Jump to content

User talk:Iridescent/Archive 22

Page contents not supported in other languages.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Archive 15←Archive 20Archive 21Archive 22Archive 23Archive 24Archive 25

Sourcing awards list

Having failed to find anything in the labryinth of policy pages, I'm asking here as an article I recently tried to improve (see Stamford Raffles Award) got tagged as relying too much on primary sources. I was a bit stumped by this, as awards articles and list articles generally do use primary sources to verify the entries on a list such as this (the text of the citations is a bit more iffy and probably raises copyright concerns, though the Nobel Prize lists have long quoted the citations in full). Has there been a misunderstanding somewhere about what primary sourcing means here? FWIW, that is a lower level award (I work a lot on various science and engineering awards) and the top level award from that society is Frink Medal, but not sure what the right approach is here.

When I look at the various awards articles I've worked on they are a bit of a mixed bunch: Linus Pauling Award that's a good start, tagged for notability; Franklin Medal; Benjamin Franklin Medal (some renaming has messed things up a bit here - you can see why the institute changed the award name to Franklin Institute Awards); Howard N. Potts Medal; Heinrich Wieland Prize; Janssen Medal (French Academy of Sciences), Prix Jules Janssen, Stuart Ballantine Medal, Michelson–Morley Award, James Bryant Conant Award, J. Robert Oppenheimer Memorial Prize, Leidy Award, Hayden Memorial Geological Award. OK, I'll stop there...

I have some other lists of similar nature lurking in my userspace (there is something alluring about wikilinking such lists and seeing which links are blue and which are red and working out which redlinks we actually have articles for if you look carefully enough). Such lists are useful, but is there a simple page to point people at that explains this? I am wondering how much of the guidance at Template:List navbox will be useful? I've long assumed that a list consisting mostly of people who have articles will not cause notability concerns, but am I wrong to assume that? Carcharoth (talk) 19:37, 30 July 2016 (UTC)

One of the many problems with WP:PRIMARY is that it prefers reports by the world's least reliable profession to official announcements, which are usually better for strictly factual matters that the issuing organization has done, as here. Johnbod (talk) 01:51, 31 July 2016 (UTC)
Indeed; if you (Carcharoth) have a long memory you may remember my complaints during round one of the COI Wars back when MyWikiBiz appeared about the inconsistency of our welcoming the most gushing waffle from hyper-biased fans providing they can dig up a press cutting somewhere, but treating neutral updates on film release dates, band discographies, company opening dates etc as having been vomited into Wikipedia by Beelzebub himself should they happen to be sourced to something connected to the subject.

WP:NOR is possibly the single most misunderstood line of policy on Wikipedia; a lot of people interpret it as "anything which isn't sourced to something completely unrelated to the subject should be deleted", and don't really understand the nuanced wording of Any interpretation of primary source material requires a reliable secondary source for that interpretation. A primary source may only be used on Wikipedia to make straightforward, descriptive statements of facts that can be verified by any educated person with access to the primary source but without further, specialized knowledge. Instead, a lot of people who should know better treat "primary source" as "source added by an editor I dislike" or "any source on an article I don't consider notable".

Because of the WMF's "world's largest encyclopedia" puffery and the "free encyclopedia" strapline, people tend to forget that "encyclopedia" is only one-third of the "Wikipedia is a combination of an encyclopedia, an almanac and a gazetteer" trinity (albeit the most important third), and primary sources are often completely appropriate for neutral gazetteer and almanac entries; the whole "neutral third-party source" gubbins is for writing about the interpretation of facts, not for stating the facts themselves.

Regarding the intent behind the policy, you want SlimVirgin, who to all practical purposes is responsible for the sourcing policies in their current form. Some of the sports projects—who are used to writing about fields with multiple levels of awards of varying degrees of prestige—would probably be well-placed to comment on how we treat award-winner lists in practice, as would the people at WT:Featured list candidates who are presumably used to deciding whether lists are appropriately sourced. ‑ Iridescent 15:28, 31 July 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for the ping. It's a myth that the policies warn against primary sources. They're often the best sources to use. You just have to be careful to use authoritative ones, and don't do anything too outlandish with them. And if it's a contentious or difficult area, make sure you know how the secondary sources use them. SarahSV (talk) 18:12, 31 July 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for the advice. Turned out the Stamford Raffles Award was more interesting than it seems. The first few awards were sculptures by Henry Moore. A limited edition of eight. But the cost of the insurance even when kept securely in a safe was prohibitive, so at some point the remaining ones were sold and they switched to sculptures by a less, um, desirable, sculptor (who doesn't have an article: Anita Mandl). As for whether secondary sources are reliable when it comes to awards articles, don't get me started! Often the sources contradict each other if the award is announced one year and awarded the following year. In really bad cases, the organisation itself gets confused and 'misses' a year. Often the organisation will have a web page that moves around at random and or disappears as the website gets redesigned every year. Sometimes the organisation no longer exists and the reports of the awards in contemporary news sources (or rather science journals) are more reliable, or the only existing record. Unless some meta-gazetteer has picked up on them (such as Winners, the blue ribbon encyclopedia of awards [1982]). With the J. Robert Oppenheimer Memorial Prize, that was awarded in an unbroken sequence from 1969 to 1984 and then stopped for some reason that doesn't seem to have been reported (they may have just decided to stop, or ran out of money, or something). The Michelson–Morley Award is puzzling. It was resurrected in 2002 after a ten year gap, awarded then and again in 2003, and then it stopped again. I suppose there is little incentive to report the details of why these things happen. Carcharoth (talk) 22:05, 31 July 2016 (UTC)

Wikipedia:The Core Contest is a good case study as to how these things happen! Johnbod (talk) 00:55, 1 August 2016 (UTC)

Deletion of {{Persondata}}

Hi Iridescent,

I'm the bot who is deleting {{Persondata}}. I noticed your edit on Bianca Gray in which you added {{Persondata}}. This template is deprecated and deleted. Please stop adding {{Persondata}}. In case you want to support the Persondata project you can help with the migration of the dataset to Wikidata at KasparBot's tool. See Wikipedia:Persondata or contact my operator T.seppelt in case you have any questions.

Thank you very much, -- KasparBot (talk) 01:01, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

I know it's not your fault, bot, but the fact that I'm the one who gets a warning for reverting vandalism, rather than the two human editors who edited it in the meantime apparently without noticing (or without caring) that the article read in full Bianca "Extra Cheese" Gray. Good friends with an asian girl that goes by the name of Phuong "No extra cheese i can't afford it" Le., embodies the reasons Wikipedia has a reputation for being unwelcome. How would a new editor feel if fixing this error had inspired them to create a Wikipedia account, and the first message they receive on joining was this? ‑ Iridescent 09:06, 24 July 2016 (UTC)
Talking to bots again, are we? :-) I just spent too many minutes reading the DRV of an AfD you closed recently. Who would have thought that would generate so much heat? Carcharoth (talk) 15:50, 26 July 2016 (UTC)
Would it be the DRV about which I'm being ranted at here, by any chance? That's a genuinely weird one; as I point out above, it was obvious before it even opened what the result would be, but everyone feels obliged to go through the motions nonetheless. It would probably make quite a good case study of Wikipedia's bureaucracy-for-bureaucracy's-sake. ‑ Iridescent 16:05, 26 July 2016 (UTC)
Have now got distracted by Wikipedia:Supervote... Carcharoth (talk) 17:49, 26 July 2016 (UTC)
I thought everyone knew that "supervote" is defined as "closing a discussion with any result other than the one I wanted"? (Was it Kelly Martin who said that whenever you hear someone claim "admin abuse", you can be sure they're abusing an admin?) This incident has prompted me to read closely, for the first time in a long time, the ludicrous WP:Arguments to avoid in deletion discussions. I'm sure I've read a more self-important and misguided crock of nonsense somewhere, but I can't think where. ‑ Iridescent 18:01, 26 July 2016 (UTC)
That essay has 62(!) section headings. That must be some sort of record. Carcharoth (talk) 18:14, 26 July 2016 (UTC)
Take it you've not read Wikipedia:Manual of Style—currently 165 section headings on the first page alone, not to mention the 70-odd separate subpages covering such weighty matters as Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Road junction lists, Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Stringed instrument tunings and Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Snooker. I'm sure if you printed the whole thing out, it would actually be longer than the Chicago Manual of Style. ‑ Iridescent 21:14, 27 July 2016 (UTC)
I generally avoid the MOS like the plague. Only in death does duty end (talk) 21:16, 27 July 2016 (UTC)
It's worth paying attention to, if only to explain why you're choosing to ignore it, but I find that even at FA level, there's no real reason to comply with most of it provided you can justify not doing so should anyone ask. It's well beyond the size that anyone could reasonably be expected to read it—I get the feeling its main use nowadays is as a heatsink for the obsessives to have their arguments and thus keep them away from the rest of us (c.f. Wikidata, Arbitration Enforcement, Wikiversity). ‑ Iridescent 21:22, 27 July 2016 (UTC)
Talking of the MOS, I noticed a recent edit where someone changed USA to United States "per MOS:NOTUSA". So I went and read that. Am now trying to find out if there was a long bitter discussion about that, or whether someone just changed it following a short discussion somewhere. At some point, I adopted a 'personal' style of writing "US" (as an adjective) instead of "American" (as American is too vague) and "USA", and I almost never use "United States", because a little voice in my head instinctively asks "United States of what?". Ah well, I suppose there is a good reason for having a little rule like that in the MOS... Oh dear, the discussion starts back in archive 1, has its own subpage from 2003 and another one from 2006, and a massively detailed quote-laden discussion last year, that is not a good sign... Carcharoth (talk) 05:24, 2 August 2016 (UTC)
Without even looking, I can predict every name that will be in that thread. Life's too short to spend any of it talking with the MOS obsessives or the hyphenation brigade; just write as you see fit, and let the bots fight it out among themselves over the formatting. ‑ Iridescent 13:23, 2 August 2016 (UTC)

Richhill A.F.C.

You deleted Richhill A.F.C. without consulting me as the creator. This club meets the notability requirements at WP:FOOTY by virtue of playing in the national cup competition of Northern Ireland. Are you able to restore the article? Thanks. Mooretwin (talk) 14:37, 3 August 2016 (UTC)

I see you have restored it. Many thanks. Mooretwin (talk) 14:52, 3 August 2016 (UTC)
I've just noticed that A.F.C. Silverwood was also deleted - same case applies as above re notability requirements. Grateful if you could also restore that one. Mooretwin (talk) 14:55, 3 August 2016 (UTC)
I've restored them procedurally as de facto contested prods, but note that there's no expectation that admins closing deletions should "consult with the creator" before deleting, nor is there any chance that such a proposal would be accepted—do you realise how many deletions take place on Wikipedia each day? (For what it's worth, I for once agree with User:SwisterTwister here that both should be deleted and that neither will survive a deletion discussion in their current state; the only cited fact on the articles is the fact that the clubs exist. Wikipedia:WikiProject Football/Notability is a personal essay, not any kind of policy, and much as some of their members may wish otherwise WP:FOOTY does not have and never has had the power to overrule Wikipedia's fundamental requirements on sourcing and verifiability. Wikipedia's actual guidance on the notability of sports teams is "A team is notable if it has been the subject of significant coverage in secondary sources. Such sources must be reliable, and independent of the subject. A single independent source is almost never sufficient for demonstrating the notability of an organization.") ‑ Iridescent 15:01, 3 August 2016 (UTC)

ANI

Please either close the discussion or block someone (or both). History is pretty clear its just going to go on and on and devolve into more arguing over content. If I hatted everything in that thread that was about content, it would be a fifth the length.... I have hatted the racism offtopic because a)it is, b)its ridiculous to claim nationality/ethnicity based attacks are not racism when almost every definition of it (as well as a number of laws in most western countries) says it is. I dont particularly want you to get dragged into an argument with someone over it and derail the thread even more. Only in death does duty end (talk) 15:13, 3 August 2016 (UTC)

I've commented in the thread, so I can't close it, and it would probably be inappropriate for me to block those involved given that I'm one of the targets of Mathsci's insinuations so am WP:INVOLVED if it comes to blocking him, and the only realistic closure options are "block Mathsci", "block both of them", or "topic ban them both given that the article in question is heavily-edited and will get on perfectly well without either of them". WP:ANI#User Mathsci and all the things, should any uninvolved TPW feel the urge to have someone shout at them for the next week for not closing it with the result they wanted. ‑ Iridescent 15:25, 3 August 2016 (UTC)
On a related note, the thread at WPO contains nothing of interest. Mainly griping by one of his old enemies. Its not 'hidden' in the sense of 'super secret' its just in an non-google-bot crawlable subforum where the dirty laundry goes. You should join, I suspect you would probably be welcomed. Only in death does duty end (talk) 15:55, 3 August 2016 (UTC)
Has any thread at WPO ever contained anything of interest? I may be being deeply unfair, but the distinct impression I get is that the terms of the divorce settlement were that WR got the semicoherent lunatics who wanted to write thousand-word essays about their crank theories, while WPO got the bar-room bores who've compiled a bulleted list of every time anyone on Wikipedia said something with which they disagreed and would like to discuss this list with anyone in earshot. The old WR may have been infested with weirdos, but beneath the veneer of crazies there was genuine thoughtfulness and a willingness to engage between both the "Wikipedia is irredeemable and must be destroyed" and the "Wikipedia is fixable, we just need to find out how to fix it" factions; the impression I get from my (admittedly limited) skims of WPO is that it's just a bunch of people whining about whoever the last person with whom they happened to have an argument happens to be. ‑ Iridescent 16:07, 3 August 2016 (UTC)
It varies. The technical discussions are very useful as WPO has quite a few technically qualified (as opposed to merely experienced) users. So the breakdown threads of the WMF's various abortions of 'upgrades' are often illuminating. Over time the 'whining about whoever last argument' people do get weeded out. WPO tolerates a higher amount of what would be considered "Personal attacks" but it does not really tolerate completely disruptive people for very long. There is a correlation between editors banned from wikipedia for being disruptive who end up banned from WPO, and editors banned from wikipedia for policy violation (paid editing for example). The former tend to annoy people at WPO as much as they do here with a similar outcome, the latter not so much. As a consequence however it also allows much greater scrutiny of problematic editors (see Qworty etc) than Wikipedia policy generally allows for (or rather, restricts to arbcom). This could be a good or bad thing depending on your opinion. Only in death does duty end (talk) 16:18, 3 August 2016 (UTC)
The volume of contributions, and their level of interest and utility, seems to have been in decline for a long time, with a steeper decline over the last year or so. Johnbod (talk) 17:19, 3 August 2016 (UTC)
In fairness, the same could probably be said of Wikipedia. Presumably WPO suffers from the same problem as Wikipedia, of being dominated by an old guard, but WPO doesn't have the lebensraum of Wikipedia. On WP, if you get fed up with a particular area you can generally find something else to do; on WPO, presumably if you lose interest in hearing the fascinating "I was banned from a conference I didn't intend to go to anyway!" anecdote for the hundredth time*, there's nowhere else to go but out. ‑ Iridescent 18:42, 3 August 2016 (UTC)

*At least, I assume this has been posted at least a hundred times. Certainly, whenever I've looked at WPO some variant on it always seems to be in at least one of the three most recent threads.

I have no account on wikipediocracy

I have no account on wikipediocracy and have never given that impression. I am banned from there, as far as I remember since 2012. You have jumped to untrue conclusions possibly by reading things too fast. Please read this User talk:Stanistani#Request. There I posted a request to Stanistani, the admin on WPO, that a thread about me be made private. You seem to have got the wrong end of the stick. I have also made a request to arbitrators about Only in death's edits. He wrote a false statement about me on WP:ANI. Incidentally I have prepared my diffs and am waiting your response at WP:ANI. They are in an unsaved section on my user talk page where I chose to gather them. They are just a raw list of diffs with dates from the talk page of the article. Thanks in advance, Mathsci (talk) 18:21, 3 August 2016 (UTC)

Go away and play whatever game you're playing with someone else; as I've already said, I am not willing to engage with you. If you have any accusations to make about me or anyone else, I'm sure you know how to find Arbcom by now. ‑ Iridescent 18:25, 3 August 2016 (UTC)
What game are you talking about? I am banned from wikipediocracy, yet you wrote the contrary. What game are you talking about? And here are the raw diffs which I started preparing last night.
Please stop acting in such bad faith. Thanks, Mathsci (talk) 18:32, 3 August 2016 (UTC)
You can also have the full annotated list of 67 diffs if you want. Thanks, Mathsci (talk) 18:36, 3 August 2016 (UTC)
And yes the request for oversight was made by email to Casliber. Nothing to do with you or your comments. Please, please, please assume good faith. Thanks, Mathsci (talk) 18:46, 3 August 2016 (UTC)

Do you really want to do this?

  1. [29] is TJW owing up to checking the wrong source;
  2. [30], [31], [32] are a correct summary of Wikipedia policy;
  3. [33] is TJW agreeing with you;
  4. [34] and [35] are TJW (correctly) pointing out that your attitude towards people with whom you disagree is itself inappropriate;
  5. [36] and [37] are TJW correctly removing a copyright violation, while [38] is TJW explaining why you can't post copyright violations on Wikipedia;
  6. [39] is a (correct) conduct warning, given that you'd already committed a blockable offense and edit-warred to keep it in, and [40] is his explaining why;
  7. [41] is you inserting yet another copyvio (for the record, this is the point at which I'd have indefblocked you had I had the page on my watchlist);
  8. I don't know what on earth you're claiming is problematic about [42] or [43];
  9. [44] is a (correct) statement of Wikipedia policy on the use of primary sources;
  10. [45] is a refutation of the (bizarre and incorrect) claim that video cannot be considered a reliable source;
  11. [46] is a (correct) explanation of what the MOS says about linking within quotations;
  12. [47] and [48] are a request for a second opinion and subsequent discussion on whether "complicité" should actually be translated as "complicity" (which has a specific legal meaning in English);
  13. [49] and [50] and [51] are TJW reverting obvious personal attacks from you (this is the second point at which I'd have indefblocked you had I been watching the page);
  14. [52] is snappy, but by this point it would try the patience of a saint to be dealing with you, and in light of all that went before I'd consider "ownership issues" a statement of fact, not an attack.
If this is the best dirt you can dig up, I strongly suggest you issue Timothyjosephwood a grovelling apology. I can say with near-certainty that if this winds up at Arbcom and the above is the best evidence you have, the only discussion will be whether your lifetime ban from Wikipedia will have the possibility of appeal a couple of years down the line. (And I have no idea what you mean about oversight.)

If you do want to discuss this further, please do so somewhere else. ‑ Iridescent 19:11, 3 August 2016 (UTC)

p

Hi. I see no optimal difference between the two versions. Do you? -- Magioladitis (talk) 11:31, 9 August 2016 (UTC)

Yes; with the forced paragraph break in place it reproduces the intentionally unusual formatting of the initial article, in which "It was fitting enough that the largest city in the world…" stands alone as a fragment. Without the html tag the paragraphs run-on.
Additionally, you've had more than enough warnings over the years to the effect that you and your vandalbot using AWB to make edits which have no noticeable effect on the rendered page is considered disruption. (I think Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Archive279#Magioladitis is the most recent installment of the saga, but there may have been subsequent ones.) If I see you make any more edits like this, I'm re-indef-blocking you. ‑ Iridescent 11:42, 9 August 2016 (UTC)

In your revert you did not bother to explain. This could be helpful next time. I had to guess the problem was with the p tag. -- Magioladitis (talk) 11:51, 9 August 2016 (UTC)

@Frietjes: to check whether the p tag is needed there. -- Magioladitis (talk) 13:54, 9 August 2016 (UTC)

A very few years ago, the idea of founding a cemetery for the metropolis which should be more than 20 miles distant from it would have been looked upon as an absurdity. Yesterday, however, saw the practical embodiment of this idea … A short distance beyond the Woking station, the country, without varying from its general character of sterility and hardness of outline, becomes gently undulating and offers features which, with some assistance from art, might be made more than pleasing. Here is the London Necropolis, which certainly throws into the shade any previous attempts at extramural interments. It was fitting enough that the largest city in the world should have, as it will now have, the largest cemetery in the world.

— The Times, 8 November 1854

A very few years ago, the idea of founding a cemetery for the metropolis which should be more than 20 miles distant from it would have been looked upon as an absurdity. Yesterday, however, saw the practical embodiment of this idea … A short distance beyond the Woking station, the country, without varying from its general character of sterility and hardness of outline, becomes gently undulating and offers features which, with some assistance from art, might be made more than pleasing. Here is the London Necropolis, which certainly throws into the shade any previous attempts at extramural interments.

It was fitting enough that the largest city in the world should have, as it will now have, the largest cemetery in the world.

— The Times, 8 November 1854

A very few years ago, the idea of founding a cemetery for the metropolis which should be more than 20 miles distant from it would have been looked upon as an absurdity. Yesterday, however, saw the practical embodiment of this idea … A short distance beyond the Woking station, the country, without varying from its general character of sterility and hardness of outline, becomes gently undulating and offers features which, with some assistance from art, might be made more than pleasing. Here is the London Necropolis, which certainly throws into the shade any previous attempts at extramural interments.

It was fitting enough that the largest city in the world should have, as it will now have, the largest cemetery in the world.

— The Times, 8 November 1854

Magioladitis, compare the format of the three versions above. the line break in the middle only works if there is a line break at the top. don't ask me why. Frietjes (talk) 14:01, 9 August 2016 (UTC)

Frietjes Thanks for investigating. In contrary to what is written above, AWB does not remove this p tag. I removed it manually. -- Magioladitis (talk) 14:17, 9 August 2016 (UTC)

I didn't accuse you of using AWB to remove the <p> tags, I accused you of continuing to use AWB to make bulk edits which have no effect on page rendering and thus breaching both Wikipedia's rules and your own unblock conditions. It's not in dispute that you're doing this systematically and there's no reasonable possibility that these are one-off occasional slips; [53], [54], [55], [56], [57], [58], [59], [60], [61] just in the last few minutes. Please stop doing this; given the number of times you've been warned about this and previously blocked for it, if it winds up at ANI it's virtually certain to result in either an indef block or a timesink of an arbcom case which results in at best a desysopping and at worst a community ban, and that doesn't benefit anyone. "Do not make insignificant or inconsequential edits. An edit that has no noticeable effect on the rendered page is generally considered an insignificant edit.", in the unlikely event you're unaware of the rule you're ignoring. ‑ Iridescent 14:54, 10 August 2016 (UTC)

Wikidata woes

I feel a rant coming on. Do you have time to look at this? Am I right that you and others on this talk page have talked about Wikidata before? Carcharoth (talk) 21:32, 6 August 2016 (UTC)

I assume you're thinking of this thread. In my experience RexxS is the only person who fits into the intersection of "people who understand Wikidata" and "people who aren't crazy". My attitude towards the relationship between en-Wikipedia and Wikidata (and Commons, come to that) is rather like Nigel Farage's attitude towards Britain's relationship with the rest of the world: I can grudgingly be persuaded that it has some benefits, but I think that any benefits the link brings are massively outweighed by the problems it causes, and that on the whole we'd be better off if we at the very least severed all links with it, and preferably destroyed it altogether and brought parts of it which are deemed worth saving back in-house. Per this discussion I can see an argument for using Wikidata to populate the small wikis with consistent data so each topic has at least some kind of minimal entry (although I'm not convinced a zillion bot-generated stubs are actually better than redlinks), but I've yet to see any discernable benefit for the four big wikipedias; my general impression is that Wikidata's main function is as a replacement for Commons and Wikiversity as en-wikipedia's dumping ground for problem we don't want to lose altogether but are too ornery to survive on Wikipedia itself without being blocked. (You were on Arbcom long enough to know what the subtext of "demonstrate six months of good work on a sister project" was.) ‑ Iridescent 18:55, 7 August 2016 (UTC)
By sheer coincidence (it's a small world wiki), I just responded to Carcharoth's questions at Wikipedia talk:Wikidata #Is this not a form of machine writing? with an example of how Robin Owain is leveraging Wikidata to grow the Welsh Wikipedia.
However, that's not the problem that Carcharoth is referring to in the CS1 discussion. Normally, I'd agree that using Wikidata in infoboxes can cause a problem when an editor can't see where the information came from. As an imaginary example, if you know that the number of test wickets that James Anderson (cricketer) has taken is wrong, or out of date, you may now have to go to Wikidata to correct the value, rather than correcting |wickets1=462 directly in the infobox. That would require a change in mind-set for editing, and I can see how folks may prefer not to do that.
Sometimes, though, Wikidata actually makes life easier. The edit that has Carcharoth worried is one that changes |source={{cwgc cemetery|142000}} to |source={{cwgc cemetery}}. What that is doing is using Wikidata to look up the CWGC burial ground ID for the article where it appears. That's what the '142000' actually is, and I don't see its value as particularly intuitive - it just shows up eventually in the source url. What have we lost by removing it from the article? Originally, somebody had to look up each burial ground ID and add it into the {{cwgc cemetery}} template for each article where {{cwgc cemetery}} is used. To me it looks like a saving of labour, particularly if all the Wikipedias used by Commonwealth countries will now share the burden of writing the burial ground ID into Wikidata. What am I missing? --RexxS (talk) 21:10, 7 August 2016 (UTC)
Just speaking generally, it seems that obfuscating the source of Wikipedia pages by placing transcluded data into WIkidata is going to be a struggle for several years. It necessitates that keen editors not only understand how to edit Wikipedia, but suddenly Wikidata which is a world apart. I can see, in an ideal world, that having one source of truth for all the myriad WMF projects is a utopian goal, but I can also see that it will be years before it can be fully adopted and understood. Plus ca change. The Rambling Man (talk) 21:18, 7 August 2016 (UTC)
(edit conflict) That if it changes for whatever reason, we've now effectively blocked the casual editors (who are still the backbone of Wikipedia, much as the self-appointed power users like to act otherwise) from fixing it. I'm a long-term admin and former arb with 40 FAs and over 200,000 edits and even I have only a vague understanding of how to edit Wikidata and how Wikidata edits reflect back into Wikipedia; it's not remotely realistic to expect a casual editor with a keen interest in cemeteries to learn Wikidata's awesomely counter-intuitive interface to make a single batch of edits, so the net result will be that it's less likely anything will be fixed.

The sensible thing in my view, would be to combine Wikidata and en-wikipedia, and have the data fields as a big glob of hidden text at the bottom of every en-wiki page, and the other language projects referencing the data on the corresponding en-wiki page, rather than a completely stand-alone database; ditto for images and do away with the Commons cesspit. Yes, it's English-language chauvinism, but it's a simple fact that en-wikipedia does have more editors than every other language combined; however much the WMF may like to make earnest speeches about globalism, the WMF is effectively en-wikipedia plus 300 relatively minor spin-off projects. ‑ Iridescent 21:26, 7 August 2016 (UTC)

Now discovered that Wikidata contains "nicknames" of individuals which don't have to be referenced to be hosted by Wikidata yet are happily transcluded into Wikipedia articles. I'm not sure how this has all been allowed to happen in such a slapdash way, can anyone point me to the right place to discuss this kind of omnishambles? The Rambling Man (talk) 21:27, 7 August 2016 (UTC)
Apart from some tightly self-controlled areas (such as medical), info on wikidata is not required or checked to be reliably sourced. Even then with a well-curated area of data (medical) the discussion Iridescent linked above pointed out the problem (by problem, I mean, complete circular un-referencing) I had with an example that was held up to be wikidata & templates working well. Now realise what happens when its working - shitly. Yes I know that is not a word. Only in death does duty end (talk) 21:33, 7 August 2016 (UTC)
Aye, Wikidata tends to have shoddy sourcing. I've sometimes tried to add proper sources in Wikidata items that link to articles I work on, but for the most part not. Maybe Wikidata's average sourcing will improve once the data grows to the point that content disputes need to be solved. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 22:30, 7 August 2016 (UTC)
Do any stats exist on how active Wikidata actually is, and whether it's reached that critical mass where The Wisdom Of Crowds theoretically kicks in to correct the worst errors through random patrolling? The official stats show it with a respectable editor base of around 1000, but I strongly suspect that figure is skewed by the fact that many admin actions on other WMF projects get counted as Wikidata edits even if the admin in question has never touched Wikidata (multiply that by all the admins on all the Wikipedias and I imagine quite a few of those "active editors" are phantoms). ‑ Iridescent 22:44, 7 August 2016 (UTC)

Scarily (or maybe it is a good thing) I feel myself getting hooked on Wikidata... My previous contributions were 9 interwiki links. Since then, I did this and this, and am now playing with the query options on the talk page of various properties. Not that I even knew the query options were there until I clicked on the talk page and tried to understand what was being shown here. I think by clicking query and expanding the limit, I discovered there were 16 items on Wikidata with that property. Early days yet. Now, if I click on the query option here, there are 173 entries. Oops, one more entry and one more edit: [62]. Easy once you know how, but you wouldn't believe how long it took me to find the right 'edit' button on the screen (no edit tab at the top, which makes sense once you know why, but confusing at first). Maybe it is possible to teach old dogs new tricks?Carcharoth (talk) 16:17, 8 August 2016 (UTC)

You certainly can - at least if this old dino is anything to go by. Andy led a very good session at the wmuk:2016 AGM on Wikidata and how to edit there. There are quite a few useful tools - like drag-and-drop references - available once you start to get the hang of it. Check your Wikidata Preferences (Gadget tab) for a list of them. --RexxS (talk) 20:07, 8 August 2016 (UTC)
Wikidata could probably do with some kind of Wikidata for Dummies guide on Wikipedia to explain what its function is and what its point is. Wikipedia:Wikidata, which is presumably intended to serve this purpose, reads to me like a cross between someone trying to explain a particularly boring dream, and a badly translated technical manual circa 1985. If I can't understand it I'm reasonably certain most of those outside the inner circle aren't going to either, as I'm more familiar than most both with the underlying structure of Wikipedia, and with the design and use of massively multiuser data systems. (I recall Eric Corbett, who's a genuine expert on computing, saying something similar at one point.) I do feel that a lot of the reason Wikidata has acquired its reputation as a creepy entryist cult of nerds trying to hijack Wikipedia is that people by and large can't see its point and resent what can sometimes look like a "do it our way, it must be better because we say it is" mentality.
After Mediaviewer, Liquid Threads, Visual Editor, Vector, Flow, List-defined references, Typography refresh and all the other half-baked ideas from the period when Brandon Harris treated en-wikipedia as his personal sandbox, editors are understandably very wary of any new initiative trumpeted by the WMF as "we've fixed a problem you didn't know you had, and if you don't agree that this is an improvement then tough". The general attitude the Wikidata hardcore take does give the impression that they see their role as hijackers forcing the various Wikipedias to divert to a new destination to which nobody else wanted to go, rather than as people who've developed a new tool and need to convince people that it's worthwhile putting in the effort. If people like myself and Carcharoth, who ought to be among Wikidata's most enthusiastic cheerleaders, can't even understand what its purpose is let alone understand how to edit it, it's not reasonable to expect the casual ten-edits-a-month editors on whom Wikipedia depends to understand why they should be expected to learn a completely new and unfamiliar system just to get an infobox to display correctly. ‑ Iridescent 03:34, 9 August 2016 (UTC)

Eh, I like Wikidata now. You should try it... :-) In other news, User:AlexNewArtBot/WWISearchResult is working better than I had hoped. It picked up my creation of Doiran Memorial and a run of creation of US generals, and United States World War I Centennial Commission and Victory Medal (Romania) and some WWI-era songs and the rather marvellous Mines on the Italian Front (World War I). Of course, the creators of these article will now be alerted to this, or maybe not? Does link notification only work from article space? Carcharoth (talk) 16:50, 10 August 2016 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure link notification only works when the link is between articles, as (before I switched Echo off) I didn't get notifications when the Signpost mentioned articles I'd written. (Still not convinced about Wikidata. I get that it makes it easier to change a value across multiple languages, but the simple fact is that most articles don't exist in large numbers of languages, and unless the subject is a footballer, town etc where the data is going to change regularly, "it makes it possible to update data across multiple articles every time it changes" is the solution to a non-existent problem.) ‑ Iridescent 16:58, 10 August 2016 (UTC)
It is the interface I like. Very easy to add discrete bits of information. Bit like adding categories using HotCat. Maybe somewhere in gadgets or preferences, there is already a way to do that here in infoboxes, but being able to add discrete properties is nice. There are moments, though, when you feel like you are copying information from one database to another, and remember that this is what computers were invented for (I know, it is setting up and making the connections between data that is the difficult bit). Carcharoth (talk) 17:13, 10 August 2016 (UTC)

Referencing on Wikidata

@The Rambling Man: The referencing on Wikidata isn't up to the standard most Wikipedians would desire. I've been trying to find ways of meeting the requests for ways to filter out data that is insufficiently referenced. To that end, I've made a tool that you can paste and preview in any section of an article, which will show all of the information Wikidata has on that article and whether it is referenced. Try previewing 

 {{#invoke:Sandbox/RexxS/WdRefs|seeRefs}}

in your favourite article. You may be disappointed by the number of "NO REFS" and "Ref = English Wikipedia" that you'll see.

I've been making a series of functions in a Lua module that will only import data if it has a reference that doesn't contain the word "Wikipedia". To take an example, Richard Burton (Q151973) has four occupations listed on Wikidata: film actor; actor; diarist; and stage actor. However only one of those has an independent reference. Instead of

we can have an infobox field that has

  • Script error: The function "getSourcedValue" does not exist.

Each entry has an 'edit-icon' link (as used on mobile view) that takes you directly to the Wikidata section you need to edit to change the value. I know that's not much help if you don't know how to edit Wikidata; and we'll have a lot of empty fields until editors get into the habit of adding references to Wikidata entries, but I think it represents a start. --RexxS (talk) 00:14, 8 August 2016 (UTC)

A couple of things strike me about the result: would you ever really need a reference for something like 'Commons category'? The same may apply for 'image', at least to some extent. Nev1 (talk) 11:51, 8 August 2016 (UTC)
For 'image', the file description on the image file ought to itself be the reference, since any image which doesn't include "what is this a picture of and where did you get it?" has no business existing. Thus, clicking on the image is its own citation. That was one of the objections when the devs tried to use superprotection to force everyone to view images in MediaViewer, as the original implementation of MV didn't have the source data visible to the viewer. ‑ Iridescent 15:15, 8 August 2016 (UTC)
There are a lot of properties on Wikidata that probably don't fall into the class of "material whose verifiability has been challenged or is likely to be challenged", such as Richard Burton's VIAF ID (P214), or the statement that he is an instance of human being. I would even suggest that nobody is likely to challenge his gender as male. But I do think we should have decent references for facts like his native language (Welsh) and place of birth (Pontrhydyfen). Incidentally, Wikidata used to state his birthplace as "Wales", which lead to the nonsense of one of my test templates showing the coordinates of his place of birth as 52°20′58.56″N 3°38′16.26″W / 52.3496000°N 3.6378500°W / 52.3496000; -3.6378500 (Wikidata's coordinate location (P625) for Wales (Q25)), a small stream just off the B4518. --RexxS (talk) 15:51, 8 August 2016 (UTC)
The "ridiculously over-precise coordinates for a large geographical entity" problem has long-predated Wikidata. It's particularly silly when the coordinates are to a road or river but we try to provide a single set of coordinates—the coordinates for River Parrett are currently out in the Atlantic.
I just tried the {{#invoke:Sandbox/RexxS/WdRefs|seeRefs}} on William Etty, as a topic on which I've recently been writing a lot and thus am familiar with what the references ought to look like. Given the number of instances of "NO REFS" and "Ref = Wikipedia", I'm not sure it's a great advert for Wikidata. If the referencing is this shoddy on a very-heavily-referenced article (258 references) which is a FA on en-wiki and a more-than-stub article on 17 other Wikipedias, I can only imagine how sorry the referencing is going to be on more obscure and less easily-checkable topics. ‑ Iridescent 03:34, 9 August 2016 (UTC)

"If only there were some place you could look unfamiliar words up...)"

Re your recent comment on a Tottenham Hale edit- I use this place.http://afterliff.com/ --Davidvaughanwells (talk) 22:24, 9 August 2016 (UTC)

You'll generally get more sense there than at the official right answer of "Wiktionary", which generally seems to have stolen the Guide's "we are infallible, reality is frequently inaccurate" motto. We're currently up to 7 years 4 months of them claiming that targetting is a word, despite this being one of the rare instances where British, US, Canadian, Indian and Aussie dictionaries are unanimous in agreeing that it isn't, and them not even having the old "but it's an misspelling in common usage so needs to be listed as a variant" excuse to fall back on. (I do struggle to understand how anyone, even if they've never heard the word before, could possibly not figure out that "gateline" means "line of gates".) ‑ Iridescent 14:20, 10 August 2016 (UTC)
Those same people would likely think that "clothesline" meant a line of clothes, rather than the obvious answers of a piece of rope or a fake wrestling move. --RexxS (talk) 17:35, 10 August 2016 (UTC)
Fair enough, but given that the context in this case was "The national rail gateline now has automatic barriers installed" I'd hope that even the densest reader would be able to figure out that we're talking about "the line of gates where your ticket gets checked as you go in or out of the station". ‑ Iridescent 17:41, 10 August 2016 (UTC)

User:Funcrunch/Protect userspace RfC draft

Hi. I tripped across User:Funcrunch/Protect userspace RfC draft earlier today. In addition to the points I made on the talk page, there's also the matter of IP addresses being a lot more informative, revealing, and useful than user names in most cases, for better or worse.

Sigh. It's not as though this will affect me (I choose to log in, after all) and it's not as though user pages are particularly important, but it's still sad to see misdirected attacks on free and open editing here. --MZMcBride (talk) 05:23, 12 August 2016 (UTC)

Logging in does make it easier to track a given user; for instance, it would make it harder for me to calculate that this person who's presuming to tell Wikipedia how we've been doing everything wrong all these years, averages eight article edits a month.
I very much doubt that this proposal will succeed—it reeks of "solution to a non-existent problem". It looks like a couple of IPs (one registered to Oxford University, no less) dared to make a rude comment on Funcrunch's userpage, and this is now an exaggerated backlash. I can't imagine it will go anywhere; even if one disregards the ethical arguments about how protection conflicts with open editing and should only be imposed when there's a demonstrable case for it, there are glaringly obvious practical issues if we create a mechanism by which we make it harder for people to remove libel, spam, attacks and copyright violations. (I wouldn't be surprised if, even in the unlikely event that "support" somehow manages to get a majority, the devs refused to implement it; they all by-and-large are steeped in a culture where both meanings of "the free encyclopedia" still actually mean something.) ‑ Iridescent 16:06, 12 August 2016 (UTC)
At least they aren't proposing a "only admins and the userspace owner can edit it" protection - I remember a year ago that whenever I randomly sampled newly created userspace pages for copyvio, a few of them did indeed contain content copied from other non-free websites. Extrapolating from these limited samples userspace may well be full of such issues. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 16:35, 12 August 2016 (UTC)
Indeed, and quite a few others contain outright spam. I really don't get the point of this proposal; by the nature of my history here I have literally hundreds of userpages on my watchlist, including most of the people who've been the targets of genuine on-wiki harassment rather than juvenile "your photo looks dumb" stuff, and I've never noticed "people editing userpages without permission" to be a particular issue. In those cases where it is an issue, protecting on a case-by-case basis works fine. ‑ Iridescent 16:42, 12 August 2016 (UTC)
(adding) BTW, Semi-protection should not be used as a preemptive measure against vandalism that has not yet occurred, nor should it be used to privilege registered users over unregistered users in (valid) content disputes, is a formal Wikipedia policy, not a vague guideline. (I note that Funcrunch is removing any opposing comment from the talkpage of the RFC, let alone the RFC itself. I do not foresee this ending well.) ‑ Iridescent 21:21, 12 August 2016 (UTC)
Yes, I did ask for some indication that harassment via userspace edits was an issue and was unceremoniously reverted. Given User:Khaleej Contact/sandbox I also wonder how many (for non-admin stalkers, promotional page tagged for G11 by an IP) good faith edits would be disallowed. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 21:44, 12 August 2016 (UTC)
I wouldn't lose sleep over this; even in the vanishingly-unlikely event that the RFC isn't snow-closed ten minutes after going live, the WMF would surely veto it. User:Jimbo Wales#You can edit this page! is just as much Wikipedia's symbolic face to the outside world as the jigsaw-death-star and the stubbornly retro main page. ‑ Iridescent 21:53, 12 August 2016 (UTC)
I wouldn't actually be surprised if this ended up passing. I see it very much as demonization of IP users as a class. It reminds me of a few points from Observations on Wikipedia behavior, of course. Nothing new, exactly. In poking at this Funcrunch subpage, I came across pages such as m:Grants:IdeaLab/Severe punishments for harassers and m:Grants:IdeaLab/Force people to log in when they edit and m:Grants:IdeaLab/Protect user space by default. I think the values and principles of the Wikimedia movement might be irreconcilably incompatible with those of some of these editors. From skimming these pages, you can see the outlines of a vocal contingent convinced that kicking out certain people will save the wikis. Build a wall, eh. However, in my experience, a vocal enough contingent, particularly if dedicated to a single cause, can influence policies and practices in any community.
I'm bemused by the dark irony of a group of people dedicated to social justice and LGBT rights and whatnot engaging in, perhaps even emulating, the same kinds of behavior and rhetoric toward "foreigners" (read: IP users) that we see outside of Wikipedia in the news. Bleh.
The people developing MediaWiki do so for both Wikimedia and non-Wikimedia installations. There are an ungodly number of configuration variables these days, so even if a feature is anti-wiki or antithetical to Wikimedia's values, it can make its way into the core code base behind a feature flag. For better or worse, the large number of disputes over software development and configuration in years past (MediaViewer, superprotection, FlaggedRevs, LiquidThreads, Flow, Gather, etc.) have likely given an edge to the local communities in deciding matters like this. The old available means of combating proposals like this—pointing to pages such as m:Founding principles and wmf:Values and letting the Bugzilla bug rot without response—may be gone. --MZMcBride (talk) 22:03, 12 August 2016 (UTC)
Have you discovered the Systemic Bias Kit yet?
I'll be very surprised if it passes. The only way it could realistically do so would be if the hardline Friendly Spacers managed to canvass enough support to railroad it through over the wishes of the community, and that's not realistically going to happen; since even SV's userpage (the ground zero of userpage harassment) isn't even semiprotected, nobody other than the usual Bay Area suspects is going to believe that userspace harassment is anything more than a vague nuisance at most. Anyone wanting to run a genuine harassment campaign is doing it on ED or Twitter, not adding "I am ugly lol" to people's autobiographies on Wikipedia.
At some point, someone should probably go through the list of indefinitely protected userpages, send every one of them an "if you still want this to remain protected, please explain why" note, and do a bulk unprotect. I find it deeply unlikely that keeping User:71.156.44.57 full-protected for ten years is serving any useful purpose. ‑ Iridescent 22:25, 12 August 2016 (UTC)
(adding) Just followed some of those links. Good grief; how can someone miss the point of Wikipedia that badly and not already be blocked as WP:NOTHERE?
Yeah, I cringed quite a bit reading some of those comments.
Regarding the friendly spacers, the battleground behavior is tiring for me. It's not as though there's a faction of people wanting to make the place unfriendly. It's silly. That said, when Wikipedians try to be welcoming and friendly, we end up with this: Template:Welcome to Wikipedia.
It's funny that you mention old page protections. Meta-Wiki has an inane activity policy to keep adminship there, so for the current six-month period, my ten actions were unprotecting pages: m:Special:Log/protect/MZMcBride. :-) My small spree included unprotecting m:Don't be a jerk, retitled since it's no longer acceptable to say dick. --MZMcBride (talk) 05:21, 13 August 2016 (UTC)
since it's no longer acceptable to say dick. Funny that. TV Tropes (the website I hail from) is OK with saying "don't be a dick" and we have a much more draconian civility policy than Wikipedia. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 08:14, 13 August 2016 (UTC)
The reason for that change is a long, boring journey into wiki-archaeology. One editor made himself a bunch of enemies in high places who were looking for an excuse to ban him; when he described someone as "a dishonest cunt", they thought they had their pretext. It was pointed out that it was inconsistent to treat the use of slang for female genitalia as a blockable offence, while the use of slang for male genitalia was written into Wikipedia's basic statement of principles; thus, the whole thing was retitled. As an interesting exercise, count just how many of the "good faith editors" who took part in that RFC have subsequently been banned from Wikipedia. ‑ Iridescent 09:50, 13 August 2016 (UTC)
Many of them in the same ArbCom case. Coincidentally, partly for fighting with that one editor seems like in a number of instances. My sense is that systemic bias and incivility are a problem here but that most proposed solutions and approaches have ... issues. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 17:24, 13 August 2016 (UTC)
WP:TWA Terminator Horse
To be fair, much as I occasionally mock it I don't actually have any problem with Template:Welcome to Wikipedia. It bundles together a bunch of links to useful things, without overwhelming the reader with WP:QKP/WP:KUL/WP:ZHFG gibberish. When I first started, I'd have found it useful. Likewise, much as I may (rightly) mock The Wikipedia Adventure's coffee-stain logo and their outright disturbing "welcoming" Horse Terminator avatar, I don't actually object to the principle of a teach-them-the-basics game rather than throwing well-intentioned newcomers into Wikipedia's weird markup and weirder social structure to sink or swim. If "play this mini-game to learn the basics before you start fighting" is good enough for Tomb Raider, it's good enough for us. ‑ Iridescent 23:58, 13 August 2016 (UTC)

How bizarre

I was just wandering through my watchlist, and I seemed to have edited your talkpage. I have absolutely no idea how it happened! Profuse apologies. I of course have reverted. Twilight zone. Simon. Irondome (talk) 21:22, 15 August 2016 (UTC)
No worries—it's very easy to slip on the rollback buttons, particularly if you have it set to show them in your watchlist. ‑ Iridescent 21:24, 15 August 2016 (UTC)

Arbcom case you might be interested in

I just filed an arbitration request against The Rambling Man, citing as evidence something that happened on your talk page. Hence, I'm notifying you. Link is here: [63]. Thanks, Banedon (talk) 05:25, 18 August 2016 (UTC)

Hi, here's another one of yours at TFA, I'm working on the TFA text now. Sorry, no donkeys in this one (yet). - Dank (push to talk) 14:43, 20 August 2016 (UTC)

FWIW, I don't have a position on this edit. - Dank (push to talk) 16:35, 20 August 2016 (UTC)
On the dates (30 November and 2 April), you make the call ... I'm generally getting rid of dates (but keeping the years) unless I want to draw the reader's attention to them (on anniversaries, for instance) or historians regard the dates as important. - Dank (push to talk) 18:20, 20 August 2016 (UTC)
I've no issue with the blurb, other than a couple of minor tweaks (although I fully expect it to get minimal page views; some topics just can't be made interesting). There's some discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject London Transport#10th anniversary approaching about running a London Transport article on 7 Sep to mark the project's 10th anniversary, so you may want to consider moving it forward by a couple of days. I personally see no point to this—no readers will be aware that WikiProject London Transport even exists, so nobody will realise the significance except the half-dozen people still involved in the near-moribund WP:LONDON and WP:LT. Plus I'm not sure Wotton is really representative of "London Transport"—it's nowhere near London, and only falls into the London Transport remit because it was briefly operated by London Underground for two years. (FWIW, it was a horse-drawn railway line, so I could probably work a donkey into it if I looked hard enough.)
I have no position on including the "featured topic" link if someone actually thinks it's useful. I personally see no point to including it—people who find this interesting will read the other articles regardless of whether it's a featured topic or not, and people who don't find it interesting won't care that there are more articles on the topic.
On dates, I'd be inclined to at least keep the months. Most readers will be aware that closed railways tend to have a very long half-life (Europe and North America are littered with disused railway lines), and to go from "end of service" to "fully asset-stripped and sold off" in five months is actually quite unusual. ‑ Iridescent 09:41, 21 August 2016 (UTC)
Enlightening as always, and I see your point about the months. - Dank (push to talk) 12:13, 21 August 2016 (UTC)
(adding) If there's space, it might make sense to say Richard Plantagenet Campbell Temple-Nugent-Brydges-Chandos-Grenville, 3rd Duke of Buckingham and Chandos in full, rather than just piping it to Duke of Buckingham. His name is so impressively goofy that it's quite eyecatching, and might draw in readers who normally wouldn't dream of reading an article on 19th-century milk transportation in the Aylesbury Vale. (In the absence of a free-use picture of the station—which wasn't much to look at, anyway—it might make more sense to use a picture of the Duke rather than the locomotive; unless you're a real hardcore enthusiast, all steam trains look pretty much alike.) ‑ Iridescent 12:16, 21 August 2016 (UTC)
Sorry, we don't have space, this one is already running a little long. Pinging Chris on the choice of image. - Dank (push to talk) 12:32, 21 August 2016 (UTC)
@TFA coordinators I've reworded the blurb slightly to remove "services north of Aylesbury", on the grounds that most readers have no idea where Aylesbury, Brill and Wotton are in relation to each other so this won't mean anything to them. This has the side-effect of bringing it down to 1078 characters; would you consider changing the opening sentence to Wotton railway station in Buckinghamshire, England, was part of a private horse-drawn tramway for freight built by Richard Plantagenet Campbell Temple-Nugent-Brydges-Chandos-Grenville, 3rd Duke of Buckingham and Chandos in 1871.? This would bring the blurb to 1154 characters, which is only just over the 1150 target, and I do feel that it would add a spot of colour to an inherently deeply boring topic, particularly for US readers who aren't used to the "Brigadier Sir Marmaduke Arbuthbott-Bumley-Smythe" naming conventions of the English hunting-shooting-fishing classes. ‑ Iridescent 09:53, 22 August 2016 (UTC)
It's not TFA style, but I have no objection, as long as you make the edit. - Dank (push to talk) 11:44, 22 August 2016 (UTC)
Thanks—done. It does occur to me that there's a lot of repetition of "the line", but I can't see a way to avoid it. Fixed that ‑ Iridescent 11:49, 22 August 2016 (UTC)

Favour

I need to admit a lack of knowledge of one of Wikipedia's basic features - archiving. I have added to archives before, but never set one up from scratch. I need to archive a talkpage for a BLP (Peter Wyngarde) I have been tidying up and not sure how to start. WP:Archive implies that cut and paste moving to an archive subpage is the main methord? Regards, Only in death does duty end (talk) 10:19, 22 August 2016 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) Only in death Easiest way is probably to add {{User:MiszaBot/config}} with appropriate parameters to the page in accordance with the instructions on User:Lowercase sigmabot III/Archive HowTo. It takes longer as the bot has to pass through, but it takes less work for the human and you don't need to do it repeatedly. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 10:29, 22 August 2016 (UTC)
Does that work ok with never-before archived pages? Only in death does duty end (talk) 10:31, 22 August 2016 (UTC)
(edit conflict) Depends how you want to go about it. If you're not expecting it to be archived very often, you can just cut-and-paste the comments into an archive page and add a link to the top of the existing page. To have the bot do it, add
{{User:MiszaBot/config
 |maxarchivesize = 200K
 |counter = 1
 |minthreadsleft = 5
 |algo = old(30d)
 |archive = Talk:Peter Wyngarde/Archive %(counter)d
 }}
to the top of the talkpage, where "maxarchivesize" is how big you want to archive to get before it opens up a fresh archive, "minthreadsleft" is how much you want it to leave behind (to prevent it archiving everything and leaving the page blank), and "algo" is how old something has to be before it gets archived. (30 days is usually good for high traffic pages, but sometimes it makes sense to make it 365 days so only genuinely stale threads are archived, to prevent people raising points which have already been raised). If you also put {{archive box | auto=yes }} at the top of the talkpage, it will put an auto-updating list of links to the archives. ‑ Iridescent 10:32, 22 August 2016 (UTC)
(add) Yes, the bot can handle never-before-archived pages. Be aware that it will sort the posts by date-of-most-recent-comment, rather than date-thread-created, so things will end up out of order. ‑ Iridescent 10:33, 22 August 2016 (UTC)
Cheers, all done. We shall see if I can follow basic instructions without screwing up at some point ;) Mainly needed to be done because of a few discussions over (sourced) issues that should not be left public forever. Only in death does duty end (talk) 10:39, 22 August 2016 (UTC)
Looking at that talkpage, you might want to consider either bouncing it up to Legal, or asking one of the oversighters to have a look at it, if you haven't already. It looks like there's some rather questionable stuff there, and while archiving a talkpage does stop Google indexing it, it doesn't stop other search engines or Wikipedia mirrors picking it up; it might be better for the discussions to disappear altogether. ‑ Iridescent 10:46, 22 August 2016 (UTC)
It has a number of issues yes. There was (prior to me removing it) a completely undue section regarding a conviction for a non-crime (a crime then, not now). Can be reliably sourced to the print media of the time. There is a category associated with this (which I just removed) and the reason for the crime has been disputed on the talkpage. So I expect someone at some point to take issue, but while the crime itself can be reliably sourced, the actor's sexuality cannot. Which causes an interesting and annoying problem. So when in doubt, remove everything. Only in death does duty end (talk) 11:16, 22 August 2016 (UTC)
"Convicted of something which was then a crime but is not now" can be notable enough, for people as diverse as Margery Jourdemayne and Alan Turing, but it needs to be impeccably sourced, particularly if the person is still alive. My inclination in all these cases is that if a conviction has no bearing on the person's career (e.g. a five-year break when they were in prison, or people refusing to hire them owing to a conviction), the fact of the conviction isn't something for which the person is noteworthy (if it weren't for their convictions, nobody except a few enthusiasts would have ever heard of Wilde or Turing nowadays), and the subject themselves doesn't want it mentioned, the burden should be on anyone who wants to add it to demonstrate the public interest in mentioning it. This is not a view which is universally shared. ‑ Iridescent 11:27, 22 August 2016 (UTC)
Sadly 40 year old newspapers are reliable then as they are now... For the most part. Which was I nuked it under Undue rather than BLP. Since no one has complained since, its not been an issue. I hate dealing with categories in these situations however because it tends to rile people up who want to 'tag' famous people with their religion/sexuality/country etc in the name of 'organisation' rather than as I suspect 'promoting my team'. Only in death does duty end (talk) 11:37, 22 August 2016 (UTC)

Proposed FAC mentoring scheme

Following discussions on the WP:FAC talkpage and with the agreement of the FAC coordinators, Mike Christie and I have finalized a "page of instructions" relating to the proposed voluntary mentoring scheme for new FAC nominators. The final draft can be viewed here.

We hope to begin the scheme shortly, on a trial basis. However, I think it would be unwise to go live until we have around a dozen or so potential mentors signed up – I hope many more than that will sign eventually. As your contribution to the discusssion indicated that you generally favoured the idea of a voluntary mentoring scheme, I am now inviting you to add your name to the list of possible mentors on the instruction page. I emphasize that the extent to which you commit yourself to this scheme is entirely a matter for you; you incur no specific obligation by adding your name. If anything about the scheme is not clear to you, please drop me a note and I'll try to explain. Brianboulton (talk) 11:45, 21 August 2016 (UTC)

Added myself. Once it goes live, you might want to randomise the list in some way so whoever's at the top (either because they start with A, or because they added themselves first) don't constantly get pestered. ‑ Iridescent 23:15, 21 August 2016 (UTC)
Thanks: Yes, I'd feel uneasy to have my name permanently at the top! I'll give tis thought. Brianboulton (talk) 10:41, 22 August 2016 (UTC)
(sort of offtopic) Wonder if one could use Template:Random number or something for that. Also, taking notice of this as I do plan to take Laguna del Maule (volcano) there at some point. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 10:31, 22 August 2016 (UTC)
Wikipedia does have a method of putting a list of usernames in random order, as they used on on the {{ACE2015}} template to make the list of names appear in a different order each time. I'll admit to not being able to make head nor tail of the coding—Lua may as well be written in Japanese to me—but Mike V who wrote it can presumably adapt it to do the same with any other list of names. ‑ Iridescent 12:12, 22 August 2016 (UTC)

I hear...

...you are a 'rogue admin' now... Only in death does duty end (talk) 13:53, 24 August 2016 (UTC)

I've been called worse; my personal favourite is "a blustering burnout who tries to blame the community for my own lack of interest". When I simultaneously have the lunatic fringe accusing me of being too inclusionist and too deletionist, I suspect I'm getting the balance right. ‑ Iridescent 22:42, 24 August 2016 (UTC)

p (redux)

Best section header ever. I followed this with some interest. I realised that this was an edit that didn't change how an article actually looks (well, maybe it does). But I get confused. Is it only bot editing that is considered 'bad'? I was pondering this, and realised that two edits I made recently didn't actually change the way the page was rendered, but were effectively moving the information around into a more machine-readable format. Namely these edits. The idea being that you could do that for all the approx 3000 links into the CWGC database (see discussion here). If I did that slowly, manually, that would be OK, but any bot work would need approval? Also, I am still a bit queasy over the idea that the end result would be to import all the data to Wikidata and call it from there. Should I be worried about that or not? Carcharoth (talk) 15:56, 24 August 2016 (UTC)

The supposed reason for WP:COSMETICBOT is that inconsequential edits swamp watchlists when they are done at high speed. My suspicion is that the policy generates far more complaints and bickering than inconsequential edits would ever do. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 16:15, 24 August 2016 (UTC)
Carcharoth, you were on Arbcom when Betacommand hit the fan; you must know the reason Wikipedia has these seemingly-draconian policies on automation in place.
Aside from bots, in practice the no-cosmetic-edits rule only really applies to WP:AWB (the rule in question is here). It's there for good reason; some editors used to make a habit of making huge swathes of minor edits to try to rack up their edit count. Because AWB users tend to work by category, this meant that if you'd watchlisted (for instance) every US Congressional biography, you could easily check your watchlist to find a couple of thousand minor edits cluttering it up. (If you like wikilawyering, Users of automation tools have a heightened responsibility to the community, and are expected to comply with applicable policies and restrictions; to respond reasonably to questions or concerns about their use of such tools; and to respect the community's wishes regarding the use of automation. An editor who misuses automation tools—whether deliberately or in good faith—or fails to respond appropriately to concerns from the community about their use may lose the privilege of using such tools or may have such privilege restricted. is a formal Arbcom ruling.) Personally I could make a case for deprecating the General Fixes altogether; most of them at best serve little or no useful purpose, and at worst are actively disruptive. ‑ Iridescent 22:54, 24 August 2016 (UTC)
Yeah, I know. And I am going far too slowly for that. I am sure it could be automated in some way, but checking each one throws up little mysteries such as this. I am quailing slightly, though, in the face of List of cricketers who were killed during military service. Am I really going to convert all those bare URLs to tagged references? At some point, it will be possible to get a list of all CWGC casualties mentioned on Wikipedia, and work out which ones are sportspeople (most of them), which ones were awarded the Victoria Cross (these are not mutually exclusive categories), which ones are dead poets, which ones are dead MPs, which ones are dead generals, which ones are 'other' (this throws up some interesting cases, such as George Llewelyn Davies - only on Wikipedia would it be possible to find a picture of that person's gravestone kindly provided by a prolific Belgian photographer), and which ones are simply mentioned in passing in other articles (usually the scions of the aristocracy who formed the mostly doomed officer class). Probably some other categories I forgot (e.g. WWII fighter pilots and WWI flying aces). Carcharoth (talk) 23:16, 24 August 2016 (UTC)
A software script could probably be knocked up without too much trouble which could go through any given list of people (particularly from somewhere like the CWGC which by definition will have death dates listed) and flag all those which have Wikipedia articles, using the birth and/or death dates as a cross-check to avoid false positives; likewise, it could compare two lists and generate a list of all those people who appear on both. Something along these lines must go on behind the curtain at Google every time searches on an ambiguous term. ‑ Iridescent 23:23, 24 August 2016 (UTC)
These are quite large lists to cross-check. I know it can be done in theory, but 1.7 million names on one list (CWGC) and 1.4 million on the other list (tagged by WikiProject Biography), though actually you would limit it to the death ranges as defined by the CWGC (1914-1921 and 1939-1947, IIRC) and use the handy Wikipedia 'XXXX deaths' categories for death years. Also, the CWGC have the same problem over disambiguation, except they don't as they disambiguate properly (unique ID for each person). But there are inordinate numbers of people with the same surname who died on the same date. I suspect the actual number with Wikipedia articles is quite small. Most will be on the lists in Category:Lists of people killed in World War I. And with that, that's enough for one day. Carcharoth (talk) 23:43, 24 August 2016 (UTC)
If you're looking at this as a serious project, rather than faffing about with CWGC lists I'd just go straight to the regiments. In my experience every regimental or unit museum in the UK and US (and I assume every other western nation other than Germany) without exception proudly displays a list of the notable people who served with them, and I imagine they'll be delighted to help anyone offering to help promote their memory. ‑ Iridescent 23:51, 24 August 2016 (UTC)
On the subject of "massive timesinks" - Wikipedia very kindly bought me this doorstop, which has me fighting the urge to turn the redlinks in List of illuminated later Anglo-Saxon manuscripts and List of Hiberno-Saxon illuminated manuscripts blue.. I think that's an insane idea but... wow... what a collection of important but so specialized material! Ealdgyth - Talk 00:05, 25 August 2016 (UTC)
Are you familiar with this book at all? I haven't read it and can't vouch for it, but Ramirez is generally well-regarded so it's probably going to be fairly high quality. (The Janina Ramirez article itself is the subject of one of Wikipedia's more peculiar slow-burning edit wars, as a regular parade of well-intentioned editors don't realise that "Ramirez" is her married name and regularly try to change her nationality to "Spanish".) ‑ Iridescent 19:00, 25 August 2016 (UTC)
Reputable publisher - she's more an art historian than a medievalist so @Johnbod: might have some insight there. Seems to be worth at least looking at - art symbolism isn't close to my field, of course, but I had to dabble at least a bit with it in the past. I'm showing nothing on Google Scholar, however... Ealdgyth - Talk 19:17, 25 August 2016 (UTC)
Out of curiosity I just had a look at her website, which is one of the oddest websites for an academic I've ever seen. (I get that presumably most visitors will be people who've seen her on TV, so it's more dumbed down than that of your typical Oxford don, but with the number of photographs of her looking moody holding illuminated manuscripts, it looks more like the website for a Seattle emo band.) The weirdest website-of-a-respected-academic is still that of Brian Cox, though. ‑ Iridescent 19:42, 25 August 2016 (UTC)
ROFL - that's a great description - Seattle emo band... heh. Ealdgyth - Talk 19:46, 25 August 2016 (UTC)
Medieval manuscripts are her thing. I must say I find her rather irritating on tv, though I still watch, for the pics rather than her comments. Very dumbed down, & poor chat with expert technique, and the slightly Goth look of early programmes now not much in evidence. I'd imagine her books are pretty populist. I have this on a stick, and am happy to make reasonable arrangements to pass on. The British Library manuscripts blog is very good. Johnbod (talk) 21:41, 25 August 2016 (UTC)
Populist isn't necessarily bad (although anyone who's written anything called "Sub culmine gazas: The Iconography of the Armarium on the Ezra Page of the Codex Amiatinus" can't be that populist); per a previous conversation I had with Ealdgyth about Museum of London Archaeology Service's publications, some academics seem to take a perverse pride in shoehorning as much incomprehensible jargon into their works as possible. Presumably anyone who reaches the level of the York Centre for Medieval Studies and Oxford University is unlikely to give wrong information, and "writes in a way that doesn't assume the reader is already familiar with Old English and the politics of medieval France" is surely a plus. ‑ Iridescent 21:50, 25 August 2016 (UTC)
BBC 4 are repeating the series late night at the moment - see what you think. Johnbod (talk) 02:21, 26 August 2016 (UTC)
I don't really mind that wide-eyed-and-breathless Carl Sagan style of presenting—given that these programs need to be comprehensible to people who have only the vaguest idea who the Saxons were, there needs to be a degree of dumbing down. Remember, BBC programmes are resold overseas, and Americans, Australians etc may well not have even the most basic 449–1066–1215–1485 basics of medieval English history. (For anyone outside the UK who's getting a "not available in your area" message on Johnbod's link, install Hola, click the flag icon in your browser and change the country code to UK. Uninstall Hola when you've finished using it, unless you don't mind your computer being used as as exit node for people doing the same trick in reverse.) ‑ Iridescent 07:54, 26 August 2016 (UTC)
Have been watching Forces of Nature (TV series) presented by Brian Cox, and wide-eyed-and-breathless Carl Sagan style of presenting sums it up. Though I've also watched Sagan's Cosmos (DVD boxset) and Sagan was good. Cox can be annoying at times. I did think it was a bit off that the Pale Blue Dot motif got reused without really being credited, though to be fair broad-sweep programmes like that lose their impact if you get bogged down in details. On the off chance that anyone here actually watches science documentaries on the BBC, the ones by Jim Al-Khalili are excellent. Carcharoth (talk) 09:56, 26 August 2016 (UTC)

I'm more forgiving of Sagan and Ramirez than I am of Cox. They're a genuine astronomer and medievalist respectively, and the overenthusiastic Attenborough style of presentation can charitably be explained away as "I find this topic which most people consider boring or unimportant, to be so fascinating I decided to dedicate my life to it, and I want to try to communicate my enthusiasm to the viewers". Brian Cox is a particle physicist, and has no more connection to the life sciences than does a goose, yet still gets hauled out to present things like Forces of Nature and Wonders of Life, presumably because the BBC assumes all sciences are basically interchangeable, and he has a Manchester accent and dresses like he spent the night in a wheely-bin, so despite his living in London he counts as a northerner for the BBC's diversity purposes. ‑ Iridescent 16:34, 26 August 2016 (UTC)

Ramirez is also on R4 just now in "Museum of Curiousity". Let's see how she does without the eye makeup. Johnbod (talk) 17:33, 26 August 2016 (UTC)
She did quite a good "explaining what famous but incomprehensible paintings are actually supposed to represent" series on R4 last year (available on iPlayer here), so I imagine she'll hold her own. (Fake eyelashes and telegenic cheekbones might get you on TV, but they're not going to get you positions at Oxford and the V&A; she's obviously someone who knows her stuff rather than just reading an autocue.) ‑ Iridescent 17:45, 26 August 2016 (UTC)

Matthew White Ridley

Would you have any views on the notability of artist Matthew White Ridley (1837–1888)? I recently added him to the disambiguation page at Matthew Ridley and got reverted with a pointer at MOS:DABRL (please, no MoS rant!). Related discussion (potentially) here. Do I really have to go and create a redlink somewhere else before adding someone like that to a disambiguation page? Carcharoth (talk) 17:32, 19 August 2016 (UTC)

Much as I may denigrate the MOS, the "No article, no link" rule for dab pages and lists is one piece of Wikipedia bureaucracy with which I do agree; enforcing it as a bright-line rule is what stops the lists degenerating into directories of streets, local councillors, non-league football players, asteroids, soap-opera characters etc. Sure, you can say "I think topic is notable enough that one day we'll have an article on him/her/it" or "I think it's important that readers know this topic exists, even though we don't have an article on it", but in that case so can everyone else.
On the specific topic of Ridley, I think you might struggle to write something which will survive AFD. (With a neat circularity, probably his best claim to notability nowadays isn't that he gets any critical attention, but that it can be demonstrated from van Gogh's letters that VVG was a fan of his.) I can knock up a microstub based on his University of Glasgow biography and fluffed out from van Gogh's letters, but I'm not sure it can be expanded beyond that. Yes, he has a few works in major collections, but I suspect that's an artefact of some of the donors who established the big galleries being close to his friends. He doesn't have an entry in the ODNB, which isn't the be-all-and-end-all but is generally a fairly good warning beacon when it comes to anyone who lived in 19th-century England (particularly if they're male and lived in London), and it looks like the only significant biographical material ever published on him is a single 1981 article. He seems to have been an etcher who dabbled as a painter rather than a painter with a sideline in etching, so Johnbod may know more about him; he tends to be more interested in that kind of thing than me. ‑ Iridescent 20:09, 19 August 2016 (UTC)
I guess I just think Wikipedia should at least try and help people (like me) who are looking at a reference to an artist called 'Matthew White Ridley' and wondering what who all these other Matthew Ridleys are and whether he is one of them? I had to go look elsewhere, and it feels, even without an article, that Wikipedia should say something somewhere about this artist.
On the specific case of people who get mentioned in Wikipedia articles but who don't have articles themselves but are borderline notable and have a common enough name that a disambiguation page exists, is there anything that stops the endless cycle of "Person A links the article [most people stop here], finds there is a disambiguation page, tries to disambiguate, fails, and delinks it"? Is there a way to flag up an unlinked piece of text to say "many people before you have tried to link this and please don't try again, unless maybe things have changed since the last time someone tried"? It is the old story of silent actions not getting logged and the silent actions happening over and over again. When someone looks at a Wikipedia article, they don't see all the silent (and endlessly repeated) checks that result in no action. Carcharoth (talk) 23:48, 19 August 2016 (UTC)
I agree in principle that it's useful to readers to disambiguate even when the articles don't exist, but it really would open a floodgate if we started allowing it. We have a shedload of name disambiguation pages and it would be impossible to monitor all of them, so they'd end up going the same way as the days-of-the-year pages, which have become an endless unwinnable war between the people wanting to include all the members of their favourite band, and the people trying to keep the articles down to a manageable size. (The most extreme example I've ever seen of the "if there's not enough for an article, shove a line into the next-level-up page" phenomenon is this page, with separate entries for every single house in a street.)
On how we treat "decision: no action", that's a long-term issue which has affected Wikipedia since its foundation, and AFAIK nobody's come up with a better solution than "hidden text comments". (Technically Editnotices are supposed to serve this function, but nobody actually reads those.) It's the same issue which makes ANI and AE such bearpits—a hundred editors who decide no action is necessary can be overruled by one admin with an itchy protect/delete/block finger. ‑ Iridescent 10:22, 21 August 2016 (UTC)
The approach used on Wikisource does allow the logging of a check, even if no corrections were needed. A checklist for each article showing the last time an action was taken such as "check all outgoing links are pointing to the right place" or "check images are OK", or "check to see if new images are available" or "do a survey of the literature to see if new sources are available" or... well, the list would be endless, wouldn't it? But there are some basic periodic checks that would be useful. Though on second thoughts, you might get the same people that tag articles for improvement marking some of these tasks as done and not doing them properly! The task of "check all incoming links are correct" (which no-one really does anyway) is not always possible when most of the incoming links are from navboxes. For articles that have been through a review process, it would be a case of "do a basic check and note that this has been done". It is more to get a sense of how 'untouched' articles are. Some just get bot edits and hardly anything else, but might still be OK. I guess it is really up to the reader to do all these basic checks themselves if they want to be satisfied with a Wikipedia article. It would be nice to have a reliable flagged revision that was last checked by a human, but different people have different concepts of what "checked" means. A quick read-through? A careful check of the sources? Vandalism-free? That is probably why flagged revisions never really took off here. You need a small community that agrees on what 'checked' means. Carcharoth (talk) 11:26, 21 August 2016 (UTC)
Which is why for anything that's been through GAN or FAC, we always link at the top of the talkpage both the version that was reviewed, and the review itself; these are the only points in the life-cycle of a typical Wikipedia article where checks are actually logged, so they serve as a de facto Last Clean Version. "Last edited by a human" wouldn't really work; as I alluded to here, if human editors are focused on a particular task (fixing incoming links to another article, tinkering with a template, categorisation…) they can have remarkable tunnel-vision and fail to notice even the most glaring stupidity. Likewise, lack of activity isn't really an indicator of anything, other than that nobody cares. 7 & 9 Bounds Green Road will probably never have an edit until someone gets around to AFD-ing it, since there isn't and never will be anything to say about it, but unless it's actively vandalised that doesn't mean it will become any less accurate over time. ‑ Iridescent 11:48, 21 August 2016 (UTC)

PS. In case you or anyone is interested, the reason I was looking into Matthew White Ridley was because I was working on this image of Queen Victoria and her family (from 1877) and have just transcribed the identification key here. That list of 39 names is both interesting and repetitive and makes me wonder if they all remembered their own names or not... (in some cases, finding the relevant Wikipedia article is not easy). Anyway, the artist is the aforementioned Matthew White Ridley, and the etching even has its own Worldcat catalogue entry for some reason. The need to distinguish between the different Matthew White Ridleys is what prompted me to edit the disambiguation page, as the Worldcat entry incorrectly credits the Viscount Ridley (this bloke). It looks like it was published in at least The Illustrated London News as a four-page supplement (see here, yours for only £375), and in Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper (with a copy available from the Library of Congress). I did find a 'printed s. steel engraving' held at some point in the private collections of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and sold at Sotheby's, New York, on 19 February 1998 (Sale No.7000-WE, lot #1342). Not sure what that means (reading here gives a bit more about that sale in 1998). I wonder who bought it and for how much? I suppose Ridley would have pieced together the artwork from various sources, rather than sketching a gathering from life? A lot of sources refer to him as "M. W. Ridley" and it is difficult to see the details in amongst the references to the Viscount. Carcharoth (talk) 09:57, 20 August 2016 (UTC)

  • sorry, I don't think I'd heard of him & it's not a period I know. I'm away at the moment. If he's not in the Getty Union Artist's Names database (online), or Benezit or the big directory of British artists, then notability is doubtful. Johnbod (talk) 15:04, 20 August 2016 (UTC)
    • Thanks. He is in the Getty Union Artist's Names database here. That is useful. Carcharoth (talk) 15:46, 20 August 2016 (UTC)
      • And apparently in "Bénézit Dictionary of Artists: English Edition (2006)" - that is probably enough. Johnbod (talk) 02:29, 23 August 2016 (UTC)
        • Available online since 2011 for £56 for 3 months or £215 for 12 months. From the sample biography, probably a short bio and a list of exhibitions, gallery holdings and auction records. Still, nice to have an official record of those. Over 170,000 entries. Wonder if they would all be notable in Wikipedia terms? Bénézit Dictionary of Artists is available from Westminster Libraries, so I can access that (will take a look later on). Carcharoth (talk) 13:14, 23 August 2016 (UTC)
          • Oh, how annoying. The Westminster Libraries institutional service appears to be limited to Grove Art Online only and excludes Bénézit Dictionary of Artists, despite what it claims on the Westminster Libraries Services page. Back to the drawing boards (though I will hopefully remember to use Grove a bit more now). Carcharoth (talk) 23:11, 23 August 2016 (UTC)
            • Richmond libraries (allegedly) give Benezit access to members, although I haven't checked. There's a handy list of which (London) library memberships give you access to which services here. Westminster is still the gold standard, although City is very useful for Wikipedia purposes as that gives you remote access to the newspaper archive. ‑ Iridescent 23:44, 23 August 2016 (UTC)
              • I should follow this up and see if I can get access at one of those libraries (technically I no longer live in that borough, but I have family members there and can just walk in off the street any way). A stub on this artist might be more useful than the stub I created at John Bethell (inventor). I suppose I can't now complain about borderline notable articles promoting women when I'm dragging obscure inventors out of some dusty corner... (even if they are related to the great and the good of the land). Carcharoth (talk) 08:07, 27 August 2016 (UTC)
                • For UK libraries, you don't need to live or work in the area—you only need to prove a UK address (so they know where to send the bill if you fail to return a book), and attend a library in the relevant local authority on one occasion so they can verify your identity. (If City of London limited their membership to residents only, it would be rather an exclusive club, given that the entire adult population of the City could have fit comfortably within the old Water Polo Arena.) Provided you're willing to pop over to Lerwick and Hugh Town with a recent utility bill and some photo ID, there's nothing to stop you holding membership of Shetland and Scilly Isles libraries simultaneously. ‑ Iridescent 09:23, 27 August 2016 (UTC)

On the Article "The Relationship between Tyranny and Arms Control"

ANI discussion now at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents#The Relationship between Tyranny and Arms Control; if you have any further comments to make, direct them there. Any further posts from Polythesis to this talkpage will be reverted.

The following discussion 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.

Are you claiming that I am the originator of the idea that there is a relationship between tyranny and arms control?

Wikipedia defines original research as:

"...material—such as facts, allegations, and ideas—for which no reliable, published sources exist."[1]

Here are three excerpts from reliable , published sources that clearly show that there is abundant pre-existing research on the relationship between tyranny and arms control. These sources disprove the claim that the article was in any way original research:

1. "If circumstances should at any time oblige the government to form an army of any magnitude that army can never be formidable to the liberties of the people while there is a large body of citizens, little, if at all, inferior to them in discipline and the use of arms, who stand ready to defend their own rights and those of their fellow-citizens. This appears to me the only substitute that can be devised for a standing army, and the best possible security against it, if it should exist." - Alexander Hamilton[2]

2. "In 1933, the ultimate extremist group, led by Adolf Hitler, seized power and used the records to identify, disarm, and attack political opponents and Jews. Constitutional rights were suspended, and mass searches for and seizures of guns and dissident publications ensued. Police revoked gun licenses of Social Democrats and others who were not 'politically reliable.' " - Stephen Halbrook[3]

3. "First he led a colony to a place called Rhaicelus, in the region of the Thermaic gulf; and thence he passed to the country in the neighbourhood of Mt. Pangaeus. Here he acquired wealth and hired mercenaries; and not till ten years had elapsed did he return to Eretria and make an attempt to recover the government by force. In this he had the assistance of many allies, notably the Thebans and Lygdamis of Naxos, and also the Knights who held the supreme power in the constitution of Eretria. After his victory in the battle at Pallene he captured Athens, and when he had disarmed the people he at last had his tyranny securely established, and was able to take Naxos and set up Lygdamis as ruler there. He effected the disarmament of the people in the following manner. He ordered a parade in full armour in the Theseum, and began to make a speech to the people. He spoke for a short time, until the people called out that they could not hear him, whereupon he bade them come up to the entrance of the Acropolis, in order that his voice might be better heard. Then, while he continued to speak to them at great length, men whom he had appointed for the purpose collected the arms and locked them up in the chambers of the Theseum hard by, and came and made a signal to him that it was done. Pisistratus accordingly, when he had finished the rest of what he had to say, told the people also what had happened to their arms; adding that they were not to be surprised or alarmed, but go home and attend to their private affairs, while he would himself for the future manage all the business of the state." - Aristotle[4]

You have wrongfully deleted the article, which makes it difficult to even discuss whether or not it is neutral or original. Please, at a minimum, take my contributions from the deleted article and transfer them to the bottom of the draft page hereso I may continue to improve them until the page can be published, and so that I may reference them in the deletion review process.

"Consensus is not determined by counting heads, but by looking at strength of argument, and underlying policy (if any). Arguments that contradict policy, are based on opinion rather than fact, or are logically fallacious, are frequently discounted... If an argument for deletion is that the page lacks sources, but an editor adds the missing references, said argument is no longer relevant." See: Wikipedia Deletion Guidelines for Administrator The arguments in favor of deletion were made in bad faith, as they were contrary to Wikipedia policies. New information has come to light in the form of references, but only if those who were arguing in favor of deletion willfully ignored those references while making their arguments in favor of deletion.— Preceding unsigned comment added by Polythesis (talk • contribs) 19:50, 24 August 2016 (UTC)

References

  1. ^ Wikipedia:No_original_research
  2. ^ Hamilton, Alexander; "The Federalist Papers: No.29"
  3. ^ Halbrook, Stephen; "How the Nazis Used Gun Control"
  4. ^ Aristotle, "The Constitution of Athens"
(talk page stalker) I have some doubts about the reliability of your first two sources. Also, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/The Relationship between Tyranny and Arms Control indicates there were NPOV problems as well, and reading the deleted articles I can see why.Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 20:07, 24 August 2016 (UTC)

@Jo-Jo Eumerus, the first source is one of the founding fathers of the United States and was taken directly from the website of the U.S. Congress. The second source is Stephen Halbrook, who is " is an author and lawyer known for his litigation on behalf of the National Rifle Association.[1][2] He has written extensively about the original meanings of the Second Amendment and the Fourteenth Amendment (the latter as applied to Second Amendment rights).[3] He has argued and won three cases before the US Supreme Court: Printz v. United States, United States v. Thompson-Center Arms Company, and Castillo v. United States." I see no way that you could possibly claim that my point of view was not neutral, since I merely stated the fact that hundreds of scholars, politicians, philosophers and human rights activists have debated and written about the relationship between tyranny and arms control over thousands of years. That is not my opinion or my point of view, that is a fact, as is apparent according to the references cited above. However, if you would like to be the first person to actually explain why you think the article is not neutral, and what parts of it are not neutral, and how you think it could be improved (other than deleting the whole article), then please do, but again, you would be the first to do so, in spite of my repeated attempts to inquire as to what is so un-neutral about the article while we were debating whether or not it should be deleted. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Polythesis (talk • contribs) 20:58, 24 August 2016 (UTC)

Have I at any point claimed that you are the originator of the idea that there is a relationship between tyranny and arms control? No, thought not. If you really feel the need to rant at me like a crazy person, at least make allegations that can't be refuted in five seconds by anyone who reads the actual AFD discussion.
Wikipedia is not a free web host or a venue for political discussion, and this type of synthesis is very rarely going to be appropriate in a Wikipedia context. (To put this in perspective, of Wikipedia's 6,927,509 articles, there are only twelve "Relationship between…" articles, one of which is about to be deleted and a couple of the rest of which will probably be deleted shortly.*) This kind of "term paper" approach is very rarely appropriate to Wikipedia, as in almost all cases the relationship is better discussed in the parent articles.
*Relationship between Friedrich Nietzsche and Max Stirner, Relationship between Gaelic football and Australian rules football, Relationship between Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda, Relationship between avant-garde art and American pop culture, Relationship between child pornography and child sexual abuse, Relationship between education and HIV/AIDS, Relationship between mathematics and physics, Relationship between religion and science, Relationship between rugby league and rugby union, Relationship between string theory and quantum field theory, Relationship between the European Court of Justice and European Court of Human Rights and Relationship between the Romanian Orthodox Church and the Iron Guard, should you care.
Per your request I've restored it to User:Polythesis/The Relationship between Tyranny and Arms Control for you to work on it, but as per my comments on the AFD as it stands this is in no way appropriate for Wikipedia, and unless and until you can get it into a state which complies with Wikipedia policies expect it to be deleted again if you try to move it back into article space. Be aware that hyperbole like The survival of freedom and democracy may depend on the careful consideration and discussion of the relationship between tyranny and arms control, and on the public's education regarding this topic is unlikely to do your case any favours; quite aside from the questionable nature of the statement, "the survival of freedom and democracy" is not a part of Wikipedia's remit; except in a very few cases where politics explicitly infringes on Wikipedia's ability to operate, Wikipedia is politically neutral. Bear in mind that this is a global project, not a US project, and most of the countries in which we operate have very different notions of "freedom and democracy" to your own. ‑ Iridescent 23:15, 24 August 2016 (UTC)

Bear in mind that millions of Wikipedia users have very different notions of what is appropriate for an encyclopedic article and what is not, Iridescent, and you are not the ultimate judge of that, you are only one administrator with one opinion, while there are hundreds of millions of people who think this topic is very notable and needs to be openly discussed in Wikipedia. If the deletion of the article is controversial, which obviously it is because we are having this conversation, and the article does not violate Wikipedia's polices, which it does not, then you can't delete it just because you think it is not "encyclopedic", whatever your definition of encyclopedic may be. The reasons given for deleting the article were that it was original research and that it was not neutral, which were both obviously false. Since you admit that this was not your reason for deleting the article, then what was your reason for deleting the article, other than the snowball clause, which is ridiculous, since you may not delete an article if the deletion is controversial. Please notice that many of my references on this topic are written by Greeks, South Africans, Romans, Indians, et.al. This is a global topic, and this topic more so than almost any other will determine the survival of freedom of democracy, with the possible exception of the free flow of ideas and information, which is also threatened by your attempts to delete this article. Wikipedia is not allowed to operate openly in tyrannies such as China and Egypt, so yes, this political issue does pertain directly to Wikipedia, but even if it didn't, Wikipedia is meant to be a venue for the collection and dissemination of all human knowledge on all topics, including the relationship between arms control and tyranny. And replying to my explanation of why the article should not be deleted by saying that I am ranting "like a crazy person" is a personal insult against me, which is not permitted on Wikipedia, so I insist that you retract that comment and respond to my claims in a respectful manner that conforms to Wikipedia policies. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Polythesis (talk • contribs) 17:08, 25 August 2016 (UTC)

You were extremely vague in your explanation of why you deleted the article, Iridescent. Simply saying that it does not conform to Wikipedia's standards is grossly insufficient. Because it was taking up too much time for you to refute the article's right to exist is not a viable reason for deleting it, especially since not one person during the discussion was able to explain why they thought it was not neutral, what about it was not neutral, or what other policies you think it violated, and since the sources provided prove that the article is not original research. If it was taking up so much time, then why not just stop trying to delete it unless you have a very good reason to delete it, which you do not. Why exactly do you think it should be deleted? How could anyone in the Wikipedia community possibly benefit by deleting this article?

You seem to be very biased against the discussion of the fact that there is a relationship between tyranny and arms control, Iridescent, so you should recuse yourself from the debate and let an unbiased panel of administrators make the decision. I suggest this matter be decided through arbitration by an equal number of Inclusionists (drawn from the Association of Inclusionist Wikipedians)and deletionist administrators, and if they cannot reach consensus on whether or not the article should be deleted, then the article may not be deleted, per Wikipedia's deletion guidelines for administrators. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Polythesis (talk • contribs) 17:24, 25 August 2016 (UTC)

Polythesis Please cut back on the length of your posts, thanks. Also, the job of an adminstrator is to implement the decision made by the editors at the AfD. It's them you'll have to convince, but please always consider the possibility that they may be right and you may be wrong. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 17:31, 25 August 2016 (UTC)

@Jo-Jo Eumerus Please lengthen your posts to actually respond to the questions I asked. I do not have to convince delitionist editors in the AfD that the article should not be deleted. I merely have to show that the deletion is controversial and the article does not violate any wikipedia policies, and since I have shown that, the administrator may not delete the article. However, to make the decision even clearer, I will seek to include at least one dozen inclusionists in the debate on whether or not the article should be deleted, which should make it very obvious that the deletion is controversial, that the article does not violate any Wikipedia policies, and that therefore deletion of the article is not permitted according to either the spirit or the letter of Wikipedia's policies. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Polythesis (talk • contribs) 17:40, 25 August 2016 (UTC)

Finally, let me express my closing opinion that these incessant attempts to censor my article and thereby prevent the free flow of information on Wikipedia, of all places, is shameful and insulting to the entire Wikipedia community. Those who have participated in this deletionist censorship onslaught deserve a firm rebuke at a minimum, and the administrator who senselessly invoked the snowball clause and wrongfully deleted the article should have his/her administrative privileges revoked for cause. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Polythesis (talk • contribs) 17:47, 25 August 2016 (UTC)

I have no idea where your conspiracy theory that I'm biased against the discussion of the fact that there is a relationship between tyranny and arms control has come from; this is a topic in which I have no interest whatsoever. You can keep claiming "if the deletion is controversial an administrator may not delete the article" as often as you want, but that won't make it true, given that this is the opposite of Wikipedia's actual policy. If you really feel that the administrator who senselessly invoked the snowball clause and wrongfully deleted the article should have his/her administrative privileges revoked for cause, Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents is the place to go, but I'd strongly counsel against it. There is no admin on Wikipedia who would have closed that debate any differently, given that there was a unanimous consensus to delete; indeed, any admin who closed as "keep" a discussion with a unanimous delete consensus would be facing sanctions for imposing a blatant supervote.
I am not willing to engage with you any further on this, and any further posts from you on this talk page will be reverted. ‑ Iridescent 18:33, 25 August 2016 (UTC)
In fact, scratch that; since this will inevitably end up at ANI, I've opened the thread myself, which can be found at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents#The Relationship between Tyranny and Arms Control. If you have any further comments to make, direct them there. ‑ Iridescent 18:45, 25 August 2016 (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.
convenience break
Well it's not like anyone else would kiss him. He probably sued the sea lion later for something or other. Have you visited the Museums? EEng 16:28, 26 August 2016 (UTC)
Indeed. One of the images there looks oddly familiar. ‑ Iridescent 16:36, 26 August 2016 (UTC)
I only borrow from the best. EEng 16:47, 26 August 2016 (UTC)
In fact, an entire section looks oddly familiar. (I keep meaning to come back and cover George and Mary properly; they were fascinating characters, and Wikipedia's current coverage really doesn't do them justice.) ‑ Iridescent 21:46, 26 August 2016 (UTC)
So that was you, I see. Good work! It's a wonderful example of the sort of out-of-the-way but worthy topic that Wikipedia allows to get its due. EEng 01:00, 27 August 2016 (UTC)
Is there anything on Wikipedia that is adequately covered in any way? The South American volcanoes I work on certainly aren't, as the huge list here attests to. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 23:45, 26 August 2016 (UTC)
Well, if I may say so myself, I think Phineas Gage, Widener Library, Sacred Cod, John Harvard (statue), Andrew Gleason, and Lionel de Jersey Harvard at least approach adequacy. EEng 01:00, 27 August 2016 (UTC) Dr. Young's Ideal Rectal Dilators is a bit squeezed, however. EEng 01:00, 27 August 2016 (UTC)
There are quite a few topics on Wikipedia which are more than adequately covered, to the extent that the Wikipedia articles are the best available material on the topic that's readily available to the public. If I do say so myself, you're not going to find better coverage of William Etty, Norwich Market, Halkett boat or Brill Tramway anywhere else without spending a lot of time in reference libraries digging through long-out-of-print books, we had an article on Alice Ayres as TFA before the ODNB themselves admitted she even existed, and our article on the Opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway has become so much the accepted text that museums just cut-and-paste portions of it for their "birth of the industrial revolution" displays. On more broad topics, Wikipedia is the best available neutral source for even very high-profile topics which you'd assume would be covered to death elsewhere—try finding better quality neutral summaries of the lives of Michael Jackson or Frank Sinatra, for instance, or better explanations of the Liberty Bell, Buckingham Palace, or Texas Revolution. The line pushed by Larry Sanger and his acolytes, that Wikipedia is inherently doomed by its design to be inadequate in everything it does, certainly has an element of truth in that the Wikipedia model leads to the creation of an awful lot of poor-quality articles on subjects of minimal interest, but it doesn't tell the full story; on the one time in a thousand when it works, it works very well, as it allows us to explain to a mass audience why a topic they'd likely assume is of minimal importance to them is actually a significant topic worthy of their attention. What site other than Wikipedia could get more than 100,000 people reading an article on an 1832 illustration of a 1757 poem? ‑ Iridescent 09:12, 27 August 2016 (UTC)
I wouldn't mention this were it not that the article is otherwise so exemplary, but in William Etty, how does the sentence, "The Academy controlled the prestigious Academy art schools, an effective monopoly on the training of new artists, and preoccupied with technique" operate, exactly? EEng 14:15, 27 August 2016 (UTC)
Blame Ceoil for that. I've changed it back to my original wording, which I think is clearer. ‑ Iridescent 15:03, 27 August 2016 (UTC)
Bubble-bursting time. How many of those people clicking through to the article actually read it all or get much beyond the lead section or looking at the pretty pictures? I suppose people that publish printed books ask themselves the same question. Evidence that people are actually reading, talking, responding to and writing about something (reviews, articles, comments) may mean more than page views. I'm not suggesting that Wikipedia should have a comments section, just that the use of page views should be taken with a pinch of salt. The real measure of success may be when other sources re-use and re-publish a Wikipedia article. But since people can do that without asking or telling people, it is hard to track that. Pity, really. (Though I get your bit about museums copying the article.) Also, how do you measure students cribbing from Wikipedia? I suppose the 'long tail' of the use of a book (in libraries long after the authors are dust) doesn't really get measured either. In a sense, people write for themselves and any others who may happen to read as well. Carcharoth (talk) 10:43, 27 August 2016 (UTC)
Before Apple shut it down, Topsy was very handy for that, as by watching the number of Twitter, Reddit and Facebook mentions you could gauge whether people were actually finding the articles interesting enough to mention to their friends. You can get a reasonable impression of whether people are actually reading TFA rather than just looking at the pictures, by seeing if there are corresponding spikes in page views for other articles linked within it—to stick with the example of Youth and Pleasure, on the day it was TFA there was a corresponding spike in pageviews for William Etty, suggesting around 10% of those reading it found it interesting enough that they wanted to find out more about him.

It can't purely be a matter of pretty pictures, since if the TFA blurb is interesting people will read something even if there's no illustration at all—Charles Domery got a huge number of pageviews which could only have been because people thought the blurb looked interesting, given that the blurb was unillustrated, and since 30,000 of those readers also clicked through to Polyphagia they must have actually been reading it rather than just taking a quick glance.

It's not just TFA that can lead to spikes—what people are searching for on Google has a huge impact on pageviews. During the 2011 riots, my Broadwater Farm article got more pageviews in a day than it had had in the previous five years, and it's very apparent whenever a celebrity or high-profile blogger stumbles across Tarrare. ‑ Iridescent 11:22, 27 August 2016 (UTC)

User:Polythesis

I strongly suspect this is also User:24.119.20.133, who has been blocked for legal threats after already being blocked for lesser offenses. --Orange Mike | Talk 21:09, 25 August 2016 (UTC)

Possibly, but not necessarily—especially in the current climate in the US, there are certainly a reasonable number of people with very strong views on the subject who genuinely believe that this is such an important topic, their duty to inform the public overrules Wikipedia policy. (One finds them on both sides of the debate; remember Lightbreather?) Either the user will come through on his promise that the draft can be made into a Wikipedia-compliant article (I find it very unlikely, but it's potentially possible), or they'll flare out or get bored and wander off. ‑ Iridescent 21:19, 25 August 2016 (UTC)
I'm sure it's the same guy, Iri; a look at the IP's previous edits shows (a) nearly identical talk page tactics, and (b) an attempt to shoehorn all of Polythesis' references for the draft article into a related article, (c) a similar level of hyperbole and bile, and (d) a similar willingness to waste a LOT of other editors' time. I've gone ahead, block this new account indef, and deleted the article per some CSD criterion about blocked editors that I can't remember the number of right now. --Floquenbeam (talk) 21:38, 25 August 2016 (UTC)
Yeah, on looking at the previous talkpage there are all the same unusual verbal tics. Good block. ‑ Iridescent 21:39, 25 August 2016 (UTC)
Floquenbeam, the criterium is "G5" if it matters. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 22:56, 25 August 2016 (UTC)
From Josiah Stamp, 1st Baron Stamp:

"Stamp's son Wilfred was killed at the same time and in the same place, but English law has legal fiction that in the event of the order of deaths being indeterminable, the elder is deemed to have died first. Legally therefore, Wilfred momentarily inherited the peerage: and as a consequence the family had to pay death duty twice."

I suppose they could afford it, but it does seem a bit cruel (the son's article states that he "holds the record for holding a peerage for the shortest length of time". Carcharoth (talk) 23:59, 26 August 2016 (UTC)
There are now provisions in U.S. law (and, ISTR, in current U.K. law) to prevent that kind of thing happening. But then, almost nobody pays death duties/inheritance taxes nowadays anyway. --Orange Mike | Talk 00:17, 27 August 2016 (UTC)
2010 election
2015 election
2010 and 2015 UK elections; note that virtually the entire shift to the Tories is in the South
Death duties are very definitely still paid in Britain. Cameron's pledge to raise the inheritance tax thresholds to address the problem of families being made homeless on the death of a relative because the volatility of the southern property market made anyone owning a house or land "rich" for tax purposes (and thus liable for 40% death duties) despite having no assets other than the house, was arguably among the main reasons the Conservatives saw such a surge in the southeast and southwest last year, and thus managed to scrape an outright majority. This in turn led to the unintended consequences of Cameron being obliged to enact the intentionally-extreme positions he'd taken in the run-up to the election (on the assumption that they'd all be negotiated away in a coalition agreement, and thus the result of a coalition compromise would be a moderate-right government reflecting his own actual views), with some fairly noticeable consequences (which ironically, have almost certainly lost those in question more than death duties ever would).

I'm not convinced the Wikipedia article is correct about "holding a peerage for the shortest length of time", given that it's fairly well-known that Frederic Leighton holds this particular record. Surely peerages aren't instantly transferred at the moment the holder dies, but a successor needs to be approved by the Privileges Committee (or back then possibly the Lord Chancellor), which wouldn't have happened in this case for obvious reasons? ‑ Iridescent 10:06, 27 August 2016 (UTC)

What is nearly true is that "almost nobody really rich pays significant death duties/inheritance taxes nowadays", in the UK anyway. But it certainly has a big hit on the merely well-off, especially those with houses in London. The new Duke of Westminster won't be too badly hit, we can be sure. Johnbod (talk) 17:30, 27 August 2016 (UTC)
You failed to explicitly mention Brexit once in the 'unintended consequences' bit above... (some reading this page might be in some remote corner of the world where they didn't hear the news). About shortest peerages, another claim is at Charles Brandon, 3rd Duke of Suffolk. Carcharoth (talk) 10:37, 27 August 2016 (UTC)
Brexit is obviously the most notorious of Cameron's "promises made with the intention of negotiating them away which he never expected to have to put in place", but it certainly isn't the only one—I'd be fairly confident in saying that he didn't actually think "deport first, appeal later", the Housing and Planning Act 2016, universal superfast broadband, EVEL, or the repeal of the Human Rights Act, were things he either believed in, or ever expected to have to put in place, but were simply intentionally extreme positions taken with the intention that they could be "sacrificed" in the coalition agreement. ‑ Iridescent 10:52, 27 August 2016 (UTC)
Really? I would have thought the peerage was transmitted at the moment of death. The Committee is there to verify to whom, if anyone, it was transmitted; I think some claimants have been recognized as de jure peers, having died before the Committee could confirm their privileges. Choess (talk) 14:32, 27 August 2016 (UTC)
I honestly don't know. My assumption would be that the peerage isn't transmitted until the new holder is invested, since the Parliamentary Oaths Act 1866 (redlink? really?) was certainly already in place in 1941, but I don't know the mechanism for certain—it's possible that the peerage is transmitted at the moment of death, but that the holder can't use the title or claim any privileges until the oath is sworn. (The more I think about it, the more questionable the Stamp story sounds. By the logic there, if a family of father, mother and five children perished in a fire, shipwreck etc, at an inheritance tax rate of 40% that would mean the eventual heir would only get 2.7% of the estate as the death duties compounded across seven "generations". The situation of a whole family dying together was common enough back in the days of wood-framed houses at home, hostile natives away, and poorly-built ships and trains connecting the two, that it must have arisen frequently enough for the law to address it.) ‑ Iridescent 16:05, 27 August 2016 (UTC)
Simultaneous death EEng 16:12, 27 August 2016 (UTC)
As with so much of the English common law, that basically translates as "the judges make it up as they go along". If "the goodwill of the Inland Revenue" is all one has to go on, you may as well flip a coin. ‑ Iridescent 16:23, 27 August 2016 (UTC)
Stamp was (allegedly) the second-richest man in England at the time (this comes from the same dodgy place as the original claim, the article on his son), so maybe it was a case of "they can afford it, we will take it". Stamp was also the "leading British expert on taxation", so if he hadn't been the unfortunate subject of this particular incident, might have had a view on this himself! Carcharoth (talk) 16:50, 27 August 2016 (UTC)
I was just having a read of William Beveridge's ODNB biography of Stamp. I'm not sure I've ever seen an ODNB entry where it's so obvious that the author couldn't stand the subject. Stamp's estate at the time of his death was £163,548 16s. 1d. (about £10,200,000 in 2024 terms), so while he certainly wasn't starving I'd treat whatever source claimed he was the second-richest man in England with extreme suspicion. ‑ Iridescent 17:22, 27 August 2016 (UTC)
Now that I think about it, it must be the case that peerages, as incorporeal hereditaments, are transmitted immediately upon death, because that was the nucleus of Tony Benn's case in 1961. Even though he did not apply to the Lord Chancellor for a writ of summons to the Lords, nor was he issued one, he was still held to be a peer and incapable of sitting in the Commons. I didn't think the death duties reached those sorts of punitive levels until Asquith, so presumably that scenario wouldn't have been a serious problem until recently. (For that matter, for the class of people paying any significant death duty, houses were probably big enough that they wouldn't usually go up all at once, and maybe one didn't typically travel with all one's children on hand at once.) Choess (talk) 17:27, 27 August 2016 (UTC)
The inheritance tax rate in 1941 was 65%, and even if they'd taxed him under the old rate he'd still have been paying 40% (handy diagram here). Reading between the lines of his ODNB bio, I suspect they threw the book at the old boy because he was a Nazi sympathiser and leading appeaser, and Churchill wasn't inclined to give his family much goodwill. (Even if the class of people paying top whack were unlikely to be on the frontier being scalped by restless natives, or living in tenements which burned to the ground, they certainly made family trips to the Colonies to visit Great-uncle Humphrey Starborgling on the Titanic and Lusitania, so the situation must have arisen previously.) ‑ Iridescent 17:40, 27 August 2016 (UTC)
Well, the hunt for precedents led me to Broughton v. Randall of 1596, where a father and son "were both hanged in one cart" but one "shaking his legs" was presumed to have survived longer and allowed his widow to claim dower. (Unfortunately, two accounts of the case are contradictory as to who lived longer and whose widow it was.) But I think our article on simultaneous death is wrong in its account of the rule of seniority; this is not part of the common law (which is correctly stated in the opening article as making no presumption as to order of death except on evidence), but was introduced by the Law of Property Act 1925, Section 184. I'll have to fix that. Choess (talk) 18:17, 27 August 2016 (UTC)

VvG II

The forces at work re popularity are endless fascinating, and obviously I don't have an answer, or Kaney west and whats her name would be bringing me tea. I think with Van Gogh the situation is the opposite to say, Talk talk and A Ha; which indicates, as we already know, that A&R is basically the business of gathering stones to throw at a wall, hoping for luck. The current "romanticised life" sect is my attempt to tease this out, but I'm not happy for various reason. Would appreciate thoughts. Ceoil (talk) 11:06, 13 August 2016 (UTC)

I gave some thoughts at the PR, but putting them into place would mean some substantial rewriting and FAC isn't the place for that. The trouble is, you're effectively writing the biography of both a fictional character and a fairly well-documented individual, and it's not particularly easy to take a side-by-side approach to explaining where reality and myth diverge. If I were writing this from scratch I'd take the same line we take with Richard Whittington/Dick Whittington and His Cat (or come to that, the course we eventually took following much wailing and gnashing of teeth at Historicity of King Arthur, Christ myth theory, Cultural depictions of Richard III of England and so on); one article on what we know about van Gogh the man who was squarely a man of his time and who rather than being a unique visionary, fits neatly into the Delacroix–Monticelli–Cezanne–van Gogh–Gauguin–Matisse continuum (essentially the first three sections of the existing article), and a completely separate standalone article on Vincent the mythological folk hero who plays the role of John the Baptist in Matisse and Warhol's personality cults, and who was posthumously whipped up into the World's Greatest Artist by dealers and critics who saw the potential in a very prolific painter whose work was largely out of the big European state and royal collections and thus available for the American, British and Japanese nouveau riche of the postwar boom to buy as status symbols (c.f. Picasso, Monet, Dali, Renoir). ‑ Iridescent 15:38, 13 August 2016 (UTC)
Do you realise how much effort it takes to type "Matisse" as often as this and to only spell it with one "t" each time?
It's quite an achievement that she's still able to inconvenience you even in her extended absence. --RexxS (talk) 16:45, 13 August 2016 (UTC)
If history is any guide, she's not as absent as she's supposed to be; she was still editing merrily away as of October last year. ‑ Iridescent 16:54, 13 August 2016 (UTC)
I already know all this. But thanks. Ceoil (talk) 19:25, 13 August 2016 (UTC)
I know you know - you were there - this is more thinking out loud about the practicalities (plus a starting point for any talk page watchers who might want to chip in). ‑ Iridescent 19:39, 13 August 2016 (UTC)
Yes, I was, and agree exactly.I dont want such an important point to be lost; hence the pestering. You have clear; absorbing. Ceoil (talk) 20:32, 13 August 2016 (UTC)

Sidetrack about horrible paintings

  • Somewhere there's a photo of a side-by-side comparison of a van Gogh and an Otto Wacker fake in slanting light (think the subject was one of those big bright yellow balls that turns up in the sky sometimes). The difference is akin to one of those experiments where they give spiders LSD- the Wacker was well out of wack. Xanthomelanoussprog (talk) 08:42, 14 August 2016 (UTC)
  • Although, would you get consistent results from multiple Van Gogh paintings? One of the reasons for VVGs "fifty years ahead of his time" reputation is that he painted in radically different styles over a short time, and Picasso and the assorted Modernist movements set the idea in the public mind that this was how "real" artists were supposed to work. (Traditionally, an artist was supposed to become very good in one style and then stick to that style; if you compare various works from the careers of Titian, Gainsborough, Rembrandt, even then-cutting-edge artists like Turner and Monet, the style barely changes once they get into their groove.) I'd be willing to bet that running the same test on Farmhouses Among Trees and Houses at Auvers would show them as completely unrelated, despite being almost identical compositions. ‑ Iridescent 21:49, 14 August 2016 (UTC)
  • That farmhouse painting is horrible- reminds me of 1970s kitsch, so he could be not just fifty but ninety years ahead. Still, I'd prefer it to any Thomas Kinkade. I wonder if there are any early Kinkades which demonstrate that he underwent a similar change in style? Xanthomelanoussprog (talk) 22:42, 14 August 2016 (UTC)
  • They have 2000 years to choose from, and they select John Everett Millais to represent "good art"? Could they not get hold of something more tasteful like Dogs Playing Poker? ‑ Iridescent 20:42, 15 August 2016 (UTC)
  • Having looked at Kincade more in the last hour than in the preceding decades, some of the criticism is possibly unfair. Comparing him to more traditional artists is missing the point, since he's effectively a mass-market high-throughput artist; complaining that his landscapes are more crappily painted than those of William Dyce is like complaining that Stan Lee pays less careful attention to colour balance than Caravaggio, or that Joey Ramone paid less careful attention to timing and pitch than did Jacqueline du Pre. ‑ Iridescent 21:12, 15 August 2016 (UTC)
  • I got side-tracked into the Pre-Raphaelites for some reason and have spent a bit of time recently looking at Dante Rossetti's women - did the man think all women were part camel? Or was he a reincarnation of Parmigianino but couldn't afford enough canvas to make the necks really long? I think I prefer Kinkade to Rossetti .. but only just. And that's probably because I haven't looked at much Kinkade recently...Ealdgyth - Talk 23:44, 16 August 2016 (UTC)
Pegwell Bay, Kent
  • Some of Rossetti's early works are remarkable in the context of their era—Ecce Ancilla Domini was genuinely revolutionary, in that it was the first time anyone had ever approached Biblical topics from the "what would this have actually looked like?" angle. The reason he's dated so badly compared to most of his contemporaries is that in around 1865 he convinced himself that he was on a mission to convince the masses that religion was obsolete and love would replace it, and that it was his duty to inspire love and an appreciation of (his peculiar opinion of) beauty in the masses, and thus spent the rest of his life churning out variations of "morose woman holding piece of fruit". (Plus, by this time he had a serious drug habit, and was churning out anything he thought would sell to supply his next fix.) There's a very brief synopsis of the change here; I have a vague aspiration to write something more substantial on the matter one day. (When they weren't painting endless portraits of Lizzie Siddall and Jane Morris looking pensive, some Pre-Raphaelite works are actually very good; Pegwell Bay, Kent is stunning when you see it in the flesh.) ‑ Iridescent 00:23, 17 August 2016 (UTC)

Donkeys in Trousers

On a sidetrack but on the subject of questionable pictures, my new winner for "apparently serious example of Wikipedia's ludicrously overblown 'all must have prizes' barnstars-and-bling internal reward culture" goes to Image:Jielbeaumadier baudets du poitou culotte st-martin-de-re 2013.jpeg, "considered the most valued image on Commons within the scope of donkeys wearing trousers". ‑ Iridescent 22:32, 16 August 2016 (UTC)

..... it's those "sans-culottes" you've really got to watch out for. Martinevans123 (talk) 22:51, 16 August 2016 (UTC)
  • By showcasing a realistic variety of donkeys rather than placing a disproportionate emphasis on those donkeys who conform to traditional ideas of donkey attractiveness, we promote a more realistic view of donkeys among the broad readership, as well as reducing body-anxiety issues among our donkey readers. It fits squarely in Wikipedia's remit. (Ealdgyth, Montanabw, why is Donkeys in trousers still red?) ‑ Iridescent 22:59, 16 August 2016 (UTC)
  • Because I don't write about donkeys? After an unfortunate summer where I was riding director for a summer camp and my boss figured that meant I knew all about donkeys too... I avoid them. (Donkey-skiiing is a sport, I swear...) @Justlettersandnumbers: is our donkey sorta-expert (at least he's written a little bit about them...) Ealdgyth - Talk 23:39, 16 August 2016 (UTC)
  • Isn't a donkey just a horse with bigger ears and a worse temper? (One of the more surreal half-days I ever spent involved coaxing a particularly surly donkey to walk in a parade, without either wandering down every side-street or running over to the crowd to steal candy-apples from children.) ‑ Iridescent 23:44, 16 August 2016 (UTC)
This may explain the personality issues...
  • My Arabians are totally insulted. Expect the wrath of the "smarter-than-they-really-should-be-horse-breed" to come at get you sometime. The gray gelding is actually smart enough to open truck doors and has figured out that the wheel has something to do with making the truck go... it's a good thing he can't fit in the cab because he might just figure out the foot pedals. No. Donkeys are not just surly horses. From your story, you've probably been donkey-skiing also - it's a fun sport ...for the donkey. They actually have enough differences that they can't really be approached in the same way as horses. And ... I do not like those differences. I'll have goats to keep the horses company rather than donkeys.... Ealdgyth - Talk 23:53, 16 August 2016 (UTC)
"put a bangin' donkey on it". Martinevans123 (talk) 07:51, 17 August 2016 (UTC)
I can top this. We do have an article on the Tijuana Zebra. Yes. Now we know why donkeys can be ... wait for it ... such jackasses! Montanabw(talk) 23:13, 17 August 2016 (UTC)
It's probably unfit for mention on a family talkpage, but being passed off as a zebra is definitely not the worst indignity inflicted on a donkey in Tijuana. ‑ Iridescent 20:54, 19 August 2016 (UTC)
Indeed. But let's not forget those poor lonely bulls. Martinevans123 (talk) 21:26, 19 August 2016 (UTC)
The Tijuana Ass? ‑ Iridescent 21:18, 27 August 2016 (UTC)

Donkeys in trousers

A donkey in trousers

The practice of putting trousers on donkeys originated in the early 19th century. In the wake of casualties during the Napoleonic wars, and of surviving able-bodied males increasingly migrating to cities in search of work as the industrial revolution took hold, many rural communities were left with no adult males. As laws of the time prevented women from holding public office, the functions of civic governance were formally vested in male livestock as a legal fiction to allow their female owners to take part in public administration. To preserve the dignity of these offices, many of which dated back to the Roman Empire and were the source of great local pride, the animals selected were required to dress in formal clothing. Donkeys were generally preferred, as horses were in short supply following wartime requisitions, cattle were expensive to dress, and pigs had a tendency to soil their clothing. As Christian revivalism became influential in the later 19th century, it was felt inappropriate to return the donkeys to their previous unclothed state, and thus as of 2016 donkeys continue to be dressed in trousers in some regions. The practice is widely considered to be the origin of the phrase "you need to cover your ass". (Full article...)

  • Most recent similar article(s): American Pharoah, May 7 really, 4 months without a horsey TFA?
  • Reasons for nomination: Wikipedia is infallible; reality is frequently inaccurate. Just cite the things which are made up to books which you know nobody's in a position to check, and cite those things which are true to friendly-looking sources which are available on Google Books, to ensure those are the bits that get spot-checked. Besides, this is probably more interesting than whatever the truth is, and people are always complaining that TFA is never interesting enough.
  • Support as nominator. ‑ Iridescent 15:45, 17 August 2016 (UTC)
  • Support ass covering. Xanthomelanoussprog (talk) 20:29, 17 August 2016 (UTC)
  • SCOMN! (snorted coffee out my nose!)
[64] Martinevans123 (talk) 21:30, 19 August 2016 (UTC)

Wikidata migration

I should go and find the discussion that was had about this but I still don't get the reasoning behind this: Category:Templates whose data is currently being migrated to Wikidata. Ah, I managed to find the bot request, but you have to go to Template:Wikidata property migration to find the link. That's not very helpful. I still feel queasy about this. Copying the data over, yes. Removing it, I'm not so sure about. There are times when it is useful to have the information available here. My experience of such templates is that they are used in three relatively distinct ways: (i) in an infobox to produce an 'official' link; (ii) in an external links section, again to produce an 'official' link; and (iii) to produce a reference when wrapped in ref tags. Given that the bot is not doing anything with case (iii), I don't really see the point. It feels like a trial run, a demonstration to say "look, it works", followed by much more ambitious data-slurping. And it still doesn't feel reversible if anything goes wrong. This bit makes no sense: "I have concerns that the seven-day wait would leave a window for people to add new instances of the template being migrated, whose data would not be on Wikidata when the bot operates". How can you even consider operating a bot like that without knowing whether the two systems are in synch or not? What is the end goal? To remove such templates from here completely and have them operating on Wikidata instead (you would click a link here, but would actually be editing Wikidata)? Will Wikidata eventually take over the entire template namespace? Carcharoth (talk) 01:04, 29 August 2016 (UTC)

@Carcharoth: My impression is that they want external link information in templates stored on Wikidata rather than locally. That is, the informaion normally provided to the template via a parameter is now provided by a Wikidata property. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 12:35, 29 August 2016 (UTC)
Yeah, I sort of realise that (you saw the previous wibble I had). It just feels like it is happening too soon, before the options are put in place to allow people to access and edit the data on Wikidata (either from Wikidata or [ideally] from Wikipedia), before it is moved across. At least a link left behind to indicate to people where to go if they want to access the data, or to edit it. As an example, I might want to try and generate a list of all articles calling a certain property from a template. At the moment I can do that. If the data gets pulled over to Wikidata, how do I get the data now? It might be easier, but the ability to work with the data needs to be seamless before, during and after the transition. An example is images. On Commons, you can see where the image is being used. On Wikidata, how do you 'see' which articles the data is being used in? Maybe I am missing something obvious? Carcharoth (talk) 13:12, 29 August 2016 (UTC)
As for a list of articles calling their property from a template, I believe this is what categories are for but maybe I misunderstand the question. The editing thing is a good question - my sense is that such migrated templates ought to have an edit link for the Wikidata entry (pinging JJMC89 about this) prominently linked. Myself I consider this a reflection of a problem with setting up inter-wiki dependencies (such as enwiki depending on Wikidata) between Wikimedia sites - the Wikimedia site philosophy considers each wiki an independent bubble with no extensive connections to each other, which is a problem here and will be even more so with phab:T121470. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 14:51, 29 August 2016 (UTC)
Thanks for the phabricator request pointer. Shadow namespaces? I hope that will be a good thing... By list of articles, I meant if a template has (say) a parameter for (let's say) the listed building ID for a database, you can do things with Wikipedia and extract the data from there to list all the articles and the IDs used in them. If the data is being called from Wikidata instead, will the same methods work, and if not, what would be done instead? I suspect it would be easier on Wikidata, but all I've worked out how to do so far is how to get lists of Wikidata items using the properties (see here), but have not yet worked out how to generate a list of Wikipedia articles calling the properties and (obviously) the value of the property in question. Carcharoth (talk) 15:13, 29 August 2016 (UTC)
The bot does not operate on references because those values are not being imported to Wikidata. The categories are to tack discrepancies between the value on Wikidata and the template parameter value with the bot operating on those that match. (The bot could be written in Python to not need the categories.) There is a 'Wikidata item' link in the toolbox on the left panel. I like the super-scripted pencil for an edit link as shown here. RexxS is that something that could be implemented for external link templates (e.g. {{Fashionmodel}})? I'm not familiar enough with Lua. — JJMC89 (T·C) 04:55, 30 August 2016 (UTC)
@Carcharoth: Where this bot is working, there are specialised templates such as {{JudoInside}}. That template uses a parameter which is the ID used by the website http://www.judoinside.com/ to identify the subject and the template then produces an external link to the subject's page at that website. What has been done is to enable the {{JudoInside}} template to fetch the subject's ID from Wikidata, if the ID isn't supplied locally at the article. That should save some editor time in looking up the ID and remove the possibility of transcription errors. However, it does then leave other editors in the dark about where the ID has come from. So ...
@JJMC89: I've created a module Module:EditAtWikidata to supply a free-standing pencil icon with tooltip and link to the relevant Wikidata entry for the page on which it is placed. It can be used inside templates to add the "Edit at Wikidata" link where desired. If an optional non-blank local parameter is supplied, it doesn't display anything, allowing articles where the value is supplied locally, rather than from Wikidata, to suppress the icon. I've made a wrapper template for it at Template:EditAtWikidata. To test it out, I've added the template to Anton Geesink #External links. I'd be grateful if you could check the documentation, to see if it makes sense to you, and perhaps let me know if it does the job you wanted it to. I hope it's obvious that the module could be added to a template like {{JudoInside}} with the relevant local parameter {{{name|{{{2|}}}}}} passed to it to avoid displaying the icon where the local name exists. See what you think. --RexxS (talk) 15:18, 30 August 2016 (UTC)
I know how the templates work. What I'm asking (probably in the wrong place) is how to extract data from Wikidata when you would previously have extracted it from Wikipedia. I am not talking about Wikipedia calling the data, I am talking about the tools used to generate lists of all the articles using a template and the values of the parameters of the templates used in those articles. Will those tools and methods still work? Will people be able to do it from Wikipedia, or will they have to switch to Wikidata instead? Carcharoth (talk) 16:19, 30 August 2016 (UTC)
It completely depends on the tool. If a tool reads the rendered html, it won't know that the ID came from Wikidata instead of the Wikitext; whereas if the tool reads the wikitext, it will not be able to find the ID in the cases where that is fetched from Wikidata. Could you perhaps give me an example of one of "the tools used to generate lists of all the articles using a template and the values of the parameters of the templates used in those articles", please? I am a dinosaur of small brain and it's far easier to answer questions based on concrete examples than to try to guess what generalisations might mean. TIA. --RexxS (talk) 17:08, 30 August 2016 (UTC)
{{AFM roll of honour}} has 17 transclusions. How would you generate a list of those articles and the AFM id values? For Talaiasi Labalaba it is X9129. For Armed Forces Memorial there are multiple values. At the moment, tools can read the wikitext and 'find' the values in the templates. Surely if the data was on Wikidata, there would be a way to get Wikidata to generate the list? Carcharoth (talk) 17:34, 30 August 2016 (UTC)
Do you mean lists automatically generated from info in Wikidata like User:Nev1/sandbox? Nev1 (talk) 21:09, 30 August 2016 (UTC)
I think (correct me if I'm wrong) the question is along those lines—how to generate a list of the height of every building in Macclesfield over 100 feet high, or the number of goals scored by every player in a specific team. While I don't think it's any great secret that I think the benefits of Wikidata are totally eclipsed by the costs (the straightforward costs of setting it up, the opportunity costs of diverting people from writing into tinkering, and the goodwill costs of relying on a system that's completely incomprehensible to the majority of editors and thus will either mean they skip over updating it and the quality of information deteriorates, or they decide Wikipedia is only interested in recruiting the small subset of nerdy white males who consider "updating someone else's spreadsheet" a worthwhile use of their spare time and instead leave altogether), generating this kind of list is one of the few cases where I can imagine Wikidata could actually be potentially useful to anyone. ‑ Iridescent 22:28, 30 August 2016 (UTC)
Wow, Template:Wikidata list looks exactly like what I was looking for. Thanks! I think I'd even briefly read that blog post (or something similar) but managed to forget all about it. I am going to need to work out how to use that template (or maybe someone will knock up a more user-friendly version with drop-down menus?). I've actually done some editing this evening that might be relevant. I added war graves references to twenty-two articles of MPs killed in WWI (see here) and I added the CWGC person id numbers to their Wikidata items (see here). I actually got those the wrong way round. I could have added the id number on wikidata and then not had to use that number over here, but as these are references (not external links) I want to at least have a record of the numbers in the edit history. I think, though, that this means I could set up a Wikidata list for the 22 MPs killed in WWI. Maybe. I will probably take me a week to work it out unless someone else does it first... <hint, hint> :-) (If that is too easy, maybe someone could work out how to sort the 3000+ pages listed here into obvious groups such as 'cemeteries', 'churches', 'people' and so on - some bright spark will probably tell me I can use Wikidata to do this, as the articles all have Wikidata entries that will indicate whether the article is about a person or something else, the 'instance of' property, I think). Carcharoth (talk) 23:57, 30 August 2016 (UTC)
@RexxS: Thanks, the module looks good. Would you add an optional link to a specific property on the entry (#P2767 for {{JudoInside}})? — JJMC89 (T·C) 16:13, 31 August 2016 (UTC)
(With apologies to Iridescent for talking technical detail on his talk page) @JJMC89: I deliberately stripped out the #<propertyID> fragment from the link (see Module:WikidataIB line 71, which is what I adapted) because I wanted to keep it simple to use and universal in application as a stand-alone. There are two ways of adding the fragment: either add another parameter to the module and expect the user to know which propertyID to supply; or build the code into an existing module for a template, which is obviously more efficient. Anyway, I've updated to module and template to allow a named |pid= which creates the link you want. I should warn you that because of the way the JavaScript expands the display at Wikidata, you rarely get exactly to the section you want. Here a link to the JudoInside.com ID for Anton Geesink Edit this at Wikidata. You could just incorporate that (or the equivalent module invocation) into Template:JudoInside. I've made a test version of that at Template:JudoInside/sandbox that seems to work when I previewed it in articles. --RexxS (talk) 17:18, 31 August 2016 (UTC)
Much appreciated RexxS! — JJMC89 (T·C) 02:33, 1 September 2016 (UTC)

Arbitration Case opened

You recently offered a statement in a request for arbitration. The Arbitration Committee has accepted that request for arbitration and an arbitration case has been opened at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/The Rambling Man.

Evidence that you wish the arbitrators to consider should be added to the evidence subpage, at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/The Rambling Man/Evidence.

Please add your evidence by September 17, 2016, which is when the evidence phase closes. You can also contribute to the case workshop subpage, Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/The Rambling Man/Workshop. For a guide to the arbitration process, see Wikipedia:Arbitration/Guide to arbitration.

For non-parties who wish to opt out of further notifications for this case please remove yourself from the list held here

For the Arbitration Committee, MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:04, 3 September 2016 (UTC)

This request wasn't heeded, was it? Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 10:40, 3 September 2016 (UTC)
Much as I'm tempted to start blocking clerks for disruption if this recent development continues—not only does it have a chilling effect since people don't want to comment in case it get them added to the clerks' spam list, but it means genuine evidence is buried on the case page among piles of chit-chat—I won't, annoying though it is. They're damned if they do and damned if they don't, since the nature of Wikipedia means that if they don't notify everyone, someone is bound to complain. I've removed myself from the evidence page, however, since nothing I said could remotely be considered "evidence", although some over-eager drone will no doubt restore it.
My thoughts on clerks, clerking, and the necessity of both are on the record already; if the arbs had to manually do all this stuff themselves, it might make them stop and think about whether whatever it is they're directing be done is actually worthwhile. There's no other part of Wikipedia I can think of where a group of editors has their own personal team of servants and guards to make their edits on their behalf and prevent them getting their hands dirty, let alone any other part of Wikipedia where even suggesting such a setup wouldn't be considered seriously screwed up. (I'm not even getting into the idea that "I was told to do so by email" is a legitimate excuse should an edit be challenged.) The whole clerk mentality has always seemed really odd to me; yes, some I assume are good people, but the whole idea that anyone would choose "menial secretarial work for a bunch of earnest nonentities with an inflated sense of their own importance"* as a hobby just strikes me as really weird even by Wikipedia standards. ‑ Iridescent 13:56, 3 September 2016 (UTC)
*I include myself in that.
I have heard some non-complimentary theories about the clerk mentality so I won't raise them. As for arbitrators having clerks, I've always thought it was a diffusion of responsibility sort of thing - so that people don't complain about clerking arbitrators supposedly being "biased". Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 14:37, 3 September 2016 (UTC)
But since the clerks do whatever they do mechanistically, at the direction of an arb, it doesn't do anything to reduce any potential bias—since the clerks explicitly act as tools of the committee, "the arbs didn't do it, the clerks did it" is semantically no different to "Officer, technically I didn't stab him, the knife stabbed him". The official definition of the role of the clerks is the administration of arbitration cases and management of all the Committee's pages and subpages; enforcing Committee decisions; implementing procedures; and enforcing good standards of conduct and decorum on the Committee's pages; none of that is anything the arbs couldn't do for themselves. (Can you imagine the outcry if Jimmy Wales unilaterally appointed a bunch of his friends to "enforce good standards of conduct and decorum"?) The real-world equivalent would be if a judge let random members of the public wander into the courthouse and paddle witnesses with a wooden spoon whenever the judge decided that they'd said something inappropriate. ‑ Iridescent 14:47, 3 September 2016 (UTC)
I can give you my theory on the clerk mentality, albeit based on anecdote. Back in dial-up-internet days I worked briefly on a very early dating website, and one of the biggest head-scratchers was how to police all the uploaded photos to prevent people using topless shots, celebrity photos etc; on the shoestring budgets of the early internet, there was no way we could have paid anyone to monitor all incoming images and we'd have probably struggled even to respond to everything sent to an abuse@ email address. Someone hit on the idea of mailing long-term users, offering them the chance to "be part of the website" and act as volunteer moderators. We were flooded with volunteers who would sit at a computer for hours on end, just pressing Y or N to an endless stream of photographs; and when we set up a high-score table listing who'd checked the most photos and who was in line with consensus most often, people would literally devote all their free time to it, racking up tens of thousands of photos approved/rejected. Never underestimate the desire of some people to play cop and exert control over other people no matter how minor that control may be, particularly in an environment with few consequences for getting it wrong, and with an element of competition to keep people playing. ‑ Iridescent 14:58, 3 September 2016 (UTC)
  • Possibly in some cases, but in some cases it's definitely driven by an urge for authority; there's a certain type of person who will volunteer to do jobs that ordinarily struggle to attract even paid recruits, provided they get a fancy-sounding title and the ability to boss strangers around. The special constables are never short of volunteers, despite doing a job for free which involves being punched in the face and having people vomit on their shoes and struggles to attract paid recruits at c. £40,000 a year, but nobody (I assume) volunteers to do those same police forces' filing for free. ‑ Iridescent 15:25, 3 September 2016 (UTC)
  • I can't let this pass without a link to Fagging. The last sentence in the History section is "It is now believed to be obsolete in Great Britain." I wonder if I'd get away with adding "... but is alive and flourishing in Wikipedia."? I'm guessing probably not. --RexxS (talk) 17:27, 3 September 2016 (UTC)
  • Make an intentionally-libellous edit to one part of the article, add what you want to stick elsewhere in the article using a different account, then use your own account to revert the libellous edit and request it be revdelled. That way not only is a "good" edit the most recent thing in the history thus making the insertion invisible to patrollers, but there's a good chance the revdelling admin will actually hide your insertion from the history while leaving it in place in the article. You're welcome. ‑ Iridescent 17:36, 3 September 2016 (UTC)
  • Bear in mind that these are public schools we're talking about, not normal schools, and while public schools have always been hotbeds of rum, sodomy and the lash they only cater for a tiny, tiny minority of the population (215 boys' and 230 girls' public schools in the entire country, compared to 2500 private schools and 25,000 state schools). While they have a higher profile than other schools because they produce a disproportionate share of public figures, they're not remotely representative of British education. See also Bullingdon Club. ‑ Iridescent 09:58, 4 September 2016 (UTC)

Organising article coverage

Could I get your advice on how to organise some of the material relating to war memorials at the Palace of Westminster? The current article is Parliamentary War Memorial (the history and change in its appearance is covered here), but there are a number of other memorials that I am intending to add more about to Wikipedia. Some of these are already covered in that article, but strictly speaking are separate memorials. There is an overview here and here. Some of that is already mentioned in Parliamentary War Memorial, some of it isn't, and some current mentions could be extended using that and other sources. What I am wondering is what is the best way to organise this? The current options I am pondering are:

  • Moving the current article to Parliamentary war memorials and using sections to write overviews and something about the main memorials. The title may not be specific enough (as it would cover more than just WWI and WII and might be thought to include other parliaments both in the history of the UK and England and elsewhere).
  • Leaving the current article where it is, but writing an overview article such as War memorials at the Palace of Westminster. Linking would be either to the article, or to sections of the article (including anchors to preserve the links), with redirects created as well.
  • Adding material to Palace of Westminster (though it is difficult to add to such a large article). I encountered similar problems when working on specific items at Westminster Abbey, though there was a subsidiary article there at Poets' Corner. These are both buildings with a storied history; maybe other articles on other buildings have taken a similar approach? St Paul's Cathedral has a section on tombs and memorials. Sometimes articles or sections are written on specific rooms or buildings (e.g. Royal Gallery and Westminster Hall) or institutions (House of Lords Library and House of Commons Library).
  • Separate articles for the House of Lords memorial in the Royal Gallery, and possibly for the WWII stained glass window (though this is more logically seen as an extension to the Parliamentary War Memorial in Westminster Hall). The other memorials don't really have enough to justify separate articles. Some will just end up referred to elsewhere, such as adding this to the Kitchener article. There are various other statues and plaques and items at different locations.
I am tending towards an overview article, though the IWM war memorials inventory has some fascinating details about the House of Lords memorial which is making me think there is enough for a separate article:

"The peers wanted their own memorial to be separate from the joint memorial in St. Stephen's Porch. The project was delayed by controversy over the site, the rejection of designs from all four artists invited to submit, and the complex process of deciding who was eligible for inclusion. In 1925, Lord Iveagh bequeathed £20,000 for thirteen murals by Frank Brangwyn as a memorial in the Royal Gallery. Five were completed, but were rejected in 1930 and are now in Swansea Guildhall."[65]

That entry also says: "This memorial record is currently under review and will be updated shortly. Please check back again soon." Which is good, but also annoying as I bet they don't provide a revision history... The stained glass window IWM inventory entry is here. I am going to dump various other IWM links I found somewhere else now (the backstory and details of the books of remembrance are particularly fascinating, as more can be said about these than you would think - they had full unveiling ceremonies, for a start). Am still unsure whether to do the overview or article approach. Where a memorial has a backstory and a well-documented design process (including costs, material used, named architects and so on), photos, an unveiling ceremony, an inscription, and was reported on in the news at the time, and a number of notable names, there is a fair amount that can be included. But it will rarely be more than a few paragraphs for anything other than the most famous ones (which I really need to get back to writing about at some point). Carcharoth (talk) 04:58, 2 September 2016 (UTC)
My instinct would be that If you think there's enough material to write an over-arching War memorials at the Palace of Westminster or even better, Monuments and memorials at the Palace of Westminster, that would probably be a good thing, as it would provide a place to park short paragraphs about those elements about which there's not enough to say to create a stand-alone article. Assuming there's enough material to write stand-alone articles on a given memorial, they can be spun off into subpages, in the same way that we treat multiple structures which are part of the same complex but are independently notable. There are certainly precedents for this approach when it comes to monuments and memorials—the articles on individual memorials and graves in Category:Arlington National Cemetery spring to mind—so it's not like this would be some kind of bizarre outrider.
Study of Alexandra FeodorovnaRoom 2White Drawing Room of Alexandra FeodorovnaThe Malachite RoomConcert HallThe Nicholas HallThe Great AntechamberThe Jordan StaircaseThe Field Marshall's HallThe Small Throne RoomThe Armorial HallMilitary GallerySt. George's HallSmall HermitageNew HermitageThe Grand ChurchThe Alexander HallDrawing-Room of the suite of Grand Duchess Maria Nikolayevna and her husband Duke Maximilian LeuchtenbergWar Gallery (suite of 5 rooms)The White HallGold Drawing RoomThe Crimson CabinetBoudoir of Empress Maria AlexandrovnaAlexander II's StudyThe School RoomThe RotundaGothic LibraryThe Arabian HallPortrait Gallery of the Romanov DynastyRoom 29Palace EmbankmentNevaCourt GardenPalace SquareStaff of the Corpus of GuardsWest gardenWest gardenThe October StaircaseApollo HallRoom 38Principal EntranceHau Winter GardenHau Winter GardenThe Dark CorridorDressing Room of Alexandra FeodorovnaPompei Dining RoomBedroom of the Tsarevich's suitepart of the Tsarevich's suiteThe Guard RoomPrivate rooms of the Imperial FamilyPrivate rooms of the Imperial Family
Unscaled plan of the 1st floor of the Winter Palace as it appears today, the fourth palace on the site. The numbers in this key are referred to throughout the article—click on numbers for images, pages and further details.
Although it breaches WP:ACCESS six ways to breakfasttime, a sketch-map of the PoW complex with the sites of each memorial as a clickable link and references to the numbers in the body text, along the lines of {{Winter Palace}}, would probably be quite useful. A lot of the traffic for such an article would probably either be people looking to find out exactly where the memorial to their Great Uncle Archibald is situated, or people who've recently visited the PoW wanting to know what that memorial they saw in (insert corridor) is called, and this would be quite useful to both.
I'm weakly against Parliamentary war memorials as a title, since it's too vague. Given the naming conventions in the English-speaking world for these things, I imagine most readers will assume it's a reference to the casualties of a conflict called the Parliamentary War. As you say, it's also ambiguous since presumably at least some other parliaments include memorials of some kind, and it could also be taken to mean memorials erected by parliamentary decree, or to Parliamentarian troops in the Civil War.
I'd be against adding more than a couple of sentences and maybe a few {{main}} templates to Palace of Westminster itself. It's already up to 12,000 words and really doesn't need any more bloat, especially given that on a conservative estimate 99% of those reading the article aren't interested in the war memorials.
I'd imagine you could get enough material to write a stand-alone article on virtually any memorial, just from the Times coverage of the dedication ceremony. Whether you should is another matter; if nobody is going to want to read the things, there's no point creating yet another stub to add to the pile. I've always been firmly of the opinion that in most cases, one long article is more useful to the reader than a bunch of short ones, as it provides context to the topic and avoids having to provide the same background information on multiple pages. (If I had my way, about 75% of the articles on Wikipedia would be rolled together into broad topics—I see no reason why we need stand-alone articles on The Grapes, The Duke's Head, The Spread Eagle, The Bedford and The Falcon, rather than Pubs in Wandsworth, and you can repeat that exercise on virtually any topic you care to name.)
Although it would annoy the purists since it's not technically part of the PoW, it would probably be sensible to include the Parliament Square memorials (and probably the Cenotaph and this eyesore) in any overarching article. They're much more likely to be search topics (since tens of thousands of people a day see them, rather than a couple of dozen people on organised tours of the PoW), and they fit into the same broad theme of "military monuments considered significant enough to be erected at the heart of government". Remember, there's no point writing something if nobody reads it, so provided it doesn't get too bloated a broad article is better than a narrow one. The disadvantage—other than potential bloat—is that Parliament Square is much more of a focus of nutters than the PoW, so an article expanded to cover it would be harder to keep clear of POV-pushing and protestcruft than a PoW-only article languishing in uncontroversial obscurity. ‑ Iridescent 14:17, 2 September 2016 (UTC)
Thanks. Overview it will be then. Though I do like Template:Public art in London and List of public art in London. Quite easy to get lost meandering around in there. Carcharoth (talk) 14:27, 2 September 2016 (UTC)
If there were some way to give a brief location of each item as part of its description in the overarching article ("about half-way along the north wall of Flagellator's Gallery") then you would satisfy concerns about WP:ACCESS, as the image would not be the sole means of providing the information. We accept that we can't be expected to provide to image-less readers everything that can be found in an image, but having the key bits of the information elsewhere is some sort of compensation. --RexxS (talk) 16:20, 2 September 2016 (UTC)
I would have thought that any overarching article would be arranged geographically, so that shouldn't be an issue. (My attitude towards WP:ACCESS has always been that while it's important, the it is best treated with common sense, and occasional exceptions may apply needs to be taken seriously rather than just as a piece of skimmed-over boilerplate—if a particular change will be useful to a lot of readers but there's no way to implement it without inconveniencing a few, then WP:ACCESS shouldn't be taken as a reason not to make the change. Too many people—not you—don't really grasp what "reasonable adjustments" actually means, and treat it as "if it inconveniences even a single reader, it needs to go".) One day, I'm going to cite WP:ACCIM as a pretext to add alt-text to the images on Rorschach test. "Two foxes kissing", "smurfs high-fiving", "limbo dancers carrying shopping bags", "fat guy on a Harley", "bat", "cow seen from below next to a dragonfly", "trowel", "woman in a corset holding ferrets", "the stains in the toilet bowl when you puke up WKD" and "Eiffel Tower with seahorses", if you're wondering. ‑ Iridescent 16:03, 3 September 2016 (UTC)
Talking of WP:ACCESS issues, I was reading through MOS:LIST and came across this:

"Although the use of tables to display lists is discouraged—because they provide low-quality accessibility and have a more complex notation that hinders editing—there are some instances where they can be useful, such as when three or more columns are required."

I then went and looked at WP:FL to see what forms various lists I have been compiling usually take, and it seems that complex lists and tables are not as common as I thought (such as lists-as-tables with, um, 12 columns)... That table is based on this one, which when I started it back in 2009 looked like this. About a day later, the bullet-pointed list had got to this stage (remember that this editing was taking place in a userspace draft) and I then turned it into a table, one that had 13 columns (I merged two later). No-one else seemed to copy that style, until July this year when an editor attempted to copy the format and was doing OK (though hadn't managed to complete the table). I welcomed them, offered to help, and then ended up finishing the article to produce this. I can see that tables are far, far easier to read and work with when they are kept simple, but I am wondering how common the more complex multi-column tables are. Are there tables out there that use many, many columns? Many ones presenting scientific data of some sort? Would it even be possible to search Wikipedia for tables with many columns? I need to work out what to do with the draft table I have (offline) with about 20 columns and work out how to present things in a simpler fashion... (maybe combining prose, sections and smaller tables, rather than cramming everything into a single table). I quite like the approach taken at List of Presidents of the United States who died in office. I never knew you could just have the sections of an article be the items in a list! (PS. I have no intention of trying to produce a massively complex map with links embedded - I had enough trouble even figuring out how to do a fade-in and fade-out .gif for the different classes of relatives listed here, and concluded it would take far too much time to do). Carcharoth (talk) 17:29, 3 September 2016 (UTC)
Tables are complex markup. I will probably need one on the Lake Tauca draft so that I can keep track of all the proposed durations of event. I've seen very complex tables in sports articles where they indicate data about competitions and the like. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 17:32, 3 September 2016 (UTC)
You wouldn't need to produce the map yourself—there are people who enjoy the challenge of things like that who would do it for nothing if asked. Jack Merridew was very good at things like that, if you can winkle him out of wherever he's currently hiding. ‑ Iridescent 17:39, 3 September 2016 (UTC)
(ec) I've also heard that tables are easier to do in Visual Editor now. I am going to insert all the fancy mark-up in an Excel spreadsheet I have, dump the result (which includes oodles of notes and links not suitable for the published version) into the draft page in my userspace, and then see what it looks like (a good trick is to footnote anything complex and leave the table contents itself simple). I think I will eventually have to split the draft table into two smaller tables, as the list is an intersection of two topics and can be split that way fairly easily. Carcharoth (talk) 17:43, 3 September 2016 (UTC)

Break: tables

The table has been done now. Only 11 columns and the first three could be merged (though the ability to sort by both birth year and death year would be lost - the column could be sorted by one, but not both). Logically, the default order is by date of death. Anyway, lots of notes as well, most of them can be ignored as it is mainly the table I am looking for advice on: see here. Should I stick with that single table, or go the route of having three separate tables/listings? The topic divides quite logically into three areas, as can be seen from the notes. Or should the focus be more on prose and less on tables? There will be lots of prose to go with the tables, but where should the line be drawn between the two? Carcharoth (talk) 09:01, 4 September 2016 (UTC)

My instinct is always for prose over tables wherever possible, since tables are much harder to read (particularly in mobile view), but in this particular case I can see the argument that sortability takes precedence over readibility, as some readers will want the list chronological, some will want it by party, some will want it by name and some will want it by unit. I don't think it would make sense to use more than one table; having multiple tables with the same names is just confusing, while "all listed together with equal prominence" is such a well-embedded convention when it comes to lists of military casualties that I think it would be quite jarring to readers to see the list split. I do think you need to make "party" sortable, since "how many from each party?" is going to be one of the most common things quick-skimmers are looking for. If you need to save width, "place of death" and "place of burial" could probably be dropped from the tables, provided they're in each person's article.
Oddly enough (and to play Devil's Advocate), tables are sometimes easier to read than prose in a couple of scenarios. On a HD desktop screen, the table of "Members and former Members of the UK Parliament who died in the First World War" takes one screen's worth of scrolling to see the entire table and gives me an at-a-glance view of the information. I find it very easy to find a particular individual and then each piece of their information. One use for that might be if someone revisits the page looking for a single piece of information, like "Was Alexander George Boteville Thynne buried in the same place as Ninian Crichton-Stuart?" then it's easy to find the answer. I make no claim as to the frequency that such information may be sought. ‑ Iridescent 09:44, 4 September 2016 (UTC)
For a screen reader like JAWS, a properly marked-up table can be jumped to with a couple of keystrokes as soon as the page is opened (call up a list of all the table captions and go to the one you want). Then table mode can be engaged which allows the screen reader to traverse the table in any direction, for example you could go to the column "Military rank and regiment" and then travel downwards, cell-by-cell. On a properly marked up table, the listener would hear first: "Thomas Charles Reginald Agar-Robartes; Military rank and regiment; Captain, Coldstream Guards", then when moving down one cell: "Guy Victor Baring; Military rank and regiment; Lieutenant Colonel, Coldstream Guards", and so on (i.e. "row header; column header; cell contents"). Giving the ability to a blind visitor to browse through a table just following a single topic, like rank and regiment, is quite an increase in functionality over prose. Now you know me better than to think I'm advocating turning the encyclopedia into a collection of tabular information - I'm just saying that there's an upside; and where there's a place for a well planned, laid-out and marked-up table, we need not be ashamed to include it. You may need to read WP:Manual of Style/Accessibility/Data tables tutorial to maximise the number of screen readers that can benefit from your work (or I could mark it up for you). Cheers --RexxS (talk) 16:10, 4 September 2016 (UTC)
Oh, I'm not some kind of anti-table zealot—the reason Carcharoth is asking my opinion is because I'm the author of List of tablets on the Memorial to Heroic Self Sacrifice which (as one of the first tables of its nature) has become something of a template for "list of all the names on a particular memorial" tables which need to include complex references-within-footnotes-within-tables markup and to be sortable in multiple ways. I do, however, recognise that quite often on Wikipedia tables add an additional layer of complexity which makes the page virtually uneditable, and can wreck the reading experience for readers on phones or small-screen devices like Kindles. (Given what today's TFA is, I'll point out Infrastructure of the Brill Tramway which if I do say so myself is a good example of something which could have been a table, but is better for both readers and for future editors as a list comprised of nested subheads.) ‑ Iridescent 16:50, 4 September 2016 (UTC)
Thanks both (and I'll come back to you, RexxS for the mark-up when it gets into article space). I am going to ignore mobile views as all tables seem to suffer there. I do think my idea of three tables does have merit, but it will need a lot of work to bring that out. It will be an absolute PITA to split an existing table into three. Certainly there are limitations to what can be achieved, and there will be lots of prose, no worries about that (though a lot of it will be in footnotes). I do despair a bit at things like List of women linguists. That doesn't look any better than it did when created back in January. At least it honestly tells the reader up-front that it is bot-generated (technically, the bot is the middleman, ferrying over data carefully mined and checked possibly by humans). If technical stuff is too boring, is it worth trying to winkle out a birth date for Francis Bennett-Goldney? Interesting character - name change and story of a jewellery theft. Carcharoth (talk) 17:00, 4 September 2016 (UTC)
I take it you've seen the talk page at List of women linguists (or the recent history of the page)? It is not a great advertisement for bot-generated tables. ‑ Iridescent 17:22, 4 September 2016 (UTC)
Indeed. I thought such lists were to be used sparingly and carefully, mostly in project or userspaces to help generate content that would be checked. Incidentally, regarding sorting by party political affiliation in such tables, there are issues with that which are better brought out in prose. The various flavours of Unionism around at that time, primarily. This list of MPs that died is not to do with their politics, except in the case of Kettle and Redmond, who were both in their own ways had their ideals magnified by their deaths. Apart from that, they were all united in death and in a common cause as the various people planning the memorials were at pains to point out (it was, obviously, not put on the memorials). I even considered leaving out the party affiliation altogether. I dread to think how Wikidata would sort lists of politicians (the problem of course is the quality of the data that was harvested). Carcharoth (talk) 17:36, 4 September 2016 (UTC)
On a dig for Bennett-Goldney's birthdate through the British Library newspaper archive, while I haven't found his birthdate I have found quite a bit of coverage of the case of Paterson v. Evans, a very high-profile court case involving the family in which a will was "found" granting Frank Evans a large sum provided he adopted the Bennett-Goldney name, with the strong implication that he'd faked the whole thing. Assuming "Frank Bennett Goldney, formerly Frank Evans" is the same guy (I'm fairly certain that he is, as it gives his father's name as Sebastian Evans), then Scotch Will Case Glasgow Herald (Glasgow, Scotland), Wednesday, March 18, 1896, Gale Document Number: BC3203845706 has him giving his age as 34 in 1896, which would make the 1865 birthdate incorrect. He sounds like a contemptible little shit. ‑ Iridescent 17:54, 4 September 2016 (UTC)
middle-aged man in military uniform
Francis Bennett-Goldney, 1918
Because I'm, like, helpful and stuff, have a photo of him. ‑ Iridescent 18:12, 4 September 2016 (UTC)
Um, certainly not your standard politician, I think I'll say. He was mayor of Canterbury, but they don't seem to have put any memorials up to him. Of all the people on that list I looked for other memorials for, he was the one I failed completely. I did find a portrait of him in the IWM collections. And this webpage has a lot. I just noticed that his brother published a book by him (FBG) post-humously, so I suppose that was a memorial of sorts. He can't have been all bad, if he was involved with something such as Beaney House of Art and Knowledge. The obituary in The Times said he was "about 53". The CWGC claim he was 51. The 1865 year is given in the Commons book of remembrance, but I suspect they got that from The Times claim of 53 (the book of remembrance biographies are in part compiled from the obituaries in The Times, and the book was then put in the Commons Library and later redone with input from the parents [who had identified lamentable deficiences] and unveiled properly in 1932). Thanks for the photo! (any more where those came from?) Carcharoth (talk) 18:23, 4 September 2016 (UTC)
Tons more, provided you can get into the Illustrated London News archive—they were very big on illustrated rolls of honour. That article alone has photos of 18 casualties, including David Jennings. (I don't really like copy-pasting ILN images, as while it's certainly legal under Bridgman Corel, I don't think it's particularly ethical to impact on their business by taking images they provide to researchers as a public service and releasing them into the public domain—however, the likely loss to them of this particular picture is negligible since I can't imagine anyone would ever pay for it.) ‑ Iridescent 18:55, 4 September 2016 (UTC)

Re:Random order

Your explanation makes sense, it's just that there are over 50 names. I guess the random order is the arbs' problem to deal with. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 20:28, 6 September 2016 (UTC)

@Baseball Bugs, remember, from the arbs point of view "order in which they commented" makes more sense than alphabetical order (which would give artificial prominence to those at the beginning of the alphabet). Think of it as a court transcript; you wouldn't expect it to be re-ordered to arrange the testimony by order of the witnesses' names. From experience, what will be happening is a few of the arbs watching every diff in real time, while the rest read the whole thing top-to-bottom every couple of days. (This is shaping up to be one of the weirdest cases I've ever seen, given that of the three parties one made an initial statement and then seems to have wandered off, one isn't participating at all, and one is raving semi-coherently, while even among those who say there's a problem which needs addressing nobody seems to agree on what the problem actually is. I don't envy whoever ends up having to draft a formal response to this crap—if Wikipedia Review were still about they'd be laughing their socks off at the time otherwise sensible people are investing in this.) ‑ Iridescent 20:44, 6 September 2016 (UTC)
I was surprised the arbs' took the case. It must be a slow time for them. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 21:21, 6 September 2016 (UTC)
I did advise them not to, but nobody listens to me. I've yet to see anything that couldn't have been resolved with a "chill out, take those pages off your watchlist, and work on something else for a while". ‑ Iridescent 21:26, 6 September 2016 (UTC)
You were too cool and calm. It might have worked better had you invoked this old slogan: "You'll be SOOOORRY!" ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 23:55, 6 September 2016 (UTC)

Plague pit

Thanks for spotting that and correcting my error -- please accept my apologies for accidentally conflating the two plague outbreaks, hundreds of years apart. -- Markshale (talk) 18:42, 12 September 2016 (UTC)

No worries. There's not been any doubt for some years that the pathogen for the 14th-century outbreak was Y. pestis; the significance of the 2016 paper is that it verifies that the 1665 epidemic was a modified form of the same disease (which wasn't by any means certain, given that the mortality rates of the two outbreaks were so wildly different). The 2016 paper is getting more publicity than it probably deserves, because MoLAS are flogging this particular horse for all it's worth having belatedly figured out that their parent organisation is about to embark on a very expensive move to Smithfield, that unless the money to pay for that move is coaxed out of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, the Corporation of London or the Greater London Authority (none of whom are reknowned for generosity) somebody will get their budget cut to pay for it, and that there's one particular wing of the MoL which is extremely expensive to run and which wouldn't have much impact on visitor numbers or gift-shop sales if it were scrapped. ‑ Iridescent 18:53, 12 September 2016 (UTC)

More on memorials

Could I ask for some more advice on memorials (presuming the goings on at {{cite newspaper The Times}} aren't too much of a distraction)? Most of the advice I am after relates to the notes at User:Carcharoth/WWI and WWII deaths, mostly right at the bottom of that page in the 'gallery' and 'links' sections.

  • The armorial/heraldic shields/coats of arms - I have a vague knowledge of how these work, and I know that the idea is that from written descriptions people are able to construct the shields. Because some of these MPs were sons of peers, some from families with well-established titles, some of the armorial shields already exist on Wikipedia. However, there are subtle differences between them and the shields displayed in the Commons Chamber (which was destroyed in WWII and rebuilt with replacement shields). Obviously I need to find a source which actually discusses this (if one exists), but would you know anything about these differences? e.g. Earl of Rosebery and Primrose heraldic shield are the same, but there are sometimes differences in colour and additional symbols, e.g. compare Aberconway barons and McLaren heraldic shield (white flags and blue crescent moon). Also Walrond and Walrond arms (obvious differences). I should probably find someone who draws these shields and find out what they know (plus actual sources on what Parliament did).
  • Memorial and headstone inscriptions. Down the bottom of that page, in the links section, I have dumped the headstone inscriptions that I found. I'm a bit wary of including these, as some of them can be very personal (they were chosen by the next of kin). Some have encyclopedic relevance, some don't. I have included these in the past (e.g. here), but I am not sure about including them as a general matter. It feels, silly though it may sound to say it, like intruding on personal grief, even after 100 years (for an example of what people can be moved to do, see here). Memorial inscriptions can also be included, and some sources do transcribe these, such as here and here (translating them is another matter). For some reason, quoting memorial inscriptions feels different to quoting headstone inscriptions. Finding sources that go into actual details is rare, though, but sometimes the sources of the often-poetic lines (unless they are an original creation) is obvious, try looking up this one for example, or this one.
  • Hansard quotes and parliamentary debates and tributes. I was quite impressed when I stumbled across the tributes paid to Neil Primrose in parliament, and went and added them to his article. Was unsure if that was excessive or not. Really, secondary sources discussing the tributes paid are needed as well, to put them in context. I had half-expected to find parliament doing this for all the MPs killed, but it seems not. A couple of references, and the rather stark formal notices of by-elections ('writs' issued 'in the room of' the MP killed), but not that much. One example is here. Can that be used as a source, or should I be wary of quoting directly from primary sources like that?

Incidentally, I am not the only one to wonder what criteria were used for inclusion for various memorials in Parliament. See the November 2013 debate here, where Chris Bryant said: "There are three shields from the first world war that I think are missing from the Chamber." Lyell and Kettle were former MPs, so I can understand them not being included. Not sure why Esmonde got left out though (the writ is here so he was an MP at the time of his death). There were also former MPs killed who were not commemorated as MPs on the parliamentary memorials: Charles Duncombe, 2nd Earl of Feversham, Gerald Archibald Arbuthnot and Mark Sykes. Duncombe is included on the memorial to the peers killed in the war. Why those two former MPs (Duncombe and Arbuthnot) and one current MP (Sykes) were not included and Kettle and Lyell were, I don't know (Lyell was an MP during the war, but not at the time of his death; Sykes died after the armistice but before the formal peace treaties and within the period where he would be included by the CWGC). Maybe they just failed to notice? Or maybe Kettle was a special case? Anyway, finishing on different note, the list of MPs killed in WWI (the canonical figure of 22) has been in the Wikipedia article space in list form since May 2008. You can cheat by using 'what links here' for those in the list, but try and see if you can find the list just by searching... Carcharoth (talk) 05:15, 10 September 2016 (UTC)

File:Times May 10 1830.jpeg
Page 2 of The Times as it was formatted in 1830
Regarding the Times brouhaha, I've commented there, not that I imagine it will do any good. I think this is a big misunderstanding; because the software was lagging, it looks like Andy genuinely believed that the template wasn't in use which is obviously not the case. It might make it easier to understand why we give the column number when citing the Times to see just how crammed the paper's news section was in single-big-sheet days owing to the need to cram everything onto two 'pages' and consequently how useless a citation which only gives the page number is.
I don't really understand coats of arms, but I'm aware that they cause hugely disproportionate arguments on Wikipedia, either from people claiming they're not illustrated correctly, or claiming copyright over them and demanding they be removed. BrownHairedGirl or Giano might understand how these things work, or be able to point you towards someone who does. Alternatively, it might be worth just writing to the College of Arms, who are paid to actually understand this nonsense and presumably can issue definitive rulings on the correct way to approach these things.
I'd be inclined to include headstone inscriptions, unless they were obviously intended to be for the family only (e.g. a plaque within a family mausoleum). As I've said previously in a different context, a tombstone is pretty much the canonical example of "work of artistic craftsmanship on permanent display to the public", and any who genuinely didn't want something to be read by other people wouldn't be engraving it on a stone tablet and putting it in a highly visible open space, so I see no ethical issues at all with reproducing their contents. I also agree with the line taken by the CWGC (and I assume their equivalents in other countries) that photographing and documenting military graves helps both in spreading the memory of people and deeds who might otherwise be forgotten, and preserving the record in case the site itself is destroyed (I'm guessing Aleppo War Cemetery is probably not being maintained), and is thus A Good Thing.
I don't really buy the "intruding on personal grief" argument—these people have been dead for a century so I assume their relatives are over it by now, and it serves as a useful reminder to readers that these were real people with real families, not the braying nitwits fresh from the minor-public-school assembly line for which "British army officer" usually serves as shorthand.
There is no issue at all with quoting primary sources as evidence that something happened (in this case that the House paid tribute to those killed); the only issue would be if you were to claim in Wikipedia's voice that they set a splendid example of patriotism, etc.
I will guess (emphasis on guess) that Esmonde was left off the memorial because the family were very closely associated with Fine Gael (two of his sons went on to be Fine Gael TDs), and the family didn't want to be publicly associated with the British Army by the time the memorial came to be built in 1921–22, so asked that he kept off. When it comes to "obscure Irish MPs and TDs", BHG is the one to ask. As regards Arbuthnot, Kittybrewster can tell you more than you ever wanted to know about any given member of the Arbuthnot family. I'll guess that the reason Sykes wasn't included was that because he died after the Armistice and died of flu rather than war wounds, they felt the link was too tenuous to justify including him as a casualty of the war. ‑ Iridescent 14:57, 12 September 2016 (UTC)
Thanks muchly for the advice. The 'cite newspaper The Times' thing was a misunderstanding. I have apologised to Andy, though I don't know if he has seen that yet. The day-of-the-week I've never understood (and that has been questioned over at the discussion). I have several questions to ask the College of Arms, so maybe I will try that approach. Please don't get me started on whether it is OK to put photographs of war memorials in France up on Commons. Several discussions at Commons have failed to make any headway against the FoP (freedom of panorama) obstacle.
About destroyed or inaccessible or unmaintainable sites and memorials, that has happened several times in the course of the now nearly 100 years of history of the CWGC - they are remarkably adaptable. They just document what happened, when they can get access again they assess the situation and save what they can, and if necessary re-establish the memorial somewhere else. A good example of that is the Port Tewfik Memorial (and the Aden Memorial, with no article yet). Over in Iraq, there is the Basra Memorial, which has an interesting history having been moved once already. There are also very remote cemeteries in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia (and some in Central Africa I think) that were essentially abandoned and the names inscribed instead on a suitable memorial. The Commission has to be practical and pragmatic in such cases.
About Hansard, I am a bit cheesed off as it appears that the grand digitisation project, named "1803-2005", is annoyingly incomplete. The project seems to have run out of steam in around 2008 (maybe a victim of the financial crisis) and this page gives an indication of what areas are incomplete. Zooming in on the series that includes the First World War period, we see that several volumes from the war years have not been digitised. This would explain why my searches were proving fruitless. I have no idea if they intend to restart/complete the digitisation project at some point, but hopefully they will.
About the specific MPs, I agree about Sykes, but the whole Irish connection is a minefield of politics. Redmond and Kettle were ardent Irish nationalists, so I don't see that Esmonde would have been left out if they were included. And Esmonde is on the other parliamentary memorials. It is only the heraldic shields in the Commons that he was left out of. I suspect it may be something to do with Kettle and Lyell being former MPs, and Esmonde being far less on active service than the others (who all were directly wounded in some way and who all went abroad on active service). Esmonde, as far as I can tell, just did recruiting at home in Ireland (this is clearer if you read this account which confirms that he served at home and died at home - those accounts are largely copied from the obituaries in The Times as far as I can tell, but that one contains a glorious nugget about "a scheme for the manufacture of synthetic rubber from artichokes"). Note also that two of his sons served and one died and is also commemorated in that book of remembrance - I don't think anyone really got left out of these books, which tried to rise above politics. The heraldic shields appear to have been reserved for those who were MPs at the time of their death, and who had actually served in action in some way. Carcharoth (talk) 19:52, 12 September 2016 (UTC)
I'll guess that the "day of the week" field reflects that the Times and Sunday Times have historically taken very different editorial lines, but convention is that they're archived as if they were a single publication, so it's sometimes important to know which day of the week is being cited. I don't think the marginal benefit justifies keeping the additional field, though.
On the photos, the War Grave Photographic Project would probably release some images into the public domain if you asked nicely, which would circumvent the problem. They pay for the service through the sale of high-resolution images, but you could make a decent case that the widespread circulation of low-quality photos will more than pay for itself by raising awareness of this service. There are probably hundreds of thousands of people who would happily pay for a high-quality image of Uncle Barney's grave but don't have the time, money or inclination to trek out to Normandy or El Alamein to take one; by releasing a couple of hundred images of selected graves into the public domain (possibly at a lower resolution) it would raise awareness that they offer this service. (IANAL but I don't see how image rights could be a restriction, even for the cemeteries in places like France which don't recognise FoP, given that the CWGC are the creators of the 'works' being photographed and have already said they don't object. If Commons are causing problems, just upload the images to en-wikipedia and periodically revert the bot when it tries to tag them.)
Digital Hansard has always been a mess. I would assume it's not so much a by-product of the financial crisis (the costs involved are minimal; the BL would probably do it for nothing if the Cabinet Office asked politely) as of the general distrust by all later governments of any of Blair's pet IT projects. The legislation database also stopped being updated around the same time. ‑ Iridescent 20:36, 12 September 2016 (UTC)
The Commons issue is not about the general photos of the cemeteries, or pictures of grave headstones, but the architectural elements of the cemeteries (quite extensive in some cases) and photos of the memorials (which are even more clearly architectural works). The architects, even though employed by the Commission, were clearly the designers with the rights under French law. I tried the works-for-hire argument, but it didn't fly. The memorials by Lutyens and Blomfield are now public domain. The ones by Baker will be public domain from 1 January 2017 (he died on 4 February 1946). Holden is a bit more tricky, as he didn't die until 1960. And some of the junior architects lived on until much later. But as you say, uploading to en-Wikipedia tends to be the way to go. Though the image discussions here can be fraught as well, as you found recently. I am aware of TWGPP, and am pondering the best approach there. Carcharoth (talk) 21:14, 12 September 2016 (UTC)
And speaking as an enwiki admin who works in Files for discussion, images with freedom of panorama issues get deleted here as well. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 21:17, 12 September 2016 (UTC)
<sniffle> One day, there will be universal Freedom of Panorama! :-) Carcharoth (talk) 21:25, 12 September 2016 (UTC)
PS. Going back to the 'intruding on personal grief' bit, maybe you saw this image. Cover of a memorial service is fine (the provenance is interesting, Google 'Sammlung Fane-De Salis' to see the other images from that archive), but would you open the booklet and take the reader into the funeral service itself? Some funerals are public (even state occasions), and reported on in the newspapers. Others are private affairs, but the service booklets can pop up in strange places many years later! Carcharoth (talk) 21:23, 12 September 2016 (UTC)
Honestly, I don't see personal grief or intrusion as an issue in this context. Every person who was old enough to personally knew a WWI fatality has been dead for twenty years; I don't see it as any more intrusive than is visiting a preserved house and going into other people's bedrooms, or reading Pepys's diary. Per my previous comments, I'd consider anything which helps us illustrate how these people were like ourselves and how they differed is a good thing. For WWII casualties I'd be slightly more careful, as in some cases there may be family members alive. On issues, yes images here get deleted as well, but the Wikipedia admins who work with images tend to be considerably more sensible than those at Commons, and are willing to disregard the tag-bombers rather than having the "delete, I've not heard of it" mentality which is increasingly prevalent at Commons. (My opinions of Commons are on record, but I'll repeat them; if I were Katherine Maher I'd shut it down tomorrow, have each image hosted on the appropriate Wikipedia for the country in which it was taken/painted, and set up a cross-wiki indexing system so files on one wikipedia are accessible from all WMF projects. Commons was a fudge of a solution a decade ago, the problem it was intended to solve no longer exists, and lord alone knows its continued existence and stubborn unwillingness to abide by even the vaguest notion of ethics causes more problems than it solves.) ‑ Iridescent 22:20, 12 September 2016 (UTC)
Some images are taken in one country and published in another. Some were taken in countries that no longer exist. Commons has its problems, but I think centralisation is a good thing here. Carcharoth (talk) 22:38, 12 September 2016 (UTC)

File:Times May 10 1830.jpeg

Can I dispute the USonly tag you added there? It is extremely unlikely the author(s) of a newspaper article written in 1830 would be still alive in 1946, which they would have to be in order for copyright to still subsist in 2016. And if the author(s) weren't known the copyright would have expired by 1900/1901. I have looked at the copyright laws and I don't see any special provisions there. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 16:21, 15 September 2016 (UTC)

Bridgeman Corel is a US-only, not a global, ruling. England (where the Times is published) has sweat-of-the-brow still in place, and there's no question at all that Gale and News UK still claim copyright over the Times back catalogue (as the big copyright notices throughout the archives make clear); if you got the actual vintage newspapers and scanned them yourselves, the resulting images would be PD in Europe but taking images where the scan has been performed by a newspaper library, would certainly be open to challenge. Yes, the NPG dispute settled down to a grumbling stalemate, but the NPG has a reputation which would be damaged by pushing the WMF to the wire; News International wouldn't bat an eyelid at pushing a lawsuit until it bankrupted the Foundation, given that Wikipedia is a direct competitor to their commercial interests. I've done a G7 deletion of the file in question, as I have no intention of letting you drag me into a dispute with one of the most litigious corporations on the planet just to make some kind of point. ‑ Iridescent 19:08, 15 September 2016 (UTC)
Ah, the PD-Art/PD-Scan issue. I've never understood why the WMF made a statement about it applying to non-New York jurisdictions. I see from Google that the scanning thing has generated quite a bit of copyright debates. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 19:50, 15 September 2016 (UTC)

Candaules

I missed your recent Etty FAC because I was preoccupied with "other stuff". A pity, because the subject of Candaules and Gyges has interested me since I read about it in A Dance to the Music of Time years ago. The eleventh volume of that series has an extended episode which analyses a ceiling painting of the bedroom incident by Tiepolo, found in a Venetian palazzo. Is this a real or imaginary painting, do you know? The analysis is certainly very interesting. Brianboulton (talk) 23:13, 16 September 2016 (UTC)

Sort of. The painting is imaginary, however Russell Gwinnett says "I’ve been told it’s not unlike the Villa Valmarana Iphigenia in composition", and the Villa Valmarana Iphigenia by Tiepolo does exist. (I can't think of any painting which actually matches the description in Temporary Kings—An unclothed hero, from his appurtenances a king, reclined on the divan or couch that was the focus of the picture. One single tenuous fold of gold-edged damask counterpane, elsewhere slipped away from his haughtily muscular body, undeniably emphasized (rather than concealed) the physical anticipation to which Pamela referred, of pleasure to be enjoyed in a few seconds time; for a lady, also naked, tall and fair haired, was moving across the room to join him where he lay.)
There's a blog discussing the provenance of the pictures in ADTTMOT at https://picturesinpowell.com/ which isn't by any stretch a reliable source, but looks considerably more intelligent than your typical Wordpress blog.
A Dance to the Music of Time
The World Before the Flood
If you want an Etty–Powell parallel, there's an even closer one at The World Before the Flood, which bears more than a passing similarity to A Dance to the Music of Time itself. (It was painted as a conscious imitation of Poussin; it is fair to say that opinion was divided as to whether this was a good idea.) ‑ Iridescent 08:24, 17 September 2016 (UTC)
Thank you, that's very interesting. I will certainly look at the blog. You'll recall that Pamela put her reference to "physical anticipation" a bit more bluntly. Brianboulton (talk) 10:16, 17 September 2016 (UTC)
The Lady Catherine de Burgh will likely never speak to me again for admitting it, but to me ADTTMOT sits neatly alongside Blackstar, Joan Miro, Casablanca and Dickens as something which all right-thinking people are supposed to appreciate but which does nothing at all for me. Like so much of British art and literature, the technique is self-evidently superb but the characters are such a uniformly unappealing bunch it becomes difficult to empathise with any of them—the overall impression is rather like being trapped in a lift with Boris Johnson. (IMHO, the only piece of British fiction ever to successfully pull off the "new money meets the minor aristocracy" setup is Vanity Fair, and even that's primarily down to the character of Becky, rather than the circles of insecure dullards and jumped-up shits through which she passes.) ‑ Iridescent 16:51, 17 September 2016 (UTC)
Well I feel a little differently about ADTTMOT, although I don't remember reading anything else of Powell's that was any good. Many of the characters are very like people I've encountered during my life – poseurs, bullies, chancers and outright shits, and I enjoy it when they get their comeuppances. And I still think the anti-hero Widmerpool is a great comic creation. Compared with Simon Raven's attempt to do the same sort of thing in his Alms for Oblivion sequence, I think Powell shines like a jewel. Brianboulton (talk) 19:59, 18 September 2016 (UTC)
The greatest evocation of "poseurs, bullies, chancers and outright shits" I ever read was Le Carre's A Perfect Spy—he tends to get dismissed as a genre writer, but his later works are spy fiction in name only and are really analyses of the froth of hypocrites, chancers and dilettantes in the upper reaches of the English middle class. ‑ Iridescent 22:57, 18 September 2016 (UTC)

It's been nine years, today.

Wishing Iridescent a very happy adminship anniversary on behalf of the Wikipedia Birthday Committee! Chris Troutman (talk) 12:21, 20 September 2016 (UTC)
Ah,those were the days. Although, remember I was desysopped for a chunk of that period, and was inactive for quite a bit more; "four or five years" would probably be nearer the mark. ‑ Iridescent 14:38, 20 September 2016 (UTC)

Like you...

Per this, I too wonder when folks will wake up to the fact that an infobox is just a big quote box highlighting facts that "give them more prominence than other elements which aren't included". Ealdgyth - Talk 18:20, 18 September 2016 (UTC)

Given that at the very least Gerda and RexxS are watching this talkpage, and probably quite a few of the other QAI-ers, I'd guess "next time Gerda checks her watchlist". (Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates#RfC regarding quote boxes and Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style#RfC: What (if anything) to do about quotations, and the quotation templates?, to save TPWs wading through my contributions to see what this is a reference to. Bring popcorn.) ‑ Iridescent 18:28, 18 September 2016 (UTC)
I pointed this out back on Brianboulton's (pinging Brianboulton) talk page a while back... didn't go anywhere. I have no desire to have my every contribution stalked so I've tried to stay out of too much involvement with either box type... Ealdgyth - Talk 18:51, 18 September 2016 (UTC)
I've said my piece already; as far as I can see explicitly banning any method of "attracting reader interest which favors a particular viewpoint" and applying the ban without exception (which is what's implicitly being proposed) will wipe out a sizeable chunk of Wikipedia's infoboxes, lead images, and opening paragraphs (as well as reducing the main page to a blank space). Even in the unlikely event they manage to force this through, it will be so widely ignored as to be pointless, to the extent that if the MOS-ers tried to enforce it they'd probably end up blocked for disruption themselves. ‑ Iridescent 19:11, 18 September 2016 (UTC)
Ealdgyth, re every contribution stalked. Its actually worse than that; if you fall within in the line of sight of these people it will be article by article, and you will find yourself defending over and over - grinding down seems to be the mo. To be clear, the central issue at the Gerarda Delition thing was coordinated attacking. Related was issues of fanning incompetent editors because they were on message.

There is also that RexxS was indefensibly horrible to Victoria, in her home teorratry of modern lith, that he knows fuck all about, but chose as a battle ground to be endless personal, and said things that would be kindly dismissed as abusive. This form seems par for the course recently and why there are not blocks and site bans is beyond me. Ceoil (talk) 19:36, 18 September 2016 (UTC)

Careful what you wish for; there are two cases currently up before Arbcom (1 and 2, and none of the committee emerges with any credit for accepting either) which have the potential to drastically extend Wikipedia's definition of "incivility" to cover "someone said something I didn't like", or even "someone said something I didn't agree with", in which case every person on this page can probably start formatting their {{extinct user}} templates and drafting the biting indictments of the fundamental flaws in the Wiki model for their userpages. Assuming this is the comment in question, if I were to block RexxS for that, I'd have to block half of Wikipedia since while it's certainly not polite, it's certainly not over any reasonable line (and isn't even the rudest comment in that thread). I've seen considerably ruder comments from the Voice of Civility himself. ‑ Iridescent 22:52, 18 September 2016 (UTC)
Its not about civility with me, god knows. This is real life and I'm not ten years old. Its about basic decency and not humiliating your opponents to take cheap shots when trying to keep your toys. And boys with toys is exactly the issue here. Ceoil (talk) 00:32, 19 September 2016 (UTC)
To add an extra layer of weird, an admin has decided (admin only) that I clicked on your link but as soon as I saw Merridew, I felt nauseous and clicked off. But you're right, that discussion is indicative of the kind of shite an FA author has come to expect. is "Grossly insulting, degrading, or offensive material" to the extent that it not only needs to be removed from the page, but the page history itself needs to be wiped to hide the fact that it ever existed. The only explanation I can think of is that he thinks "Merridew" is somebody's real name and that this is some kind of BLP violation. (The irony of protecting Jack Merridew from rudeness is not lost on me. Not only do I imagine even his most loyal friends would concede that he had a decent claim to be the rudest editor on Wikipedia, but for all his faults he could take it as well as dish it out and was never one to run to mummy when somebody was rude to him.) ‑ Iridescent 07:37, 19 September 2016 (UTC)
Ah, that explains why "rudeness about Merridew" is unacceptable but "rudeness about Victoria" isn't. Shocked, shocked, I tell you. ‑ Iridescent 08:35, 19 September 2016 (UTC)
I will admit I watched the deleting of that comment and then the removal of it from the history with a bit of incredulity, especially as the comment to Victoria on the JA page was left standing... I fail to see how that comment was any worse than a bunch of stuff on the JA page... but I guess that's why I'm not an admin or something. Ealdgyth - Talk 13:10, 19 September 2016 (UTC)
"Incivil" is an irregular verb: I am standing up for my principles, you are being incivil, he is being baited, she has been blocked. You must have been on Wikipedia long enough to notice that people are only being "incivil" when the person making the comment is someone an admin dislikes. (The civility police were presumably all on vacation here, here or of course here.) ‑ Iridescent 16:13, 19 September 2016 (UTC)
It turns out there were other reasons. I didn't put two and two together and stand corrected. It should be said that the deleter is a friend and collaborator of all involved here; the action was most certainly was not to *defend* Merridew from rudeness; but is covered by policy. An unfortunate sequence of events, but all are clear now. Ceoil (talk) 15:19, 24 September 2016 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

The Tireless Contributor Barnstar
By now you must hardly think anything of plugging away at quality content, but when I got a ping and checked to see who had linked to my little article on A Sea–Spell I was amazed to see so much good and fascinating writing appear all at once. Thank you for your work! FourViolas (talk) 23:42, 25 September 2016 (UTC)
Well, thanks. I'm not entirely happy with it, as I feel the prose reads a little tersely, but I'm reluctant to expand it any further given that it's already longer than Mona Lisa or The Starry Night. I'm hoping to shoehorn it through FAC in time to run on Obama's last day in office, as it would seem to be a fitting send-off for him. ‑ Iridescent 07:36, 26 September 2016 (UTC)

Category:English people of Indian Tamil descent

and many other such, including Category:British people of Indian Tamil descent. Are these even remotely necessary? The English one sounds wrong too. cheers. —SpacemanSpiff 14:54, 24 September 2016 (UTC)

I'm not a fan of hypercategorisation, but I'm aware that some people find them useful, and I can certainly see potential uses for categorising down to this level (if I were writing a paper on whether communities from different Indian backgrounds were integrating differently into English society and wanted examples of high-profile English people of Tamil descent, for instance). I suspect that in the wake of Recent Events this kind of ethnicity-category will become gradually less and less useful, as the immigration doors slam shut and the immigrant communities already in Britain gradually become fully assimilated, in the same way that "English person of Irish/French/Welsh/German descent" have gradually lost most of their meaning as the communities blur together. BrownHairedGirl is the one you want to talk to about categories, generally. ‑ Iridescent 15:29, 24 September 2016 (UTC)
I don't usually work on cats or on stuff related to this part of the world, so I'll let it be. There's probably more that I don't understand than what I do. It just seemed odd to have a linguistic-national-linguistic cat, so I brought it up. cheers. —SpacemanSpiff 08:42, 26 September 2016 (UTC)
English is probably nationality/cultural in this context (like Scottish or Welsh) rather than language. Unless they actually meant it to be 'British' in which case it needs a rename. There are probably (given the ethnic makeup of England) at least some people of Tamil ethnicity who identify culturally as 'English' rather than British. I cant imagine that there are that many notable ones. Likewise Tamil's are also an ethnic group. So really its a Nationality/Cultural - Nationality - Ethnicity category. Which is equally silly. Only in death does duty end (talk) 09:26, 26 September 2016 (UTC)

Extended confirmed protection

Hello, Iridescent. This message is intended to notify administrators of important changes to the protection policy.

Extended confirmed protection (also known as "30/500 protection") is a new level of page protection that only allows edits from accounts at least 30 days old and with 500 edits. The automatically assigned "extended confirmed" user right was created for this purpose. The protection level was created following this community discussion with the primary intention of enforcing various arbitration remedies that prohibited editors under the "30 days/500 edits" threshold to edit certain topic areas.

In July and August 2016, a request for comment established consensus for community use of the new protection level. Administrators are authorized to apply extended confirmed protection to combat any form of disruption (e.g. vandalism, sock puppetry, edit warring, etc.) on any topic, subject to the following conditions:

  • Extended confirmed protection may only be used in cases where semi-protection has proven ineffective. It should not be used as a first resort.
  • A bot will post a notification at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard of each use. MusikBot currently does this by updating a report, which is transcluded onto the noticeboard.

Please review the protection policy carefully before using this new level of protection on pages. Thank you.
This message was sent to the administrators' mass message list. To opt-out of future messages, please remove yourself from the list. 17:48, 23 September 2016 (UTC)

Remind me when we repealed Wikipedia:Anyone can edit and became Citizendium 2.0? I have no intention of ever using this ability, which was created for a very specific purpose, not as a general purpose tool to make it easier for admins to build protective walls around whichever little fiefdom they want to prevent the peasants defiling with their pesky edits. Every person listed here should be ashamed of themselves for supporting this. ‑ Iridescent 18:00, 23 September 2016 (UTC)
Eh, I think there is a long way still from that to a Citizendium lookalike. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 18:51, 23 September 2016 (UTC)
"Slippery slope" is a cliche, but warranted here—this is pretty much exactly what happened at Citizendium, which initially started as a Wikipedia clone but Larry kept ratcheting up the restrictions on who could edit what until nobody bothered even to try. I get the feeling an awful lot of those voting forget just how daunting "500 edits" sounds to a new editor. Someone who wants to fix an error on one of the walled gardens this will create will be given the choice of putting in a significant amount of work in an unrelated field first, or wandering off and finding something else to do; if they protest this and say that only City Without Baseball/Phosphorus/Andrew Rannells/Homeward Bound II: Lost in San Francisco (all listed at Category:Wikipedia indefinitely semi-protected pages so presumably leading candidates for the new treatment) interests them so why should they go edit something unrelated, they'll be dismissed as a single purpose account and kicked off altogether. And then we pay money to consultants to figure out why Wikipedia has a problem recruiting new editors! ‑ Iridescent 19:09, 23 September 2016 (UTC)
None of these pages are candidates unless a interminable sockpuppeteer starts hitting it, to my understanding. Also, my impression was that Larry Sanger was not a fan of the "open to everybody to edit" model, yeah? Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 19:13, 23 September 2016 (UTC)
No, Citizendium started off as a pure Wikipedia fork, the only difference being that every editor had to use (what they claimed was) their real name. Larry then ditched all the content imported from Wikipedia, leaving an almost empty shell in which only those articles which had been edited post-fork remained, and over time started adding more and more layers of "peer review", special editing privileges for anyone he deemed "an expert", expulsion of anyone he felt wasn't showing him enough respect, and so forth, meaning virtually all their editors quit in disgust and "the reliable and high-quality alternative to Wikipedia" currently boasts fine writing like Moscow, Encyclopedia, Black Sea or my personal favourite Art, and the last 100 edits in their recent changes feed for the entire project stretch back ten days (to put that in perspective, the last 100 edits to Wikipedia stretch back less than a minute).

"None of these pages are candidates unless a interminable sockpuppeteer starts hitting it" sounds great in theory, but that's not what will happen. Just look at Category:Wikipedia pages under 30-500 editing restriction—the ink isn't even dry on the RFC and it's already being used on pages with no apparent serious long-term abuse problem or community discussion. ‑ Iridescent 21:26, 23 September 2016 (UTC)

I haven't used this protection but I've seen three articles I took to GA (The Who, Tommy (album) and Who's Next) stung by it. In the case of the former, IPs are making constructive edits all the time, in the latter two I'm pretty sure the article was expanded after an IP or new account added some extra information which I then copyedited and sourced. A lesser admin would have reverted and blocked - pooh to them. Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 16:25, 26 September 2016 (UTC)
Ah, these pages have landed on User:Никита-Родин-2002's target list. Myself I am more bothered by the liberal application in the Israel-Palestine area (and I am not innocent in that regard, either). Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 16:41, 26 September 2016 (UTC)

The World Before the Flood

Have you simply abandoned this FAC? You have not shown any interest in the comments I left a few days ago. I understand that your main interest has switched to another painting article, but an acknowledgement would have been nice. Brianboulton (talk) 08:55, 29 September 2016 (UTC)

Oh, sorry—I must have slipped over it on the watchlist and not realised anyone else had commented. Will pop over there now. ‑ Iridescent 14:54, 29 September 2016 (UTC)

Nazarian Para PMC

18:13, 11 July 2016 Iridescent (talk | contribs) deleted page Nazarian Para PMC (Expired PROD, concern was: This article is written by the club itself, and it grossly misrepresents the organisation.)

Objection!.. PROD Protocol not Followed by Iridescent.

"To nominate an article, place the {{Proposed deletion/dated |concern = reason for proposed deletion |timestamp = 20160930185522 |help = }} tag on the page. This is automatically converted to a {{proposed deletion/dated}} which lists the article in Category:Proposed deletion. You should notify the article's creator or other significant contributors by adding the == Proposed deletion of Name of Article‎ == [[File:Ambox warning yellow.svg|left|link=|48px|]]

The article Name of Article‎ has been proposed for deletion. The proposed deletion notice added to the article should explain why.

While all constructive contributions to Wikipedia are appreciated, content or articles may be deleted for any of several reasons.

You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{proposed deletion/dated}} notice, but please explain why in your edit summary or on the article's talk page.

Please consider improving the article to address the issues raised. Removing {{proposed deletion/dated}} will stop the proposed deletion process, but other deletion processes exist. In particular, the speedy deletion process can result in deletion without discussion, and articles for deletion allows discussion to reach consensus for deletion. tag or other appropriate text to contributor talk pages."

Articles creator was not notified. Thous Objection was nt submitted. please restore the article ASAP.

Also submit information you have on how the organisation is misrepresented. which you have absolutely no basis for.. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 176.11.7.141 (talk)

I think you're working under a misapprehension about how the proposed deletion process works, and on what the role of a Wikipedia administrator is; this is not a topic about which I have the slightest interest. That I'm the one who enacted the actual deletion doesn't mean I'm the one who proposed it for deletion; it was proposed for deletion on 3 July 2016 by User:37.191.140.144, this nomination was reviewed and seconded on 5 July 2016 by User:Tseung Kwan O, and as no objection was raised for a week it was automatically deleted by myself on 11 July 2016. I'll consider the above a belated contesting and have temporarily restored it for a full discussion, which you can find at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Nazarian Para PMC. ‑ Iridescent 20:13, 30 September 2016 (UTC)
Also notifying Graeme Bartlett who originally accepted this at WP:AFC. ‑ Iridescent 20:17, 30 September 2016 (UTC)

Noted.. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 176.11.7.141 (talk) 19:05, 1 October 2016 (UTC)

Old frivolous nomination

I was rather surprised that this old frivolous nomination for deletion is still standing. The nominator seemed to be trying to be funny, but was blocked for it and admitted they made it in bad faith. Would you be able to delete the unfunny nomination? I believe it falls under G6, but I'm not sure. Hammill Ten (talk) 15:15, 2 October 2016 (UTC)

No, of course I'm not going to delete it—we don't delete the records of discussions unless there's a good reason to do so, even if the nomination itself was an obvious attempt at disruption. At the time of writing, we're up to WP:Articles for deletion/Wikipedia (8th nomination) and WP:Articles for deletion/Earth (8th nomination) so far. ‑ Iridescent 15:30, 2 October 2016 (UTC)
Retrieved from "http://en.wiki.x.io/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Iridescent/Archive_22&oldid=1083598591"