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Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)/Archive 46

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This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (policy). Please do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to revive any of these discussions, either start a new thread or use the talk page associated with that topic.

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License incompatibility?

While doing some free image moves to Commons, I noticed that the terms of {{PD-old}} differ between here and Commons. On en Wikipedia, the license terms are equivalent to {{PD-old-100}}, while on Commons, the terms equate to {{PD-old-70}}. This means the terms can be changed when images are transwiki'd. Should we have a bot replace existing usages of {{PD-old}} with {{PD-old-100}}, and then change the {{PD-old}} text to reflect 70 years instead of 100 years? Kelly hi! 15:05, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

Monthly update of style and policy pages: April 2008

It was a complicated month, so I hope I've captured, as simply as possible, the substantive changes. Please notify any issues on the talk page. TONY (talk) 16:07, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

Increase autoconfirm

Please see: Wikipedia:Autoconfirmed Proposal/Poll (talk)

This is a discussion and poll for whether the requirements for autoconfirmation should be increased. - jc37 20:19, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

The Perfection of BLPs

I do wonder why people seem to be deliberately obtuse on this issue. The point is that the majority of the population have no concept of what editing Wikipedia entails, and reasonable people would not grasp that there is a social networking site in behind editing Wikipedia articles. Of those that do, most would assume there was an ethical and morally responsible organisation responsible, as opposed to a dysfunctional group left to their own devices, who cannot come to an ethical consensus on what to do on obvious moral issues like BLPs.
We did come to an ethical consensus regarding BLPs. See NPOV, RS, V, and even the specialized BLP. If anything, we're too protective of BLP subjects; see the various deletions of the Brandt article. Again, Wikipedia is not a social networking site. We're here to write an encyclopedia, not to have cybersex or look for dates. The only "social" thing we do is discuss policy, debate deletions, dispute resolution, and discuss sources. Celarnor Talk to me 18:23, 5 May 2008 (UTC)
The current "consensus" on BLPs is one that still allows defamatory articles to be held in place against reasoned arguments that demonstrate actual distress to those defamed. How is that ethical? It may have a consistent logic, but that isn't the same thing. Dogbiscuit (talk) 20:41, 5 May 2008 (UTC)
We don't allow anything that doesn't adhere to a non-neutral point of view or anything that doesn't cite reliable, independent, verifiable sources. In what way do these policies allow libel? Celarnor Talk to me 21:11, 5 May 2008 (UTC)
Who is this "we" you are talking about? I thought Wikipedia was not a hivemind of like-thinking people. Now, do you want to have a long debate on the various international definitions of defamation, which Wikipedia could still be subject to regardless of it being hosted in America? In the UK, even the knowledge that something is true is not necessarily a defence if something is maliciously posted. Funnily enough, over at Wikipedia Review, the suggestion is that if it was not for the problem of Wikipedia having defamatory articles, then Wikipedia Review would not exist as a credible forum for discussing issues. (The above para was part of a post continued below, signed by Dogbiscuit (talk) 22:43, 5 May 2008 (UTC))
"We" is the consensus of editors, although I obviously don't speak for everyone personally. Policies are arrived at by consensus. RS, V, N and BLP were all arrived at via discussion and consensus. Celarnor Talk to me 23:43, 5 May 2008 (UTC)
Anyway, any time soon, Wikipedia Review will be publishing a pretty damning review of actual prominent BLPs that have contained defamatory information for long periods of time. You don't seem to understand the difference between having a policy (broken or otherwise) and the reality. I can even point to a recent oversight edit which I requested via OTRS which has been done incorrectly so has left the defamatory information in place via the edit summaries. There are numerous people fighting Wiki-wars over maintaining inappropriate information in particular biographies. They claim they are using policy, but by the selective use of arguments, or simply attacking other editors, they manage to maintain inappropriate materials. (The above para was part of a post continued below, signed by Dogbiscuit (talk) 22:43, 5 May 2008 (UTC))
Rather than complaining about the state of certain articles, why don't you improve the articles in question, tag them, or re-submit the OTRS ticket? Celarnor Talk to me 23:43, 5 May 2008 (UTC)
Now, what is your view, is it that policy is perfect and all editing is according to policy therefore all biographies are perfect? Or is it that the supervision of articles is so good that any editing not according to policy is corrected in a reasonable time? Or is it that you do not believe there are malicious editors on Wikipedia, that "we" are all models of perfection and integrity? Or are you just guessing that because policy looks sensible to you that it must all work properly and anyone suggesting otherwise is deluded or malicious? Are you aware that long term respected editors have left Wikipedia because they believe that the BLP policy is ethically flawed and they believe politics here is so ossified that they cannot get the issues fixed. Dogbiscuit (talk) 22:43, 5 May 2008 (UTC)
We have extra policycruft like BLP because people don't follow core policies closely enough. If N, NPOV, RS and V were followed, we wouldn't need BLP at all and they could be treated just like any other article. An article in line with those policies couldn't include unqualified slander or libel and thus couldn't be defamatory. It's really that simple. It's not an issue of changing how Wikipedia works, it's an issue of making sure that editors adhere to how it works. Celarnor Talk to me 23:43, 5 May 2008 (UTC)
Ha! As easy as getting editors to adhere to policy. You are an expert rabbit herder I take it :) Dogbiscuit (talk) 00:08, 6 May 2008 (UTC)
I never said it was easy. I'm just saying policy isn't the problem. The problem is the implementation. Celarnor Talk to me 00:33, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

And for your information, my friend hooked up with 2 chicks he met on here last year. JeanLatore (talk) 23:30, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

Bot flags for admins' alternate accounts to help WP:ACC

Hello, everyone. After discussions at Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/WODUPbot and Wikipedia:Bureaucrats' noticeboard#Bot flag, I'm looking to demonstrate a consensus for bureaucrats to give the bot flag to an alternate account of any admin for the purpose of helping to create requested accounts. Admins are affected by neither the 6-per-IP-per-day account creation throttle nor the antispoof. While this works well for creating accounts where there is conflict with an unused or barely used account, an account without the sysop flag is required to attempt to create requested accounts first to see if there is a conflict. Unfortunately, non-admins are stopped after creating six accounts. Bot accounts, however, are informed of similar usernames but are not affected by the throttle.

I think that this could work well if restricted to admins as it's not allowing them any permissions that they don't already have with the exception of just one, but of course, if anyone is given the bot flag for this purpose and edits with the account, the flag should be removed, and the admin whacked with a trout or crushed by an elephant. I don't think that admins are trusted with delete, protect, and block, but can't be trusted not to edit with this bot-flagged account. WODUP 18:22, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

  • Well, I've commented on this elsewhere already, but just for the record, I certainly support this. Giving the bot flag to WODUP's alternate account will not allow him to do anything he can't already do with his sysop access. It just lets him do one thing more carefully. Therefore, as a precautionary measure, I think it's the smart thing to do. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 19:37, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

Also, I was just able to create an account from my alternate account while it was blocked with account creation enabled and autoblock disabled. If these bot-flagged accounts were blocked in this manner, that would prevent any accidental editing by forgetting that you're logged in with the flagged account. WODUP 20:25, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

  • No problems with this. Stifle (talk) 11:53, 5 May 2008 (UTC)
  • I do this all the time with SQLBot (manually). I think I've created nearly 1000 accounts now in this manner. There are no problems with this, that I've encountered in the last 1000 or so that I've done. SQLQuery me! 12:30, 5 May 2008 (UTC)
  • Bot accounts are, in essence, single-purpose (or, at most, more limited than a usual editor) productive accounts. Using an alternate account to create accounts counts as that in my book. Sounds good to me. EVula // talk // ☯ // 18:42, 5 May 2008 (UTC)
  • As long as its limited to users who already have a "higher" right than Bot on the main account, it looks like a good thing. MBisanz talk 18:44, 5 May 2008 (UTC)
  • Ok, as MBisanz AKAF (talk) 13:24, 6 May 2008 (UTC)
  • Support, as I already have done on WP:BN, for the smae reasons. --ais523 10:08, 7 May 2008 (UTC)
  • Sure. Honestly I don't even see the reason the crats asked for a pool on this, its pretty incosequential they couldve just cut thru the red tape Acer (talk) 17:10, 8 May 2008 (UTC)
  • Note: The "accountcreator" usergroup was just created to allow an account to do unthrottled account creation without the anti-spoof override. This right van be given out by admins and does not contain all the other rights that bot has that account creators won't need. Mr.Z-man 00:35, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

userboxes

Is there anything wrong with a user filling his or her user page with every userbox that can be found or that being the only contribution to the Wikipedia that a user makes? -- Taxa (talk) 04:21, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

It's highly discouraged, per user page guidelines and Wikipedia is not MySpace. Since the primary use of userboxes is to identify people who may have knowledge in a particular area to help edit articles, it may be considered slightly disruptive to have userboxes that suggest knowledge that isn't actually there, and someone whose only edits are to their userpage could probably do with a warning, but it's unlikely they'll be blocked on first offence. Confusing Manifestation(Say hi!) 05:00, 7 May 2008 (UTC)
Toptomcat is a case in point. What would be the appropriate determination for this user? -- Taxa (talk) 09:38, 7 May 2008 (UTC)
I think that to stress over how many userboxes a user has on their page is largely pointless; looking around, it's clear this is an attempt to harass Toptomcat, which is massively inappropriate. Leave it alone.--Prosfilaes (talk) 13:10, 7 May 2008 (UTC)
I've seen people who do the same and make no edits outside of their own userspace. Looking through Toptomcat's contribs, it appears he is editing more than just his userpage. I wouldn't worry about it. --Kbdank71 13:20, 7 May 2008 (UTC)
Are we blocking people now for people establishing who they are on their user page before doing any mainstream editing? The editor in question makes edits outside of the userspace, but even if he didn't, it's entirely possible and extremely likely that he's planning on doing it in the future. Celarnor Talk to me 20:50, 7 May 2008 (UTC)
I started off with 10 user page edits, followed by ~10 additions to Word Association. Just because someone make ridiculous edits at first doesn't mean that they can't become a useful editor. Paragon12321 (talk) 21:12, 7 May 2008 (UTC)
It was an utter lark, really, something I did when I had far too much time on my hands that amused me and harmed no one. I make constructive edits regularly, and should my userpage somehow become a genuine problem I'll change it. Additionally: thank you for registering, Taxa. -Toptomcat (talk) 17:18, 8 May 2008 (UTC)
  • Can you have userboxes that display your affinities for illegal activities, such as drugs? JeanLatore (talk) 03:13, 8 May 2008 (UTC)
    • If the user is making constructive edits elsewhere I see no reason to care how stupid their page looks, as long as it does not contain attacks against other users. Drugs? Can you be more specific? Most drugs are legal in most jurisdictions, and I doubt any substance is prohibited everywhere (and by that I mean "subject to laws which are actually enforced"). — CharlotteWebb 04:20, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

What are you talking about baby drugs like cocaine are super illegal as far as I know! And I smoke hella weed as well, which, last time I checked, is still against the law. JeanLatore (talk) 22:08, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

License incompatibility?

While doing some free image moves to Commons, I noticed that the terms of {{PD-old}} differ between here and Commons. On en Wikipedia, the license terms are equivalent to {{PD-old-100}}, while on Commons, the terms equate to {{PD-old-70}}. This means the terms can be changed when images are transwiki'd. Should we have a bot replace existing usages of {{PD-old}} with {{PD-old-100}}, and then change the {{PD-old}} text to reflect 70 years instead of 100 years? Kelly hi! 15:05, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

Monthly update of style and policy pages: April 2008

It was a complicated month, so I hope I've captured, as simply as possible, the substantive changes. Please notify any issues on the talk page. TONY (talk) 16:07, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

Increase autoconfirm

Please see: Wikipedia:Autoconfirmed Proposal/Poll (talk)

This is a discussion and poll for whether the requirements for autoconfirmation should be increased. - jc37 20:19, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Hebrew) has been marked as a guideline

Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Hebrew) (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has recently been edited to mark it as a guideline. This is an automated notice of the change (more information). -- VeblenBot (talk) 18:51, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

Update in privacy policy

Hello,

During the last board meeting, the board approved the following resolution

The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees will amend its privacy policy to notify, when possible, those members of the community whose personally identifiable data has been sought through, or produced as a result of, civil or criminal legal process, except when such notification is forbidden by state or federal law in the United States of America.

This change of policy was suggested early march by Nsk92, following the Video Professor incident. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28policy%29/Archive_25#Releasing_IP_addresses_of_registered_users:_the_Video_Professor_incident After I was informed of this request, I added it on the board agenda and asked Mike Godwin to come with an appropriate text.

As a matter of interest, I had asked Mike to review entirely, and to work on a full update of our privacy policy. We should expect a full draft for this summer. However, I felt that this little update could anticipate the brand new summer version.

Thanks

Florence

ooops Anthere (talk) 00:16, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

I know I am missing the point here...
...but there is no signature. Please consider this an effective timestamp. Waltham, The Duke of 00:13, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

On Inherent Notability

It has recently come to my attention that inherent notability is beginning to spread through Wikipedia. I feel that this is a bad move for the project, for a number of reasons.

  1. We end up with lots of short articles. Inherent notability is often the line of defense used by articles with insufficient sources in order to avoid deletion. This leads to lots of 'cite' requests when users are bold in adding information. As the defence is inherent notability either we end up with unsourced statements or stubby articles. Neither is a good place for a reference source.
  2. Increasing inherency will spread, from schools to other public places. Arguably, religious buildings are as much a cornerstone of a location as a school. Following this pattern, more objects would fall under inherency. This leads to the total avoidance of the notability, because soon everything falls under an inherency guideline. Obviously, this is a 'thin-end of the wedge' assumption, but it does need to be looked at. At some point, a line has to be drawn in cyberspace.
  3. Aside from anything else, do the articles help people or give them necessary information. Wikipedia's goal is often stated to be 'to give everyone access to the sum total of human knowledge'. Now that's an idealistic statement and given a limited period, people don't have time to see the sum total. So my question is: Do these inherent articles serve a goal, beyond bulking Wikipedia.

So, after that, I think it would stupid of me not to suggest my solution: Merge current short articles that are insufficiently sourced into a section in their geographical location. For inherent geographical locations simply move them 'up the chain' so to speak. For people and the such-like, move them to the articles which relate to their issues - artists to the styles that they use and the such-like.

NB: For readability, I tried to think of examples. However, obviously, if I could think of them, chances are they would be notable and as such not be part of the inherent notability.

Obviously, once a section begun to expand, it could be moved into it's own article. IE if a Republican senator gained enough cited sources to be consider to be a significant portion of the page on Republic senators, they would be moved into a new page.

Thanks for your time, Philipwhiuk (talk) 22:28, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

  • If you can't find examples, then I have to question whether it's really a problem. Finding examples should be easy; go to a category that's "inherently notable" and look at a few articles until you find one. I believe that "inherent notability" is fine in moderation. A US senator has enough cited sources to be notable; "inherent notability" is there to remind people not to toss the article up on AfD.--Prosfilaes (talk) 22:47, 1 May 2008 (UTC)
  • As long as you can propose merges, and as long as no-one is a dick about it (i.e. is against a reasonable merge), this would fall under meta:separatism and meta:mergism and can't be solved per se. (I am a hardcore mergist and see the same problems as you, but my whole merging approach and process usually works just fine.) – sgeureka t•c 04:42, 2 May 2008 (UTC)
  • Notability is a community standard, and when we say that a class of articles is inherently notable, what we mean is that so many of them have been shown notable that challenging any of the remaining instances would be quite simply a waste of the community's time. For your more specific example of senators, senators as a class are by definition both public figures and more significant than the average professor, and hence all pass WP:BIO. --erachima talk 05:26, 2 May 2008 (UTC)
Is there a way of marking user essays as contrary to current best practice? If you can get consensus to mark Wikipedia:Inherent notability like that then that might be one way to forestall inherent notability based arguments. Percy Snoodle (talk) 08:58, 2 May 2008 (UTC)
  1. Considering the essay has a pro and a con, I dont see how it contradicts any practice at all.
  2. as for the actual issue, yes, I think consensus is indeed changing on this one, and I hope it will change further. Hair splitting arguments about the notability of over 100 individual articles a day does not contribute much to the encyclopedia. a simple agreement for each topic about what counts as notable and what does not would do much better. Of course, we'd need to compromise, but better a compromise than any one of us may not particularly like than eternal fighting, quibbling, and the resulting lack of consistency.
  3. As mentioned below, policies & guidelines are the policies and guidelines we actually apply here, and the formal statements are just codifications of that. If people have formed a consensus to accept arguments based on inherent notability, so they have, and if a guideline statement disagrees it will be properly ignored. Remember, WP:N is not policy. It's a guideline, and intended to be flexible. DGG (talk) 17:51, 2 May 2008 (UTC)
I would hope that if the policy does indeed evolve further into naming classes of things as notable, it should do so with classes of things that are considered notable because they are likely to have sufficient third party reliable sources to enable a good article to be written about them. For example, all state legislators are considered notable as a class. This strikes me as a good idea, because while there are likely to be sources about a state legislator from the 19th century so that a decent article could be written about him or her, many such sources may not be online. Thus, including the class is beneficial because it prevents these articles from being mistakenly deleted.
I do not believe that notability should be based on anything other than the availability of reliable sources to write an article, as then we are getting too close to evaluating the merit or worth of the subject. I'd prefer to see us go closer to having deletion/inclusion criteria be simply based on whether reliable sources are available to write a decent article about a topic. This would require deletionists to abandon the "simply a normal x, doing its job in a normal way" rationale for deletion and inclusionists to abandon their "This is important for reasons x, y and z" rationales. I think the War on Schools (which would almost always meet my preferred criteria) and the prevalence of articles on small-time beauty pageants that survived deletion because they managed to get a few photos in the newspapers show what a narrow hope that is, but I can always dream I suppose. ObiterDicta ( pleadings • errata • appeals ) 18:26, 2 May 2008 (UTC)
but relying on RSs is what gets the beauty pageants in when they happen to get the publicity! If we have a rule about what level pageant count we don't have to worry about finding special arguments to delete the ones that made no sense. I usually can find sources when I think an article is important if I try hard enough. I could probably do so even when I don't think its important, but of course I think about what's worth working on. And there are people better at it than I, and the result is some pretty absurd articles--just as you say. And I could argue about just which sources count as reliable for what to get whatever result I like, except that if it contradicts common sense people quite rightly would follow common sense about what is important. What belongs in an encyclopedia is the important things we can find sufficiently reliable source to write about. That's V, and I agree with V. But then there's the part about "important". DGG (talk) 19:12, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

Did someone ask for examples?

I have some on my mind... not targeting these specifically, just ones I have run across... and to head of the criticism: no, I do not have anything against the people who care about or live in or near the topics I mention, I am sure they are very nice and hardworking.

  • places - there is the sentiment that any place or region, especially if it is defined by a government, is inherently notable, even if there are no reliable sources saying anything beyond that it exists and the usual statistics.
    • census-designated place like Meadow Woods, Florida where the entire article consists of describing census data in prose form. The idea is that if the government needs a name for it, then it must be notable. The problem is that they are effervescent, externally meaningless constructs as they are created only as a convenience to conduct a thorough census: WP:NOT#STATS
      • "The boundaries of such places may be defined in cooperation with local or tribal officials, but are not fixed, and do not affect the status of local government or incorporation; the territories thus defined are strictly statistical entities. CDP boundaries may change from one census to the next to reflect changes in settlement patterns. Further, as statistical entities, the boundaries of the CDP may not correspond with local understanding of the area with the same name."
    • government administrative divisions all over the world like Bilanga Department... there are project to document administrative units for any number of countries, not just with lists of them, but with individual articles for each one entry. The idea being that someday, someone may write something about them, and there will be a page ready.
      • usually, these articles are going to remain empty, or at best become lists of things that happen to be inside the boundaries of the district. It is like Better Know a District but taken to an extreme... there is map (WP:NOT#Atlas?) and a reference to a parent entity... then over time maybe links or short sentences to everything that's notable in the district. Somehow the fact that a government uses the name for administration, and that notable things happen to exist within the boundaries, makes those boundaries notable.
    • towns? villages? rest stops? hamlets? parks? places like Tumalo, Oregon where the contents is a list of businesses. Or Tumalo State Park, where the contents are a description of the location of the park, and are way overshadowed by the giant infobox listing links to other places of equally questionable notability, some with articles, some (thanfully) without, but with red link just begging for article creation. Aguemone?

Yes, there is something to be said about all these places.. in fact, about every place. But should it be said? Especially with names and regions made up by a government, unless it is meaningful enough for third-party sources to talk about it, why document it?

  • people and groups
    • Articles for people we currently have little information on, like List of rulers of the Gurma Mossi state of Piela
      • now, lists of such people are not necessarily bad... but lists of people with red links suggest that we should create pages for them, and there is also the risk, because names are short and not ambiguated, that accidental linking due to name collisions will lead to misinformation about people.
    • Articles for people whose career caused them to be publicly known, but who we have little to say about, like David Shaw (ice hockey) and Alan Fogarty
    • articles documenting traditional groupings which blur the line between traditional encyclopedic fare and family history, such as the tree of articles growing from List of Jat clans ... sure you get good stuff like Chauhan but a lot of Legha (clan) or like Special:WhatLinksHere/Drall (who knew that an Indian clan Drall settled in the Star Wars universe).
      • how far is this from articles about the Smiths of Hampton, Virginia? I don't know... part of the problem is that many english wikipedia editors shy away because the names seem exotic and they don't want to seem culturally insensitive by telling someone their ancestor is not notable. Sources, if there are any, are invariably in the native languages, which makes verifiability practically impossible, especially on the scale of that which would be need to handle the volume of such entries. And the accidental links... the lack of disambiguation... the shear number of clan and subclan names is almost like a dictionary attack. They are certain to collide with topics and need disambiguation, hatnotes, and lots of editorial wrangling.

For some reason, there are active efforts to catalog every instance of the above that have thrown the very effective rule of WP:N and WP:V out the window. And many editors just don't have the same innate feel for what belongs in an encyclopedia or share the standards of verifiability and notability that wikipedia relis on so much for the rest of article space.--Marcinjeske (talk) 12:33, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

(to the OP), "inherent notability" isn't beginning to spread throughout the Wikipedia. Those articles on small towns populated with Census data have been there since the early days. If anything, the standards for notability have become stricter over time. Squidfryerchef (talk) 15:11, 3 May 2008 (UTC)
The idea that certain types of things are inherently notable (inherent notability) is indeed spreading through Wikipedia, as it is being used to justify keeping article... a search like this for 2008 suggests that there about 500 AfD (or similar) debates where some sort of inherency was raised. The same search for 2007 returns only 727 hits... so while I admit that not all the hits necessarily reflect someone raising inherent notability as a defense, it still suggests that after four months of 2008, we have almost as many invocations of inherent notability as for all of last year. This does not even take into account all the articles that do not make it into deletion because some editor claims WP:IN and editors believe them (I can't think of a good search to pinpoint these). Some quoted highlights from the following deletion debates:
Citations are often made to Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Common outcomes#Geography and other parts of Common Outcomes as if they were policy or guidelines. Now, none of the above suggests my opinion on any of the specific articles (many could establish notability without anything inherent-like) or the specific editors whose comments I have quoted. I just want to show evidence that the idea that certain subjects are inherently notable is alive and well, and I believe, spreading each time. (At some point we should take this conversation over to WP:Inherent Notability.)--Marcinjeske (talk) 01:58, 8 May 2008 (UTC)
  • Well regarding villages, settlements, and administrative divisions in general, the reason these things are virtually always kept (the few exceptions are due to a deficiency in the article, such as it being a hoax from end to end) and considered "inherently notable" is that these are the kinds of topics which paper encyclopedias traditionally cover. The same goes for a number of different categories of article, including legislators, professional athletes, and so on. Sjakkalle (Check!) 09:55, 8 May 2008 (UTC)
  • But what do we write about if there are no WP:Reliable Sources on which to base the article? I mean between verifiability and neutral point of view, inherent notability doesn't make sense. Why create an article when there is nothing to write about. Administrative divisions are just that – administrative – they typically have no meaning except as a convenience for administering a region. They do often overlap with meaningful regions that are discussed in sources and are therefore notable.. but just the administrative region? Not all villages and settlements will be notable - by definition, if they are notable, sources will have noted them. Why invent a new concept when following our existing guidelines gets the superior result? Traditional encyclopedias do not slavishly document every settlement or designation a government creates. They, and we, analyze whether there is useful knowledge to relate about the topic. --Marcinjeske (talk) 20:31, 8 May 2008 (UTC)
    • Not all reliable sources speak to notability; a directory or almanac is reliable from the point of verifiability, but is not generally accepted as evidence of notability. That's just one example, but probably the biggest. If this were not the case, there'd be no need for a notability guideline, as WP:V would have it covered. SamBC(talk) 21:04, 8 May 2008 (UTC)
      • I think we agree... I was merely pointing out that even if you ignore the notability guidelines because they would reject your proposed topic, and instead use "inherent notability", it is almost impossible to follow the verifiability and NPOV policies and still write a meaningful article. You are right, that the WP:Neutral point of view, WP:Verifiability, WP:No original research, WP:What Wikipedia is not, and WP:Biographies of living persons policies imply the WP:Notability guideline... but the importance of the guideline is that it spells out the combined implications of these policies on deciding if a topic should be included. The need for the guideline is due to people creating articles which can't meet the policies - and consensus wanting a simple guideline to help identify those articles. --Marcinjeske (talk) 07:06, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

Speaking of...

I am willing to assume that many of the persistent users of wikipedia write and edit articles while high on cannabis. It's just plain downright fun; however the issue is I think we should do a study of the percentage of edits whilst high, and track the quality of said contributions. Not everyone like me is cogent enough to write academic articles while high. JeanLatore (talk) 22:58, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

If nothing else, I would find the results of such a survey quite amusing. — Trust not the Penguin (T | C) 23:05, 8 May 2008 (UTC)
That is a good argument in favour of anonymity in editing: "Editor partakes in special scientific research". Waltham, The Duke of 00:10, 9 May 2008 (UTC)
You may be interested in the essay Wikipedia:Editing under the influence. Confusing Manifestation(Say hi!) 05:20, 9 May 2008 (UTC)
If there isn't a "This user contributes under the influence of THC" userbox, there needs to be. :P Celarnor Talk to me 00:49, 10 May 2008 (UTC)
Found one. {{User:Vincent de Ruijter/UserBox/Marijuana}} Celarnor Talk to me 02:18, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

In a WP perfect world...

This brief posting is to address the conflict between the WP goal of being a repository of all human knowledge and the need for various inclusion/exclusion policies like notability. For purposes of discussion I ask you to imagine a hypothetical reality where Wikipedia exists in a "perfect world" ... by that I mean one where such problems as

  • vandals do not exist
  • twits do not want to put myspace cruft here
  • WP has unlimited serverspace and bandwidth

In such a world, does there still need to be a notability policy? If so, what else needs to be eliminated to remove the need for WP:N and friends so that WP can more easily achieve its goal?-- Low Sea (talk) 01:18, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

What needs to be eliminated to remove the need for WP:N? Children. --Golbez (talk) 01:19, 9 May 2008 (UTC)
Amen.--WaltCip (talk) 02:15, 9 May 2008 (UTC)
the WP goal of being a repository of all human knowledge - there is no such goal. In fact, it is policy that Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collector of information. It's an encyclopedia; as such, it presents an overview of important topics.
And as far as hypothetical perfect worlds, I also note that WP:NOT says that Wikipedia is not a social networking site. Discussing "perfect world" scenarios is a bit pointless - there really is a lot of real work that needs to be done. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 02:40, 9 May 2008 (UTC)
"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing." - Jimmy Wales [1].
Wikipedia is often presented as a comprehensive collection of all human knowledge, and yes this does conflict with NOT. Dragons flight (talk) 06:08, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

"Knowledge is part of the hierarchy made up of data, information and knowledge. Data are raw facts. Information is data with context and perspective. Knowledge is information with guidance for action based upon insight and experience."

— From random website which had a good definition
I think when drafting the aim of Wikipedia, something like this definition was at work. If you want information... you have the entire web, (hundreds of?) acres of libraries, bookstores, office buildings. It is not a sensible goal for Wikipedia to replicate all that... Archive.org and Google are better positioned to do that. So that leaves Wikipedia to describe the important (hence notable) stuff.
But to answer the question... yes, in that world there is still need for notability policy. Why?:
  1. To guarantee WP:NPOV, there need to be sufficient independent people who are able to evaluate articles.. but if we include everything... those articles at the less notable end of the spectrum (which currently get excluded) would not have enough editors.
  2. Verifiability - in order for an average editor to be able to verify a fact in an article, information about the topic needs to be available widely enough. This is not the case for many less notable things.
  3. Limited people... sure you gave us unlimited server space and bandwidth... but the real limitation is people... the maintenance needs of the encyclopedia (linking, category maintenance, copyediting) grow as the amount of text grows.
  4. Informing the reader - the assumption is that an encyclopedia provides the reader with useful information about the world around them... if they read the article about a sports team, and all the players get articles, and then all the schools they ever went to get articles, and each place they worked, and then each item on the menu of their favorite restaurant... we have abandoned the responsibility to make the judgement of what is important to mention... the reader has to wade through everything and figure out themselves what is important... they might as well do a Google search. --Marcinjeske (talk) 06:46, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

policy linking to Wikipedia from commercial product

Hello. I work for a company that has proprietary software that we lease for profit. We want to link to Wikipedia from our help files, to use Wikipedia to supplement our help topics, for example, a discussion of "pi". Is this permitted? If permitted, is there a policy for how the user recognizes that he/she is being offered a link to Wikipedia? For example, must the link be from some sort of Wikipedia logo or can the link merely be directly from the work "pi" in our help file? GeoDancer (talk) 07:24, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

I don't believe that it is possible to restrict anyone from linking themselves to anything else on the web. That is what makes it a web. What you should not do is use anything from Wikipedia on your website without following the licensing requirements of GFDL. --☑ SamuelWantman 08:36, 9 May 2008 (UTC)
Actually, use of the logo "is subject to the Wikimedia visual identity guidelines and requires permission." so don't do that. I would suggest using a different color for links to Wikipedia if you want them to stand out, but there is no legal or moral obligation for you to do this. — CharlotteWebb 16:19, 9 May 2008 (UTC)
For more information about reuse of material on your website see this FAQ. --☑ SamuelWantman 19:41, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

Policy change - soft redirects

See discussion at Wikipedia talk:Deletion policy#Allow (some) soft redirects to Wiktionary. I propose to allow some WP:Soft redirects to Wiktionary, such as {{wi}}, instead of AfD. --Kubanczyk (talk) 16:15, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

Image content guidelines

Please see Wikipedia:Image content guidelines for an attempt to start a guideline to consolidate and improve our guidelines on image content on Wikipedia. Please discuss at the talk page and help improve this new guideline, which was inspired by recent image discussion controversies. Carcharoth (talk) 23:26, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

Preventing sock puppets

There are too many sock puppets on wikipedia simply because it is too easy to register. My suggestion to halt this is to ask for a credit card number in order to verify name and address. That way if some one wants to make a second registration they have to pay a monthly fee or simply not be allowed to register a second ID. The investigation system for removing sock puppets is inefficient and wastes editors time trying to investigate abusers. Libro0 (talk) 22:11, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

That would be a monumentally bad idea. For starters, not everyone has a credit card. In addition, I doubt anyone would be gung-ho about paying to edit a free website. Even if they provided another ID, then we'd have to have a system to check that. Even more inefficient. EVula // talk // ☯ // 22:23, 8 May 2008 (UTC)
There are many sites that use credit cards to verify ID without making any charges. As I said the encyclopedia would still be free for editors and readers. Most of the people without credit cards are minors that should not be editing without parental consent anyway. I doubt any verification system would be less efficient than the current sock investigation methods. Libro0 (talk) 22:39, 8 May 2008 (UTC)
What a wonderful way to remove the poor, the young, the non-American from Wikipedia. Lousy idea. DuncanHill (talk) 22:43, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

You are reading into it a bit too much. My intent was sock puppets only. It was just a suggestion. I am fairly certian that poor people and non-Americans have credit cards. Such as this international student. Libro0 (talk) 22:46, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

Your suggestion was well meant - I was just trying to shew some problems with it - sorry if I was a bit over the top. DuncanHill (talk) 22:53, 8 May 2008 (UTC)
Most of the websites that I've seen that require a credit card number look so shady or unprofessional that I wouldn't trust them with my email address. I don't think any major website that doesn't require you to buy anything would ask for a credit card number simply to verify ID, that's just tacky and a major overreaction to what's really a minor problem (though often blown out of proportion by drama-mongers). Mr.Z-man 22:50, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

I have seen no other suggestions only hostility. I am disappointed. Ok I will retract this then.Libro0 (talk) 22:53, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

I support this idea and think it should be implemented post haste. If you are too irresponsible and paranoid to give a credit card number then you shouldn't be editing anyway. JeanLatore (talk) 23:27, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

How about if one is too poor? Or of a faith which prohibits usury? DuncanHill (talk) 23:31, 8 May 2008 (UTC)
Or from a country where credit cards are hard to come by? (IIRC, this includes most of Europe.) --Carnildo (talk) 23:41, 8 May 2008 (UTC)
That is incorrect, credit cards are available in most of Europe. If we also include debit cards then cards such as Visa Electron is available through most of the world. That said this suggestion still excludes minors and those people that take the view that giving credit card information across the internet is a very bad idea. Taemyr (talk) 14:19, 9 May 2008 (UTC)
In the US, it's expected that an adult will have at least one credit card. My impression is that this is not true in Europe. --Carnildo (talk) 19:33, 9 May 2008 (UTC)
Or Amish? Kelly hi! 00:34, 9 May 2008 (UTC)
Bad idea mainly because it excludes young editors. We have 13-year-old admins who are highly effective, and many young contributors on a variety of topics. Also, it provides little defense against a dedicated sock puppeteer who is likely to have multiple credit cards, or can gain access to lists of credit card numbers. Finally, many users concerned about anonymity or fraud would refuse to register if this measure were in place. Dcoetzee 00:28, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

That is a good point but keep in mind they are admins. They are a group I think are allowed to have more than one ID. Although a pinch harsh the responsibility thing is also a good point. When it comes to poverty and religion these do not preclude one from having a card. If you are poor or "place religion here" you do not have to use the card for purchasing things. You can possess one solely for this purpose. Libro0 (talk) 03:24, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

Being poor does preclude having a credit card - they are (in most of Europe at least) not issued willy-nilly to anyone who asks for one. A credit check is made, and ones income & occupation is taken into account. DuncanHill (talk) 09:19, 9 May 2008 (UTC)
This is profoundly unworkable on multiple grounds. It would exclude whole classes of people just in this country. Those who don't want a credit card, those with have bad credit, those who are in bankruptcy, young editors, etc. This pales beside the barrier this would be to the vast areas of the world where credit cards are something only the very few possess. Basically, we want the door open to the 6.6. billion people on the earth, all with the ability to go beyond editing by ips and register. What percentage do you think have credit cards?--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 03:57, 9 May 2008 (UTC)
You're really serious about this, aren't you? When I first saw this, I figured it was some kind of joke. You really expect users to get a credit card to edit a wiki? Not everyone is as financially well off as you. Most of the credit cards available to someone in my position (i.e, poor college student from a family beneath the $12,000 a year line getting by on loans and scholarships) have mandatory monthly fees. Even if you aren't using these, you still have to pay a monthly fee. In effect, since I sure as hell couldn't afford to use it to buy anything, I'd be paying a monthly Wikipedia editing fee; or at least once before I cancel it and pay the subsequent cancellation fees. You're being really narrow-minded here. Celarnor Talk to me 16:32, 9 May 2008 (UTC)
You think I'm rich because I have good credit? Rather I am responsible. I stated that I am just like you- a poor student. FYI my first card was a student mastercard with a fixed $500 limit and no fees. I am sorry you don't know about these types of cards. Libro0 (talk) 16:58, 9 May 2008 (UTC)
Oh, I know about them, I just can't get them. Fall quarter, I was all stoked about getting one that you mentioned, marketed specifically for students. I signed up for two such cards and got denied for both of them. Just because you can get credit doesn't mean that the rest of us can. Some of us burned up any credit we had getting loans. Celarnor Talk to me 17:12, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

When you register you are only registering for the respective language wiki not all the wikis. Keep in mind the use of the credit card is for preventing puppets. If people edit anonymously then they wouldn't need a credit card. Furthermore, if that IP should be home to a vandal then it will be blocked. As long as people don't abuse they can continue to use credit or not. So I still strongly support the idea because it is very workable. No one needs be shut out. Libro0 (talk) 05:46, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

i'm sorry Libra0 but you appear not to understand how credit cards work. Your proposal would exclude minors, many people on low incomes, many people in the third-world. DuncanHill (talk) 09:23, 9 May 2008 (UTC)
Let's assume that everyone can get a credit card. That's still going to drive away a huge number of people who aren't going to give their credit card number to some website "who isn't going to take any money off of it, no sir, really, you can trust us."--Prosfilaes (talk) 10:38, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

The 13 year old admins can either "borrow" their parent's credit card (I am sure they do this anyway to buy online stuff anyway), or simply give up being admins. I don't know why some 13 year old thinks he can run this site anyway. Perhaps that's why much of wikipoedia is slanted towards the jejune and picayune. JeanLatore (talk) 15:44, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

You say Wikipedia is slanted towards the jejune, and yet you've started articles on pop culture topics? I'm detecting some hypocrisy here. Anyone capable of understanding policy is capable of being an administrator. Age is no barrier to that. Editors are responsible for content, I think that kind of narrow-minded attitude is one of the things that hurts the community the most. Besides, promoting deceit and thievery of your family's property is not part of a free encyclopedia. Celarnor Talk to me 16:03, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

This is an absolutely terrible idea. First, you make the assumption that all users have credit cards, which is a terrible assumption to make. I don't have one because I'm a college student and the only ones I could get would have insane interest rates. Celarnor Talk to me 16:03, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

Whilst I believe that the credit card method is completely wrong, the goal is certainly worth pursuing. We can't completely prevent socks, but we can raise their entry bar. Institute a probation period on new users based on the number of non-reverted substantive edits, not just time. If someone has to constructively and nontrivially edit dozens or hundreds of articles to gain credibility for a sock puppet, they'll at least think twice about burning that sock and in the meanwhile they'll have done some good for the project. Far fewer puppetmasters will take the trouble. While new-users, only allow self-reversions and prevent edits to semi-protected articles. How hard would it be? LeadSongDog (talk) 16:08, 9 May 2008 (UTC)
That already happens when users are being examined for sockpuppetry allegations. If you're talking about some kind of hardocded system with a table in the users database with a boolean "This user is probably a sockpuppet because he doesn't have enough edits" or "This user has enough edits to not be a sockpuppet", that just reeks of assuming bad faith; i.e, all users are sockpuppets until proven otherwise. The prevalence of this kind of view is really starting to scare me. Celarnor Talk to me 16:12, 9 May 2008 (UTC)
Strong Oppose: I'm 13, my parents will never put their credit card details online and this would force me to give up my account...... Dendodge .. TalkHelp 16:17, 9 May 2008 (UTC)
Also, autoconfirm is the solution that we take to keep new users from editing semi-protected articles. While that also assumes bad faith on the part of new users, I think it's an acceptably harsh solution to the problem considering the problems that we have with BLPs and the like. Celarnor Talk to me 16:42, 9 May 2008 (UTC)
The problem isn't just "new" user socks, it's the sleeper socks that are registered months before being used. See the recent edit history of World War I for example. Look for the red usernames. Autoconfirm seems a reasonable approach, but anyone could have fifty gmail accounts tomorrow if they wanted them. Even if we limit it to real (connectivity-providing) ISPs it won't always work, as many allow multiple accounts. WP:AGF goes a long way, but GF users are getting pretty frustrated by a lot of this stuff. As in poker, "trust everyone, but cut the cards".LeadSongDog (talk) 18:38, 9 May 2008 (UTC)
There's a proposal now that would increase autoconfirm to be 7 days and 20 edits. That would essentially kill the sleeper socks, or at least force them to contribute. Celarnor Talk to me 19:01, 9 May 2008 (UTC)
Why do people think it has to apply to the whole world. Wikis are separated by language. Each one can apply its own methods. Like I said before, registration gets you into one language only. You register separately for another wiki. Besides don't people know that credit cards are protected from fraud nowadays. Libro0 (talk) 16:58, 9 May 2008 (UTC)
It doesn't necessarily follow that people believe there are sufficient fraud protections. My mother had a credit card at one point that was used only for emergencies. I showed her how to watch the activity every day, which she did. One day, someone in California used it to buy $250 in electronics. Despite the fact that she did everything that she was supposed to, she was still liable for $50 of the fraud. That was enough to scare her out of having it anymore. Should she be blocked from editing Wikipeda because of that? Celarnor Talk to me 17:16, 9 May 2008 (UTC)
So people in the third world, or as some have mentioned, even parts of Europe, who don't have access to a credit card can no longer edit the English Wikipedia even if they speak fluent English? That sounds awfully elitist. Or should they move to the US? I don't see what fraud has to do with anything. If the card isn't being charged for anything, what would fraud protection be alerted by? I have a credit card (well, technically a check card, which can work like a credit card) and I've donated to the foundation. But if I needed a credit card to register an account when I did back in 2005? Even if I had one then, I'd still probably be pretty leery of using it. The problem of sockpuppetry is blown far, far out of proportion. If it were a truly widespread problem, I might support this. But the fact is, it isn't. It affects a minority of discussions, generally about controversial topics. Chances are this won't even deter the most dedicated sockpuppeteers. This is like trying to kill a fly with a grenade. Mr.Z-man 04:38, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

This is an extremely bad idea. Apart from the people who haven't got credit cards, or who refuse to register them with a website, there's the question of whether anyone will bother. If you want to add a bit of information to an article on something you're interested in, you can currently do it without creating an account. You might also be prepared to provide a username and password. But very few people will go to the effort of providing sensitive information such as a credit card number, and we will lose thousands of potentially useful contributors. And bear in mind that the problem this is intended to tackle (sockpuppetry) isn't even a particularly serious problem right now. Hut 8.5 17:54, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

There are multiple reasons why a good faith user would need to create more than one account. For one thing this would cripple Wikipedia:Request an account, unless the users creating new accounts had literally thousands of credit cards available to them (one for each new account they created on behalf of new users). It would also make it extremely difficult for people to create legitimate bot accounts if a unique credit card number were required for each instance of account creation. --VectorPotential Talk 18:57, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

Requiring a credit card would seem to be a cure that is worse than the disease given the issues that it would bring with it. --Gwguffey (talk) 04:43, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

Another thing of concern is what would happen if someone managed an SQL injection on the database that linked users to their cards? The Foundation would be put at serious financial and legal risk. Is such a draconian, risky measure really worth the minor benefits that we would experience as a result of having such a system in place? Celarnor Talk to me 07:35, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

articles assessements

Hello folks, we are at the beginning of the process assessing articles assessments on the French Wikipedia. I would like to read the discussions that led to the actual system used here. Could anyone point me to the right pages? Thanks. Moez talk 02:37, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

Somewhere in WP:1.0 I think. Try Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Assessment. The oldest version of that page is here. That links to an earlier discussion, which I think was this one. Also have a look at the archives of Wikipedia talk:Version 1.0 Editorial Team. The earliest archive there is Wikipedia talk:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Archive 1 (November 2004). I think the very earliest attempt is here (again, November 2004). User:Maurreen hasn't contributed since December 2006, but User:Walkerma is still active and is probably the best person to ask. I'll drop him a note pointing him here. Carcharoth (talk) 10:54, 10 May 2008 (UTC)
A brief timeline:
  1. The origins of the present system are at WP:Chem, here.
  2. This was refined by discussion to this version. We found that the system worked very well for our worklist of a few hundred articles.
  3. In 2005 I became interested in the English 1.0 project, which was almost inactive at the time. It had long been agreed that an assessment scheme was needed, and at that time this was the viewpoint. I made this suggestion to use the system that had proved successful in chemistry, and getting WikiProjects to do their own assessments and give us lists of their best articles to use.
  4. By late 2005, there were a couple of other schemes in use on other projects: medicine, and {{Anti-warTasks}} (Anti-war).
  5. During late 2005-early 2006 a the WP:WVWP group at WP:1.0 contacted all the active WikiProjects asking them to give us names of the B-Class or better articles they thought should be included. We set up a system of manually compiled tables, one for each project. This helped to propagate what (by now) had become the WP1.0 assessment scheme. After WP:GA began in late 2005, we added a new level "GA-Class", but this is still a controversial level, because it is not a WikiProject-based assessment.
  6. In April 2006 discussions, we came up with a bot-assisted scheme which is what is used today. Once this became active, the 1.0 assessment scheme became standard across the English Wikipedia.
  7. In April 2007, we released a CD (WP:V0.5) of around 2000 articles, using the assessment scheme.
  8. In 2007-2008 we have been developing a bot to automatically compile a suitable collection of around 30,000 articles. This uses the article assessment scheme as a key part of the process. The first full set of output is available here, and we are refining the algorithm right now in preparation for release of Version 0.7.
Over the last few years there has been a steady trickle of comments, "We need an extra assessment level between XXXX and YYYY" or "We need to raise the criteria for ZZZZ" etc. The early discussions had only three levels- Good, usable and not usable. It is always possible to add more levels, and you can be sure that even if you have ten levels, people will keep saying that we should refine the levels further. As I explained here, there are many parameters that make up an assessment - some more content-based, and some more style-based. In general, an article assessment focusses more on content when the article is in its early stages, but as the article develops towards Featured Article style issues become more important in the assessment.
If I had to summarise all of those suggestions, I would say that the most common ones are the following:
  • Add another level between Start and B. I think this has a lot of merit, and could easily be done. Many Starts are just a little above Stub, whereas some are really quite good. The advantage would be that you could give more refined assessments, but the disadvantage is that you may not have the ability to have hundreds of reviewers properly assess the levels across a diverse set of subject areas. Note that the bot can allow projects to have additional levels that are simply not separated by the bot - for example, the Maths WikiProject has a B+ level.
  • Put A equal to or below GA: Currently A is above GA, but this dates from the time when GA was a new system and GAs were very variable in quality. There is a strong case (see this recent debate for doing this, now that GAs are much stronger. One problem is that the GA standard is assessing different things.
I had a 90 minute phone conversation recently with User:Holon, who is a professor of education who conducts research on assessment methods and evaluation. He believes that our current system is very effective as it is, but he is going to help us refine it (for example, by adding more exemplars across different subject areas). He believes that the assessment scheme can have as only many levels as the parameters allow- and with many reviewers, many different topics and many levels of quality, we are even more limited in the level of sophistication. When I assess my students, I am the only assessor for the class, and I have numerical exam scores, etc, so I can give a more precise assessment of a grade. A WP article grade is clearly much rougher. The other thing you need to consider is the purpose of the assessment. For us on en, the purpose is twofold: The WikiProject wants to keep track of which articles need work, and WP:1.0 wants to compile lists of articles suitable for publication. For both of these purposes, I believe the current quality assessment scheme on en is not perfect, but it works well as it is. Walkerma (talk) 16:33, 10 May 2008 (UTC)
That's a very interesting history. Thanks! I followed the initial link, and I noticed one of the things said there was "It is critical that people not take these assessments personally." In my experience, if you have reviewers assessing en masse at speed, then people do take "stub" and "start" assessment personally. Assessing slower with personal interaction between assessor and article writer is nearly always best. The examples of personal affront I have seen from from WP:BIOGRAPHY, a particularly broad area where people can assess articles using checklists, but if they lack specialist knowledge in obscure areas, may get the assessment "wrong". In general, if there is a dispute about an assessment, the time is nearly always better spent on improving the article in question, rather than trying to decide what the assessment should be. Carcharoth (talk) 20:53, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

Thanks folks for the answers, particularly the timeline. it is very useful. However, I can't seem to find the collective discussion that led to the current assessment state of the article to be present right under the title of the main page. It is believed to be important for the reader to be directly informed about what the editorial team think the state of advancement of the article is. This came out from a discussion dealing with external critics of WP, where we are sometime attacked on the poor quality of some stub articles. the presence of the assessment right under the title is a good way of saying that we are aware that this particular article is a stub, for example. Moez talk 02:31, 11 May 2008 (UTC)

I'm a little confused about what you're asking. If you're seeing the assessment right under the article title then you're probably using the special script (by User:Outriggr) that does this - I don't think regular users see this! The "standard" way to see the assessment on en is on the talk page, in the WikiProject banners near the top. The decision to place the assessment on the talk page was part of the April 2006 discussions that I mentioned. If there are other specific discussions you want to know about, there have been lots (the timeline was designed to help you zoom in!) - but I've participated in nearly all of them and I'll try to remember where they occurred. Unfortunately these discussions have taken place on about 10 different pages - and I think this page is yet another one to add to the list! Many are here and in the archive of that page. Please ask, I'll do my best. Walkerma (talk) 04:40, 11 May 2008 (UTC)
I meant to mention earlier, there is a discussion going on because we are about to start rewriting the assessment criteria. At the moment, people are brainstorming ideas, in case we want to change the assessment scheme. The only time we considered seriously making a change to the scheme was in early 2007, when I proposed removing GA from the scale - this was defeated. Walkerma (talk) 04:40, 11 May 2008 (UTC)
Doh! I totally forgot that one day, I checked this particular function in my preference, through a gadget (User:Pyrospirit/metadata). That explains it. Thanks for all the info. tata Moez talk 05:42, 11 May 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Harassment has been marked as a policy

Wikipedia:Harassment (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has recently been edited to mark it as a policy. This is an automated notice of the change (more information). -- VeblenBot (talk) 18:51, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

Offensive userbox

What is the best way to deal with a user who has an offensive userbox, in violation of Wikipedia:Userboxes? -- Mwalcoff (talk) 01:09, 11 May 2008 (UTC)

Report it to WP:AN/I. So long as it's blatant, that will get it killed real quick. — Trust not the Penguin (T | C) 01:42, 11 May 2008 (UTC)
Or you could talk to the user about it, let them know that you find it offensive, and see if you can't work out an appropriate re-wording. That's always an option that doesn't require other people to get involved in something that doesn't need other people's attention. Celarnor Talk to me 04:38, 11 May 2008 (UTC)
I agree; we must try and avoid creating situations where things could so easily be blown out of proportion. Waltham, The Duke of 13:23, 11 May 2008 (UTC)
Or you could try taking a deep breath and walking away from it. If you really want to push the most strict interpretation of Wikipedia:Userboxes, I would delete the clear violation on your user page first.--Prosfilaes (talk) 13:38, 11 May 2008 (UTC)
I know you aren't asking for an opionion on this, but for what it's worth... I figured out the userbox you're referring to, and I don't think it could be regarded as offensive unless you choose to interpret in a way that was clearly not intended, and doesn't make sense to interpret it that way, under the circumstances. I agree with the recommendation that said take a deep breath and walk away. No offense was intended, so that is the best solution. --A Knight Who Says Ni (talk) 14:36, 11 May 2008 (UTC)
The condescension toward a subset of WP editors is clear. It's like saying "people who watch NASCAR are f'king morons." -Freekee (talk) 15:31, 11 May 2008 (UTC)
Um, no. It does not explicitly label a group of people at all, especially not as morons. It denigrates a belief system in a way that many supposedly NPOV articles do; does Greek mythology say that "all the believers in the Ancient Greek gods (including the modern ones) are f'king morons"? Because if it does, it clearly violates WP:NPOV. It's not horribly polite, but I don't see it as crossing the line. The hair-trigger complaint is more disruptive than the userbox.--Prosfilaes (talk) 16:08, 11 May 2008 (UTC)

Is this the user box in question? --Kevin Murray (talk) 15:37, 11 May 2008 (UTC)

 This user doesn't believe in myths or superstitions.


What if it were to be changed to say "GODS" rather than "GOD"? God tends to mean a specific diety for most of Western Culture, where Gods are more generic. A simple S might clarify the meaning and reduce the offense. --Kevin Murray (talk) 15:41, 11 May 2008 (UTC)

 This user doesn't believe in myths or superstitions

or

 This user doesn't believe in deities, myths or superstitions


If you look at the users of the graphic, Image:Nomoregod.jpg, and the date of the upload, you will see that the use is widespread and for some time. --Kevin Murray (talk) 15:43, 11 May 2008 (UTC)

The user box just went through the deletion process at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/User:Jeff dean/Userboxes/Atheist and was kept. The original author of the userbox seems to have left the project with no contributions for about a year. --Kevin Murray (talk) 16:26, 11 May 2008 (UTC)
Damn, why are you using an image of Jesus there? It was supposed to be a generic userbox about any god in general :D *runs to nominate it again* (nah, just joking) --Enric Naval (talk) 00:23, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
That's Zeus. Celarnor Talk to me 01:16, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
Lol, from a distance, he is just a bearded guy. My assumptions must have made me see Jesus there. My bad for not opening the image to check. I'm sure that nobody will get offended for the image. --Enric Naval (talk) 04:29, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

And while we're on the subject,

SI-0This user thinks the metric system is bureaucratic and inhuman.

, which is on User:Mwalcoff's user page, violates the rules just like this one does. It labels a belief system as "bureaucratic and inhuman", which is surely as bad as labeling one "mythological and superstitious".--Prosfilaes (talk) 16:08, 11 May 2008 (UTC)

I think that this is a bit more tongue in cheek. Let's focus on one issue at a time. I don't find etiher offensive, but I can see the issue. --Kevin Murray (talk) 16:17, 11 May 2008 (UTC)

Well, it's not that big of a deal and I don't mean to cause a big fuss over it. I just wanted the user to know that his userbox is not really in the Wikipedia spirit of everybody trying to get along and treating each other with respect. How he chooses to deal with it is his decision. But we're simultaneously in a dispute at WP:VP/M over how Wikipedia should deal with a potential concern of users, and I think Celarnor's userbox is indicative of a dismissive, condescending attitude that taints his arguments, IMO. -- Mwalcoff (talk) 16:42, 11 May 2008 (UTC)

Attacking other aspects of a user's contributions while in a contentious situation with them elsewhere may seem a bit disingenuous. Why don't you focus on the issues at WP:VP/M and if you feel strongly make the other issue later. --Kevin Murray (talk) 16:56, 11 May 2008 (UTC)
I'm sorry if that's how it appears; I assure you I was not intending to "muck stir." I simply visited Celanor's userpage with the intention of putting a message on his talk page (regarding the porn discussion) when I saw the userbox in question. I thought the userbox was inappropriate, so I asked here how to deal with it. Since Celanor himself suggested I leave a note on the user's talk page, that's what I did. -- Mwalcoff (talk) 18:21, 11 May 2008 (UTC)
I appologize! I've softenend my comments above; however, it might be a better policy to keep one contentious issue at a time going per editor. No real harm, and perhaps we might get a better graphic for that user-box. I'm not a believer, but I'd not post that box to my page with the current graphic. --Kevin Murray (talk) 19:31, 11 May 2008 (UTC)
No apology necessary. Let's just drop the whole thing. I think I can take a userbox. -- Mwalcoff (talk) 20:27, 11 May 2008 (UTC)

Possible changes to the BLP policy

There is a proposal currently being debated at Wikipedia talk:Biographies of living persons regarding removing the exception to the 3RR rule from the BLP policy. There also seems to be some disagreement regarding what kind of consensus exists and what kind of consensus is required (and a minor edit war on the BLP policy itself seems to be developing). A wider community involvement would be helpful here. Nsk92 (talk) 01:27, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

Questions regarding interpretations of WP:RS and WP:SPS

We have an ongoing discussion on WP:RSN regarding the RS-ness of the boxofficeindia.com site. I am of the view that it is not RS but some defenders of the site as a RS point to the less than a handful of citings of that site in RSes and are arguing that a source automatically becomes RS once it gets cited (even if only once) in a RS source. Atleast one editor has also opined that it is OK to use the "best sources we have" at hand even if they are not demonstrably RS. I neither see any merit in these arguments nor do I see any evidence of WP:RS and WP:SPS lending credence to these arguments. In fact, imo these arguments go against the very grain of WP:RS. I will be grateful if some eyes from here can take a look at the discussion and weigh in. Thanks. Sarvagnya 21:20, 11 May 2008 (UTC)

Meh. Is there any reason to doubt the validity of information on that site? Sounds like we're getting into the "academic standards" quagmire. As far as a source "becoming" RS, there is an exception for self-published material by experts. I think if several newspapers are using it for information, that would make a case for the site to be an "expert" in Indian cinema. I also feel that for noncontentious information, Wikipedia ought to use all available sources. Squidfryerchef (talk) 23:11, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

Policy on spam linkers?

A user called Educatedshopper keeps adding links to articles about Priceline bidding secrets. He keeps adding them after other users continually revert his additions. It looks like his only contributions to Wikipedia are to add links to the site. I looked on his talk page, but he doesn't seem to have any warnings. I'm a veteran editor, but I don't often deal with linkspammers. What's the appropriate action to take against such a user? — Frecklefσσt | Talk 13:16, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

Revert and warn, and when it is excessive, report them to Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Spam. There are people there that can handle the situation. If it are IP's, also User:XLinkBot may come in handy, and if it is really rubbish, see Mediawiki talk:Spam-blacklist. Hope this helps. --Dirk Beetstra T C 13:23, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
Spam is considered a form of vandalism. Have a look at Wikipedia:Spam. You can use {{subst:uw-spam1|Spammed Article}} and place it on the editors talk page as a first level warning. Arnoutf (talk) 15:29, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
Some is good faith, some is vandalism. There is always a very grey line between the two. 199.125.109.105 (talk) 16:51, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

Social networkers

I wrote a thing about social networkers, see Wikipedia:Social networking. This is my idea of what (I hope) becomes standard practice for dealing with such folks. The main idea is, do not give them the social interaction they desire, and above all, do not help them misuse Wikipedia. Comments/brickbats welcome. Friday (talk) 14:29, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

I don't know... There is a fine line between exploiting the site and simply enjoying your stay. Some of the features abused by clueless newcomers are actually helpful, and their removal would upset many established editors. And many "networkers" do eventually join the fold; not all cases are hopeless. Conclusion: don't take the hard line. This is the least of our problems—these users might be a burden but they are largely out of the way. Waltham, The Duke of 04:44, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

Section headings

  1. ==Heading==
  2. == Heading ==

Which is correct? Help:Section shows the former, but I know of a reputable editor who frequently reformats articles to the latter. Are there any instances where the latter is necessary, or any policy directing us to use the latter, or recommending wholesale edits to articles to change to the latter format? --A Knight Who Says Ni (talk) 16:05, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

I think they are the same. The WP software ignores unnecessary spaces. – ukexpat (talk) 20:04, 10 May 2008 (UTC)
The formats are equivalent and can be used interchangeably. There is no need to change headings from one format to another. Sandstein (talk) 21:29, 10 May 2008 (UTC)
Indeed, the two formats are equivalent. However, I also often change the former to the latter; it makes for clearer and less crowded edit windows. (For the record, I always do that in the course of general copy-editing; I never edit an article just to change the spacing.)
Also, I don't know if it's true (it is probably apocryphal), but I've heard the spaces help 'bots in some way. Waltham, The Duke of 16:38, 11 May 2008 (UTC)
That's just a legend, probably originated from people seeing how MiszaBot adds spaces to headers when archiving pages (I'm not actually sure it was MiszaBot or other bot, but there is definitely one bot doing this). --Enric Naval (talk) 23:59, 11 May 2008 (UTC)
I use the second method, it makes reading headers easier. βcommand 2 15:01, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
In the edit window? In the article it makes no difference, they are both parsed the same. Use whichever you wish whenever you wish, but don't go around editing articles to take the spaces out or to put them in. 199.125.109.105 (talk) 17:45, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

Fan Sites

Are fan site ever considered reliable sources? For example, can a fan site be used in order to obtain descriptions of the characters of a television program? What if a fan site is the only source for such descriptions? --SMP0328. (talk) 02:45, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

If fan sites are the only source available for descriptions of characters, you've got more problems than whether or not a fansite constitutes RS. Could you give us some more data? What fansite are you talking about, what page is it being put/proposed to be put on? Celarnor Talk to me 02:53, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
The article is Neurotically Yours. Here is when the link to the fan site was removed. --SMP0328. (talk) 03:02, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
Self-published material can sometimes be used to source non-contentious material, if it's written by an expert. While some Wikipedians are on an "academic standards" kick, I'm of the opinion that we ought to be out there harvesting all available sources of information, and should be able to use a fansite if it's a large, stable, community site and only used for minor details. I'd recommend tightening up the writing though, and citing the episodes themselves to explain what the characters are like. Squidfryerchef (talk) 23:06, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
The only time I can think of where fansites would be an acceptable source would be interviews with actors/creators of the work. Anything else should either be from third-party reliable sources or (on rare occasions) directly sourced from the work itself. -- Kesh (talk) 23:17, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

Fair use of images with unknown copyright status

Following the discussion at Wikipedia:Media_copyright_questions#Fair_use_of_images_with_unknown_copyright_status, I have decided to bring the question up here.

As it is possible to claim fair use for certain images that are subject to copyright, why is it not possible to claim fair use for the same sort of images for when the copyright status cannot be ascertained? For an example, see Image:Trenchard as a militia cadet (low res).jpg. Greenshed (talk) 20:50, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

We should presume that a work is copyrighted unless we can obtain clear information that it is not. So then the question is, without knowing for sure what the copyright status of that work is, may we validly claim fair use of that work? I don't see why not, and I would think that we would only allow a work of uncertain copyright status to be used on Wikipedia if we had a fair use claim, on the risk that the copyright is still valid. And if the question is who authored/owns that copyright, as long as you can verify that it is what it is (that it is a screenshot of X film, or a scan of the cover of X book), that usually helps identify the author, and we've never concerned ourselves with the current copyright holder, which may not even be publicly ascertainable because of having to trace inheritance from dead authors, sales of rights between corporations, etc. Does that answer your question? Postdlf (talk) 21:07, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
In practical terms, if I don't put a copyright template on Image:Trenchard as a militia cadet (low res).jpg, then as far as I can see, it will be deleted. I have been as thorough as I can be with the source details and the uncertainty over copyright. Generally, speaking I strongly deprecate the practice of asserting something to be a fact when there is doubt. In this case, asserting the the image is copyright might hamper others with more knowledge than me in determining the copyright status of the image. What I really need is a copyright template which states something along the lines of "copyright uncertain - therefore assummed to be copyright". Greenshed (talk) 23:08, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
It shouldn't get deleted as long as you have valid fair use templates on it; what else do you think you need? You can just add in the description of the image that it's presumed copyrighted. Postdlf (talk) 23:13, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
Currently the criteria for speedy deletion permit deletion of unsourced works after a certain period. The right way to handle this is to simply mark the image "copyrighted" and to mark the source as "irrelevant" or something along those lines - this might be stricter than strictly necessary but it keeps it from being deleted while still keeping it highly visible as something that needs to be replaced if possible. Dcoetzee 00:54, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

If this photo was taken in the 1800s, why do we think it is still copyrighted? — Carl (CBM · talk) 23:48, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

Copyright protection lasts for 120 years from the date of creation for all unpublished works by anonymous, pseudonymous, or corporate authors, or authors for whom their date of death is unknown.[2] Postdlf (talk) 01:09, 14 May 2008 (UTC)
But that's not relevant; it was published in 1962, we can presume legally, and if that was its first publication, and a bunch of details about renewals hold, as they likely do, then it has a copyright of 95 years from 1962. That 120 years would only hold if it were unpublished, which it's not.--Prosfilaes (talk) 01:24, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

Keeping track of wikipedia's importance, a new theory

I just read Freakonomics and got an idea. Instead of all the studies of dubious accuracy attempting to track the influence of wikipedia and the esteem in which it is held, an easy way would be to monitor the selling prices of admin accounts/passwords where they are commonly sold on Craigslist and other places. Thus we can see what access to power on wikipedia is "worth" on the free market at given times, and can easily track the fluctuations. Last time I checked admin passwords were being sold for about $800. If the price goes down, we can infer that wikipedia is held in less esteem, and the converse when the price goes up. Any suggestions? JeanLatore (talk) 04:27, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

Hmmm... I think I am interested in making an investment. What was the site again? (evil grin) Waltham, The Duke of 04:37, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
Yes. Stop with the inane "suggestions." -- Kesh (talk) 23:27, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

Discussion to remove 3RR removal exemption from WP:BLP

Please review this discussion here and weigh in. One editor is claiming that practice may not support the inclusion of the long-standing WP:3RR exemption for the removal of BLP-violating content from articles. Lawrence Cohen § t/e 04:06, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

Yes, please, this debate really needs some wider community involvement. Nsk92 (talk) 04:20, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

Dispute about scope of Wikipedia:Fringe_theories/Noticeboard

Andries (talk) 21:05, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

Well...perhaps you should actually lay out the dispute here instead of just links? — Scientizzle 21:50, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
I think that the discussion on undersourced articles on minor religious groups that are works in progress should take place on the respective talk pages and not on the Wikipedia:Fringe_theories/Noticeboard because that deals with balance and NPOV issues regarding scientific theories. Some other users disagree. Andries (talk) 22:06, 12 May 2008 (UTC)


  • The discussion has been about two articles that are, in my view problematic. Those are Benjamin Creme and Share International. Share International has been nominated for deletion [3]. I think that an AfD is more fair when there is maximum participation, and I encourage users to take a look at the article, and to comment on the AfD. Malcolm Schosha (talk) 22:08, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
    • Malcolm Schosha, may be you can explain why the discussion of minor religious groups is on-topic on Wikipedia:Fringe_theories/Noticeboard, because I really do not understand your view on this. What balance/NPOV issues do these articles have or cause? What are the scientific theories that receive too much or too little weight?Andries (talk) 22:13, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

WP:FRINGE:

We use the term fringe theory in a very broad sense to describe ideas that depart significantly from the prevailing or mainstream view in its particular field of study.[3] Examples include conspiracy theories, ideas which purport to be scientific theories but have not gained scientific consensus, esoteric claims about medicine, novel re-interpretations of history and so forth. Some of the theories addressed here may in a stricter sense be hypotheses, conjectures, or speculations.

I certainly see how articles on fringe religious groups might warrant attention from the noticeboard...it's not solely limited to fringe science, particularly given that the guideline cites urban legends, conspiracy theories, historical revisionism and the like as examples of WP:FRINGE-relevant topics. — Scientizzle 22:23, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

So then this would included Christianity and Islam and most other religions too because they also make claims that diverge from mainstream science. Andries (talk) 22:26, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
If the article on Christianity or the article on Islam had problems with WP:FRINGE ... of course it would be appropriate to raise the issue at the Fringe Theories/Noticeboard. Blueboar (talk) 22:33, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
[EC]As I wrote above, WP:FRINGE doesn't just deal with fringe science, but any "ideas that depart significantly from the prevailing or mainstream view in its particular field of study". For Christianity, as an example, claims regarding the how Apocryphal texts relate to New Testament scholarship might delve into FRINGE territory; if there were problems with undue weight given to non-mainstream views, certainly Wikipedia:Fringe theories/Noticeboard would be a place in which to gather useful outside input and garner discussion. — Scientizzle 22:47, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
~:So how do these two article diverge from the views of the relevant experts in the field i.e. religious scholars? I do not see any balance issue. Andries (talk) 22:54, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
Your wires appear to be crossed. I'm not active on those pages so I don't know if Christianity and Islam have FRINGE issues or not. They were your examples. (And, so I'm not completely sidestepping the issue, supernatural claims by religions, such as resurrection, are dealt with in the scholarship of that religion, which meets the WP:FRINGE requirement of "prevailing views" in that "particular field of study".)
Maybe a more general explanation of how WP:FRINGE, and therefore the noticeboard, (should) work would help...?
  • There is a notable subject X with a Wikipedia article.
  • Scholarship on X has a readily cited consensus that A happened, with consequence J resulting.
  • There exists a very small group of X enthusiasts that claim B happened and not A, and that J is a conspiracy perpetrated by the all-powerful X lobby.
    • This view demonstrably departs significantly from the prevailing/mainstream view, therefore...
    • In order to be covered by Wikipedia appropriately, we must gauge the level of in-depth, quality coverage:
      • If it's a substantial enough minority (with corresponding ample quality sources), B may deserve its own article (in which it can be discussed in detail with due representation of the mainstream view) and perhaps a link from the article on A from the "Criticism of A" section.
      • If it's an insubstantial view (and/or cannot be properly sourced), then it makes no appearance in Wikipedia.
      • If B is one of several alternate viewpoints, maybe they can be merged together in a "A denialism"-type article.
WP:FRINGE informs this, no matter what you substitute for any of those capital letters. The noticeboard, then, is an appropriate place to discuss relevant matters in the proper sourcing, weighting, and organization of alternate viewpoints. In some cases, even the existence of an article is undue weight. Between WP:FTN & the other noticeboards, FTN is a reasonable place to bring up concerns regarding the appropriate coverage of a non-mainstream topic, including religious cults. — Scientizzle 00:32, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
I think I understand it. And following your reasoning, I think the treatment of minor religious groups on the noticeboards only because they are minor and undersourced is off-topic. The claims of most (minor and major alike) religious group are religious in nature and not conspiracy theories, nor (pretend to be) scientific, scholary, or pseudoscientific, or pseudohistorical. Andries (talk) 00:41, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
of course they have fringes issues. Jesus resurrected and the Koran was channelled. So that diverges both strongly from mainstream science. Andries (talk) 22:42, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
Andries, it was you, not me, who brought this issue here. Why are you asking me to explain the nature of the problem instead of doing that your self? Your position is that articles can be discussed nowhere but their own talk page; but you have not explained how you reached that conclusion, or why other users should agree with you. Malcolm Schosha (talk) 22:39, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
I am asking you to explain your own position on this because I sincerely cannot understand your position. Andries (talk) 22:43, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
Andries, you initiated this Village Pump discussion, but without any explanation. How am I supposed to know what your issue is if you refuse to explain it? Malcolm Schosha (talk) 22:58, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

I created the Wikipedia:WikiProject Cults, sects, and new religious movements and the discussion should go either there or on the talk pages of the article. Andries (talk) 23:01, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

OK... let me see if I understand... you believe that discussion of Fringe religious sects should not be discussed at WP:FTN... because... nope, still don't understand. Would you please explain? Blueboar (talk) 01:15, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
The mere existence of an article on a minor religious group and its founder in itself is not enough reason for a discussion on the Wikipedia:Fringe_theories/Noticeboard noticeboard, because they do not cause balance problems. The noticeboard has as its stated purpose NPOV problems, balance problems with regards to scientific theories. Andries (talk)
You created that page 12 minutes before posting this. That's not a Wikiproject, that's just plain weird. -- Kesh (talk) 02:38, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

Andries, in the Share International article you write: "The Share International website claims that Maitreya is not a religious leader, but rather an educator in the broadest sense of the word, whose coming signals the dawn of a golden age." Also the article claims a tie with Alice Bailey, who considered that she had founded an educational (2nd ray), not a religious (6th ray) movement. Considering that, why do you insist calling Share International a "new religious movement"? Either you must, for the sake of consistency, change what you are saying here or change the article. Malcolm Schosha (talk) 16:16, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

I admit that I have no sources, but I cannot seriously doubt that it is religious movement. Andries (talk) 19:39, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
Malcolm Schosha, You were right: I changed the article. This sentence was not sourced to a reputable 3rd party source. Andries (talk) 19:28, 14 May 2008 (UTC)
Mind you, in my opinion it is not about the "religion about Maitreya" that is a fringe theory, but about the existence of "share international" (just like the theory of creationism (introduced as belief, not as theory btw) can be considered a fringe theory, but the movement supporting it is real, and notable enough). Arnoutf (talk) 20:31, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

Andries, this isn't a "dispute" about any noticeboard, this is just a weak and transparent attempt at wikilawyering and making political noise in order to dodge the actual issue. Well known and persistently unserviceable approach to Wikipedia. dab (𒁳) 07:45, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

What is the issue? I am sincere in my belief that the mere existence of an article on a minor religious group and its founder in itself is not enough reason for a discussion on the Wikipedia:Fringe_theories/Noticeboard noticeboard. The noticeboard has as its stated purpose NPOV problems, balance problems with regards to scientific theories. Andries (talk) 19:07, 14 May 2008 (UTC)
yes? your point being? The article wasn't discussed by virtue of being about a "minor religious group", the discussion did indeed surround npov and balance. Why are we discussing this? If you want to move the discussion to another noticeboard, suggest so, but don't start a meta-discussion for no reason. The article is on AfD now. Case closed. Is there any point to this section? dab (𒁳) 19:20, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

Protection policy proposal

There is a proposal at WT:PROT#Proposed change to policy to ensure that it is the "right" version (rather than the "current" version) that gets protected when protection is applied to stop edit wars.--Kotniski (talk) 08:43, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

How is the admin who places the the protection to know which is the "right" version? Blueboar (talk) 11:42, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
Engagement of brain, basically. But please continue the discussion at the policy talk page, not here, to avoid duplication.--Kotniski (talk) 12:16, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
In fact don't even do that, since brains apparently prefer to remain disengaged, and the discussion has already closed as a clear rejection.--Kotniski (talk) 07:41, 14 May 2008 (UTC)
What discussion? You yelled at everyone who disagreed with you and closed the discussion in seven hours, hours in which some of us were working or sleeping. There's no way to have an actual discussion under those terms.--Prosfilaes (talk) 15:19, 14 May 2008 (UTC)
Don't remember yelling at anyone. I closed it because the proposal seemed to have the proverbial snowball's chance in hell of being accepted. Open it up again if you disagree.--Kotniski (talk) 15:36, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

Blogs as a reliable source...

I'm arguing this point over on the Wikipedia talk:Reliable sources discussion page. Please join in.BcRIPster (talk) 18:56, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

Input requested for propsed deletion addition: postponed deletions

I have presented this idea at AFD and it seems to have some legs, so I would like to get more input to improve it. Wikipedia:Postponed deletion would allow an editor during an AFD to request a four week delay in the deletion process to improve an article, primarily in cases where the AFD is the first time that the article's quality has been brought into question. After four weeks, such articles would be reviews and renominated for AFD if they still fail, as to prevent "cleanup limbo". --MASEM 23:48, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

Credit Cards/Sockpuppet control, pt. 2

I personally think the above-proposed policy of having users register with their credit cards to buttress their identity is a great one. Let's take it one step further however. Make users register their credit card, and the Wikimedia Foundation can fine them a certain amount for vandalistic edits. That should put a stop to vandalism quick. I'm not saying the fine should be large, like $1.00 or so for each fine. And only blatant vandalism should qualify. The money would go to the foundation, or to charity. I think the future of wikipeida depends on it. JeanLatore (talk) 01:29, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

What about people who do not have a credit card or don't want to play such information on the Internet? --SMP0328. (talk) 01:41, 10 May 2008 (UTC)
  • then those chaps certainly will not be wandalising wikipedia sir. JeanLatore (talk) 01:56, 10 May 2008 (UTC)
... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... just ... ... ... no. Celarnor Talk to me 02:04, 10 May 2008 (UTC)
considering we allow IP address to edit, this wouldn't work (and no IP addresses will continue to be allowed to edit) I for one would never give my credit card for this Idea and many of your good editors and SysOps are under 18 and probably don't even have one. My position is NO--Pewwer42  Talk  03:03, 10 May 2008 (UTC)
Aside from the ridiculousness of the premise altogether, "fining" users over something as subjective as what constitutes vandalism would, I suspect, be remarkably illegal. Resolute 03:55, 10 May 2008 (UTC)
(looks at proposal)
(blinks)
(blinks again) Waltham, The Duke of 05:18, 10 May 2008 (UTC)
There is consensus that IP contributions should be allowed. This would not only intoduce mandatory registration (against the current ideas), but also wants to limit Wikipedia editorship to people who have access to a credit card. That is not going to make the content better. You then also exclude a lot of people who do have a creditcard, but are not willing to provide Wikipedia with that data.
On top of that this proposal also introduces a lot of (legal) strain on the Wikipedia organisation, that cannot, can never be handled by volunteers as this is about privacy/financially sensitive data. It requires 2 costly operations to be put in place (1) a way to check credit card data whether the card is valid (2) A way to collect, check, and store the credit card data in a way that guarantees it cannot be abused (ie. the peopel with access need to be thrustworthy (hence no volunteers), the data submission system must be completely secure, and the storage area has to be unhackable. This will generate a huge amount of costs for the foundation.
In brief, to reduce the nuisance of vandalism many valuable editors will be excluded and the foundation will be forced to make huge financial cost. Not a good idea at all! Arnoutf (talk) 09:05, 10 May 2008 (UTC)
That gives criminals one more venue to achieve credit card fraud, and the resulting vandalism upswing is not necessarily good for the encyclopedia either. This "proposal" doesn't even pass the laugh test.--WaltCip (talk) 12:14, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

Credit card registration is not a good idea, IMO, primarily due to extensive disenfranchisement. Although there should be a real identity based registration process other than signing up with any email address to prevent sockpuppets. However, the real problem is anonymous editing which really needs to be gotten rid of before Wikipedia can and will be taken seriously. Socks is just one part of the problem. I can't believe that anon contributions are sufficiently strong to make up for all the disruption in reverting, warning, reporting, and blocking the rampant and persistent IP vandalism, as well as the damage to WP's integrity. — Becksguy (talk) 21:43, 11 May 2008 (UTC)

Allowing IPs to edit without registration is part of the spirit of an open wiki. These ideas were inherited from the c2.com wiki, which I think is the first original wiki, and where editing by IPs is still allowed today. Look, if wikipedia prevented anonymous editors from editing, then it would take such a serious hit to its reputation that it would eventually be destroyed by it and replaced by other open wikis unless it reverted its decision. Wikis are supposed to be edited by anyone that happens to visit them. Jimbo Wales is not idiot, and surely he knows all of this perfectly, and he is going to let anonymous edit as much as humanly possible --Enric Naval (talk) 00:09, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

I am not against IP contributing as long as they provide the credit card. I firm believer that most of hte productive small edits here come from IP. JeanLatore (talk) 02:46, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

No one's going to take this seriously. I'm pretty sure you're not going to get consensus for producing "Wikipedia: The free encyclopedia that anyone can edit, as long as they have good credit." Celarnor Talk to me 02:51, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
Cubans are not going to like this... :-) Waltham, The Duke of 04:28, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
  • Um... sorry, but if BJAODN was still open, I'd be putting this proposal there. Stifle (talk) 10:55, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
Stolen credit cards numbers are selling for 40 cents a piece right now. So the card that someone else uses could be yours. 199.125.109.105 (talk) 17:35, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
Strong oppose and recreate BJAODN for this purpose: We would be excluding some of Wikipedia's best editors...... Dendodge .. TalkHelp 17:40, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
I'll just take this opportunity to mention that it does still exist. Hut 8.5 20:24, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

When I started the thread it was because the credit card method was the first thing that came to mind to prevent a second(or third...) account. It seems most people took the credit card idea and ran with it instead of taking the preventing socks idea and running with that. It is pretty clear that most people are less concerned with who gets in than who doesn't get in. I say we move on to driver license numbers. Wait. I changed my mind. That would exclude minors too. Okay how about this. New Wikis. WikiKids 'for the young editor in you'. WikiSocks 'for those of you who can't stand having just one sock'. And the good ole Wikipedia* The (sock)Free Encyclopedia. *Visa and Mastercard accepted. The preceding message was sponsored by Hanes. Libro0 (talk) 06:43, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

... ... ... You do realize that no one's taking you seriously, and that they want to move this thread to a page that used to exist called "Bad Jokes And Other Deleted Nonsense". Anything like that is going to require far too much from editors in terms of privacy, identity. yes, we are concerned with who gets in rather than who doesn't get in. This is "Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia that anyone can edit". You edit first, we ask questions later if it looks like you're a sock. This isn't "Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopeida that anyone can -- oh wait, papers, please." Anything like this is going to get shot down and laughed at like it already has. Celarnor Talk to me 05:16, 15 May 2008 (UTC)
Someone above mentioned they wanted all 6.6 billion people to be contributing. Actually you don't need that. Not everybody wants or needs to contribute. We can't all be teachers, coaches, and leaders. We still need students, players, and followers. Saturation would be bad. That is why there are sock puppets now. People who want to get around the rules and have their way, altering content that is fine the way it is and never adding anything new. I think we need 'contributors' not 'redecorators'. Some people's only contributions are cosmetic. I am more interested in finding info and less concerned with how it looks. So...are you going to accepting American Express? Libro0 (talk) 02:34, 15 May 2008 (UTC)
Why do we only need teachers, coaches and leaders? Why don't we need auto mechanics familiar with automotive techniques, programmers familiar with operating systems, chemists familiar with chemistry, physicists and physics, basketballers and basketball, teenagers and pop culture, writers and literary devices, anime freaks and anime, gamers and video games, conosseiurs and fine dining, hobbyists and their hobbies, activists and social programs, lawyers and law, doctors and medicine, engineers and mechanical dynamics, mathematicians and math, gamblers and gambling, soap opera fanatics and their favorite tv shows? We need as many people we can get who can make good contributions, and even better if they happen to be experts in their fields. We also need copyeditors. Encyclopedias are not just ugly, useless repositories of information rife with grammatical corrections, improper citations, missing / broken links, and words spelled incorrectly in every other sentence. They're usually well-written, concise, predictable in their formats, and readable. Not looking like crap. Celarnor Talk to me 05:18, 15 May 2008 (UTC)
Also, I suspect you don't have the experience necessary to quite understand what it would take to implement this kind of system, the kind of legal obligations that would have to obeyed, etc. We'd have to get a merchant account, hire people to manage to that/add to the Foundation's already long list of responsibilities, pay for each and every verification. No, we aren't going to be taking American express. Or Mastercard. Or Visa. Or social security numbers. Or drivers license numbers. Or the middle name of your cat. Or anything else other than a username and password. Celarnor Talk to me 05:16, 15 May 2008 (UTC)
Actually, a "secret question" (like the middle name of your cat) as part of the registration process could help reduce the problem of people losing access to their account if they don't have an email address confirmed and forget their password. But that's another proposal altogether... Mr.Z-man 05:43, 15 May 2008 (UTC)
The fundamental trouble with "secret questions" is that that the secret answer has to be easier to remember than your password and just as secure - in which case, why didn't you just use it as your password in the first place? If having the question is a useful reminder for you, write down the question. This is one of those commonplace measures that doesn't make any sense. Dcoetzee 23:35, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

There is no need to get over emotional. This idea clearly is 99% against. If I said you would need to present a student ID card to prove you are scholastically inclined then that would eliminate another massive chunk of the population. No more attacks please. We are supposed to be finding a way to prevent socks and not good editors. I consider the the credit option closed. I am starting a new thread. Preventing sock part 3 : term limits. Libro0 (talk) 01:15, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

Please see Wikipedia:VPR#Wikipedia logo improvement for a discussion regarding improvement of the Wikipedia logo. I've uploaded a new version of the logo, and since this would be a major change, I'm guessing it would need wide consensus, so I'm posting a notices around. Please direct any comments to the Village pump discussion. Thanks. Equazcion •✗/C • 16:09, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

Proposed rewrite of WP:DEADREF guideline

Please comment at Wikipedia talk:Citing sources#Proposed rewrite of 'What to do when a reference link "goes dead"'. --BrainMarble (talk) 01:06, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

My suggestion: allow non-admins to block users

I primarily edit as an IP (I simply prefer it that way). However, right now I'm having to edit using my fallback account as the IP address I'm at - one that is shared by a large number of internet users - is currently blocked.

In my opinion it would be a really bad idea if IP address ranges, or shared IP addresses were to be blocked even for established users.

So how about if autoconfirmed users, not just admins, could block users (both IP and registered)? Hear me out first please: what I suggest is that autoconfirmed users should be able to block IP users and non-autoconfirmed users for a very short period - say, 15 minutes. This would disrupt vandalism campaigns more effectively because admins would not have to be called in to block someone, and as it's almost immediate it stops a vandal in their tracks instantly.

It should be made clear though to users of this facility that it should only be used for clear and obvious vandalism, and not simply for poor edits such as inappropriate external links or good-faith POV. Perhaps also it should only be used after the second or third instance of vandalism. And of course if someone abuses this facility it should be withdrawn from them.--Anthony Nolan O'Nymous (talk) 08:42, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

So you want all of Graw's socks to be able to add spam links to the block log, do you? If it's ok with you, I'd really like to keep "Hagger" out of my block log. This would just become a free-for-all for disgruntled users, socks, and jokers, to vandalise the logs of any user they disliked. Can you imagine what Special:Log/block/BetacommandBot would look like if every one of its 'targets' had been able to block it when it was doing image tagging? Happy‑melon 09:01, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
You and Betacommandbot are both autoconfirmed, so wouldn't be blockable if this were implemented. (Not, you understand, that I'm in favor of it. For starters, way too many people have too broad a definition of "vandalism".) —Cryptic 09:29, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
No, because BetacommandBot and yourself and almost all registered users are autoconfirmed. I'm only suggesting that non-autoconfirmed users (and IP users) be blockable by autoconfirmed users.--Anthony Nolan O'Nymous (talk) 09:28, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
Sorry, looks like I missed that caveat when I first read your proposal. I still think it would lead to near-anarchy in the 'lower echelons' (for want of a better phrase) of users; and clutter the block logs beyond comprehension. Plus the autoconfirmed user-group, once granted, cannot be removed, so it would not be possible to "withdraw" it from abusers without blocking them (in fact, blocked users can still use Special:BlockIP, so there are significant security issues to be considered). Perhaps (and I really do mean "possibly", with a bucket-load of caveats) a permission like this, which files to a separate part of special:log, with a short-duration fixed time-limit (15 mins sounds good), with no restriction on who can be blocked, should be bundled with 'page-patroller' as and when we finally get FlaggedRevisions. In fact, I would support merging 'rollback', 'page-patroller' and 'short-block' into one user group, perhaps 'trusted'. Just my £0.02. Happy‑melon 09:43, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
No prob, Happy-melon. If the proposal to tighten up the criteria for becoming an autoconfirmed user happens, then maybe that would protect us against the likes of Grawp. However, I hadn't realised there would be a difficulty in "de-autoconfirming" users that abuse the facility, so maybe that isn't the way to go.
However, I do like the concept of a "trusted" user, and binding it with other privileges sounds a good idea (as perhaps we don't want too many ranks of user in the hierarchy: IP, non-autoconfirmed, autoconfirmed, trusted, etc. etc. up to Jimbo.) Another alternative would be to require users to apply for the ability to block people (just like they have to apply for some of the anti-vandal tools).
Actually, why is this discussion on VP's Technical page and not on the Policy page?--Anthony Nolan O'Nymous (talk) 10:30, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
Implementing de-autoconfirmation would be relatively simple to do, development-wise. You'd just have to allow implicit groups to depend on the presence or absence of one or more explicit groups. The rest would be configuration. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 14:36, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
All of Grawp's accounts are auto-confirmed, some are over a year old when they start page move vandalism. MBisanz talk 09:31, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
This proposal is deadly: blocking is the most serious of admin's abilities, it should be used extremely carefully, as it's the easiest way to make someone pissed off. MaxSem(Han shot first!) 09:36, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
Thanks for that reality-check, MaxSem; you're right, of course. I do still like the idea of a 'trusted' user group though. Happy‑melon 13:54, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

Philosophically, I'm a big fan of figuring out ways to take sysop privileges away from sysops and give them to the editing community at large, in support of wiki principles. I'm hopeful that flagging revisions will obsolete protection, for instance. But deletion and blocking seem difficult to give out so freely. If blocking were given out freely, I would suggest that it be in the form of "moderation", like some bulletin boards or mailing lists have: with FlaggedRevs, this might mean that changes made by the user would have to be approved on any article (while normally they'd have to be approved only on some, if I understand correctly).

I would imagine something like that any autoconfirmed user can put a non-autoconfirmed user on moderation, or remove one from moderation. There might be varying levels of moderation: the first level would moderate only edits to articles, the next edits to any page other than one's own talk page, and the final one could moderate all edits. Finally, sysops would be able to remove autoconfirmed status in case of abuse, and would be able to moderate (or entirely block) anyone, including other sysops (but as now, they could probably unblock/unmoderate themselves, too).

Of course, sysops are still important here, but a lot less so. As I said, protection could in principle be replaced more or less entirely by FlaggedRevs (well, still keep the main page protected, I guess). Now about deletion . . . —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 14:36, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

Respect is always hard to obtain and once gained, easily lost. Creating a "trusted" user group would mean something that took a lot to obtain, but would be easily lost. I like it. However, I have no idea how it would be implemented, although probably the easiest way is to select one editor as trusted, and only trusted editors could contribute positively or negatively in the selection of other trusted editors. Wait, we already have that - isn't that the cabal? And yes we have long ago drifted off from technical implementation inappropriately into policy discussion. 199.125.109.105 (talk) 16:12, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

(above discussion moved from wp:vpt to wp:vpp)

To allow some limited blocking or moderation of obvious vandals, preferably just IP vandals, by established editors sounds like a good idea. Providing it's not automatic, and there is some vetting before granting that right. In the very early days of WP, all users had sysop rights, but as WP grew, that was split off, and rightly so. Now that WP is immense, I think there is a need for other levels of user trust below that of admin. WP:Rollbacker is a good example and the caveats expressed there about reverting ONLY vandalism are good. Another example of new user rights; The WP:Flagged revisions page discussed new WP:Userrights for: Surveyors and Reviewers. All that to say that a usergroup could be created called "established editor" (I don't like the term trusted, since it implies that others may be untrusted) or preferably a new term that is unambiguous. The term Editor was also used in a test version of the Flagged Revision software (Editor and Reviewer as separate rights). — Becksguy (talk) 17:28, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

Why is the current process for granting blocking powers insufficient to extend such powers to those 1) who are established enough to be trusted with that power and 2) who are interested in using that power to police vandalism? Postdlf (talk) 17:58, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

How about a 'blocker' usergroup, somewhere between the process of requesting rollback and adminship?...... Dendodge .. TalkHelp 18:04, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
As I've already mentioned above, blocking is the most serious of admin's abilities, and granting it w/o granting all the others makes no sense. MaxSem(Han shot first!) 18:11, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

What about a systeme where all users (including IPs) had the power to block. Taht;s more in spirit of wiki. JeanLatore (talk) 01:01, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

I even know who will use that button most often;) MaxSem(Han shot first!) 12:56, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

There's one big disadvantage to splitting up admin tools: When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Some problems are better solved using page protection, and some using blocks. If someone only has a partial toolkit, there is natural tendency to apply the wrong tool for the job. Bovlb (talk) 18:20, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

Good point. To be honest I think the admin procedure has become way to strict. The original idea was that every editor in good standing (i.e. with a history of little conflict and good edits) would be able to become an admin. Look at the current admin nomination procedure and the third degree interrogation going on to establish whether someone is allowed to become one...... But that is another discussion entirely Arnoutf (talk) 18:59, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

Flagged revisions: let's get this sorted

It would seem desirable that we finally agree on what to do about flagged revisions. There's a discussion continuing here where consensus seems to have been reached that we should implement them, but there are still outstanding issues that need to be settled before we do so. Please have a look.--Kotniski (talk) 09:44, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

Excuse me, but I'm slightly puzzled: Why is this being debated in user space, and not at the proposal page Wikipedia:Flagged revisions/Sighted versions where it belongs? --B. Wolterding (talk) 16:11, 14 May 2008 (UTC)
In my humble opinion, I'd hardly consider that userpage "consensus". --CapitalR (talk) 16:14, 14 May 2008 (UTC)
Anyway, we should try to bring the various discussions together in one place (as already proposed on that userpage) and actually get something done.--Kotniski (talk) 16:23, 14 May 2008 (UTC)
The problem is that most of the proposals are different and some even predate the flagged revisions extension. I think the best thing to do would be to try to combine whatever bits had support into a new proposal as well as observe how it works on the German Wikipedia (I believe there are also plans to use it on the Russian Wikipedia as well). Mr.Z-man 23:58, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

Again, the central place for this kind of proposals would be Wikipedia:Flagged revisions and its subpages. There are two active proposals, Wikipedia:Flagged revisions/Sighted versions and Wikipedia:Flagged revisions/Quality versions, where you may want to weigh in. Of course you're free to start a separate third proposal if you feel it's warranted; but please leave at least a link at Wikipedia:Flagged revisions so that people will be aware of it. --B. Wolterding (talk) 09:36, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

Opinions requested on a quick policy question

Disclaimer/assurance: This has nothing to do with WR, or anyone/anything that has shown up on AN/ANI the last couple of days.

It has something to do with an editor I'm dealing with via email, and I want to have things very clear in my head before I reply to them. I think, based on the past few WR threads on WP:ANI that I've stooped to reading, that I know how it works, but would like to be sure.

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that I'm 100% sure, and could document for ArbCom or someone if necessary, that User:AbleWiki on Wikipedia is the same person as AbleX on website X, and 100% sure that User:BakerWiki on Wikipedia is the same person as BakerX on website X. AbleX makes some truly offensive attacks on BakerX on website X, which would result in a rapid indef block if they had been made on Wikipedia. AbleWiki and BakerWiki have a history of fighting on Wikipedia, but neither has been blocked for it.

Am I correct that current policy is "what happens off Wikipedia stays off Wikipedia", and that no action is taken here against AbleWiki? That's my interpretation, but I'm not sure it's right. And based on the "Wikipedia is not a battleground", if AbleWiki was clever enough not to do anything further against BakerWiki on Wikipedia, and BakerWiki retaliated against AbleWiki here, I'd actually have to warn and eventually block BakerWiki, and leave AbleWiki alone, even though I know for a fact that AbleWiki is the true weasel? --barneca (talk) 15:03, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

From what I've seen, the only time off-wiki behavior is punishable on-wiki is outing an editor's RL identity. -- Kesh (talk) 22:00, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
Not really, take Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/CAMERA lobbying, for instance. x42bn6 Talk Mess 00:53, 17 May 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Plot summaries

A new guidleine regarding plot summaries is being discussed. --Kevin Murray (talk) 19:46, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

Socks the trilogy

There is already a quality rating system in place. There are also plenty of guidelines to follow when it comes to quality and content. I was thinking that when an article met a certain quality rank it can then be locked. In a sense articles can be finished. In order to continue editing it would require approval by an admin or by sufficient consensus. Granted that might be difficult with certain current subjects that are undergoing changes. My point is that it is better to 'force' consensus than to have to deal with undos/reverts and vandalism. This would reduce make people resort to discussion than to run amock. If someone cannot find consensus from lack of other editors it can simply be approved by an admin. If the editor does any damage or edits in a way other than authorized then they will be blocked. Libro0 (talk) 01:29, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

Proposals of this general nature have been discussed before. Postdlf (talk) 01:38, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

That is a good point. It does little to protect the less established articles. Would it be possible to require consensus? Or is consensus one of those things that are more of a suggestion than a rule. Libro0 (talk) 01:44, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

The way I see it, this is contrary to the way Wikipedia is intended to work. Blocks and locking of articles is only done as a temporary approach to specific problems. The internet is filled with static pages. Wikipedia is supposed to be something different. --A Knight Who Says Ni (talk) 01:42, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

I see your point. However, would it not be true that an article can eventually be more or less 'done'. Libro0 (talk) 01:46, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

No. Everything on Wikipedia is in a constant state of flux. Celarnor Talk to me 01:49, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
Even if we believe, in theory, that an article can be "done," how would we determine that a particular article was, in fact, done? Postdlf (talk) 01:50, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

I agree with the Knight who said Ni above. Wikipedia isn't meant to be a collection of static pages you can only contribute to if you have the admin bit. Semiprotection is used to protect articles from common vandalism, and if something gets too bad, it gets fully protected for a while. In the case of articles such as Penis, the duration may be infinite because it's such a high-profile target. Blanket protecting all articles just because they're FA seems to be contrary to our pillars and ideals. Celarnor Talk to me 01:48, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

Ok, I am not against this. But back to consensus. How about requiring it. Libro0 (talk) 01:53, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

Things can already be closed with "No consensus to change". I don't really understand what it is you're saying... Celarnor Talk to me 01:56, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
I think you are referring to consensus with regard to policy not article content. Libro0 (talk) 02:07, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
I still don't understand what you're saying. Are you still talking about locking FAs with no criteria other than being FAs? That's almost as bad of an idea as the credit card thing. Celarnor Talk to me 02:11, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

Oh, sorry I think you missed the spot where I said I was not against blocking FA's. I am now talking about people following the rules, namely by requiring consensus. Socks refuse to follow the rules. Maybe WP should be a little more harsh. If attempts to reach consensus through talk pages is disregarded then maybe this can constitute a reason to block a user or lock a page. Libro0 (talk) 02:21, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

Edit warring already gets pages locked and people to dispute resolution, whether they're socks or not. What new material are you proposing? Celarnor Talk to me 02:30, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
I think WP should have less regulation, not more, in the spirit of a wiki. That is, no locking articles for ANY reason, no semi-protection for ANY reason, letting IPs create articles, disestablishment of the admin class, getting rid of the 3RR rule, and the "no legal threats" policy. Let the market, not bureaucracy, decide our path, man... JeanLatore (talk) 03:29, 18 May 2008 (UTC)
While I agree that there is too much wikilawyering, we don't anarchy either. So how many policies/guidelines should Wikipedia have without being bureaucratic or too rigid? --SMP0328. (talk) 03:52, 18 May 2008 (UTC)
I really can't take you seriously at this point. There is no "market" on Wikipedia, despite your "suggestions" to create one. -- Kesh (talk) 04:10, 18 May 2008 (UTC)
Well, there may be a market of some sorts, but certainly not one we encourage. Mr.Z-man 04:53, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

Hit Counter Proposal

Why don't we put a "hit counter" on every single wikipedia article. That way we can track how many times a page has been viewed and how popular it is. Or does the nature of the wiki software prevent hits from being counted? JeanLatore (talk) 01:30, 17 May 2008 (UTC)

The nature of the software is such that counting hits is not meaningful, and the two billion visits a day mean that trying to set up a proper hit counter would kill the website. --Carnildo (talk) 01:37, 17 May 2008 (UTC)
But apparently is now possible: http://stats.grok.se/ x42bn6 Talk Mess 01:38, 17 May 2008 (UTC)
How do you know who's hitting the page? Would it be helpful to know if the pages were read by editors, versus readers? A page gets an edit, and a couple dozen people check it to see if it was vandalism? Helpful? Meaningful? -Freekee (talk) 01:48, 17 May 2008 (UTC)
Not really useful. The squid caching cluster allows this (raw data available here), but we'd have to start hosting it on Wikimedia servers. I don't really see how what this does for the project, though; specifically, what benefit would this add? Celarnor Talk to me 02:18, 17 May 2008 (UTC)
Sorry but I think there are better uses to server capacity; the meaningfulness of the counters will be fairly low because of editor/reader diffs anyway. Arnoutf (talk) 08:27, 17 May 2008 (UTC)
A possible work around for this would be to allow embedded objects[4] as long as they had no visible content, in this way the strain would be passed onto third party websites although there are several problems with this idea such as that the third party sites would have access to the users IP. - Icewedge (talk) 08:36, 17 May 2008 (UTC)
Per WP:TFAQ#Can I add a page hit counter to a Wikipedia page? hit counting is a feature of the Wikimedia software but it's turned off for performance reasons. Even access logging is typically turned off in the squid front ends for performance reasons, so I'm not sure how http://stats.grok.se/ works. I don't think adding invisible tracking images to all pages would even be considered - note that the strain of fetching the invisible image would be a far greater performance hit than keeping access logs in the squids. -- Rick Block (talk) 15:20, 17 May 2008 (UTC)
The external hit counter works by having each Squid cache send a UDP packet out for each hit. This keeps the load on the cache servers reasonable, but means that hits will be lost if the stats server is overloaded, or if there's network trouble. --Carnildo (talk) 06:06, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

Why are "short articles" bad ?

Up above there is a discussion on the contentious topic of "inherent notability". The original author of that thread states one of the problems is: "We end up with lots of short articles." Ignoring the issue of "inherrent notability" (that's a separate debate I do not wish to rehash here) I would like to know on a more basic level, why are "short articles" a bad thing?

I don't know about you but in almost every encyclopedia I have ever seen the majority of the articles are very brief. Yes, WP is "not paper" so we don't have space restrictions ... but that does not mean we MUST create articles that are long.

To assume short articles have little or no value is as erroneous as to assume that long articles are automatically worthy just because much can be said about a given topic. 72.87.158.243 (talk) 21:26, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

Short articles are, in themselves, not bad. Obviously a long article is better as it provides more information but small articles certainly have their merits, that's why there are so many stubs. That's just my two pence (I'm English and hate the word 'cents')...... Dendodge..TalkHelp 22:15, 7 May 2008 (UTC)
There's traditionally a certain article length that people like Wikipedia articles to be (see e.g. Wikipedia:Article length) - there is such thing as a very short yet complete article on a very narrow topic with little available information, but I haven't run into many of these. 05:33, 8 May 2008 (UTC)
Generally, it's a question of organization. Since we're not paper, we can also organize things into logical groupings, and instead of a ton of short articles, we can have several redirects leading to one coherent, reasonable-length, in-context presentation of those subjects. We can even anchor redirects to a specific section. In traditional paper encyclopedias, such "see also" entries require the reader to find a different page or even perhaps a different volume. Here, the redirect is seamless and automatic. There's also the legitimate question of "What is important enough to give any space to?" If we can only say a sentence or two on a subject, we should have it merged to a parent, if possible, or simply decline to mention it, if not. Seraphimblade Talk to me 05:38, 8 May 2008 (UTC)
Well, there's two kinds of short articles. One is an article which should be longer, but no one has bothered to expand it, and the other is one that is destined to have no meaningful content ever, because there are no meaningful references to cite to help write the article. The former is not a problem. The latter is. --Jayron32.talk.contribs 05:51, 8 May 2008 (UTC)
I pretty much agree with the anon here. Short articles are fine, and most of the articles in traditional paper encyclopedias are short, but the publisher has still decided that these articles (which we invariably call "stubs" on Wikipedia) are useful to their readers. For an example of a rather short article, Vadsø Airport is a fairly "bare bones" article by Wikipedia standards, and marked as a stub, twice. It contains only six lines of text in the body, along with a destination list, an infobox, and some references. But by paper encyclopedia standards, this is not a bad article really, it is four times more informative than the corresponding article in Store norske leksikon which just gives the location, opening year, runway, and passenger numbers. Their entire article goes over two lines of text. Shorter articles than the stubs we have can be found in paper encyclopedias, so we should not really be too worried. Sjakkalle (Check!) 06:04, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

Are short articles bad? Of course not. Sometimes biographical articles are necessarily short due to a lack of information, are still notable, but are not suitable for merging because, well, they are articles about a person. See these examples: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11. Some of those can be expanded, others will forever be short or will rely on only a few sources. Those are only 19th century people. If you go back to the 16th and 17th century, there are plenty of people where snippets of biographical information exists, but it is difficult to decide where to put them in an encyclopedia. You could put footnotes in all the articles the person is mentioned in, giving the biographical information about that person, or you can create a short article that will never be more than a few paragraphs, and link to that from the places where the person is mentioned. Carcharoth (talk) 12:09, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

The gist of this discussion is: short articles aren't bad - poorly sourced ones are.-Wafulz (talk) 13:44, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

My understanding is that the complaint about "short articles" in the context of the inherent notability discussion refers to articles that are extremely short because they contain only the most trivial of information. Some of these examples are liable to get deleted... but take a look at Abrided anime All Good Things (film) Alcatraz (Horse-Ecuador 1967) and Bilanga Department. Generally, we are talking about articles of a few sentences that merely state some basic directory-like information about the topic. They capture information that would usually be presented as part of a list in a more general article. --Marcinjeske (talk) 03:25, 14 May 2008 (UTC)
I want to clarify my comment... the short articles I mentioned above were examples of *bad* articles of the type justified by inherent notability. They were provided to answer the original question of "why are short articles bad?" by differentiating between shortness due to lack of notability and shortness due to brevity. --Marcinjeske (talk) 06:05, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

Source question

Is an album's booklet a verifiable source? How should such a citation look like? If I write "In the insert booklet of "some album", the band notes blah blah blah." - is it a sourced statement as it stands?--  LYKANTROP  20:18, 17 May 2008 (UTC)

Nope, it is just as much the primary source as the album lyrics itself are, and most likely self-serving. JeanLatore (talk) 21:13, 17 May 2008 (UTC)

Not sure I agree, but of course it depends on the subject matter, and whether it's something controversial. First off, I would recommend using a <ref> tag instead of writing it out as a sentence in the body of the article. Album notes (once popularly known as liner notes) are published and verifiable info, and can certainly be quoted for hard info such as who played what instruments, where and when the album was recorded, etc. If there are opinions being expressed by members of the band, I fail to see how self-published quotes are inferior to media quotes, for example, and I'm not sure what the "self-serving" concern is about. I haven't looked at Lykantrop's recent edits to see if I can find the subject in question, but if you want to provide a link, do go ahead. --A Knight Who Says Ni (talk) 00:54, 18 May 2008 (UTC)
Thanks. I just wanted to know generally if it is verifiable. I know the WP:SELFPUB rule very well.--  LYKANTROP  09:10, 18 May 2008 (UTC)
This has come up over at WP:RSN before, and the consensus was that liner notes WERE a RS, (and therefore verifiable). DigitalC (talk) 00:52, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

Fixing questions posted to Reference Desk in all uppercase letters

From time to time, (inexperienced) users post questions to the Reference Desk in all uppercase letters. Quite predictably, the questions are responded to with comments that posting in all uppercase is the equivalent of yelling. In my observations, usually neither the original poster nor the commentators who pointed out the problem would do anything about the problem. I think it is harmless for others to fix stylistic problems like this but I hesitate to do it because I don't know whether it is an accepted practice or something frowned upon.

I propose that fixing formatting problems in questions posted to the Reference Desk be recognized as accepted practice.

What are your thoughts?

While we are at it, what are your thoughts about fixing broken English in Reference Desk questions?

Of course, all this talk about fixing problems in posted questions assumes that the meanings of the questions are not altered. --71.162.233.156 (talk) 13:25, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

I have seen – on more than one occasion – cases where a 'helpful' editor has in good faith 'corrected' an 'error' of spelling or grammar, and their change has a) not been necessary, as the 'error' is simply a regional variant of English; b) introduced a new or different spelling or grammar error; and/or c) has altered the meaning of a question completely (by, for example, 'correcting' an obscure or archaic term to a word with a similar spelling but completely different meaning). Per Wikipedia:Reference desk/Guidelines#Don't edit others' questions or answers, it's a bad idea to mess with anyone else's signed comments. In general, we don't 'fix' anything except broken markup (unintentional leading spaces, unclosed formatting tags, etc.).
In other words, while the intent of the 'fixers' is almost always to preserve the meaning of the question, the effect is not always what might be desired. If you see a question that's in ALL CAPS, you might offer a polite explanation to the original poster about netiquette and YELLING. If the question is lengthy enough that the ALL CAPS interfere with reading or understanding it, consider reposting the question in the same section properly formatted and under your own signature. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 15:25, 18 May 2008 (UTC)
Leave it be. Some people get very angry if you refactor their text, even just taking off all-caps. Too many people feel that you're insulting them by doing so, and it's not worth the fighting. If you can figure out what they're talking about just make a polite pointer about proper typing, and then answer the question. If not, a polite request for clarification is all that's needed. -- Kesh (talk) 15:31, 18 May 2008 (UTC)
Indeed, leave it be. Explain but they may save/bookmark the anchored URL and when they discover such a link doesn't exist any more, there is every chance an angry person comes along. After all, it doesn't do any real harm to anyone reading because if it's obvious the user isn't shouting, then it's not harmful. x42bn6 Talk Mess 15:39, 18 May 2008 (UTC)
Agreed, leave it be. I got "reprimanded" once, for changing a term in someone's comment to a wikilink. While I still feel it should have been perfectly fine for me to do so, the person whose comment it was was not happy. We shouldn't be making people unhappy, especially at the reference desk. -Freekee (talk) 15:40, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

Namespace?

are there any rules about namespace pages? Guitarplayer001 (talk) 20:45, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

I'm not sure what a "namespace page" is but there are some restrictions on certain namespaces, such as "no fair-use images outside of the Main namespace". Could you be a little more specific? x42bn6 Talk Mess 20:58, 18 May 2008 (UTC)
thanks for the links, that's pretty much what I was looking for, searched for it, couldn't find it. so thanks. *problem resolved* Guitarplayer001 (talk) 21:48, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

Editor Review

is it just me or does nobody make comments or even check the "editor review" list anymore? JeanLatore (talk) 01:25, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

The best way to get people to do an editor review on you is to advertise the fact that you are looking for feedback. Do this by adding a link to the editor review to your signature. That way people who interact with you (positively and negatively) will know that you want feedback. But no, editor review is an area where a lot of people don't partake. It takes 2-4 hours to do a decent editor review on somebody, and most people aren't willing to spend that kind of time on a stranger.Balloonman (talk) 01:45, 19 May 2008 (UTC)
I had a similar experience last year with no repsonse to my request, and I guess I never took the time to comment on others. I like Balloonman's idea. But, if you are posted there I'll take a peek. --Kevin Murray (talk) 01:56, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

Amending the Wikipedia 1.0 assessment scale - community input requested

(cross-posting to several noticeboards)

We've had a considerable amount of discussion discussing the merits and drawbacks of the current assessment scale, and it has resulted in two proposals. The first consists of moving the {{A-Class}} assessment level below {{GA-Class}}; the other is the addition of a new {{C-Class}} scale between {{B-Class}} and {{Start-Class}}. We'd like the community to voice its opinion about these propsals here. Thanks, Titoxd(?!? - cool stuff) 05:58, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

WP:RFC/U - time to get rid of it?

Moved from archive as it's premature to close this - future datestamp applied to make sure it isn't archived again - Will (talk) Moving from WT:RFC...

Undid future timestamping, time to archive this (only three posts in two months, no need for this to stay as the first post on the VPP for the next half year). Fram (talk) 06:53, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

About two months ago, I listed Requests for user comment for deletion under the premise that it did not work, and it's basically a quagmire of personal attacks and a stepping stone to ArbCom. The consensus in the MFD, including the creator of the process and the MfD's closer, is that it doesn't really work 99.9% of the time, and only exists because there is no other process existent. Just get rid of it and reinstate the Community Sanction Noticeboard, as that actually did do some good. Will (talk) 17:51, 26 January 2008 (UTC)

Sounds like a good idea. I personally preferred CSN better than RFC/U. D.M.N. (talk) 18:10, 26 January 2008 (UTC)
I would support CSN provided there was a minimum time for comments (about 7 days). There should also be a maximum time for banning (1 year, same as ArbCom). R. Baley (talk) 18:14, 26 January 2008 (UTC)
CSN had teeth, RFC/U hardly any. CSN saw discussion and nuance, RFC/U sees ganging up and party-lines half the time. With the same provisos as R. Baley, except I'd prefer six months, it would be good to have it back. Relata refero (talk) 18:20, 26 January 2008 (UTC)
Maybe you could merge the two... CSN to me always seemed to arbitrary. Consensus could be declared in an hour or never... that kind of gives power to people who can generate a mob of "me too"s on demand. RFC is very structured but seldom goes anywhere. Is there any realistic way to have CSN but with a more normalized process, to give the accused a change to reply, slow down the mob mentality, and reasonably assess consensus? --W.marsh 18:28, 26 January 2008 (UTC)
Would it need a new name possibly? Also please note than CSN only closed three and a half months ago and consensus might not of changed much since then. Also, a lot of things that "could" of gone there are instead now sent to WP:AN or WP:ANI, meaning they get a lot more traffic and stress put on them. D.M.N. (talk) 18:29, 26 January 2008 (UTC)
W.marsh, don't you think a minimum one-week period for each sanction discussion would help with the mob of "me-too"s? (Too much evidence has emerged lately of off-wiki co-ordination for us to discount that as a factor.) Relata refero (talk) 18:32, 26 January 2008 (UTC)
A week sounds reasonable. If it's truly an emergency WP:BLOCK should apply, and if someone's transgressions don't seem blockworthy a week after the fact, then a ban was a bad idea to begin with. I'd also like to look at a waiting period before people start bolding words (ban, don't ban, etc.) maybe 48 hours of pure discussion without people taking definitive stands like in a vote. I think that would lead to better discussion, people tend to feel psychologically committed to a stance once they're locked in to it. --W.marsh 18:36, 26 January 2008 (UTC)
At Arbcom they've decided to take the ambitious step of waiting (I believe 48 hours, but I can't remember) before voting on the proposed decision page. We could do something similar, discussion can take place for 2 days, but no proposed "remedies" (ban, topic ban, etc.) could be offered until 48 hours after a new complaint had been certified (maybe not "certified," just following the initial complaint --basically enforce 2 days of discussion before any talk of "banning"). R. Baley (talk) 18:44, 26 January 2008 (UTC)

RFC works when it's used for asking for comments, it does not work when sanctions are sought, but that is not its purpose. The CSN should be brought back and RFC kept and used for its intended purpose. — Rlevse • Talk • 20:09, 26 January 2008 (UTC)

The Community Sanction Noticeboard had its own problems, though I'm not sure that it needed to be eliminated. Part of the problem is that dispute resolution mechanisms seem to come and go - Mediation went away, and now it's back under a new name, the CSN came and went, ANI seems to alter its mission every so often. I see three main problems with RFC/U: it is not empowered to sanction, it's intended to keep reduce the burden on ANI, and it's a mandatory step before going to ArbCom, which can sanction. The solution I see is to 1) bounce more stuff, both from RFC/U and ANI, to Mediation (wherever it's living right now), 2) have some level of sanction available at RFC/U, which would probably require administrator patrolling, and 3) allow admins to move complicated cases off ANI to RFC/U. Perhaps a name change would be in order - instead of "Request for Comment/User Conduct", it could become "Administrators' Noticeboard: Ongoing Problems" (to distinguish it from AN:Incidents). Making it part of the Administrators' Noticeboard would mean that sanctions would be available and it would be an appropriate preliminary step to ArbCom. It would also reduce the load at ANI, where probably half the volume of discussion is on complicated, drawn-out issues, even though those are fewer than 10% of the actual incidents reported. Community Sanctions would all get moved to AN/OP, also. As part of the AN cluster, AN/OP would be fairly highly visible. Argyriou (talk) 20:37, 26 January 2008 (UTC)
I'm Opposed to this. Many of our processes suffer from a lynching mentality and RFC is as bad as some of them but it does serve a purpose. I really do not see a return to the votes for lynching that CSN turned into as a viable alternative. If we are replace this process we need some other way to garner community feedback into problematical or disputed editor behaviour and a noticeboard doesn't seem the way forward. Spartaz Humbug! 22:22, 26 January 2008 (UTC)
I concur with Rlevse's and Spartaz's comments. --Iamunknown 00:39, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

Both W.marsh and Spartaz voice important concerns. The CSN was split off from ANI, and then was merged back into ANI after only 8 months. I think ANI, with its high visibility and traffic, is the proper place for most such discussions. The deletion discussion is very instructive as to the potential problems that must be kept in mind. I oppose any page dedicated exclusively to "sanctions," as well as any form of voting for a ban.

Getting back to RFC/U, I think its purpose and its place within the DR process should be better defined. The list of DR options here is rather bewildering, and does not indicate (what I see as) RFC/U's status as a second-tier DR forum for problems that have proven intractable in the first-tier forums. The third tier, of course, is Arbcom.

There is a grave problem when people see DR as a list of hoops that must be jumped through before you can ban someone. Emphasis should be placed on restoring relationships and on helping problematic editors to become better ones. Note that I am not talking about obvious trolls, who should be dealt with easily enough in the first-tier DR forums. To me, the purpose of the first-tier forums is to have one or two experienced editors tell a problematic editor that he/she is behaving problematically and should change. At this point, the case may be obvious enough that a block or ban would be appropriate. The purpose of RFC/U is then for the larger community to communicate that same message. If the problematic behavior continues, then an admin can enact a community ban, and the tougher cases can go to Arbcom. If I am out in left field on this, then tell me so or ignore me. If not, then the DR guidelines should be a lot more clear that this is the case. --BlueMoonlet (t/c) 05:09, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

It would be good if it worked that way, but the practice is less harmonious. The process seems to escalate conflict rather than diminish it. I don't however know how to substitute it. CSN was seen as a kangaroo court, so that too had problems. DGG (talk) 09:11, 27 January 2008 (UTC)
Practice does not need to be harmonious. I'm not so naive as to think that a large fraction of people are actually focused on "restoring relationships" etc. But I'd settle for orderly. --BlueMoonlet (t/c) 01:29, 28 January 2008 (UTC)


The problem I have seen in the few RFC/U's I've seen (as an outsider) is that there is very little in the way of objective evidence. It usually ends up in IDONTLIKEHIM comments, or sometimes people siding with the nominator they like or the defendant they like, or even lining up with the POV they like.

Any complaint, whether it is in an RFC/U or an AN/I or a proposed AN/OP, should have specific charges based on policy or guidelines and specific diffs to support the charge, and diffs to demonstrate attempts to resolve the problem. A user who behaves badly should be warned every time the problem is noticed. Just as we warn against vandalism, we should warn about NPA, incivility, etc. (If we had more warning templates, users might issue warnings more often.) If we warned users more often we might see fewer problems. If problems persist, then the warnings will provide the evidence to justify blocks.

AIV is not contentious because there is a visible history of escalating warnings to demonstrate the problem, to demonstrate attempts to resolve the problem, and to justify the length of a block. 3RR is not contentious because diffs provide objective evidence of bad behavior. RFC/U, AN/I, CSN almost always are (were) contentious because there is usually no objective evidence to demonstrate the problem and attempts to resolve the problem. I think that RFC/U would be more effective if it required specific charges of violated guidelines, specific diffs to support the charges, and specific diffs to demonstrate attempts to resolve the problem.

I was just about to make these suggestions about specificity over at WT:RFC when I saw the link to this discussion. I might still suggest it over there to try to improve the process while waiting to see if a consensus develops over here to eliminate or replace the process. I'm also thinking of starting a new section over here to suggest that we should issue warnings for bad behavior much more often. I have seen a lot of incivility go unwarned. If we had escalating templates for warnings, editors might use them more often. Sbowers3 (talk) 02:41, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

IMHO, RfC on User Conduct should be used to elicit a wider community involvement in the background of the situation instead of the superficial cat-calling that we stumble acrost in article-talk and user-space. I frequently accidentally wander into a vicious debate, simply because I visit a lot of pages. The RfC/U posted to the article-talk, and user-talk of both the RfC presenter and the subject would allow for impartial input. Which should continue for a minimum of three days there. Then, as above mentioned, the subject can be given some breathing room in which to evaluate improvement or at least detachment. After sufficient time, if an editor feels that anti-project editing still exists, then it would be appropriate to escalate to CSN and allow at least 3 further days for responses to be gathered. So my nutshell, RfC/U as a precursor to CSN and a necessary part of DR.Wjhonson (talk) 02:59, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

The problem with ANY system of open community comment on another editors actions, regardless of which Wiki-acronym you attach to it, is that it is always open to sniping and abuse (once someones name shows up there, everyone they ever have pissed off gangs up on them). The question is whether such abuse is willing to be tolerated in order to have a system whereby the community can comment on user behavior. You can't have a system in place that is immune to this kind of abuse, but neither should you throw out the baby with the bathwater... --Jayron32.talk.contribs 06:54, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

I am strongly in favor of the WP:RFC/U system. It isn't good at seeking punishments for past bad behavior, but that's partly because sanctions are preventive, not punitive -- the point is, sanctions should be applied when bad behavior continues, rather than because it existed. RFCs are good for that -- if a user pushes POV, for instance, and it becomes well-established that this is the case in an RFC, and they continue to do it, sanctions can be safely applied. RFCs sometimes get out of control, but that's actually a good thing -- think of it as water in the mountains, it needs to come downhill somewhere. WP:RFC/U is a good way of handling that release of tensions because of the way its rules keep editors from commenting back and forth, which tends to build tension. Plus, they have a good way of adding lots of uninvolved editors to the mix, which distributes the energy. Mangojuicetalk 15:49, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

I don't really know what to think. The Wikipedia community hasn't shown itself to be anymore trustworthy than the Wikipedia admins. Both increasing and decreasing admin accountability or things like RFC/U seem counterintuitive. Making it more strict allows people to witch-hunt users and admins they don't like. Making it more lax allows trolls and corrupt admins to do whatever they want. The problem is that so many Wikipedia editors have zero regard for reason. That needs to be addressed first, I think. ☯  Zenwhat (talk) 11:35, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

RFC works (as stated above) when it's used for asking for comments on behavioral issues of a user or users, it does not work when used for witch-hunts, lynchings, Public floggings, personal attacks, bitterness, and character assassinations. Since this process does seem to escalate some conflicts rather than diminish them, perhaps modifying the guidelines within the process is needed as opposed to removal. Without RfC/U, the only formal steps in dispute resolution that focuses on editors are AN/I and ArbCom. Conversly AN/I could serve as an appropriate venue and does provide wide community involvement on issues (Apropriatly a modified format would be needed on AN/I to replace RfC/U). Processes exist to have a purpose, I belive this does, but some reform may be needed to improve it.--Hu12 (talk) 13:18, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

If you thought RFC is terrible, CSN was horrendous. I don't ever want to see anything like that back on wikipedia ever again. But if I do, I shall certainly crucify the inventor using their own process. ;-) --Kim Bruning (talk) 15:48, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

I like Argyriou's suggestion of making it AN/Ongoing problems. From the very little experience I have with RFC/U, my impression is that it's essentially a temporary repealing of the NPA policy on both sides. There are votes but no conclusions. After lambasting each other for days, both sides claim victory, and use the archived RfC as a method of ongoing bypassing of NPA by simply providing a convenient link to the RfC.
On second thought, don't call it "Ongoing problems". Self-fulfilling prophecy. Call it AN/Problems. A header at the top of the page can specify what types of problems are postable there. --Coppertwig (talk) 22:02, 2 April 2008 (UTC)
I've been involved recently in an ongoing controversy regarding a disruptive editor that has gone through an informal RfC on the talk page of the affected article, a discussion on the No Original Research Noticeboard, a formal RfC on the talk page of the affected article, and finally an extended discussion on AN/I. At the end of a month of these discussions there was a clear consensus for a topic ban, but everyone seemed to be uncertain as to how to formally impose the topic ban.
The advantage of CSN (as I understand it) was that there were people who were knowledgeable about the problems and procedures for dealing with disruptive editing. The concerns that led to WP:DE first appeared in WP:Expert Retention and sought to provide a speedy way to deal with such disruption. As it stands now, the lengthy and ineffective procedure of dealing with disruption "operates toward an end of exhausting the patience of productive rules-abiding editors," which is one of the definitions of disruptive editing. From what I've heard, CSN apparently went overboard on instantaneous bans, but the present ineffective model has become part of the problem. I'm not an advocate of any particular solution, but we need to have effective procedures and make them clear to all editors and admins, if we are to deal with disruptive editing, point of view pushing, personal attacks, etc. --SteveMcCluskey (talk) 14:42, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

How to guide

I think RFC is a good way to gather evidence and gauge community sentiments. If an RFC/U convinces an editor to cease causing problems, that is a good result. If they continue, a note can be posted at ANI requesting a community remedy, such as an editing restriction or ban, with a link to the RFC/U. If there is no consensus at ANI, the case can go to ArbCom, and again, a link to the RFC/U provides much of the necessary evidence. The processes work when people use them correctly. Jehochman Talk 14:05, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

To be honest, if we ever want RFCU to ever work, we need more admin intervention - Anittas was indefed a second time in October. The attack he was blocked for was on RFCU for twelve days, but nothing happened until ANI got wind of it. Will (talk) 00:50, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

BLP-Lock: A way to deal with contentious BLP articles

After reviewing the Don Murphy DRV, it's obvious that the community has some differences with regards to BLP articles, Notability, and how to handle things. I tried to come up with a compromise that would ease some folks mind with BLP. I actually brought this up with one of the folks whose article would be covered under this policy, and they were pretty positive with it. It alleviated one of his major problems about having a Wikipedia article about them.

So, without further ado..

User:SirFozzie/BLP-Lock

The basics:

A) The article can be placed under BLP-LOCK by any uninvolved administrator. When an administrator places an article under this policy, they must either refer to an existing OTRS ticket, or submit one, and detail why such action is necessary in that OTRS ticket.

B) If an OTRS volunteer agrees that the article should be placed under BLP-LOCK, the article will be stubbed down to a bare-bones situation (just bare facts, no controversial information), and fully-protected for a period of a MININUM of six months (this can be permanent).

C) During this BLP-LOCK status, the only edits that should be made are those via {{editprotected}} requests that have full-consensus on the talk page. Any information that not reliably sourced should not be added to the article, even with consensus. While a subject of the article does not get an automatic veto over information being added to the page, administrators who handle BLP-LOCK editprotected requests should be fully aware of the BLP policy and judge accordingly.


This is actually fairly close to the Stable Versions idea we've been promised for eons going forward.. It reduces a major part of the reason that folks (here and elsewhere) are upset about BLP: That any "child with a computer" can vandalize it, and then these vandalizations are available in the history forever.. and for folks that don't have people watching/OWNing the article, these vandalizations can persist for a period of time until caught. Instead, the article grows in a more controlled manner.

The reason for thinking that the OTRS ticket is necessary.. I'm not sure this is necessary or a good idea for ALL BLP articles, but if an article needs BLP-LOCK, then it should have above-normal levels of attention paid to it, and OTRS is one way to do that. I know that the problem is that OTRS can be overwhelmed at times, I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is on it, and work OTRS/BLP-LOCK if it goes through.

Also, on a strictly personal level of thought.. if a subject complains to WP via OTRS, this should be a standard option (to BLP-LOCK their article) going forward. It's bad enough if a subject needs to email us once if there's problems with their article. We shouldn't have to make then continually monitor their article. 21:14, 21 March 2008 —Preceding unsigned comment added by SirFozzie (talk • contribs) Timestamp for archivng purposes. Fram (talk) 06:54, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

Question on editorial over-focusing

I have a question about a type of behaviour, not an editor. It is a question that specifically doubts good faith and yes this question is prompted by an editor who shall remain nameless. I think it is appropriate to not identify who. If I am wrong then no harm is done by asking this nameless question, and if I am right then I will follow official dispute resolution processes starting with discrete personal discussions with this other editor whom I will call "Editor1" for this discussion. As you read this please keep in mind my question is about WP perspectives and/or policy on the kind of behaviour described, not a specific editor.

I have been involved in editing a set of related articles that have been difficult to source. Editor1 is one of those wikipedians whom I assume in good faith tries to improve WP by aggressively challenging unsourced or poorly sourced material. All of that is well and good. My concern is as follows... Based on an offhand comment by another editor of those articles I looked at the contribution history of Editor1 and it seems that roughly 90% of his challenges over the past year have been on topics that go against his personal belief systems. While the challenges are technically done correctly it seems to me that the targetting of a group of articles and more importantly a subset of specific topics within those articles could represent a hidden agenda to bias the articles. Perhaps even an unintentional/subconscious agenda.

If Editor1 truely is trying to improve WP by seeking out faulty citations shouldn't his edits cover a wider range of topics than only (mostly) those he disagrees with? Faulty and missing citations are easily found everywhere on WP. Does this represent a broad-spectrum violation of WP:OWN or any other WP "rules" ? 66.102.205.150 (talk) 08:08, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

In my experience, it is much easier for people to to challenge ideas they oppose than to guess what the weak points in their own arguments are. The standard of supporting evidence on the English Language Wikipedia required here has increased significantly in the last few years (and articles which are widely accepted on smaller WPs have to fight for survival here). The "I'm an expert and this is obvious" school of thought is giving way to the "This reliable source says" school. I have seen this lead to tension in a number of cases. The latter school is perfectly acceptable in, for example, Wikinfo. I think Wikipedia is big enough that there will be readers with all opinions, so the bias in improvements of one particular editor will balance out overall, giving a well sourced body of knowledge in all areas. Stephen B Streater (talk) 08:24, 18 May 2008 (UTC)
True Stephen, however the aggresive nature of this behaviour is causing a clear pattern of sentences, paragraphs, "poorly formatted" citations, whole subsections and even whole articles being tagged and removed only to eventually be brought back with obvious but difficult to find reliable sources (mostly due to being offline and specialized texts).

Is the material unsourced or poorly sourced? Yes - at first edit it often is.

Should they remain on WP as such? No, not forever ... but the WP:INSPECTOR essay suggests much wisdom on this matter.

Can these articles be validly sourced? Yes, allowing for a cooperative effort and time to do research.

Are there editors willing to do such work on these articles? Yes, but dwindling in number because reluctance to do so is increasing as a result of these behaviours.

I realize that WP:INSPECTOR is only an essay, yet it strikes me as significant that this particular behavior flies almost 100% in the face of every suggestion in that essay. 66.102.205.150 (talk) 08:55, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

It seems the easiest solution would be to find the sources, and re-add the material with citations. Unless the editor is being disruptive, there's really not much else to go on here. -- Kesh (talk) 15:29, 18 May 2008 (UTC)
Despite the trend towards good sourcing, if the fact mentioned is obvious to anyone, or otherwise would never be questioned by a reader, a citation is not necessary. But keep in mind that your view might be biased as well, if it's a topic you're very familiar with. On the other hand, there's nothing wrong with a few cite tags. Let him place them. Try not to get upset at the implication that the article is less than perfect. But don't let the info be removed unless there's a real possibility that it is untrue. -Freekee (talk) 15:51, 18 May 2008 (UTC)
I can feel with the anonymous editor. I have seen a section on city transport naming the numbers (E27, E12 etc.) of the highways connecting to this city being deleted without warning as this information was not sourced (this has actually happened). Anyone owning a map of the region could easily have checked, or you could turn onto the road and read the signs. I think the tagging and deletion has become a goal in itself for many (rather than a means of improving wikipedia as a whole). Arnoutf (talk) 16:02, 18 May 2008 (UTC)
I've come across one who's reducing articles to stubs in particular area, will not discuss, is seemingly abusive, non-negotiable and cite-righteous. They don't seem to contribute to articles and focus on a particular area almost as if they were a specific-type account (I forget the correct term for it). If they weren't an IP, it would amount to a kind of vandalism. Disruptive is a euphemism. Is there any recourse re someone like that? I'm willing to walk away, but I see where that's pretty common in response to this one and it's a pity if this behaviour is too effective. Any advice greatly welcome, thanks, Julia Rossi (talk) 12:57, 19 May 2008 (UTC)
Julia I think we are talking about the same editor but that really isn't important (see below). What saddens me is your comment I'm willing to walk away, but I see where that's pretty common in response to this one and it's a pity if this behaviour is too effective. I hope you will not walk away but I think you've clarified for me my own concern. Is the effect of such behaviour to cause opposing editors to walk away? I will not ask if the intent is to create that effect, but I am concerned that this could be used in the future as a very subtle disruptive strategy and so I am seeking input on if this is or should be allowed.

There are policy instances where single edits by multiple users have been equivalenced with multiple edits by one user. This issue feels related to that concept somehow. 66.102.205.150 (talk) 16:45, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

I appreciate the feedback so far. Unfortunately I feel the heart of my question was missed - perhaps because the editor Julia and I know of should never have been mentioned and I should have asked in a more hypothetical way. Let me try that now...

All editors at WP are supposed to do things that improve and add value to the encyclopedia, and certainly pointing out missing citations does do that. My question is: Does pointing out missing citations only for topics which one dislikes (or disagrees with) constitute a problem? Doesn't that amount to an attempt to destroy specific material by nibbles rather than improve the encyclopedia? If an editor is concerned about missing citations should they not be applying that concern with a wider paintbrush? 66.102.205.150 (talk) 16:34, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

If it shows a disruptive pattern of behavior, yes. It's really hard to say for sure without knowing the situation, though. Some people are here because they're interested in one particular subject/group of subjects, and will excise any unsourced statements because they want to make sure only verifiable facts are presented. As an example, I've been keeping an eye on a few cryptid pages because people like to toss in personal "sightings" and wild claims about the subject. I've offended a few posters because their pet theory/prank edit got reverted. So, it's hard to say without knowing the situation. If you really think this editor's work is disruptive, or based on an agenda, it's best to take it to WP:RfC. -- Kesh (talk) 18:09, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

I think it's time I outed myself as the editor in question. It's true, I absolutely hate class rings (in spite of the fact that I've never seen one in real life), and want to erase all evidence of their existence. I also hate St. Francis Xavier University (presumably because they have class rings). But seriously, what I have against these two articles, and a whole bunch of New Thought-related articles (that are the source of 66.102.205.150's & Julia Rossi's irritation with me) is that they're appallingly badly referenced (and in many cases completely unreferenced). Far from them "go[ing] against his personal belief systems", I only heard about this theological genre when I stumbled across a couple of incredibly crufty New Thought articles on AfD a couple of months ago (I can't remember what they were -- but one had 'Global' in its title) when I was commenting on a completely unrelated article. I did a bit of category-searching and turned up a large number of similar ones, and decided to template/challenge them. Where editors were prepared to front up with citations (e.g. Religious Science), I've been supportive. Where they haven't, I've pruned radically. My viewpoint can be roughly summarised as WP:NRSNVNA (which although only an essay, is not violative of any wikipedia policy or principle, as far as I can see). I have in the past challenged the notability of articles on topics directly supportive of my views (e.g. Salem hypothesis), and have just recently supported the deletion of an article on a non-notable book congruent with my views. Far from being the WP:SPA on New Thought that Julia Rossi accuses me of being, the bulk of my edits have been unrelated to New Thought.HrafnTalkStalk 18:18, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

I really was trying not to target you specifically Hrafn. I did my best to not identify you because I was asking about a behaviour pattern that might apply to one editor (you) but more importantly a pattern that sooner or later will apply to someone at WP. I do thank you for "outing" yourself as it does allow others to look over the patterns and give meaningful feedback.

My contention was not about your edits on New Thought related articles alone, but on the bigger picture of your views on various theological matters of different kinds. Were you even aware that the many challenges you issue mostly fall under this larger umbrella?

Two questions do arise now that we are in the open ...

1. How were you able to see yourself in the descriptions and yet not feel it applies?

2. Why do you not seek out missing citations on a wider range of topics? There are tons of non-cited articles you could apply yourself to.

-- Low Sea (talk) 21:46, 19 May 2008 (UTC) (formerly known as IP 66.102.205.150)

Morn, yes Hrafn, thank you for coming along. Can I ask what you mean when you say, topics directly supportive of my views, congruent with my views, etc. It seems a certain subjective something is at stake for you. When you do quote that NRSNVNA essay, it gives a good picture of where you're at, so thank you. Don't you think your label for contributions as "stalk" is just a little bit creepy? Julia Rossi (talk) 23:04, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

Low Sea:

  • The "pattern" you see is one of insistence on WP:V that can, as I have already mentioned, be roughly summarised by WP:NRSNVNA. A "pattern" of insisting on compliance with policy is not a problem in any community that thinks its policy is worth the (metaphoric) paper its written on.
  • Like most people, I have a few theological views that I accept, and thus (at least passively) reject most of the vast constellation of theological viewpoints beyond my own. As long as the holders of these other viewpoints don't attempt to impose their viewpoints on (or otherwise harm) others, my view of them is a mild and amused skepticism.
  • As far as "How were you able to see yourself in the descriptions and yet not feel it applies" -- quite easily. There is little that is 'over-focused' about my application of WP:NRSNVNA. If I care about a topic, I am likely to be knowledgeable on it, to have sources on it, and to rewrite rather than simply tag (and later prune). The latter course tends to be exclusively applied to articles on topics that I really don't care two hoots about either way, except that they should be WP:V. When I do this, I tend to follow links/categories for related articles. What I choose to focus on tends to be what sticks out as being blatantly unverifiable.

Julia Rossi:

  • My "views" in question are support for the scientific method and a consequent dislike of pseudoscience, probably deriving from a background in sciences and philosophy. No, I don't find "stalk" to be "creepy" -- just an amusing commentary (which I plagiarised from another editor) on the nosiness that wikipedia tends to encourage. If you are reduced to commenting on my sig, it probably means that there's little left of substance to discuss.

HrafnTalkStalk 01:52, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

While Hrafn's edits have been "legal", they have focused solely on the deletion of material in spiritualist articles and been carried out with a combative (and "threatening") style. That is, his attitude contradicts Wikipedia:Please do not bite the newcomers and a number of other guidelines that address what we hope is the spirit of Wikipedia. I am not a regular spiritualist editor, but I ran across several instances where Hrafn deleted entire articles -- not by bringing them to Wikipedia:Articles for Deletion but rather by means of redirect -- and I have since worked on resurrecting these many articles, in spite of spirited resistance from Hrafn.
The frustrating part is that these fights are about run-of-the-mill biography articles, unsourced yes, but nothing that anyone should get their knickers in a twist over. As just one example, I resurrected one stub and 9 minutes later he redirected it without so much as a "how do you do".
This type of behaviour reflects poorly on the Wikipedia community. Madman (talk) 03:30, 20 May 2008 (UTC)
P.S. As one example, I had rescued a stubby Malinda Cramer from one of these redirect-as-a-form-of-deletion exercises and 9 minutes later Hrafn reverted it. I didn't even have time to get another cup of coffee.
Given that Madman2001's first talkpage post related to this dispute was an unjustified accusation of "vandalism", I think it is safe to say that he 'bit' first, and established the "combative" tone of the interchange. "Threatening" the blatant non-compliance with WP:V with the consequences that this policy explicitly states is hardly bullying. HrafnTalkStalk 03:54, 20 May 2008 (UTC)
Actually Madman's characterizations are 100% consistent with WP:VANDAL. WP:VANDAL states (bold enphasis added):
Vandalism is any addition, removal, or change of content made in a deliberate attempt to compromise the integrity of Wikipedia. The most common types of vandalism include the addition of obscenities or crude humor, page blanking, or the insertion of nonsense into articles.
One could certainly have interpreted the wholescale removal ("page blanking") of an article outside of the AfD or CSD processes as an act to "compromise the integrity of Wikipedia".
Any good-faith effort to improve the encyclopedia, even if misguided or ill-considered, is not vandalism. Even harmful edits that are not explicitly made in bad faith are not considered vandalism. For example, adding a personal opinion to an article once is not vandalism — it's just not helpful, and should be removed or restated. Not all vandalism is obvious, nor are all massive or controversial changes vandalism. Careful attention needs to be given to whether changes made are beneficial, detrimental but well intended, or outright vandalism.
Here Madman could have been more careful, yet his perspective on the matter was an reasonable interpretation that was made rationally. It is generally difficult to see any form of non-consensus supported page blanking as an improvement.
Committing vandalism violates Wikipedia policy. If you find that another user has vandalized Wikipedia, you should revert the changes and warn the user (see below for specific instructions). Users who vandalize Wikipedia repeatedly, despite warnings to stop, should be reported to Wikipedia:Administrator intervention against vandalism, and administrators may block them. Note that warning is not an absolute prerequisite for blocking; accounts whose main or only use is obvious vandalism or other forbidden activity may be blocked without warning.
Madman initiated a return of the article text (a revert) and left a warning on the talkpage. Based on his understanding of the issues and policy his action and his talkpage entry are quite appropriate.

Perhaps rather than reading just the diff you provided others might find ALL of that discussion[5] enlightening. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Low Sea (talk • contribs) 13:10, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

Yes, and I am not the only one who has characterised Hrafn's deletions of whole sections and even articles as vandalism. Citations upon request.
And my first "spiritualist" edit was not an accusation of vandalism, but a request not to "delete without giving folks a chance to research" some 4 days prior. Madman (talk) 14:11, 20 May 2008 (UTC)
Two things from me, the reduced articles are not stubs in the usual sense of starting point to developing, but are more like stumps where the references outweigh the body of the text and clutter the reduced text giving no room to writing that reasonably assumes a knowledge base as other biographies allow and as "writing" as such requires. It's a stub in a straight-jacket. The other thing is that when an article is retrieved from redirect etc, and survives AfD for example, where do you go from there when the editor is ready to revert or excise further activity? There's also the overdose of tags as well and the demand to self-justify and measure up via the red-hand warning I received when I went near it during the deletion review of Florence Scovel Shinn. Even the section headings have gone so there is a further de-wikifying happening. I'd like to shape up a couple but don't want to see my work down the drain over and over. It's no use pointing such an editor to other areas of the pedia, a cold wind would soon be blowing through their bones as well. There are a lot of other reservations I have but don't want to invite the tit-for-tat reaction. My regret is that a pageant of history makers is being suppressed (seemingly legally but in reality, through something like prejudice and fear). Julia Rossi (talk) 23:46, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

Baseless accusations of vandalism

Actually Madman's characterizations are 100% consistent with WP:VANDAL. WP:VANDAL states (bold enphasis added):

Vandalism is any addition, removal, or change of content made in a deliberate attempt to compromise the integrity of Wikipedia. The most common types of vandalism include the addition of obscenities or crude humor, page blanking, or the insertion of nonsense into articles.

One could certainly have interpreted the wholescale removal ("page blanking") of an article outside of the AfD or CSD processes as an act to "compromise the integrity of Wikipedia".

Thank you Low Sea for that baseless accusation based on a tendentious reading of policy. Redirection is not page-blanking. That redirection is clearly not envisaged as vandalism can be seen by the fact that it is explicitly mentioned as a legitimate option (short of deletion) both at WP:GAFD and template:notability.

Redirections do not require AfDs, as Madman2001 was very clearly told on WT:AFD, with an editor from there repeating this on Talk:Church of Divine Science -- so I don't see how Low Sea can be unaware of this.

The accusations made in the "Question on editorial over-focusing" thread have had no basis in fact or in policy, but rather in fanciful and baseless assumptions as to my motives. I would further point out that they have received little or no support from anybody other than protagonists. HrafnTalkStalk 02:34, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

Suggested truce

Based on the most recent discussions held over at the talkpg of one of these articles (see here), I think we are approaching a productive resolution to the issue across this brace of articles. I don't think there's anything more to be gained by continuing this back'n'forth exchange of policy quotations and questioning of motives.

My suggestion is, that those editors who have a mind to concentrate on completing the work adding reliable and relevant sources to the articles and vetting the article content accordingly. I don't think anyone disagrees that the quality of referencing had been inadequate. In the meantime, while this exercise is in progress Hrafn will be (as they've indicated) "suspending imposition of WP:V", in the sense of not adding to the 'cite needed' tags and comments that have already been supplied. Other editors will likewise have no further need to pursue Hrafn (and vice versa) in response to the comments and actions of the past & up to and including now. All parties will be better off focusing on content improvement, staying cool and observing a 'truce'. Without these distractions, the articles' referencing & verification concerns should be able to be addressed in a reasonable amount of time. All further discussions to be centred on content improvement. Presuming these principles are mutually observed from now on, continuing this thread here and on other talkpgs should not be necessary. --cjllw ʘ TALK 01:00, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

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