo was taken by somebody who went on to upload it to Commons directly". It's also worth noting that not all those images from Flickr are bot scrapes in the usual sense; the Commons upload system is really bad at handling multiple uploads, so if I for instance want to upload sixteen images of the same sculpture from different angles and in different lighting conditions, it's considerably easier to upload them all to Flickr and then use Magnus's tool to import the album from Flickr appending the same description and categories to each, than it is to waste time uploading each individually or mess around trying to coax Pattypan to work. ‑ Iridescent 15:52, 27 January 2021 (UTC)

Aye, the multiple files upload process on Commons is a leg pain. I've been using the Upload Wizard but it's not very convenient at all. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 16:06, 27 January 2021 (UTC)

Create an album on Flickr, upload them into the album, go to Flickr2Commons and transfer the album from Flickr. It's about a thousand times easier than uploading the "official" way (if the photos are taken with a phone you can even use the Flickr app to upload them direct to Flickr so they never need to be on your hard drive at all, and if you're uploading on a PC or Mac you can just open the Flickr website and drag a folder direct onto it). Just make sure to set CC as your default license on Flickr before you start doing anything. ‑ Iridescent 16:20, 27 January 2021 (UTC)

I just tried the same. I won't bother linking to them all but I get 40%. So I did it again and got 20%. And again and got 50%. I've asked on Commons if anyone knows. Anyway the point is we can't/mustn't attribute Commons instead of the creator, even if they are using a pseudonym. In terms of uploads, I use Commons:LrMediaWiki plugin for Lightroom. There are other options at Commons:Upload tools. -- Colin°^Talk 16:49, 27 January 2021 (UTC)

I got a reply to my question on Commons. Nothing official but the {{own}} template is trascluded 30 million times, which is about 45% of the 68 million files on Commons. As you note, that template isn't used on your Flickr transfers so doesn't count everything, and there may well be files people upload with "own work" that are in fact not. But it seems to show that perhaps around half of Commons content is user generated. -- Colin°^Talk 10:24, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

It's also going to exclude situations where the uploader has written "own work" (or some variant like "I took it myself") in the source field, rather than use the {{own}} template (Slobot does its best but presumably isn't going to catch every variation in every language), any file where the uploader subst'ed rather than transcluded {{own}}, and the alternative templates like {{own work by original uploader}} which also mean "I created this" but don't show up in the {{own}} transclusion count.

Assuming the 30,751,483 count is accurate or at least in the ballpark then at minimum almost half the files on Commons and possibly substantially more are going to have a copyright holder with a name like "User:FluffyBunnies123"; I'd say this makes it even more important that we encourage re-users to attribute Commons as well as just the copyright holder even if they're not legally obliged to do so, as if a downstream reader can't see which site User:FluffyBunnies123 is a user at, they've no way of knowing whether this is FluffyBunnies123 at Commons, at Flickr, at Twitter etc etc etc. ‑ Iridescent 16:01, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

The URL back to the Commons page also provides that, though in a less visible way. The thing about CC-licenced media is it isn't meant to have some canonical repository. You upload to Flicker, it gets copied to Commons, it gets used on The Guardian, it gets deleted from Flickr, it gets published in a book. The book re-user should be able to say "from The Guardian" and link to The Guardian article, or wherever they found it. I agree that a source webpage disappearing poses some book-keeping risk for the re-user. That is ultimately their problem and one reason to continue to use a paid stock photo agency, because they take on any risk that the photo turns out to be stolen or wrongly credited. All the people who re-used your CC BY-SA 2.0 photos from Flickr are now left with a hard job to prove that the photo by "Irid Escent" was freely licenced. But then Flickr lets people change their licence tag too. Take a screenshot at the time you decide to use it?? -- Colin°^Talk 16:57, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

With my professional hat on, I would have to say that I am not a lawyer, that the WMF does not provide legal advice to re-users, and that people should seek legal advice if they're not sure how to comply with a license.

On a related note, there's been some talk about having major re-users provide credit in specified ways (e.g., requiring the use of a Wikipedia logo). In that case, the point wouldn't be attributing the content as required by the license, but agreed to in exchange for access to a high-speed API service. I believe that there is more, and more accurate, information about this idea at mw:Okapi. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:55, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

Another candidate for 'Worst Ever Photo' (TM) on the Bendor Grosvenor page, I see... Carcharoth (talk) 14:46, 26 January 2021 (UTC)

Cripes. Looks like he's been stuck in a cupboard under the stairs for the past century and guess what.... he's still there! Martinevans123 (talk) 22:10, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

But what about Astrid Proll? Johnbod (talk) 18:58, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

I'm very tempted to reach out to them to see if they could release the photo on here to Commons... (or upload their own, of course) Perryprog (talk) 17:00, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

It never hurts to ask, but I doubt he'll release it. Most living people hate releasing their photos as free-use, as it gives carte blanche for detractors to manipulate them. (In 99.9% of cases the concern is totally overblown since most of these people aren't important enough for anyone to be photoshopping their photo onto porn and uploading it to Twitter, or whatever, but if there's one thing every celebrity has in common it's thinking they're more important than they are.) It's why so many Wikipedia articles are illustrated with really awful photos. This photo which illustrated Denis Irwin for eight years is still my personal favourite, and the hilariously bad images that illustrated Michael Jackson before he ceased to be a BLP were the stuff of legend. ‑ Iridescent 19:22, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

Well, sent. I doubt they'll release it either, but (and sorry for the cliché) you miss 100% of the shots you don't take. It's also my first time doing something like this, so I figured this was as good an opportunity as ever to try it. Perryprog (talk) 19:57, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

Good luck—the worst they'll do is say no. ‑ Iridescent 08:47, 1 February 2021 (UTC)

I did encounter this issue at 1669 eruption of Mount Etna when I wrote it. I did use Tringa, Giovanni (2012). "Oronimi Etnei - Il nome dei crateri dell'Etna" (PDF). Bollettino Accademia Gioenia Sci. Nat. (in Italian). 45 (375). Catania: 511–606. ISSN 0393-7143. Archived from the original (PDF) on 4 March 2016. as a source because it appears to be reliable and useful for the article, but it does cite Wikipedia as its own source of information in several points. I eventually decided to keep it anyway because it clearly marks its sources of information (Wikipedia or others) so citogenesis is less an issue. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 10:19, 26 January 2021 (UTC)

I still believe that the more that Wikipedia is relied upon to be good, the better Wikipedia will be. Paul August ☎ 21:42, 26 January 2021 (UTC)

It cuts two ways—it's also the case that the more Wikipedia is relied upon to be good, the more incentive there is for spammers to advertise and for extremists and nationalists to push their particular point of view. ‑ Iridescent 05:09, 27 January 2021 (UTC)

Video game FAs for terribly received games

Hello -- sorry that I'm here to rely on the Iridescent talk page ecosystem again, but I've really run into something I don't know where to find out elsewhere. I'm working on (and soon to put up a GA review) for an article that I've had significant encouragement to, and offers of collaboration for, taking to the FA level someday. It's in a niche field (tabletop gaming) and is niche within that -- its notability comes from being unanimously agreed the most notoriously awful work produced in the whole medium. Tabletop RPGs have one true FA (the whole WikiProject names four, and three of those are video games based on tabletop games); the FA in question is Dungeons & Dragons, which, let's say, is on a completely different level of coverage and mainstream recognizability.

The best comparison I can think of for this, if I decide to pursue it and can get the article to that level eventually, would be video games notable for their bad reception. Are there any FACs known to you for games that have that sort of notoriety? I know you've written quite a bit about visual art with that notoriety, although it's a different matter on a lot of levels (very different sources, for one). Vaticidalprophet (talk) 19:12, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

We certainly have FAs like Battlefield Earth and Cut the Crap where notability primarily derives from "it's famous because nobody liked it". Likewise, we do have some articles on games that are only notable because they were so poorly received and otherwise wouldn't warrant Wikipedia artices—Plumbers Don't Wear Ties and Custer's Revenge jump straight to mind while those of a certain age will be wearily familiar with Zero Wing—but none of those are particularly well covered. In general FAs reflect what writers happen to be interested in, and people are more likely to want to write about things they like than things they don't.

If I had to guess, the best place to start looking for FAs/GAs on unpopular games would be within popular series like God of War and Final Fantasy where people for the sake of completeness will cover each installment in detail, even the unpopular ones. This situation (and Battlefield Earth, Cut the Crap, Maxwell's Silver Hammer, Cats etc) isn't quite comparable as the notability exists independently of the bad reviews. Something like Hotel Mario (currently a GA) would be notable even if it hadn't had such bad reviews, but it should at least give an indication of how to write about something that the critics hated. (With particular reference to tabletop gaming, if you're looking for parallels among videogames the best place to start looking is probably in the 1980s Commodore/Spectrum/Amiga games. The line between boardgames, RPGs and computer games was much more blurred, plus these are the games that the original generation of Wikipedia editors remember from their youth and—crucially—it was the golden age of the computing magazine so Reliable Sources exist for even the most obscure releases. There are plenty of shitty early-80s tabletop/videogame crossovers like Theatre Europe and Automonopoli where the Wikipedia article is written reasonably well albeit not to FA level.)

David Fuchs, you know the obscure video game articles better than me—are you aware of any that meet the description? ‑ Iridescent 08:43, 10 February 2021 (UTC)

I don't think the reception of a work really matters much to getting it to FA, beyond how that impacts the sources. If a subject was notably poorly-received, that's great—the internet especially loves pulling together people to talk about some legendary failure, and in order for it to really be known as a failure it had to have enough consciousness in the media. But most bad media—and plenty of good media—just sinks without a trace because it's not bad enough to make an impact, and there you're likely to find some pretty thin sources which can impact whether or not you can make a complete-enough article that meets FA criteria. Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs ^talk 19:00, 10 February 2021 (UTC)

It's the 'relatively few sources' matter that worries me, considering how intense FA source review looks. Vaticidalprophet (talk) 19:36, 12 February 2021 (UTC)

"Relatively few" varies by topic. For something niche like an individual videogame, a single source that covers it in depth plus a handful of reviews would probably be enough (the reviews are important because if part of the story is that it was badly received, it needs to be clear it was genuinely unpopular and you're not giving undue weight to a single person who hated it and happened to write about it at length). There are certainly Wikipedia articles on books, paintings etc that are built around one or two in-depth source(s), backed up by a lot of passing mentions and short reviews to demonstrate that it was actually considered notable enough to cover. The one thing I would say is important is making sure you include both contemporary (i.e. from the time it was released) and later coverage; if part of the story is that something is considered good or bad, it's important to make it clear whether public perceptions of it changed over time. Every artistic medium, including videogames, has examples of things that were well-received when they were released but later became unpopular as problems became apparent, or of things that were panned when they came out but which later developed a cult following.

Don't be intimidated by the reputation of FA source review. It can sound complicated, but all it means is that someone is checking "Do these sources actually say what they're cited as saying?" and "Are these sources appropriate to use in this context?". It's the latter one that causes arguments as the nature of the internet means it's easy to give undue weight to inappropriate sources. (For example, if it's a 1980s or early 1990s game, most of the specialist reviews will be in print archives so Google results will give undue weight to present-day people discussing it with the benefit of hindsight. For something like Deus Ex Machina*—which sank without trace at the time but subsequently became recognized as a turning point in game design for its use of big-name actors instead of blobby sprites and tinny computer voices, and of professional musicians rather than traditional plinky-plonk computer music—it would be easy to gloss over the fact that hardly anybody cared at the time and those that did dismissed it as a pretentious waste of time and money. It's also easy to give undue weight to the opinions of celebrities above those of genuine subject-matter experts, as they tend to drift to the top of search results).
*Regular talk page watchers will know that I have a fascination with Deus Ex Machina, which is a truly bizarre collision between the cultures of old-school music hall, first-wave punk, Douglas Adams era SF, and the emerging cyberpunk/goth-geek scene. Even if you have no interest in videogames whatsoever, I'd recommend to anyone that they give one or both of the soundtrack albums a listen—I prefer the 1984 Frankie Howerd / Ian Dury / Jon Pertwee version for the sheer "what the hell" factor, but the 2015 Christopher Lee / Sulene Fleming / Mary Carewe / Ian Dury / Joaquim de Almeida version is equally loopy. The comments on Steam from people who've mistakenly downloaded Deus Ex Machina 2 instead of Deus Ex 2, and are wondering why instead of wandering around killing people they're listening to the Brand New Heavies and the Blockheads while Sir Christopher Lee solemnly recites excerpts from As You Like It are a thing of joy as well.

Provided you can look at everything in the reference section and feel confident that you can answer "why is that there?" if anyone asks, and that if there's any obvious source you're not using you can explain why you're not using it, source review is nothing to worry about. The people who do the source reviews at FAC genuinely want to help. Unless it's a genuinely controversial historical or religious topic where you get two sides each trying to discredit the sources which support the "wrong" side, the toxicity at FAC largely stems from people demanding that articles follow their personal stylistic preferences. ‑ Iridescent 08:15, 13 February 2021 (UTC)

Coronation Park, Delhi

Bit of an Ozymandias moment as I came across Commons:Category:Coronation Park, Delhi. Lots of Raj-era statues unceremoniously dumped there and mouldering away, to the extent that the photographs on Commons are not even identified (to be fair, I doubt the statues themselves are identified now). The George V statue was apparently said by Jagger to be his finest work (slightly spoilt by him dying and not finishing it). The history of the statue can be seen at India Gate, and the history of Raj-era statues in the journal article in footnote 15 ("The Viceroys are Disappearing from the Roundabouts in Delhi: British symbols of power in post-colonial India"). Thankfully the article Coronation Park, Delhi is more helpful, and though this sums it up (" In 2017, however, after missing several project deadlines, the park largely remained in a state of neglect") at least I can now identify the statue I wanted a picture of! Carcharoth (talk) 07:59, 11 February 2021 (UTC)

If I Ruled The World, the British government would scoop up any the Indians didn't want to keep, and create an open-air museum somewhere. It would require minimal upkeep, would help regenerate whatever area they chose to put it as it would create a small but steady stream of visitors, and could also accommodate assorted slavers and imperialists which local councils don't want to keep around but which are too artistically important to demolish. If they got the Science Museum and National Railway Museum on board, it could ultimately be turned into a general Museum of the Nineteenth Century where all kinds of disparate monuments, militaria and industrial paraphernalia could be properly displayed in context. I'd imagine there are places that would jump at the chance to house it. ‑ Iridescent 19:24, 12 February 2021 (UTC)

Not the National Trust under present management, but probably several of the big private stately homes with the odd empty avenue. Mind you, getting them out of the clutches of the Indian bureaucracy would probably be a task to equal Brexit. Though one has to applaud the new Indian portrait statues going up all over (the more conventionally-sized ones anyway). Johnbod (talk) 22:37, 12 February 2021 (UTC)

One of the statues of the viceroys ended up back in Reading, see Commons:Category:Statue of the 1st Marquess of Reading. One wonders if it will fare any better there in the long term? I wondered whether a note on the Coronation Park article would help explain why one of the statues is 'missing' and am wondering if there is a list anywhere of which statues were originally intended to be moved there (apparently some towns and cities in India wanted to keep their statues). Carcharoth (talk) 07:48, 13 February 2021 (UTC) Took forever to track down the now relatively obscure "Sir John Jenkins" (image), the father of Evan Meredith Jenkins and David Jenkins, Baron Jenkins. 'Home Member' of the Viceroy's Council and one of those who figured in the move of the capital to Delhi. Sir John Lewis Jenkins KCSI (1857–1912). Carcharoth (talk) 08:36, 13 February 2021 (UTC)

Merseyside would be the obvious place for a grand unified Museum Of Imperialism. They already have the International Slavery Museum, the Maritime Museum (plus the National Waterways Museum just up the road in Ellesmere Port), and the World Museum, which would help put the whole thing in context. Plus between the Walker, Lady Lever and the National Conservation Centre they probably have the most experienced people in the world when it comes to conserving and restoring old statues; they have MOSI up the road in Manchester to assist with the Industrial Revolution side of things; as the key port of the Triangular Trade there's probably nowhere on earth with its hands more drenched in blood regarding the negative aspects of imperialism; as the start point of the first scheduled railway service Liverpool has a reasonable claim to be one of the birthplaces of the Industrial Revolution; it has the transport links and tourism infrastructure for people to actually visit it; by the time the Covid and Brexit dust settles it will have no shortage of empty factories and warehouses that could house such a place; and since it would be something new it would be a relatively cheap and painless way for the government to put their money where their mouth is when it comes to moving major institutions to the north, without having to close or downscale an existing institution and consequently face an outcry somewhere else. I'd imagine that the Indian authorities (and Hong Kong, South Africa, Ireland, Malaysia, Kenya et al) would probably quietly be quite pleased to have a way to get rid of reminders of unpleasant parts of all this stuff without the diplomatic incidents that would be caused if they just bulldozed it.

I can't really criticise anyone for uploading photos with titles like File:A statue at Coronation Park.JPG (although I can certainly criticise anyone who'd upload a photo of such poor quality). I've uploaded about 40,000 (literally) photos with unhelpful titles like File:Lincoln Castle 20201014 105857 (50481671401).jpg; while I do genuinely intend to go through them one day giving them more sensible names, descriptions, and categories, that's more of an aspiration than a target and I think it's more important to get them uploaded so at least people can access them if they have a use for them, then to spend time individually labelling them as I go along. ‑ Iridescent 08:59, 13 February 2021 (UTC)

I nearly went cross-eyed going through your images from Putney Vale cemetery. I didn't find what I was looking for (can't even remember now), but did get distracted by adding notes to File:Putney Vale Cemetery 20200112 103315 (49372651063).jpg. There is a later descendent of the same name (son, I think) who bred dogs or something. See Saluki. Carcharoth (talk) 09:22, 13 February 2021 (UTC) It was the grave of Charles Blackader I was looking for. Block K. Grave 200 if that helps. Picture of the grave is here. Carcharoth (talk) 09:34, 13 February 2021 (UTC)

I pass by Putney Vale reasonably often even during lockdown, if I get the chance I'll nip in and take one. When I'm photographing graveyards I generally try to include any than mentions any kind of award (military or civil) on the grounds that they're the ones which will have notability in Wikipedia's terms. ‑ Iridescent 06:04, 14 February 2021 (UTC)

Because I'm like helpful and stuff. It appears to have had a wash since that Findagrave photo was taken. ‑ Iridescent 14:51, 14 February 2021 (UTC)

Thanks! Much appreciated. Carcharoth (talk) 20:57, 14 February 2021 (UTC)

Happy First Edit Day!

Happy First Edit Day, Iridescent, from the Wikipedia Birthday Committee! Have a great day! History DMZ (HQ) † (wire) 03:30, 15 February 2021 (UTC)

Thanks—fifteen years is slightly depressing, this account has literally been active longer than some editors have been alive. ‑ Iridescent 06:01, 15 February 2021 (UTC)

Happy First Edit Day!

Possible mentorship

Hey there! I checked out WP:FAM and saw that you had an interest in any subject, so I thought I'd say hello – I just nominated Daisy Pearce, a prominent women's Australian rules footballer, for GA status, but thought I'd take things a step further and see what I could do for the article in order to achieve FA status in the short- to medium-term future. Was just wondering if you might be interested in helping me through the process, offering advice, etc., as I haven't even done a GA nomination before now, let alone a FA nomination – I've put a fair bit of work into the article and think it ticks a few boxes, but thought it would best to get an uninvolved opinion. If you don't have a lot of time or aren't overly interested, I totally understand – thanks! 4TheWynne (talk • contribs) 12:42, 7 February 2021 (UTC)

I'm happy to offer general advice (and to review at Peer Review and/or FAC once you nominate it), but I'm not the best person to deal in detail with a sporting FA, as they tend to work slightly differently to articles on other topics. Particularly with a sport like Aussie Rules, at FA level there's a fine balance to be struck between "explaining enough so readers in the US, India and other places with no siginficant Aussie presence will understand it when it runs on the main page" and "not explaining so much that the people who will normally be looking her up, who are presumably already familiar with both Australia and Aussie Rules, will get bored". The person I'd say is best placed to help is User:The Rambling Man if he's willing (or he can at least recommend someone else if he's not willing or too busy); he has a lot of experience working with articles on "huge deal in some places but unknown in Wikipedia's core North American market so we need to assume readers won't be familiar with the terminology and the historical background" sports like rowing, snooker and cricket. ‑ Iridescent 13:01, 7 February 2021 (UTC)

(adding) Further pings to Sportsfan77777 who shepherded Erin Phillips through FAC, who seems to be a fairly comparable person. ‑ Iridescent 13:14, 7 February 2021 (UTC)

Happy to help do what I think is necessary for FAC, but as of a month or so ago, my contributions are no longer deemed "explanatory" enough and fall between the gap that Iridescent describes. But nevertheless, there are a lot of other aspects which I would be more than happy to support, I even have a passing interest (and knowledge) of Aussie Rules so that may (or may not!) be advantageous here! Cheers. The Rambling Man (Stay alert! Control the virus! Save lives!!!!) 14:09, 7 February 2021 (UTC)

That's completely fair enough, Iridescent; I wasn't sure where to start – even still, would welcome your input if you do decide to throw in your two cents here and there. For sure, The Rambling Man – would definitely appreciate the help! Same to you, Sportsfan77777, if you're interested. 4TheWynne (talk • contribs) 18:28, 7 February 2021 (UTC)

Sure, I can advise on getting through FAC. Just noting it could take some time. Thanks for the ping, Iridescent! Sportsfan77777 (talk) 06:28, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

(re to The Rambling Man) I know, and that's why I said you're better placed than me to advise in this particular case. I personally feel that any Wikipedia article, and particularly any article which is likely to appear on the main page and thus be seen by people with no prior interest, needs to take extra steps to ensure background is explained to people who aren't familiar with the topic. (My personal standard is "if a bright 14-year-old with no prior knowledge of this topic were to read the article, would it make sense to them?". Most of what I do is on arts and transport, and those are areas where there are lot of high-traffic off-wiki mirrors—e.g. the Tate Gallery's artist biographies. As such, one has to write on the assumption that one's writing for a reader who will only see the raw text, and won't see bluelinks to click if there's a term they don't understand.) However I'm not the Supreme Dictator of Wikipedia, and I'm aware that the sports articles follow a different set of protocols when it comes to balancing "don't explain things which most readers already know" against "explain things which some readers won't know", and you're much more familiar with the sports articles than me. ‑ Iridescent 08:58, 10 February 2021 (UTC)

Cheers, but I think that's a huge stretch. FAs get a maximum of one day on the main page pretty much ever and then live the rest of their entire existence serving people who are likely to be searching for the information that they are interested in. There is literally no way you can encapsulate the laws of cricket in a cricket FA or the subtleties of association football in a soccer FA or even stand a chance of getting through the jargon in a baseball FA without relying on links to dedicated articles. Sports articles aren't different from dinosaur articles or legal articles, but they are treated differently because there's a huge element of snobbishness which means they are considered inferior and not worthy. But happy to help outside the process which lately has become quite shambolic and inconsistently managed. The Rambling Man (Stay alert! Control the virus! Save lives!!!!) 09:21, 10 February 2021 (UTC)

I agree on the process—I haven't nominated anything at FA for two years, and only review there when I'm specifically asked to look at something, and I don't feel I'm missing anything. On readership, as well as the mirror issue I mention earlier I think you're underestimating the long-term boost to readership that FA status gives, as long as we have the bold direct link to Wikipedia:Featured articles on the Main Page. Compare the page view histories for After the Deluge and The All-Pervading, both obscure paintings by the same artist but one with FA status and one without; despite minimal incoming links, one consistently gets a stream of visitors and one doesn't. (After the Deluge is an uninteresting work that hangs in an obscure gallery in Guildford, it's not as if people are seeing it elsewhere and being inspired to look it up.) I wouldn't expect all terms to be explained, but I do think it's reasonable that we define something if it's both necessary to understanding the article and is something it's reasonable to assume a significant number of readers won't know. It's not unique to sports—I'd expect a dinosaur article to define "Cretaceous" or a legal article to define "tort" if it was necessary for the understanding of the particular topic—but it's always going to arise more often on sports than elsewhere as it's an area with the combination of specialist jargon and extreme regional variations across the English-speaking world. (Anyone outside the US who's watched a baseball movie, or any American who's tried to understand what the issues caused by the Northern Ireland Protocol are and why it's such a big deal, will be familiar with the problems that arise when people assume that audiences are going to be familiar with the jargon.) ‑ Iridescent 19:10, 12 February 2021 (UTC)

Well I think all I ever asked for was a level playing field (no pun intended) and while a co-ord was opposing my nomination on three linked phrases, same co-ord was promoting a FAC with a good dozen or more completely unexplained highly technical terms. Then, as if by magic, another FA regular opposes having supported very similar article six weeks earlier. It's a shambles I'm afraid, and the only place on Wikipedia where a discussion is closed as "no consensus to promote" when nine reviewers including at least three non-experts (and one non-male...!) all in agreement that the language was fine. The powers that be didn't like it so it torpedoed. I'm afraid if we apply this approach then that effectively precludes sports FAs unless they are written in such a way that the very audience they are intended to reach just gives up through the frustration of being continually led off-topic to explain dictionary definitions (like "aggregate") or esoteric rules (like "offside" or "leg before wicket" etc). Wikipedia is not paper and links should be exploited and not rejected as insufficient. If you want to understand more about the laws of cricket, go read laws of cricket, don't expect every single article which deals with cricket matches to explain the nuances of the laws of cricket each and every time. Not only does it detract from the subject at hand, it raises the risk of multiple definitions for the same concept all over much lower level Wikipedia articles, instead of these concepts being defined once in one (logical, linkable) location. Anyway, if the sudden obsession had been applied evenly, I might have considered it, but it really hasn't been and the only explanation is that either the kinds of article I write are now unwelcome or will never be satisfactory to a tiny minority (who completely control the process) until the writing is murdered to the point where we have to explain what dribbling means or what a corner is in every single football article. Not for me, and not what I believe FAC should be (nor has it been for the past 14 years). The Rambling Man (Stay alert! Control the virus! Save lives!!!!) 20:06, 12 February 2021 (UTC)

I can't speak for anyone else, but when I talk about explaining things I'm not talking about things like explaining the offside rule, which I agree would be unreasonable. What I mean is things where without context things may not make proper sense—so if a biography of a footballer says "he won the Milk Cup, the FA Vase, the Anglo-Italian Trophy and the Cup Winners Cup" I don't think it's at all unreasonable to have an explanatory footnote that these achievements have very different levels of impressiveness, or that on articles about American college sports we make it clear in each case whether this is one of those sports where college teams are the de facto second prefessional tier below only the national top-flight league or one of the sports where college teams are a handful on enthusiastic amateurs playing in front of three men and a dog in a public park on Sunday afternoon. It's by no means unique to sports—e.g. on even a bland article like St Mary's Church, Chesham I made sure to explain what "advowson" meant since it's not reasonable to assume readers will know it—but because of the nature of sports it tends to arise as an issue quite often there, particularly on sports that aren't well-known in most places our readers live. ‑ Iridescent 14:08, 13 February 2021 (UTC)

Well you've nailed the problem. Not one soul has asked for the FA Cup or the League Cup to be explained in footnote terms, but they have asked for explanations of dictionary definitions like aggregate score. It was even questioned at one point why the word "equaliser" was being used. I mean, once it gets to that kind of level, it's throwing "professional writing" and "sticking to the subject" right in the bin. I'm afraid it's overt snobbishness and, in some cases, completely inconsistent behaviour, both of which have made FAC such a ridiculous place to be right now. People don't understand aggregate score but they do dribbling? Give me a break. I'm all for a bit of subjective debate, but when a FAC can fail because one individual opposes (while nine other individuals support) because two-legged tie isn't explained with a footnote or a parenthetical note, the process is broken. The Rambling Man (Stay alert! Control the virus! Save lives!!!!) 14:24, 13 February 2021 (UTC)

I've been trying to teach myself some advanced topics in physics and math, and the Wikipedia content in that area raises some interesting comparisons. As a science PhD, I feel like I might be a little beyond "a bright 14 year old", but a lot of our pages leave me wondering what language they are written in, to the point that it has become a pet peeve of mine. To pick an illustrative example, Lie algebra (not audited content) deals with an important subject that is needed to understand some advanced areas of physics, and seems to me to be just the kind of thing where readers might turn to Wikipedia to get an introduction to the topic – and be sorely disappointed. Just try reading the lead section. And there are a lot of other pages like that. I've discussed this concern with some editors who work on math content, and they say that trying to explain this sort of thing in something like plain English loses too much precision. I don't know much about sports content, and I certainly don't want to presume any kind of extrapolation between these subject areas. In fact, I'm inclined to feel that it should often be enough to blue-link a sports topic, instead of inserting an explanation of it, whereas just giving a blue link like those in the Lie algebra lead seems to me to be inadequate. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:35, 15 February 2021 (UTC)

Indeed. In fact I asked my seven-year-old son to explain my article to me and he did it. Correctly. But apparently the whims of a couple of users who were in a tiny minority (this article had nine supports btw) sent the nomination to hell in a hand-basket. And no-one answered why dribbling was so much easier to understand without inline explanation than aggregate score. Funny old world. Perhaps the "read and understood by a child" test needs to apply to a specific nationality with specific interests now. The Rambling Man (Stay alert! Control the virus! Save lives!!!!) 21:47, 15 February 2021 (UTC)

Random grave pics

Just so I can stop going cross-eyed now... no longer random grave and now added to the article. :-) No, I am not going through all the other ones (well, not today)! Carcharoth (talk) 10:45, 13 February 2021 (UTC)

FWIW they're not random, although the logic in what got photographed isn't straightforward. (IIRC that day it also started pouring rain so there's a big chunk that got left out.) Multiply that by 40,000 and you'll see why I'm not wildly enthusiastic about getting round to sorting them—Commons:Category:Naval section, Woodlands Cemetery could easily take a full day to sort just on its own, and they at least all have the luxury of being well-maintained and sensibly labelled. (I've still yet to solve the mystery of the four different styles of CWGC gravestone there. As far as I can tell there's no pattern at all to which design was used; there are instances of four servicemen from the same unit killed in the same incident on the same day each getting a different style of stone. Yes I know I could just write to the CWGC and ask.) ‑ Iridescent 14:26, 13 February 2021 (UTC)

Sorry, didn't mean to imply it was random in that sense, just that it looked random. Carcharoth (talk) 20:56, 14 February 2021 (UTC)

Oh, no offence taken. The criteria I use (in decreasing order depending on how much time I have: memorials to mass-casualty incidents or mass reburials; anything that mentions an award or achievement; monuments of a design of which I haven't photographed an example in that particular cemetery; anything that looks at serious risk of deterioration or falling for which this might genuinely be the last chance of capturing a legible image; anything with an unusual (or atypical for the area) monument or inscription; Crosses of Sacrifice and Stones of Remembrance; any war graves that don't fall into any of the above) does look random, particularly when they're all jumbled up in an unsorted category. I suspect I missed Blackader first time around because I was distracted by "last surviving son of Charles Dickens" just around the corner from him. ‑ Iridescent 06:10, 15 February 2021 (UTC)

Heh, its has been six years since I created Commons:Crosses of Sacrifice (which has about 300 images) and you have prompted me to add a couple more - I created that page because I periodically get dis-satisified with the way images get a bit lost sometimes in categories, but the perennial problem with gallery pages is maintaining them. Also, to go through all the categories again to see if any new ones have appeared is annoying. There is a way apparently to see what images have been added to a set of categories since a certain date, but I can't remember how that is done. I thought of doing the same for the Stones of Remembrance (of which there are less), but for various reasons the images are not really there at the moment (or not tagged properly). Maybe they don't get photographed in quite the same way (maybe people find it harder to photograph them than a large stone cross that can be composed with a suitable sky or other scenic backdrop?). Carcharoth (talk) 22:15, 15 February 2021 (UTC)

I've certainly been guilty of uploading both Crosses and Stones within bulk uploads of photos of military plots, without specifically labelling them (for example). While I again intend to correctly label and categorise all these things one day, these aren't something I'd consider high priority, as literally the point is that all Crosses of Sacrifice and Stones of Remembrance look exactly alike be they in Berlin, Bayeux, Baghdad or Botley. ‑ Iridescent 06:16, 16 February 2021 (UTC)

No problems if not (or if you have already uploaded it and I missed it) but are you able to get a better version of this image? Carcharoth (talk) 23:10, 20 February 2021 (UTC)

And final note for today: this image is interesting. And this one loads upside down when I try to crop it... Anyway, will come back to that later. Carcharoth (talk) 23:27, 20 February 2021 (UTC)

I know exactly where that tablet is and have seen it from a distance, but have never gone over to see what it is—that extension of the cemetery behind Asda doesn't have any notable burials (that I'm aware of), doesn't have any graves that are artistically interesting, and isn't a short-cut to anywhere. I should be in Wimbledon at some point in the next couple of days, provided the weather holds up and I have time I'll try to do a quick Barnard Castle across the common and take a photo of it. ‑ Iridescent 04:50, 23 February 2021 (UTC)

Done, including one which I've taken at ridiculously-high-resolution in case you want to crop down to individual elements. Literally every word on the description of File:War Memorial, Putney Vale Cemetery - geograph.org.uk - 1315008.jpg is inaccurate other than "near Asda"; it's not a "forgotten memorial with only women's names on it", it's a well-maintained standard "memorial to civilians killed in the Second World War that are buried in this cemetery" of the type one sees in every cemetery in Europe. (This one is for residents of Chelsea; immediately next to it are similar ones for Holborn and Wandsworth.) It doesn't list only women; women outnumber men, but that's always the case with memorials to civilian casualties since for obvious reasons men were less likely to be civilians.

Commons is currently having one of its periodic refusals to import from Flickr. (This happens very regularly; the script isn't maintained by the WMF and thus relies on the kindness of strangers to fix it whenever either Commons or Flickr changes their code.) I'll import them once that's resolved, or if you desparately want one of them transferring files manually should work (or download them and re-upload them from your hard drive). If you do upload any of them, let me know so I don't also upload it and accidentally duplicate it. ‑ Iridescent 07:55, 25 February 2021 (UTC)

Thank you. No particular need for it now you have corrected my impression that it was anything different to normal, so I will wait until you upload it in the normal course of events. I often use the Geograph-to-Commons tool, and that periodically has problems as well, unfortunately, but that may be more a problem at the Geograph end, I'm not sure. Carcharoth (talk) 20:41, 25 February 2021 (UTC)

Invitation to join the Fifteen Year Society

Dear Iridescent,

I'd like to extend a cordial invitation to you to join the Fifteen Year Society, an informal group for editors who've been participating in the Wikipedia project for fifteen years or more. So congrats on 15 YOS since your first edit to Cathy Rogers! (Per WP:FTYS, any editor may bestow membership upon any qualifying editor, so I boldly went ahead with it).​

Best regards, History DMZ ^{(HQ) † (wire)} 18:42, 15 February 2021 (UTC)

I appreciate the sentiment, but (if this means actual addition to a category or being listed in a category somewhere) I'll politely decline. Being here for fifteen years also means being around long enough to remember the unpleasantness surrounding the Association of Established Editors (the wreckage is preserved here for the morbidly curious) and I think that's a fire we shouldn't be relighting without good reason. ‑ Iridescent 05:47, 16 February 2021 (UTC)

The word misbegotten does come to mind. Re your first link: I've never seen a snow no consensus before, and there's also a certain irony in Image:Save Freedom of Speech.png being deleted as unfree. EEng 06:13, 16 February 2021 (UTC)

I can undelete Image:Save Freedom of Speech.png if you want it, that deletion was just Fastily's "God will know his own" delete-everything-o-bot being overenthusiastic. The supposedly "non-free" element was Norman Rockwell's Freedom of Speech, which is very much in the public domain. ‑ Iridescent 06:22, 16 February 2021 (UTC)

Could you please undelete it? Sounds like an intriguing image and maybe useful somewhere. Thanks. Randy Kryn (talk) 13:35, 16 February 2021 (UTC)

It was literally just a low-resolution copy of File:"Freedom of Speech" - NARA - 513536.jpg, with a "SAVE FREEDOM OF SPEECH BUY WAR BONDS" caption. On reflection if I undelete it, it will just be re-deleted not because of any copyright issue (as a work of the US government it will be in the public domain), but because it has no encyclopedic value. ‑ Iridescent 15:05, 16 February 2021 (UTC)

We could port it to Commons. Isn't that where they keep the stuff that doesn't have encyclopedic value? Vaticidalprophet (talk) 15:06, 16 February 2021 (UTC)

I clicked the "preserved here" and went down the rabbit hole and found Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Advisory Council on Project Development. Mildly curious, what happened to that structure of RfCs? Where editors posted a statement and others agreed/disagreed. Seems to have been somewhat common in old RfCs but is practically extinct now. It looks more organised and somewhat less repetitive (like a more organised "per X" vote), and easier to extract different perspectives. But guessing it was retired for good reasons? ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 06:17, 16 February 2021 (UTC)

They still exist. I ran Wikipedia:Requests for comment/2019 Resysop Criteria (2) that way. Formatting an RfC is half the battle. I think I’ve probably run the most major “reform” RfCs over the last few 4-5 years, and my typical process looks goes like this: identify a problem, repeat that it’s a problem in a ton of local discussions over 12-18 months, develop larger and larger local consensuses that it is a problem, run narrowly tailored RfC to rubber stamp the pre-existing community consensus that has developed organically over the last 12-18 months. Policy RfCs simply don’t work if there isn’t already agreement on the question going into it.

The statements RfC works best on issues where there’s a consensus that there’s a large problem but any given proposal if phrased as one proposal with yes/no sections will fail because of some really niche issue in the wording or because everyone has an opinion and they think their opinion is better than the existing proposal (basically anything involving desysop and resysop fall under this heading.) You give people the opportunity to voice their really oddball proposal only they think will work while also supporting the least controversial proposal. That results in it having a better chance to pass than if it was a straight up or down.

It’s a rather inefficient way of running an RfC compared to the now normal way, but it’s still allowed and has its very limited uses. TonyBallioni (talk) 06:32, 16 February 2021 (UTC)

Ah, the golden age; the WP:ACPD disaster was probably the closest Wikipedia came in its entire history to Arbcom actually being overthrown in a popular revolt. I don't know why we no longer structure RFCs in that "everyone suggestion has its own section, and participants support or oppose each statement" format any more (Newyorkbrad might know); at a guess the explanation is the prosaic "although it's the first suggestion at Wikipedia:Requests for comment#Suggestions for responding, that's buried quite far down the page, and before someone reading the page reaches it they'll have seen the link to Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Example formatting which doesn't mention this style". It had advantages in that it made it much less likely that pages would degenerate into back-and-forth arguments, but it also had drawbacks; it gave a massive early-mover advantage to the first few people to comment since their opinions would be the first to appear at the top of what quickly became very long pages. ‑ Iridescent 06:35, 16 February 2021 (UTC)

Well, to be even more blunt than my comment above, the flip side to arguments at the bottom being ignored is that it relegates the cranks to where they wouldn’t be read. That means there’s less chance of the 5 people who really strongly believe that Jimmy Wales’ should personally pay people in Bitcoin to do maintenance tasks (actual proposal at one point, you might remember it) drawing more opposes with their crazy alternative idea that has no chance of passing, but could sink one that does if mentioned in an oppose section rather than at the bottom of a 300,000 byte page with 30 statements. I don’t actually support going back to it for most RfCs, but like I said, if you know the community politics well enough, it very much still has a use once in a blue moon. TonyBallioni (talk) 06:45, 16 February 2021 (UTC)

Oh indeed; it will almost certainly be the method used when we finally admit that the Main Page is an ugly cluttered mess filled with stuff that nobody reads, and need to take a "here's a bunch of different proposals, we know nobody will be happy with any alternative but put your name next to the ones you can at least live with" approach. It would also be necessary should we ever get rid of the ridiculous S-S-C-B-G-A-F quality scale.

On the subject of ACPD, connoisseurs of Wikipedia infighting shouldn't miss Wikipedia talk:Arbitration Committee/Noticeboard/Archive 5#Advisory Council on Project Development convened. ‑ Iridescent 07:01, 16 February 2021 (UTC)

Deleting the S-S-C-B-G-A-F scale is your pet griping point just like WP:ROPE being abused to mean AGF is in fact a suicide pact and we should let the [right-wing nationalist, ethnic nationalist, anti-vaxxer, caste warrior, etc.] crank who has friends who promise he’ll be good this time keep pushing their agenda forever despite having been given more chances than I have fingers is mine. While I agree wholeheartedly with you on that, the number of things to populate your user page with would drastically decline if we moved to the Stub-Start-Good-Featured scale I’d support, so it’ll never happen. TonyBallioni (talk) 17:30, 16 February 2021 (UTC)

the number of things to populate your user page with would drastically decline if we moved to the Stub-Start-Good-Featured scale funny, User:Jo-Jo Eumerus/article work would be mostly intact I think. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 18:32, 16 February 2021 (UTC)

Thank you for the "preserved here" link. Oddly enough, one of the things that got me interested in learning about Wikipedia's governance was going through those old... messes? (I'm reminded of Liz's (probably not unique) wikiarchaeologist userbox.) While it might be a stretch to say it's to "learn" something from what I read, it is certainly interesting to be able to explore a history as deep and complex as Wikipedia's. I wouldn't be surprised if at some point in the far future reading through records of Wikipedia talk pages would be the retirement dream for some anthropologists :). Perryprog (talk) 13:27, 16 February 2021 (UTC)

If you want unpleasant episodes from Wikipedia's past regarding one group of editors setting themselves up as superior to the others, wade through the debris of Esperanza some time. The ACPD debacle is notable because it was the final time a group of editors tried to self-appoint themselves as super-users (shortly after that, WP:ARBPOL was ratified which set strict limits on any Arbcom overreach; the only threats now to the principle of community consensus as the final authority in disputes are external agents like T&S), but it's Esperanza that was the genuine formative experience. Had Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:Esperanza been closed a different way—see the previous deletion debate for how easily it could have gone another way—by 2010 Wikipedia might have just become a social network for nerds and the actual article side of things would just be a Friendster-style footnote in the history of whatever replaced it. (Google was in the process of launching Knol at the time while Citizendium in some ways looked much more credible than Wikipedia; although Wikipedia was the first of the big crowdsourced projects it was never predestined that it would be the one which survived.) It was fifteen years ago, but to this day Esperanza is such a sore point people don't like to mention it. ‑ Iridescent 15:24, 16 February 2021 (UTC)

That's quite a surprise to hear. I haven't read through Esperanza's history yet as I never really realized how significant of an impact it had on the community. Definitely something I'll be reading soon, though, so thanks again. Perryprog (talk) 16:42, 16 February 2021 (UTC)

After you've read both MfDs, if you haven't lost the will to live at that point you could try the three DRVs for comedy relief. Black Kite (talk) 19:37, 16 February 2021 (UTC)

(Edit conflict) Iridescent is right about Esperanza being a sore point, because I'm still salty over a decade later. Where we differ is that I still find the slippery slope argument of "oh no Esperanza will take over Wikipedia and turn us into a social network" to be complete tripe. It offered a counternarrative against this image of an ideal editor as stolidly writing articles "for the good of the encyclopedia alone", and that wasn't acceptable to a large part of the community. But I do think Iri is right for identifying the emergence of social media and rival projects as a major source of pressure for the community at the time. As someone who was a part of Esperanza, it was a safe, fun place to be for a young editor, and it played a big role for me in sticking around and editing long-term.

I suppose the silver lining of it closing down was that it forced a number of us to "grow up," and we found other ways to channel that spirit of editing while having fun in collaborative article writing efforts like WP:TSQUAD, or by moving the hijinks to IRC. And we wonder why we're having trouble retaining new editors... bibliomaniac15 19:45, 16 February 2021 (UTC)

I might not have made myself entirely clear; I don't think Esperanza was acting as a "come to Wikipedia to chat with your friends" magnet that was turning Wikipedia into a social network. (Facebook and Twitter may not have been off the ground yet—indeed, long after Esperanza bit the dust we were still repeatedly deleting [[Twitter]] for a lack of notability when people tried to create it—but Myspace, Friendster and Bebo were all up and running; if people wanted social networks there were better places to go.) What I do think is that it was creating an atmosphere in which those who weren't a part of it felt like they were being treated as second-class (not helped by their habit of making decisions off-wiki), and creating a culture of goofing around and general jokeyness on Wikipedia in which the people who'd come here to write about aircraft technology or Socotran pottery felt increasingly uncomfortable and were starting to walk out. (Citizendium failed not because it had a problem poaching Wikipedia's editors, but because it was run by a creepy weirdo who tried to micromanage everything and ended up alienating everyone.) In 2006–07, while we still has a huge influx of people coming in to create three-line stubs about bands and to add unsourced sentences to the articles on their hometown, the good-quality-article-writing side of things was being held together by a group of people who'd probably all have fitted in a Ford Transit, half of whom were batshit crazy, and the administration side of things was being swamped by what was then a losing battle against swarms of socks and spammers.

If Google hadn't cut their losses, or even a small handful of the group that rose through the ranks in 2007 and steadied the ship in 2007–08 (say, Moni, Malleus, TRM and Wehwalt from the writing side, and NYB, Lara, DGG and Risker from the administrative side) had decided the atmosphere of Wikipedia was too off-putting and gone elsewhere, I honestly think there's a very high chance Wikipedia would have just disintegrated. (Remember, the WMF at the time had a staff of five with no fundraising department, and a straight-up criminal as Chief Operating Officer, so we didn't get big charitable grants and were wholly dependent on the kindness of strangers. Even a slight dip in article quality and the subsequent slight dip in donations would literally have seen the lights switched off unless Jimmy baled it out with his own money, and if there's one thing Jimmy's business career has shown it's that when the going get tough he backs away.)

For the benefit of those who can't see the history (most of which has been deleted)—and who might get the impression that Esperanza was some kind of informal social club—I'm just going to put the full text of Wikipedia:Esperanza/Charter here. (I'll post the attribution history if anyone really wants it—no CC BY-SA in those days—but it's quite long.):

The goal of Esperanza is simple—to be a place Wikipedians can turn to for hope, help, and reassurance. Esperanza is designed to be a small approachable community. Its members strive to recognize situations where Wikipedians need help, hope, or reassurance. Esperanzians try to match those who desire help with those who offer it.

Membership is open to any Wikipedian with about one hundred and fifty (150) edits, who has stayed at Wikipedia for at least two weeks and is willing to follow this charter. Esperanza is committed to the Wikipedia community; our members should be as well.Esperanza members may be suspended for persistent and gross vandalism or violation of civility. Esperanza will abide by any ruling by ArbCom or Jimbo Wales concerning its membership or any specific member.

The leadership of Esperanza is a Council of 7 members in 2 tranches, A (with three members) and B (with four members). Each Councillor serves a term of six months. Should a Councillor resign or leave Wikipedia, he or she is replaced by the runner up from the last election to serve out the remainder of his or her term. In the case that there is any dispute from a vacancy in the Council, or a rule in dispute, the Administrator General shall have the sole duty to determine the resolution. In the case the Administrator General cannot complete that duty, then the Council will do it.

Tranche A
* Elected on March 31; term ends September 30
* Elected on September 30; term ends March 31
Tranche B
* Elected on December 31; term ends June 30
* Elected on June 30; term ends December 31

After each election, an Administrator General (normally abbreviated as Admin Gen) is chosen by the council from within the council. Should the Administrator General resign or leave Wikipedia, the Council shall meet and elect a new Administrator General from among themselves.

The Council shall approve any and all changes that affect Esperanza as a whole, like accepting new programs or any proposed amendments to the charter. This shall only happen after appropriate consultation with the Esperanza community as a whole, via the Esperanza talk page. Additionally, it is the Council's role to remind any member of Esperanza's values, should they need reminding. The role of the Administrator General shall be to co-ordinate the Council's affairs, and to "own" the IRC channel.

The Council can amend the charter, provided that discussion is held on the Esperanza talk page for one week prior to the amendment. Should there be dissent in that amendment from three or more Esperanza members, the amendment will require a straw poll of the membership.

To be clear, this was their main policy page, not some failed proposal or obscure discussion; it's hard to over-emphasise that Esperanza was a rigidly hierarchical bureaucracy, not some kind of Wikipedia recreation lounge. Yes, they did some good—some things which are still with us started off as Esperanza initiatives—but the discussion at the time of the MFD about whether Wikipedia was going to have a decentralized consensus-based model or be a coalition of self-selecting autonomous groups with the ability to set their own rules over who could participate in "their" areas was a genuine fork in the road. ‑ Iridescent 21:32, 16 February 2021 (UTC)

This makes for fascinating reading; thanks so very much for it! I'd be very interested in a brief summary of what it was during that 2007–8 period that those editors you listed did, that "steadied the ship". What was it, that they changed during that time? --Tryptofish (talk) 21:55, 16 February 2021 (UTC)

Iridescent mentioned earlier that "the good-quality-article-writing side of things was being held together by a group of people who'd probably all have fitted in a Ford Transit, half of whom were batshit crazy, and the administration side of things was being swamped by what was then a losing battle against swarms of socks and spammers." I don't have much to comment on the article writing side, but my impression was that the period around 2007-9 was the two spheres dovetailed and major actions were finally taken against the aforementioned "batshit crazy" people via AN and ultimately RFAR...if you wanna have an idea of what Risker and NYB's time as first-time arbs was like, just take a look at the craziness that was 2009.

As for Esperanza and bureaucracy, I've too many thoughts on that topic. It didn't seem superforeign back then because it was a synthesis of different structures that existed at the time (ArbCom, MedCom, even FA Coordination), and there was something that was a little tongue-in-cheek about how it imitated those structures (down to the "tranche" bar graphs). Esperanza had hundreds of members, and attitudes towards that level of hierarchy varied widely even within the org. It really came down to a simple observation: a small group of dedicated people could make big, effective changes in a short period of time. If it could be applied to articlespace and to some of the different reforms that were going on in Wikispace, why not community space? But Iridescent is right as usual when he mentions that the extent to which interest-based usergroups could be centralized was a genuine fork in the road back then. Esperanza's shuttering represented a clear line in the sand for the community, and in that sense probably for the better; it's hard to see how an encyclopedia where Esperanza's structure was the norm could be healthily inclusive. bibliomaniac15 23:21, 16 February 2021 (UTC)

Do we all have Esperanza on the brain somehow? I saw it mentioned here last week, with a description that doesn't align with my previous understanding (precursor to the Teahouse, shut down because it had members). WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:22, 17 February 2021 (UTC)

Maybe everyone just needs an espresso? --Tryptofish (talk) 19:28, 17 February 2021 (UTC)

"Precursor to the Teahouse" is like saying the chemical munitions of World War I were a precursor to dishwasher tablets; it's technically true in the sense that the Teahouse duplicates one of Esperanza's functions, but misses the main point. (What Esperanza did, the pros-and-cons of it, and the reasons for its demise, are all explained at Wikipedia:Esperanza; while it's not a topic that's generally raised since—as you can see—it still raises tempers on both sides of the debate, it's equally not any kind of secret.) ‑ Iridescent 07:37, 19 February 2021 (UTC)

Responding to the question I was asked way up near the top of this thread, the "Statement/Users who endorse this statement/Users who oppose this statement" format was the standard format in user-conduct RfCs. These were of course discontinued a few years ago, which is why we don't see that format as much now. The format was never common for article-content RfCs, and only occasionally used for policy RfCs.

The reaction to the "Advisory Council on Project Development" was overblown. A group of arbitrators had the idea of consulting with a group of experienced editors, which was to include, in the hopes of avoiding groupthink and building bridges, some people who were known as strong critics of the Committee. When the idea proved to be controversial, it was quickly dropped, but the idea there was some nefarious agenda behind it never made much sense. And reflecting that any wounds from the episode healed quickly, the arbitrator most associated with creating the Council resigned from the Committee in the wake of the controversy, only then to be returned to the Committee in the next election with the most votes and highest support percentage of any candidate.

Responding to another reference to me (as "NYB") above, after all these years I've finally figured out how to explain why I don't do as much article-writing here as I might (or as I did when I first started). It's obvious now that I see it, but no one (friend or foe) has ever noted it that I have observed. I'm curious whether anyone will figure out what I'm thinking now that I've said that, although if no one cares that would serve me right too. In any event, now that I see it, I'll try to figure out what to do about it. Regards, Newyorkbrad (talk) 03:22, 17 February 2021 (UTC)

Brad, I want to go on the record as saying that I do care, and am quite interested. I don't know the answer, but I can haphazardly toss out various conjectures, and maybe something will, by dumb luck, stick to the wall: Not enough time or energy after dealing with real life. Not enough time or energy after dealing with ArbCom and adminning. Effects of having your real-life identity known. Feeling sick-and-tired of dealing with unpleasantness (much as the reason for my own cutback in content activity). Feeling like there are users who are watching whatever you do and looking for reasons to find fault. Feeling like it's just "getting old" and not as interesting as it used to be. Feeling like the most interesting content to work on would be too close to what you do for work (either as a COI, or because it should feel like a hobby and not feel like work). --Tryptofish (talk) 19:39, 17 February 2021 (UTC)

…creating something, particularly from scratch, takes an investment in time, whereas meta-issues one can dip in and out of; as we get older we have less time to commit; the longer you're active, the more you have on your watchlist and talkpage that ends up siphoning away time; Wikipedia has a definite 'tall poppy' phenomenon in which once you become well known within the community, anything you create gets followed around by both a flock of haters hoping to find something to insult about your work, and a flock of eager but annoying wannabees trying to get your attention by 'improving' your work; Wikipedia has long-standing simultaneous problems with a lack of recognition mechanisms, and a tolerance of a culture of sneering arrogance, and thus poor work is immediately pointed out but good work gives the appearance of being unnoticed (that's an issue that's been recognized at least back to Phaedriel's time); because Wikipedia tends to attract both a lot of subject-matter experts, and a lot of convincing bullshitters, it's easy to develop impostor syndrome and think "I shouldn't write this, there are other people who'd do it better and if I tried I'd just expose my lack of knowledge"; the more work one puts into something, the more invested one feels in it, and it's less mentally draining if you're not feeling you need to constantly be checking every change deciding whether to revert; the guidelines around article-writing, particularly the MOS, get steadily more complicated, and "this is just a brief stub, it doesn't really matter if it follows the rules provided it's comprehensible to readers" is the easy route compared to "this is as good as I can make it, I feel duty-bound to follow the rules or to justify each instance of deviation from them"; the topics in which one is most interested are generally going to be the topics on which it's hardest for one to maintain a neutral point of view, and are also the topics for which one is most likely to have a conflict of interest… ‑ Iridescent 07:37, 19 February 2021 (UTC)

I think GorillaWarfare has pointed this out before re: ArbCom, but I think it applies that Wikipedia as a whole tends to be a hobby for people who have time. Something I’ve grown frustrated with as my off-wiki life has advanced is that a lot of the people who do have time and interest to rise to the level where they make significant meta contributions to the project also tend to lack an appreciation for what can be easily done by volunteers and what really should be punted to the WMF. I’m not talking about UCOC, but stuff like figuring out what is actually libelous; what is and isn’t a copyright violation on commons for the purposes of risk, the decision on whether or not to block users reported to emergency@ who are potential threats to themselves, etc. Yeah, the WMF can be a hammer, but there’s also a decently long list of things a professional organization could reasonably do that they’re not doing in part because it’s someone who may of may not be qualified’s hobby.

Part of this is that the WMF has done its absolute best to send anything where they could possibly draw on section 230 protections back to the community to decide, part of it is that they’ve overacted in areas they shouldn’t (see superprotect and FRAM), and part of it is that active new admins/arbs/functs attract the type of people who want to to handle a lot of the complicated bureaucracy themselves. This isn’t a criticism of anyone in particular, but I think there’s a sense of wanting to do something that makes it difficult to develop a sense of what our limits are as a volunteer community. It’s also not an area I really see a solution to. TonyBallioni (talk) 17:50, 19 February 2021 (UTC)

It's more complicated than that. The domination of Wikipedia decision-making by the class of 06–08 means that most of those who are making policy have completely valid reasons not to trust the WMF with anything involving either nuanced decisions, cultural sensitivites, or handling sensitive personal data. The reluctance of the big established wikis to give the WMF authority over e.g deciding whether to block users reported to emergency@wikimedia isn't just cultural interia or a knee-jerk distaste for centralizing authority in a decentralized project; it's also a conscious balancing of whether it's better to trust committees of volunteers who may not have full competence (in either the literal or legal sense) but at least have some kind of audit trail and oversight in place, or to trust the black-box of the WMF whose processes are entirely opaque and which we know for certain includes amongst its employees some people who shouldn't be trusted with scissors let alone sensitive personal information. ‑ Iridescent 05:08, 23 February 2021 (UTC)

Arbcom in action? Martinevans123 (talk) 20:55, 25 February 2021 (UTC)

2000's dad rock

Would you mind providing a copy of the deleted "Landfill indie" article, either via user space or email. Had it red linked and authoritatively cited in Andrew Harrison (journalist), but found on creation it had been earlier deleted. Its a thing (Rolling Stone, VICE, Guardian, etc) and am still that bitter after Britpop and the abysmal following 15 years of UK adult orientated soft guitar pop. Ceoil (talk) 01:52, 17 January 2021 (UTC)

@Ceoil: In its entirety, the wikitext was:

{{notability|Music|date=January 2012}}
{{Merge to|Indie rock|discuss=Talk:Indie rock#Merger proposal|date=September 2012}}
{{dicdef}}
{{Orphan|date=January 2011}}
'''Landfill indie''' was a phrase coined by the journalist Andrew Harrison of the defunct magazine ''[[The Word (magazine)|The Word]]''.<ref>{{cite web|last=Robinson|first=Peter|title=All killer no landfiller|url=http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/jan/17/florence-and-the-machine-indie|publisher=The Guardian}}</ref> [[Simon Reynolds]] of the [[The Guardian]] described the phrase as a [[meme]] in 2010:

"..."Landfill indie" was one of the decade's great [[meme]]s. Coined by Andrew Harrison of ''[[The Word (magazine)|The Word]]'', it captured that sense of alarming overproduction, the gross excess of supply over demand. All these bands! Where did they come from? Why did they bother? Couldn't they tell they were shit?"<ref>{{cite web|last=Reynolds|first=Simon|title=Simon Reynolds's Notes on the noughties: Clearing up the indie landfill|url=http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2010/jan/04/clearing-up-indie-landfill|publisher=The Guardian}}</ref>

Also writing for the [[The Guardian]] in 2012 music journalist [[Paul Lester]] described a level of disconfort with using the phrase in an article reviewing [[Malaysia]]n [[singer-songwriter]] [[Yuna (singer)|Yuna]]:

"We were always a bit uncomfortable with the term "landfill indie" because we felt it was just a convenient way for journalists to get out of the tedious business of having to listen to a new band closely. Why bother when you could, metaphorically speaking, just toss them in the dumper? Trouble was, those indie outfits, like any acts speciously grouped together, had, on closer inspection, less in common than was first supposed."<ref>{{cite web|last=Lester|first=Paul|title=New Band of the day|url=http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/may/03/new-band-day-yuna|work=Yuna (No 1,263)|publisher=The Guardian}}</ref>

The level of usage of the phrase amongst the wider public is unclear.

==References==
{{reflist}}

[[Category:Pejoratives]]
[[Category:Indie music]]
[[Category:British styles of music]]


To comply with the copyright gods without either unilaterally restoring something deleted at AfD, or cluttering my talkpage with a long list nobody cares about, open the edit window and the full edit history is here as a hidden text comment—if you do think you can rescue the article and that it's worth rescuing, let me know and I'll restore the full history. It's a legitimate topic for an article—if we can have an article on twee pop we can definitely have one on landfill indie—but I can't fault any of the participants in Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Landfill indie for choosing to delete it. As it stands there's literally nothing to put it in any kind of context and make it clear that the term referred to a specific and recognisable genre and wasn't just a meme for "music I don't like". (On that note, I'll never pass up the chance to share this tribute from the bubblegum punk scene to the landfill indie scene. I'm reliably informed that Chris Evans was so offended he still refuses to speak to anyone involved with it 20 years later.) ‑ Iridescent 06:26, 17 January 2021 (UTC)

The revived article is dreadful and totally misses the point, to be honest as expected, so apologies. Have moved it nonetheless my sandbox...so you can feel free to de-clog your talk. Re guilty Chris Evans moment...and do have worse; Pete Waterman hires athletic northern strippers to dance to, for some reason, the seminal 1988 acid house classic Stakker Humanoid on the The Hit Man and Her. Ceoil (talk) 06:52, 17 January 2021 (UTC)

pps, I'm long won over to Helen Love. Ceoil (talk) 06:54, 17 January 2021 (UTC)

I managed to miss The Hit Man and Her (although I got here just in time for The Word), but am occasionally shocked by clips of it in a "people used to watch this?" way. BTW if you still have the 80s/90s indie groups on your watchlist, be prepared for BLP-geddon when this finally gets released. ‑ Iridescent 15:11, 17 January 2021 (UTC)

I wished they would have asked me to cast. Ewen Bremner as Alan McGee=; sedated Jack Black as Dick Green; Guy Chadwick by nudist Matthew McConaughey; special guests Proposition Joe as "Slaughter" Joe Foster, Judas Iscariot as Ed Ball, Kevin the Teenager as the members of Ride, and God the Father as Kevin Shields. Ceoil (talk) 02:15, 18 January 2021 (UTC)

I'd love to have been a fly on the wall when they broke the news to McGee:

"Great news Alan, you're going to be played by the actor from Trainspotting"

"Wonderful, the bloke who's now a global superstar?"

"No, the other one"

"Oh, the fella who starred in Grey's Anatomy?"

"No, the other one"

"Right, you mean the guy from The Full Monty who then played the lead role in Once Upon a Time for seven years?

"No, the other one"

"So, you mean the man who plays Sherlock Holmes in Elementary?"

"No, the other one"

"You mean the one who throughout the whole movie and its sequel was the subject of a running gag about how pasty and dopey-looking he was, and whose entire subsequent career has consisted of a bunch of bit parts in really bad movies?"

"Aye, him"

 ‑ Iridescent 14:49, 18 January 2021 (UTC)

McGee had a very hard crash himself after his major label coke money ran out, and being portrayed by -in his view- the worst actor in Scotland (TM), may be just one other fact he has to deal with[6] (obv not actually;, the casting alas is just in my twisted dreams, for now). Personally, I don't care for the man, he seems to have blindly lucked into a lot of his successes, and mangled quite a few others, so think, in the immortal words of Mr Burns, dude was not quite the "brilliant tactician we thought he was at the time". Still, wouldn't be wading into any of the associated articles; a bio pic is hardly a new RS; righteous Indie pop Armageddon might not be quite on or doorsteps just yet. Ceoil (talk) 02:08, 24 January 2021 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) Trawling YouTube again (as if I would ever lower myself, of course... ) for "Landfill indie" I find Chester-Le-Street quintet Catweasels (no, not the 1990s Swedish neo-prog-rock quartet Catweazle) who apparently were likened to The Futureheads in their day.... Martinevans123 (talk) 14:04, 24 January 2021 (UTC)

And there you have it. If the article passes the "Martinevans has made a quip about it" test, its a thing. This is a hill I will now march towards dying upon. Cheers Martin my fried. Ceoil (talk)

Martin my fried – How unappetizing. EEng 21:49, 24 January 2021 (UTC)

Spectaculos! Eínai kouzína Anglaterros!! "Unlucky" Alf Evans123 (talk) 22:49, 24 January 2021 (UTC)

ps, the next ladder is that EEng makes a landfill based pun. Tap, tap; drums fingers. If that happens, I will take to FAC, out of sheer deviliness and fucking spite, against Futureheads specifically, and EE generally. Ceoil (talk) 21:16, 24 January 2021 (UTC)

Indie landfill

Paleface landfill

EEng 21:58, 24 January 2021 (UTC)

To register, nearly choked when saw this, and almost a week later am still giggling. Ceoil (talk) 23:31, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

..... and somewhere in between, but definitely not Landfill Indie. Martinevans123 (talk) 22:11, 24 January 2021 (UTC)

Hopefully we won't get BLP-geddon, but this isn't just any biopic but a biopic by the Irvine Welsh/Danny Boyle combo, so is going to get more interest than it deserves. At minimum I'd expect a bunch of ageing Guardian readers using Wikipedia as a battleground to refight tired Oasis/Blur/Pulp arguments, while Television Personalities is always going to be a libel case waiting to happen given the combination of who Dan Treacey and Ed Ball are, and the lack of high-quality sources that actually document them. (If I had my way, I'd have pre-emptively salted Dan Treacy a decade ago. He's undoubtedly notable—possibly the most notable musician I can think of who doesn't have a Wikipedia biography—but no possible good could come of lifting that particular rock.) ‑ Iridescent 17:29, 25 January 2021 (UTC)

I always felt that Longpigs were unfairly maligned in that Helen Love song by being lumped in with the other relentlessly mediocre bands mentioned, which I suspect was mainly because their lead singer was (a) called Crispin, and (b) had a name which lent itself to rhyming malarkey. There were plenty more that could have been chucked in there, though. How Razorlight once headlined Reading Festival is something that probably should have been investigated by law enforcement. Black Kite (talk) 22:05, 24 January 2021 (UTC)

Razorlight at Reading, really? The year Glastonbury was headlined by Kings of Leon, The Verve and Jay-Z didn't do it for you? ‑ Iridescent 17:29, 25 January 2021 (UTC)

I haven't been to Glastonbury since I started working in education since I'd miss half of it. My last one was 2000 (Bowie, Pet Shop Boys and I had to look up the 3rd headliner as I obviously didn't see them ... oh God, Travis). Black Kite (talk) 22:56, 25 January 2021 (UTC)

Have decided not to get bogged down in landfill indie. Have no problem with with the "twee-pop" label however; a lot of English bands were deliberately aiming for the effect - it was the Smiths era, when over sensitivity (mother's apron strings) was often confused with culture and intelligence. And a lot of the music is great. Re TV personalities, yeah am watching and have rewritten the main article and some of the sub-pages, effectively trying to OWN tbh, least sensationalist stuff creeps in. If a Tracey page of that type is started it would not likely survive ADF; have seem very little of his hard times substantiated by first hand accounts...its all 'rumored' this, 'heard' that. Where it might slip in is in little read late 2000s album articles...eg there was a lot of speculation around the time of the (provocatively titled) My Dark Places (album). Ceoil (talk) 01:27, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

I have no issue at all with the "twee pop" label—they were consciously aiming for the twee effect, it's not derogatory—but I dispute that they were all trying to play the "sensitive" card in the wake of the Smiths. Most of your C86 bands (and fellow travellers like Talulah Gosh) and their present day successors weren't so much trying to be sensitive, as reacting against post-punk and electronica, and trying to recapture the spirit of the pre-MES 70s when "indie" and "snarling" weren't synonyms. If the UK indie scene had a famiy tree, there would be pretty much a straight line from Paul McCartney & Ray Davies, to Gary Numan & Marc Almond, to Amelia Fletcher and David Gedge, to Thom Yorke and Jarvis Cocker, to Arlo Parks and Alt-J.

Dan T would be a interesting subject for a biography (much more interesting than McGee) if someone could get him to talk on the record, but otherwise it's too much of a BLP minefield. I've seen enough of him—and heard enough horror stories from other people—that I'm willing to believe that virtually every claim is true, but all of it's based on hearsay. I'll be interested to see how the film handles him. ‑ Iridescent 09:32, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

To sort of go back to the original opening for the thread, tempted to start an article on Plague Raves. Its unsurprising that both the music and gangly, poser audience at these things arealways dreadful; most if not all of the DJ's were closely associated with the 2018-2019 [also bitterly derided] "Business techno" scene, which I had been earlier tempted to gather into a dedicated article so as to shame these people, but of course I am too sweet for that. Perhaps am now in my grumpy old man, decline, phase, and Shite is the future. Ceoil (talk) 00:49, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

Is it that the scene has got worse, or is that we're now older and thus more likely to be listening sober, and thus in turn realising how bad of the stuff they play at clubs and raves is ("rare vinyl" and "exclusive track" are usually just code for "so bad no label would release it") and just what proportion of the audience consists of drugged-up posers? Most scenes were mostly shit—for every cutting-edge band or DJ there was a hundred third-rate impostors and for every Berlin Chicago there was a thousand grim sheds with names like Dino's or Legends. ‑ Iridescent 04:45, 23 February 2021 (UTC)

eh no, plague raves are large events held in breach of co-vid restrictions. Ceoil (talk) 01:48, 26 February 2021 (UTC)

Would You Mind Providing a Reason For Deleting Thunderhead Novel By Neal Shusterman?

I would to recreate that article and would just like to know why the article was deleted so I can avoid that problem. Thanks! — Preceding unsigned comment added by VideoGameMovie (talk • contribs)

As per the message you saw when you visited Thunderhead (Shusterman novel) (which you must have seen or you wouldn't have known it was me that deleted it), it was deleted because the page was a word-for-word cut and paste from this website. For legal reasons, we can't host any material to which somebody else holds the copyright unless that material has been released under an appropriate licence, and even then we have to make it clear that we're copying somebody else's text. Neither I nor anybody else could restore this page no matter how much we wanted to, since even if it was subsequently rewritten, by keeping the copyright violation in the history it would still be visible and this we'd still be publishing it; if you feel this is a topic that warrants a Wikipedia article, you'll need to write it from scratch in your own words. ‑ Iridescent 12:42, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

Armorial of Bishops of Chester

I wasn't sure, and perhaps I should have simply left a question on an admin's page. So, escutcheons are okay to copy verbatim? If this were a list of say, trees, would it be okay to copy the trees' description from the source verbatim? Thanks for your help. Onel5969 ^{TT me} 14:52, 6 March 2021 (UTC)

There's not a hard-and-fast answer, as it would depend on both when the description of the trees was written, and to what extent there was a degree of originality. One can copyright writing but one can't copyright facts, so if the list was just "Quercus robur, Oak, flowering tree native to northern Europe; Pinus palustris, Longleaf pine, pine species native to eastern North America" and so on it wouldn't be copyrightable, but if it was "Quercus robur, Oak, a mighty and long-lived tree found across northern Europe buy most closely associated with maritime societies owing to its historic suitability for building warships and consequently having become a symbol of maritime supremacy; Pinus palustris, Longleaf pine, a tree which formerly grew in abundance in what is now the Deep South, as a ready source of easily-worked lumber and of waterproofing pitch it allowed European settlement without the need to import building materials and consequently is an official symbol of many areas despite being rarely found in the present day" there would be enough originality to make it copyrightable, in which case you'd need to look at when it was written and the status of the license. For historical heraldry topics it's unlikely if not impossible that the material would be in copyright—there's usually only one way to formally describe an escutcheon, and most of them will be centuries-old in any event; if an out-of-copyright list has been imported from elsewhere then attribution is a case of good manners rather than legal liability. (I generally think we should always attribute, to allow people to track errors should there be any copied from the source, but that's good practice rather than law.)

I will say that I think 99% of heraldry articles are about as useful as feet on a fish and that if anyone really wants to see the arms of assorted Bishops of Chester they should be looking on the Diocese of Chester website, not Wikipedia, but that's just me. ‑ Iridescent 15:29, 6 March 2021 (UTC)

I'd be pretty amazed if they covered it at all - not the sort of thing the forward-looking CofE wants to appoint an Outreach Coordinator for. Johnbod (talk) 17:52, 6 March 2021 (UTC)

Personally, I'd think the CofE would want their website to host as much uncontroversial material as possible on the history of the Bishop of Chester, in the hope of squeezing a certain unpleasantness out of the search results. ‑ Iridescent 04:52, 7 March 2021 (UTC)

Iridescent is correct that there's almost always one and only one correct blazon for a given coat of arms; it's like the rules that allow us to translate a chemical structure into an IUPAC name. There's no room for creative scope or expression. (In heraldry, that comes from creating an image based on a blazon.) If you show the Scrope coat of arms to ten competent heralds, all of them will blazon it as "azure a bend or". By contrast, no two botanists are likely to write the exact same description of longleaf pine, even though they all agree on what it is. Choess (talk) 19:07, 6 March 2021 (UTC)

Wow... thank you Iridescent, Johnbod, and Choess - for your thoughtful answers. Don't come across these often in NPP, but will remember for the future. And thanks again Iridescent for explaining it so thoroughly. Onel5969 ^{TT me} 23:18, 6 March 2021 (UTC)

Where "facts are uncopyrightable, originality is copyrightable" does come up quite often on Wikipedia is with maps. If a map is strictly geographic one can copy its layout (although not the exact image), but if it's stylised in any way the design becomes copyright—thus, we can show a London Underground map that shows the actual geographic position of the tracks without any concern, but the familiar "Tube Map" layout we can only host as a non-free image with the station names intentionally unreadable so as to make it useless. ‑ Iridescent 05:17, 7 March 2021 (UTC)

Quick cemetery question

Do you know if Brockley and Ladywell cemeteries were originally separate? I think there were/are two Crosses of Sacrifice, one here and one here. The latter has co-ords on it. Not 100% sure where they are within the cemetery boundaries. Both by roads. The Brockley one by a chapel. Carcharoth (talk) 20:33, 24 February 2021 (UTC)

Yes—they were originally two separate cemeteries (Brockley for Deptford and Ladywell for Lewisham) on opposite sides of an orchard (they each have their own CWGC plot, CoS etc), with a wall built to divide them. When the cemeteries were laid out Lewisham also bought the orchard in case more land was needed, and they duly cleared it and expanded Ladywell after WWI. Three of the four chapels were destroyed in WWII (the surviving one is Ladywell Nonconformist), and after the war the wall was removed and the cemeteries merged. If you look at the plan of the internal paths and avenues on a map you can see that the two halves were laid out independently; at ground level, there's still a raised earthwork the length of the cemetery where the dividing wall used to be. (As a very rough rule of thumb, if the grave is surrounded by trees it's Brockley, if the grave is surrounded by grass it's Ladywell.) ‑ Iridescent 07:40, 25 February 2021 (UTC)

Thank you. Very useful mini-history there. While I am on the topic, sort of, can I ask (I know I should really ask the CWGC) if you have any idea why their definition of 'London' appears a bit strange? If you go here and put 'London' as the locality you get 72 cemeteries (if you also put 'United Kingdom' as the country as well as locality 'London', you get 43 results). But some obvious ones are missing. Actually, I think I have answered my own question, apparently I need to put the four London-bordering home counties (Middlesex [127], Surrey [250], Kent [446], and Essex [420]) in separately to get those cemeteries that are in Greater London and within the boundaries of those counties (presumably a consequence of the changes in county definitions over the years), but there is no way that I can see to separate them out from the ones in the non-London parts. Though it is possible to view the results as a map, which may help. Carcharoth (talk) 21:24, 25 February 2021 (UTC)

They appear to be using the pre-1965 county boundaries. Thus, the East London Cemetery is shown as Essex owing to the kink in the lower Lea which swung the old Essex boundary to the west, Saddleworth is still shown as an outpost of Yorkshire rather than in Manchester… There's a sort of logic to deliberately using the historic rather than the current boundaries in that it means they don't need to update the site next time the boundaries change, which they do surprisingly often. (Plus, 99% of the occupants of their cemeteries lived and died under the 1889–1965 boundaries. Continuing to do business in the old money avoids the risk of upsetting relatives who take offence that their uncle Derek who lived, died and was buried in Barnet and was always a proud Hertfordshire lad is listed under "London". It also makes the historic links between particular cemeteries and individual regiments more obvious.) ‑ Iridescent 05:57, 26 February 2021 (UTC)

*cough* Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 15:39, 26 February 2021 (UTC)

"Don't get me started"

Don't get me started. Feel free to watchlist WT:LONDON and join in next time one of those people pops up insisting that "there's no such thing as Greater London"; we haven't had one for about three months so we must be due another. I imagine Merseyside, Greater Manchester, Tyne & Wear, Cumbria, West Midlands—and any other place where local officials have dared to suggest that boundaries drawn by Alfred the Great on the basis of which warlord occupied the land in the year 878 are no longer the most rational basis for determining local government districts—have exactly the same issue with these people. ‑ Iridescent 19:24, 26 February 2021 (UTC)

It's a can of worms alright, but it's a little more subtle than what you're suggesting. The Greater London argument is silly - no reasonable person disagrees with that, and to a lesser extent, so is Merseyside and Greater Manchester. However, I don't think anyone living in Rochester, Chatham and Gillingham cares that much that they have an independent section of local government, but to suggest it's wrong to put "Rochester, Kent" on a letter will just irritate people. Similarly, ask people in Hull or Cleethorpes how they feel about Humberside. Northern Ireland's done it properly - the historic counties have no relation whatsoever with the local government district areas, nobody pretends they're the same thing, and nobody starts a feud about it. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 10:56, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

Of course they don't, they're too busy arguing about London/Derry. Johnbod (talk) 15:35, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

Yup—if I had to pick an example of a place where "nobody starts a feud over borders", my first thought isn't going to be "Northern Ireland". The London boroughs might be a reasonable example of historic boundaries being done away with without any loud objections—you don't see "abolish Camden and bring back the metropolitan boroughs of Hampstead, Holborn, and St Pancras" activists—although even the old boroughs were relatively recent creations and didn't have the sense of identity that comes from sports teams, local army regiments and so on. AFAIK Scotland is relatively free of this kind of thing—at least, I've never heard of any "bring back Peeblesshire!" campaigners—although that may just be that I see a lot more of England and Wales than I do of Scotland. ‑ Iridescent 17:46, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

Northumberland

Durham

Lancashire

Cheshire

Derbs.

Notts.

Lincolnshire

Leics.

Staffs.

Shropshire

Warks.

Northants.

Norfolk

Suffolk

Essex

Herts.

Beds.

Bucks.

Oxon.

Glos.

Somerset

Wiltshire

Berkshire

Kent

Surrey

Hampshire

Dorset

Devon

Cornwall

Heref.

Worcs.

Bristol

East Riding
of Yorkshire

Rutland

Cambs.

Greater
London

Not shown: City of London

Tyne &
Wear

Cumbria

North Yorkshire

South
Yorks.

West
Yorkshire

Greater
Manc.

Merseyside

East
Sussex

West
Sussex

Isle of
Wight

West
Midlands

But the Medway towns are still in Kent for the purposes of the lieutenancies (see right), and thus "Rochester, Kent" isn't incorrect. Where one gets problems with the new boundaries is places like Romford with its strong Essex identity but nominally in London, along the arbitrary Scouse–Manc border around Newton-le-Willows, or places like Appleby in now-abolished counties that refuse to admit they've been absorbed by their neighbour. (Personally I blame Penguin Books who spent about fifty years keeping up a dogged insistence on "Harmondsworth, Middlesex", presumably on the grounds that "Harmondsworth, Middlesex" sounds like a quaint country village rather than the grim industrial estate between the Immigration Removals Centre and a long-stay car park that was the reality.) ‑ Iridescent 12:59, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

To some extent, it's a question of perception. I regularly talk about friends in Ewell, South West London (which is technically false if geographically approximately true) and nobody bats an eyelid. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 22:50, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

If I were in charge, I'd make the M25 the formal boundary—it makes much more sense than the current completely arbitrary border which in some stretches still follows the limits of the conquests of the Great Heathen Army. I could make a decent case for defining "London" as "anywhere within the TfL fare zones"—all your Epsoms, Watfords, Sloughs and Waltham Crosses are part of London for all practical purposes—although Sussex would scream blue murder at losing their Gatwick cash cow. ‑ Iridescent 16:40, 28 February 2021 (UTC)

"Penguins in Middlesex are people too, you know!!" Martinevans123 (talk) 13:31, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

In a related question (well, very loosely related), the 2021 series of Grand Designs (Channel 4) features a build in a "Victorian cemetery in South-West London" (based around the gatekeeper's lodge). It should be fairly easy to work out which cemetery, especially as there is an aerial shot of the cemetery towards the end of the programme (with skyscrapers in central London visible in the distance), but I have not yet worked out which cemetery it is. Maybe it is a fairly loose definition of 'south-west London'. Eye-watering sums of money spent by a scion of the Maxwell Stuart/Traquair family. Carcharoth (talk) 19:15, 27 February 2021 (UTC) Found it now. The football ground fairly nearby gave it away. Carcharoth (talk) 20:41, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

Was it Fulham Palace Road? There were certainly a swarm of diggers and workmen hanging around the old lodge a few months ago. FPR has always been a bit of a ginger stepchild, being only a few minutes walk from the Margravine which is much more photogenic, and with most of Fulham's residents actually buried in North Sheen so the locals don't have much reason to visit FPR. ‑ Iridescent 16:25, 28 February 2021 (UTC)

So you're trying to say that Fulham Palace Road has no soul?? Shame on you, Ire! Martinevans123 (talk) 21:35, 28 February 2021 (UTC)

That's the one. The build took four years (paused for three months at the start of the pandemic). Our article is at Fulham Cemetery. The programme-makers pay lip service to the privacy of the people doing these (self-)builds as sometimes you do get gawkers as in the case of the converted water tower where the owner lifted his curtain blinds the day after the programme aired to the sight of 50+ people taking photos of it. In this case, some of the architects/garden designers have let the cat out of the bag, so to speak, see here. Some news reports name the council and the cemetery. And it is possible to book to stay there as well: see here (I'd never heard of 'Plum Guide' before). The council did deny planning permission for a gate onto the cemetery, as it would have potentially offended those buried nearby (or something). Carcharoth (talk) 20:06, 28 February 2021 (UTC)

(talk page stalker)Ah yes, gates and access. Near me at East Finchley Cemetery all of the useful and convenient "informal" ways through to the cemetery from Coldfall Wood have been blocked up, very sternly, since the pandemic. Presumably this is to avoid the living infecting the dead with Covid-19, or perhaps the other way round ... DBaK (talk) 20:19, 28 February 2021 (UTC)

All the larger cemeteries that are still in use for burials were sealed and secured at the start of the first lockdown. If the first wave had peaked much higher, before the NHS and coroners had infrastructure in place, there was a genuine possibility the burial systems would have been overwhelmed and the cemetery chapels turned into temporary coffin-stacking storage facilities (it happened in Germany, which had a lower first peak and has reasonably efficient and well-funded systems); the last thing the government wanted is people wandering about in those circumstances. Even without the worst case, there are practical reasons to seal off all but the main entrances to parks, cemeteries and other open spaces; it allows them to monitor how many people are coming and going to make sure a particular facility isn't getting too crowded, and discouraged people from breaching rule-of-six back when they thought the main transmission vector was outdoor airborne transmission. (Plus, preventing people using open spaces as a shortcut means fewer people littering and fewer people using them as impromptu toilets, reducing the strain on council staff who are well below minimum strength given that the same council crews are also the people responsible for mass testing, rebuilding the roads to put in the emergency segration lanes and so on.) ‑ Iridescent 08:01, 1 March 2021 (UTC)

Thank you for the first coherent account of this logic that I have read! Cheers DBaK (talk) 23:10, 1 March 2021 (UTC)

Different cemetery now, but this image is of the grave of "Nelly" (with N.H. at the top) said to be "the beloved wife of the cebrated Turkish poet Abdulhak Hamid Bey, who died at Isleworth the 8th February 1911 in her 42nd year". That is Abdülhak Hâmid Tarhan, where the article mentions his second wife Nelly. That was an unexpected find! Carcharoth (talk) 22:08, 28 February 2021 (UTC)

Grave of George Richard Bond (d. 4 May 1934 aged 1yr 5mths), Woodgrange Park Cemetery

I do intend to go through all these and catalogue them at some point, as well as moving them to more sensible titles, but do feel free to label and classify any like this that you see! If you're specifically looking for quirks and oddities—and not at places like Acton or Abney Park where all the noteworthy burials are catalogued and available on display boards or downloadable factsheets—I'd recommend Manor Park, South Ealing and Paddington Old as well as the aforementioned Finchley as the ones to start in London. An honourable mention for Woodgrange Park as well, which has a peculiar atmosphere even by graveyard standards—it's not derelict (and indeed still in use for burials) but so well-hidden even the locals don't know it's there, and the older half has the look and feel of a horror film set. ‑ Iridescent 07:53, 1 March 2021 (UTC)

Crosses of Sacrifice

Thanks for the tips and pointers. One final question for now (as need to get back to some other things): Brompton Cemetery appears not to have a Cross of Sacrifice as far as I can tell. I will add this to my list of things to ask the CWGC at some point, but am I imagining this or not? I have been there at least twice (once for the re-dedication of the grave of Johannes Zukertort - for some reason I seem to have failed to upload a picture - not to worry as you took a photo!) but I don't recall there being a Cross of Sacrifice in the CWGC plot, I suspect because this area was (and still is) a plot for the Brigade of Guards, dominated by this cross instead, so I am thinking that the CWGC decided against disturbing that with a 'competing' cross? I had also forgotten about this memorial - and the one that was dedicated there in 2018, see here. Carcharoth (talk) 20:10, 1 March 2021 (UTC)

Chelsea Cross of Sacrifice

The Cross of Sacrifice for Chelsea is at Sloane Square (see right—in the centre of the roundabout, between the tube station and Peter Jones), rather than in the cemetery. Brompton is somewhat sui generis, being owned and administered directly by the Crown rather than by a local authority or private company, and as such there might have been objections on the grounds of protocol regarding building on Crown land. My guess is that the explanation is more prosaic. Brompton Cemetery is very cluttered, and there isn't any obvious open space to erect a big memorial. In the practice of the time (both religious and civil), after 30 years a grave formally reverted to being vacant land after 30 years. (The size of Brookwood was chosen to exactly cover the projected number of deaths in London over a 30-year period for this reason, in the hope it would negate the need to ever build another cemetery.) As such, for most cemeteries large enough to warrant a CoS there was a 19th-century core dating from the time of the Burials Act; thus, if there wasn't either an unused area large enough to accommodate the CoS or a convenient adjacent patch of land that could be added to the cemetery, they just levelled some existing headstones to make space for it. Brompton, by contrast, is by virtue of its location full of the burials of the Great and Good, and there was probably no site that could be cleared that wouldn't have generated howls of protest. (The solution adopted elsewhere in this situation was to put the CoS on an island in the middle of a pathway, but the pedestrian paths at Brompton are very narrow.) ‑ Iridescent 05:36, 4 March 2021 (UTC)

Interesting points. My understanding of the CWGC Crosses of Sacrifice (though undoubtedly exceptions to the 'rules' exist as the CWGC were always flexible to local circumstances) is that from a certain point onwards, cemeteries with 40 or more burials would automatically have a Cross of Sacrifice, but that adaptations were made to the design where appropriate. Some village/parish memorial committees seem to have opted for a Cross of Sacrifice design for their memorials (they would have had to agree this separately with Reginald Blomfield, as far as I am aware, and those negotiations would not have not involved the CWGC at all except maybe to facilitate communication). These CoS memorials will be the ones that say "dedicated to the memory of .... of this parish/village" and usually with a (fairly short) list of names on the base (a good example of this is the one in Blomfield's home town). This is why you will see such memorials in or near cemeteries with less than 40 CWGC burials, or somewhere in the main square of the vilage/town. Some of these memorials that incorporated or were based on a Blomfield Cross of Sacrifice were quite elaborate. The 'standard' CWGC cemetery Cross of Sacrifice in France was replicated in the UK cemeteries with sufficient numbers of CWGC burials, and these ones have text inscribed on them stating this explicitly (and these ones will not have any other text on them or any names on them). The main difference, as far as I can tell, apart from the differing text on the base, is that the CWGC ones are paid for and maintained by the Commission, but the village/parish memorials would have been funded locally. The other use of Blomfield's design that I have come across is its use for individual memorials, which interestingly (well, to me at least) seems to have been in the two instances I have found so far, for memorials to distinguished generals (negotiated by whoever erected them). The two examples I have found are Haig and Currie. There are still other 'different' uses of the CoS design, but that maybe is a story for another day. I should note that most of the above is informed speculation, not sourced to anything specific, though I think I read somewhere that Blomfield's design was favoured by many because of the way the base lent itself to having text inscribed on it (and it may indeed have been designed that way deliberately, though left blank in its core design). I do wonder whether the 'imitations' were just attempts to replicate the "sword on a cross" concept (not that original) in a way that didn't infringe Blomfield's design? Anything with any octagonal-stuff and the same proportions is clearly close enough to be an imitation. Most of those using the exact same design would, I presume, have been authorised, though maybe not all. (Honorable mention to the Maryport memorial design.) Carcharoth (talk) 11:30, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

• 
  Arthur Currie monument (Canada)
• 
  Haig and his wife Dorothy's graves at Dryburgh Abbey and Cross of Sacrifice
• 
  Standard UK cemetery Cross and inscription (Gap Road Cemetery)
• 
  Cross as part of Bath War Memorial
• 
  Cross as a small village memorial (Leaton)
• 
  Wimbledon Common: Blomfield-type cross, but different base and stone?
• 
  Weymouth, Massachusetts: authorised copy or imitation?
• 
  Possible example of a non-Blomfield imitation? (Millicent, South Australia)
• 
  Another non-Blomfield imitation? (Chilworth, Surrey)
• 
  The war memorial in Blomfield's home town of Rye, East Sussex

Everything with 40 CWGC burials was eligible for a Cross of Sacrifice (minus some cemeteries in countries where the cross design was considered insensitive, and not counting Indian and Chinese servicemen who had separate arrangements). Eligibility didn't automatically mean that they were erected there, if there wasn't a suitable site or if for some reason the locals wanted it elsewhere. Paddington Old Cemetery (the one on Willesden Lane) is another nearby example with a high number of CWGC burials (218 according to the CWGC), but without a Cross of Sacrifice on-site—the CoS for Paddington is further up the road in Mill Hill Cemetery. I'd be very surprised if either the National Archives or the London Metropolitan Archives doesn't have a dusty volume somewhere detailing exactly how these things were decided. ‑ Iridescent 15:19, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

I am sure there is something somewhere going into more detail. I am not convinced that there was a concept of a CoS for an 'area' (you say "for Chelsea" and "for Paddington" above). It was probably nothing more than a combination of "standard CWGC provision" + "local memorial committees incorporating the design" + "absences where local circumstances dictated". I don't think anyone was making sure that specific 'areas' had a CoS. Indeed, some areas had more than one CoS if that area had lots of cemeteries. There are also the cemeteries that have a CoS for a WWI plot and another CoS for the WWII plot. These obviously tend to only be the very largest ones. Brookwood Cemetery (as you will know) has this layout. I think City of London Cemetery and Crematorium, Manor Park also has two CoSs (here and here) but still need to double-check that. Carcharoth (talk) 16:34, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

I'm fairly sure a conscious effort was made to ensure that each district got one—I've certainly noticed them in places where the burials are spread across multiple churchyards and thus none meet the 40-burial quota on their own—but don't quote me. It certainly goes the other way in some places like Brighton, where there are multiple cemeteries with a lot of military burials but not all of them get a CoS. (Brighton City Cemetery—not to be confused with the better-known Brighton Borough Cemetery across the road—is well worth a visit if you're ever nearby. Not only does it have an astonishing number of military burials, it's also at the highest point in the area so you have glorious views over the city and across the Channel. The CWGC page makes it look misleadingly small, as hundreds of the burials are of St Dunstan's patients and technically under the administration of Blind Veterans UK rather than the CWGC—example—and thus don't count in the figures.)

As well as separate WWI/WWII plots, there are also oddities like Kensal Green and Brockley/Ladywell where for official purposes the site is technically multiple cemeteries rather than one big cemetery, and each part wanted a memorial of their own; Brookwood falls into this. I'd need to check City of London—I can only think of one Cross of Sacrifice, but it's so sprawling there might well be another somewhere. From memory, it doesn't really have a war graves plot as such; the graves there were allocated chronologically and the war dead are mixed in with anyone else in the City and Bethnal Green who happened to die at the time. I may be wrong though; aside from the old Victorian section around the chapels, I haven't really paid much attention to City of London (it's huge, but to my mind Manor Park and Woodgrange Park around the corner are both more interesting architecturally). ‑ Iridescent 19:28, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

City of London is interesting. Sometimes I wonder if images get miscategorised when people confuse cemeteries with similar names, or close to each other, or don't realise that some inner areas have cemeteries further out. Could you check the two images I linked above for City of London (I think they are the Manor Park cemetery) to see if they are: (a) in the right cemetery; and (b) actually two separate CoSs. Good point about the blind veterans. Finally, I made some edits to Brigade of Guards and Chelsea Pensioners that you might want to review/add to. I hope to add more on the memorial inscriptions later if I have time, and there is the epitaph on Nelly's grave that I am going to try and track down as well. Oh, and this made me chuckle (the file name!). :-) Carcharoth (talk) 12:57, 6 March 2021 (UTC)

Neither of the two you link above is Manor Park Cemetery (as opposed to City of London Cemetery, Manor Park); the Cross of Sacrifice at Manor Park is quite distinctive as the Screen Wall has black panels and curves around the Cross, while the CoS at Woodgrange Park is also quite distinctive as it has two Screen Walls (a WWI one behind the cross, and a WWII one in front of it). There are a lot of cemeteries in the area, as it's at the junction of multiple railway lines (19th-century extramural cemeteries were almost invariably on railway lines so bodies and mourners could get there); as well as City of London, Manor Park and Woodgrange Park you also have West Ham Cemetery, West Ham Jewish Cemetery and Plashet Cemetery within a 10 minute walk, and the sprawling East London Cemetery, Tower Hamlets Cemetery, Ilford Cemetery, East Ham Cemetery and East Ham Jewish Cemetery (plus the now-cleared Victoria Park Cemetery) within easy walking distance; I'd need to go to City of London and see for myself to be absolutely sure as it's perfectly possible someone has mislabelled a photo somewhere along the line. ‑ Iridescent 15:01, 6 March 2021 (UTC)

(adding) I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment behind this file name. Of all the various vile people I've had to deal with in connection with Wikipedia, the gaggle of nutcases who used to run Brookwood are firmly at the top of the list. ‑ Iridescent 15:57, 6 March 2021 (UTC)

And I thought you were the only one to feel that way about Brookwood's former owners... :-) I do need to look at a map for some of these clusters of cemeteries. Thanks for the earlier pointer to Brighton. I spotted a Belgian grave among your photos, and a poignant epitaph (aren't they all?) here - usually those are taken from some existing poetry, but here I can't find that. "Cut down like a flower in lovely bloom / The early tenant of the tomb / Let us prepare, for we know not how soon / The morning flowers may fade at noon." The closest I can get is (bizarrely) a comment on an obituary page for a female British Airways Concorde pilot who died in 2011, and the epitaph that reads in part "Let youth prepare , for oh how soon The morning flower may fade at noon" (from an 1856 travelogue by Samuel I. Prime). It might be an epitaph that combines several separate elements, or composed from half-remembered passages, or it might be original (i.e. produced independently by different people at different times). Some of these epitaphs take on a life of their own. Getting back to the Crosses of Sacrifice, any clarification would be welcome, but not strictly needed (I could check myself at some point). Carcharoth (talk) 22:01, 6 March 2021 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) – apropos of the filename, can I just say blimey? Some wrath there. Gosh. DBaK (talk) 22:05, 6 March 2021 (UTC)

Before the local council took control of it a couple of years ago, Brookwood's owners were somewhat unusual characters, and I unfortunately encountered them when writing London Necropolis Company. The BLP policy (and a distinct lack of enthusiasm to have any further dealings with them) prevents much discussion of the family, but this Google search should serve as a primer. ‑ Iridescent 04:43, 7 March 2021 (UTC)

Good Heavens! I had a look at some of those links. I'm flabbergasted, and keep having moments of wondering if I'd stumbled into a rather bad novel. Thank you (erm, I think) for sharing this, ehmmmm, fascinating information with me! I mean. Gosh. Best wishes DBaK (talk) 21:43, 7 March 2021 (UTC)

Pär Olofsson

LOL, I must say, you could have fooled me! :) I even went through the article and editor histories and convinced myself 100% it was a genuine fake. Cheers, --DoubleGrazing (talk) 14:46, 6 March 2021 (UTC)

PS: Now I'm curious... do you happen to know what sort of music it is?

Belarusian death metal; it's quite common for older bands and albums in the genre to have ridiculous names. With the advent of voice-controlled systems it's largely died out, as it's not practical to say "Hey Siri/Alexa/Google, play Prajecyrujučy Sinhuliarnaje Wypramieńwańnie Daktryny Absaliutnaha J Usiopahłynaĺnaha Zła Skroź Šaścihrannuju Pryzmu Sîn-Ahhī-Erība Na Hipierpawierchniu Zadyjakaĺnaha Kaŭčęha Zasnawaĺnikaŭ Kosmatęchničnaha Ordęna Palieakantakta, Najstaražytnyja Ipastasi Dawosiewych Cywilizacyj Prywodziać U Ruch Ręzanansny Transfarmatar Časowapadobnaj Biaskoncaści Budučyni U Ćwiardyniach Absierwatoryi Nwn-Hu-Kek-Amon, Uwasabliajučy Ŭ Ęfirnuju Matęryju Prach Ałulima Na Zachad Ad Ękzapłaniety PSRB 1620-26b by Eximperituserqethhzebibšiptugakkathšulweliarzaxułum.

If you're curious, the tracklisting for the album is:

1. Transhręsiŭnaje Ŭšęście Ęn-Miendurana Skroź Pramianistuju Dęĺtu Wialikaha Architęktara Al-Sadirah Minujučy Modusy Času Ankh-F-N-Khonsu, Niewiadomaha Wartaŭnika Wuzłoŭ Maa-Atef-F, Da Abicieli Adąda, Wysmaĺwajučaha Trysmiehičnym Wiedańniem Mistęryj Sęfitaŭ Arual-Jøruvalla Dahmatyčnaje Traktawańnie Paradoksu Fiermi J Pryčynnuju Dynamičnuju Tryjanhuliacyju Ancitętyki Ęŭklida, Pierasliedujučy Pieraradžęńnie Ŭnutrana Razdwojenaha Čystaha Rozumu Ŭ Branach Chaohnozisa Ŭrytry, Pasrodkam Spaścižęńnia Katęchizisa, Rytuaĺnych Samahubstwaŭ Aghōra, Imia Jakomu: N = R ∙ ƒρ∙ ne∙ ƒl∙ ƒi∙ ƒc∙ L
2. Imknieńnie Apantanaści Hniewu Sębęka Da Słupoŭ Twaręńnia Ruin Aššurbanipała Skroź Zabaronieny Šliach Ęmpiryjakrytycyzmu Miedytatyŭnych Pahłyblieńniaŭ Ćiomnych Zaklinaĺnikaŭ Pustyni Ŭšęścia Płutona, Uchiliajučy Tęliemičnyja Tęaręmy Skarabiejaŭ Małoj Kaliaśnicy Atmāna, Pierapyniŭšych Biaskoncy Łancuh Ręinkarnacyj, Adwaryŭšy Apahanieny Kupał Pifaharyjanskaha Pałancira Snoŭ Zmiainych Wačęj Uładara Much, Jaki Zachoŭwaje Paroh Apošniaha Wyhnańnia Nefėrkeperųre Wąenre Ęchnatona
3. Da Pytańniaŭ Ab Suziraĺnym Paznańni Naradžęńnia Trahiedyi J Niaŭchiĺnaści Hibeli Isnaha Ŭ Wučeńni Anihiliacyi, Jak Pra Pieršaęliemienty Praŭdziwaj Pryrody Askietyčnych Praliehamienaŭ Mižhałaktyčnaha Smutku Smierciśćwiardžajučaj Mudraści Šapienhaŭęra, Jakaja Kuje Apakatastasičnym Połymiem Hietęradaksaĺnaha Katarsisu Artęryi Mietafizičnych Siłahizmaŭ U Liazo Liucyfieryjanskaha Rozumu J Akaŭzaĺnaha Waliuntaryzmu, Zwiartajučy Ŭ Prach Saliarnyja Zikkuraty Apošniaha Świtańnia Nadychodziačaj Juhi Nicšęanstwa
4. Akružany Parallieĺnymi Cykłami Biaźmiežnaści Śmierci Baâl Wadalieja Nakiroŭwaje Wypaliennyja Wačnicy Kosmakarkasaŭ Pachawaĺnych Piramid Pa Toj Bok Miež Twaręńnia Asliapliajučych Promńiaŭ Mietatrona Da Sciakajučych Krywioj Klinapisnych Skryžaliaŭ Sparchniełych Prarokaŭ Skasoŭwajučy Samu Mętazhodnaść Byćcia Jak Pryncyp Wieĺmiiłžywaj Zdoĺnaści Mierkawańnia Jakaja Nie Maje Ab'jektyŭnaha Sęnsu, Pryčyny, Iściny J Kaštoŭnaści
5. Somnambuličnyja Tulliańni Karawanaŭ Ziłlijonnamiesiacowych Rozumazrokaŭ Žracoŭ Ïrminizmu, Jakija Pakidajuć Pojas Kojpiera, Skroź Hnozis Ękzistęncyjanaĺnaha Immažynaryuma Katakombaŭ Ra-Hoor-Khuit CVII Wymiaręńnia Uročyšča Skarpijonaŭ, Wykarmlienych Pracham Mierćwiakoŭ Cykličnych Turbuliencyj Chrama Sûtekh, Da Wytokaŭ Antropamahičnaj Dęmanałohii Zwierchkancęntracyi Ciemry Ŭ Pošukach Zichatliwaha Trapiecyjaędra
6. Apałohija Samaźniščęńnia Ŭ Daktrynie Wyzwalieńnia Philippa Mainländęra, Jak Dumka Jakaja Biaskonca Pahłybliajecca Ad Z'jawy Da Sutnaści, Jość Adzina Dakładnaje Mierkawańnie Ab Wyšęjšaj Marali Indywiduaĺnaj Woli Supraćstajačaj Nieświadomamu, A Tak Ža Sutnaść Baraćby Za Nieisnawańnie, Što Jość Krajniaja Supraćliehłaść Asnoŭnym Wiecham Swietaŭładkawańnia, Alie Nie Z'jaŭliajecca Antynomijej Sabie, Z Pryčyny Łahičnaha Wykliučęńnia Ręakcyjnym Piesiemizmam Usiakaj Inšaj Ętyki, Skažajučaj Wizualizacyju Pracęsu Pamknieńnia Ducha Ŭ Kirunku, Jaki Ŭkazwaje Wolia Da Śmierci
7. Rytuał Pryzyŭnoha Zaklionu Ŭsioabdymnaj Ęnierhii Ciemry, U Hipastyĺnaj Zalie Matęryjalizacyi Ŭwasablieńniaŭ Kokabaęła, Zaklikany Zubožyć Ahafałahičnyja Abliččy Idałaŭ Anhârąka, Zwajawaŭšych Wypramieńwańnie Pandęmaničnaha Pantęonu Kheri-Beq-F, Addajučy Piaščanym Wiatram Supăja Prystupki Mastaba Šmatsuswietnaj Intęrprętacyi Κονξ Ομ Παξ, Z Mętaj Zrynuć Chanifičny Impuĺs Kaâba Jaki Pieraškadžaje Raspaŭsiudžwańniu Baryjonnaj Asimietryi Niebuliarnych Rahoŭ Satany
8. Paświačęńnie Adęptam Salipsizmu Uwažliwym Da Pastuliawańnia Von Hartmana Ab Nieswiadomym U Z'jawach Cialiesnaha J Duchoŭnaha Žyćcia, Što Skažajuć Azimutaĺny Kut Palinhienęzii Ad Zawieršanaha Ŭwasablieńnia Liutaści Šywy Da Stęły Adkryćcia Toţa Nad Prorwaj Samaręalizacyi Partałaŭ Inšabyćcia Mieskałamduha Wyličajučy Kanstantu Začatkawaj Formy Nadychodziačaj Æry Rujnawańnia Pasrodkam Wyrašęńnia Prabliemy Raspaŭsiudžwańnia Tęaręmy Kronękiera Ab Abieliewych Paliach Na Adwoľnuju Ałhiebraičnuju Wobłaść Racyjanaľnaści

I assume you can see why Eximperituserqethhzebibšiptugakkathšulweliarzaxułum has never troubled the charts. ‑ Iridescent 15:09, 6 March 2021 (UTC)

Hee-hee... :) I'm going to get into Belarusian death metal just for that. Must be the only album where the track listing is longer than the combined lyrics. Cheers, --DoubleGrazing (talk) 17:41, 6 March 2021 (UTC)

And I thought this was pushing it. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 18:27, 8 March 2021 (UTC)

That wasn't even insanely long by prog standards of the time, given My People Were Fair and Had Sky in Their Hair But Now They're Content to Wear Stars on Their Brows. This Soulwax compilation deserves a mention as well. ‑ Iridescent 09:59, 10 March 2021 (UTC)

Problem edit

Hello, there appears to be a problem with this edit. It changes just the second of a pair of hyphenated years in a sentence rather than both of the years. Keith D (talk) 20:07, 25 February 2021 (UTC)

It's a known issue; reported at Phabricator: T272246, although I wouldn't hold my breath for it being fixed. I try to always skip these on the grounds that it's better to consistently use non-standard formatting, than to use a mixture of standard and non-standard, but they do sometimes slip through—apologies. ‑ Iridescent 05:40, 26 February 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for the info. I have subscribed to the ticket to see if there is any movement on it. Keith D (talk) 13:36, 26 February 2021 (UTC)

There's also a (brief) thread on the issue at Wikipedia talk:AutoWikiBrowser/Typos#Date ranges. Since I assume that's a page all the AWB developers monitor at least vaguely, whereas phab tickets have a tendency to vanish into the long grass, there might be more action there. If you see any more of these, feel free to just revert them; because the - and – characters look so similar, they have a tendency to slip through. ‑ Iridescent 15:14, 26 February 2021 (UTC)

Is this the part where I start a diatribe on my typography pet peeves and complain about people who use hyphens and open en dashes in favor of em dashes? (</sarc>, but only sort of.) Perryprog (talk) 15:38, 26 February 2021 (UTC)

Or "people with standard keyboards" as we prefer to call them, since no realistic normal person is going to be even be aware of the difference between hyphens, minus signs, en-dashes and em-dashes, and a significant proportion of them are either going to be on phones or on compact-format keyboards on which they couldn't type alt-0151 even if they wanted to and remembered to. The "oh, it's easy, you just scroll to the bottom of the edit window, select "wiki markup" on the drop-down, and guess which of the almost-identical –, — or − symbols on offer is the em-dash (and yes, –—−actually are the three different symbols on the 'insert' drop down; not to be confused with - which isn't listed there, although all four are mandated by the MOS for different situations), and repeat each time you want to insert an em-dash; but make sure you read Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Punctuation (8000 words just for that one section) beforehand because sometimes Wikipedia actually prefers you to use a hyphen or an en-dash, and sometimes doesn't want you to use one at all" argument isn't practical in the real world.

This is why we periodically clutter people's watchlists running these search-and-replace scripts in the first place. It's much easier to just let everyone use the hyphen character on their keyboard and quietly standardise formatting in the background. ‑ Iridescent 19:01, 26 February 2021 (UTC)

(On macOS it's easier with ⌥ Option+- for an en dash and ⌥ Option+⇧ Shift+- for an em dash. (I don't know how to do a minus sign though.)) Facetiousness aside, I do definitely agree that the distinction is a bit ridiculous, even if I'm personally a huge stickler for it within my own editing. Regardless: I do agree with you here, and it raises an interesting point about the various AWB-esque changes that pop up occasionally. It's unreasonable to expect many of the formatting conventions to be known by even mildly experienced editors—I would bet stuff as basic as "footnotes after punctuation" isn't something clearly stated in the hundreds of articles underneath Category:Wikipedia basic information.

We all know that Wikipedia has a fairly weird (to put it lightly) learning curve, but I'm wondering: how much of a negative effect do these various content guidelines (manual of style, citation styles, and so on) have on beginner wikipedians? Perryprog (talk) 19:31, 26 February 2021 (UTC)

English Wikipedia editors with >100 edits per month

If you've been following my talkpage (or my contributions at other discussion pages) for any length of time you'll know that my personal feeling is that the proliferation of arbitrary guidelines and over-zealous enforcement of the "how dare you not follow this rule!" kind is at least one of the causes of the collapse in the editor base and the subsequent decade of stagnation. (I haven't posted That Chart for a while, so let's do it again.) I'm not sure if it's even measurable, let alone if it's been measured; some half-hearted attempts have been made to speak to people on the way out, but it's hard to get a fair sample from a group whose members by definition aren't participating.

By increasing the number of ways in which an editor can "be disruptive"—and thus potentially incur a block or just draw some bad-tempered comments that make them decide not to participate—I don't see how the proliferation of guidelines wouldn't have some kind of impact. (At the time of writing, the overview Wikipedia:Manual of Style page comes in at 26,314 words on its own and the {{Style}} sidebar lists a total of 64 MOS sub-pages and 16 "related guidelines"; failure to follow any of these can at minimum result in somebody shouting at you, especially if you're a new editor who hasn't yet had the chance to build up a "if this person isn't following Teh Rulez they probably have a reason for doing so" reputation.) ‑ Iridescent 20:02, 26 February 2021 (UTC)

> no realistic normal person is going to be even be aware

Are you saying that I'm not normal, or that I'm not realistic? ;-) WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:29, 26 February 2021 (UTC)

I'm more likely saying you don't understand the difference in MOS terms, given that even the people who write this stuff sometimes have difficulty remembering which arbitrary rules they've made up for which situations. (Without peeking at the MOS, tell me in terms of the current MOS guideline under which circumstances "minus sign" should be used instead of "hyphen minus"; when to use a spaced em-dash; whether "co−operation", "pre−World War I" and "post−war" should be written with hyphens, dashes or spaces; how to format "Comet Hale−Bopp was detected from Guinea−Bissau" and "the Chinese−Canadian community supported the Chinese−Canadian treaty".) ‑ Iridescent 21:59, 26 February 2021 (UTC)

Guesses: cooperation; pre-World War I; post-war; "Comet Hale–Bopp was detected from Guinea–Bissau"; "the Chinese–Canadian community supported the Chinese–Canadian treaty" (the first uses nothing, second two are hyphens, the last two use two en dashes) Elliot321 (talk | contribs) 03:32, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

Two right out of five, if we're going follow the letter of the law of the MOS. ‑ Iridescent 08:49, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

On the generally safe assumption that our MOS recommends correct typography, then my answers are:

• Our MOS will have cooperation. The alternative of coöperation probably won't be mentioned in the MOS, which is either a shame (it's pretty) or a relief (because means they didn't ban it). If you're writing for an international audience of non-native English speakers, then co-operation (with the hyphen) is often recommended.
• Pre–World War I gets an en dash, even though just about everyone gets that wrong.
• Post-war (hyphen)
• Comet Hale–Bopp (en dash) was detected from Guinea-Bissau (hyphen, although it rankles).
• The Chinese-Canadian (hyphen) community supported the Chinese–Canadian (en dash) treaty.

Spaced em dashes are always wrong, and if the MOS disagrees with me, then the MOS is wrong. The minus sign itself shouldn't normally be used unless numbers (or equivalent) are involved, and even then, if it's not wrapped in <math> tags, you probably shouldn't use a true minus symbol (the line weight is different in some fonts). The Hyphen-minus character is used in preference to either the Unicode minus symbol or the Unicode hyphen symbol for convenience, and an en dash makes a decent visual substitute if you are writing equations inline, to be printed on paper, and you don't want to look up the proper minus symbol (which was harder to do back in the day, before search engines were invented).

If you are suspicious of my answers, then any of my teammates can tell you that I've been correcting their dashes for years. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:38, 2 March 2021 (UTC)

A spaced em dash is not called for anywhere in the MOS. (In fact, every use of em dash clearly indicates 'unspaced'.) --Izno (talk) 00:47, 2 March 2021 (UTC)

This is always amusing when I switch between projects; out at Wikivoyage the spaced dash seems to reign supreme, although our MOS is almost half-sane and I don't think mentions dashes at all. (Personally, I can't visually distinguish between the dashes in source mode unless they're right next to each other or consistently remember how to make either an en-dash or em-dash on my keyboard.) Vaticidalprophet (talk) 01:27, 2 March 2021 (UTC)

@Vaticidalprophet, the English Wikivoyage specifies the use of spaced em dashes in voy:en:Wikivoyage:One-liner listings. They are wrong. It is one of their few faults. (Spaced en dashes would be fine, but that's not what they do.) IMO most editors should not worry about it. It is easier and ultimately more effective to let the fanatics clean it up themselves. I never mind cleaning up dashes, as long as I feel like I have reasonable odds that they'll stay cleaned up. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:32, 2 March 2021 (UTC)

The English Wikipedia MOS does mandate the use of spaced em dashes in one specific situation; when attributing quotations. The {{blockquote}} template puts the spaced em-dash in automatically (see Template:Blockquote/doc#Examples) so I doubt most editors are even consciously aware that it's happening. As with Wikivoyage, they are wrong.

Regarding if it's not wrapped in <math> tags, you probably shouldn't use a true minus symbol, this is actually the opposite of what the MOS says (for a negative sign or subtraction operator use U+2212 − MINUS SIGN unless within a <math> tag, in which case use a hyphen). You see what I mean about "no realistic normal person understands this crap"? ‑ Iridescent 05:51, 4 March 2021 (UTC)

If the template is wrong, shouldn't we fix it? Elli (talk | contribs) 23:32, 4 March 2021 (UTC)

The template isn't 'wrong', in that it reflects the MOS. My point is that the MOS is based on the personal preferences of the handful of people who WP:OWN it, and that handful of people set their own rules rather than reflecting real-world usage, and thus the rules are completely arbitrary. ‑ Iridescent 07:06, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

The MOS is wrong. When you attribute the source for a block quotation, you should use an unspaced em dash. (As a general principle, I don't mind the MOS being wrong; one of its purposes is to eliminate disputes, and settling firmly on one answer about which reasonable people may disagree is sometimes better than being right.)

In this case, the MOS currently specifies a hair space, which I think is sufficiently similar to unspaced that I'd accept it. A hair space is not very different in the overall effect from kerning, which you'd want to do on paper if the dash happened to align strangely with the first character. The template, however, is using a thin space, which means that the template violates the MOS. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:43, 10 March 2021 (UTC)

Peter Schaufuss

I was planning on expanding the page Peter Schaufuss but a few days ago an IP added a huge chunk of unreferenced contents. Not exactly sure what to do with it. Corachow (talk) 17:09, 10 March 2021 (UTC)

(Talk page enjoyer) Corachow, I've reverted it as at the very least it shouldn't remain in the article as-is. Since this talk page is watched by quite a few extremely talented content creators—which I am not—I'll leave it up to someone else to decide if it's salvageable. I also don't have time at the moment to look too thoroughly into it, but the formatting strongly implies it may be a copyright violation. Perryprog (talk) 18:17, 10 March 2021 (UTC)

Yes—that might not have been a copyright violation (it had a distinct whiff of the subject's own publicist) but that much unsourced content should never be in anything, let alone a biography of a living person, even when it's this anodyne. I've no reason to think any of it was untrue, but that's not the point—we need to be able to say where we got it if anything does turn out to be inaccurate or misleading. ‑ Iridescent 18:51, 12 March 2021 (UTC)

Revisiting the reliable source guidelines for the modern era

Hi. I was just looking up an old discussion User_talk:Steamybrian2#Bletchley-_Bicester_and_Aylesbury_line, and it raises a couple of issues. Firstly, if somebody travels on the last scheduled service on a line, logs it in their diary, and is absolutely certain they are correct, but sees an incorrect date in Wikipedia, cited to a magazine, what can they do if they can't see their date sourced anywhere? The Verifiability, not truth essay looks to me to be more geared towards the consensus of opinions, instead of hard facts like opening dates which are either right or wrong, and to be honest having something that is provable to be false, just not by a manner which would satisfy Wikipedia policies, creates something of an issue.

Secondly, there appears to have been a train of thought that the words in WP:SPS "Anyone can create a personal web page, self-publish a book, or claim to be an expert." are sacrosanct, and date from a time before anyone could gather enough attention on the web to be considered a trusted subject expert and reach a far wider audience by publishing there. As of 2021, there are websites that have been established for decades, and picked up a reputation for being excellent on fact checking and corrections, and ought to be considered a reliable source by the spirit of the guideline. For example, I would consider the writings of Nick Catford at Disused Stations to be generally reliable; I have no reason to disbelieve the dates or the basic factual information in it, yet I am sure there are editors out there who will instantly reject it out of hand as "SPS! Evil!" for being a website. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 16:25, 8 March 2021 (UTC)

My view, having seen too many websites vanish after a period of time (sometimes leaving minimal or inadequate traces behind even with use of internet archives), no matter how reliable, is that having a printed version of a source is still the best of all worlds (and this can disadvantage SPSs). To take the Disused Stations example, at the foot of the page is "© 2004-2015 Disused Station. Page last updated: Monday, 10-Jun-2019 16:55:32 CEST". Poking around (including looking at the 'About us' page), it looks very organised, but you do wonder what the ultimate fate of the information will be - will it ever get printed in book form? Will it be archived in some way that preserves it? Take for example the mention of the 'John Mann Collection' ("The collection contained over 60,000 images and was donated to us in 2010.") - where will those images eventually end up? In general, and more relevant, is how the individual pages themselves give their sources. e.g. LONDONDERRY FOYLE ROAD with the sources (printed) given at the bottom. In some ways, the only way to judge a source is whether it itself gives the sources it is based on (or makes clear where it is adding original conclusions to the record). In theory, if all sources did this, you would be able to trace everything back to an original author or primary source. That is maybe what the original intent was behind 'verifiability, not truth'. A self-reported observation is a primary source, and still needs to be published somewhere, but once published can be treated as a primary source (i.e. it still needs to be handled appropriately, ideally, but not always, picked up on and used by someone suitable publishing on the topic - this adds an often needed layer of checking as self-reported observations can be made in error). Carcharoth (talk) 23:10, 8 March 2021 (UTC)

I've had the same thought about the SPS issue. It doesn't really have an easy answer -- on any given niche topic it's more and more common for the person who clearly has the most expertise to be "random blogger". On sufficiently commercial topics "random blogger" sometimes gets a publishing deal, which helps matters (I'll admit I've made book cites that are blog cites in all but name). Stuff like Cite Unseen plays interestingly with this -- books must be reliable, Wordpress sites must not, so Chris O'Leary gets a no-go sign on Ava Cherry for writing the most serious review ever given of her Astronettes work, while two Bowie biographies that I think are fine for this topic but other people might strongly disagree on get a pass. Vaticidalprophet (talk) 03:21, 9 March 2021 (UTC)

I certainly defer to print sources on lots of occasions. However, if you're just cleaning up an article and want to at least verify it to something, and you're unable to get a print source (such as, for example, if your local library's closed due to a major pandemic ;-D), then at least fact checking against a trusted and reputable web source is better than nothing, isn't it? Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 12:57, 9 March 2021 (UTC)

The SPS policy is more flexible than you might think. For example, TorrentFreak, a "blog"—and something that would've been considered an unreliable SPS when it was founded—is listed at WP:RSP as a reliable source, as it should be. Subject-matter experts are allowed per the policy, regardless of how they publish (though like, could you cite Jon Ralston's tweets? it's iffy, shrug, but his writing at The Nevada Independent you certainly could). Elli (talk | contribs) 06:50, 9 March 2021 (UTC)

A website is better than nothing, but for our specific purposes anything that's capable of change isn't particularly good—consider how much of a PITA it is when a widely-sourced reference work publishes a revised edition and we need to check all the Wikipedia pages which cite it against the new version, and then consider that all websites are in a permanent state of flux.

Although "verifiability not truth" is now a discredited ideology there's more than a grain of truth to it. The point of Wikipedia's reference sections is to let readers see for themselves where everything came from (and cover our asses if something is wrong, by showing that we're repeating the error in good faith rather than making things up), and websites have an annoying habit of correcting their errors and updating their information, leaving Wikipedia to repeat what they used to say rather than what they currently say. (The Wikipedia of the future will have an army of AI scrapers monitoring cited sources for changes and automatically flagging statements which potentially no longer match their source, but we're certainly nowhere near that level yet and I wouldn't hold my breath for WMF developers getting something that complicated to work this side of the year 2100.)

Making a habit of sourcing to websites can also introduce bias; if you're basing a Wikipedia article on what you found on Google rather than what you found on Worldcat, you're immediately introducting both a recentist bias and a bias away from academic texts (which even if they are online are usually behind paywalls) and towards bloggers interpreting those academic texts through the filter of their own prejudices and pet theories. The whole notion of "a trusted and reputable web source" is problematic—with (most) books we at least have the confidence that they've gone through some kind of editorial process, but any part of a website could be taken over by crazies tomorrow and there's no obvious way to tell. (Wikipedia itself is one of the web's most respected sources, but there's a reason that at the time of writing this page has 52,939,275 incoming links.)

Subject matter experts are a bit of a grey area. People can be universally respected in one area but have very fringe views in another, and it's not always clear where the line is—when they're publishing via legitimate publishing houses it's not such a problem as a decent editor will filter out the crazy, but when they're self-publishing the lines can get blurred. There are very few occasions when we should ever be citing tweets (or any social media posts)—if we're discussing Jon Ralston's tweets then we should be citing the reaction to and discussion of them in reliable sources rather than the tweet itself. The only exception I can think of is as evidence to sceptical readers ("if you don't believe he said that, here's the proof"); basically, treat citing tweets the same way you'd treat citing a seriously problematic source like the Weekly World News. (As with the interminable discussions about the Daily Mail, The Canary etc, the line of thought should be "if this is significant, then an unquestionably reliable source will be discussing it; if the other sources aren't discussing it, then why are we considering it important enough to be mentioning in Wikipedia?)

On the specific topic of railway line closures, these have always been a problem. Firstly, there are two different conventions for writing a closure date for a railway line (or any other scheduled service like an air route); "Last day of service" (the last time the service operated), and "First day of no service" (the first time a train/plane/bus would ordinarily have operated but didn't). These can often be widely different since the services that get shut down are usually those that were only minimally used anyway. Secondly, it's often unclear exactly what constitutes "closure", since even after the last scheduled passenger service has departed a station or line often remains in use for freight, heritage operations, chartered trains from hobbyists who want to visit it, mothballed as a strategic asset or to serve as a potential emergency diversionary route, or just left in situ to rot rather than go through the complicated legal process of formal closure. If you want a concrete if extreme example, Sampford Courtenay railway station is on an active freight route and is also used by the heritage Dartmoor Railway. It only has scheduled mainline passenger services (as opposed to the vintage trains operated as a tourist attraction by the Dartmoor Railway) on summer Sundays, which for obvious reasons didn't run in 2020. It in turn lies on a route which has been strategically safeguarded as an emergency fallback route between Exeter and Plymouth should the sea-wall at Dawlish collapse and take the Great Western Main Line with it. If GWR decided not to restore GWR services, then the last day of scheduled service would be 8 September 2019; the first day of no service would be 27 June 2021; but Dartmoor Railway service would still continue to run and it would still be possible to catch a train there, and even if the Dartmoor Railway also failed to reopen it would still be in use for freight, and even if the freight line also stopped it would still continue to exist as the route is protected as an emergency fallback should Brunel's harebrained "have the trains run along the sea wall" structures finally collapse for good and sever the link between Exeter and Plymouth. In these circumstances, what's the "closure date"? ‑ Iridescent 09:49, 10 March 2021 (UTC)

Surely bricks and mortar, not concrete? Martinevans123 (talk) 10:01, 10 March 2021 (UTC)

Sampford Courtenay is a good example of some of the problems we face where somebody puts a date in without a source in good faith (and presumably from direct personal knowledge), leaving the date to spread far and wide over the internet, with nobody thinking about whether it's factually correct. Indeed, the entire "Reopening" section has only one citation to the Dartmoor Railway website, which is now goes to a landing page elsewhere - and backs up your view that most websites have a tendency to decay and stop verifying the information in them. Meanwhile, the most up to date source I can find that cover this, Railway Passenger Stations in Great Britain (M. E. Quick, Fifth Edition) gives the service suspended date as seen in the article, using Wikipedia as a reference!

I don't know how we can practically deal with that. Most of the station closures I have looked at or sourced are all pre-Beeching, where the source (typically a Middleton Press, David & Charles or Ian Allan book) documents the last day of services for passengers and goods separately. So we're stuck with something that is probably true, but isn't verifiable. And that's far from the first time I've wanted to fact check a statistic that I'm suspicious about, only to find the entire internet has repeated what some random editor put on Wikipedia 15 years ago as gospel. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 12:24, 10 March 2021 (UTC)

@Ritchie333, when the accuracy of an objective fact is disputed, I think I'm not alone in invoking Wikipedia:Editorial discretion and just leaving it out, or re-writing it to encompass the likely fact (e.g., turning "1835" into "19th century"). WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:50, 10 March 2021 (UTC)

In the specific case of Sampford Courtenay station, it won't be hard to source the exact dates if you're really bothered. Sampford Courtenay is a flyspeck of a place but Okehampton, the next town on the line, is a fairly important place as it's the jumping-off point for walkers visiting Dartmoor and for assorted military facilities in the area, and all the assorted changes to the railway will be well-documented in the local papers. (Indeed, a story about the railway line is coincidentally the lead story in the Okehampton Times as I write this.) ‑ Iridescent 18:47, 12 March 2021 (UTC)

What's your take on webarchives for dealing with this? Obviously it doesn't solve all the problems you mentioned, but it does prevent the source from changing. I tend to try to add them to most citations I include. Elli (talk | contribs) 01:09, 11 March 2021 (UTC)

Web archives are better than nothing, but I'd still take a print source over them every time. There's no such thing as a stable web source; the Internet Archive is constantly on the verge of going bust (WAID is better placed than me to tell me if this is true or just a rumour, but I believe at one point the WMF was seriously considering taking them over to stop them going dark), WebCite is literally in its death throes (you can still read previously-archived pages for the moment but they're no longer archiving anything), and Archive.is has strict usage caps so you can only view a few pages per day, and occasionally gets blocked altogether by national governments owing to their habit of hosting some very questionable content. All the services are also obviously affected by DMCA and right-to-privacy legislation, so anything under copyright (which realistically is virtually everything of interest, since anything old enough to be out of copyright will exist as print anyway) has a fairly high likelihood of disappearing the moment the rights holder notices you've had one of these services archive it. ‑ Iridescent 18:47, 12 March 2021 (UTC)

There have been suggestions about merging the WMF and IA, but I'm not sure that they reached the "serious consideration" stage, and I know that the WMF rejected the idea a long time ago. They would be far more likely to fund a grant for a mutually beneficial project than to merge. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:34, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

I'm sure WMF wouldn't enjoy hosting a project with such a blatant (though justified, imo) disregard for copyright, considering their strict criteria they require for fair use on all their Wikis. A significant grant would probably be a good idea though, given the millions WMF takes in. Elli (talk | contribs) 00:19, 17 March 2021 (UTC)

Been thinking about this conversation, because it's popped up for one of my drafts. User:Vaticidalprophet/List of video game hoaxes (yes, it'll be changed to 'urban legends' when it goes to mainspace) is currently up to the part on Ocarina of Time legends, one of which is the Running Man. It's impossible to defeat the Running Man, full stop, any context -- if you emulate or hack your way to a 00:00:00 time, he'll beat you with 00:00:\. Every user-genned or self-published source says this. For unclear reasons, every source with editorial control says that you can beat him with emulation/hacking. I currently have a very evasive footnote saying he's undefeatable 'in normal play', which is technically true, except he's also undefeatable in abnormal play. I suspect this is going to be a real headache when it gets to somewhere Anyone Can Edit. Vaticidalprophet (talk) 08:08, 13 March 2021 (UTC)

Proving a negative is difficult in Wikipedia prose since it's rare to find sources that bother to mention things that didn't happen, but that doesn't mean we can't use links to lead the reader to a point where they can put two and two together themselves. Assuming he's beatable with hacking, then (assuming the hacking isn't so extreme that it doesn't crash the game completely) there will be a video somewhere of him being beaten. In this particular case, I'd not include a definitive statement either way if the sources don't agree; instead I'd just include a very prominent external link with a very clear caption to a clip of him being beaten. (To stick with the Sampford Courtenay railway station example from previously, if and when it does reopen it may not get mentioned in reliable sources given that Sampford Courtenay has a population of 600 and nobody else cares, but it will start appearing in timetables and we can point those out to demonstrate that trains are stopping there again.) I did something similar in this footnote. Every reliable source that mentions this 'medieval poem' claims that it's evidence that this is a genuine medieval legend (not unfairly, given that the Pitt Rivers Museum who are as respectable as it gets makes the claim) but anyone familiar with the original will recognise it as a fragment of a 19th-century Scottish poem (by Walter Scott who was the J K Rowling of his day, not some obscure figure). I can't find any source that explicitly refutes the "medieval poem" claim, but what I can do is point out that this is bullshit and tell the readers where it actually comes from, to pre-empt anyone trying to be helpful. ‑ Iridescent 15:36, 13 March 2021 (UTC)

Re: Jack Cabhan

Hello, this is just one of many forgeries created by the LTA named Peluches extronidos. Master account is not banned on this wiki, but more than a dozen socks are blocked locally and several other hoaxes were deleted as G5. Best, —Hasley[talk] 13:42, 17 March 2021 (UTC)

If you want something deleted the onus is on the person wanting it deleted to explain why it meets our (intentionally strict) speedy deletion criteria. If the user isn't banned (and the editor in question wasn't blocked, banned or globally locked at the time the page was tagged for deletion), then by definition we can't delete it as "created by a banned or blocked user in violation of their block". We're long since past the days of "edits in a similar way", and these situations need to wait for the checkusers to do their thing before we start deleting. ‑ Iridescent 20:02, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

I have created a MFD at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Draft:Jack Cabhan. Thanks for letting me know. —Hasley[talk] 22:18, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

Melbourne Queer Games Festival

Hi, I would like to contest the speedy deletion of this page. It was gone before I got the message it was nominated! 159.196.120.182 (talk) 22:08, 14 March 2021 (UTC)

I've restored it, and moved it out of publicly-viewable article space to Draft:Melbourne Queer Games Festival to allow you to work on it. For it to be suitable for Wikipedia, it needs to demonstrate that independent sources consider the topic significant, and to be sourced to reliable sources by Wikipedia's definition of the term. As it stands if I move it back to article space, it will just be re-deleted by somebody else, but that isn't to say it's not potentially a legitimate topic provided you can demonstrate notability. ‑ Iridescent 22:24, 14 March 2021 (UTC)

(adding) Looking more closely at the history here, @MarioJump83 what the hell are you doing? Unilaterally moving an incomplete page from draft-space to article mainspace, and then within two minutes slapping a deletion tag on it as inappropriate for the mainspace, looks to me inappropriate. ‑ Iridescent 22:30, 14 March 2021 (UTC)

Iri, from that user's page, they may be going through a rough patch. I agree with you that it was a dead-wrong error, but maybe it doesn't need to be said quite that way. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:35, 14 March 2021 (UTC)

@Tryptofish I've toned it down, although since looking at the history I now realise this is the same editor who was edit-warring with me yesterday over my not allowing him to add deletion tags to pages that obviously didn't meet the deletion criteria, my AGF reserve is getting low. ‑ Iridescent 22:49, 14 March 2021 (UTC)

@Dodgyville: I did some work on it so that it shouldn't be at risk of another CSD if it's moved back to mainspace. It needs some fleshing out by someone who is more familiar with games (not a challenge, my gaming days ended with Super Nintendo). There are a couple interesting (paywalled) Scholar sources too and its gotten some good traction for a three year old festival. StarM 00:30, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

So as not to flood WP:IRI, ping for anyone to lend a brain cell to Draft:Melbourne Queer Games Festival. It needs some background from someone familiar with gaming. I'm not sure if this is an awards ceremony, a livestream, a digital show and tell? If it can't stand alone, a merge to Melbourne International Games Week (also in need of help) would make sense. StarM 19:38, 17 March 2021 (UTC)

If you haven't already, I'd have thought the videogames project would be the place to ask. Gaming is one area where we certainly have no shortage of active editors. ‑ Iridescent 20:14, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

Thanks Iri. Done and done as it's now in mainspace. StarM 14:26, 23 March 2021 (UTC)

Good work—sorry I couldn't help but this is literally something about which I know nothing and wouldn't even know where to look for sources. I'm now curious as to what Queering Spacetime could possibly be. ‑ Iridescent 17:16, 23 March 2021 (UTC)

Also, Lesbian Spider-Queens of Mars! StarM 18:09, 23 March 2021 (UTC)

An arcade game from an alternate history where lesbian spider-queens are REAL and have conquered mars to build their pleasure palaces. her majesty's consensual slaves are revolting - can YOU quell the rebellion??, obviously. Honestly, do they teach the kids nothing in school these days? (Meaning no disrespect to the fine people behind it, but from the video this looks like it would have been lame even in the early 80s, let alone the present day.) ‑ Iridescent 18:34, 23 March 2021 (UTC)

My first thought is a physical effect of space travel turning people LGBT, but then I am a biologist... Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 18:44, 23 March 2021 (UTC)

Request to TPWs: Heiho Niten Ichi Ryu Memorial

In the absence of a noticeboard for "issues requiring attention but which don't rise to the level of urgent issues requiring administrative intervention", I'll post this here on the grounds that a decent cross section of Wikipedia's managerial class are watching. If anyone has a spare few minutes—particularly if you're familiar with cross-wiki abuse issues and even more particularly if you speak French and/or Japanese and are familiar with assessing source reliability in those languages—can you have a look at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Heiho Niten Ichi Ryu Memorial? (This doesn't violate WP:CANVASS as I've very explicitly avoided taking a view on the actual issue being discussed.) This is either a very well-coordinated long-term hoax involving everything from the falsification of off-wiki sources to the creation of fake photographs, over a period of years, by multiple editors (or at least multiple accounts); or we're about to delete the article on an international landmark and create another entry in the Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Meghan Markle hall of infamy. In either case it could do with as much input as possible so there's a clearer picture of what's actually going on before I have to try to wade through the Meta bureaucracy for notifying stewards, and take on the thankless task of trying to convince the Commons admins that just because the problem has come to light on en-wiki and fr-wiki it doesn't automatically make it a part of Wikipedia's vast anti-Commons conspiracy. ‑ Iridescent 13:46, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

That's a wacky one! But Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Meghan Markle was entirely correct in 2006, & there's no need for us to be embarassed about it. Johnbod (talk) 21:41, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

Agreed, I don't know why such a thing is "infamous". Even to an outsider, all you have to say is "they're weren't notable enough for one then but now they are" and a "bright 14 year old" will certainly understand. Though there are some even more surprising ones at Wikipedia:Before they were notable. - Aza24 (talk) 22:41, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

Perhaps oddly, I'm not aware it has ever received attention from our fearlessly probing media. And it wasn't one of the crimes brought up in that interview. Johnbod (talk) 04:31, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

Equally oddly, Wikipedia:Before they were notable leaves off Nicki Minaj, which is probably the best-known of all of these. (It also doesn't take account of the fact that the current definition of "notability" is relatively recent and we used to be considerably stricter. I can't be bothered to go search for it, but somewhere in the archives you'll find a long discussion aver whether individual artworks can ever be notable in their own right or should just be redirects to the artist, which concluded with a grudging acceptance that maybe we could make an exception for Mona Lisa provided it was clear that it didn't set a precedent.) ‑ Iridescent 07:35, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

Never heard of her - so, is she famous for not being famous? I've only ever seen a pretty short discussion, way back when, on the artworks question. Johnbod (talk) 13:48, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

She's (arguably) the biggest female American rapper so if you're not American, or into rap, the odds of you knowing her would be pretty low I'm guessing (which maybe explains why you don't). On the topic of notabillity, I've been thinking; I always reach the conclusion that the older someone or something is (historically, I mean) the more chance they have for inclusion. There might be nothing known on Meritites IV, but since she's from 4000 years ago; we have some de facto practice to suspend normal coverage guidelines. Is this a reasonable observation or am I off here? Aza24 (talk) 22:02, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

Sigh.....I remember initiating this before it was notable....Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 13:45, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

I remember that one. We should use that as the canonical example of what occasionally goes wrong when AFD is used as an alternative to the MERGE process. That closed with a recommendation to merge, and the proposed target page, whose editors were unaware of the AFD, rejected the content. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:44, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

That has to rank with the Catholic Church FAs as one of the funniest things I've seen here... so much discussion on Wikipedia for Incels; imagine if an "incel" saw how much attention they were getting here, I'm sure they'd be thrilled... I suppose those who were actually there probably don't find it as funny, but still Aza24 (talk) 22:02, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

@Aza24: what's funny about the Catholic Church FAs? Elli (talk | contribs) 00:13, 17 March 2021 (UTC)

Whats funny about the article on the biggest religious institution in the world going through FAC 5 times? (Not to mention the countless GANs and GARs) Probably that it so perfectly demonstrates the difficulties of neutrality on Wikipedia and in a way that is seemingly so blatant, it feels like an April Fools joke... which as someone looking back at it, I do find rather funny. Aza24 (talk) 02:29, 17 March 2021 (UTC)

oh wow, that's impressive. GA since 2015 though, maybe time for a review? Elli (talk | contribs) 06:32, 17 March 2021 (UTC)

The RCC is one of my go-to examples of why WP:WIAFA isn't fit for purpose. With these big broad-topic articles it's literally impossible to meet WIAFA—show me someone who's conducted "a thorough survey of the relevant literature" on the history of Catholicism and I'll show you a liar—so the review process end up as a long set of value judgements over whether the article covers the pet topic, or includes the preferred source, of whichever reviewers have happened to turn up. ‑ Iridescent 20:06, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

Maybe so, but this is why I will always shamelessly advocate for the use of Oxford Bibliographies Online... not only does it focus on these big topics (and is available through library card platform) but the authors of each bibliography there give comments on the relative importance—to the scholarly community—of each source listed. Sure, people can still say, "well that's just their opinion", but it does add another layer of verifiability, and the stamp of Oxford University Press, though I know Iridescent disagrees with the sentiment of the latter. Aza24 (talk) 17:51, 21 March 2021 (UTC)

Having been involved with some of them, I think it came close a couple of times, & might well have passed if the main author had not been unrealistically partisan & frankly rather stubborn on this. Reviewers complained about specific issues and overall tone rather than lack of deep-depth sources. The sheer size of the subject meant that everything was covered very briefly, & I think this was mostly accepted. One might compare Middle Ages, where reviewers trusted the main author, & accepted that there was deep reading & knowledge behind very summary statements. Johnbod (talk) 18:55, 21 March 2021 (UTC)

That's quite the impressive FA. Elli (talk | contribs) 23:41, 21 March 2021 (UTC)

Just to be clear, I don't have any objection to Oxford University Press as a publisher; OUP is a well-regarded publishing house which has published many very high quality works. My issue is with people who use variants of "this book must be a reliable source as it's published by OUP". OUP isn't an academic department of the university, it's a big commercial publisher that publishes all kind of gubbins, which happens to be owned by the university, and like any big commercial publisher each book they publish needs to be assessed on its own and its author's own merits. I'm also very unimpressed by OUP's glacial pace when it comes to errata and corrections—I can obviously appreciate that correcting print sources takes time and money but correcting howlers in online references is just a matter of a few keystrokes, and some of their showpiece online resources like the ODNB are absolutely riddled with mistakes which in turn trigger citogenesis since people copy them in good faith. (Just checking the ODNB William Huskisson bio, my usual bellwether for whether their corrections department has checked their emails yet; yup, "the first fatality of the railway age" is still there.) ‑ Iridescent 07:33, 25 March 2021 (UTC)

8 users were blocked on fr-WP, with a ban for long term abuse, cross-wiki-spam, and sockpuppettry. We began to explain the case on fr:Wikipédia:Faux-nez/Praelongum. Even if you don't speak french, a google translate and the use of Special:CentralAuth that are listed there could help to have an idea of what concerns en:WP. --Pa2chant.bis (talk) 08:45, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

About geopolitical issues...

...currently playing out at Tropic Seamount. First time I've seen one of the articles I wrote become a battlefield of some geopolitical argument. I remember that you commented on geopolitical issues on another of my articles, Pako Guyot if memory serves. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 13:31, 25 March 2021 (UTC)

If you think "Canary Islands Seamount Province is a geological concept, not a political one, and does not imply a political association with the Canary Islands" will satisfy them, I take it you've never run into faux-outrage over the presence or absence of the term "British Isles". Back when that particular group of editwarriors were active, discussions used to look like this. See also the interminable arguments over whether "Ireland" refers to the country or the island, which eventually got us to a place in which things like this looked sane. ‑ Iridescent 17:20, 25 March 2021 (UTC)

Adding character's pictures to Quinn, Carter and latest regular characters on B&B

Can you please tell me if you or someone you know can add pictures to B&B characters pages such as Quinn, Carter, Flo, Finn and any regular characters after 2013? I've had trouble doing that. JaydienMS (talk) 11:15, 25 March 2021 (UTC)

Adding photographs to pages like List of The Bold and the Beautiful characters (2014) is always problematic, since screenshots of the characters are always going to be in copyright. If we have free-use photos of the actors (you can find out by going to Wikimedia Commons, our free-use image repository, and searching for the name) that's usually the simplest solution—for some genres which use a lot of makeup or prosthetics and consequently the characters don't look like the actors off-duty that's not viable, but for soaps that's generally not an issue.

If you're want to use screenshots or publicity stills, it gets more complicated. These are non-free content—in the sense that someone other than Wikipedia owns the copyright and hasn't given us permission to use it or to license it for other people to re-use it. As such, every time you use an image in these circumstances, it needs to meet all ten of these criteria. The criteria look complicated, but basically it needs to be the case that someone reading the article wouldn't fully understand it without an image; and that you explain why. Also, you need to use as few non-free images as possible, so if there's a photo of the whole cast just use that one photo instead of a separate photo for each character (see List of Buffy the Vampire Slayer characters as an example.

I personally think it would be very difficult to justify using non-free images in the case of The Bold and the Beautiful. This isn't something like Star Wars where particular characters genuinely had an iconic and distinctive image (using a freely available photo of David Prowse would mislead readers as to what Darth Vader looked like); a photo of Ashleigh Brewer out-of-character would serve perfectly well to illustrate Ivy Forrester, and since anyone could take a photo of Brewer just by walking up to her and asking, I'd think it would be virtually impossible to satisfy no free equivalent is available, or could be created, that would serve the same encyclopedic purpose.

The poor quality of images of living people on Wikipedia is one of the internet's running jokes, but there's a reason for it. Remember, everything on Wikipedia isn't just appearing on our site but is also being released for anyone, anywhere, to copy, distribute and transmit the work, and to adapt the work for any purpose, even commercially. That is, by hosting an image we're essentially turning it into a public resource for other people to mess around with even if it means photoshopping it into torture porn or selling it on greetings cards; as such, we have a particular responsibility to respect both the commercial rights of photographers and the legal and ethical rights of the subjects of photos not to host anything they wouldn't be happy allowing anyone in the world to use for any purpose. ‑ Iridescent 13:19, 25 March 2021 (UTC)

I also see another problem, List of The Bold and the Beautiful characters (2014) is a list - admittedly a short one - and at FFD Non-free content is used only if its presence would significantly increase readers' understanding of the article topic, in Wikipedia:Non-free content criteria is usually interpreted as meaning that significantly increasing the understanding of an article's section is often insufficient to justify their usage. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 13:31, 25 March 2021 (UTC)

That depends. If the list is genuinely comparing and contrasting between different appearances, then one can make a case that the "article topic" in Wikipedia terms is "all the characters", that the use of non-free images is necessary to illustrate the topic of "all the characters", and thus that if there isn't a useable group image it's justifiable to illustrate each individual section with a non-free image. (See Justice League for an example of the legitimate use of multiple non-free images on a single list, since the article is legitimately comparing the design of the JL as drawn by different artists at different times.) We're into the long grass of hypotheticals here though; in general, the rule of thumb is "only use a non free image when it's literally impossible for the reader to understand the topic without a photo". (Disclaimer: I think non free images are far more administrative hassle and legal liability than they're worth, and that we should be adopting a free-use-only policy for images. German Wikipedia's world didn't come to an end when they did so, even though it makes pages like Gerechtigkeitsliga visually less appealing.) ‑ Iridescent 17:52, 25 March 2021 (UTC)

Removal of Olilifood

I would like to know why my post "Olilifood" was deleted please. Makarios62 (talk) 23:08, 25 March 2021 (UTC)

Because Wikipedia isn't a webhosting service or a company directory. We host articles on companies if–and only if–they're sourced to independent reliable sources to demonstrate that the company is considered notable by those not connected to it, and the resulting article is written from a neutral point of view. Your article, on the other hand, was a piece of pure puffery about how great this particular company was, sourced entirely to press releases and containing such lines as Imagine not having moved an inch or call more than 4 vendors for a particular Pizza flavor and still have the option to pay for it with bitcoin. ‑ Iridescent 06:57, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

Wikipedia Finally Asking Big Tech to Pay Up

Any thoughts on this article in Wired: "Wikipedia Finally Asking Big Tech to Pay Up"? Paul August ☎ 19:21, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

Without knowing the details, it looks like a common-sense approach, or at least as common-sense as one can get when the information in question is free-use so the only control we have over it is to make life a nuisance for free-riders. "Wikipedia Finally Asking Big Tech to Pay Up" is PR-speak—the Foundation is already funded by Google, Amazon and Facebook—but making it a formal arrangement rather than dependent on the whims of multinationals seems reasonable to me, and might also assist with quantifying the actual value of Wikipedia as a service.

The obvious thought that immediately comes to mind is that, since all this data is already CC BY-SA and the WMF thus can't restrict what a reuser does with it, it would be an eminently viable business model to pay for a subscription to this service, and then relicense the data stream on to twenty further customers charging each of them 10% of what the WMF would charge them, giving each of the customers a 90% saving while simultaneously instantly doubling your money. AGF and all that happy stuff prevents me saying names, but I can certainly think of a few people I'd be watching closely were I the suspicious type. ‑ Iridescent 20:36, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

I am looking forward to it (and I suspect my list of people to watch closely matches yours in at least for a couple of people). Its going to give some people a sharp lesson in civil law if they try it. Only in death does duty end (talk) 10:57, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

• This is from the horse's, er, mouth on meta: Wikimedia Enterprise/Essay. Johnbod (talk) 19:05, 17 March 2021 (UTC)
• And a monster thread at Pump. Johnbod (talk) 21:22, 17 March 2021 (UTC)
• One of the discussion points that (probably intentionally) doesn't get mentioned is that it's massively easier for these large commercial entities to make a solid business case to purchase the kind of feeds they want than there is for them to make donations without a rock-solid guarantee that Wikimedia will continuously provide them with that feed. Since this is an additional specialized feed that won't in any way alter the feeds available to the rest of the users, this actually sounds like a very positive solution. Risker (talk) 00:57, 26 March 2021 (UTC)

• Don't get me wrong, I don't object to any of this. I think it's healthy for all concerned for the WMF to have some kind of formal tithing system from the big tech companies which leach from it, rather than depending on questionable continuing goodwill. If this arrangement can put an end to the annual "if you don't give us $3 we might shut down!" charade, so much the better. ‑ Iridescent 07:03, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

Baitus Sami Mosque

Cleaning out a backlog or six and this article came up. Curious about your thoughts from your 2010 dePROD. I was going to take it to AfD as I can find zero coverage other than the protests surrounding its construction. What am I missing architecturally? Thanks! StarM 16:49, 26 March 2021 (UTC)

I have no objection to it being AfDd if you can't find a source, but to me that's an absolutely clear-cut deprod. Large-size purpose-built places of worship—particularly in a country like Germany with a strong tradition of local media—are never going to be non-notable in Wikipedia terms. There will always be reams of coverage of the discussions around the need for a new church/mosque/synagogue/temple/whatever; the discussions and objections about where to build it and why it needs a new-build rather than converting an existing building; the competition for the design and further objections and appeals regarding its design (as anyone in earshot of a mosque can confirm, there's no such thing as an uncontentious minaret); the groundbreaking ceremony and opening ceremony; and assorted events which have taken place in and been organised by it.

As such, these articles might not be appropriate for Wikipedia if nobody wants to expand them (or might be better-suited to be entries on a list rather than stand-alone pages), but they don't meet the "uncomplicated deletion proposals where no opposition to the deletion is expected" requirements for WP:PROD. In this particular case, while I don't speak German and don't know enough about the German press to assess the reliability of sources, the existence of a fairly substantive article on German Wikipedia also indicates to me that this isn't going to be uncontroversial, since de-wiki are generally much less tolerant than us of marginal-notability topics. ‑ Iridescent 07:29, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

Thanks, as always. I totally get what you're saying, I thought I was missing something obvious on the architecture front; notable design or firm that I wasn't seeing. I'm going to wait as I don't have time to tackle a complicated, in depth AfD right now with some offline time coming up (yay), but so far I've been unable to find much independent outside of the protests, but am going to dig a little in scholar to see if I can find anything on the architecture side that popular media might not have picked up. There were some listings of their events, but nothing in depth for significant coverage. Guess we'll see. Thanks! StarM 14:03, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

So far as I can tell, the deletionists now consider this Routine Coverage™ and therefore inadmissable in court AfD. With the caveat I don't do many building AfDs (don't see many of them in the first place), but it comes up all the time with schools, where a given type of editor's apparent deep offense at the idea school articles are something readers are interested in leads to everything closing no consensus. Vaticidalprophet 22:23, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

I won't touch anything music related with a ten-foot pole, schools are a 9.99 foot one. They turn into an unnecessary argument all the time because people can't/won't see the difference between run of the mill coverage (school X's open house was on date) and actual notability. Somehow GHits is sometimes still an acceptable argument at AfD and I don't get it. I personally truly believe few primary and secondary schools are truly (real world, not wikipedia) notable. That said, I'm 1000% guilty of trying to save all the museums when some are scarcely more notable then schools. If this church had been a school, I'm not sure I'd have tried to save it. A lot of what I've stumbled on in clearing out notability backlogs is article X was created because X was in the news and then forgotten about, ergo no subsequent coverage and/or wow, notability standards were very different ca. 2010, and I was here then too. In some cases though I find some real gems and wish there was an active enough editor base in topic Z to maintain the article. StarM 23:41, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

Aside from a few genuinely notable schools like Le Rosey and Haberdashers' Aske's, I tend to agree. As far s I'm concerned 99.9% of schools could be covered perfectly adequately with List of schools in Fooville tables rather than the current situation of having tens of thousands of pseudo-articles like Meole Brace School, none of which serve the slightest useful purpose to readers since anyone wanting the minimal information they provide can find more in-depth and more up-to-date information on either the school's or the local school board's website and as such the existence of Wikipedia articles is actively damaging since it puts an article which is more likely to be outdated and inaccurate at the top of the search results.

In all fairness, the same could probably be said for museums. For every Art Institute of Chicago there are a hundred 'local history museums' which consist of a couple of spare rooms in a municipal building and contain nothing more than a dusty case full of arrowheads, a handful of amateur paintings of local landmarks, and a bunch of samples of whatever the local factory/mine/refinery happens to make (generally accompanied by a display board explaining why said factory/mine/refinery is a wonderful place to work, the greatest thing that ever happened to the area, and why that unpleasantness about the fatal explosion/child slavery/contaminating the bread with asbestos was all an unfortunate misunderstanding by the big-city press). ‑ Iridescent 06:26, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

I'll be honest, if Cedarburg History Museum is AfDed, I won't be surprised. I'd still !vote keep, but I'd understand good faith arguments. I created it out of trying to figure out how to address the current status of Chudnow Museum of Yesteryear, which seemed worth saving even if it's borderline itself. I think the broader issue is no one is coming to Wikipedia to find out about the schools in their prospective town and the same is true for museums in cities they're planning to visit. Part of the reason I like List of museums in Whoville is because it tells you something about the role of culture in the town. Is this pre-Thunder OKC where you have to go to Dallas for the arts, or is this like Albuquerque where Santa Fe is better, but you can enjoy the local scene? I feel like that's something we used to read about in the dusty Funk & Wagnalls, which somehow feels more "encyclopedic". StarM 13:50, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

I agree that nobody comes to Wikipedia to find out about schools, but I disagree nobody comes to find out about museums (or visitor attractions in general). Wikivoyage is nice in theory but Wikivoyage is dead and just hasn't finished twitching yet (to repeat something I said further up the page, my talkpage alone gets a higher readership than the Wikivoyage pages for London, Paris, New York City and Rome combined), and Google knows this and in most cases has removed Wikivoyage (and its evil twin Wikitravel) from search results for destinations. Given the number of different people—none of whom are particular fans of Wikipedia—I've seen doing it over the years, I can say for certain that people do use Wikipedia to plan their holidays, on all aspects from the Wikipedia page on the town to see what the sights are, to the pages on the airport/station to see which airlines/rail companies go there, to clicking on the photos in the article to expand them (although I've never—and I mean never—seen anyone figure out how to continue through to Commons to see other photos, since MediaViewer was imposed). It might still be dogma that "Wikipedia is an encyclopedia", but that's nowadays little more than a legal fiction we use as a pretext to delete clutter; "Wikipedia is a directory of things which independent sources have at some point considered interesting" isn't as pithy but it describes things more accurately. That people are using Wikipedia to plan vacations is measurable—the million people a year visiting our Disney World article aren't doing so because they're interested in the history of theme park design. ‑ Iridescent 14:51, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

I do think people are coming to Wikipedia to find out about schools! (I did exactly that when I was still in the compulsory educational system -- I switched schools more than a few times and would read the articles of new possibilities.) It's difficult to do a views-per-article analysis because "local high school" is much more niche than "Disney World", but I checked the largest two high schools in my approximate geographic area and found respectable yearly pageviews of around 15k-20k, much higher than I'd expect of a local-interest article about anything else. (One was also a GA.)

To once again veer totally off-topic at the mention of Wikivoyage we're trying our best, man, I recently decided to run through the 'active'-users-by-project of the side projects after seeing a mention in a history search that you could track the chronological rise-fall-rise of the Wikimedia experiment in its side projects as well as in Wikipedia proper, with Wikiquote as the given example. It turned out when I checked the rest that Wikiquote was the only one to have this pattern, and the patterns of the rest of the lot were interesting in and of themselves. Wikivoyage is a straight line but for the obvious. Wikiversity has a frankly bizarre pattern with swings of several hundred users, which strikes me as slightly too high to be explained even by the tenuous definition of 'active' (five+ edits a month) the WMF uses -- I have to assume it's something to do with educational recruitment drives. Wikibooks is also spiky, but downwards. Wikinews is dead. Wikisource is basically upwards, although the timeline raises COVID questions. And Wiktionary is the most interesting of the lot, with a strong, significant upwards trend that strongly implies much higher comparative activity than the given number, considering that while Wikidata and Commons may be nominally way higher that activity (especially the former) is overwhelmingly people interacting with them as an aside from another project. Vaticidalprophet 15:34, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

Wikivoyage is actually a niche project. In the format they have chosen they can not compete with big publishers, and therefore Rome or London are generally not the best pages they have. I am not so well familiar with the English Wikivoyage, but I am sure there are come articles about an semi-obscure place in Idaho or in Cork County which are better than everything else written about these locations. The problem is of course they are difficult to find, and most people just do not have motivation searching.--Ymblanter (talk) 21:24, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

I don't think you have to worry about off topic Vaticidalprophet when we've already meandered from mosque to museums via schools. :D I guess my question then, Iri, is what info are we providing? Historical info about the museum/school/mosque should be easy if they're notable whether it be content, listed building, etc. I guess what we don't (and probably shouldn't) convey is what's on at museum X. Ymblanter, I think obscure is always what's done best. StarM 01:29, 30 March 2021 (UTC)

My point isn't that people aren't coming to Wikipedia to learn about schools, it's that people are coming to Wikipedia to learn about schools when really they shouldn't. Since most of these articles are unpatrolled and unmonitored magnets for vandalism and dubious trivia, anyone reading them has to operate on the assumption that at best they're outdated and at worst they're actively wrong. Given that any local education authority is already going to have comparable pages which are kept up to date, the existence of the Wikipedia articles for non-notable schools is actively damaging as it puts potentially inaccurate content above the accurate content in search results.

Yes, obscure is always what the WMF does best—for popular topics we're rarely the best source since our nature means we're always slightly out-of-date, and at any given time our pages are a lottery as to whether that particular version is neutral. (If I ran the internet, I'd order the search engines to remove pages like Coronavirus disease 2019 and Joe Biden from search results altogether unless the search string was something like covid wikipedia that specifically indicated the searcher was looking for us.) I'm not sure the "we fill in the blanks more reputable sources don't have the space to cover" model translates as well into a travel guide though, as people use the two differently—even for places completely off the tourist trail there will usually be some kind of official website which is more informative than anything we can provide, and when it comes to travel readers understand how to decode marketing euphemisms in a way that isn't always the case with more general content, and thus neutrality and paid-editing aren't so much of an issue. ‑ Iridescent 14:12, 30 March 2021 (UTC)