User talk:Ravenswing/ArchiveR

Rant of the Month (courtesy of AN/I) (7/08)

Quite aside from that this has been exhaustively argued and the horse is long-dead, there's an important point being obscured, and it's one Americans, especially, usually muff. Do individuals have "rights?" Yes, they do. What does that mean? It means that the government cannot do certain things to them. Wikipedia is not the government; it is a private entity that has no duty to respect anyone's constitutional rights except as required by law. There is no right to free speech, to privacy, to pretty much of anything here, except as provided in Wikipedia's own policies and guidelines. Except to the degree those policies and guidelines are applied, and unless compelled otherwise by a court with jurisdiction over the English Wikipedia (read: the US federal courts and state courts in California and Florida), it can say pretty much whatever the hell it wants about whomever the hell it pleases.

My Rant of the Month (courtesy of Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Walter J. West) (9/08)

"To quote from CFB:COACH: "This page is a WikiProject essay on notability. It contains the advice and/or opinions of one or more WikiProjects on how they interpret notability within their area of expertise. It is not a policy or guideline, and editors are free to, but not obliged to follow it during XfD's." Quite aside from my complete confidence that Paul's assertion of the importance of every college football team is not shared by the average football fan in reference to a program that only last year started Division III, it is scarcely forum shopping to point out the obvious and ongoing fact that the various Wikiprojects have not, yet, been given the authority to write notability guidelines that overrule WP:N, WP:ORG or WP:ATHLETE. Beyond that, I've no faith in their ability to set notability criteria if they assert that every coach who has ever coached a college game is notable, or that any level of college football below NCAA Division I is the "highest level" of amateur sport in that field. That's not "setting" anything; that's declaring that everyone under the sun is notable, and that's an end run around WP:N I doubt many Wikipedians would find acceptable."

My Rant of the Month (courtesy of WP:AFD, which is typical) (9/09)

There's a recent AfD where a veteran (and chronically outspoken) editor rails, among other things, against consensus and wants his opinion on record about how much it's BS.

Now a catchphrase of mine I've used on Wikipedia before is pertinent: "The nature of consensus is that sometimes it runs against you. When it does, accept that fact and move on." That isn't really so much pertinent here as a comment about the rules of the road. Wikipedia stands and falls on consensus. However much people claim this isn't about v-o-t-i-n-g, it is a rare admin who'll rule for policy over consensus, and we can all think of cases where idiotic consensus gave policy the finger and won the day.

Aggravating, yes. Maddening, yes. But I don't think many of us can imagine Wikipedia working any other way. With all the opinionated folks around, consensus is the only thing that holds us together: the concept that our voice stands a chance of being heard, that we're not going to get overruled as a matter of course by dictators in charge. It's what keeps us from being a joke like Conservapedia.

And that's the issue here, which being an AfD on a sports article layers in extra irony. Sports have rules, and no matter how free-spirited you are or how right you think you are, you must follow those rules as the price of admission. You don't get to tell the referee that you're going to ignore his input. You don't get to tell your fellow players or your coach that you're doing things your way and your way alone.

Wikipedia works the same way, and like a hockey team, your options are to play by the rules, to accept the framework of the rules, or to take a hike.

My Rant of the Month (10/09)

My wife Amanda and I are walking home in the icy rain from Walmart, getting drenched. On the way, we have a conversation about clinging to belief. Substantively, we agree on the following point:

People, upon first encountering an issue, swiftly decide which side they support. This decision is often knee-jerk, and not based on much of anything: whim, emotion, the point-of-view first presented to them (especially when by someone likeable), and so on. Since humans are tribal animals, they then cling to that position in the face of all reason and contrary fact, and often dissolve in confusion or throw up irrelevancies when brought up short on their POV. I'm minded of the news yesterday about repeated Republican attacks on Newt Gingrich, who espoused an anti-global warming message in a public forum; plainly he's a traitor for breaking ranks just because of pesky scientific fact.

I run into this syndrome all the time on Wikipedia, where in various policing and content discussions - for some of the most turgid thinking extant, take a gander at WP:AFD - folks find the most startling explanations as to why they are right and the facts are wrong. All this to avoid the statements so many people would rather die than admit:

"I'm wrong." "I was mistaken."

It isn't easy to confront it; sometimes it is simpler to walk away. I'm as prone as the next fellow to fighting my corner ... but when it happens I have to accept when someone trumps my beliefs with fact and change my POV.

These are the things I think about.

My Rant of the Month (2/10)

It's yet another AfD, with a disturbingly regular theme; a superficially well-sourced article about an organization where the sources are uniformly about another issue, with quotes from an officer of the organization. As is to be expected in such cases, there's a flood of Keep voters with arguments such as "Seems notable" or the ever-brilliant "It's an organization that's been in the news."

Now I'm not even ranting so much about the editors who use terms like "notable" without bothering to review the definitions of notability on Wikipedia, among which is the clear and unambiguous statement that "Quotations from an organization's personnel as story sources do not count as substantial coverage unless the organization itself is also a major subject of the story." After years of AfD work, I know full well that you can't go wrong underestimating the willingness of your average AfD voter to pay more than five seconds' attention to the relevant policies or guidelines, let alone take five minutes to research the notability and bonafides of a subject at AfD.

What does cause my head to shake is the assertion by one editor that this organization is more a coatrack for the founder than any standalone outfit, which seems to be the case ... and no one else caught it. It reminds me - vividly and painfully - of the years I lived out in western Massachusetts. We Americans all know about the extremist "militia" movement and its antics over the last couple decades. There'd be times when "militia"-related issues would hit the news, and like clockwork, the regional newspaper would contact this one particular Springfield resident for a quote. He was the "head" of a "militia," and the bizarre fact of the matter was that he was the only fellow in the area upon whom the Union-News could lay its hands with any claim to be a "militia" spokesman; his organization was an army of one.

But, of course, articles had to be "balanced," and there had to be two sides presented, doncha know. Thus a fringe whackdoodle espousing a philosophy no one else in the area would do got a bully pulpit. Now perhaps the pretentions of the Springfield Union-News to journalistic integrity were threadbare. What's Wikipedia's excuse?

My Rant of the Month (10/10)

This from an old AfD discussion in which, as seems often enough the case, a bunch of us was battling against a sole militant. Like The "Speech", sometimes it bears repeating:

There's a .sig I use on VBulletin-based forums that permit it. It runs "It's not that I don't understand you. It's that I don't agree with you. What about this distinction is so hard to grasp?" You already let us know you thought the concept of consensus was BS, so it's little enough surprise that you equate failure to agree with you with lack of understanding, but I'm afraid our comeuppance will have to wait until you're elected the Dictator of Wikipedia and can remold it all in your image. Good luck with that.

My Rant of the Month (11/10)

From AfD, as usual:

That being said, I agree with Hrafn, and am trying not to get increasingly testy with the tendency of Keep proponents at AfD to presume that the GNG (which clearly and explicitly states that sources must describe the subject "in significant detail") kicks over for any casual mention of the subject's name. Look: a 5000-page review of a play by the most prominent literary critic alive and published on the front page of the New York Times, describing it as the greatest work ever penned by mortal man, does not support the notability of the author if it doesn't discuss the author in significant detail. Period. If it doesn't, the reliability of the sources do not matter. The length at which it discusses the derivative work does not matter. Allegations that he may have won some kind of award don't matter. The duration of a show for which he wrote a couple of eps doesn't matter. Without sources which discuss Meenan - not his works - in significant detail, an article on him cannot be sustained.

This is my third variation of the above argument put into AfD discussions today.

For pity's sake, what is wrong with people that they can't grasp basic concepts? The GNG is solidly designed and heavily footnoted. Its provisions are explained in detail. There is no excuse whatsoever for this nonsense. I'm reminded of nothing short than a beaming student handing a 15-page paper up to a professor, hoping that the professor won't notice that there's about one page of solid writing buried in fourteen pages of fluff, generous kerning and typesetting, wide margins and elliptical expressions.

Rabid inclusionists, please try this exercise out: instead of your habit of thinking "OMG, we have to save this article from those evil babyeating deletionist scum, so let's take any and every source we can borrow, beg or steal and claim they meet the relevant guidelines!" how about you approach it from the angle of "Do these sources meet the guidelines?"

(There. I feel slightly better.)

My Rant of the Month (12/10)

December's rant, a few days early. For a change, I'm not teeing off at AfD. WP:DISINFOBOX has been cited a few times in a particular content dispute, so I went and took a peek at it. (Please do yourself; this rant will make less sense without it.)

There. Let’s continue.

Generally speaking, I have a problem with Wikipedia essays. A lot of users feel – or act like – they represent official policy or community consensus. Many folks don't hesitate to cite them as "reasons" to advocate deletions. As such, essays often cow the inexperienced, who see the official-looking hyperlink and back off under the assumption that a formal rule is being quoted. Never mind that essays are often desperately flawed; the oft-cited WP:WAX being an example of one of the worst offenders. Look, in a process that leans heavily upon precedent – "all high schools are notable," "anyone who's played a single major league game is notable," "we've ruled that way in all similar recent AfDs," "consensus has always gone that way" – how in the hell can that be squared with an essay proclaiming precedent to be bad?

This one, however, is a particularly egregious straw man argument.

First off, it's condescending. Its lead, boldface statement is: "A box aggressively attracts the marginally literate eye with apparent promises to contain a reductive summary of information; not all information can be so neatly contained. Like a bulleted list, or a timeline that substitutes for genuine history, it offers a competitive counter-article, stripped of nuance. As a substitute for accuracy and complexity, a box trumps all discourse." Really? Do they genuinely think the average Wikipedia user is "marginally literate?" That users are incapable of distinguishing between bulletpoint info and substance? That they will presume there is nothing more to say about the subject than what's in the infobox? Nonsense: that's what the article is for … and, wonder of wonders, it takes just a flick of the eye to notice that there is, indeed, an article attached to the average infobox.

(Ironically enough, this statement is set aside in a separate box, in the exact same spot an infobox would be placed were one included with the essay. Go figure.)

The essay's laundry list of "problems" is likewise, well, disinformation. "If the infobox contains only information found in the lead it is a disinfobox." Really? What about an infobox makes the information within it erroneous? "If a biographical infobox contains only a photo, a person's occupation, and date and place of birth/death it is a disinfobox." Again, what's presumptively erroneous about that? "If the infobox contains multiple entries within any identifying field it is probably a disinfobox." Or, mirabile dictu, there's more than one thing to say in the field, and not saying it is, well, disinformation.

Beyond that, the essay expounds on three principal criticisms: that sometimes infoboxes are as large or larger than the stub articles to which they're attached, that they sometimes have inaccurate information and that they lack nuance.

On the first, well, yeah. So what? Wikipedia is littered with stub articles, and few pretend that stubs are the ideal purveyors of information. Why are they allowed to exist? Because they're placeholders for bigger and better articles. I’d bet $100 against a dime that more Wikipedia articles come from people coming across a stub, thinking "Damn, I could write a better article than that" and doing so, than from those who think, "Gee, I wonder whether there’s an article on Dallas Smith on Wikipedia; I'll write one up and post it over there." No one's suggesting we get rid of stubs because they're still only stubs.

On the second, well, yeah. So what? If the article's inaccurate, correct it. Simple as that. It happens a hundred thousand times daily.

On the third, well, yeah. So what? That's what the article is for.

Indeed, the very essay title is disinformation: it's not really that infoboxes mislead the reader. It's that the author of the essay hates them, and came up with a catchy sound bite to spread his, well, disinformation.

Wikipedia is not for morons incapable of reading outside the lines, and I wish more people wouldn't sell its users quite so short.

My Rant of the Month (1/11)

January's rant, a few days early, as in Christmas Eve. Yeah, I'm teeing off at AfD. Somewhat.

There's an editor. He's been around a few years. He's very active at prod removal, and very active at AfD - in fact, nearly half his Wikipedia edits are, astonishingly enough, at AfD. He's a banner carrier of the inclusionists, an inveterate dePRODder, a leading light of the Article Rescue Squadron (which, in my not-so-humble opinion, is less a vehicle for saving worthy articles than a militant force whose goal is to Thwart Deletionists, but that's another rant). He's also very caustic and prolix when it comes to denouncing the deletionists, and rhetoric about "haters" out to "destroy Wikipedia" flows freely and often from his keyboard, to the point where titles such as "Snotty Elitist Deletionist" pepper his user page.

Well now. In the midst of responding to one of his screeds, I took the liberty of pulling up his editing stats. They're pretty staggering. In point of fact, over three quarters of his edits to date have been to talk pages and at AfD. He averages fewer than two articlespace edits a DAY, a lot of which are prod removals instead of actual new content. The majority of his new article creations are redirects or name changes.

So this bloke, who misses very few chances to pontificate at the "destroyers" who do nothing but "tear down" Wikipedia, in point of fact spends most of his time pontificating. Sorry; you want to call yourself an inclusionist, start building things. Nasty old deletionist me? I've created over fifty articles, only one of them a redirect. I've got several DYKs to my name and an Imperial Triple Crown for multiple FAs AND GAs AND DYKs. I drafted the standard notability criteria now in use by the sports Wikiproject in which I participate most. I put in six mainspace edits for every one this chap does, and that's with me taking six months off last year on a Wikibreak. I bristle enough at being called a "hater" and a "destroyer" without words like that coming from a hypocrite poser who talks a great deal more than he actually builds.

And to all a good night.

My Rant of the Month (3/11)

Something of a blast from the past here, this from an RfA back in '08. It was the candidate's second self-nom of several (he'd go on to a colorful run at ArbCom the next year) on the "I don't give a fuck - let's tear it all down" platform, and got the usual startling number of Supports for being a jaunty, tell-it-like-he-sees-it free spirit, doncha know. So herewith some of my comments:

Could we stop pretending that jaunty arrogance is some manner of gold-plated virtue? It scarcely takes bravery or moral courage to be a jackass. Go to a shopping mall on any school day and you'll find a 15-year-old cutting class who claims the same level of "honesty;" it's as impressive here as at the shopping mall. Any of you genuinely think that Wikipedia would benefit from a proliferation of this attitude?

"It's a remarkable thing (and I've traded on it all my life) that a single redeeming quality in a black sheep wins greater esteem than all the virtues in honest men." -George McDonald Frasier, Flashman and the Redskins

In any event, Sir Harry Flashman was right. No doubt there are a lot of folks who chafe under Wikipedia's civility rules, but there are a lot more who wouldn't like the results of a Wikipedia full of jaunty individualists who popped off their mouths, and wouldn't stick around long.

My Rant of the Month (9/11)

Folks, kindly indulge me in a little exercise. Could you look over the following notability criteria (from WP:NHOCKEY), see what conclusions you draw from it, and then glance at the excerpts from the discussion below? Thankew.

Ice hockey players are presumed notable if they

1. Played one or more games in an existing or defunct top professional league such as the National Hockey League, World Hockey Association, Elitserien, SM-liiga, or Kontinental Hockey League;
2. Played one or more games in an amateur league considered, through lack of a professional league, the highest level of competition extant, such as the 19th century Amateur Hockey Association or the Soviet League;
3. Played at least 100 games in fully professional minor leagues such as the American Hockey League, the International Hockey League, the ECHL, the Mestis, the HockeyAllsvenskan or other such league;
4. Achieved preeminent honours (all-time top ten career scorer, First Team All-Star, All-American) in a lower minor league such as the Central Hockey League or the United Hockey League, in a major junior league such as those of the Canadian Hockey League, or in a major collegiate hockey league (Note: merely playing in a major junior league or major collegiate hockey is not enough to satisfy inclusion requirements) ...

• NHOCKEY only says "fully professional minor league", which the CHL is. Tendentious Editor 12:27, 8 September 2011 (UTC)
• And note that List of ice hockey leagues lists the CHL under "Minor professional" not under "Semi-Pro". Tendentious Editor 12:35, 8 September 2011 (UTC)
• If Criterion 3 is not meant to include lower-minor-league teams -- professional or otherwise -- then say so. Tendentious Editor 12:42, 8 September 2011 (UTC)
  • Well that is sort of what I am saying, I thought it did. Which is why the next criteria clearly indicates "lower minor league". Perhaps its a case that it was considered that people would take all the requirements together instead of trying to split them out individually. I know I assumed people would read the following point and take them together. Would have to ask Ravenswing what he meant when he wrote it but assuming from his comment above I am guessing he did as well. -Someone who isn't braindamaged 12:43, 8 September 2011 (UTC)

** One would think it wouldn't have to do so, and that any reasonable editor would see two criteria referencing top-level leagues, the next one referencing upper-tier minor leagues, and the fourth referencing college, junior and lower-level minor leagues, and conclude from that "Gosh! Maybe those criteria not only define those levels, but mention the leagues to which they pertain ... hey, look, in fact, they do!" I presumed, when drafting those criteria, that a reasonable degree of common sense would prevail, and that people would (for instance) assume that a notability criterion specifically citing the Central Hockey League did, in fact, set forth the standards of notability for players of that league. To have set down in every other criterion, "By the way, this doesn't apply to the Central Hockey League - go see Criterion #4, really!" would have been unnecessary and insulting to the intelligence of the average editor.

The above rant aside, Tendentious Editor, come on. Are you really claiming to be confused here? Are you genuinely claiming that you don't think that Criterion #4 sets down the notability standards for lower-level leagues? To be honest, this is an exercise in pedantry. It's unnecessary, it's tendentious, and I don't see its relevance to this AfD.  ῲ Ravenswing ῴ  13:14, 8 September 2011 (UTC)

Anyway, thanks for listening, folks.

My Rant of the Month (11/11)

Wikipedia is materially improved every time someone with a chip on his shoulder gets into a hissy fit, the moment he finds that policies apply to him too, and takes a hike. Editors who can handle the principle that their work is subject to quality standards and editing are assets. As with any other contributor, it's up to you which you wish to be.

-- from AFD, March 6, 2007

My Rant of the Month (3/12)

It's interesting that the author of this essay uses "elitist" as a slur, as if there was something wrong with it. The fact of the matter is that not only do we not eschew "elitism" in our daily lives, we positively demand it. If your automobile is broken down, if you're visiting the doctor's office, if you're taking your family out to a pricey restaurant, you would not be pleased at the suggestion that you ought to settle for mediocrity; you want that mechanic, that physician, that cook to be proficient at the task, and they had better give you your money's worth. From the schools that educate our children, to the sports teams for which we root, to the officials we elect to govern our communities, we demand no less than their elitist best, and we are very unhappy when we don't get it.

We're not out to write a mediocre encyclopedia here. This is a resource the whole world employs, and it is not merely our duty, but our privilege to get it right. That mechanic, that doctor, those sports players, those teachers all have rules they must obey, procedures they must follow, ways of doing things they shouldn't contravene ... as well as people whose duty it is to bring them to book if they don't.

And so do we. We should all be "elitists" on Wikipedia, and we should be proud to use the appellation.

- from a rebuttal to WP:Just write a damn encyclopedia

My Rant of the Month (4/12)

... Well, one problem that you have is a fundamental misunderstanding of what WP:COI means. It does not, as you seem to believe, refer to being a partisan of one side or another. No one claims - for instance - that I have a conflict of interest in editing the Boston Bruins article, even though I am a native Bostonian and a partisan of the team, and have nearly twice as many edits in the article as any other active Wikipedian. WP:COI's examples are narrowly construed: being a paid employee of an article's subject, being involved in a legal case concerning the subject, self-promotion, editing your own article, citing your own publications as a source.

So, what we have is your presumption that someone who merely feels strongly about certain aspects of a subject cannot avoid "bias" when editing an article. Does that not, then, apply to you? You've made it clear that there is a faction in this that you despise; you consider them unethical, immoral, and unfit to edit Wikipedia. Your talk page, and your postings, make it clear that you are strongly anti-circumcision. This is just as much of a bias, and a strong one. How can you then, by your own lights, fail to impart your prejudices and biases into related articles?

When all is said and done, I rather doubt that Wikipedia is any more full of idealists than any other walk of life. No one expects you, or me, or anyone to believe anything of other editors. All we are expected to do is act in good faith, and presume that others are doing so, absent concrete proof to the contrary. You are not required to love editors you feel are immoral; you are required to act with civility towards them.

- from a warning string on a problem user's page, following an ANI complaint

My Rant of the Month (11/12)

It is a regular feature at AfD that (especially inexperienced) editors aggrieved that their pet articles are being deleted pen essays similar to the above, claiming that Wikipedia's failure to suspend its notability criteria and other rules and guidelines in their favor is a sure harbinger of the encyclopedia's doom. In point of fact, the notability criteria are not "subjective" - they've been painfully hammered out over a decade's time. There is no "crisis" requiring "extreme measures" - and somehow, those "extreme measures" always do seem to boil down to "Let my article stay on Wikipedia" - and if a horde of casual users from the days when Wikipedia was the Next Big Internet Fad are leaving the project in the hands of those who seriously care about maintaining and improving it, well and good.

Your insinuation that your article is the victim of power-mad haters is easily refuted. Go look at AfD for any given day; there are about 80-120 articles put up daily. You will see the same editors cropping up over and over again, in AfD after AfD ... voting to Keep sometimes, voting to Delete other times. These discussions aren't dominated by folks highly invested in the subject matter, but by average Wikipedians who seek to apply the rules and guidelines in standard fashions. No one here is Out To Get You -- you haven't been on the encyclopedia two weeks, and what foes could you possibly have made in that time? No one here is Out To Get Your Article -- I have no stake or interest in what elements do or do not get articles, and I'm sure that in like fashion there aren't many physicists or pseudoscientists commenting here. All this is is another AfD.

Rant of the Month (6/13)

There's a very large essay (at WP:ATA) concerning arguments to avoid in deletion discussions. As such things often do, many of its component essays (each focusing on a separate argument) have acquired the patina of holy writ. One of the most time-honored is WP:WAX, or as it's latterly better known, WP:OTHERSTUFF. The gist of the argument is that you ought not argue that an article should be kept at AfD because other similar articles exist. (The converse, to delete an article because none like it exist, is far, far rarer.)

Honestly, while I'm sure that the knee-jerk inclusionists would count me firmly in the deletionist camp, and according to their propaganda people like me seize on any excuse to ashcan articles, I've always thought WP:WAX/OTHERSTUFF is arrant nonsense, and have thought so going on to a decade now. Quite aside from that the essay's verbiage boils down to little more than "It's bad," have people really been paying attention all these years? Wikipedia is heavily precedent-based and entirely consensus-based. We rule, all the freaking time, that a matter ought to be decided a particular fashion because it's always been done that way.

This has even been the case at AfD. The entire notion -- for example -- of American high schools being presumptively notable, a bugbear of mine once upon a time? That came for no better reason than a certain tipping point (not even, then, a majority) of AfD frequent flyers kept voting Keep on high school AfDs. Eventually it came to be seen as not worth the bother. A stance turned into a custom, the custom turned into a tradition, the tradition turned into a rule. How? Precedent.

The entire concept of presumptive notability falls into a similar camp. Look. I defend subordinate notability criteria. There are two sets in play on Wikipedia now that I drafted; so stipulated. But truth be told, there really is no good reason for "Asa Stratton" -- for whom we know no biographical information beyond dates of birth, death and internment, and often not that many -- to have a Wikipedia article, simply because he pitched an inning for the Worcester Ruby Legs in 1880 or played five minutes on the pitch for West Bromwich Albion in 1878. It was just decided, back when such standards were first conceived, that having played so much as a single game in a "top-level," "fully professional" sports league qualified one for an article, and the line's been drawn in the sand ever since ... even to the point of absurdities that (for instance) many editors of the baseball Wikiproject are firmly convinced that minor-league players, even if they've played hundreds of games, aren't notable, while the aforementioned Asa Stratton's single game was enough for immortality.

If we're going to have a precedent-based encyclopedia, then let's admit it, shall we?

Rant of the Month (1/14)

So ... I've been running a bunch of XfDs on articles from a particular editor. Another editor kindly sent me e-mail, concerned that I would be seen as unfairly targeting this fellow and wondering how I'd respond. I just composed an answer, which it seemed useful to turn into my first Rant of the year.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

... I already have my answer to that:

1) These are all BLP articles, and in almost every case, the only refs are to stat blocks on EliteProspects and Hockey DB. WP:BLP speaks explicitly and at length about the degree to which we need to be aggressive on whacking down unsourced BLPs.

2) For years now, X has demonstrated his contempt for policies, guidelines or consensus where they conflict with his own POV as to How Things Should Be. Aside from the blocks he's had, this behavior has earned him permanent topic and page move bans on any article where diacritics might be an issue. As far as WP:NHOCKEY criteria goes, he has for years now edited against consensus. It isn't that he's unaware of consensus; I can link to several years worth of WikiProject talk pages where his open advocacy of the notability of fringe leagues and fringe awards has been met with uniform and explicit consensus against his POV.

3) In the particular case of these AfDs, he's consistently miscategorized the criteria, when he hasn't outright lied about it. He cannot be unaware, after years' worth of debate over it, how consensus has interpreted the criteria ... especially since on three occasions now, his actions have been the direct provocation for the original "common sense" criteria to be tightened up. Beyond that, he's not acting to clean these articles up. Instead, he keeps arguing for delay ... to have articles tagged instead of AfDed, to introduce this venue or that to the layers of complexity to change the criteria. Notably absent are attempts, any visible attempts, to clean these articles up. Despite his protestations that he has found sources which satisfy the GNG in some of these AfDs, in not one case so far have any of those sources found their way into the articles. Given his history of bad faith, I'mcalling his bluff: produce those sources.

4) If a newcomer were guilty of these actions, some admin or other interested party would walk down the newcomer's contribution list, vette each article, and either clean up violations or take them to AfD/CSD/Prod. We recognize that this is not "targeting," but an examination of an editor's contribution history where we have strong evidence that the editor routinely violates Wikipedia policy and guidelines, followed by action against those cases where those policies and guidelines have been violated. I've always rejected the premise that there's an unspoken number of edits beyond which an editor may commit such violations with impunity, and beyond which an editor's contribution history becomes immune to examination, and we can all think of many ugly incidents (sometimes dragging on for several years) this syndrome has produced.

Rant of the Month ... and apparently of the year (3/16)

Several years ago, I opined that if I ever named a law on Wikipedia, this would be it. High time I put my bytes where my, well, bytes are.

Ravenswing's Law: "The degree to which a group believes that their impact on the world is worthy of memorializing is in inverse proportion to the sum of its size and genuine notoriety."

Rant of the (year) (10/17)

Sometimes, over on biographical AfDs, people (especially fans of the subjects or the article creators in question) advocate keeping the articles because surely the player in question is a future star ... about to be a high draft choice, sure to gain preeminent honors in their amateur/collegiate/junior/minor leagues, a can't miss prospect. This is, of course, where WP:CRYSTAL comes into play, and almost always carries the day. Still, they're not always convinced. Indeed, they seldom are, and some of the most bitter and contentious AfDs I've ever seen have involved this principle.

Something I like to hang onto, and glance at every rare once in a while, are links to some of these AfDs where people maintain fervently (and sometimes hotly and bitterly) about what a great star their subjects are destined to be ... and where time has continued to tell that not only had no one ever heard of them before, no one's heard of them since.

Rant of the (year) (12/19)

A longstanding dispute over in the hockey Wikiproject, where I’m most active, is in the notability of women’s hockey. By and large, the project’s ongoing take is that while of course many individual players pass notability muster, women’s hockey leagues generally do not. I’ve just read over a couple old AfDs on the subject. Herewith some of my quotes, in lieu of a more organized rant.

"I expect I'm the only commenter here who's been a season ticket holder for a women's college hockey team, never mind driving two hours to see Erin Whitten's AHL debut (if but an exhibition game, alas). But that being said, c'mon: that's an WP:ITSIMPORTANT argument. What notability guideline is satisfied by being the Xth woman to go from Y town to Z college to the pros? Answer: zero ... The answer to "But women's hockey just isn't covered by reliable media sources" isn't "oh well, then we're going to waive GNG/BIO/WP:V where women's hockey subjects are concerned." It's that if they don't meet the GNG, they don't get articles."

"You're not the first person to claim that the guidelines are flawed because they don't grant presumptive notability to Some Group Of Players you feel are being disadvantaged. My answer, as it always has been, is that NHOCKEY has been changed a number of times, and all you need to do to move consensus is to prove your argument. Granting presumptive notability to every player in the NWHL is a huge step, and only the top professional leagues in the world, with far greater media coverage and far greater attendance, get there. Take the Ontario major junior league, for one. The OHL has immense media coverage. Many of its games are televised, the teams all have radio deals, and the average attendance at an OHL game is greater than the combined capacity of every NWHL rink combined (let alone actual attendance). And the Ontario Hockey League is not accorded presumptive notability for its players."

"(rant warning) Honestly? I would love for the world to take more notice of women's hockey; it's skillfully played, it's fast, it's hockey. But for whatever reason, the world just does not much care. I may not like ... But we do not get to rewrite Wikipedia's notability guidelines just because there's a group or an activity out there that the media ignores. Neither NHOCKEY, nor the GNG, nor Wikipedia generally are for forcing the world to pay attention to women's hockey."

My Rant of the (Year): Turning on the flamethrower (7/20)

Okay, so a longstanding editor placed alerts in two WP talk pages I frequent, touching on the ghastly backlog of articles at CAT:NN. For those of you scoring at home, this is the master list of articles that have been notability tagged. The backlog was up over sixty-five thousand articles.

More than a little appalled, I decided to be part of the solution. I dove right in at the back of the queue, articles tagged back in 2009. Prodding, filing AfDs, redirecting, the like. About one article in ten I haven't touched, because it'd be too much of a struggle to establish notability and/or an automatic and probably losing fight at AfD. About one article in twenty proves notable at first serious glance; fair enough, remove the tag.

Of course, the inclusionists and professional deprodders have jumped in as well. (To give one his due -- because he's otherwise been an asshole over it -- he pointed out to me that I really should be redirecting instead if there's an obvious and valid target, which lesson I took to heart. It does preserve the history, after all, in case someone waddles along with some proper sourcing in hand.)

But here's where I cross the civility line, and I don't really much care. An article that has been tagged for questionable notability for eleven bloody years (the most recent group I've touched is June 2009) is one sending a blaring message: that the community just cannot be bothered to set it right. And while I loathe backseat drivers at the best of times, my use for those who are paying attention enough to an article to deprod it, contest a speedy or an AfD, or revert a redirect but NOT paying enough attention to do five bloody minutes of work to source it? Somewhere between zero and "you got to be frigging kidding me." The ones who are a cut below that on the Clueless scale are the ones who've actually dared to deprod with -- and I am not making this up -- rationales of "It's been tagged for ten years, surely we can't make a decision to delete in just seven days."

My wife has a catchphrase: lead, follow or get out of the way. If you don't have the time to improve the encyclopedia, get out of the way of those who do. Or else get out in front: every editor can see the same list I do. If you get to an article, properly source it, and remove the tag before I get there ... well, ain't that a bonus we all appreciate? Good on you.

And if all the contribution you have to make is to be reflexively and mindlessly disruptive ... then what I feel for you is utter and deep contempt.

Good day.

Ravenswing's Rant: Breaking Out The Cluebat (10/21)

So. There's a slightly rancorous debate going on as I type on the talk page of the NSPORTS notability criteria. Following a recent (and startling) successful RfC to trim the presumptive notability criteria from Olympic athletes generally to medalists, some other tightening attempts have taken place. This particular one involves removing automatic presumptive notability for Davis/Federation Cup tennis players. It was open for nearly a month and a half, and had a 8-5 headcount at the close ... and it was that close only because a handful of tennis Wikiproject members noticed at the last moment. The closer made a long and very well-reasoned explanation for closing on strength of argument over headcount.

Whereupon the tennis Wikiproject participants went varying degrees of batshit. I'm not ranking on them here; I don't think their objections hold water and said so, but they're not self-evidently crazy. But another editor got into the party, with the pretty startling assertion that Wikiprojects should have sole and exclusive custody of their associated SNGs, and that editors who are not members of those Wikiprojects should keep their (presumably layman) opinions to themselves. Thus --

• ... I will use a different forum to talk about the lack of respect by "superior" editors to a group of editors that have made a specific long-term commitment to a topic. Seriously, would you tell the Medicine project that they have NO RIGHT to manage what is notable to their project? What on earth makes you think they would respect your non-medical opinion from outside the project? Frankly, I would be disappointed if they did. - CluelessBoob

• As long as you address your lack of respect for the facts, feel free. No one has been told they have "NO RIGHT" to have input on anything. What has in fact been stated -- and what is in fact Wikipedia policy -- is that no editor or group of editors has any manner of dominion over, or veto concerning, any notability standard, and you have been around Wikipedia quite long enough not to be ignorant of that fact. Part of the reason for this is practical -- if you choose to use me as an example, neither you nor the medical-oriented Wikiproject/s have any idea whatsoever about my professional qualifications (or lack thereof) to judge medical topics. All you know is that I'm not an active participant in such Wikiprojects.

  That's not unusual, I'm sure -- of the 113 articles I've created, only ONE has been in my area of professional expertise, and no doubt the great number of editors prefer not to bring their workplaces to Wikipedia. In like fashion, the editors in those Wikiprojects have not been required to prove their credentials in order to edit those articles. Never mind that the result would be utter disaster. Would you go on to claim that a registered nurse's opinion trumps a paramedic's? That a MD can veto a nurse? Well, THAT doctor has her degree from a more prestigious institution, so STFU. Oh yeah? Well, THAT doctor has a Wikipedia article himself, so HE gets more say ... (Sure, that doctor's a podiatrist in Milwaukee, and has a Wikipedia article because he was a pro tennis player at one point, but sure, he gets to have a veto over articles dealing with tropical diseases ...)

  The main reason is this, though. We are not a consecrated elite here. Notability standards are, and should be, broadly comprehensible to editors. Your inference that there is something about the question "Do these players, generally speaking, meet the GNG" that requires such a consecrated elite to understand is at the level best peculiar. I recommend you ditch it. We are required to treat fellow editors with civility. We are not required to pay any group of editors deference. Ravenswing

Ravenswing's Rant: Common ≠ Sense (2/22)

An occasional column for rants of mine that I wanted to memorialize. For past rants, see my Rant Archive.

In a recent AfD, one editor who should know better (being an admin with nearly 200,000 edits) kept asserting that the subject ought to be presumptively notable because of his interpretation of WP:COMMONSENSE, however much the subject failed to meet any extant notability criterion, the GNG or any other. Alright, no one else agrees with him except the article creator, who's now indeffed. Not quite the point.

What is the point is the further crystallization of my belief: that WP:COMMONSENSE -- along with the more often-quoted WP:IAR -- is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

Caustically worded, perhaps, however much that it's a paraphrase of Dr. Johnson's famous quote. But my belief is firm. Wikipedia has rules, and it has those rules because without them, this would be Urban Dictionary and a lightly regarded (and poorly visited) Internet joke, instead of the grandest and most useful encyclopedia in the history of the world. Those rules have been painfully hammered out through two decades of oft-contentious consensus. There's more tinkering going on now. There will be as long as Wikipedia lasts, because without this system, it won't last very long. Defying those rules should only be done for the most important of reasons, and they sure as hell shouldn't be defied because an AfD about a provincial police official who otherwise fails to meet the GNG is the hill one has suddenly decided to die on.

I would change a LOT of rules were I elevated to Dictator of Wikipedia. Damn the torpedoes, I'd require registration to make edits. I'd abolish all SNGs except for the GNG itself, and consign obscure academics and mere placenames on a topo map to the same abyss as obscure sportsmen playing in a single match for the Twittenham Minor Old Boys in 1878. I'd do what should've been done a decade ago, and take RfA out of the hands of a community that's proven itself so unfit for the job that new admins are rarer than triple plays. No one would be allowed more than one dePROD a day, and the price of being allowed to vote 'Keep' at XfD would be to make at least one substantive edit improving that article within a week of the vote. Article histories after a certain point (a year? two years? three?) would be anonymized, which would hopefully sabotage the horribly pernicious Game High Score mentality so many editors have. And so on.

None of these stands a chance in hell of being implemented in the foreseeable future. Yet somehow, even though Wikipedia is not constituted in my image, I can believe in its mission. I can follow and respect rules with which I disagree. And I can do so because imperfect as it is, those rules were created through consensus. In a bunch of those cases, I had my say. (And in many more, I could have had my say if I'd cared enough to participate.) As I've said before, the nature of a consensus-based system is that sometimes you're on the losing side of it, and when you are, it's incumbent upon you to lose gracefully and move on.

COMMONSENSE and IAR aren't invoked by those people. They're hauled out as trump cards in the hope of defying common sense, defying the rules, defying consensus. They're a declaration of "I'm right and everyone else is wrong." They're the last refuge of those who know in their guts that they don't have any other arguments to proffer -- else why not use stronger ones? -- but they're incapable of either losing gracefully or moving on.

Ravenswing's Rant: "But I Shouldn't HAVE To!!!" (7/22)

It is safe to say that I have little use for extreme inclusionists. I've certainly clashed with them often enough these last couple decades. But the reason has little to do with their fundamental belief in the "inherent" notability of everything. It is much more with their tactics.

A giant case in point has been unfolding since last fall. WP:NSPORTS has been a lightning rod of controversy for many years. Certain editors have treated Wikipedia like some MMORPG where they're chasing Game High Score -- in article creation, in edits -- and found fertile ground in the traditional premise that playing so much as a single minute in a top-flight professional match in any sport, in any country, is an automatic notability pass, no questions asked, never you mind the need for any sourcing. Some have created many hundreds of sub-stubs on that premise. Some have created thousands, causing no end to problems for those who'd seek to clean up their messes.

It got so bad that by last year, one biographical article in seven was of a soccer player. Think about that for a moment. One in seven. Of every human in the history of the world, the footy inclusionists really felt no shame in pushing forth the notion that of the most notable people who'd ever lived, it was reasonable for 15% of them to have been soccer players.

Needless to say, this infuriated a great many editors, sports-loving ones among them. (Hell, I wrote more than one notability standard for NSPORTS, and even I think that was way over the top.) And for years, the uniform reaction of the inclusionists to their protests were variations on "Tough shit!" and dogged combat in defense of their self-declared turf. Whether it was kneejerk deprodding, reflexive "Meets NSPORTS" at AfD or general obstructionism, what they never, ever did was seek to source the damn articles. It always came down to "We don't have to!"

At least until the protesting editors reached a critical mass, the RfCs stopped being efforts in futility, SNGs started to fall like ten-pins -- and not only at NSPORTS -- and some of the most egregious extremists have been curbed by community sanctions at ANI. And in a curious parallel to the fall of smoking in America, the reactions of the inclusionists? They've been baffled. Bewildered. Angry. Tossing out last-ditch counterproposals for "compromise" and "middle ground." Trying some tactic, any tactic, to stem the tide. Anything to avoid having to do the actual work to source their sub-stubs ... the work that had it been done in the first place, or even done at the last extreme, would have quite effectively shut the deletionists up.