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December 2017

Please comment on Talk:Current members of the United States Senate

 Declined

 – Not interested.

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:Current members of the United States Senate. Legobot (talk) 04:23, 1 December 2017 (UTC)

Mister wiki case has been accepted

Resolved

 – Noted; I think I'm done commenting there.

You were recently listed as a party to or recently offered a statement in a request for arbitration. The Arbitration Committee has accepted that request for arbitration and an arbitration case has been opened at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Conduct of Mister Wiki editors. Evidence that you wish the arbitrators to consider should be added to the evidence subpage, at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Conduct of Mister Wiki editors/Evidence. Please add your evidence by December 15, 2017, which is when the evidence phase closes. You can also contribute to the case workshop subpage, Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Conduct of Mister Wiki editors/Workshop. For a guide to the arbitration process, see Wikipedia:Arbitration/Guide to arbitration. For the Arbitration Committee, Kostas20142 (talk) 21:34, 1 December 2017 (UTC)

Precious

four dimensions player

Thank you for quality articles such as Jasmin Ouschan and William A. Spinks, for service in 12 years, for thoughts about policy, style and consistency, for an initiative for clarification, - Stanton, cat lover in four dimensions, you are an awesome Wikipedian!

--Gerda Arendt (talk) 22:41, 1 December 2017 (UTC)

Grazie! PS: I really didn't do much on the Ouschan article, though the Spinks one is about 95% my work. Some non-trivial articles I created (not from splits/mergers) are Persian onager, Turkmenian Kulan (over a redirect [1]), "Pool Hall Blues", Valley-Dynamo, Valley National 8-Ball League Association, IBSF World Snooker Championship, Five-pin billiards (a progressive WP:TNT, over what was originally a useless machine translation of the it.wikipedia stub: [2][3][4][5][6]), Crystalate Manufacturing Company, and a TNT rewrite [7] of Three-ball. Something in the system just partial-credited me with the Ouschan GA, probably based on number of edits or something, but it was mostly cleanup work.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  00:01, 2 December 2017 (UTC)

Sony Ten

You know what, the "TEN" part of Sony Ten came from the network's original owner, Taj Entertainment Network, not because it is/was on channel 10. JSH-alive/^{talk/cont/mail} 14:36, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

The article indicates otherwise: "Taj Television India Private Limited" (which normal people would surely write "Taj Television India Pvt Ltd"). Our article doesn't mention a "10" channel, though I saw that somewhere while looking into this. Even if the "10" thing is wrong, "Ten" is the predominant spelling, when Sony ("SONY") capitalize-like-crazy marketing isn't involved [8],[9], so it would be lowercase anyway. If there were concrete proof it originated as an acronym, the argument could be made, but I think it would fail, because no one presently seems to interpret it as an acronym, and it's not styled as one even in sources not independent of the subject but pre-dating Sony's takeover.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  14:51, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

PS: This is really obviously not an acronym; it's the sister station/network of Sony One and Sony Six.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  10:55, 4 December 2017 (UTC)

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Please comment on Talk:Sergio Verdú

Disregard

 – Not a valid RfC.

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:Sergio Verdú. Legobot (talk) 04:23, 4 December 2017 (UTC)

Kalki Page and over control by User ShotgunMavericks

 Done

 – to the extent there's much to do but remind people of the core content policies.

Can you please look into this?

He is just removing what he does not like, stating "Reverted to last better version" even facts are removed just because he does not like them.

https://en.wiki.x.io/wiki/User_talk:ShotgunMavericks#Control_over_Kalki_Page — Preceding unsigned comment added by SourceOnly (talk • contribs) 10:22, 4 December 2017 (UTC)

@SourceOnly: I suppose I can look at it, as a random editor, but I have no experience with the topic, and am not an administrator.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  10:39, 4 December 2017 (UTC)

Thank you for looking at it, few people seems to control what content they like and dislike, regardless of facts. If one in not good enough but other of same type is allowed to remain then there is a problem. Please see what you can do.

off topic (remove if you want) you do look like the "iron man" downey jnr :)

(no offense meant.) — Preceding unsigned comment added by SourceOnly (talk • contribs) 10:48, 4 December 2017 (UTC)

Please sign your posts (add ~~~~ after them). I wouldn't mind looking like Downey! Someone the other day said I look more like Matthew Rhys in The Americans. I definitely don't have his sneery smile, though.

Anyway, I'm looking over Kalki and Talk:Kalki. I don't see any open threads on the talk page in which you're involved. If (as seems to be indicated at the User talk:ShotgunMavericks thread) you are adding material without providing reliable sources, then you can expect people to remove it, since reliable sourcing is required; this isn't a blog. Not sure what else to tell you. I don't see an extant dispute for me to attempt to mediate, at any rate.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  07:56, 6 December 2017 (UTC)

It's not as simple as that, I have removed stuff that has no reliable source however the page was reverted to source less page. not to worry, thanks for at least looking into the matter. Good luck with the election. — Preceding unsigned comment added by SourceOnly (talk • contribs) 10:38, 6 December 2017 (UTC)

I may have mistaken who was talking to whom and thus who was adding the unsourced material. You keep not signing your posts, and it makes the conversations very difficult to follow. So does outdenting replies so they are not threaded. I left a thing on the article's talk page, reminding people not to add unsourced material, etc. If it still keeps happening, you might to try WP:RSNB or WP:NORNB.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  10:41, 6 December 2017 (UTC)

@ShotgunMavericks: This conversation probably interests you as well.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  12:23, 6 December 2017 (UTC)

Visual editor infobox bug

Changing data in an infobox resulted in the deletion of spacing. Someone was even implying that I was a vandal. Take a look. Thinker78 (talk) 21:42, 5 December 2017 (UTC)

Argh. VE should just be taken offline until they fix its numerous severe problems.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  07:44, 6 December 2017 (UTC)

Bizarre symbols, got shot right of- couple of page moves though, sorry about that

 Fixed

Génération·s, le mouvement, take care! Serial Number54129^{...speculates} 11:40, 6 December 2017 (UTC)

What an absolute palaver that turned out to be! Thanks for sorting it though; I did originally move it to the diacriticless-page sans symbol, then I assumed that the S should stay lower-case. Of course, it never occured to anyone that in fact that was never under the correct bloomign name in the first place! :D Cheers, Serial Number54129^{...speculates} 12:04, 6 December 2017 (UTC)

It's weird; still working on it. I went with the name on their own website, which is also dominant in the French press. The election article had a template call in it, but I find no template.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  12:05, 6 December 2017 (UTC)

@Serial Number 54129: Fixed it all up; found the template (I was looking for the "parent" name, and apparently only the full path to the subpages that aren't really subpages would work. Created some additional redirects for things like "Génération·s" and "Génération(s)" to match the alternative spellings used in a few newspaper articles. If people want to move it again, I suggest using WP:RM and making sure we arrive at the a name that will stick!  :-)  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  12:20, 6 December 2017 (UTC)

Great stuff, yes looks much better. Thanks for sorting it- I agree that after all that, nothing less than RM will suffice for yet another move! cheers, Serial Number54129^{...speculates} 12:28, 6 December 2017 (UTC)

I'm afraid, though, that I spoke to soon! Ffs... SerialNumber54129^{...speculates} 07:31, 8 December 2017 (UTC)

Derp. I opened a full WP:RM on it.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  08:26, 8 December 2017 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:Flag of Turkey

 Done

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:Flag of Turkey. Legobot (talk) 04:24, 7 December 2017 (UTC)

Hi

Seeing that Kingsindian and myself understand Version 2 completely differently over at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Clarification and Amendment, could you please tell us what your opinion is, about the situation on Mausoleum of Abu Huraira: did editor C break the rules' according to Version 2, or not? (I have no intention of reporting anyone, but I really need to know,....or I will be reported next, if I have gotten it wrong.) Thanks, Huldra (talk) 20:22, 9 December 2017 (UTC)

@Huldra: Well, given that it's an open question at ArbCom, I'm skeptical anyone would be addressed under version 2 until after ArbCom decides that is the interpretation to apply, if they do so. I would need to see specific diffs to know what "danger" you or the other editor might think they're in. I would think in the interim that acting as if version 2 is in effect is safest, because the Arbs chiming in so far are leaning toward that direction (or were as of yesterday – I haven't looked since then), and it's the safer interpretations if some admins already use that interpretation, and it's more in keeping with the spirit/point of it, and of course WP:THEREISNODEADLINE.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  02:46, 10 December 2017 (UTC)

Well, to repeat: I have no intention of reporting anyone, BUT: I need to know, as I know with about 100% certainty that I will be reported if I break any rules. (I normally write Palestinian history, which means that......not everybody loves me, put it that way. The threshold of reporting me to the dramah boards is rather low, Ive been reported twice just this last half year, for basically misreading things, see [10][11])

As it is, at the moment, Kingindian and I have completely opposite opinion on how Version 2 is to be understood, and I really need a clear answer to which one of us is correct. Huldra (talk) 20:11, 10 December 2017 (UTC)

@Huldra and Kingsindian: Only ArbCom can give you one. Only the current ArbCom members can determine which interpretation prevails (or, technically, they could refuse to decide and leave it up to WP:AE admins' interpretation, but I predict they'll not do that because it would perpetuate rather than solve the conflict). I think the safe bet is to presume that version 2 will prevail (based on Arbs' responses so far), and further to assume that it means that if A reverts B, and C un-reverts B, and D re-reverts C, that for A, B, and C the "clock" starts from D's re-revert. It may mean more waiting (and ArbCom might not go that far with it), but I cannot see how that interpretation can go wrong as a "how to stay out of trouble" matter. Meanwhile, it's already been more than 24 hours since you raised this question with me, and what the "real" interpretation is remains an open question at WP:ARCA, so I don't think you or anyone else need worry about whether some edits from over a day ago might or might not technically might have been sanctionable. It's already stale, and if none of you are editwarring, especially in ways that seem to be system-gaming the confusion about what the the exact 1RR rule is in this case, then no one would take action against any of you, because sanctions are meant to be preventative not a form of retroactive punishment. Have some ice cream and watch a comedy; relax. :-)  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  06:29, 11 December 2017 (UTC)

To Huldra: as of this moment, you can continue as normal. If this widespread insanity actually results in a rule change to version 2, then you can really start to worry. Kingsindian ♝ ♚ 06:54, 11 December 2017 (UTC)

The version 3 compromise looks promising.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  19:33, 12 December 2017 (UTC)

sorry i edited the blade runner article

can u tell me if it has robots though — Preceding unsigned comment added by Handbabyy (talk • contribs) 08:57, 10 December 2017 (UTC)

@Handbabyy: Please sign your posts (put ~~~~ at the end), and new posts go at the bottom (took me a while to get used to that, too). We have robots today, so there are surely robots in the Blade Runner fictional universe. However, The stories in Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049 focus on genetically engineered artificial life, not mechanical. I.e., they were grown in a lab, not built in a shop. So, depending on your definitions, the films either are not about robots at all, or are a "re-imagining" of and a continuation of robot-themed fiction into the era of genetic engineering, much as biological zombie and vampire fiction, in which those conditions are viruses, are a bio-era outgrowth of older genres about them as undead spirits. I don't know if our articles on the films really get into this sort of thing, but there are numerous books in the film studies vein that analyze the original Blade Runner in detail. Try an Amazon books search on "Blade Runner" [12]. I have several of these books and some of them are quite good (I liked Retrofitting Blade Runner and Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner), though not every bit of them is great. PS: Even in Philip K. Dick's original 1968 novel, which was about "androids", they had a biological as well as mechanical component, so that wasn't new to the film, just turned up a notch.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  10:20, 10 December 2017 (UTC)

Making matter worse

Moved to WP:Village pump (policy)#RfC: Russian railway line article titles

See User_talk:Anthony_Appleyard#Mis-moved. You've just complicated matters further. We need to unwind some stuff, then we can worry about what the better titles are. Dicklyon (talk) 04:37, 9 December 2017 (UTC)

I'd opened the RfC because I could see it was turning into a mess, that might not even be resolved to making it a full RM; the anon was going on about numerous other articles with the same doubly-wrong pattern.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  02:47, 10 December 2017 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:Ireland

Disregard

 – I'm the one who opened that RfC in the first place. Wish WP:FRS was smart enough to detect that.

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:Ireland. Legobot (talk) 04:24, 10 December 2017 (UTC)

Thoughts

I disagree with your assertion, expressed elsewhere, that the mathematics wiki project is somehow a narrow focus group for the purposes of the mathematics manual of style. MOSMATH dates back to 2002 and is one of the earliest and most well-established parts of the MOS. The math project is the most knowledgeable group on the wiki about the actual styles used in mathematics articles, and members of the project have long collaborated on that page for the benefit of the wiki. It would be absurd not to point them to potential changes that would affect thousands of mathematics articles.

But the main reason I wanted to write is about the framing of the closed RFC. From my perspective, no MOS page has ever said that colons cannot be used for indenting displayed mathematical formulas. This is, undoubtedly, why featured articles continue to use colons. So I see no actual CONLEVEL disagreement. By claiming there is a disagreement, I believe you were saying that there is another MOS page which says colons cannot be used. I don't see any page that says so, so I interpreted the RFC as saying that you wanted to change the Wikipedia style to say that colons cannot be used (as was done for block quotes, but not for other indented content, in the past). That position was rejected in the RFC. And so there is still no conflict: no other MOS page says not to use colons for mathematical, chemical, or other formulas.

You have also described MOSMATH as a "fork", but MOSMATH predates most of the rest of the MOS, and the guidance about how to indent mathematical formulas is very well established (since 2002). So there does not seem to be any "forking" going on with the page. Moreover, I f there were a CONLEVEL disagreement because of language recently added to other pages, it seems that those other pages might not accurately reflect the long term consensus about how to format mathematical formulas - those other pages, in effect, would be attempting to fork the previously existing directions from MOSMATH.

I can also point out that I'm quite knowledgeable about HTML and programming. I have edited the Mediawiki source for my local installs and I wrote the WP 1.0 bot including its web interface. Our disagreements are not based on technical misunderstandings about how to generate HTML. — Carl (CBM · talk) 18:03, 12 December 2017 (UTC)

That's a lot of mostly unrelated stuff to cover. I'm just going to listify these points for expediency (and if I seem angry in any of it, be assured that I'm not):

1. How old the wikiproject is, and how much people like it, and whether the people in it are smart and edit in good faith (of course they are and do) has nothing to do with whether it's narrowly topical compared to VPTECH, which is the only comparison I made.
2. It's correct that no MoS page has said "colons cannot be used ..."; the RfC didn't posit that one should say that, nor did the edit the RfC was about say that, either. You just made it up out of thin air, and misled the wikiproject that such a proposal was being made, so of course they all showed up and bloc voted against it in confused terms and with much hair-pulling and angsty wailing. Notifying the wikiproject of the discussion made perfect sense. Doing so in entirely misleading and alarming terms did not. I assume that happened out of misapprehension not craft, and blame myself in part for not having been clearer from the start about why not to recommend : markup when we have alternatives now and the problems with the old markup are now well-known.
3. The reasons FAs use colons for indentation are a) most of them pre-date the templates that do this more accessibly and MoS advice to use them, b) few MoS points are ever "enforced" at FAC (only those that reviewers happen to both notice and give a damn about), c) FAC "stewards" are frequently hostile (sometimes really excessively so) to MoS gnoming to bring old FAs into compliance with current standards, and d) this sort of markup usability thing is precisely the kind of MoS gnome geekery that hardly anyone works on and which only very slowly makes its way into the "live" code of the encyclopedia. Even if an actual WP policy mandated use of accessible code for this instead of abuse of <dd> list markup it would probably take years to implement (though of course it will never be a policy-level matter).
4. "[F]or mathematical, chemical, or other formulas" is completely irrelevant. What is on the right of the indent has nothing to do with the HTML and CSS markup used to induce the indentation; they're separate domains. It could be a poem or an interlinear gloss or a diagram of flies mating, and the means for indenting it all are identical, as are concerns about doing it in a crappy way just because it's easier by a few characters. It's a layout and accessibility and WP:REUSE and code maintainability matter, a meta-level above the topic of the content being indented.
5. If the maths people want to get the MW developers to hack <math> to support an indentation system within that x-tag, that's fine and dandy, but has jack to do with whether we should continue abusing <dd> list markup for visual layout. It's essentially the same debate as the ancient one about misuse of tables for webpage design layout.
6. Maths concerns are also completely irrelevant to the WP:CONLEVEL issues that are what the RfC was really about. Due to your misleading canvassing of WT:MATHS, none of that got discussed; it was all just a bunch of panicked off-topic noise from maths editors who did not understand the RfC because you confused them about it with a chicken-little story. That sounds more pissy than I really mean it. RfCs get derailed all the time, and I could have written that one better, and notified the wikiproject myself; live and learn. Reasonable discussions are emerging from it, despite the FUD, both at WT:MOSMATH and at Phabricator, so I consider it an overall step forward, despite the verbal abuse I've suffered at Nyttend's hands. I was never going to bother objecting to your canvassing until Nyttend forced my hand by accusing me of unbalancing the RfC when all I did was try to get some people to actually pay attention to what it said rather than what you told them it said.
7. I did not describe MOSMATH as a fork of anything. I described – entirely correctly – something happening at MOSMATH as WP:POLICYFORKing: the "I don't understand, I'm lazy, I don't like change, or this is my page anyway"-style reverting at MOS:MATH to prevent it from being updated to agree with WP:MOS and MOS:ACCESS in deprecating problematic markup and replacing it with demonstrably better markup. It's Not related in any way to how long a page has been around or how long it has said something; it's only about a maths MoS subpage trying to fight (without even any legitimate cause!) against the main MoS page and against the accessibility MoS page about an accessibility matter, which is not a maths matter. It's no different from, say, WikiProject Comics deciding the MOS:TEXT doesn't apply to them and topics they think they "owns" and thus they can go bold-face and ALL-CAPS and turn purple all the names of all superheroes in articles.
8. You keep recycling this argument that it's about "how to format mathematical formulas". It's not. It has to do with how to indent content of any kind. Nothing anywhere in this debate has any effect on anything between the <math>...</math> beginning and end tags. If it's still not clear, let me try this analogy: If your city statutes prohibit hunting animals within the city limits, you don't get a free pass to go around shotgunning rats just because you know a whole lot about rats and how to hunt them. Not even if you're sure something needs to be done about rats. Especially when you've been provided with well-tested rat traps as an alternative. Even if you really like running around shooting them instead. And even if your family's been shooting them since before the city was incorporated. Even if you're doing it on your own property. And even if you don't understand why its better to trap them than to go around shooting even. Even if you still don't understand, after people explain to you that you're injuring others in your shooting sprees. Even if you rabble-rouse your gun club with a false story that the ordinance against hunting in city limits is actually a statute that plans to take away all their guns. Even if the governor is a friend of yours and verbally abuses one of your city councilmen in public because the governor doesn't agree with the statute the city passed.
9. No one said anything about whether you understand how to generate HTML. It's as if you just don't give a damn whether the HTML generated is valid, conformant, and accessible, versus just expedient to generate with shortcuts like ":" even if it's wrong. "As long as it looks okay to me with my eyesight on my browser, that's good enough" is the message you're sending. I don't read minds, so I have no idea what your intent is. I don't work in intent, I work in actual results. Abusing : for visual indentation does not produce good results, any more than using White Out on your teeth to make them look clean from a distance is an actual tooth cleaning.
10. Finally, Accessible talk pages are a lost cause until we have better software for discussions. Accessible markup in articles is not a lost cause. We have template replacements for : that not only work great, they actually work better. The only cost is typing a few extra characters to use them. If maths people couldn't handle that, they also couldn't handled maths markup, or wikimarkup in general. You, me, and the other respondents to the RfC and related discussions have already spent more characters and time arguing at the guideline talk page, the RfC, and my talk page than would have been needed to fix hundreds of articles to use the better markup.
     — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  19:32, 12 December 2017 (UTC)

Re (2): If no other MOS page says colons cannot be used, and MOSMATH says they can, there is no CONLEVEL issue to start with, because there is no conflict between pages. The only way to see a conflict is to believe that some MOS page forbids the use of colons. Indeed, just today you wrote that MOSMATH should "conform with current main-MoS and MOS:ACCESS advice" - but MOSMATH does agree with these pages, because they have always treated colons as an acceptable way to indent things, possibly apart from block quotations. This is why it was important, in my opinion, for the RFC to establish clearly that colons are an acceptable way to indent formulas, and why I focused on that issue in the RFC. The deeper issue here is not CONLEVEL, in my opinion, the issue is that other MOS pages might be misread to suggest that colons cannot be used to indent formulas. — Carl (CBM · talk) 22:33, 12 December 2017 (UTC)

This isn't about whether anyone "can" use colons to indent (you "can" use any markup you can think of to do that, while others definitely also can replace it if it sucks). It's about editwarring at a subordinate MoS page to thwart advice from the main MoS page (which has precedence over all MoS pages) and from the accessibility MoS, both of which make it clear that colons for indentation are a problem and that it's preferable to use a more accessible solution. This is a matter that has nothing to do with maths but to do with accessible page layout and standards-conformant markup in general. This is about a conflict in guideline wording and about WP:CONLEVEL precedence.

No one can be punished for or utterly prohibited from doing anything by any guideline, so this whole "cannot" and "says they can" stuff is entirely off-topic. The indentation-related material at the main MoS is not about block quotations (which auto-indent) but about how to indent everything but block quotations; it's right there in plain English. The material at MOS:ACCESS on colon-indents being a poor idea for specific reasons has nothing to do with maths or quotes in particular but all indented content. The "use a colon to indent" idea you like at MOS:MATHS has nothing to do with maths, but about content behing shifted visually to the right. WP:Writing policy is hard, and if you're having trouble following three guidelines' wording in a row, this may not be your long suit, even if you're amazing with calculus. This is not about "indent[ing] formulas" in particular. Formulas are just content; this is about indenting content, which might be pictures or code snippets, or sports scores, or formulae, or anything else people happen to be indenting.

If you still do not absorb this, and want to recycle your "but maths ..." and "what I like isn't banned" and "there is no guideline conflict" arguments, just don't. The accessibility problem will eventually be fixed one way or another (next month, in 2027, who knows) whether you understand or not. You just go right ahead and keep using colons; others will replace them with better markup after the fact, just as we replace "teh" typos with "the", and add missing alt text to images, and so on.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  05:03, 13 December 2017 (UTC)

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Please comment on Talk:List of areas of London

 Done

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Books and Bytes - Issue 25

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The Wikipedia Library Books & Bytes Issue 25, October – November 2017 OAWiki & #1Lib1Ref User Group update Global branches update Spotlight: Research libraries and Wikimedia Bytes in brief Arabic, Korean and French versions of Books & Bytes are now available in meta! Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:57, 15 December 2017 (UTC)

Power~Enwiki at DRV

I saw your note in the now-closed RFA, and I'm entirely puzzled: That DRV is still open with a day or two to go, and so the fact that the article hasn't been restored really doesn't say anything--and if you read the rest of the DRV, it certainly says that a lot of non-inclusionist admins also thought the A7 was improper. And... him invoking SNOW? Really? Cheers, Jclemens (talk) 06:12, 16 December 2017 (UTC)

@Jclemens: ah I had not noticed the DRV was still open. I tend to agree with the WP:NOT#BUREAU arguments made there. I also agree with you that Power-enwiki was mis-citing SNOW, but it is not a policy or guideline, so it seems immaterial. Even those seeking to overturn the deletion on technical CSD grounds are mostly !voting to send it to AfD – they don't think the article will be kept, only that it shouldn't've been speedied. I'm not in a frame of mind to castigate an RfA candidate for having their own interpretation of an essay, or for agreeing that a bad article is bad, or for not jumping on the "process is more important than common sense, and NOT#BUREAU policy doesn't apply when I don't want it to apply" bandwagon.

I had actually already concluded to oppose the candidate on other grounds, though, that are closer to my concerns about admins than "perfection" in deletion squabbling. (RfA was withdrawn before I got around to it.) Yes, I know many editors care more about that than just about anything, and even vote against candidates for "being wrong" in AfDs more than 5% of the time, or for ever even once having tagged something incorrectly (in the view of the RfA voter) for CfD. I'm not among these people. I'm way more concerned about the know-it-all attitude and temperament issues, plus general lack of experience (time-wise – he actually seems to meet my 10K edits threshold, though I expect little of that to be automated). Someone like TonyBallioni, for example, might have made a good admin that soon, due to conscientious, focused absorption of policy and process while also being an active content editor (I'm not meaning to toot TB's horn over-much, his RfA is just fresh in mind – he was a total shoo-in at 14 months, an unusual landslide support); but Power-enwiki isn't in that category, and most candidates are not. This is one of the reasons I've supported a one-year minimum for RfA the entire time I've been here (and I would even buy into 18 months or so). I know many people hate the idea, but it's a philosophical and emotional, not practical, objection.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  16:17, 16 December 2017 (UTC)

Wow, thanks for a fully detailed rationale, which is more explanation than I expected or I think you owe. I just wanted to point out something... and I find I agree with you on all of these points. A year isn't too much, when we're now treating admins as U.S. Federal judges, with for-life appointments. If I ever run for RFA again (which I have toyed with, but don't have enough time to invest for it to be worth the hassle, and I'm pretty sure some folks are still mad at me 5 years after I got voted off ArbCom), I would run with the condition of yearly reelection. That is, I think the best way out of RfA being too big a deal is the ending of "well, now I'm an admin, now I can show my true colors" problem. Jclemens (talk) 17:54, 16 December 2017 (UTC)

I'm a chatty cathy about internal stuff. :-) And I'm not perturbed in any way by people challenging what I say at RfA (or elsewhere); I just may argue a bit for my position if I thought about it hard before posting it!

Glad you brought this stuff up. Adminship's always been a for-life appointment, other than we've belatedly instituted inactive-admin auto-desysopping, for security reasons, and of course bad-acting admins can be removed, like judges who break the law. The community treating the position like something super-serious is ArbCom's doing, by inventing discretionary sanctions, which made it super-serious. While it has been somewhat effective at addressing a specific problem (uncivil, obsessive editwarring and battlegrounding in particular topic areas), DS is a blunt and heavy-handed tool, with little effective oversight. This has had consequences. It's exactly the same kind of double-edged sword as SWAT teams – great for taking out organized groups of heavily armed felons, but at the cost of public faith in "officer friendly", because a militarized police force is dangerous and abuses its power. Adminship was not a big deal ... only for as long as it was not a big deal. The power to arbitrarily issues block and bans of various kinds, and impose article-level restrictions (which lead to cascading series of blocks and T-bans), without any process other than an old case saying a topic area is under DS, and virtually no recourse (AE and ArbCom virtually never overturn a DS action) is very powerful, and all power leads to abuse.

I've also often thought of doing something like a promise of yearly re-election, when I temporarily forget I don't really want to be an admin. I would definitely support the idea that all adminships should be reconfirmed annually, though likely with lower criteria (50+%) passage. I think that would actually reduce the "adminship is a super-mega-huge deal" perception, for the reason you gave and an additional one: If we were pass-or-failing people (mostly passing them) every week, then new candidates would be subject to less of a hostile gauntlet, out of the process being more routine foo it not being as hard to get rid of "badmins". Our only process now is ArbCom, and it's nearly impossible to invoke successfully except against an admin so off the rails ArbCom has no choice but to act or face censure from the community. Another positive effect of such an annual reconfirmation change would be that losing adminship wouldn't be as huge a deal either; the community would be more apt to forgive after 6 mo. or whatever, rather than treat someone like a criminal for a decade. (That said, I can think of two admins who've regained the bit who never should have because their earlier abuses weren't errors but programmatic abuse of authority, which is a personality problem not a learning-curve issue.)

No system is perfect, and "political" ones are always far from it, the more so they more they are rooted in cult-of-personality and fear-of-change psychology. I'm in favor of anything that moves adminship and other aspects of WP's internal governance more toward meritocracy and further away from popularity contest.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  18:33, 16 December 2017 (UTC)

Failed ping notification

Resolved

 – Nothing to fix.

You have pinged by Zero0000 at WP:ARCA, but it failed due to a typo. You may wish to check the page. Best regards, Kostas20142 (talk) 11:58, 16 December 2017 (UTC)

I didn't try to ping Zero0000, I just mentioned the editor in passing (albeit misspelled as "Zero000"). Kind of a WP:DGAF; I have little sympathy for people who intentionally choose hard-to-remember usernames with strings of digits in them. I don't have a need for Zero0000 to respond there; while I disagreed with one of the editor's ideas, our mutual support for Callanec's "version 4" makes the matter moot, and the purpose of that page is to provide input on ARCA requests to the ArbCom members, not to engage in back-and-forth threaded conversation for its own sake.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  13:33, 16 December 2017 (UTC)

Kostas wasn't telling you that a ping you made had failed, rather that a ping by Zero aimed at you had done so, in case you cared. Cool if you don't, but still neighbourly of Kostas to let you know... -- Begoon 09:59, 18 December 2017 (UTC)

Ah! I get it. I have the page watchlisted. @Kostas20142:, I do appreciate the effort. :-)  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  10:03, 18 December 2017 (UTC)

A beer for you!

Thank you for your recent edits to WP:RFAADVICE. When I wrote that page a few years ago, I never dreamed of the tens of thousands of hits it would get and become the default advice for RFA candidates. It's nice to know that someone is watching over it and making useful improvements. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 10:14, 17 December 2017 (UTC)

{burp} Thankee verr mush!  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  10:25, 17 December 2017 (UTC)

Happy Saturnalia!

		Happy Saturnalia
		Wishing you and yours a Happy Holiday Season, from the horse and bishop person. May the year ahead be productive and troll-free and you not often get distracted by dice-playing. Ealdgyth - Talk 14:03, 17 December 2017 (UTC)

Donkey shins!  :-)  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  15:16, 17 December 2017 (UTC)

I think I'm OK with Dash

Resolved

As you requested, I have double-checked my edits at Dash. I do find that, while I didn't leave anything substantial out, there are a few details that I deleted; I have now restored them to the section Rendering dashes on computers.

Probably in the new year, I plan to add a hatnote to the effect that additional techniques are available using the Unicode values 2013 and 2014, refering the user to the article Unicode input. Peter Brown (talk) 22:51, 17 December 2017 (UTC)

@Peter M. Brown: Thanks for looking into it. :-) I would probably care less about something like an article on the ℞ symbol or whatever, but this is basic punctuation, and oft-used by Wikipedians directly, so not losing any "how do I do this?" info was important. :-)  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  22:59, 17 December 2017 (UTC)

ArbCom

Sorry you just didn't make it. It looks like you got enough support (more than four who got in), but you had a few people opposing just because you aren't an admin. Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/SMcCandlish 3 is waiting for you. I think third time will be lucky, and then either next year or the year after you'll be voted onto the Committee. Anyway, best wishes, whatever you decide. SilkTork (talk) 22:19, 19 December 2017 (UTC)

Thanks! And, yeah, I thought it was funny that I missed it by less than 3%. It's okay. I was looking to serve the community – to try to really make a difference at ArbCom. But, if a sufficient number of people are never going to accept an Arb candidate who's not already an admin, I have lots of other stuff I can do. I know being an Arb would have been a big time drain; it's not something I wanted for the cachet of it (is there any? Arbs get fists shaken at them a lot), but was tedious work I was signing up to take on. I'm likely to run again next year, on the same "I'm not an admin, and that's a good thing for balance" platform. Because it's true. Adminship is like a combination of security guard and janitor. Has an all access pass to the campus, and that requires a lot of trust, but not everyone wants to fill that role, and it has nothing to do with whether someone would be good on a dispute arbitrating board.

I'm also sure I got lots of downvotes because I'm the primary steward of MoS for the last several years, and heavily involved in it since at least 2008 (and in WP:N before that). In various editors' voter guides, at least two opposed me because I was involved in MoS. There are people who don't think we should have MoS or that it it should say something that better suits their preferences (usually profession-based, generational, or nationalism-driven), sometimes with a "wikipolitical" power struggle component (against centralization and broad input, in favor of localized WP:FACTION or individual-author WP:VESTED article control). Every time one of these people doesn't get their way in some trivial style dispute, I get on their long-term "dirt list".

This is why wikifriends drop by and have a hearty chuckle when someone posts on my talk page that I should run for RfA. (All the MoS drama, plus I'm not always Mr. Sweetness and Light, and I'm also wordy on talk pages.) To pass RfA, I might have to abandon MoS and most other WP:POLICY work to the winds. Probably for 5+ years, ha ha. MoS is actually getting close to feature-complete (finally!) for WP purposes, so within another couple of years, this might actually be feasible. The rest of the P&G seem pretty stable, other than a pair of related problems I've identified here.

I might consider RfA again if I had something like 4 nominators who were all active, long-term, not-too-controversial admins. And after I came up with something I want to work on a lot that requires admin tools.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  01:21, 20 December 2017 (UTC)

Well, good luck on whatever you do. SilkTork (talk) 14:55, 20 December 2017 (UTC)

I don't know if I'm active enough as an admin, but give me a shout if you'd like a nomination. Fences&Windows 17:57, 4 January 2018 (UTC)

@Fences and windows: Thanks!  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  00:17, 5 January 2018 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:LiSA (Japanese musician, born 1987)

 Done

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:LiSA (Japanese musician, born 1987). Legobot (talk) 04:23, 20 December 2017 (UTC)

Education vs. alma mater

Infobox person. What was the final decision on merging these duplicate parameters? --RAN (talk) 21:54, 20 December 2017 (UTC)

@Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ): I don't recall; it's been flushed from my FIFO buffer. :-)  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  22:01, 20 December 2017 (UTC)

Happy Holidays

	Happy Holidays
	Wishing you a happy holiday season! Times flies and 2018 is around the corner. Thank you for your contributions. ~ K.e.coffman (talk) 00:54, 21 December 2017 (UTC)

Thanks, you too! Remember: Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  18:23, 21 December 2017 (UTC)

And olive branch & holiday wishes!

SMcCandlish, please accept these holiday wishes :) I've caused this year to end on a chord of disappointment for many, but I hope that despite my mistakes and the differences in opinion and perspectives, and regardless of what the outcome is or in what capacity I can still contribute in the coming year, we can continue working together directly or indirectly on this encyclopedic project, whose ideals are surely carried by both of our hearts. I'm hoping I have not fallen in your esteem to the level where "no hard feelings" can no longer ring true, because I highly respect you and your dedication to Wikipedia, and I sincerely wish you and your loved ones all the best for 2018. Ben · Salvidrim! ✉ 03:59, 21 December 2017 (UTC), humbled but optimistic about the upcoming year of renewal and growth!

Good season and luck to you as well. Despite being critical of the self-granting to your COI account some bits that require confirmation of trust level, I'm less concerned about this case than some of the other parties. I don't agree with the "prohibit from paid editing" suggestions, just paid admin actions (or admin actions in furtherance of paid editing). See also RfC at VPPOL; you're basically the test case, and there could have been a test case that was far more egregious, but you happened to be in the [right/wrong] place at the [right/wrong] time.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  19:14, 21 December 2017 (UTC)

"happened to be in the [right/wrong] place at the [right/wrong] time. -- spot on man, sounds like the title of my biography. :p Ben · Salvidrim! ✉ 19:17, 21 December 2017 (UTC)

Oh, and a new RfC at WT:ADMIN, even more of a snowball. Events are out of any individual control at this point.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  19:25, 21 December 2017 (UTC)

No fancy template...

Mac, but just wishing you all the best for the holidays and the new year, and thanking you for all you do. It's probably a lot warmer where I am than where you are 😎 Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 09:08, 21 December 2017 (UTC)

Thanks, and happy Western year-end holiday season! Heh. Heat: I was wandering around last night in just a denim jacket (after seeing the new Star Wars movie) and it wasn't bad. Northern Califoria's pretty warm despite Mark Twain's "The coldest winter I ever spent was summer in San Francisco" quip (which was certainly not true even for him, having lived in New York; the winters there are about as tough as in Ontario).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  18:22, 21 December 2017 (UTC)

accessibility guidelines headings and serial commas

You should probably look for consensus for the change. Not mandatory, but probably best. I don't see consistent use of Oxford commas on the page, and it's not at all confusing in the heading. Cheers. Walter Görlitz (talk) 22:07, 21 December 2017 (UTC)

I already opened a talk page thread about this (showing serial comma use on that page, which you can find in a few seconds with an in-page search on the string , and). You should have opened the "D" in WP:BRD, if you're going to take the BRD route. Per WP:EDITING policy, all editors have a right to make good faith edits. "I don't agree" or "I don't understand" without an actual facts-, policy-, or source-based rationale is not a valid reason to thwart constructive edits; see WP:FILIBUSTER and WP:STONEWALL. See also WP:LAME, and find something better to do that edit-war against highly standardized use of commas, which you'll find in The Chicago Manual of Style and most other mainstream style guides, and find opposed in virtually no style guides other than those for news journalism, the primary edict of which is to shorten content as much as possible to save newsprint space. So, see WP:NOT#NEWS and WP:NOT#PAPER.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  03:16, 22 December 2017 (UTC)

@Walter Görlitz: Sorry, that was more testy than was warranted. I just spent an hour and half in transit, only to miss a connecting (and limited) train by less than two minutes due to a delay on a streetcar on the way to the station; cost me some work. I'm kind of biting the world's collective ankle right now. Nothing personal. I need to go watch a comedy for half an hour or something.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  03:47, 22 December 2017 (UTC)

Not a problem. Thanks for the explanation. It makes sense.

As for long commutes, I hear you. Have a wonderful Christmas and a fulfilling new year. Walter Görlitz (talk) 04:38, 22 December 2017 (UTC)

@Walter Görlitz: You too! I'm in a cheerier mood already, and have decided I won't argue further on the comma thing over there. Either what I posted on the talk page is convincing (to retain it, or to use one of the alternative versions) or it's not. However, the version with the comma is linked to from at least one page, so it'll need to be tracked down if that version isn't retained.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  04:53, 22 December 2017 (UTC)

Maureen Wroblewitz

 Declined

Help expand this article. Thank you!171.248.249.168 (talk) 03:21, 22 December 2017 (UTC)

Sorry, but this is the kind of article I'm most likely to try to get deleted on WP:Notability grounds. Wikipedia doesn't need more articles on people who aren't actually important but are just having their "15 minutes of fame" because they're pretty or got on TV a couple of times. This one has a lot of sources cited, but a lot of them are trivial, passing mentions, not in-depth coverage. Even if this person is genuinely notable, I've sworn off working on "minor celebrity" bios, as a poor use of my (or anyone else's) time.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  04:31, 22 December 2017 (UTC)

Seasonal greetings

Happy holidays, SMcCandlish! I am sorry for stealing your seat at the election; I hope we can still work together. As I am relatively inexperienced and not well versed in policies, I am hoping that I can come to you for advice from time to time (actually, there is a MoS-related case about editors in general that I would like to hear your insight). Best wishes, Alex Shih (talk) 09:56, 22 December 2017 (UTC)

I'm surprised things came so close, and I actually had more support votes than 50% of the successful candidates, so I don't feel bad about it. Kind of relieved, since ArbCom is reported to be a lot of work and rather thankless for the most part. What we're using right now is a strange and deeply flawed voting system, which gives a double-vote to grudge holders (they can vote for who they like, against you, and neural on everyone else, effectively a double oppose against you; meanwhile there is no double-support alternative, except the drastic step of voting for one or two candidates someone supports and against (not neutral on) everyone else. The combination of these effects is that, in any close race for the last 3–5 seats, the numbers will automatically be skewed in favor of newer editors who've collected fewer grudge bearers, even if their actual support level is lower.

Anyway, I'll be happy to help how I can.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  15:56, 22 December 2017 (UTC)

Season's Greetings

Hope all's well with you and yours, and you're enjoying a relaxing weekend by your choice of heating source. Looking forward to continuing to see your good works in the coming year! —/Mendaliv/^2¢/_Δ's/ 21:39, 23 December 2017 (UTC)

Thanks, and you too! Here in Cali, the weather's actually pretty nice. If I had any sense, I would give up this hobby and write another book or ten, but it's hard to stay away more than a couple of months at most.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  22:09, 23 December 2017 (UTC)

Ahh, I know what you mean. I need to get around to writing a book at some point... I've got a million ideas in my mind but always get stuck after writing 10-20k words. Guess my head's still too used to academic paper writing, lol. Any recommended reading or advice? —/Mendaliv/^2¢/_Δ's/ 22:14, 23 December 2017 (UTC)

Not right off-hand, for writer's block (I have the opposite problem), though just searching that on Amazon and looking for four- and five-star results, from real publishers, is probably a good bet. For writing in general, one of my faves is Stephen Pinker's The Sense of Style; he's not a just a linguist and a very well-regarded nonfiction writer, he's also a cognitive scientist, so he really knows his stuff. That said, I would have preferred he did an introductory and an advanced volume back to back; TSoS is kind of a mixture, and I find the "basics" material in it a little tedious, as if it's aimed at college freshmen and retirees thinking of starting a blog about their hobby. Zero of the advice is wrong though; I've only found 3 errors in it, and the're all trivial (like an adjective mislabeled an adverb). I have a bunch of other "how to write well" books, but few of them have stuck out in my mind. There are a lot of genre/topical ones, though. I guess it depends on what you want to write.

If it's non-fiction, the key is to outline like mad. You can just start filling in stuff as it occurs to you, and it will already be quasi-organized. Fill in what's missing and massage each section to be cohesive, and the sections to flow together well. This can also help identify material that doesn't really belong and should be saved for another work. Even for short stuff this works well; I use the technique a lot when writing essays and guideline drafts and other WP-internal material. (It really shows when I don't and just do a brain dump, as I did at WP:SSF; at least 50% of that needs to be cut out.) I recently started How to Write Short by Roy Peter Clark (it's focused on tweets, headlines, blog copy, etc, but I figure it will also help me reign in my prolixity habit when it comes to talk page posting, which has always been more conversational to me than anything; the fact that SSF originated in copy-pasted talk page material is why it is the text-wall wreck that it is, even if the reasoning underlying it has proven essentially irrefutable).
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  22:58, 23 December 2017 (UTC)

This is all very helpful. I appreciate it! One of the long-shelved projects I think I'm going to seriously push on this coming year is a legal treatise. So that ought to be fun. Good luck if you decide to work on a book yourself! —/Mendaliv/^2¢/_Δ's/ 13:33, 26 December 2017 (UTC)

Heddwch ac ewyllys da

		Compliments of the season Wishing you all the best for 2018 — good health, sufficient wealth, peace and contentment
		Cheers! ‑ ‑ Gareth Griffith‑Jones The Welsh Buzzard ‑ ‑ 19:38, 24 December 2017 (UTC)

Rwy'n gobeithio y byddwch yn cael tymor gwyliau da, hefyd. [If that really says "My hovercraft is full of eels", blame the machine translator!].  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  22:12, 24 December 2017 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:Meghan Markle

 Done

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:Meghan Markle. Legobot (talk) 04:23, 25 December 2017 (UTC)

Anchor placement again

The examples in the documentation for Template:Anchor still have the anchors placed inside the section heading. I think this needs to be sorted out once and for all. A New Year task? Peter coxhead (talk) 09:47, 26 December 2017 (UTC)

@Peter coxhead:Seems worth doing. There was disagreement about this stuff only last week at WT:MOS. In my draft User:SMcCandlish/Manual of Style/Internal supplement essay, I've laid out the nature of the dispute, in the "Links and anchors" section.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  02:18, 27 December 2017 (UTC)

Yes, I've seen the "Links and anchors" section which is excellent. The right solution, it seems to me, is for this to be fixed in the MediaWiki software, so there's a standard way of doing linking to the heading that produces sensible HTML and generates 'plain' edit summaries. Whether this would be worth pursuing is another issue. Perhaps it would give some leverage if it could be shown that some of the methods you've laid out, which are actually used by editors, confuse screen readers. However, the key step for me at present is to get text like yours (slightly amended here) into the MoS: The overwhelmingly most common practice in mainspace is to include anchors below headings, not inside them, to avoid confusing new editors with mangled edit summaries. Prefer below the heading by default, as least likely to be problematic, but do not editwar over different placements. Peter coxhead (talk) 07:35, 27 December 2017 (UTC)

@Peter coxhead: Could compress it even more for real MoS usage: In mainspace, include anchors below headings, not inside them, to avoid confusing new editors with mangled edit summaries.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  22:56, 27 December 2017 (UTC)

Code-example markup tricks

New year greetings. Putting my stupidity hat on- giving clear examples of false code seems weird. Looking at the third example in placement in tables, there is no visual distinction between this and the correct code in the other examples. I am not an expert on the MOS conventions for displaying false code, but use of colour (displaying the illicit code in red) or putting the whole lot in the second column of a two column table- and 'Don't go here' icon in the first, would signal the difference. --ClemRutter (talk) 13:41, 26 December 2017 (UTC)

@ClemRutter: Yes, we have templates for that, e.g. {{!mxt}} and {{dcr}}. Which one works better depends on the surrounding markup. If the page is already using {{xt}}-family templates to mark up examples, I use {{!mxt}}, but an isolated case might better with {{dcr}}, especially if the code in question is outright invalid or malfunctional (that template uses re-styled <del>...</del> markup).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  02:18, 27 December 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for that- it will be copied over to my user/sandwardrobe. In the Tenplate:anchor/doc under discussion- the offending code appears to be:

the following forms of cell are not valid:<source enclose=div lang=text>!{{anchor|Foo1}} |A header cell !style="background:white;" {{anchor|Foo2}} |A header cell with styling |{{anchor|Foo3}} |A data cell |rowspan=2 {{anchor|Foo4}} |A data cell spanning two rows</source>

So is there a magic way in Template:/doc space of turning the text color=red, in a way that is not overwritten? It has beaten me today. I can see multiple uses if we had a simple negative template for false code blocks. ClemRutter (talk) 14:30, 27 December 2017 (UTC)

@ClemRutter: I don't use <source> or <syntaxhighlight> much, specifically because they interfere with tweaking the displayed output – they're a rather blunt instrument. I guess I need to be sure what your intent is. My usual approach to this sort of thing is to use <code style="padding-left:0;">...</code>. This gets rid of the annoying rightward indentation at the start of the code material, and then one can just use <br /> to create line breaks within the code block (turning off nowiki as needed to make that happen, and to make templates like {{!mxt}} or {{dcr}} work within the code example). Regardless what approach you use, the main thing to remember is CSS cascading order; if you do something like {{!mxt|<code>Bad example</code>}}, the result will look the same as <code>Bad example</code> because the stylesheet stuff for the code element comes after that for the {{!mxt}} template. Same goes for links; if you want to something like {{xt|Example text [[War of 1812]]}} you end up with link coloration marring the green example: Example text War of 1812. This actually has to be done as {{xt|Example text}} [[War of 1812|{{xt|War of 1812}}]]: Example text War of 1812. Various MoS pages have errors of this sort in them; I've been fixing them as I run across them.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  22:56, 27 December 2017 (UTC)

A suggestion regarding User:SMcCandlish/Discretionary sanctions/2013–2015 review

Specifically, regarding the "Ds/alerts" problems you highlighted. Would it lessen the "threat" aspect if the alerts were issued by a bot? What I was thinking is that if an article is tagged (say by edit notice) as under discretionary sanctions, that if an editor makes a substantive edit (let's say a non-minor one) to it the bot informs them of the presence of sanctions if they are otherwise eligible for such notification. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 22:47, 27 December 2017 (UTC)

@Jo-Jo Eumerus: That would help a lot, though someone from WP:Teahouse or whatever needs to also re-design the template to look less like a "go F yourself" message. >;-) I have actually been proposing a solution like this since ca. 2015, so if others take up the bot idea, maybe it will finally grow legs. It would also prevent system-gaming of the kind of outlined many times (disrupt in one area until "notified", go to another one and do it there, etc., then come back a year later, after notice expiry, and start over again at the original topic).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  22:56, 27 December 2017 (UTC)

Now we would need to get it proposed somewhere where AE active admins and arbitrators see it... Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 23:01, 27 December 2017 (UTC)

Could try WT:ARBCOM, but this might actually require a formal WP:ARCA.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  23:39, 27 December 2017 (UTC)

I'll see if @Callanecc: knows where to ask. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 12:44, 28 December 2017 (UTC)

I'd suggest probably taking two steps, the first by proposing it at WT:AE for AE regulars to review and then at WP:ARCA for the committee to review. I suggest WT:AE first as I think it's reasonably likely that the committee will want to hear from them before making a decision. Callanecc (talk • contribs • logs) 06:16, 29 December 2017 (UTC)

Sounds reasonable. I'll let Jo-Jo continue to take the lead on this. I've had F-all luck getting any traction of any kind on DS reform for something like 4 years now. I know when to take a back seat.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  06:31, 29 December 2017 (UTC)

Recent edit to collapse top template

Resolved

 – Fixed.

SMcCandlish, the collapsible (and collapsed) instructions on the Template:Did you know/Queue page between the queues and the preps is suddenly no longer collapsing, nor even offering the option to collapse/show. When I took a look to see what might be causing it, the only thing that caught my eye was this edit by you. Can you please check to see whether your change has broken the "collapse top" template, and if so, please fix things? Many thanks. BlueMoonset (talk) 22:58, 27 December 2017 (UTC)

Repaired. I'd forgotten the closing }}} when adding a parameter alias. Derp.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  23:34, 27 December 2017 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:Bosnian pyramid claims

 Done

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:Bosnian pyramid claims. Legobot (talk) 04:23, 28 December 2017 (UTC)

Mots justes

On the MOS talk page you recently wrote: "(our articles are palimpsests stirred together by a global assortment of geniuses, crackpots, and everyone in between, sometimes citing great stuff, sometimes poor stuff, and sometimes nothing)". This, my friend, is a gem. If there's a Hall of Fame for WP user quotes, this should be on it. Whatever you had for dinner the night you wrote that, have it more often.  White Whirlwind  咨  10:14, 28 December 2017 (UTC)

Guess I'd better stock up on chicken covered in extra-spicy barbecue sauce then. Heh.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  13:24, 28 December 2017 (UTC)

Somebody here remembers Vera Lynn

Note to self: Vera Lynn is badass. Over 100 now, and still gets albums in the charts.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  07:34, 30 December 2017 (UTC)

WikiProject Genealogy - newsletter No.5 -2017

Newsletter Nr 5, 2017-12-30, for WikiProject Genealogy (and Wikimedia genealogy project on Meta) Participation: This is the fifth newsletter sent by mass mail to members in Wikipedia:WikiProject Genealogy, to everyone who voted a support for establishing a potential Wikimedia genealogy project on meta, and anyone who during the years showed an interest in genealogy on talk pages and likewise. (To discontinue receiving Project Genealogy newsletters, please see below) A demo wiki is up and running! Dear members of WikiProject Genealogy, this will be the last newsletter for 2017, but maybe the most important one! You can already now try out the demo for a genealogy wiki at https://tools.wmflabs.org/genealogy/wiki/Main_Page and try out the functions. You will find parts of the 18th Pharao dynasty and other records submitted by the 7 first users, and it would be great if you would add some records. And with those great news we want to wish you a creative New Year 2018! Don't want newsletters? If you wish to opt-out of future mailings, please remove yourself from the mailing list or alternatively to opt-out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Opted-out of message delivery to your user talk page. Cheers from your WikiProject Genealogy coordinator Dan Koehl. To discontinue receiving Project Genealogy newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list. Newsletter delivered by MediaWiki message delivery

New Years new page backlog drive

Hello SMcCandlish, thank you for your efforts reviewing new pages!

Announcing the NPP New Year Backlog Drive!

We have done amazing work so far in December to reduce the New Pages Feed backlog by over 3000 articles! Now is the time to capitalise on our momentum and help eliminate the backlog!

The backlog drive will begin on January 1^st and run until January 29^th. Prize tiers and other info can be found HERE.

Awards will be given in tiers in two categories:

• The total number of reviews completed for the month.
• The minimum weekly total maintained for all four weeks of the backlog drive.

NOTE: It is extremely important that we focus on quality reviewing. Despite our goal of reducing the backlog as much as possible, please do not rush while reviewing.

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If you wish to opt-out of future mailings, go here. — TonyBallioni (talk) 20:24, 30 December 2017 (UTC)