User talk:WhatamIdoing

If you expected a reply on another page and didn't get it, then please feel free to remind me. I've given up on my watchlist. You can also use the magic summoning tool if you remember to link my userpage in the same edit in which you sign the message.

Please add notes to the end of this page. If you notice the page size getting out of control (>100,000 bytes), then please tell me. I'll probably reply here unless you suggest another page for a reply. Thanks, WhatamIdoing

Strawman

If you use a strawman then I know that you know. Writing in general is fine, writing articles from scratch didn't work out so well last time. I am trying to help them. It is very discouraging to work hard on, lets say, Unstable DNA sequence and then to discover that Genome instability already exists. Or work on Draft:Shortening of the eye muscle when we have Strabismus surgery. Or work on Draft:Vaccine myths and misconceptions and discover that we have Vaccine hesitancy and Vaccine misinformation already. Or Drugs and sexual performance which ends up being redirected to Sex and drugs. Or Draft:Chromosome mapping and Gene mapping. Or Draft:Anti-HIV agents and Management of HIV/AIDS.

Last time no one helped them figure out which topics to write about. Same with those other drafts. So it looks like our options are to let them contribute to existing articles, or to let someone else make the list of possible article topics. Having them contribute to existing topics fixes the biggest flaw of the previous iteration. We already have a big problem with editor retention, it may be wise to not WP:BITE all those students. I can detect problems that haven't been fixed yet, by anyone, and we don't require that someone fixes a problem before they are allowed to point it out. Polygnotus (talk) 04:41, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

We're already set up to give them a decent list, so that's not a problem.

The last item in your list may have been wrongly declined. Bluethricecreamman, properly speaking, Draft:Anti-HIV agents is a subtopic of Antivirals. There is more to managing HIV than just the antiviral drugs themselves (e.g., Management of HIV/AIDS#Food insecurity; also, treatments for opportunistic infections). I suggest moving that to the mainspace, ideally under the Antiretroviral name.

The others should probably be moved to the mainspace and tagged for merging, because Wikipedia needs up-to-date medical content, and leaving it in the Draft: space until it gets auto-deleted is not actually helping anyone. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:15, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

It was a problem at the time of my comments tho. And indeed it is REALLY discouraging to have a draft deleted because the class is over and no one bothered to follow up on the AfC review. So it would really suck to have a new iteration of the same course repeat the same mistakes. And the instructor, who is not a super experienced Wikipedian, can really use some help (and that unfortunately includes things they are not happy to hear). Polygnotus (talk) 05:19, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

Well, I could be wrong, but I smell a WP:LEGITSOCK there. The class isn't making enough mistakes for the instructor to actually be inexperienced.

If the students aren't following up, then I'm not sure how discouraged they would actually be. They might not even notice. We're the ones that are losing out. I am going to die one of these days (you, too; sorry if that's news to you), and good content will outlive us. It would actually be better to get those pages out of AFC's hair and into the mainspace, tag them for merging, and let the WP:MED folks follow up on it. Anything tagged for the project and for merging will turn up on Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/Article alerts and be handled in due course. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:43, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

I didn't expect you to say that. Is it a hunch, or is there more? I haven't done an in-depth investigation, but I have seen the instructor make mistakes; the same mistakes I would expect a well-meaning but inexperienced person to make. Why would an experienced instructor let students write a new article on a topic that is already covered? Especially Vaccine myths and misconceptions in 2024, post-COVID? It sucks that AfC is so backlogged, but Category:Articles to be merged isn't exactly empty either. Polygnotus (talk) 06:05, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

I don't think the instructor will turn out to be an admin with 20 years experience. A highly experienced editor would never have trusted the "missing articles" lists. But I wouldn't be surprised to discover that the instructor either has a second account (which is fine; there's no reason for the students to know what subjects interest the instructor personally) or has someone close at hand to explain things. For example, you made about 3,000 edits before the first time you tried to move a page. The instructor moved a page – cross namespace – around the 70th edit. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:27, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

Well, I checked, and that ain't it (they don't match the pattern). They're just arrogant. And cross namespace moves are probably explained in the WikiEdu tutorial (and if they are that might be a problem because they should use AfC). Polygnotus (talk) 07:13, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

I then fact-checked myself, because that is the kind of (incredibly boring) person I am, and in 908-move-your-page.yml it teachers the instructors how to do a cross-namespace move. Do you agree that they should use AfC? We can ask them to remove that information and teach the instructors to use AfC instead. Also the instructions on how to check if a topic is already covered consist of a single sentence in 907-move-out-of-the-sandbox-new-article.yml so it is not surprising that this goes wrong. The WikiEdu instructions need to be improved, because they are setting instructors up for failure which in turn set up students up for failure. Polygnotus (talk) 07:33, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

Using AfC would probably be better than not using AfC. Would it be worthwhile suggesting they use the article wizard, so that they get the blue buttons? Alpha3031 (t • c) 08:48, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

That sounds like a good idea to me. And I love the idea of an article wizard. WhatamIdoing what do you think? Polygnotus (talk) 08:50, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

I know you are a busy person, but it would be nice to hear your opinion. If you agree then I can contact User:Ragesoss and make some suggestions. Polygnotus (talk) 23:22, 31 October 2024 (UTC)

I'm conflicted. AFC can be helpful, and I'd probably encourage that for articles about people and organizations, but when it comes to this particular class, AFC is more likely to reject articles that Wikipedia:WikiProject Articles for creation/Reviewing instructions says they should accept. For example (sorry, @IntentionallyDense; I'm going to pick on you for a moment) Draft:Prescription drug overuse has been declined. It has 36 sources (the median is 4). It has 1800 words (the median is 350). Most importantly, there is no chance of the subject being declared non-notable at AFD, which is theoretically the primary standard for AFC acceptance.

So why was it rejected? Probably because one (1) paragraph doesn't have its own inline citation. For comparison, Prescription drug has 10 uncited paragraphs, and Drug overdose has 4 uncited paragraphs. We are holding these students' work to a higher standard than we use on articles that we've been developing for years, and that is IMO neither fair nor helpful. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:23, 1 November 2024 (UTC)

As someone who has literally zero experience with AfC I cannot judge if this is something that happens so frequently that the benefits of AfC are outweighed by its downsides. And I also don't know how fixable this is (e.g. with better instructions, raising the standards for reviewers, having more oversight e.g. a supervisor or whatever). Are you saying that AfC is so flawed that it is more likely to hurt than help? And what if we compare it not to a (hypothetical) perfect system, but to having the articles moved to mainspace by a teacher who usually has little to no experience and is usually underpaid and highly stressed (or at least that is true for every teacher I have ever met). Also, perhaps we could get the Wiki Ed Staff (who are supposed to be experienced Wikipedians) to do the crossnamespace moves instead of the teacher. Based on a quick check on the dashboard it looks like this particular class is the exception (medical topics, a higher standard of quality), so it would still be wise to update the instructions for other classes. Polygnotus (talk) 01:41, 1 November 2024 (UTC)

It sounds like there are two things going on here:

1. How can we fix AFC? Answer: Realistically, I think the answer is by not letting anybody complain at or about them for having 'low' standards. And that's not a realistic action, because we could have a 100-person RFC with unanimous agreement on this point, and Editor #101 wouldn't get the memo, or Editor #99 would think "Sure, we agreed not to complain, but we didn't mean not complaining about huge problems like this one".
2. How can we restrict new student editors more than new non-student editors? I think the only relevant answer is: We shouldn't. New editors make lots of mistakes, but student editors make fewer of them.

The first problem is one of the reasons that I've been repeating the facts about existing articles: The median Wikipedia article has 4 refs. Not four refs that demonstrate notability – four of any kind. If you're declining articles with 20 refs at AFC for being undersourced, you are probably screwing up. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:56, 1 November 2024 (UTC)

I have no issues with being picked on. I turned that article down when I was newer to AFC and if I had to go back I would probably make a comment asking them to fix up the citation needed tags (as I know it's common for editors to simply forget to cite things) but at the time I was a little heavy handed with the decline button. As for a work around with this issue, I'm still quite new to AFC so I'm not 100%. Calling people out for their mistakes (as WAID has done) is probably a good start as well as communicating with the editor more (which I failed to do). Something along the lines of "this article looks really good, do you know where you got that unsourced info from" probably would have been more helpful than just outright denying the article. I don't know the full context of this convo but those are my thoughts. IntentionallyDense (talk) 03:35, 1 November 2024 (UTC)

{od} @IntentionallyDense, my question is: Why are we thinking that it's necessary to resolve the {{citation needed}} tags before accepting the article?

Before answering that question, see WP:AFCPURPOSE:

"The purpose of reviewing is to identify which submissions will be deleted and which won't. Articles that will probably survive a listing at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion should be accepted. Articles that will probably not survive should be declined. Issues that do not affect the likelihood of success at AFD (e.g., halo effects like formatting) should not be considered."

If this article were nominated for deletion at WP:AFD, would it be likely to survive?

Yes, it will probably be kept.	Then ACCEPT it now. (You can tag non-deletion-worthy problems.)
No, it will be deleted.	Then DECLINE it. Please explain why you believe it would be deleted.
Maybe, but I'm not sure.	Then ASK FOR HELP on the talk page.

A couple of uncited sentences are "non-deletion-worthy problems" that should not prevent acceptance. And yet not only you, but multiple AFC editors, decline articles over those problems. IMO it's because the rules give the theory, and the editors respond to the social system, i.e., to their well-founded concern that if they follow the rules, other editors will yell at them or despise them for being too lenient. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:03, 1 November 2024 (UTC)

On an unrelated note, Bluethricecreamman is a really cool name. Polygnotus (talk) 05:26, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

I agree! WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:39, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

Clearly I haven't read into the process enough and that is where my mistake came in. As for others, I'm not sure. I suspect some, like me, misunderstood the purpose of AFC and were too strict. In hindsight, it would be nice to resolve all citation needed tags, but it is not necessary. I didn't really understand that when I started out doing AFC but I do now and will going forward. IntentionallyDense (talk) 21:31, 1 November 2024 (UTC)

Your action is pretty typical. It's very rare for anyone to complain if an AFC reviewer upholds "the highest possible standards". I'd suggest accepting that particular one now, but I haven't figured out how to solve the bigger problem. We could set a bot to "welcome" every AFCer the first time they decline an article, but what's needed is a culture shift. We need AFC and NPP folks to believe that their job is about getting deletion-worthy articles deleted, and getting non-deletion-worthy articles out of their queue. Those fact-tags ought to be Somebody else's problem in the mainspace, rather than AFC's problem in the Draft: space. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:27, 1 November 2024 (UTC)

This may be a dicussion better fitted for the AFC or NPP talkpage as well. IntentionallyDense (talk) 03:16, 2 November 2024 (UTC)

I wonder if what they need is something closer to the WP:AE rules, namely some protection from taking unpopular actions. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:33, 2 November 2024 (UTC)

I’m not sure what you mean by that sorry. IntentionallyDense (talk) 23:17, 2 November 2024 (UTC)

One of the ways that we convince admins to work at AE is to provide them with a level of formal protection for their choices. We recognize that mistakes are going to be made (e.g., due to incomplete information), and we recognize that de-sysopping the folks who are willing to deal with the mess, or dragging them off to ArbCom for every mistake, is not going to help. We accept the mistakes as the price of having admins willing to participate in AE.

We don't have a history with AFC and NPP of tolerating mistakes that are made to accept articles. In fact, we have a history of ugly ANI drama over highly active participants who have an error rate (in the eyes of the beholder, of course) of a small single-digit percentage, because 1% of 2,000 processed articles is 20 mistakes, which looks very impressive when you list them all out with their "obvious" signs of problems. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:37, 3 November 2024 (UTC)

I see that makes sense. I do feel this would be helpful because I know personally I was terrified of accidentally accepting an article that wasn’t ready and that probably led me to be overly harsh. IntentionallyDense (talk) 04:00, 3 November 2024 (UTC)

Do you remember what steps you took to learn about how to review drafts? Did the instructions leave you more nervous, or did they tend to be reassuring? WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:11, 3 November 2024 (UTC)

For AFC I felt reassured by the instructions and it felt lower stakes. NPP on the other hand felt very nerve racking. I felt like every move I would take would be scrutinized. I definitely made more mistakes with NPP as well cause the stakes are a bit higher in my opinion. IntentionallyDense (talk) 05:02, 3 November 2024 (UTC)

This sounds like a framing problem. You can frame it as a "reviewer" role, which can be perceived as adversarial (like a goalkeeper who shouldn't let trash slip through), or as a "helper" role (as in help them write a better Wikipedia article and use the correct templates and syntax). As someone with no experience with AfC I kinda assumed it would be the latter.

Perhaps it would be a good idea to have a few checkboxes and a button near the top of the draft. Something like it (1) is not copyvio (2) there is no existing article on this topic (3) is notable then publish. That is only a slight simplification of the workflow. Polygnotus (talk) 07:02, 3 November 2024 (UTC)

@Polygnotus, I think that NPP needs a similar workflow. I don't know if you've ever taken a look at page views for new articles, but right now, what happens is:

• Within the first hour, multiple people check the page for hoax/attack/obvious deletion-worthy problems. These people are not interested in 'accepting' pages; they are interested in getting rid of serious problems. They are duplicating each other's work, with no idea that anyone else has already checked this page.
• During the next day or two, several people look at the article. If the subject is difficult to evaluate (e.g., WP:NEVERHEARDOFIT), then they might add a tag, but mostly they do nothing.
• Eventually, one of a few stalwarts runs through the list (usually looking at articles that are 30–60 days old), and if notability isn't 'demonstrated' (an unwritten rule), then they shove it into the Draft: namespace.

If Special:NewPagesFeed could let NPPers tick off items like 'not db-copyvio', 'not db-hoax', and so forth, then they might waste less time, accomplish more, and feel less stressed about the "huge" backlog of pages that have already been reviewed multiple times. (Another misfeature I'd like to see fixed is the reported age, which is the age of first revision, not days that the page has been in the review queue.)

BTW, it is important to remember that neither NPPers nor AFCers are actually publishing the pages. "Publish" is what happens when you click the big blue button in the editing environment. Publishing is not what happens when a page is removed from the noindex list or moved to a different namespace. There is legal liability involved publishing some things, and nobody should put that on the NPP or AFC folks. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:56, 3 November 2024 (UTC)

I think using Javascript is morally wrong, but it would be pretty easy to add something to {{AfC submission}} like:

Condition 1 [mark this as done]

Condition 2 [mark this as done]

Condition 3 [mark this as done]

And then when you click on them they look like this:

Not copyvio  Checked Polygnotus (talk) 07:46, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

Not a hoax  Checked WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:56, 3 November 2024 (UTC)

Notable  Checked Jimbo Wales (talk) 12:25, 25 October 2024 (UTC)

The Javascript should then of course add appropriate categories (and possibly remove inappropriate ones). It could even move the article from draft to main if all 3 conditions are met, although it may be hard to get consensus for that.

It looks like NPP doesn't have an equivalent of {{AfC submission}}, so perhaps it is better to simply move those 3 conditions to under the article title.

This Javascript can then be added as a gadget so that its easy to install for people who want to work on AfC stuff. Thanks to oAuth you could even restrict its usage to people who are, for example, extendedconfirmed or have a specific userright.

My User:Polygnotus/Scripts/TypoFixer also makes an edit when you click on a link.

If NPP and AfC require just 3 clicks per article, perhaps it is easier to reduce the backlog and clearer to reviewers what they should and should not check.

In theory it would be possible to modify Special:NewPagesFeed so that this information is displayed, and people can filter. But it looks like the interface has barely changed since 2012.

It may be wise to just ask the top ~5 reviewers which criteria they check, what the most common reasons to fail a draft are, what they spend most time on, and how we can make their life easier. Polygnotus (talk) 07:46, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Articles for creation/Helper script already exists, though it probably needs an active maintainer. (I haven't checked, but almost all of our scripts need an active maintainer.)

I don't think the "most common reason to fail a draft" is the right point, as they might have a high volume of very easy declines. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:41, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

From ANI

I wrote It is not normal for productive contributors to Wikipedia to have 34% of their edits to WP:space, for obvious reasons. You responded AFD regulars frequently have a very high proportion of edits in the Wikipedia: namespace, as do people who help out at the noticeboards. For example, Jclemens has 33% of his edits in that namespace, and JoelleJay has 44% of her edits there, and nobody thinks that's a bad thing (except possibly the UPE scammers). Personally I do not think the editing pattern of either of the editors you mention is "normal" for a productive contributor to Wikipedia in my experience. Perhaps more importantly, neither of their contributions to WP:space is remotely like Warrenmck's. It would be better if that discussion had more uninvolved people pushing Warrenmck away from their current path, not suggesting that it is similar to unrelated valuable contributions that people make in WP:space. --JBL (talk) 18:54, 27 October 2024 (UTC)

I don't think the idea that there is only one normal way to contribute to Wikipedia is an idea that promotes the community's overall health. We need diversity in types of contribution. Hanging out on noticeboards can be a very good thing, or it can be a very bad thing, and it is frequently somewhere in the middle. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:24, 27 October 2024 (UTC)

I see, your comment has nothing to do with any point I was making, nor with the thread in which you placed it. Ok then. Probably would have been better on my user talk! --JBL (talk) 19:33, 27 October 2024 (UTC)

In this particular case, I may be a particularly poor example, as my contributions peaked in 2011-12 when I served on the arbitration committee, but before that I was quite active as an administrator in deleting articles, in addition to my current, more modest participation which is indeed centered around AfD/DRV. I'm certain various people have various opinions on whether I'm a productive contributor to Wikipedia or not, but my point is that once someone has gotten sucked from content creation into project maintenance activities, it's uncommon for anyone to entirely abandon those activities. If I were to suddenly find myself with nothing to do but Wikipedia work, I would probably return to GA work which is rewarding but less tolerant of work- or school-associated absences. Jclemens (talk) 21:07, 27 October 2024 (UTC)

Here's something I've been thinking about: If someone voluntarily moves from 'front stage' to 'back stage', then they tend to stay back stage.

If we nudge high-volume article creators to make that shift, how many will be successful in the back stage? And how many will get disgusted by it all and quit? WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:52, 27 October 2024 (UTC)

To be clear, I do not believe, and nothing about any of my comments is meant to suggest, that you are not a productive contributor -- what you're not is a normal productive contributor. (Ditto JoelleJay.) --JBL (talk) 23:35, 27 October 2024 (UTC)

JoelleJay is important to me: She is willing to persistently disagree with me, and she has the skills to do so without being ugly. That combination doesn't happen as often as might be good for Wikipedia. We still disagree on multiple points, and I still believe that editors ought to think about her reasons and go out of their way to do something nice for her.

Part of the difficulty with the word normal is the implication that average is good. Nobody with 10,000+ edits is a statistically average editor; we are all abnormal in the sense of being statistical outliers. However, most editors with 10,000+ edits are productive, desirable contributors; we are not abnormal in the sense of deviating from acceptable social norms. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:06, 28 October 2024 (UTC)

War widow

I haven't written this, exactly, but I have written Artis Henderson Allthemilescombined1 (talk) 01:15, 30 October 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for telling me about this article. It sounds like it could be an interesting book. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:16, 30 October 2024 (UTC)

has there ever been consideration of an SPS Noticeboard?

I got involved in an RSN discussion of whether a page on GLAAD's website is an SPS. (The discussion arose at the RSN because it was initially a question of whether GLAAD is an RS, and it developed into an SPS discussion because the WP text in question involved living persons, bringing the BLPSPS rule into play.) In looking at WP:USESPS, WP:SPS, and some of their Talk page discussions, I was reminded that you're the author of the USESPS essay, so I figured that you might be a good person to ask: has there ever been discussion of creating an SPS Noticeboard where people can ask for guidance about whether a source is self-published? Thanks, FactOrOpinion (talk) 22:55, 30 October 2024 (UTC)

I haven't seen any conversations about that. IMO it is a bit 'niche' for a whole noticeboard.

If you're interested in the subject, then let me say that back in the day, the SPS rules were really intended to control the use of websites like Myspace and Usenet newsgroups. This focus resulted in claims, e.g., that a corporate website like https://www.coca-cola.com couldn't be self-published because the company employed too many lawyers. It may be useful to keep that intention in mind when you think about SPS issues. This tension between "a corporate website is created by and published by its employees, so technically it's self-published" and "but they have lots of lawyers, so they're not going to publish libelous comments!" is one of the reasons why SPS sources are not automatically bad sources, even under BLPSPS. For example, a corporate/organizational website (also press releases) is acceptable under BLPSPS for statements about the organization's staff.

If the dispute you mention hasn't been resolved, then one question that's often helpful for SPS question is: If this were a press release instead of a webpage, would you still want to use it? If not, then it's probably worth looking for another source (and sometimes, looking for another source is the fastest solution anyway). WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:14, 30 October 2024 (UTC)

I wondered about a noticeboard because I've more than once been uncertain about whether a source is a SPS, and I've also seen more experienced editors have very different opinions about whether a source is a SPS. But I trust your opinion that it's too niche to merit its own noticeboard.

I do recognize that SPS sources aren't automatically bad, which is why they're allowed if someone is an expert in the field they're writing about. However, statements like "Never use self-published sources ... as sources of material about a living person, unless written or published by the subject of the article" and "Never use self-published sources as third-party sources about living people" make it sound like it's unacceptable to use, for example, a university's website as a source in an article about an NPROF at the university, unless the website's text was written by the NPROF themself. Andy Mabbett recently added a line to BLPSPS saying that it was OK for the situation you describe, and also OK to use the website of an outside organization that gives a notable award to the BLP's subject. FWIW, the text in USESPS that "Almost all websites except for those published by traditional publishers (such as news media organizations) [are self-published sources], including ... Business, charitable, and personal websites" and "If the author works for a company, and the publisher is the employer, and the author's job is to produce the work (e.g., sales materials or a corporate website), then the author and publisher are the same" certainly makes it sound like the website of an organization like GLAAD is SPS, but many people in the RSN discussion say that it clearly isn't one. FactOrOpinion (talk) 01:04, 31 October 2024 (UTC)

The obvious cases are obvious: Chris Celebrity posting on social media is self-published; the daily newspaper is not self-published.

For something like GLAAD, it's not really either of these obvious cases. Part of their business is to publish things (e.g., their media guide at https://glaad.org/reference, now in its 11th edition), and those things appear to have the kind of editorial control that we'd expect from a traditional publisher. Similarly, governments issue reports (e.g., the United States census), and we generally treat those as non-self-published.

However: A traditional publisher can issue a press release (e.g., "buy our new books for the holiday season" or "please stop taxing our industry so heavily"), and that's self-published even for them. GLAAD engages in advocacy work that goes beyond their traditional publishing work. And in the case of a government publication, we impose even stricter rules on courtroom transcripts per WP:BLPPRIMARY, and a speech made by a legislator should probably be considered self-published even if it's been transcribed into official records.

I don't know if you'd ever noticed this – I didn't, until someone pointed it out – but we don't technically have an official definition of a reliable source anywhere. IMO the actual definition is something like "a source editors are willing to accept for a specific use". I think that we sometimes get hung up on the details of various labels and criteria, when we really ought to ask ourselves whether ____ is acceptable and appropriate for a specific sentence. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:54, 31 October 2024 (UTC)

Talk page stalking here, not to argue with you on how reliable source is defined. But woulnd't that type of definition subvert neutral point of view? To be uncharitable, that definition sounds a lot like sources that I like, and a lot of NPOV discussions fall back on we're just documenting reliable sources. To me it just seems to boil down to, we're documenting what the sources that we like say, which sounds so very POV. --Kyohyi (talk) 13:57, 31 October 2024 (UTC)

@Kyohyi, I've just been cleaning up Cannabis edible, which is an area in which "documenting what the sources that we like say" unfortunately sounds like a pretty accurate description of editors' behaviors. Rest in peace, Tanner Clements, age 4. His mother has received a life sentence of grief, plus 10 years in prison for involuntary manslaughter because she didn't seek medical care soon enough to save his life after he ate a box of THC gummies. I hope that our article, which has been cheerfully telling readers that children have never died from overdosing on edibles, played no part in her decision to delay seeking medical care.

About the definition: I agree that such a definition is open to bias. It's also circular, at least in some contexts (Which sources are reliable? The sources editors accept. Which sources do editors accept? The reliable ones.).

But I'm not sure that it actually changes the level of bias, but it might admit to it a bit more openly. Right now, for example, Death#Problems of definition barely notes that religious views exist but goes into great detail about medical tests. Religion is relegated to a section at the end, and the article overall has twice as many words about dead volcanoes than about death in Judaism. IMO this is because we are biased towards hard sciences and against religion. We don't want to think about whether the Buddhist definition of death is about the departure of an immaterial soul from the heart and proven by signs of decomposition rather than neurological activity or heartbeats, or whether the Orthodox Jewish definition is the departure of the divinely instilled breath from the lungs. We want to talk about stuff you can see and touch, and we choose sources based on our preferences.

I arrived at this definition after discarding others (e.g., it can't be that it's non-self-published, because {{cite twitter}} exists), so it's entirely possible that someone else can come up with a different definition that would be better. If you've got candidates, I'd love to hear them. I'm always interested in this subject. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:28, 31 October 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for the reply. I suppose I was looking more for a sanity check on how I was seeing things. If I were to try to write it better, I would probably start with determining among whom the reputation of fact checking and accuracy has to be. Right now, it appears that the reputation is amongst Wikipedia editors, and I'm not sure that should be the case. --Kyohyi (talk) 12:47, 1 November 2024 (UTC)

@Kyohyi, in principle, we want the source (e.g., the newspaper, the scientific journal) to have a reputation for fact checking and accuracy. In the case of newspapers, this is proven by the existence of corrections; in the case of, say, the The Rush Limbaugh Show, it is disproven by the non-existence of corrections and the widespread complaints about his made-up content and inaccuracy. In the case of a scientific journal, it is proven by the information on their website about peer review, and it is disproven by accusations that it is run by a predatory publisher.

There is an element of editorial judgment in there: Which sources do we investigate the most? How do we handle sources that are borderline or contradictory (e.g., MDPI, whose peer review standards are better now than they used to be, which means they were pretty bad in the past)? Whose complaints do we elevate, and whose do we ignore (e.g., if the complaints are all from 'that' end of the political spectrum, does that matter)? Consequently I agree that the real rule, in practice, is "Wikipedia editors' perception of the reputation", but I don't think that is a solvable problem.

Adding another layer of complexity, consider the case of the public figure who is accused of a crime. He appears on social media to say "I am not a crook". We aren't really looking for fact checking and accuracy in that source. Our interest is more akin to a right of reply because it is more neutral to briefly acknowledge his denial than to omit it. There, we are not looking for a "GREL" source; we are looking for a source that is reliable for the specific claim in question (namely, that he denied any guilt). WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:43, 1 November 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for taking the time to respond; I'm always appreciative of experienced editors who make time to help me and others. You reminded me that an organization may publish a mix of SP and non-SP material (something I knew but wasn't holding at the front of my mind) and that I need to be more careful about that in discussions. The GLAAD page in question is part of their Accountability Project (GAP), which has individual pages for ~250 public figures/groups, where each GAP page consists of evidence (e.g., quotes) illustrating the figure's/group's "anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and discriminatory actions," along with brief statements about why the rhetoric/actions are problematic, and where the pages get updated with new bits of information over time. Does every addition to a page get independent editorial review? I don't know. Hopefully we'll reach consensus at the discussion. FactOrOpinion (talk) 22:19, 31 October 2024 (UTC)

For the mix of self- and non-self-published material, I like to use the example of The New York Times (or any reputable newspaper). The news content is non-self-published. The advertising rate sheet is self-published. It is similar to WP:ALLPRIMARY: every website has some self-published content (even if it's just the terms of use/privacy policy), but generally reliable sources also have some non-self-published content. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:46, 1 November 2024 (UTC)

Request for your keen eye

I realize, as I made my way to the end of your talk page, that you are indeed occupied, preoccupied and busy, so I apologize in advance for requesting that you look once again at the Landmark Worldwide talk page. I am an admitted participant in Landmark's programs, and as such have refrained from any editing and merely spoken up on the talk page. But your looking clarified the conversation with myself and Grafell, and if you are able I think your judgement and comments would be valuable. Thanks in advance. Ndeavour (talk) 16:42, 31 October 2024 (UTC)

@Ndeavour, thank you for your note. I've pinged a few folks. I don't know their views on Landmark Worldwide at all, and I don't remember most of their views on cults in general, but they are already deep in discussions about a different subject's possible cult status, so they'll at least already know what a cult is and how Wikipedia's usual rules apply. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:03, 31 October 2024 (UTC)

Do you mind if I email you?

I am hoping you can help me with an application of WP:NOR re; List of common misconceptions. Best, Rollinginhisgrave (talk) 13:50, 9 November 2024 (UTC)

If you feel like it shouldn't be discussed in public, then Special:EmailUser/WhatamIdoing is available. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:39, 9 November 2024 (UTC)

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Watch what you write

At WT:RFC you hinted that an identifiable editor is antisemitic. I know you didn't write exactly that, but your phrasing "I frankly couldn't fault other editors if they cynically wondered whether the real desire is to know whether the person who started that RFC is Jewish." is a stock-standard way to make an assertion with plausible deniability. You are lucky that the issue involves ARBPIA, where I do not act as an administrator, as otherwise I would have blocked you. Casual charges of antisemitism are increasing in this place and the practice has to be stamped out. Take someone to a drama board if you have actual evidence against them. Zero^talk 01:49, 15 November 2024 (UTC)

Zero0000, I think we have very different ideas about what I wrote. I think that, when a contentious subject is involved, requesting to re-write the RFC rules so that the person's identity is front and center will result in bystanders wondering whether the stated goal is the real one.

I think this partly because such a request is a significant departure from our usual rule to Wikipedia:Comment on the content, not the contributor. I think this is also partly because editors who hang out on policy pages have learned that demands for rule changes are often prompted by a single, specific situation, and we have consequently learned to cast a jaundiced eye over any complainant's contribs in response.

The resulting speculation will naturally vary with the question. For example, the 2018 identity demand was about an unsigned RFC proposing more restrictions on admins. I'm sure you will not be surprised to learn that the unsigned OP was a non-admin with a sizable block log. When the RFC is about a divisive subject, some editors are going to believe (rightly or wrongly) that the demand is being made for partisan purposes.

NB I'm not saying any people "should" do this; I'm saying some people "will". People do not generally feel constrained to "actual evidence" when they react to such situations. They often react intuitively or even illogically, and their reaction is often rooted in their own personal experiences.

On this point, I think you might be interested in reading the "No subtle -isms" explanation at https://www.recurse.com/social-rules. Not everyone will agree on what counts as a subtly exclusionary action, and, even if everyone did agree, not everyone will feel it the same way. You and I could agree that centering the OP's identity doesn't bother us, but that doesn't invalidate how other editors (especially the targeted OP) feel about it.

Also, the context for my sentence is IMO important: Every request to center an editor's identity in RFCs (that I remember) has been on a divisive topic. People do not demand rule changes for unsigned RFCs about fluffy bunnies. They only demand this rule change when a high-tension dispute gets an unsigned RFC.

Any unsigned RFC suggesting that the article be either "more pro-____" or "more anti-_____" (anything with serious real-world divisions) risks some speculation (voiced or not) about why the OP didn't sign it, and any complaint about it being unsigned risks some speculation (voiced or not) about why the complainant finds the OP's identity so important to the discussion that he insists we change the rules to accommodate his desire.

In theory, this cuts both ways: If the RFC question suggests minimizing Israel's perceived guilt, then some people will wonder whether the identity demand is motivated by anti-Israel bias; if the RFC question suggests maximizing Israel's perceived guilt, then some people will wonder whether the identity demand is motivated by anti-Palestinian bias. In practice, however, there have been about 50 unsigned RFCs this year, and two demands that the RFC rules be changed to require a username. Both of those demands appear to have been prompted by an RFC that I personally would classify as being pro-Israel in nature. We'd have to collect subject matter data for all 50 unsigned RFCs to determine whether that is statistically significant vs just an odd coincidence, but with just a quick glance down the list, I notice that the numbers look something like this:

• 100% (2 out of 2) of the identity demands were about unsigned "pro-Israel" RFC proposals.
• 33% (2 out of 6) of the unsigned RFCs related to conflict in the Middle East prompted these complaints.
• 0% (44 out of 44) of the unsigned RFCs unrelated to conflict in the Middle East received any such complaints.

This pattern could well be a coincidence, and 2 is a pretty small n. I also suspect that unsigned RFCs are not randomly distributed. However, if you remember that "subtle isms" thing I mentioned above: Even if we could prove statistically that it is merely a coincidence that 100% of the demands for identity were "pro-Israel" unsigned RFCs and that 0% of the (many more) non-Israel-related unsigned RFCs received any such complaints, it might not land that way to any editor who feels targeted and excluded by these complaints.

I realize that this may feel awkward for you, because you started the first of the two complaints this year (which arguably makes you WP:INVOLVED, I suppose). As it happens, I didn't attribute any disreputable motivation to your request; my perception at the time, rightly or wrongly, was that you were more surprised by the old rule than anything else. But when I imagine this from the POV of an editor who identifies in any way with Judaism or Israel, I'm not sure whether I'd have read it that way, and the fact that since the present war in Gaza started, only "pro-Israel" unsigned RFCs have produced these complaints – well, those numbers wouldn't tell me a reassuring story about our community. Perhaps casual charges of antisemitism aren't the only thing that needs to be stamped out. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:26, 15 November 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for your reply. Of course we can't stop people speculating about each others' motivations, but speculating out loud does nothing except increase the toxicity for everyone. In my opinion you crossed the line, especially because you were referring to a particular editor. You really must suppress that impulse in the future.

When one of the main protagonists in a dispute doesn't sign an RfC, their opponents suspect that they are hiding their involvement so that people who come along without knowing the background will !vote without understanding what the consequences will be. This especially happens when the originator is involved in an ongoing dispute and knows how to write RfC questions that are superficially neutral but in fact designed to get what they want. This is the same thing that pollsters take pride in: very subtle variations in the question can produce large changes in the response. RfC questions in contentious topics very often don't contain all that is necessary to know in order to make a reasoned decision. I'm not saying that's a fair description of the two cases you mention — I haven't even looked at the recent one and I don't edit that article.

I might be wrong, but you seem to have the impression that disputes in ARBPIA are about Jews versus others. That is far from true and there are countless exceptions in both directions. Zero^talk 10:48, 15 November 2024 (UTC)

I wonder if we should continue this conversation in e-mail. You've just posted a comment that could be (mis)understood as saying that "a particular editor" (who appears to watch this page, by the way) is being intentionally and skillfully deceptive ("superficially neutral but in fact designed to get what they want"), and I understand that that's an antisemitic trope. In another context, we'd all read this as run-of-the-mill accusations of very ordinary Wikipedia:Civil POV pushing, but this isn't another context. Special:EmailUser/WhatamIdoing is open to you. WhatamIdoing (talk) 14:22, 15 November 2024 (UTC)

Thank you

I really appreciate what you did at the human penis article. If you're up for a somewhat similar project where there's some dubious broad statements about women in wikvoice, there's Parental investment#Application of Trivers' theory in real life. That content has bugged me for ages. I even started a noticeboard thread about it: Wikipedia:Neutral point of view/Noticeboard/Archive 113#Parental investment. A part of me really wants to be bold and fix things but I don't know how and it really isn't my area of expertise. But my instinct looking at that content is not great. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 18:26, 15 November 2024 (UTC)

@Clovermoss, I'd like to encourage you to have a go at it. If it's sufficiently bad, then anything will be an improvement, so you can hardly screw up. For example, I just blanked a long paragraph except for one sentence, because only the one sentence had anything to do with the subject of the article, and the rest was an effort to connect that one sentence to something else, i.e., SYNTH.

As a general rule, editing for concision will help, and in particular, removing intensifiers ("very influential") is good encyclopedic writing style. I'd also suggest, as an easy place to start, blanking the worst sources from the strings of Wikipedia:Citation overkill in the Parental investment#Paternal investment section. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:48, 15 November 2024 (UTC)

I'm just really hesitant to touch it when I don't really have that background to know for sure what's normal and what's bunk. I had a concerned message on my talk page for even starting a noticeboard thread about this. [1] Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 18:51, 15 November 2024 (UTC)

Since I disagree with the claim that evolutionary psychology is a "hard science", that editor and I are perhaps unlikely to come to any sort of agreement. You might partner up with the folks that responded to the NPOVN question (pinging Elmmapleoakpine, Bluethricecreamman, and Hydrangeans), and see if the four of you could accomplish something together.

m:Eventualism is a good approach here. Even if you only improve one small part, it's still an improvement.

If you feel like you need more eyes, then I'd suggest Wikipedia:Fringe theories/Noticeboard next time. That crowd is usually good at differentiating between scientific consensus and the ...other stuff. @Bon courage, can you think of anyone offhand who'd be worth asking for help with Parental investment? It's not really as awful a subject as, say, Parental alienation, but it's looks like it might have the same problem with distinguishing between what researchers say and how social media twists that. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:05, 15 November 2024 (UTC)

i’ve been told through the academic grapevine much of the literature by anthropologists (especially older anthropologists) is tremendously racist, sexist, orientalist etc… assuming evolutionary psychology is a sort of rebrand for the sort of thinking Bluethricecreamman (talk) 19:26, 15 November 2024 (UTC)

Well, I tried. [2] There's so much going on with this article that I'm not sure I actually made much of a difference. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 00:38, 16 November 2024 (UTC)

That looks like a great start. I did a little copyediting on the ==History== section, and decided that we didn't need to be using a primary source to pull this all the way back to Darwin. Can someone else have a go at Parental investment? Any little edit will help. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:41, 16 November 2024 (UTC)

I appreciate your enthusiasm. I hope others will chip in too. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 02:46, 16 November 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for the ping, WhatamIdoing. Sorry that I didn't do much more than second you in the NPOV thread, Clovermoss. I agree with your impression; my instinct looking at that content is not great. But like you, I've hesitated to intervene much directly. I'm more familiar with histories of human sexuality than of human family. It's adjacent enough to make me skeptical of a claim that suggests any kind of biological hardwiring, but without knowing specific sources that overturn other work, I do my best to defer to the sources. I'd be very surprised if there aren't sources that characterize parental interest in children as a more social phenomenon, but I don't know them off the cuff.

I'll see what I can do to chip in when I can. I know eventualism can feel a little unsatisfying, on the grounds that surely the article if inaccurate is disinforming people in the present, but there's too much Wikipedia for anyone to fix everything anytime. Making a little difference is still a difference. Hydrangeans (she/her | talk | edits) 18:47, 16 November 2024 (UTC)

assuming evolutionary psychology is a sort of rebrand for the sort of thinking: It's not a rebrand per se—but in certain hands, it's not not a rebrand (not in all hands, mind). We do experience the world through the evolutionarily developed physical brain, so it's not unreasonable for there to be some evolutionary influences on psychology. The critical thing is to achieve balance in our on-wiki presentation with the also academically and thoroughly documented reality of the social construction of behaviors, norms, habits, etc. (And this is hardly just a human thing; animals have culture and social construction to, like whales with different dialects or orcas with different hunting styles, behaviors social contexts and not solely evolutionary ones). Hydrangeans (she/her | talk | edits) 18:42, 16 November 2024 (UTC)

I think that an over-focus on humans may be one of the problems for this article. This probably ought to start at a point like "most fish don't care for their young, but most birds do". Instead, I suspect that both readers and editors are arriving with a mental context like "Is it better to have one child who graduates university with no debt or two children who don't?" WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:15, 16 November 2024 (UTC)

+1. I hadn't thought of that, but you're right. The topic is one that is about parenting generally across animals but very little of the article is explicitly about how this manifests (or doesn't) in species other than humans. Hydrangeans (she/her | talk | edits) 20:41, 16 November 2024 (UTC)

AfC

If you are not yet bored of me (I am) I would like to ask how I should interpret [3] in the context of [4]. I kinda assumed you would be on board because you mentioned the amount of duplicated work. Someone started an RfC based on my idea which was a bit surprising to me; if I had been involved I would've done it differently. Polygnotus (talk) 09:38, 17 November 2024 (UTC)

Since the first is AFC and the second is NPP, they're not really related, though you are right that there are some similarities.

I don't think that a bot is the right way to go about AFC re-submissions, because a zero-change re-submission is appropriate when the first decline was bad, and those are really easy to game (add or remove double spaces after every sentence; put single line breaks between words; rearrange the parameters in the citation templates...).

But when AFC is seeing repeated zero-change re-submissions or inappropriate zero-change re-submissions, then I think AFD is the right model. I suppose some might think of AFD followed by deletion as somehow "punishing" the author and/or submitter if the article gets deleted, but the author can get a WP:REFUND to their userspace upon request, and the submitter will, over time, discover what the actual standards are and stop risking that on articles they actually want to see in the mainspace. AFC's backlog will start decreasing immediately. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:16, 17 November 2024 (UTC)

quarry request

Hey, WaId! I was just making a request myself and saw this one from you. Have you written that up yet? I'd be quite interested in reading it. Valereee (talk) 15:19, 17 November 2024 (UTC)

There isn't much to say, but here it is:

Among our 1,000 very highest volume editors ever, a quarter have since stopped editing (quit, blocked, banned, died, lost password – any reason). Those now-inactive accounts tended to edit for about 12 years before they stopped editing. Having spotchecked less than 10, these editors probably had an average vaguely around 600–1200 edits per month while they were active.

The longer I thought about this, the less convinced I am that this is a representative group. But I'm still concerned that we may not have enough high-volume folks coming into the pipeline to replace them. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:26, 17 November 2024 (UTC)

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A barnstar for you!

	The Brilliant Idea Barnstar
	Thank you for shepherding WP:NSPECIES from draft to guideline. It's a bit surprising that this was a de facto guideline for many years without achieving official status. It needed a push, and you gave that push. Great job. –Novem Linguae (talk) 11:20, 19 November 2024 (UTC)

Thank you.

I think the next step is to wait a couple of days to see whether anyone posts a request for a WP:Close review at WP:AN, and then there are at least two other major discussions in the pipeline (extinct species [dinosaurs!] and nothospecies) before I will feel like this one is basically finished. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:51, 19 November 2024 (UTC)

I came here to leave the same barnstar – great work getting this necessary work done WAID, what a slog... – Joe (talk) 07:56, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

Personal wedding website

Err, disagree on what basis? The entire "Comparing and contrasting the price of a wedding planner with the price of a website" is a big SYNTH violation, and it's all written with a very 2000s understanding of the internet:

• "Each wedding website is different"
• "Wedding websites offer a way for couples to showcase their personality"
• "wedding website suppliers now operate in many worldwide locations, many creating specific functionality and tools for their own national identities, customs, and faiths"
• "Personal wedding websites have changed how information about weddings is communicated."
• "If plans change, the website can be updated with the new information."

I mean, this is...fluff. This reads like a mix of NOTESSAY and NOTPROMO and most of all, NOTHOWTO content. Why are we keeping this? Alyo (chat·edits) 00:41, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

I don't think this is all fluff. For example: "Personal wedding websites have changed how information about weddings is communicated." You know what? They actually did change how information about weddings is communicated. In the 1980s, the information was communicated on fancy paper, was fairly minimal, and if you needed to travel, then making and coordinating travel plans was more complicated (and long-distance calls weren't free). Need a hotel? Write or phone the family to ask for a recommendation, or call your favorite chain and hope they have something nearby. Once you got there, everyone had to figure out every little thing.

When I went to an out-of-town wedding last year, all the information was on the website. Need a flight? Here's the airport's name. Need a hotel? Click these links. Need a ride from the wedding venue to the reception? Here's the information about the meeting points. Want the schedule for the whole weekend? It's all right there, and updated as necessary. Want to know how far it is from your hotel to the event? The map is right there. This is a totally different world. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:56, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

Well, I'll pare down my request to just one thing--the "Comparing and contrasting" section reads like synthesis, because there's nothing in the prose that makes it clear that the sources themselves are actually making that comparison. Additionally, the article lists very specific numbers that are now decades out of date. I feel pretty strongly that paragraph starting "According to White Weddings" needs to go entirely, and I'll leave it to you if you want to reframe the rest of the content in that section. I'll just note that even that part is largely out of date, with the websites people use nowadays. E.g., "websites promote expensive wedding products" is no longer as common a monetization practice on the sites people use now.

The first paragraph of the final section isn't really about wedding websites at all, and is also based on a single survey from 13 years ago, fwiw. Alyo (chat·edits) 01:21, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

It doesn't really matter if an article "reads like" SYNTH; what matters is whether it "is" SYNTH. I'm pretty sure that ~2010, those were pretty common thoughts: Is it better to sort through RSVPs yourself, to hire a wedding planner to figure out who is coming or not, or to set up a website so responses get tallied automatically? Unfortunately, the relevant cited sources are offline (sort of ironic for an article about websites...), so I can't check them specifically, but I would be surprised if this turned out to be SYNTH.

I do agree that the whole article deserves an {{update}} tag. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:05, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

Haha, if you want me to be exact in my wording, then sure, I'll say it directly: it's currently SYNTH. We have sourced content (sort of) discussing the costs of a website, and then we have sourced content discussing the costs of a wedding planner. What we don't have is sourced content saying "people pick one over the other" or "here is a direct comparison of the two". The framing of these two things in wikivoice is, as written, a synthesis not stated by sources. Maybe in 2010 these were common thoughts, but that shouldn't be relevant to how the article is written now. Every wedding I've been a part of recently has not treated these two things as substitutes. You get a website, unless you're being particularly elope-ish, and you get a wedding planner, if you want the help and don't mind the cost: they're entirely separate. (I realize I'm speaking of my own OR, but that's all we have to go on here!) Alyo (chat·edits) 02:24, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

Here are the main sources cited in that section:

• Daws, Laura Beth (2009). Happily Ever After.com: The Construction of Identity on Wedding Websites. University of Kentucky.
• Ingraham, Chrys (2008). White Weddings: romancing Heterosexuality in Popular Culture. Taylor & Francis. p. 90. ISBN 9780203931028.
• Camenson, Blythe (2002). Opportunities in Event Planning Careers. McGraw-Hill Professional. p. 160. ISBN 9780071382281.

How many of them do you have access to? WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:29, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

I have access to none of them, but again, what the sources say isn't the issue--it's SYNTH even assuming that the sources correctly back up each sentence in the article, as they are currently written. Alyo (chat·edits) 08:02, 23 November 2024 (UTC)

Um, what the sources say is 100% the issue. If any source says the whole story – if, for example, one of them says "Some people are ditching the professional wedding planner in favor of a personal wedding website because the main service they wanted was tracking RSVPs, and the website is a much cheaper way to do that", then it's not SYNTH. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:05, 23 November 2024 (UTC)

Ok sure, but neither of us have access to the sources. So if the article itself does not say anything about the trade off, and neither of us can in good faith add that content (since again, we don't have access to the sources), then I repeat that as it is currently written it is SYNTH. I agree that hypothetically if the sources say that, then it isn't synth. When you have that source, please go ahead and add it. In the meantime, there is no sourced content in the article connecting the costs of a website to the costs of a wedding planner. The title of the section, and the framing of those two issues as connected, is thus SYNTH. Alyo (chat·edits) 20:45, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

No. @Alyo, I'm concerned that you have misunderstood SYNTH, and possibly the whole of OR.

If "it" (whatever bit of material is being discussed, e.g., the idea that someone might choose between a human wedding planner and a cheap website to track RSVPs) has ever been published in any reliable source, then "it" is not a NOR violation, full stop. It cannot be SYNTH if the two issues are connected in any reliable source. The biggest problem we could have in such a case is that it might look like SYNTH to an editor who didn't want to go to the trouble of getting copies of the sources. (Try Wikipedia:WikiProject Resource Exchange/Resource Request.)

Note the absence of words like "considering only sources that are cited in the article" or "counting only sources known to or accessible by currently active editors" or "sourced content in the article connecting the two, so future editors who aren't reading the sources will be confident that the sources really did say that". NOR requires that there never have been a single reliable source, anywhere in the world, in any language, known to you or otherwise, that contained this material. If even one reliable source says this, even if you don't know what the source is and even if you don't know what the source says, then it's not NOR. Consequently, editors should be very cautious about claiming NOR for material that is cited to sources they haven't read, because it is likely that your unfounded assumption is simply wrong. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:12, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

I'm happy to get more opinions from WP:NORN, but I think your interpretation is moving the goalposts a bit. This section doesn't just say "some people think that websites are a cheap RSVP replacement", it is attempting to be a comparison of the features of a website vs the costs--at a very detailed level--of a wedding planner. If this section was as simple as you're framing it, then sure, maybe not synth. But this is trying to be an in-depth look at how wedding websites allow for better communication, more creativity, and greater flexibility in use--and those abstract benefits are getting compared to the cost of a wedding planner. That is the comparison I'm challenging, and that is the comparison that I'm saying needs to be sourced. Going back to my original statement that this article reads like an essay, the first paragraph of the section is a series of somewhat unrelated facts that are presented/sourced in ways that don't connect at all to this larger comparison of cost. The SYNTH argument is that no source is discussing this set of website features in comparison to a wedding planner, and part of the evidence for that is that we aren't even really comparing this set of features against a wedding planner. Break down the section by sentence:

1. "Websites allow for two-way communication". Source is a scholarly article about identity expressed via wedding websites. RS, but based on topic area/methodology, no reason to assume it digresses into talk about costs of wedding planners.
2. Aside from same source about creation of individual identity, creativity, etc.
3. "Free websites are a cheaper way to communicate, but sometimes wedding websites also promote expensive products." Bit of a non sequitur--unclear how the two clauses relate. Is the reader being told that free websites need to monetize, and this affects their advertising? Does this sentence imply commission-based referral links? or exploitative advertising? Or is the sentence saying that cheaper websites appeal to thriftier people, but websites aren't doing a good job of knowing their audience? Sentence is both internally unclear and does not flow in the overall logic of cost comparison. Additional source here is a Medium blog post by a random with three followers and two posts.
4. "User receives their own domain name." -- most promising source, as it's about cost-cutting, but is otherwise completely unused in the section.
5. One sentence of comparison of who is helped by websites vs planners. This is the closest we get to any sort of direct comparison between the two, and still not about cost.
6. "websites have multiple uses" -- source is a "groundbreaking study of our culture's obsession with weddings" that looks at "films, commercials, magazines, advertising, television sitcoms and even children's toys" to show "pervasive influence of weddings in our culture and the important role they play in maintaining the romance of heterosexuality, the myth of white supremacy and the insatiable appetite of consumer capitalism".

The following four sentences then contained outdated numbers about the cost of wedding planners--but no discussion of how the services of a wedding planner might replace/interact with a wedding website. Because the source for most of the section is a career guidebook published by McGraw-Hill, it isn't going to contain any additional comparison to wedding websites. So yeah, I'm sorry, but I do not see the vast difference here between what I'm saying is SYNTH, and what you are saying is not. This isn't just about tracking RSVPs. We're presenting a miscellaneous series of websites features/abstract benefits, and then some out of context numbers from 2002, and slapping a "comparison" section title on it. We are the only entity doing this comparison--I believe that is synth. Alyo (chat·edits) 01:14, 27 November 2024 (UTC)

Here's the problem: You say that we are the only entity doing this comparison, but you don't know that.

The evidence you've given is: Nobody has yet handed you exact quotations from the cited sources that prove you wrong.

The ordinary work you have not done is: You haven't even tried to get the cited sources yourself. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:51, 27 November 2024 (UTC)

I don't think this is relevant to the objections I've listed above, but I absolutely did hunt around for the Daws article. It only has one cite, has almost no results when googled, and isn't located on the databases I have access to through the Wikipedia Library. I didn't think the other sources were worth hunting around for, for the reasons I listed above. Alyo (chat·edits) 20:02, 27 November 2024 (UTC)

Did you ask for help at Wikipedia:WikiProject Resource Exchange/Resource Request? Have you inquired with your local library about an interlibrary loan? Have you e-mailed the university that has the source and asked them for help?

This might seem overkill, but you're trying to gut an article based on your unfounded guess, years later, that the multiple editors who did read the source have violated a policy, which is also kinda overkill.

Alternatively, have you tried to find other sources? I can tell you that the 1955 edition of Emily Post's Etiquette lists an expense for hiring someone to manage invitations and RSVPs – one of 15 enumerated expenses for the bride's family, with nothing else even remotely like what we would say falls under the job description of "wedding planner" – but of course that's decades too old to provide the necessary comparison against websites. Miss Manners has a 2010 book which directly compares the cost of a evite+website against paper invitations+website but does not mention the services provided by a wedding planner. (There is more in that chapter about wedding websites.) This 2018 book does the same. By the time we're in the current decade, books like this one just assume that of course everyone will have a personal wedding website. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:58, 27 November 2024 (UTC)

I'm sorry, but I'm not trying to "gut the article". I'm trying to remove a single section that has so many issues I've had trouble even getting you to see my objections. That section was written well over a decade ago. I'm not saying anything about the intentions of the editors who wrote it, but standards on Wikipedia have tightened dramatically since 2011. I see that you were involved in this article at that time, and I'm not trying to attack you at all. I see that you feel strongly about this article. Heck, that's why I've dropped all my other objections apart from a single section that either misleads our readers, or is completely irrelevant (depending on how it's written). The burden is not on me to replace material that contravenes our policies that newer material that doesn't. If you want to update the article, that's awesome, please do! I know, based on the weddings I've been in/attended, that there is modern use of wedding websites that isn't covered here.

Miss Manners has a 2010 book which directly compares the cost of a evite+website against paper invitations+website... That does not surprise me at all, which is why I did not say that sources wouldn't compare paper invites against evites. ...but does not mention the services provided by a wedding planner. This is what I've been saying, and this is the crux of the whole matter. By the time we're in the current decade, books like this one just assume that of course everyone will have a personal wedding website. I know, I said that previously in this discussion. They are no longer substitutes for each other, which is why sources do not compare them against each other. Alyo (chat·edits) 18:14, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

Hello

Hello. Do you close talk page discussions? If so, can you please close this one? Thanks, Wolverine X-eye ^{(talk to me)} 06:00, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

@Wolverine X-eye, you have listed this at Wikipedia:Closure requests#Talk:List of pholidotans#Merge to Manidae and you need to wait until someone feels like closing it. Given your behavior in those discussions,[*] it's possible that nobody will want to touch it, and that when they do, they might be less willing to close it the way you'd prefer. In other words, you may have shot yourself in the foot by talking about editors and pushing for a closing summary to be delivered as soon as possible. When it works in your favor, we call it the halo effect, but this is all going to work against you. Honestly, I think the most effective thing you could do at this point would be to put a note on your calendar for some time after Christmas, and not say a word to anyone about closing this until then, and resolve now that your only reply, whatever the outcome is, will be to say "Thanks, I appreciate you writing a closing summary for us". And if they disagree with you, add "I plan to fully abide by this, even though I'm disappointed in the result".

[*] For example: "I don't know why you are trying to ruin my hard work, but just know that your plan won't work here." "I envy people who have never met you." "You are wasting my freaking time. I asked you a question and now you are ignoring me? Wow, what a waste of time and energy it has been trying to reason with you. Never ever am I doing this again. If I have to go the extra mile to ensure that you and I never interact again, then that's exactly what I'll do." You might want to strike these per Wikipedia:Talk page guidelines#Editing own comments. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:30, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

Weissman on Covid origins

Thanks for being willing to look at Weissman's work.

I think it's a problem that the lab leak article takes such a polemic stance on an open question. I've given up on improving it (I noticed that the regulars ban a few people a year for trying) but I still look at the talk page occasionally and noticed that you were weighing in - I've been impressed in the past by your skill at writing passages that express both sides of an argument.

I suppose there's no point trying to convince you of anything since you commented that the interesting thing about the lab leak theory is the psychopathology aspect! Still, I thought I'd recommend Weissman's work since it is the strongest thing I've read on the subject. Not so much because of his conclusions but because of how he's structured the evidence, and because he's not interested in rumors. - Palpable (talk) 02:26, 25 November 2024 (UTC)

I wouldn't call it Psychopathology; I think there is a healthy normal defensive mechanism involved (at least in some cases), even if it leads to unjustifiable statements. Most of us seem to be drawn to ideas, claims, and experiences that fulfill a need we have. There are probably people who wouldn't be functional (e.g., couldn't get out of bed each morning) if they understood that there could be another pandemic at any time. We seem to have gotten a bad new coronavirus about once a decade (SARS in 2002, MERS in 2012, and COVID in 2019), so it seems likely that we'll see another during the next five or so years. I would not be surprised if public health officials in some countries were trying to sort out how one could issue a sensible warning whenever the next one appears without triggering suicides (or riots, or panic buying, or any number of other problems). It seems like knowing things like whether these people are caught in the loneliness epidemic or whether they're feeling like they're losing political power could be helpful.

You said that Weissman "limits the analysis to evidence where the two theories can be compared side to side". I can see why he might do this, but what it means is that you say "On this side, we have data about ABCD, and on that side, we have data about CDEFGHIJKLMNOPQ, so I'm only going to compare C and D, and I'm not going to put any effort into determining whether that self-imposed limitation gives a fair description of either side". That model seems better suited for demonstrating a technique to students than for figuring out a real-world answer. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:33, 25 November 2024 (UTC)

Not sure what to say to your first paragraph. I provided the most principled analysis of the evidence that I've seen, and your alternate pop psych explanation seems a little condescending.

In your ABCD example, that is absolutely a limitation. There is no valid way to assess A if you don't have it on both sides, the math just doesn't work. My impression is that the biggest argument for zoonotic spillover is historical precedent, exactly what you allude to with SaRS and MERS, and based on that I think he starts with a prior strongly favoring zoonosis at around 100:1. Is there specific evidence in favor of zoonotic spillover that you think he is unfairly omitting?

In any case, the argument I'm making is just for agnosticism and for dialing down the level of contempt. You can discount Weissman's numbers by 100x and the possibility would still deserve to be taken seriously. - Palpable (talk) 04:29, 25 November 2024 (UTC)

That Weissmann stuff is just the usual Bayseian trick of feeding biased priors into a magic maths box and thinking it achieves something. All it does is re-confirm those biased priors but with a veneer of science. Nobody is taking it seriously. If you want to see whay happens when independent domain experts are brought in to tamp down on the nonsense being fed into these mechanisms, check out the rootclaim story.[5] Bon courage (talk) 04:36, 25 November 2024 (UTC)

His starting priors favor zoonosis by 70:1, estimated from counting previous pandemics and previous lab accidents.

The rootclaim debate is addressed in Appendix 1. I think the main disagreement is over the evidence value of the 2022 market origin papers. Appendix 2 is a critique of those papers.

- Palpable (talk) 05:18, 25 November 2024 (UTC)

So he disagrees with people who disagree with him. That doesn't make him wrong or right.

The thing about "There is no valid way to assess A if you don't have it on both sides" is that it's partly right. It is actually an indication that Weissmann's chosen method might be inadequate. Because you do have another option: Figure out the likelihood of "this", all by itself, and figure out the likelihood of "that", all by itself, and then compare the whole likelihoods. There are challenges with this approach (e.g., the person might be biased; there might be significantly more precise data for one of the two), but it's another approach.

I don't find the Rootclaim story to be convincing, either. They say that the (never-funded, possibly never-happened) lab work was to be done in a BSL-2 facility without even face masks, but they do not mention that potentially infectious materials are handled in a Biosafety cabinet, which is more protective than a face mask.

Some of the claims don't pass the straight face test. For example, they say that there should be a >50% chance of a researcher getting infected from the planned work within a few months. Really? There are labs all over the world that are working with coronaviruses. Some of those viruses (e.g., MERS) were more deadly. Some of those labs have less protection (e.g., hospitals processing samples from patients with unknown infective agents).

Where are the hundreds or thousands of sick researchers? Where are the human resource departments talking about the unusual sick leave patterns among researchers? Where are the unions demanding hazard pay? Could it be that... this isn't actually happening? WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:57, 25 November 2024 (UTC)

Also if you're going to feed rubbish into a mechanism (like that SCV2 was somehow 'specially adapted' to infect humans) then of course you're magically going to find that the mechanism determines that it's a lab leak. GIGO innit. The whole rootclaim story makes for interesting reading about the clash between science and belief.[6] Bon courage (talk) 06:01, 25 November 2024 (UTC)

This GIGO is one of the things that bugs me. The claim starts from the belief that SARS-CoV-2 is special and did not happen by random chance. Compare:

• There are 15,000 officially recognized viruses in the world, and an unknown number of unknown viruses, each of which has its own variations and mutations. There are thousands of labs doing research on viruses. What are the odds that a random virus would be found near a random lab that randomly happened to have applied for (and failed to win) a research grant closely related to that random virus?
• There might be tens of thousands of viruses in the world, but this lab does significant work on only tens of them, and those viruses are chosen because they are scientifically proven to be a threat to the immediate area. Our prior analysis of bat guano has found coronaviruses with a wide variety of mutations in furin cleavage sites in our area, and since a functional furin enzyme is necessary for infectiveness, we think studying this variation would be scientifically interesting, and let us remind you that this research is important because a highly functional one furin enzyme – say, a sequence like _____ or _____ – could turbocharge the virus. Oh, #$@&!: yet another coronavirus with a mutated furin cleavage site has turned up in this area. Given that we already know that there are x of these variations found in bat poop in this area, what are the odds that there would be at least x+1 and that at least one of them would be a doozy?

I don't think the "pretend everything is 100% random" is the right comparison point. It's a bit like going into a casino and then being shocked that there's gambling going on. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:30, 25 November 2024 (UTC)

FYI Wuhan was deemed so low a risk for coronavirus spillover that WIV actually used it as a negative control in a previous sampling study.

I don't know where you got "prior analysis of bat guano has found coronaviruses with a wide variety of mutations in furin cleavage sites in our area" from either. The related viruses are not found near Wuhan, and people are suspicious because out of a thousand or so known sarbecoviruses only one has a furin cleavage site. Another improbable coincidence with the research proposal. It doesn't sound like you've looked into this at all!

I think it's best that I bid you adieu. Have a good week. - Palpable (talk) 06:56, 25 November 2024 (UTC)

I believe that if you look at my comment, you'll see that I was talking about the whole of the Coronavirus subfamily, and not exclusively about the lone species of SARS-related coronavirus, as in "Furin cleavage sites naturally occur in coronaviruses". But my example is made up, to illustrate the point that assuming random chance is not appropriate when you know that the situation is very far from random. The one is saying "Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine", and the other is saying "You should have predicted this possibility when you set up one of the few gin joints along one of the few routes people use to flee from her last known location." WhatamIdoing (talk) 07:51, 25 November 2024 (UTC)

Where is the ">50% chance of a researcher getting infected from the planned work within a few months" from? What I see is "We can make a crude estimate that if DEFUSE-like work was started at WIV the P­_0if(2019, LL) = ~ 1/100" - Palpable (talk) 06:20, 25 November 2024 (UTC)

"...the probability that a researcher working on a SARS2-like virus for weeks or months under BSL-2 would get infected. There is good reason to claim this could be an over 50% probability..." WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:31, 25 November 2024 (UTC)

I'm still not sure where you got that but you'll be happy to hear that Weissman puts a much lower number on it. - Palpable (talk) 06:41, 25 November 2024 (UTC)

Open https://blog.rootclaim.com/rootclaims-covid-19-origins-debate-results/ and use ⌘F in your browser to find the text that I quoted for you. WhatamIdoing (talk) 07:41, 25 November 2024 (UTC)

And why would you be interested in the opinion of a non-expert? Unless it confirms your priors too ... Bon courage (talk) 05:58, 25 November 2024 (UTC)

When people agree with us, we think they are more credible. We all do this. It's a real problem for Wikipedia, because editors who are trying to evaluate sources fairly at, say, WP:RSN or WP:FTN, are subject to that same human bias, too. WhatamIdoing (talk) 07:53, 25 November 2024 (UTC)

Palpable, the first paragraph has nothing to do with Weissmann. It barely has anything to do with the COVID pandemic, except that this common manifestation of human behavior that attached itself to several things about the pandemic. People need to make sense of their experiences. Sometimes they disagree over what makes sense. These disagreements are predictable, e.g.:

• Some people will see a megadrought and say "Our agricultural practices have badly disrupted the ecosystem"
• Some people will look the same events and say "The gods are mad at us. We must appease them".
• Some people will say "It's those powerful other people's fault, and if we get rid of them, everything will be better".

For example: The Dust Bowl is blamed on poor water management techniques. The Mayas sacrificed their children and animals to appease the gods during the society-destabilizing droughts that led to their collapse. Water conflict has been a reliable source of wars throughout history, and in cultures around the world, drought, with its attendant famine, was one of several socially acceptable reasons to kill the king.

And what did we see with COVID, especially with the lockdowns?

• The eco-warrior says "Climate change and our endless expansion into the wildland–urban interface disrupts the ecosystem and makes zoonotic events inevitable".
• The televangelist says "This is a divine warning. We need to repent of our sins and turn our nation back to God".
• The politician says "Let's blame the other party! Let's blame another country! Let's hurt the other party! Let's hurt the other country! If I were in power, everything would be better!"

These responses to a pandemic are inevitable. Another pandemic is inevitable. Why would we not prepare for the inevitable? WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:32, 25 November 2024 (UTC)

I think everybody agrees that we should prepare for future pandemics. The question of whether the last pandemic might have been research related has strong implications for how we should do that.

(Though the most probable next pandemic is zoonotic H5N1 as you are likely aware) - Palpable (talk) 05:55, 25 November 2024 (UTC)

I think that there is value in addressing lab leak concerns, but not because of anything to do with COVID. Instead, I think people ought to be taught that these things exist and that they're a net benefit, but that like nuclear power plants, there are some downsides.

I think the reason to study people drawn to the lab leak story is to understand how we can better help people next time. We should be sit down at the next disaster simulation (or the next real event) and say things like: If you want nurses and firefighters, then parents need childcare, so we can't order the day cares closed, and we probably shouldn't order the schools closed for younger kids. (Also, it'd have been nice if we had recruited some younger and healthier people into teaching.) If you want people to stay home, we need more delivery services, and that means people working in warehouses. If you want people to respond positively to social distancing, then we need messages that position this as a way they can help protect their community and not an imposition on their right to breathe germs on every person they encounter. And so forth. Understanding each 'unusual' or 'interesting' response to the previous pandemic will help us with the next one. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:07, 25 November 2024 (UTC)

Request correction for talk page post

In this edit you referred to the Internet Engineering Task Force but linked it to International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement. (Disclaimer: I volunteer with the American Red Cross as, among other things, a disaster duty officer.) Jc3s5h (talk) 20:01, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

Thanks. I've fixed it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:31, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

November 2024 (Casting Aspersions)

I consider one of your recent edits[7] to amount to WP:ASPERSIONS and a violation of WP:AGF. Thank you, Roggenwolf (talk) 17:56, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

Have you ever read WP:ASPERSIONS? It says "On Wikipedia, casting aspersions is a situation where an editor accuses another editor or a group of editors of misbehavior without evidence". I wonder why you would consider a link to be "without evidence".

I can understand that you might not appreciate editors having an easy way to discover your focus on eugenics and similar subjects. It is not unreasonable or uncommon to wonder whether an editor who says that "advocacy groups have been used to unduly problematize various individuals" has encountered that problem in the articles they most commonly work on. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:12, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

^{( Buttinsky)} alongside "bad faith", "aspersions" is one of the most misused/misunderstood terms bandied around on Wikipedia. Bon courage (talk) 02:47, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

Do you think so? Worse than WP:NOTCENSORED, WP:NOTNEWS, WP:CONLEVEL, WP:STATUSQUO? I think we have a lot of WP:UPPERCASE problems. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:02, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

Yes, a long list of problems like that. Bon courage (talk) 09:39, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

I did not think of "eugenics" when I wrote my original comment at all. The user warning I issued is perfectly reasonable. Regards, Roggenwolf (talk) 09:30, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

Disagree with the characterisation as reasonable here. The diff linked is basically the opposite of an aspersion: evidence without accusation. Finding myself most in agreement with its first reply. Folly Mox (talk) 14:05, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

Invitation to provide feedback

Inspired by Worm That Turned's re-RfA where he noted administrators don't get a lot of feedback or suggestions for improvement, I have decided to solicit feedback. I'm reaching out to you as you are currently one of the users I've selected as part of my recall process. I hope you will consider taking a few moments to fill out my feedback form. Clicking on the link will load the questions and create a new section on my user talk. Thanks for your consideration. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 16:31, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

Sexism and racism of the user of this talk page as suggested by Fram

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

Close this unconstructive discussion. I don’t see any collaborative spirit but I do see many untrue/ABF claims. --Dustfreeworld (talk) 13:19, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

---

Please keep your sexist and racist comments out of Wikipedia. I hoped that your terrible [8] "much of the discussion seemed to be divided between childless white men living in wealthy democracies, and, well, the entire rest of the world." was a one-off slip, but apparently you also felt the need to state that apparently young mothers are child rape victims, but young fathers aren't, and therefor one list should be deleted and the other kept, to the understandable astonishment of e.g. User:JoelleJay. Fram (talk) 08:59, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

Accurately describing the demographics in a dispute is not sexist or racist.

I think that young fathers can be victims of child rape, but I'm hard pressed to see how most of the ones in this particular list – which is mostly a long line of royal fathers (which could be command rape of the mother) and young teens with a unintended pregnancies in same-age girlfriends – actually were child rape, unless your personal definition of "child rape" includes "14-year-old boy voluntarily has sex with his 15-year-old girlfriend". WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:20, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

Making wild, insulting guesses about the people opposing your position is in this case clearly and apparently deliberately sexist and racist. The fact that you just assume that the royal fathers would willingly have sex with someone they have not chosen and may very well not be interested in, while the brides are by just the same assumption unwilling, as if consent is something for girls only, is no surprise. For the vast majority of these cases, we don't know the circumstances at all, for either party. For all we know some of these princes would in the current world be LGBTQ+ but were forced by family, tradition, even violence, to obey and to produce an heir with someone chosen by their parents. Forced child marriages aren't only bad for girls, you know. Fram (talk) 19:01, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

"Interested in" is not relevant to the definition of rape. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:06, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

??? Forced to have sex with someone without their consent is not part of the definition of rape? Fram (talk) 21:05, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

No, don't be silly. Being "interested in" is a matter of sexual attraction. "Agreeing to" is a matter of sexual consent. It is possible to "agree to" have sex with someone without being "interested in" having sex with that person. I assume, for example, that sex workers do that every day of their working lives. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:08, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

A 12- or 14-year old agreeing with their parents to have sex with someone they are not interested in is not rape? Underage persons selling their body because they agree with their parents that they need to provide some money for the household is not the parents forcing them to be raped? If a 13 years old is not interested in having sex with someone, but is coerced into doing it anyway by their parents (or other persons of authority), then how would you describe it? Fram (talk) 08:09, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Its not possible for a child to consent to sex in that context, you've argued yourself into a corner. Either you're arguing that children in such a situation can consent in which case you are a monster or your argument is moot. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 14:00, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Perhaps it isn't sexist or racist, but it surely isn't handing the situation with tact and civility. Please take some criticism here even if you reject (as if your right) the labels, we've all said things which weren't taken the way we intended them to. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 19:06, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

I'm not sure which part you're talking about. Are you talking about the part in which I said that self-identified men tended to have different opinions in a discussion 13 years ago than self-identified women?

Or are you talking about the part in which I say that a 12-year-old prince impregnating a concubine, or two modern-era fourteen year olds discovering the results of Doin' What Comes Natur'lly without effective contraception, is different from a five-year-old impoverished girl getting impregnated by her stepfather? WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:14, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

I'm not trying to scold either you or Fram (lord knows that would get us nowhere). I'm saying that this makes us all uncomfortable in the best of cases, lets try to be understanding with each other and dial it back to a low boil. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 19:36, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

I'm still trying to figure out which "this" you're talking about. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:46, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

"a 12-year-old prince impregnating a concubine, or two modern-era fourteen year olds discovering the results of Doin' What Comes Natur'lly without effective contraception, is different from a five-year-old impoverished girl getting impregnated by her stepfather?" Rape isn't less of a problem if you are rich or priviliged than if you are poor. You are taking the worst fact of one list, and the most benign interpretation of the other list, as they are both undeniable truths and as if both are representative for the whole list. Fram (talk) 21:05, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

Do you believe that two 14 year olds are always unable to consent to having sex with each other? WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:10, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

Read what I wrote instead of posting some strawman argument. Fram (talk) 08:09, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

I did read what you wrote. I thought about reasons why you might think that child rape was a significant, non-hypothetical concern for the typical case on that page. One reason why we could differ is if you thought that people below a certain age were always unable to consent. So I have asked.

So far, your response leads me to believe that your concerns are largely hypothetical. I can grant that it's possible that Yazdegerd III, 5th-century King of Kings in what's now Iran, having ascended to the throne at the age of 8, gotten married, and then fathered Peroz III at the age of 12, might hypothetically have been the victim of child sexual abuse by his wife. But I have no reason to believe that he actually was, which leads me to be unconcerned about his inclusion in this list being a record of sexual victimization.

And to be clear about the contents of this list: It is currently 22 names, of which 18 are royalty, 3 were unintended pregnancies by teenage boys with their teenage girlfriends, and the fourth involves a conviction for statutory rape. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:58, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Are you really unable to grasp that two children having sex doesn't necessarily mean that one abuses the other, but that it still can mean that others exploit or force both or one of them? While you correctly have a problem with people being directly abused by relatives, you don't see the issue with forced arranged marriages and the forced need to consummate it and produce a heir, no matter the age of the children involved? Fram (talk) 17:12, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

I'm willing to believe that the whole system of royalty is inherently abusive, but I don't think that we have a single reliable source indicating that any of these were forced marriages or had a forced consummation. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:23, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

These child marriage are by definition forced marriages, unless you believe that e.g. an 8-year old can give their consent. Fram (talk) 17:29, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

AFAICT the date of that marriage is not recorded, and it may well have been at age 12. Consent is a complicated thing to talk about. We have our modern moral standards (which IMO are a vast improvement over previous standards), but it is difficult for me to say that a 12-year-old king can consent to pass legal judgements, to issue fines, to impose beatings, imprisonments, and executions on those he judged, to order men in the court to get married or divorced, even to adopt or to kill their children – but, somehow, though he can literally start a war whenever he chooses, he cannot consent to getting married himself. This is not an ordinary child; this is a king with no legal restrictions on his power. According to the culture at the time, he did have the power to consent.

BTW, where I live, there is no minimum age for marriage, though below the age of 18, any prospective spouse who is underage has to get both parental permission and a court order.[9] (They also can't get divorced until they're 18.[10]) WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:21, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Problem is, in which I say that a 12-year-old prince impregnating a concubine, or two modern-era fourteen year olds discovering the results of Doin' What Comes Natur'lly without effective contraception, is different from a five-year-old impoverished girl getting impregnated by her stepfather is not actually remotely near what you said in the relevant deletion discussion. Neither is, for that matter, I'm hard pressed to see how most of the ones in this particular list [...] actually were child rape.

What you said was 1. the list currently at AfD has a set of obvious selection criteria (being, in your words, about 14 or younger, blue links only) and 2. that people feel the other article was a list of child rape victims but that such is not a relevant concern for (emphasis mine): anyone that is (or should be) in this list. The logical reading of those two statements combined is 3. being the victim of child rape could not be a relevant concern to anyone fitting the selection criteria.

Maybe that's not what you meant, but it is what the words you said meant, and as someone close to a male csa survivor? That sentiment is common and harmful. Please strike it. If it was not what you meant to say, that should surely be no hardship. AddWittyNameHere 20:59, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

As I said, I don't think that this list's selection criteria should include known victims of child rape. The list as presently written contains one victim of statutory rape, and I think that entry should be removed. (I also think his name should be removed from the text of the linked article.) There is no evidence – or even any suggestion in the sources – that any of the others were victims of child abuse. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:06, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

Then in that case, again, it should surely be no hardship to strike the comment that reads to several different people as you saying young fathers can't be rape victims, and adding a new comment underneath clarifying what you actually DID mean? AddWittyNameHere 21:25, 3 December 2024 (UTC) ETA: to be clear, what I mean is add the comment clarifying it to the AfD, not here. So people who see the initial statement also see the clarification, rather than solely those who then go on to check this discussion on your user talk. AddWittyNameHere 21:26, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

I have added a detailed clarification at your request. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:54, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

@Horse Eye's Back, Perhaps it isn't sexist or racist, but it surely isn't handing the situation with tact ... we've all said things which weren't taken the way we intended them to

HEB, I find myself most in agreement with what you said. Sometimes it maybe just some misunderstanding, and can be easily resolved if we AGF, unless, unless, people (not you of course) have some other thoughts at the *very* beginning and has determined to escalate. I want to AGF but ... --Dustfreeworld (talk) 13:14, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

Bullshit.

To support your claim of notability, you linked to articles on a 13-year-old boy who became a father with his 17-year-old girlfriend, who had been dating him since he was 11, in a situation described as "technically indecent assault" even in the 90s; a WP:HUFFPO article on an 11-year-old boy who had a child with a 36-year-old; a 12-year-old boy who fathered a child with a 17-year-old; and a clearly unreliable to anyone who can read listicle you described as a "magazine" featuring a 9-year-old father and a boy who became a father with a 15-year-old "days after his 12th birthday". Not to mention your link to a deprecated source for a BLP whose fatherhood at 13 we have no details on and very well could have been from CSA. If you didn't think any of those cases would qualify for the list had they been notable, you wouldn't have linked to them as examples of list-qualifying coverage. JoelleJay (talk) 13:46, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

"I said that self-identified men tended to have different opinions in a discussion 13 years ago than self-identified women?" That's not at all what you said. If you can't see the difference between this statement and what you actually said, then I understand why you don't see it as problematic. Fram (talk) 21:05, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

Yes, it is remarkably close to what I said. I said that the discussion had a demographic divide in which people who meet all four of these characteristics:

1. Childless
2. White
3. Men
4. Living in wealthy democracies (I can be more specific: from Northern Europe [particularly countries touching the North Sea, though not so much from France] and from the US)

generally held a different view from everyone who did not meet those three characteristics, specifically including people who are known (to me, at least) to have any one of the characteristics:

1. White fathers with children still at home
2. Mothers of any age
3. Non-white people from North America
4. Anyone living in the Middle East
5. Anyone from anywhere on the continent of Africa
6. Anyone from anywhere on the continent of Asia
7. Anyone from any Latin American country

Note that this is a broad, high-level summary. That means that it is true in the sense that "Old people voted for Trump" or "Conservatives vote for the Tories" is true. You may find a counter-example, just like you may find an older person who voted against Trump or a conservative who votes against the Tories, but finding a counter-example does not disprove the overall sentiment. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:25, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

• Came here from VP. I’m going to say that your remark there is little more than negative stereotyping of Wikipedia as “Bro-kipedia” (i.e, not just mostly edited by white men in developed countries but run exclusively by inconsiderate, prejudiced, sex-obsessed white men in developed countries) with some “think of the children” thrown on top rather arbitrarily. This makes no sense when two of the people calling you out are not even male. Your second remark, whatever you’re trying to say there, certainly looks like it’s playing on problematic tropes about male sexual abuse victims. Either way these comments are unhelpful and needlessly offensive to a lot of people. Dronebogus (talk) 04:27, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

  Okay, @Dronebogus. Given the facts as they are, namely:

  • There were two groups of editors, "for" and "against".
  • One of the two groups was far more likely to publicly self-identify as being men from countries such as Germany or the Netherlands.
  • The other group is far more likely to publicly self-identify as having one or more of the following characteristics: being Middle Eastern, South Asian, having children, or being women.

  How would you describe the demographic difference between these two groups in a way that you personally do not feel is prejudiced?

  Or is the prejudiced part simply the fact that I noticed that demographics tended to predict the viewpoint, because Nice™ people don't notice that people from different parts of the world and different life experiences have different perspectives? WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:37, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

  The whole argument is rubbish because you’re just stereotyping with minimal evidence. Dronebogus (talk) 04:46, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

  How would you know how much evidence I have?

  Your current account is 4.7 years old. Were you perhaps involved in the 2011 discussion under a different username? WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:00, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

  Considering that you have provided no evidence at all for your claims (all we know is which Wikipedia languages voted for or against somethings, that's all you produced) and that you have to resort to accusing an experienced editor of eing some nebulous sockpuppet for daring to question you instead of, you know, producing your evidence, I would answer your first question with "none". Fram (talk) 08:09, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

  You would answer my question "How would you know how much evidence I have?" with "None"? Does that mean "Of course Fram does not know how much evidence I have"? I would agree with that. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:01, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

  Since you are so extremely reluctant to actually share your evidence, the more logical conclusion is that you don't the necessary evidence to support your statements. Feel free to prove me wrong by, you know, actually producing the evidence. Fram (talk) 17:12, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

  Shall I start with telling everyone which country you live in? Or would you consider that an intolerable violation of the WP:OUTING policy, even though you ask me to do that for others? WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:19, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

  If you don't have on-wiki evidence, then don't post such claims. I have never asked you to out anyone, you have only now produced the very convenient excuse that you know these things but aren't at liberty to tell us. Fram (talk) 17:33, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

  You have asked me to produce the evidence. But not all of the evidence is on wiki. This is either "very convenient" or "close adherence to the policies". WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:22, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

  WhatamIdoing, your comment could be read as a veiled outing threat and could get you blocked or banned. —A. B. ^{(talk • contribs • global count)} 17:40, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

  When someone asks for private information about others – and anyone who's been around this long ought to be aware that most editors don't usually disclose information about several of the characteristics I mention – then I think it perfectly fair to ask him whether he'd like to be treated the way he would like to see others treated. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:24, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

  No one was asking about private, not on wiki disclosed information about anyone, that's only your spin. You'll have a hard time convincing people that you somehow knew in person enough people in that discussion fitting in one of the above 8 groups you identify, to make any statistically relevant (or even somewhat convincing anecdotical) claims about how any group overwhelmingly reacted. But then again, correctly using such data doesn't seem to be your forte, as can be seen at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Requiring registration for editing. I already highlighted a number of wrong claims you made there, let's add one: "That community has almost halved in the last decade." Oh really?[11][12][13][14]. You have every right to be opposed to a ban on IP editing. That doesn't mean that you may make false claims again and again. The same applies to your remarks here, but of course no one can check your private "evidence", and if we doubt you anyway we are either socks or get threatened with outing. Fram (talk) 08:42, 5 December 2024 (UTC)

  You are approximately 1mm away from getting reported for outing threats, aspersions (why am I always a sock when somebody doesn’t like me?) and generally acting needlessly unpleasant. Dronebogus (talk) 18:04, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

  @Dronebogus, people lose account information or change usernames all the time. If you were there at the time, then I wouldn't want to tell you things you already know.

  If memory serves, just the main discussion was something on the order of 300K words long, or 11.3 tomats. It would take you a couple of days just to read the English content, and then there were the non-English discussions and the side discussions (mailing lists, IRC chats, formal and information conversations across most of the larger wikis). If you want to go read it, I particularly suggest seeking out the German-language content, as that was a significant factor. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:00, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

  As a wholly uninvolved editor, Colin's comment about holes could easily be applied to you too. You're only making it worse with most every comment. Sincerely, Dilettante 18:16, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

  We assume in good faith that you have provided all of the evidence you feel appropriate to provide, anything which you haven't provided you don't feel is appropriate for us to consider. Failing to provide appropriate available evidence in a timely manner for a claim you make would raise competence questions. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 14:08, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

  Fram's description of WAID's post 05:00 4 Dec as a "resort to accusing an experienced editor of [b]eing some nebulous sockpuppet for daring to question you" is inflammatory, bad faith and inaccurate description of their question. They asked if Dronebogus had a previous account, which is not sockpuppetry as everyone here well knows. It is in fact a possible good faith explanation of how Dronebogus would be so highly familiar with an ancient discussion that they know with confidence that WAID's argument is "rubbish".

  The post at the VP: "full of prejudiced assumptions about who might disagree with you" is a personal attack. Clearly you guys disagree about the demographics and/or the importance of the demographics of who was involved and voted certain ways, and disagree about how much evidence either side has to support their claims. Nobody is going to convince the other side by making personal attacks about prejudice and throwing words like racist, sexist, bullshit and "competence questions" around. HEB mentions "tact and civility" while ignoring the comments of others which are neither tactful or civil. Fram could have carefully asked WAID for an explanation of their post, as they were uncomfortable with x/y/z. Instead they came here accusing a longstanding editor of making racist and sexist posts full of prejudice, to which Dronebogus has joined in with claims of stereotyping.

  It is possible to disagree on wiki history and to disagree on the merits of articles and sources without calling each other names. Regardless of whether there is any merit in Wikipedians debating the rights or wrongs of underage parenting and how those rights or wrongs influence what we write about, it needs both sides to be working under an assumption of good faith and collaborative spirit. This was very much not present from the start of this section, and continues to be what can only be described as poisonous.

  Nobody here is going to convince the others. Please drop it and go cool down somewhere else. -- Colin°^Talk 15:33, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

  Saying that one interaction lacks tact and civility does not obligate me to comment on every such comment... Please don't insult me like that. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 15:42, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

  Nope. The assumption that editors are apparently unable to follow the link Whatamidoing posted with their sexist, racist remark and can only judge it if they were around at the time is stupid, and clearly meant to imply that Dronebogus is hiding their enwiki past somehow. And there is no personal attack in correctly describing someone's post. If there is no evidence for their description of those opposing her POV in such a way, then she was making prejudiced assumptions. If you want people "working under an assumption of good faith and collaborative spirit" then perhaps tell Whatamidoing to not paint people having a different opinion with such an insulting brush, to not imply that people must have some previous account for being able to, er, read, to be more careful in how they treat sensitive topics instead of givng the impression of "young women having sex = rape, young men having sex = willing fun", and so on. They are a longstanding editor, yes, but many problems with their approach to discussions and facts are longstanding as well. "disagree about how much evidence either side has to support their claims": no evidence is needed to support a negative. The burden is on Whatamidoing to demonstrate the comments from e.g. many childless white men that lead to their conclusion. So far, they have produced nothing to support it. When someone posts inflammatory, derogatory, sexist and/or racist comments, it is not up to others to prove them wrong: it is up to them to provide some evidence to back it up, or else to withdraw or amend their comments. The only thing "poisonous" is Whatamidoing poisoning the well by describing people opposed to image censoring as childless rich white men who edit Wikipedia because Jimmy Wales previously ran a porn site. I've gotten quite used to Whatamidoing's dubious debating tactics, but this was a new low even for them (or at least I hope it was a new low and not something recurrent I didn't notice so far). Fram (talk) 15:58, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

  Fram, HEB, holes and digging and all that. I'm not quite sure what you hope to achieve here other than amassing diffs for how hot-headed you can be. Posting outrageous misinterpretations of another's writings ("young women having sex = rape, young men having sex = willing fun") is a clear signal. You've made your point. Posting more only makes it worse. -- Colin°^Talk 16:56, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

  Well, an unintended result seems to be making it clear which editors are unconcerned about racist or sexist statements. Fram (talk) 17:06, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

  The result AFAICT is to make it clear which editors struggle with the difference between "a statement about viewpoints differing by race or sex" and "a racist or sexist statement". WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:12, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

  Indeed. Your statements clearly fall into the latter category. Fram (talk) 17:21, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

  The above appears to be an outrageous misinterpretation of my writing... Note that I am not involved in the underlying dispute. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 22:41, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

  HEB, for clarity, the holes and digging was for both of you, but the latter part of my post at Fram. What concerned me about your posts were the "Failing to provide appropriate available evidence in a timely manner for a claim you make would raise competence questions" which appears hostile and a rather odd and unhelpful thing to say to WAID. And the thin skinned response to me calling out a one-sided attack over "tact and civility". This is a discussion whose opening post and continuing posts by some spectacularly lack tact and civility. If all things were fairly balanced, you would be right that you don't need to equally address both sides, but it quite clearly isn't. Asking WAID to explain comments that one had interpreted as racist or sexist but hoped weren't would be a tactful thing to do. Allowing them to explain their comments before jumping to bad faith conclusions would be a civil thing to do. But coming to this page, having misunderstood the posts and underestimated WAID's personal Wiki experience on this issue and accusing them of a pattern of making racist and sexist remarks and of prejudice, is unacceptable. Colin°^Talk 09:40, 5 December 2024 (UTC)

  "having misunderstood the posts and underestimated WAID's personal Wiki experience on this issue". Since neither of these is true, your conclusion is invalid as well. Fram (talk) 09:53, 5 December 2024 (UTC)

  What attack? What are you talking about? Horse Eye's Back (talk) 02:33, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

  @Colin

  Allowing them to explain their comments before jumping to bad faith conclusions would be a civil thing to do. But coming to this page, … and accusing them of a pattern of making racist and sexist remarks and of prejudice, is unacceptable.

  Sure. Unacceptable, but they just won’t stop. --Dustfreeworld (talk) 12:49, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

  I don't assume that editors are apparently unable to follow the link I posted unless they were around at the time, but if they weren't participating in that discussion, it is unlikely that they have read more than a tiny bit of it, and very unlikely that they read any of the many discussions that happened around that time but not on that page. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:16, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

  working under an assumption of good faith and collaborative spirit. This was very much not present from the start of this section, and continues to be what can only be described as poisonous.

  Again, Colin, it’s very well-said, but it won’t be possible, because IMO the editor who started this discussion came with a grudge, as their attacks towards the WMF and it’s current/ex employees has been pointed out directly by WhatamIdoing. AFAICT, the OP (Fram) is a former admin that was desysopped by the WMF. This all began much like a retaliation. It can *only* be poisonous with no assumption of good faith and collaborative spirit. --Dustfreeworld (talk) 12:55, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

  HEB, I have never actually been asked to provide evidence for the demographics of the people who participated in that discussion. I originally provided a summary of my impression. Anyone who wants to know who participated in the discussion and which views they held can read the discussion for themselves. Some of the evidence comes from off-wiki interactions with people. If you don't know the people involved, then you may have some difficulty in determining all the demographic characteristics, but your lack of personal knowledge is neither proof that I'm wrong nor a reason for me to out editors' personal situations.

  If you prefer to believe that editors from Muslim-majority countries were leading the drive to shove images of Mohammad in every reader's faces, or that parents were most insistent that there be no way to pre-emptively toggle off images of violence (a frequent European concern) and sex (a common American concern) on the computers their children use, then I suppose you're entitled to your opinion, but you won't convince me to share it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:11, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

  How convenient that you can't provide the evidence for your remarks. Fram (talk) 17:36, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

  If you aren't willing to publicly support the assertions you make then you shouldn't be making them publicly... And no, you making vaguely stereotypical guesses at users demographic details is not evidence its uncivil. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 22:41, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

  Would you be offended if I assumed, based on the extremely minimal information I have from your userpage, that you are probably a mother concerned about her children and that’s the sole basis for this elaborate argument? Because that’s exactly what you’re doing with everyone else— making assumptions with the bare minimum evidence. I’m a sock, everyone who disagrees with you is a sexist white man, etc. Dronebogus (talk) 18:12, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

  I would not be offended by such a guess, but it would be wrong. This (i.e., that a high-volume editor does not have a house full of children) is something you should expect. Mothers do not seem to have enough time to contribute to Wikipedia as much as someone like me can. Even fathers don't necessarily have time to edit, at least when the kids are little. Some of the editors we've lost over the years send me baby photos when I ask why they've stopped editing, and we have some divorced fathers on the "edit when my ex has the kids" schedule. (There might be some divorced mothers on that schedule, but if so, none of them have told me that.)

  I've suggested in the past that editor surveys include questions about this, and they seem to be taking baby steps towards testing questions about caregiving of any kind, but there is obviously a difference between "having children" (at least young ones) and "sitting by the bedside". Both could be exhausting and time consuming, but the latter would be more conducive to editing Wikipedia. Parents (i.e., with children in the home, not empty nesters) are significantly underrepresented in our community, just like some other demographics are overrepresented (e.g., Autistic editors, editors with disabilities).

  I have never said that the people who opposed it are sexist, and I don't believe that's true. I have only said that the people who opposed the image filter tended to have certain demographic characteristics, not certain attitudes. Some of them believe(d) themselves to have quite noble reasons for opposing it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:26, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

  The problem I have, and I think most people here are having, with your conduct is that you’re engaging in what are basically civilized ad hominem arguments based on “lies, damned lies and statistics”. A majority of editors are white men, so that means everyone is opposing your arguments because they’re white men and not because arbitrary censorship is fundamentally incompatible with Wikimedian values? And the whole male sexual abuse thing is just… weird. Uncomfortable and weird. And I also don’t see how your remark about my account history is supposed to be interpreted as anything other than aspersions of sock puppetry, especially since this is seemingly a common enough tactic that I’ve been subjected to it multiple times. Dronebogus (talk) 00:21, 5 December 2024 (UTC)

  ...Why bring up those editors' backgrounds at all in the VP discussion? Let alone characterize any set of traits with so much condescension and certainty? JoelleJay (talk) 19:10, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

  I don't believe that Demography is destiny, but I do believe that demography has effects. For example: Our early community had certain demographic characteristics, and those characteristics led to agreements about (e.g.,) the notability of individual athletes and Playboy Playmates.

  If the community had instead mostly been made up of schoolteachers, we might have some decent articles on how to teach reading instead. If it had been mostly made up of small business owners or investors, we probably would have had lax rules about notability for businesses instead.

  In the particular case of the image referendum, we had a pretty stark demographic divide. We even talked about it at the time. But this is our community's demographics. The community is estimated to be ~85% men now, and it was more than 90% men back then. Most editors actually were from the US and Europe, so it is hardly surprising that most participants were from the US and Europe. The people participating in that discussion were even more likely than average to be from northern Europe. This is at least partly due to the German Wikipedia feeling like their decision to run de:Vulva on the Main Page in March 2010 "caused" the proposal in the first place, so they were very active in discussions.

  The participants' demographic backgrounds mattered. On a question of "Should we have a system for preëmptively filtering out photos of nude people?", you should not expect to get the same answer when you ask people who live in a country where billboard advertisements regularly and uncontroversially feature topless women vs people who live in a country where this would be criminal behavior. So, why bring up those editors' backgrounds? Because the participants' backgrounds drove the end result. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:12, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Well, you don't even consider "There is a high degree of racism from Anglos evident throughout this discussion. English is a universal language my friends, and not the property of colonial imperialists." a personal attack or truly problematic statement, but just something where "a little re-wording might be helpful."[15] Quite a pattern you are developing here. Fram (talk) 12:07, 5 December 2024 (UTC)

See linguistic racism, covert racism, structural racism, etc. It may be uncomfortable for us to be reminded that the rule proposed in that discussion will have a negative disparate impact along racial lines, but it is not IMO unreasonable for an affected editor to do so. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:15, 5 December 2024 (UTC)

“Anglo” means “non-latino white” per the New Oxford American Dictionary. Even if you were generous and ”just” thought it meant “native english speaker”, it’s a distinction without a difference: one is racism (“all white people are racist”) and the other is xenophobia (“all native anglophones are racist”) that hews pretty close to just being racist. In any case “racist” is an unambiguous personal attack, even if “it’s true”. Dronebogus (talk) 21:20, 5 December 2024 (UTC)

I don't know if you noticed, but the word racist doesn't appear in the disputed remark. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:28, 5 December 2024 (UTC)

“A high degree of racism from…” = “…is being racist” = “…is racist”. Basically if you bring up the r-accusation people are going to take it poorly. Can you politely accuse someone of racism? Dronebogus (talk) 08:13, 6 December 2024 (UTC)

I suggest that you read about Societal racism. It is possible for racism to exist without anybody "being a racist". WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:52, 6 December 2024 (UTC)

So you are defending a brand new editor who either is trolling or at the very least lacks the basic skills to contribute positively on enwiki[16], by rephrasing their attack into a more eloquent attack, still clearly implying that native English speakers don't want non-native English speakers to use LLMs on, er, the English language Wikipedia, simply because the natives are White and the non-natives aren't; while at the same time playing silly bugger games like "oh, it said racism, not racist, I win". Like I wise person once said, "Maybe try to imagine a world in which the other editor isn't wrong." Fram (talk) 08:57, 6 December 2024 (UTC)

In a discussion that is partially about how editors who speak English as a foreign language either are, or are not, permitted to participate in this community, I am indeed defending an editor whose contribution shows evidence of limited English skills (e.g., absence of eloquence, potentially incorrect words) and whose comment is about feeling excluded on that basis.

I can easily understand people feeling offended by the comment, but I'm not sure that feeling offended is proof that the comment is wrong. Covert racism is still racism. Unintentional racism is still racism.

Can you understand why people who are trying to help Wikipedia – AFD certainly needs people who can read non-English languages, for example – and who read a discussion that says:

• Oppose because we need these non-English speakers
• Support because they're lazy
• Oppose because this is used by non-English speakers
• Support because we should just block these people
• Support because this is disrespectful and cheating
• Support because you shouldn't participate if you can't write in English

might feel like quite a few editors were trying to discriminate against them in some way? WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:11, 6 December 2024 (UTC)

"an editor whose contribution shows evidence of limited English skills (e.g., absence of eloquence, potentially incorrect words) and whose comment is about feeling excluded on that basis." I don't think we are looking at the same editor. This is not "absence of eloquence, potentially incorrect words" but nonsense. Fram (talk) 17:35, 6 December 2024 (UTC)

Wrong diff? "Yes. You are correct." is not exactly evidence of eloquence. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:28, 7 December 2024 (UTC)

This is not a discussion on whether ESL editors "are, or are not, permitted to participate in this community", what a ridiculous and insulting strawman. No one is opposing editors simply machine-translating from their native language to communicate, something that has been fine for the two decades before ChatGPT. People are objecting to apparently-machine-generated arguments that have unclear provenance and a high chance of wasting people's time with hallucinations. Framing this as if the editors supporting collapsing obvious LLM comments are any kind of racist is frankly bordering on a personal attack. JoelleJay (talk) 17:45, 6 December 2024 (UTC)

I have hesitated to bring up individual remarks, because it seems mean to pick in individuals, but here is a direct quotation from a very nice editor in that discussion: But what we do here is write in English: both articles and discussions. If someone doesn't have the confidence to write their own remark or !vote, then they shouldn't participate in discussions.

Can you imagine someone reading these two sentences and concluding that because they "don't have the confidence to write" in English, then this editor believes "they shouldn't participate in discussions"? Do you think that is a reasonably fair, or at least non-ridiculous, understanding of these two sentences? NB that I'm not asking whether it's your own interpretation – just whether you can see how someone with limited English skills might read those sentences and feel like their participation was being discouraged. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:38, 7 December 2024 (UTC)

You're really going to pull out @Yngvadottir's thoughtful comment as the prime example of the imperialist/colonialist/Anglo/racist view that editors who cannot compose any amount of English prose confidently probably shouldn't participate in discussions in English on the English Wikipedia? JoelleJay (talk) 23:20, 7 December 2024 (UTC)

No, I'm not calling this the prime example. I'm calling it "a" comment that could be interpreted as saying that people with limited English skills shouldn't participate in discussions, because it actually contains the exact words that "they shouldn't participate in discussions".

I notice that you don't claim that it's "ridiculous" (your word) to interpret "they shouldn't participate in discussions" as meaning "they shouldn't participate in discussions" or that it's "straw-manning" to say that this discussion is partly about who should and who "shouldn't participate".

I very strongly doubt any nefarious intent. I am saying that people who are looking at this problem from the other side of the English language gap are not being "ridiculous" if they feel like some editors in the discussion don't want them to participate. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:33, 7 December 2024 (UTC)

One comment that might be interpreted as meaning "not even machine-translated non-English-speaker comments are acceptable" is obviously not representative of even a real minority of supporters' arguments, and anyway the comment appeared 3 days after the one in question so isn't at all relevant to your behavior there. JoelleJay (talk) 00:11, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

It's not the only comment. You read English just fine. Put on your "other people's eyes" glasses for a minute and go read the discussion. Look for words like "lazy" and "cheating" and "ban these people".

Think about how the opening comment against people who "can't make a coherent argument on your own" would make you feel, especially if you didn't feel able to read 20,000 words (something that takes a native English speaker more than an hour to read) about it to discover that the OP didn't actually have English language learners in mind and doesn't actually object to English language learners using machine translation or even AI-based translation. Would you be feeling welcomed? WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:19, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

The "lazy" and "cheating" and "ban these people" comments were unambiguously about LLM-generated content, which is no more relevant to ESL speakers than it is to native speakers since both still have the option to write things in their own words.

I have no idea what you are trying to say with your appeal to "imagine how 'can't make a coherent argument on your own' would make you feel". People who cannot make a coherent argument on their own do not have the competence to participate in discussions. How is that remotely controversial? How would anyone proficient in any language see that statement, especially in the blindingly clear context of generative AI that it appears in, and think "this means it is no longer possible for me to contribute to discussions on en.wp, because I identify as someone who cannot compose coherent arguments"; or jump to the conclusion that this applies to "even AI-based translation" (which is basically all online translation now), despite not mentioning translation anywhere, and despite obviously being prompted by the recent topical issue of LLM-generated content, and despite LLM-based translation being a very niche market that doesn't even use the problematic capacity for creative extrapolation that distinguishes LLMs from predictive models? JoelleJay (talk) 01:44, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

I can't "make" a coherent argument "on my own" in German. I need at least a dictionary, usually a machine translation tool, and sometimes a friend to check. Would you say I'm incompetent to participate in discussions?

The problem with saying "Oh, but I didn't literally mean that you have to 'make' the written text truly 'on your own'" is that it's unreasonable to expect English language learners to pick up on that nuance.

You and I know that there is a meaning of "making an argument" that doesn't include "writing" or "framing" or "expressing" that argument. You and I know that "on your own" usually means "with no tools, supports, or accommodations" ("The baby is standing on his own") but sometimes includes using relevant tools ("The engineer built that computer on his own"). But I think in the context of people saying that LLMs are bad (and they are!), we should not expect English language learners to assume that insisting that people must write "on your own" means "it's okay to use tools, including LLMs, to translate or correct the grammar, so long as it's your own original thoughts".

This discussion is basically an example of Wikipedia:Policy writing is hard. The proposed rule is that "Admins or other users evaluating consensus in a discussion should discount, ignore, or strike through or collapse comments found to have been generated by AI/LLM/Chatbots".

The rule that appears to be wanted is probably closer to this: "When evaluating comments in a discussion, please accept comments that appear to express genuinely held views by an editor, even if that editor used assistive tools such as AI/LLM/chatbots to correct their grammar or help them communicate in English, and please discount or ignore comments that appear to be purely generated by those same tools without representing the views of any human."

(Also: good luck telling the difference, especially if it's a short comment and not obviously hallucinating.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:11, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

The proposal does not say "make a coherent argument on their own directly in English". Why would anyone interpret policy as literally forcing non-English speakers to attempt to compose English comments entirely on their own?

The number of users of "LLM translation tools" is vanishingly small and anyway those don't involve content generation, so I don't see why anyone using them or translation tools in general would think the proposal applies to them. If using translators to communicate was considered a problem it would have been brought up much earlier and the proposal would actually mention them.

All this looks a lot more like native English-speakers hand-wringing over the terrible possibility that someone on Earth might not feel warmly welcomed in meta-discussions on English Wikipedia. JoelleJay (talk) 02:27, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

Why would anyone interpret this proposal (which is not a policy) as wanting non-English speakers to attempt to compose English comments "entirely on their own"?

I'd say that's probably because editors, from the very first comment, are using words like "not using their own words" to describe the unwanted behavior and "on your own" to describe what's wanted.

You may have heard the Maya Angelou line that "When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time". Perhaps some editors are taking us at our word, and believing what we wrote the first time. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:06, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

WhatamIdoing, that was the topic under discussion: not whether EFL editors are welcome on en.wiki (and particularly, not whether they are welcome to contribute to articles), not even whether EFL editors are welcome in discussions (the example given at the outset was AfDs, IIRC), but what should be done about LLM usage in discussions. (As I mentioned, machine translation is already deprecated in article space here on en.wiki, and LLM usage in article space is I believe simply not tolerated.) As I attempted to point out—I'm a bit hampered right now, but I do stand by what I wrote—en.wiki already has, and has probably had since the 2nd week or earlier, significant EFL participation. Including some with native-or near-native writing ability, so we can't know how many (plus there are a lot of dialects of English; excellent written Indian English differs from my usage in many respects, for example.) And also significant participation from EFL writers who make spelling and grammar mistakes. It also has a lot of editors who don't claim any other languages on their user pages, but make spelling and grammar mistakes. I make some myself. It's a wiki, and usually a friendly community, IMO; people help others by fixing the mistakes (and we're pretty good at explaining the ENGVAR thing to native speakers who don't realise their usage isn't universal); and in discussions, people ask if they didn't understand, maybe suggesting a different word. (Who knows, the word used may have a jargon meaning I didn't know, or be the preferred word in English as taught in China.) So "the English language gap" doesn't really exist. There is no chasm between English-native and EFL; there isn't even a defined border, like a streambed, and there aren't 2 distinct sides. Try imagining people standing and sitting at various points on a bunch of hillocks, and moving up and down to grasp each others' hands and haul someone up or sideways a bit. The actual process of communication and collaboration is easier than the mataphor I came up with, because humans collaborate well. Bifurcating native/EFL (even without bringing in colonialism; the sun may have not set on the British Empire, but the British Empire didn't include everywhere and is not solely to blame/thank for the widespread use of English, particularly online, in 2024) is not helpful. It actually strikes me as condescending, if only in defining the EFL Wikipedian as necessarily less than able. From that perspective very different to yours: yes, if an editor doesn't feel they can say what they mean in a discussion and instead has an LLM—a gussied-up search tool designed for writing flowery extended arguments—confabulate their comment, then they shouldn't participate in that discussion. The tool may say something different from what they intended. It may say something that makes them look bad—I gave an example that arose when a Nigerian editor used an LLM at AN and the LLM's output was a nasty personal attack. At the very best it will make them look silly. Participation in AfDs, policy discussions, and other behind-the-scenes discussions is not mandatory. If someone really wants to make a point—for example, to defend an article—then they should just try, and it will always be better than having ChatGPT drop a 5-paragraph brochure into the discussion. Even if it has a wrong word or two or an agreement error. (Again, that's not an unheard-of level of English from some presumed "natives", in discussions.) It will be what they actually wanted to say. LLMs are not better. They muck things up in unpredictable ways. (I'm also going to say this: as a past teacher of ESL and also of another language, I would consider any past student of mine who used an LLM to make a comment in a discussion venue to be shaming me. Teachers of foreign languages seek to equip students with the tools to say what they want to say, with or without a dictionary. I'm sure some of these overly nervous people had better teachers than I was.) ...Those are the main legs on which I stood the part of my argument to which you object. You are of course free to disagree with me as strongly as you desire. But I do find invidious your simple dualism of native–non-native. And I also wonder whether you aren't taking too prominent a role, as an ally, through not considering what a wide range of English backgrounds there are—including its being an official government language in some countries, and the whole world of online and off-line "international English" (see Simple English Wikipedia, but there are also folks whose English is primarily aural–oral, built in large part on TV and movies, and who write it mainly in chat channels :-).) You may be crowding out EFL editors with different perspectives. I'm biting my tongue not to identify one. Yngvadottir (talk) 00:48, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

I think that any EFL editors with different perspectives will find that I've made 1.7% of the comments in that Village pump discussion, which I doubt anyone will consider "crowding them out".

In addition to the native–non-native spectrum, I think that language family plays a role. It's easier to learn English if you already speak Dutch than if you already speak Chinese. I struggle to remember the correct definite pronoun in German, but because I'm an English speaker, I expect articles to exist and have a sense of whether they belong (though the rules vary a little between the two: "He is a physician" vs "Er ist Arzt). Articles don't exist in Chinese. It is a source of confusion and insecurity – one more thing to get wrong, one more way for editors to subconsciously decide that you don't belong, don't know what you're talking about, can be safely disregarded. The 'polish' that an LLM system produces might help in most cases. The problem, of course, is that it might be harmful in others (just like ordinary machine translation. Back in the day, Google Translate used to turn German statements meaning "I don't" into "I do". Depending on the language pair, an LLM might not be any worse).

I'm sorry you would discourage EFL editors from participating "if an editor doesn't feel they can say what they mean", especially in AFDs. IMO we really need people who are fluent in Chinese and other non-English, non-Western languages at AFD. Take a look at Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/Schools some time. There are 16 schools listed at the moment. Glancing through the names, as many as 14 of them might be from non-English speaking countries. They're often sent to AFD by a nom who can't read the local language/script and who didn't attempt to search by its non-English name. That doesn't result in accurate evaluations of notability, even by the relatively weak standards of "I put the name in a web search engine and didn't see anything on the first screen of results".

BTW, you might be interested in chatting with Piotrus about his EFL students in Asia. The use of translation tools is ubiquitous, with browser plugins automatically translating everything. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:43, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

Hi, I ran into this discussion accidentally.

I would like to say that I agree with Fram and JoelleJay over the removal of that comment as a personal attack. It was an aspersion, as it implied that other participants of the discussion have racist motivation or bias without presenting evidence. Moreover, it was based on its referrents being Anglos, which is a national or ethnic categorization, thus fitting the first bullet point of WP:NPA#What_is_considered_to_be_a_personal_attack?.

In my opinion, enforcing civility must take priority over preferences based on political concepts. This rule is being followed on Wikipedia as of today, and is one of the main reasons why editing Wikipedia has been such a pleasant activity for me so far. This experience greatly contrasts for me to what I have experienced on Mastodon and both pre-Musk and under-Musk Twitter, where I found the levels of verbal aggression to be extreme but close to no moderation against it, creating an highly unwelcoming atmosphere for me, despite a very strong (and ironically, anglocentric) focus on abstract social justice concepts both by users and administrators.

By the way, the term racism feels overused in the mainstream Anglo(-Saxon) political discourse. For those who like to talk about systemic biases in English-speaking spaces against cosmophones (this is a non-negated term for non-anglophones which I promote), I would like to suggest saying Anglo cultural (or linguistic) imperialism or just anglicism instead, though this likewise must also be done with care. NicolausPrime (talk) 06:31, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

If you are so worried about editors who might feel discriminated against, why didn't you bat an eye when an editor posted [17] this hate-filled rant but simply answered as if nothing untoward had happened? Fram (talk) 18:00, 6 December 2024 (UTC)

Because I'm a WP:VOLUNTEER, and I thought that I already has as many discussions about discrimination on my hands as I could manage to reply to right now.

If you are worried about discriminatory comments, why are you posting that link here? Wikipedia:Don't create a Streisand effect seems like a relevant concept. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:41, 7 December 2024 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

A question

Greetings and salutations @WhatamIdoing, I've had a good time reading through this talk page. I noticed that you have quite a lot of experience here so I was wondering if you might be able to answer a question: I've seen that some administrators have protected their own talk pages, as well as the talk pages of other administrators. Is this...allowed? And if so, doesn't it kind of contradict the point of being an administrator? I would think that administrators should practically be as available as possible to all other editors. Thanks for your time. Big Thumpus (talk) 02:55, 7 December 2024 (UTC)

@Big Thumpus, it is allowed, it is rare, and it is usually due to sustained and sometimes very severe harassment campaigns. Admins may be more frequent targets for this type of harassment, but the same protection is available to anyone who demonstrably needs it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:04, 7 December 2024 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

		The Anti-Systemic Bias Barnstar
		Thank you for being one of the most upright persons I have ever known. I hope you like this. :-) --Dustfreeworld (talk) 06:18, 7 December 2024 (UTC)

Thank you. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:26, 7 December 2024 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

		The Medicine Barnstar
		WAID for your support of WikiProject Medicine Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 02:50, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

Thank you. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:07, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

Saints Star Award

		Saints Star Award
		For the patience, clarity, wisdom and accumulated knowledge that you bring to Wikipedia through thick and thin ... thank you ... and may memories of the productive times always outweigh those trying times! SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:13, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

Thank you. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:18, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

+1 --Dustfreeworld (talk) 12:19, 14 December 2024 (UTC)

story · music · places

I agree and thank you particularly for your positive contribution to the RfC about the composer of the opera I look forward to see today, - my story. Happiness and sadness under music, travel pics under places, unfinished. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 12:11, 14 December 2024 (UTC)

Listen today to Beethoven's 3rd cello sonata, on his birthday - it was a hook in the 2020 DYK set when his 250th birthday was remembered. I picked a recording with Antônio Meneses, because he was on my sad list this year, and I was in Brazil (see places), and I love his playing. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 17:17, 16 December 2024 (UTC)

I come to fix the cellist's name, with a 10-years-old DYK and new pics - look for red birds --Gerda Arendt (talk) 20:43, 18 December 2024 (UTC)

Today is a woman poet's centenary. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 16:05, 20 December 2024 (UTC)

WP:ANI discussion

I've started a discussion about your edits, suggesting either a topic ban or a final warning for you, at WP:ANI#User:WhatamIdoing, sexism and racism. Fram (talk) 11:30, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

For the record

The case was closed with no action on 11 December by an uninvolved administrator ("After reading through the discussion and diffs, I see nothing actionable for any involved parties").

Seven administrators (not including the closing admin) had commented in that discussion, one of them is also a bureaucrat and two are checkusers. Like the closer, none of them see anything actionable for WhatamIdoing. Of the bureaucrat and checkusers, one opined that "this is blatant hounding by Fram and ... should be met with a WP:BOOMERANG", while another expressed "strong support for both an interaction ban and a community ban for Fram".

---

--Dustfreeworld (talk) | 17:50, 14 December 2024 (UTC)

(There’s no need to reply to this discussion anymore. Thank you.)

---

Have a care (or not)

In this comment you said ordinary readers care but I think you meant ordinary readers don't care? Thryduulf (talk) 01:24, 13 December 2024 (UTC)

Yes, thank you. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:08, 13 December 2024 (UTC)

Electronic harassment, Gangstalking, Targeted individual, etc

There is a sadly large community of folks on Reddit and other places who self-perpetuate conspiracies that they are being pursued and harassed by shadowy figures. I have sympathy for these people, but we should not be bending Wikipedia articles to accomodate or perpetuate those beliefs in any way; that would not be doing them any favors in the long run. It's certainly possible for someone to be harassed by electronic means, but Electronic harassment is specifically about the delusional case. OhNoitsJamie ^Talk 13:26, 13 December 2024 (UTC)

Let's continue talking about that on the article's talk page. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:31, 13 December 2024 (UTC)

A fox for you!

WAID, I can’t find a fox called LinaBell from the templates :-/

I hope you like this :-)

--Dustfreeworld (talk) 18:20, 14 December 2024 (UTC)

Reliable Sources Out of the West

Hi I noticed you mentioned " amodbd, comillarkagoj and dailyamadercomilla" as reliable sources for Bengal. I often work on non-western articles and find WP:RSP to not cover any of the sources in the article. Is there a page you have these sources to as perennial/reliable sources for Bengali matters? Have you considered trying to expand WP:RSP for these sources? Czarking0 (talk) 19:04, 17 December 2024 (UTC)

@Czarking0, I believe that you are referring to this comment, which is from Worldbruce. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:09, 17 December 2024 (UTC)

@Czarking0: I believe those three are reliable for local news in and around the city of Comilla. That's based on my years editing Bangladesh-related topics. Wikipedia:WikiProject Bangladesh has an expandable section of "Bangladesh resources", but there has been hesitancy to list more newspapers there than The Daily Star (which is the Bangladeshi newspaper closest in stature to The Times or The New York Times). List of newspapers in Bangladesh lists notable newspapers, which of course is not the same as reliable, but is an adequate proxy. Wikipedians experienced in the space know which ones are unreliable for certain years or for certain topics.

Feel free to ask at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Bangladesh. We aren't experts on Bengal-related sources in the Republic of India, but have some familiarity with them. You can also ask at WP:RSN. If a source is questioned enough times there, it will make its way to WP:RSP. --Worldbruce (talk) 20:24, 17 December 2024 (UTC)

ANI report on electronic harrassment SPA

Hey, I am thinking of filing an ANI report on the SPA about bludgeoning, but I saw you are having a convo on the talk page of that article. I'll hold off if you think the editor is good-faith arguing and is just a newbie (I've lost track of the intricacies of the argument at this point). Bluethricecreamman (talk) 22:59, 18 December 2024 (UTC)

I could also wait and see behaviour after RFC is posted, if that works as well. Bluethricecreamman (talk) 23:10, 18 December 2024 (UTC)

What outcome do you really want from ANI? If you just want the editor kicked off the page, then a partial block is something we could ask an individual admin for. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:19, 18 December 2024 (UTC)

partial block if WP:SEALIONing and WP:STICK on that article doesn't stop within a reasonable limit by new user. you seem to be the last one giving user patience, and if you think we can avoid WP:BITING and come to reasonable conclusion i'll wait Bluethricecreamman (talk) 23:26, 18 December 2024 (UTC)

I think we'll come to a reasonable conclusion; the only question is whether it will become reasonable/necessary to block the user. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:38, 18 December 2024 (UTC)

Based on behavior so far, the user responds to any engagement by arguing their position and refuting any opposition. It's a predictable cycle. RFC or no RFC, I expect this behavior will not change. IMO you should stop engaging and feeding the cycle. - LuckyLouie (talk) 00:35, 19 December 2024 (UTC)

I haven't seen the editor actually wikt:refute anything. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:48, 19 December 2024 (UTC)

From their perspective, they are refuting. My point is that conversational engagement is only prolonging the WP:TE disruption which has gone on far too long. - LuckyLouie (talk) 00:54, 19 December 2024 (UTC)

Non-responsiveness, OTOH, might result in an RFC, which wastes more time. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:55, 19 December 2024 (UTC)

PBLOCK applied by an individual admin. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:19, 19 December 2024 (UTC)

Notice of Dispute resolution noticeboard discussion

This message is being sent to let you know of a discussion at the Wikipedia:Dispute resolution noticeboard regarding a content dispute discussion you may have participated in. Content disputes can hold up article development and make editing difficult. You are not required to participate, but you are both invited and encouraged to help this dispute come to a resolution. The discussion is about the topic Autism.

Please join us to help form a consensus. Thank you!

Oolong (talk) 16:12, 20 December 2024 (UTC)

Happy Holidays

Merry Christmas and a Prosperous 2025!

Hello WhatamIdoing, may you be surrounded by peace, success and happiness on this seasonal occasion. Spread the WikiLove by wishing another user a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past, a good friend, or just some random person. Sending you heartfelt and warm greetings for Christmas and New Year 2025. Happy editing, Abishe (talk) 22:18, 24 December 2024 (UTC) Spread the love by adding {{subst:Seasonal Greetings}} to other user talk pages.

Abishe (talk) 22:18, 24 December 2024 (UTC)

Thank you. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:39, 24 December 2024 (UTC)

heads up

Just a heads up that you have someone editing your userspace: User:WhatamIdoing/Editors are people. happy new year! Snowycats (talk) 21:07, 31 December 2024 (UTC)

Thanks. I don't especially object to the edit, but the page had fallen off my watchlist, so I wouldn't have seen the edit if you hadn't left me the note. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:10, 31 December 2024 (UTC)

Greetings of the season

~ ~ ~ Greetings of the season ~ ~ ~

Hello WhatamIdoing: Happy new year, and thanks for your work to maintain, improve and expand Wikipedia. Cheers, --Dustfreeworld (talk) 14:14, 1 January 2025 (UTC)

Thank you. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:39, 1 January 2025 (UTC)

January music

story · music · places

Happy new year 2025, opened with trumpet fanfares that first sounded OTD in 1725 (as the Main page has). -- Gerda Arendt (talk) 17:46, 1 January 2025 (UTC)

Liebster Immanuel, Herzog der Frommen, BWV 123, my story today 300 years after the first performance, is up for GAN. Dada Masilo will be my story tomorrow. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 22:08, 6 January 2025 (UTC)

My story today is about a composer who influenced music history also by writing. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 11:37, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

... and today, pictured on the Main page, Tosca, in memory of her first appearance on stage OTD in 1900, and of principal author Brian Boulton. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 19:00, 14 January 2025 (UTC)

Today, between many who just died, Tobias Kratzer on his 45th birthday who was good for an unusual DYK mentioning a Verdi opera in 2018, - you can see his work in the trailer of another one that I saw, and my talk page has a third (but by a different director). 2025 pics, finally. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 18:48, 17 January 2025 (UTC)

RFC Notice

Hello, this notice is for everyone who took part in the 2023 RfC on lists of airline destinations. I have started a new RfC on the subject. If you would like to participate please follow this link: Wikipedia talk:What Wikipedia is not § RfC on WP:NOT and British Airways destinations. Sunnya343 (talk) 01:10, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

Wiki Education Project

Hi there, I thought I'd write to you here regarding any requests for medical topics. Our students are pharmacy and biomedical science students so any topics that fall within these fields would be great. Of course the wider medical field is also OK. I apologise for not always being able to respond in a timely fashion but will do my best to keep checking back here. G.J.ThomThom (talk) 09:15, 13 January 2025 (UTC)

@G.J.ThomThom, when does the class start (or at least start talking about Wikipedia)? Approximately how many students (or articles)? WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:58, 16 January 2025 (UTC)

Tip: Legobot doesn't respect nowiki

Hi, WaId. Just thought I'd leave you a friendly tip bout Legobot. I learned to my surprise some time back, that Legobot doesn't respect surrounding <-- comment delimiters --> or nowiki tags, so if you leave {​{rfc}​} commented out or nowiki-protected in a Talk page comment somewhere, like here at Talk:Amphetamine, Legobot is still going to see it anyway, and add a new Rfc header, as it did here a few minutes later, right in the middle of your Talk page comment. (And then the FRS-bot notified me randomly of "your Rfc" !) You can still refer to an Rfc header in a Talk comment, but you have to obfuscate it somehow, either don't use the double curlies, or use a Cyrillic es character (с = Unicode 0441: 'с') which looks exactly like an Ascii lower-case C, or introduce invisible spacing via the zero-width space character (as I did above), or by using <noinclude/> e.g., : R<noinclude/>fc or {{Not a typo}} with two args, or an embedded comment {<!--la la la-->{Rfc}}; pick your poison. (If I screwed up any of the examples, Legobot will soon start an Rfc inside my comment; I'll fix it, if it does.) I find the с-trick much the easiest, but there's a possibility of confusing a fraction of users—neither the newbies nor the experts, but some tech-aware people in the middle— usually not a problem, though.

I fixed up your comment at Talk:Amphetamine to look the way you intended (took me two tries!), apologies for the TPO, but I'm pretty sure I have it right, now. Hopefully, the tip will save you some Legobot-induced grief next time around; it really should be considered a bug, and it should be fixed. I have a feeling the reason it isn't, is that Legobot is used to acting on commented out strings, and so are archiving bots, when seeing {{DNAU}} embedded in comment delimiters, but <nowiki> really should have disabled it. Cheers, Mathglot (talk) 23:14, 16 January 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for the note, and more importantly, for fixing it. I'm pretty sure that I have been told this detail before, but I'd forgotten it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:42, 17 January 2025 (UTC)

Template

Thanks for inspiring WP:DONTSAY3RDPARTY. What do you think should be done about Template:Third-party inline? jps (talk) 23:12, 17 January 2025 (UTC)

@ජපස, I think it could be trivially re-worded ("independent source needed") and moved to Template:Independent source inline (keeping the redirect). WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:41, 17 January 2025 (UTC)

 Done jps (talk) 16:50, 22 January 2025 (UTC)

Thanks. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:15, 22 January 2025 (UTC)

Circles and arrows

Your stock just went up. Anybody who knows Alice's Restaurant is okay in my book. Supporting me in that discussion doesn't hurt, either. Cheers, ―Mandruss ☎ 08:11, 19 January 2025 (UTC)

Thank you. I suspect you have to be of a certain age to remember Alice's Restaurant.

BTW, I just started documenting the 'other' Alice at User:WhatamIdoing/Cast of characters. The backstories are getting too long for me to carry around in my head. WhatamIdoing (talk) 08:15, 19 January 2025 (UTC)

I am definitely of a certain age. I somehow happened upon Alice's Restaurant when I was in high school. It became a family favorite at Thanksgiving. ―Mandruss ☎ 08:19, 19 January 2025 (UTC)

hello

Hello, WhatamIdoing. Please check your email; you've got mail!
It may take a few minutes from the time the email is sent for it to show up in your inbox. You can at any time by removing the {{You've got mail}} or {{ygm}} template.

@WhatamIdoing Thank you so much for your time, and have a great week =) Phoebezz22 (talk) 17:51, 21 January 2025 (UTC)

@Phoebezz22, I have no experience with LLMs, and I am not interested in being interviewed. Good luck, WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:16, 21 January 2025 (UTC)

Thank you for letting me know! Phoebezz22 (talk) 18:19, 21 January 2025 (UTC)

YouTube

Let's say 2 people are debating on some random talkpage. One of them links to a selfpublished video about a BLP subject (who is not the publisher of the video) on YouTube, because they want to use it as an example of what they are talking about (and not as a source in the article). So for example: I link to your selfpublished video about George Bush. The video does not infringe on anyone's copyright. Should that be and is that allowed or not? Polygnotus (talk) 07:31, 22 January 2025 (UTC)

That is allowed. For one thing, if we banned all such links, it would be difficult for editors to talk about whether they were self-published.

I think it should be allowed, with the caveat that if it's derogatory or contentious, it should be removed or 'broken' when the discussion is over. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:23, 22 January 2025 (UTC)

Yeah, "derogatory" may be a good word to describe your selfpublished video about George Bush. Thanks! Polygnotus (talk) 23:44, 22 January 2025 (UTC)

I'm guessing that Polygnotus asked this in response to an exchange in a very contentious AfD discussion with a bunch of denigrating comments about the article subject. (There's actually a discussion at BLPN about whether the page should be courtesy blanked in light of them.) The hypothetical brushes over some particulars that are relevant: Sgerbic introduced the Youtube video and made some comments about the people shown in the video (Ido Kedar and his mother), using the video as a source. I pointed out that the BLP policy applies on all pages, I quoted the relevant sentence from BLPSPS, I noted that this specific Youtube video was self-published by someone other than Kedar and his mother, and I asked her to remove the link, which she did (though her comments using the video as a source remain, and she added information about how to find the video without the link). Then Polygnotus reintroduced the link, telling me that it was not a BLP violation. It's one thing for someone to introduce a BLPSPS-violating source, perhaps not realizing that it violated BLPSPS. It's something else for another editor to reintroduce a link after it was removed, having seen the exchange about it violating BLPSPS. I've asked Polygnotus to remove the link they reintroduced. And although I don't think it's key here, the video itself is contentious. FactOrOpinion (talk) 00:59, 23 January 2025 (UTC)

I quoted the relevant sentence from BLPSPS a sentence you yourself edited 2 days ago, and which does not support your claim that its a BLPVIO.

You are leaving out important context, it wasn't about "What is a BLPVIO?", what happened is that longterm goodfaith Wikipedians were falsely accused behind their backs of insulting incredibly vulnerable people because they do not believe in pseudoscientific methods like Facilitated communication and Rapid prompting method. Apparently some people who are very interested in autism-related articles don't like it when sceptics say that they do not believe that FC and RPM work. My advice was to not draw attention to those comments, great advice for those who actually care about protecting the BLP subject, but instead you decided to make a big scene and act as if those sceptics were horrible people who were violating BLP and insulting the BLP subject. People don't need to have sources for their opinions on talkpages and there is quite a bit of leeway on what you can say because that is required when building an encyclopedia, and you can't just falsely accuse people you disagree with of breaking the rules.

You don't seem to understand how serious it is to accuse someone of insulting and degrading a very very vulnerable person. Without proof. See WP:ASPERSIONS.

The view of the sceptics is explained in places like [18] and [19] and [20].

One time I wrote It is very hard to figure out when to trust a liar. on a talkpage and 1 person went full tilt, but every other person said that was acceptable (for the record, he did make many false claims so it wasn't an unfair description).

Not sure why you are bothering WhatamIdoing with this stuff, but now that we are here: WhatamIdoing can you please explain to FOO that the fact that sceptical people do not believe in FC and RPM is not a BLPVIO and falls within the parameters of acceptable debate on a talkpage? I tried to explain it but they don't listen and I was unhappy with the way FOO treated me so I tried to ignore them for a bit. Thanks, Polygnotus (talk) 01:27, 23 January 2025 (UTC)

WhatamIdoing, I'm sorry that you've become embroiled in this and for my part in that. I disagree with much of what Polygnotus just wrote, but won't respond further here unless you want me to clarify something. Polygnotus, if you have a problem with my behavior, I suggest that you take your concerns to my Talk page. FactOrOpinion (talk) 01:45, 23 January 2025 (UTC)

Well, I was trying to ignore you because of your behaviour. Can I please go back to ignoring you now? I don't want to explain BLP violations to you and you won't listen to me anyway. If WhatamIdoing wants to then WhatamIdoing can explain that people are allowed to voice their opinions on talkpages, even if those opinions are unpleasant to hear for some. Polygnotus (talk) 01:47, 23 January 2025 (UTC)

First reaction: Oh, joy. Everyone's riled up about Facilitated communication just in time for DRN to propose an RFC on a new, less pathologizing lead for Autism.

Second thought: Having glanced through that mess, I think it probably should be courtesy blanked. Whether that's primarily a courtesy to the BLP subject or to our editors, who are not acquitting themselves with grace, is an open question in my mind.

On the question of FC, I find myself wondering what would happen if his mother were wearing dark sunglasses, so she could be next to him but not see the screen. Or if she just closed her eyes while he typed. (I would be surprised if she agreed to any such test. At this point, proving to herself that she's unconsciously cuing would be an extremely painful, life-shattering discovery for her.)

I wonder what an ethicist would make of message-passing tests in FC. Perhaps it's not in the nonspeaking person's best interest to have fraudulent (if unconscious) communication proven. If the parent/facilitator's loses the emotional bond or the feeling that something special is happening, that might ultimately reduce the nonspeaking person's quality of life. If we extend Alexis de Tocqueville's line about having "too good a memory" ruining aspiring politicians, perhaps there is such a thing as too much knowledge about what sustains a person through difficult circumstances. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:19, 23 January 2025 (UTC)

Counterpoint to Perhaps it's not in the nonspeaking person's best interest to have fraudulent (if unconscious) communication proven. Tell Them You Love Me. Polygnotus (talk) 11:10, 23 January 2025 (UTC)

Yes, I remember when that horrifying case broke. It, and the resulting activity on Wikipedia, is one of the main reasons that I've ever looked into FC. (But she was a babysitter, not a parent; she could have walked away if she didn't like it, whereas parents usually can't.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:37, 23 January 2025 (UTC)

You are referring to something else I think, this is about Facilitated_communication#Anna_Stubblefield. List of abuse allegations made through facilitated communication There are quite a few of those stories. Polygnotus (talk) 20:34, 23 January 2025 (UTC)

No, it's that case. "Babysitter" is perhaps the wrong word, but she was taking care of him for hours at a time. (I wonder whether the last sentence for the lead ought to mention not only false allegations of abuse but also facilitators falling in love with their clients.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:03, 24 January 2025 (UTC)

Ah, gotcha. Yeah I am not sure if I would describe that as "falling in love" when there is a power imbalance like that. To me, that is not what love is. Polygnotus (talk) 03:53, 24 January 2025 (UTC)

Language is tricky. One can fall in love with reflections of oneself, which appears to be what's happening here, but "falling in love" does sound a little too accepting of the POV. Perhaps "have claimed to"? I'm sure wording could be worked out either through direct editing or a discussion on the talk page. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:37, 24 January 2025 (UTC)

I would describe it as sexual assault (she was found guilty of two counts of first-degree aggravated sexual assault) or criminal sexual contact (she pled guilty to third-degree aggravated criminal sexual contact). "Language is tricky" is the understatement of the year, and should be Wikipedia's unofficial motto. Polygnotus (talk) 05:19, 24 January 2025 (UTC)

I was thinking of the reports that other facilitators have announced that "We're in love" (presumably most of them doing so without first raping the client).

Sexuality and disability does not seem to mention consent at all, or the complexity of consent related to dementia or people with communication impairments. Neither does Sexuality in older age. Sexual abuse#Elderly and people with dementia reports that some institutionalized people engage in sexual activities with/on each other, but does not attempt to grapple with the question of whether it's possible for it to be consensual (e.g., this case). That's another hole in Wikipedia's coverage. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:10, 24 January 2025 (UTC)

Maybe I am stupid but I kinda assume that this is the kinda thing the WMF is (or should be) willing to throw some money towards. Both disability related topics and sexuality related topics can use a lot of work, and it would be nice to have some people on the WMF's dime who know what they are talking about and are willing to tackle sensitive topics. Volunteers got the milhist and sports stuff covered; spending some money to fill in the gaps makes sense to me. It is one of the easier ways to raise the overall quality. We do have Sexual abuse and intellectual disability which may overlap a bit with Sexuality and disability. Patient_abuse#Intellectual_disabilities consists of a single sentence. Polygnotus (talk) 06:22, 24 January 2025 (UTC)

The WMF does not pay for content creation. They have funded access to sources (and occasionally even a camera, when the missing content is photos), and they will pay for events at which people (learn how to) edit, but they do not pay for writing articles.

Sometimes a non-profit that is not affiliated with the WMF will hire someone to create or improve articles. For example, the International League Against Epilepsy tried it a while ago, in the hope of improving articles about epilepsy. WhatamIdoing (talk) 07:09, 24 January 2025 (UTC)

Yup, if I had it to do over again, I certainly would have made some different decisions about how I participated in that discussion. FWIW, there's been a discussion at the BLPN about courtesy blanking the AfD discussion (and I would make some different decisions in the discussion there too). Unfortunately, I discovered tonight that someone has archived the AfD discussion at the Internet Archive — not something I ever would have thought to check on, except that a comment from ජපස (jps) at the bottom of the AfD discussion linked to this article, which noted archived AfD discussions, so I decided to check. The whole thing is a mess. If you think I was wrong to ask Sgerbic to delete the YouTube link and/or to ask Polygnotus to delete it after he reintroduced it, please say. I was acting on my understanding of BLPSPS, but I certainly recognize that just because I believe something doesn't make it true. FactOrOpinion (talk) 06:16, 23 January 2025 (UTC)

You were wrong to act so childish when I was trying to help you, you and your side were wrong to draw so much attention to an AfD that would normally maybe get 10 votes and be forgotten in a week (which showed that this was all about ego, not protecting Kedar), you were wrong to demand (not ask) to remove that video, you were wrong to repeat yourself a million times. And your understanding of BLPSPS is clearly flawed, nothing in there gives you the right to do what you did. Oh, and the worst thing you did is accuse goodfaith longterm Wikipedians of insulting and degrading someone so vulnerable, when all they did was stick up for a disabled man in a tough situation.

This is a problem with certain advocacy groups on Wikipedia and in the real world; they lose all connection to reality.

People think "my autism just makes me like trains, therefore all people with that label must be secret geniuses who get discriminated against." But the label "autism" has been applied to an enormously diverse group, with incredibly wideranging abilities. Which is why the term has become meaningless and should be replaced with something that also turns out to be bad when the new DSM rolls around.

It won't help, but I have courtesy blanked the AfD, because we should be ashamed of it, as a community. WhatamIdoing can explain to you that your understanding of BLP is incorrect. And please don't ever accuse goodfaith people of such a thing again.

Polygnotus (talk) 10:23, 23 January 2025 (UTC)

@Polygnotus: would you be so kind as to post notifications and explanation for your courtesy blanking to the relevant threads at WP:BLPN and WP: FTN? I saw the courtesy blanking and wasn't sure what the rationale was for it, but after reading this comment, I understand and agree, so it might be useful to have this explained for those who may be confused as to the rationale. jps (talk) 13:11, 23 January 2025 (UTC)

@ජපස: Good point, thank you. I have done so. I hope this explanation is enough, if not people are of course welcome on my talkpage. Polygnotus (talk) 13:16, 23 January 2025 (UTC)

I wonder, if you look back over your life, how much success you've had when you tell adults that they're being childish. I have not found it to be a useful way to win friends and influence people myself. People can have different opinions about what is insulting or degrading.

Given the lack of clarity over at WT:V and WT:BLP about what constitutes a self-published source, I'm hesitant to say that FOO's understanding of BLP is actually incorrect. It might turn out to be "a minority POV", and it might even turn out to be "incorrect", but right now, we don't have any agreement about whether (e.g.,) a press release issued written by and distributed at the behest of a multinational corporation is "self-published" or "non-self-published". If we take a narrow view of self-publishing (e.g., an individual making and uploading a video to YouTube is 'self-published' but a large organization doing the same is not), then we could see wide-ranging changes to all of our processes. Imagine, e.g., that every press release or social media post condemning the killing of George Floyd from a large organization was non-self-published – and therefore contributed to notability. I think my response to this request is going to have to be "ask me next year". WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:47, 23 January 2025 (UTC)

Did you read what I was referring to? Perhaps it was not a nice thing to say, but based on your reaction it looks like you haven't read the context. It starts all the way here and then moved to BLPN. Polygnotus (talk) 20:05, 23 January 2025 (UTC)

Anyway, I am gonna shrug and move on. I tried helping but it was impossible to explain anything. Debates in public places are very difficult because people keep jumping in based on the last three posts and don't know the background and history and are unfamiliar with the concepts. I hate it when goodfaith people are falsely accused behind their back. People just assume that those who disagree with them must be evil. Polygnotus (talk) 20:26, 23 January 2025 (UTC)

Last three posts, or the first three posts – I agree. I glanced through the AFD but none of the other pages. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:05, 24 January 2025 (UTC)

About autism:

There appear to be three main theories, which I massively oversimplify and unfairly caricaturise here:

1. Autism is a developmental disorder proximately caused by congenital malformation of the brain, partly or mostly due to genetics. It contains a variety of problems (e.g., sensory problems like hyperacusis).
2. Autism is a normal part of being human. It has advantages and disadvantages and also co-occurring conditions that are statistically correlated with autism but are really separate things (e.g., conditions that some non-autistic people also get, like hyperacusis).
3. Autism is a meaningless mess. Didn't any of you study nosology? Saying that autism is a distinct medical condition is like saying a fever is a disease. What the DSM and ICD call a single spectrum disorder is probably best understood as a collection of symptoms that manifest in dozens or hundreds of actual diseases. No wonder you #1 folks can't find any reliable biomarkers. It's not one thing!

I think there is much to be said in theory for the third viewpoint, but it's not very practical at the clinical level. At the Wikipedia level, it would be interesting to find a source that talks about the proportion of savant-like abilities. I could imagine a ==Society and culture== paragraph contrasting the actual (low) prevalence of striking talents in the real world against their appearance in pop culture (e.g., Rain Man). WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:20, 23 January 2025 (UTC)

WhatamIdoing, I feel like I need some guidance here (about the exchange above and related comments elsewhere), but I also don't want to drag you further into something that you may not wish to be a part of. Can you suggest someone or someplace that it would be appropriate for me to seek guidance from? Thanks, FactOrOpinion (talk) 15:25, 23 January 2025 (UTC)

I'd appreciate your weighing in on Newslinger's response to me here about the applicability of the BLP policy outside of mainspace. I'm not sure whether the two of you view it differently, or if I'm simply failing to understand something about the view that each of you takes on this. Thanks, FactOrOpinion (talk) 15:20, 24 January 2025 (UTC)

I think that the basic problem is that the written rules, at this point in time, do not adequately communicate the nuances and complexities of what's actually accepted by the community. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:50, 24 January 2025 (UTC)

I'd be interested in hearing more about how you perceive the nuances and complexities, but understand if that's not something you want to take the time for. If you are up for it, it might be more useful to post that to WT:BLP, in case someone wants to work on revising BLPSPS at some point.

I'm not in a position to work on BLPSPS now (nor does it make sense to work on it now if there's a possibility that the explanation of SPS will change), but I might be up for it later, perhaps depending on whether my RfC turns out to be a bad RfC / worthless in making progress, or if it instead turns out to be useful in some way. I need to proofread it, hopefully for the last time, and then post it. I know that lots of people create RfCs, and it's not that I've been less thoughtful than them, but I'm still feeling a bit anxious about actually posting it (because it's so much longer than most RfCs and I wonder if people will be willing to wade through a lot of text or if that will just tick people off, and because it's hard to communicate the issues effectively even though I've tried, as my approach is partly based on nuances and complexities in the previous discussions). But I know that I've made an effort to do a good job and my intentions are good, so I should just be bold and do it. FactOrOpinion (talk) 20:10, 24 January 2025 (UTC)

BLP redux

FactOrOpinion and myself apologized to eachother so that is good news.

But then, while hunting for trash on BLPN, I found a false claim that someone was allegedly fired for their alleged treatment of female employees. Case of mistaken identity.

IPs tried to remove it, editwar ensued. I factchecked and then removed the BLP violation. Would you be so kind to take a look at Talk:Bessel_van_der_Kolk, specifically the Outdated and scientifically discredited theories section. I am not sure how to deal with that. It is not FC/RPM, but it is repressed memories and the triune brain model. And of course sexual abuse allegations. And sorry that I keep using you as a sanity check, you made the mistake of giving me good advice, if you are busy just send me to someone else. Polygnotus (talk) 23:12, 24 January 2025 (UTC)