Wikipedia talk:Reference desk/Archive 82

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Question removed

Question asking for opinion about a living person removed here. A previous editor has commented on the OP's talk page.--Shantavira|^{feed me} 09:38, 10 February 2011 (UTC)

Good call. Utterly inappropriate for the refdesk; a potential magnet for BLP violations. Karenjc 10:28, 10 February 2011 (UTC)

section removed

I just removed a section because it speaks about the death of a specific person without any evidence that the person is dead or died in the way indicated. And it wouldn't be acceptable to discuss a specific non-notable person in that way in any case. Looie496 (talk) 19:43, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

I disagree with the removal. The link given goes to the person's Facebook page. From that, it's pretty clear the person is dead. You can confirm this if you enter his name into Google News. Given that, I fail to see how BLP is relevant. The removal also removes the main point of the question, i.e. is there any solid scriptural basis for saying that suicides go to hell. --Viennese Waltz 19:48, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

It's perfectly possible to ask that question without naming a specific person, especially if the person is not notable and he is named in a way that would cause distress to anybody who knew him. Looie496 (talk) 19:53, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

I agree, which is why what you did – blanking the section – was wrong and what Egg Centric did – anonymising it – was right. --Viennese Waltz 19:56, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

The 'L' in BLP remains important because the original question didn't provide reliable sources confirming the individual was deceased (Facebook isn't generally a reliable source, and an account could have been created or hijacked as a malicious prank); and because speculation and unsubstantiated discussion about the deceased – particularly the recently deceased – can have real and detrimental effects on the decedent's still-living friends and family. We further hold ourselves to a higher standard when we discuss people who are not public figures regularly subject to broad media coverage (that is, not celebrities or politicians), in part because it is all to easy for our casual on-wiki ramblings to become the top Google hit for those individuals. It is not Looie's responsibility to seek out additional references to support unsourced and poorly-sourced biographical claims before he removes them, nor is it his responsibility to attempt to rephrase and anonymize the content; it is up to the person who wants to post the material to do so. Both Looie496 and Egg Centric took actions that were correct and within policy. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 20:36, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

"and an account could have been created or hijacked as a malicious prank" is a good point. You can use an official Facebook if you are positive that it belongs to the person and that it wasn't compromised. WhisperToMe (talk) 02:05, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

You are losing sight of the fact that as well as the (admittedly dubious) material about a named individual, the OP asked a perfectly allowable question. Blanking the whole section removed that question, which is unacceptable in my view. It's throwing the baby out with the bathwater. If an editor wants to remove the BLP stuff then fine, but it is their responsibility to retain what was a perfectly valid question. --Viennese Waltz 09:17, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

WP:BLP doesn't place a burden on editors enforcing that policy to attempt to salvage useful residue before removing inappropriate content, particularly when the bulk of a post is gratuitous and irrelevant discussion of a private individual. (And don't forget that substantially modifying the signed comments of another editor is a minefield all its own; the latitude we have to modify other people's writing on the Ref Desks and on talk pages is quite a bit different than that we have in article space.) Looie even immediately notified both the original poster of the question (on the IP's talk page) and the other editors of the Ref Desk (through this thread) so that anyone who was interested could provide a revised version of the post—he probably went above and beyond the call of duty there. If you're not convinced that Looie's application of WP:BLP was correct, then I recommend that you seek a third opinion at WP:BLP/N or WP:AN. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 14:30, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

My, you are obsessed with policy, aren't you. I'm not particularly interested in BLP enforcement, I'm interested in a user's reasonable expectation not to have a legitimate question removed just because some other part of their post fell foul of BLP. In my view the only person who should be responsible for "provid[ing] a revised version of the post" is the editor who removed it in the first place. --Viennese Waltz 14:46, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

Not at all. My very first response to your misplaced outrage provided a detailed, reasoned explanation for why it was appropriate for Looie to take the action he did, since you expressed sarcastic ignorance as to why we would remove comments about a purportedly deceased individual. My most recent comment addressed some of the reasons why removing the entire post makes sense, rather than attempting to dissect and redact it. I mentioned WP:BLP partly because some people prefer to fall back on the comfort of written policy (though my statements and reasoning hold up equally well in light of WP:IAR), partly because Looie mentioned it first and you seemed intent on framing the discussion in its terms, and partly because it's actually not a bad document to sit down and read.

Someone posted a question that was needlessly callous and insensitive towards a (possibly) recently-deceased individual's friends and family; that question was removed with a polite explanation to the editor involved. There were no threats, no blocks, no bans, no scarlet letters. The question was reposted in a suitably modified form within minutes. Why are you obsessed with pillorying Looie over this? I don't believe there's anything I can do at this point to persuade you myself, so if the issue is important to you then I recommend that you seek broader consultation in a venue with more experience in handling this sort of thing. The relevant noticeboards may be able to guide you on what our community's expectations are (not merely the letter of policy) regarding an editor's obligations. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 15:45, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

The editor's comment, "I'm not particularly interested in BLP enforcement", does not sound promising. BLP is one area that overrides nearly all other considerations in wikipedia. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 20:08, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

But not all Wikipedia editors agree 100% with the way Wikipedia functions, and there is no requirement to agree with Wikipedia's policies to edit Wikipedia. Buddy431 (talk) 23:30, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

Certain policies are given high priority by the folks who own wikipedia, as being the most likely areas that could hurt wikipedia legally. These include BLP violations and copyright violations. There is no compromise. If someone doesn't agree with those rules, and continually violates those rules, they will be sent to the phantom zone. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 00:29, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

Agree with ToAT here. Looie's response was entirely appropriate. And I don't care whether you Viennese Waltz don't care about BLP, if you aren't going to enforce it that's up to you (although bear in mind depending on what you do you could be blocked for it) but you have no right to get in a huff here about someone correctly enforcing BLP. And I would note the RD has problems here in the past, drawing unneeded attention to the RD by a refusal to enforce BLP or excessive arguments when someone correctly enforces BLP isn't likely to be a good thing for us. As I've said in the past, gaining an image of not enforcing BLP is not likely to end well for the RD, believe me... In particular, while Looie is a regular, it is entirely likely and has happened in the past non regulars have had BLP vios pointed out to them. And it's entirely unresonable to expect them to be aware of any nuasences of the RD or preferences of certain editors. Getting up in their throats for correctly enforcing BLP is not going to encourage them to stick around or think much of the RD.

As ToAT said, there is no and has never been any requirement for people to fix someone's contributions to the RD which clearly violate very important parts of policy, removing those outright is completely appropriate even fi they arguably could be fixed. This may sometimes be done in articles, if the contributions advance the article but also have flawed parts but for signed contribs it's quite a different matter. In fact I would go as far to say it's a bad idea for Looie to try and remove the BLP violating parts.

In the past I did suggest removing the bad bits is sometimes a good way to reduce people yelling 'censorship' (not because I believe such claims have any merit but because it's a potential reduced drama solution) but considering the history of the RD and even though SteveBaker is gone, I believe most of the time it's far better to just remove whole post and let the original contributor fix it if they so desire rather then getting into a long argument about 'modifying posts'. The only real consensus we have for modifying posts is for removal of email addresses and fixing formatting problems (including large images). I would note that although when we had the whole 'modifying posts' drama in the past I did suggest something like this as an example of when I felt modifying posts was acceptable and useful, I never claimed it should be compulsory (rather it was something I may do and which is sometimes done on talk pages).

BTW, as a regular at BLP/N I can say there is no way we'd accept solely a Facebook post in an article as evidence that someone is dead (the info would be removed until RS pick it up) so yes it was a BLP vio. And you'd find people don't take too kindly to those who yell at someone else for correctly removing BLP vios simply because someone wanted to do it differently.

Nil Einne (talk) 06:49, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

Just glancing at this issue (I am still technically on a "wikibreak") but I wonder if it might not have gone differently, and have benefited from, a bit of further research into whatever the issue may have actually been before it got removed? Just a thought; don't know enough about the case to have an opinion on its full removal. (Apologies btw if this just is not relevant right now;). But: I have myself found many times that actions that make sense to me when I am relatively "uninformed" often make much less sense to me once I have become better informed -- seems perhaps like that might possibly have been a case of that sort of thing going on here. WikiDao ☯ 11:16, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

Wait: Looie's original post said the whole question was removed. But, it seems to be back on the Hum desk now with the names redacted: WP:RD/Humanities#Does suicide send them to Hell? Mom told me this, but where in religious text does it say so? (By EggCentric, it seems?) That is definitely the way to go in a case like this, instead of complete removal, it seems to me ... WikiDao ☯ 12:45, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

Well that's what I think too, but we seem to be in a minority. --Viennese Waltz 12:56, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

Well, no -- the "clean" question seems to have gotten some good responses from about 10 or so RD regulars! :) Well done. WikiDao ☯ 13:00, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

Sure – I meant a minority in this discussion here. Thanks, --Viennese Waltz 13:04, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

Score minus one point, WikiDao, for not reading the rest of the discussion here before adding your comment.

I'll add one more reason why we permit and encourage the immediate removal of material that runs afoul of WP:BLP, and why it's so important in this particular case. (Yes, yes—I'm mentioning a policy again. Please try to think about why we have policies, and where they come from on Wikipedia. The rules exist, by and large, because large numbers of editors have discussed them extensively and tried to codify our best practices, so that we don't have to have the same conversations and arguments over and over again every time the same situation arises. They aren't there just because Jimbo's mean, or because some editors are on a power trip.) The short version is this: Google.

Search engines regularly crawl Wikipedia in order to index our content and to make information in our pages easier for the world at large to find. This is very handy for us when we're trying to find an old answer to a question on the Ref Desk, but it can also spawn some unintended consequences. If Google crawls the Ref Desk while we have "John Doe committed suicide in such-and-such a way, is he going to go to Hell?" that's what goes into their index, at least until their spider comes around again (could be hours, could be days, could be weeks). That's what comes up when someone searches for John Doe. It is both a blessing and a curse that Wikipedia is regarded by Google's (and other engines') algorithms as a generally highly-credible, high-priority source; our mention of John Doe, with a link to his Facebook profile, suddenly becomes a highly-ranked search result – possibly the highest – whenever someone looks for his name online. In the case of a recent suicide, John Doe's friends and family members are going to see our question about whether or not he's going to Hell at the top of their page. The longer we leave a post like this in place, the greater the likelihood that it will be cached and appear in Google search results, even some time after we take it down on our site. The situation is made even worse by mirror sites: web sites entirely unrelated to Wikipedia which duplicate and republish our content, generally in order to bump their ranking in search engines in order to generate ad revenue. They tend to update their copies infrequently and unreliably.

Increasing the barrier to removal of this sort of content by imposing greater obligations on the editors who remove it means that it will remain visible for longer, and is more likely to be copied by web sites out of our direct control. And that's actively harmful. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 15:45, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

Sorry, Ten. Guilty as charged, and your preceding post was -- well, TLDR, what can I say ;) -- but, ok, yes: one wiki-demerit justly given and duly accepted. :)

I really am "supposed" to be on a "wikibreak" at the moment, though -- just thought I'd tried to get in a word edgewise real quick here on a point or two while I had the chance.

Interesting issues going on, and a definitely a question or two on the desks I regret having mostly missed out on. I'll be here-and-then-gone-again regularly for at least a few weeks it looks like -- apologies in advance for anything I might say in that time that is just cluelessly out-of-context etc :P Cheers, WikiDao ☯ 16:38, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

• Have now read your preceding post, Ten. And I must say again that I could not possibly agree more. The nature and possible extent of problems like that became very clear to me over the course of the "N.I.M." → "Comet Egypt" saga. If you get a chance to read my comments in the "Concerns about how the WP:U policy made this problem possible" section of my present talk page, I think it'd become clearer that I am in complete agreement with you about the sorts of BLP issues you describe which Wikipedia may inadvertently have direct (and in sometimes unforseeable ways even very harmful) real-life consequences.

So in this case the personal info got removed and the BLP-scrubbed question got a variety of responses from a lot of RD regulars. (I regret I have not yet had time to read those responses myself, but I'm sure they were mostly good ones;). Pending further consideration, I think that outcome is probably as it should be, at least in this specific case. And since as far as I know that thread on the Hum desk (I think) hasn't been removed yet, I assume you yourself are reasonably acceptant of that fact, too? WikiDao ☯ 20:58, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

Stairfall

I just removed this section[1], section header and all, because it looks like trolling for conflict over the ref desk guidelines against giving medical advice, specifically advice pertaining to treatment. I would normally give some benefit of the doubt, but the IP was blocked just last month, and is back today with multiple edits, all of which are destructive. I reported the IP on WP:AIV, and the IP has now been blocked. Red Act (talk) 04:17, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

It's obviously a trolling question. If a real centenarian fell down a hundred flights of stairs, the obvious answer would be, "Call the funeral home." ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 20:10, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

Further, it is not possible to fall down 100 stairs - let alone 100 flights of stairs (note: a flight of stairs is more than one stair, usually about 20 stairs). If it is 100 stairs, at an average of 7 inches per stair, that is a 58 foot fall. That means that the stairs pretty much continue in a straight line for 58 feet. It is rare to have stairs continue in a straight line for more than 20 feet. Often, they only go up about 5 feet and then turn in condos. Assuming it is a straight shot up each floor, this person would have to fall down 20 stairs, turn, fall down 20 more, turn fall down 20 more, turn, fall down 20 more, turn, and fall down the last 20. That is simply not reasonable. If you consider it to be 100 flights of stairs - that would be impossible. Even buildings like the Empire State Building don't have 100 flights of continuous stairs. It has 87 flights of stairs max - and they are not truly continuous, but nearly so. I have yet to see a 100 floor condo, so once again this claim is impossible. Now - I've wasted enough time on this troll... on to the next one. -- kainaw™ 20:21, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

I get the impression, kainaw, that you are getting frustrated here...Aaronite (talk) 03:26, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

What about spiral stairs? APL (talk) 05:14, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

A 100-story spiral staircase? Yikes. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 06:01, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

Come to think of it, falling down the up escalator might do it. 207.81.30.213 (talk) 05:57, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

Thus falling down one flight of stairs a hundred times, yes? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 06:01, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

I wonder if it's possible to fall down 100 stairs in Batu Caves? They do tilt a bit and I don't think they are truly continous so perhaps not? Not a condo of course. Nil Einne (talk) 07:13, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

Maybe a condo for bats. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 07:15, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

And monkeys? Nil Einne (talk) 07:17, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

Hey, maybe he took a misstep at the top of the "I fell" Tower? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 07:21, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

At this point I must bring up one of Myron Cohen's stories, about a guy who had been on time to work every day for decades. One day he showed up an hour late, looking all banged up and disheveled. The boss asked, "What happened?" The employee said, "I fell down 20 flights of stairs." The boss said, "And this took an hour?" ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 20:34, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

109.128.101.244

Is anyone else getting increasingly irritated by this user's contributions? APL (talk) 20:55, 10 February 2011 (UTC)

Now that you mention it, it sounds like it may be the same person as the ethical card-shark from awhile back (whose "sincerity" on that one I ended up doubting myself at the time).

91.183.62.45 (talk • contribs • deleted contribs • blacklist hits • AbuseLog • what links to user page • COIBot • Spamcheck • count • block log • x-wiki • Edit filter search • WHOIS • RDNS • tracert • robtex.com • StopForumSpam • Google • AboutUs • Project HoneyPot)

109.128.101.244 (talk • contribs • deleted contribs • blacklist hits • AbuseLog • what links to user page • COIBot • Spamcheck • count • block log • x-wiki • Edit filter search • WHOIS • RDNS • tracert • robtex.com • StopForumSpam • Google • AboutUs • Project HoneyPot)

(Both locate to Brussels). I thought the question about the "smarter self" was a good one, though. Clearly the person is intelligent, even if they may be inclined to trouble-making somewhat. But I haven't looked too much at any of the other contribs, so I don't have too much of an opinion yet. WikiDao ☯ 21:15, 10 February 2011 (UTC)

FWIW, my (possibly mistaken) impression is that there is an element of "Stump the RefDeskers" being played. However, while a proportion of the questions thus far verge towards opinion-fishing or debate-provoking and might be deletable if and when they clearly cross those lines, others seem to fall within acceptable parameters. I think it would be dangerous to start deleting or blocking questions on the grounds of assumed motive rather than content, and a permissable interesting question (plus answers) is interesting to other readers (including ourselves) regardless of how much the OP really wants to know. 87.81.230.195 (talk) 07:22, 11 February 2011 (UTC).

Based on [2], I'm pretty sure 217.136.92.148 (talk • contribs • deleted contribs • blacklist hits • AbuseLog • what links to user page • COIBot • Spamcheck • count • block log • x-wiki • Edit filter search • WHOIS • RDNS • tracert • robtex.com • StopForumSpam • Google • AboutUs • Project HoneyPot) is the same as 109 (also [3] 109.128.65.7 (talk • contribs • deleted contribs • blacklist hits • AbuseLog • what links to user page • COIBot • Spamcheck • count • block log • x-wiki • Edit filter search • WHOIS • RDNS • tracert • robtex.com • StopForumSpam • Google • AboutUs • Project HoneyPot)) Nil Einne (talk) 10:22, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

These are damn-interesting questions! How can you be irritated by such things? They have stimulated a lot of thought for me - I've really enjoyed reading people's answers to them, and IP has never been disruptive or inappropriate in such questions. Removing or reverting such a question just because you find it "annoying" probably means you should take a step back from the Ref Desk for a day or two, or at least try to put the notion of "annoying questions" into the context of easily-ignorable hypertext. SamuelRiv (talk) 19:32, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

Please keep in mind that this is not the "Interesting Discussion Desk". This is the "Reference Desk". There are thousands of forums for interesting discussion. -- kainaw™ 21:33, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

I didn't say "interesting discussions". I said "interesting questions" with interesting responses that in their intrigue further the cause of widening the scope of education for both ends of the academic spectrum. That said, we aren't robots - there is a holistic element to answering a question that makes it, by some semantics, a "discussion", so I would suggest your comment is pedantic were it relevant. SamuelRiv (talk) 22:47, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

I agree. If a question can be answered, troll or not, it should be. Remember my rant a few sections above? These questions and answers serve as much as an ad for our service as anything else, so if new users see us blasting stuff for from their perspective no reason, they won't post at all. What use is that? Again. Tired of a particular OP? Don't answer.

Besides, if we are to use the archive to keep these questions for future reference (see what I did there), then maybe someone someday who is not a troll does want an answer to that question. Aaronite (talk) 17:12, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

I agree with SamuelRiv and Aaronite. I see nothing particularly wrong with this user's questions so far; they certainly do not "annoy" me. Gandalf61 (talk) 09:29, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

• Also agree with SR, Aaron, Gandalf. This is someone who can be worked with, and may be drawn eventually into contributing to WP in useful, constructive, valuable-to-WP ways. Many quite competent and intelligent people may also be "annoying" in various ways at various times, especially when they're younger. These people need to be tolerated, corrected when necessary, but otherwise drawn further whenever and however possible into the WP community. WikiDao ☯ 11:07, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

And yet he still wants "moar" [4]:

"advanced question: how to play honorable poker"

109.128.173.122 (talk • contribs • deleted contribs • blacklist hits • AbuseLog • what links to user page • COIBot • Spamcheck • count • block log • x-wiki • Edit filter search • WHOIS • RDNS • tracert • robtex.com • StopForumSpam • Google • AboutUs • Project HoneyPot)

OK, fine: this guy's probably problematic, sure. WikiDao ☯ 02:40, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

Removed question

I removed the question "Where do babies come from?" See the question HERE. I did so in the interests of not feeding the trolls. The OP was a new User who has already been warned about vandalism. Dolphin (t) 06:37, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

If you wanted to start a lively discussion, you could have answered, "They're a gift from God." ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 06:41, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

Trolling-only, and now indef'd. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 06:49, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

I would like to mention that trolls feed on provocation. Removing a question that is perfectly ok just because it was asked by a "troll" is in fact feeding the troll the food they live on. Provoking such a response is their bread-and-butter.

Best not to feed them that way. Better to answer neutrally (you also removed my own response, btw, which was simply "Human reproduction") or else ignore it altogether (unless of course it is clearly problematic per the guidelines). WikiDao ☯ 12:57, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

And I say that by answering the question, you legitimize them and give them a foot-in-the-door, which at least in certain cases should not be done. Obviously, philosophical differences here, and some degree of case-by-case is needed. When a question looks odd, see what other stuff the editor has written, and see if he looks like a troll or not. But anyone coming here and seriously asking "where do babies come from" has got significant issues that need to be addressed, which we are not qualified to do. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 13:23, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

Do we have any RD regulars who have acknowledged themselves to be teachers/educators in real life? I seem to recall perhaps FisherQueen and HiLo48 are or were, right? Are there others who want to acknowledge that? Because I think we would all benefit from their insight(s) on this issue.

Seems to me (not a teacher/educator) though that in an "educational environment" if you let kids "get to you" and come down too intolerantly on them when they are just asking something stupid to get a rise out of you -- even if they really have been more problematically trouble-making in the past -- that just is not very productive or useful or educational to anyone. I'd like to hear perhaps a specialist's opinion on that notion if possible, though. Thanks, WikiDao ☯ 13:50, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

If you want to relate the trollish behavior here to trollish behavior in the classroom, it is somewhat similar. In class, I have had students ask purposely stupid questions just to waste time. I feel that they want to do what they can to avoid learning. So, they try to waste time on off-topic stuff. On the RD here, I feel that the trolls want to see how much time they can waste. The primary goal is to get responses. I have investigated a few trolls and the ones who consider themselves to me most successful try to get extra responses by cutting/pasting questions from places like answers.yahoo (or whatever that is called). So, in class, I simply refuse to discuss off-topic questions. On the RD here, I suggest simply deleting ANY questions from known trolls - even if they are perfectly legitimate questions. -- kainaw™ 14:06, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

I forgot to mention "why" I believe that the trolls are competing to see who can get the most responses... Check the other websites where the trolls gather to brag about how cool they are, like encyclopediadramatica.com - you will see references to how many "idiots" they get to waste time responding to the questions. -- kainaw™ 14:12, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

Well I guess the trick in that case is to not let them waste time.

So: either ignore it, or briefly provide something topically informative (all I did here was say "Human reproduction" for example), or if it can be turned into something informative, interesting, or educational to others who do want to learn -- despite whatever intentions the questioner may have had in asking -- then such opportunites as those should be exploited for all they're worth whenever possible imo. WikiDao ☯ 14:21, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

I don't see how anyone could possibly believe that "where do babies come from" is not a trolling question. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 14:47, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

For those not fixated at groin level the question "where do babies come from" generates inquiry into the origins of Consciousness and the characterization of Individualism studied by René Descartes, John Locke, Hegel, Sartre, Anatta in the Nikayas and Mahāyāna, Ayn Rand et al. with critical repercussions on assumptions of Human rights, initiation of Personality development and stances in the Abortion debate. The question can also relate to baby animals though not specifically to the ones from Australia. Cuddlyable3 (talk) 09:05, 17 February 2011 (UTC)

At some point, a teacher recognizes that a child is unwilling or unable to function in the classroom environment in a way that doesn't disrupt the ability of the teacher to teach and the right of his fellow students to learn. At that point, the child is removed from the classroom, and gets sent to see the principal or headmaster. These edits illustrate such conduct. (I'll also observe that we're at risk of mis-framing the situation; the closest physical-world analogy for our space here is a library reference desk, not a classroom. What happens in the library if you scrawl "Fuck you!" on the wall, then walk over to the reference desk and ask for help?) TenOfAllTrades(talk) 14:34, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

Certainly agree with that general sentiment, Ten, and fully also with Bugs' point below.

Here we are just talking about "where do babies come from?" though. Not a problem. Should be answered in any "educational" environment, in this case with a link to the Human reproduction article without further comment. If the person has subsequently been blocked, then the removal at that whole thread was ok by me at that time. But not before that point, in this particular case, is all I'm saying. WikiDao ☯ 14:48, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

The purpose of trolling is to get a reaction, any reaction, so whatever you do will be feeding the troll. If a seemingly legit and acceptable question is asked by A Known Troll, they probably deliberately made it very obvious who they are to see if you'd delete their otherwise perfectly acceptable question. Deleting it after people spent (and wasted, once the section is removed) time answering gives the troll their kicks. There is really just one sensible route to take; delete things if they are problematic to the desks. 85.68.85.117 (talk) 14:22, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

delete "if and only if" they are problematic, is what I am saying -- without regard for past problems WikiDao ☯ 14:30, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

Banned users are not allowed to edit, even when their edits are theoretically "legitimate". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 14:28, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

I can agree with that, Bugs. Once they get banned, that's that, I agree. WikiDao ☯ 14:30, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

Bugs had to make that statement because we repeatedly have some IPs argue that banned users should be allowed to ask questions. Eventually, they are identified as banned users themselves who take part in the discussion only to derail attempts at discussing how to handle trolls. -- kainaw™ 14:50, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

If I can answer a question then I shall do so. I reject the vigilantism that I see here. I support WikiDao who treats the question "where do babies come from" sensibly without introducing an irrelevant judgment of the particular questioner. John 8:7 (think about it). Cuddlyable3 (talk) 16:26, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

Off topic
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
Trolling is fine, unless they misspell something, then it becomes a crisis. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 16:34, 16 February 2011 (UTC) Bugs, provocative OT sarcasm is what you think is fine and you correctly spelled a good word for it. Cuddlyable3 (talk) 18:22, 16 February 2011 (UTC) "OT"? "Overtime"??? ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 18:55, 16 February 2011 (UTC) Off topic. Cuddlyable3 (talk) 19:46, 16 February 2011 (UTC) It's not off topic. You think it's just fine for improper questions to be posted, yet you go ballistic over misspellings. Your priorities need some re-thinking. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 19:58, 16 February 2011 (UTC) We do well to answer important sensible questions and it was heartwarming to see your twofold agreement[5]. Cuddlyable3 (talk) 21:28, 16 February 2011 (UTC) What? Was there a problem with my spelling? ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 21:32, 16 February 2011 (UTC) Under Kainaw's Offtopic Deletion Theorem expounded upon in this very thread, everything in this thread from Bugs's needless provocation of Cuddlyable3 through to the end of the thread (this post) should be deleted, as it is all off topic. Comet Tuttle (talk) 17:58, 17 February 2011 (UTC) Cuddly's sense of priorities is all wrong, and pointing that out IS on-topic. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 13:53, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Pirate Bay referral removed

Here, I removed WikiDao's referral of a querent to The Pirate Bay to obtain a copy of obviously copyrighted content, and the subsequent small-texted discussion about this. We don't assist copyright violations on the Reference Desk. Yes, I know some people claim piracy is legal in some locales; but we don't assist copyright violations on the Reference Desk anyway. Comet Tuttle (talk) 18:31, 17 February 2011 (UTC)

Would a link to the Wikipedia article have been acceptable, for future reference? 82.43.92.41 (talk) 18:55, 17 February 2011 (UTC)

No; that's just a winking, coy way of doing the same thing, just as it would be if you referred them to "Gur Cvengr Onl" or obfuscated the message in some other way. Comet Tuttle (talk) 20:02, 17 February 2011 (UTC)

But it's well known The Pirate Bay offers downloads of copyright material; telling someone that isn't "assisting copyright violations", otherwise almost every news sites in the world has assisted copyright violations by simply mentioning the site. I do understand that there was some kind of intent to direct someone to copyright material rather than simply stating facts, but I don't think linking to Wikipedias article crosses the line. 82.43.92.41 (talk) 21:48, 17 February 2011 (UTC)

I didn't think there was a clear consensus for deleting this sort of thing. If there is it's very rarely enforced. APL (talk) 20:33, 17 February 2011 (UTC)

Uh, to be more clear, I've seen posters refereed to television clips on youtube, song lyrics sites, The Home of The UnderDogs, Google results of dubious providence, and even occasionally torrent sites or p2p programs. All with no problem.

I think this is the first time I've been aware of something like that being removed as even though it wasn't a direct link to a file. APL (talk) 20:51, 17 February 2011 (UTC)

• PirateBay should be made impossible to link to from WP if we are going to be serious about that site per WP:LINKVIO. (Similarly to the way edits with spam-blacklisted sites in them get spewed back permission-denied at you if you try to link to 'em.) I'd be okay with that. It was wrong for me to provide that link. I apologize for doing so. Pending any developments that may change my mind about that, I will endeavor to never provide a link to that site again. Sorry for the time and trouble this issue may have caused. WikiDao ☯ 22:14, 17 February 2011 (UTC)

I think in general the policy is that we don't aid people in pirating media directly. But we've had long, drawn out discussions of how much we want to abide by that. The end purpose, as I see it, is not so much the "we obey the laws of a particular nation to the letter, either because we want to or feel we have to," but because we don't want the Reference Desk, on the whole, to be the kind of place where people chat about pirating media.

If I were drawing the lines as to what kinds of answers in this regard were acceptable, I would find, "you can probably find it online at a torrent site, but we won't help you with that here" to be about the extent of such an answer. Direct links are over the line. Saying "this particular torrent site" is borderline and I would lean against it. But these are just my own inclinations. It's obviously subjective.

Before this degenerates into an argument about the legality or morality of pirating (as such discussions inevitably degenerate), I would just suggest that we frame this in terms of the sort of Reference Desk we want to participate in. It'll cut through a lot of the back and forth which doesn't seem to convince anyone of anything anyway. --Mr.98 (talk) 22:48, 17 February 2011 (UTC)

Meh. I largely agree with Mr. 98. I would never link to a specific torrent or other instance of copyright protected material, but it seems a little naive to not allow anyone to mention the existence of media on the web that violates someone's copyright in some jurisdiction. I guess I wouldn't really have a problem with the reference desk turning into a place that "people chat about pirating media", though I certainly wouldn't be participating in it. That's the point though: no one has to participate in any threads that they are uncomfortable with. Heck, if it were up to me, I'd let people be armchair doctors here to, but my opinion is a minority one in that regard. Buddy431 (talk) 23:29, 17 February 2011 (UTC)

Good removal, Comet Tuttle. Wikipedia as a project depends on respect for the copyrights held by its contributors to keep its content free and open; there is very little tolerance for hypocritical infringement of other content creators' rights.

Incidentally, what is with the Reference Desk this week? Copyright violations and BLP policy violations are just about the two biggest bright-line no-nos as far as Wikipedia's content rules go, and we're challenging both of them at once? Really? This talk page isn't an appropriate venue at which to overturn project-wide policies. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 01:03, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Yes let me agree again that it was a good removal, CT.

I guess that makes two demerits duly-accepted today then, Ten.

I agree that linking to thepiratebaydotcom is just wrong, whether or not that is made explicitly clear at eg. WP:LINKVIO (which I had been culpably aware of before providing that link, too). The truth is, I just wasn't thinking. I should have thought better about it.

Also, I am rarely at the Entertainment desk, and I just honestly felt a bit disoriented and confused while there earlier today. I'll just try to stay away from there from now on. Sorry again for any trouble that linkage may have caused. Let's all just accept the spirit-and-letter of wikipolicy on this point and move on now without spending any more time on it, ok? WikiDao ☯ 01:15, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

I don't think anyone is questioning your intentions, WikiDao, at I don't. As far as I'm concerned, what's gone on here is a good example of WP:BRD: so long as the boldness is done in good faith and the Discussion stays on topic and people learn from it, it's a positive experience. Matt Deres (talk) 02:09, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Link to protracted discussion last time this came up here. I won't go there again, except to say that I disagree with the removal of references to a specific torrent site. --Viennese Waltz 08:42, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Speaking of trolls not being allowed to post ...

Julie Dancer (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log)
Adaptron (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log)
Taxa (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log)
Inning (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log)
71.100.5.4 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log)

I think it's pretty clear that User:Inning, is the same person as banned User:Adaptron and possibly banned User:Taxa as well. Similar writing styles, similar uncomprehending rudeness, and identical obsessions.

It's probably only a matter of time before he's banned again, is there anything that could speed up the process? APL (talk) 17:39, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

A sockpuppet investigation? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 18:54, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

Probably too old for an effective technical investigation, so the "duck test" might be required. Can you provide some diffs where the similarity is most striking? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 19:13, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

I'm primarily referring to their single-minded obsession with replacing all legal prose with single-access keys describing all possible dos and do-nots. Adaptron,Inning.

It's not just interest in the same obscure topic. It's the style of posting where a leading question is asked, and then for the remainder of the thread the poster is apparently trying to convince everyone else.

In fairness there's someone in the 71.100.* who has a similar obsession so maybe it's not as rare as I first thought. APL (talk) 20:42, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

It's uncanny. Yep, you've pretty well got me convinced. But I wonder, is there enough to convince an admin? Or would it be better to just deal with the current user's behavior? And maybe challenge the user a bit on this question? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 20:47, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

I'm persuaded. I imagine that a checkuser would be able to confirm that all the accounts are coming from the same IP block (Verizon 71.100.*), but it really isn't required. Creating sockpuppet accounts in order to evade an existing block is sufficient grounds for a permanent block of the new account, even leaving aside the fact that the individual appears to be using his socks to resume the same behaviour. Is there any reason why I shouldn't block right now? TenOfAllTrades(talk) 14:27, 17 February 2011 (UTC)

Do you want a real reason or an "Oh my God! We could be blocking an innocent troll!" reason? -- kainaw™ 14:30, 17 February 2011 (UTC)

Ha! (You couldn't possibly mean to suggest that editors who start out wasting time on the main Ref Desk pages often graduate to wasting time on this talk page because they've discovered they'll get a lot more leeway here...could you?) Yes, I'm wondering if there's a 'real' reason. I don't spend much time on the Humanities Desk, so I can't really gauge the effect that Inning/Adaptron has there. I wasn't involved in the blocks of the original account(s), and I'm not really familiar with all the circumstances of the case or the account's on- or off-Reference Desk contribitions (if any). I'm saying only that as an administrator I'm satisfied that Inning is a sockpuppet of the named currently-blocked accounts, and that I will block Inning unless someone proposes a reasonable, specific, constructive alternative course of action. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 14:48, 17 February 2011 (UTC)

Looks like other users are getting frustrated with him as well. User_talk:Inning#February_2011

APL (talk) 15:27, 17 February 2011 (UTC)

I have looked in to this user before and I'm am very confident that it's them (their Verizon IP looks up to Florida BTW (which concurs with [6]). I would note as I've said before on the RD, a lot of the time their blocks have been semi-independent, their link with the other blocked users has only come up after they were blocked (or came close to it anyway), which someone reveals how acceptable their behaviour has been. Their interest isn't solely polychotomous keys/decision trees (legal may be what most people remember, but I've also seen medical and other things, from what I've read I'm not sure if there's anything polychotomous keys can't do in their opinion) but also the evils of GM (particularly "The Future of Food") although they seem to have lost interest in that in recent times. Their interest in polychotomous keys/decision trees and the evils of GM and rants about lawyers, censorship aside; a lot of their posts have been highly offensive comments about Jewish people (and occasionally Arabs or Iranians and Chinese people, females) e.g. [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] but they seem to have also toned this down which perhaps explains why they lasted this long. Some have speculated this is trolling, I'm actually not sure from what I'v seen they may genuinely believe a lot of what they say about various human groupings.

BTW some of their recent posts (as well as those in the past) also come close to spamming since they are posting about algorithms they developed (actually a common problem in the past). From memory User:Biggerbannana and User:Barringa are also them, Wikipedia talk:Reference desk/Archive 63#User:Taxa has a large number of other identities. I believe User:Jiuguang Wang and User:Dcoetzee has some experience with some of their accounts although not sure if they are still aware of that.

Although Julie Dancer is often listed as the primary account, their earliest account I am aware of is Special:Contributions/Pce3@ij.net. They had a different IP then Special:Contributions/209.216.92.232 but I'm quite confident from the similarities and linkages it's the same person.

Nil Einne (talk) 15:06, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

Megaprojects and Risk

I don't know who to tell, but this guy is obviously just flogging his book, Megaprojects and Risk, if you look at the what links here section links have been added to every article that could possibly be considered related to the content of the book. Surely we can't have every article linking to all the books it has ever been mentioned in. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 129.67.37.227 (talk) 21:16, 20 February 2011 (UTC)

The place for your comment is the article discussion page. Note that the page was nominated for deletion on 15 Aug 2006. The result of the discussion was no consensus. Cuddlyable3 (talk) 21:27, 20 February 2011 (UTC)

An old discussion is here. Definite spamming and sockpuppetry for promotional purposes. At a glance, it doesn't look like there's been significant problems since, but I'm not sure how detailed the cleanup has been. If anyone sees any new problems, please start a new spam report. --Ronz (talk) 22:01, 20 February 2011 (UTC)

Ethics added to Humanities on the RD Project page

• Support [15] – Smallman12q added "Ethics" under "Humanities" on the RD Project page. WikiDao ☯ 02:04, 19 February 2011 (UTC)
• I have reverted the addition. In the first place, this kind of stuff should be discussed (preferably first, but it's no big deal to go in BRD order). In the second place, I really don't want to have to include every tiny sub-discipline or topic for each desk - let's keep it general. In the third place, ethical questions are often subjects requiring opinion and/or lengthy discussion. While there certainly are ethics-related questions that could possibly be answered with references (which would already be covered under "philosophy"), I'm not sure we should in any way encourage people to ask questions that require us to apply ethics or morality, as in the "Will they go to Hell?" question a while back. Matt Deres (talk) 17:02, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

Legitimate questions about ethics (excluding questions of the form "is __ ethical") will obviously be directed to the humanities desk. I doubt it's necessary to advertise that ethics is a subset of philosophy or humanities - it's clearly not "computing", "entertainment", "mathematics," or "science." On a case-by-case basis, if an ethics question goes to the wrong desk, we can leave it there or redirect it to Humanities. Nimur (talk) 20:35, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

• I agree with the point that "ethics is a subset of philosophy". And that that same argument might not be nearly as easily made for any of the other topics listed at present under Humanities: history, politics, literature, religion, philosophy, law, finance, economics, art, and society. WikiDao ☯ 20:53, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

Arguably finance and/or economics could be collapsed into one, but it's not exactly a pressing need. And I can see the argument that they are somewhat different. (But I still think that one of them would stand in well enough for the other for this purpose.) --Mr.98 (talk) 18:48, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

To be completely honest, I don't much see the point in having the specifics listed below at all. If posters can't parse that their question about faster-than-light travel belongs on the science desk, I don't know that having physics listed there helps them much. And the Computing and Math desks repeat the desk names in the specifics. If I was King of the RefDesk, I'd just remove the sub-fields completely. And if someone isn't sure, they can always post to the Misc desk. Matt Deres (talk) 20:01, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

Editing carbon black question

I sympathise with the wish to make this question less provacative; asking wtf invites the response rtfa. However, I don't think that we should be doing this: it is an established principle on Wikipedia not to edit the posts of others and it is especially bad to edit a question after it has already received answers. This has the potential to subtly change the meaning of multiple posts. Either let the question stand as it is, or, if deemed unacceptable, remove it. SpinningSpark 11:43, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

"What" is a word understood by anyone who speaks English. "WTF" is not, necessarily. Changing it to "What" does not alter the actual question. I would recommend putting an anchor to retain the original title, to prevent breaking links. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 12:40, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

Personally I would have just left the question as is since it gives people an idea whether it's worth spending time to help the OP. Nil Einne (talk) 13:51, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

(ec @Nil Einne - exactly) Well clarify it, if you like, in a following post. The OPs original question should be left as it is. To me, the tone of the question, as well as its actual factual content goes a long way to help understand where the questioner is coming from (academic, knowledgable individual, joe public, troll). In any case, I am only asking for the applicable guideline, WP:TALK, to be followed here. SpinningSpark 13:57, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

I completely agree with Spinningspark and Nil Einne. If the poster wants to come off as a lazy, demanding SOB, who are we to interfere with that? Matt Deres (talk) 17:05, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

I will restore the original form of the question. It's one thing to modify the section-header; it's another thing to modify the original, signed post. Nimur (talk) 18:57, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

We all hope that Wikipedia will be become a truly international source of quality information, read by millions each day. Let's imagine Tom Johnson's question and its answers are eventually read by a million people. That begs the question Should Wikipedia's presentation of Tom's question, and all its answers, be tailored to Tom himself, or to the million others who will read it, draw information from it, and judge Wikipedia as a whole by what they see? Those who regard all Wikipedia's answers as being directed personally at Tom, for his benefit only, will most likely take the view that his question should be left exactly as Tom wrote it. Those who, like me, don't regard the question and its answers as being solely for Tom's benefit will most likely take the view that the presentation and its answers should reflect the sort of standard we want for Wikipedia. If a question is not readily comprehensible to the million who will read it, then it should be refined. Wikipedia's Reference Desks shouldn't be allowed to become graffiti walls where people scrawl all sorts of questions and always get all sorts of answers. There are plenty of other websites where that happens. Wikipedia's Reference Desks should work towards a reputation where genuine questions receive serious, quality answers. Our Reference Desks are provided for the benefit of the million, not for the miniscule number of individuals who actually posts questions there. Tom Johnson might be offended at "wtf" being altered to "what", but I'm sure the million other readers won't be similarly offended. Dolphin (t) 06:07, 20 February 2011 (UTC)

No, the RD is not article space; rather, it is governed primarily by talk page guidelines. -- Scray (talk) 06:14, 20 February 2011 (UTC)

You seem to be presenting that as a fact. Is it fact, or just your personal opinion? Dolphin (t) 06:19, 20 February 2011 (UTC)

It is fact. Wikipedia:Reference desk/Guidelines refers to the talk page guidelines in several places, including an injucntion against editing the posts of others, making it cleat that WP:TALK is meant to be the template for the ref desk format. SpinningSpark 15:07, 20 February 2011 (UTC)

I'd say it was a serious question (perhaps generated out of some state of confusion or frustration), and it received a serious answer (not that I'm biased about that). The issue is whether we cater for the sensitivities of people who might be offended by "wtf". It didn't bother me. I wouldn't use that expression, but I hear roughr stuff every day in my workplace. But I imagine it would bother some. However, Wikipedia has heaps of content that would bother the kinds of people who would be bothered by "wtf". The question was asked in the natural language of the OP. I'd probably put that language in the same basket as the content we have that offends some readers. Those who wouldn't use such language can just let it slide. HiLo48 (talk) 06:41, 20 February 2011 (UTC)

My opinion: It's wrong to alter someones posting. If it needs to be done for clarity then it should be done the way newspapers do it - in square brackets like this: [ed: what]. Or simply add an additional posting translating or clarifying as needed. And regarding future generations, a common complaint of historians is that they only see sanitized history. Ariel. (talk) 08:56, 20 February 2011 (UTC)

And mine as well: I'll just take a fresh line and give small tags to my comment, so what Im saying is not really important, more like a tip. — Preceding unsigned comment added by General Rommel (talk • contribs) 09:21, 20 February 2011 (UTC)

I thought I should see if Wikipedia explains wtf, and sure enough, the usage presumably intended by our OP is the first entry on the disambiguation page WTF. Not going to add any interpretation to that fact. Just place it on the table. HiLo48 (talk) 10:25, 20 February 2011 (UTC)

We've had long arguments about editing other people's posts before, and it seemed to result in "don't do it". You never know when you might make a mistake, since it's not your post. And if you say "yes, but this clearly meant that" - then you need to set some sort of line in the sand - how far can you go before things aren't obvious enough to change? It'll result in inevitable arguments (look at the arguments about every question removed as a judgement call on the Ref Desk, for a start). Is it worth it, all for changing a question in order to do...what? I don't actually see a benefit in changing someone's question. If the meaning was ever ambiguous enough that editing it would actually clarify it, then there's no way that your interpretation could reliably be said to be an accurate one. Vimescarrot (talk) 11:40, 20 February 2011 (UTC)

I am thinking along the same lines as HiLo48 and suggest we merely put a couple of square brackets around the "wtf" in the posted question. That wikilinking makes no interference with the questioner's wording seen on the page, and no further comment on their choice of expletive is needed. WP:NOTCENSORED & WP:NPOV (and at a stretch even WP:AGF about which of the alternative meanings is intended) can all apply.Cuddlyable3 (talk) 14:51, 20 February 2011 (UTC)

Wikilinking others' posts also has the potential to change meaning - this has been discussed here before, too. I'm no expert in archives-searching, but others may be able to provide links. Linking is one form of editing others' posts, and therefore has the same proscription. -- Scray (talk) 18:49, 20 February 2011 (UTC)

One recent example [16] was where a poster wrote Adam's Ale (water), which at the time was a red link. Another, completely well-meaning poster "fixed" the red link by piping it to Beer, completely changing the meaning and annoying the original poster. Given the large number of disambiguation pages, words with multiple meanings, etc. on Wikipedia, even linking without piping has a potential to send someone to a page that doesn't capture the cultural nuance that was in the original statement. Much better to clarify in a reply post instead of editing:

Note for the confused: "wtf" should probably be read as "what". -- Concerned Editor 25:89, 31 February 2011 (UTC)

Or

By "wtf", I assume you meant "what the fuck", correct? -- Concerned Editor 35:95, 32 February 2011 (UTC)

Or similar. I you don't know what was meant, by all means ask a clarifying question, but one certainly shouldn't try to make a point by feigning ignorance when they have a good idea what something was supposed to mean. -- 174.21.250.120 (talk) 19:38, 20 February 2011 (UTC)

One can always provide a wikilink in ones own post if it is felt the link is required, rather than edit the OP. SpinningSpark 20:26, 20 February 2011 (UTC)

No, wikilinking "wtf" has no potential to change its meaning. The disambiguation page gives more enough meanings to cover the rather limited possibilities. Doing anything else is like waving a flag to potential copycat trolls. Cuddlyable3 (talk) 21:43, 20 February 2011 (UTC)

Perhaps, but well-meaning wikilinks in others' posts do occasionally ruin meaning. It would happen more often if it were encouraged. (Or, to be blunt, if your EDITABLE proposal happened.)

Here is an example [17]. Someone mentioned "Adam's Ale". (Water), some other poster wiki-linked that to beer. (Perhaps he was thinking of Sam Adams?)

Luckily the error happened while that question was still under active discussion and was spotted. APL (talk) 16:59, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

We do not edit others' posts, including adding links. Full stop. Do not do it, please. If you feel the need to clarify something that is unintelligible, lazy, or idiotic, then do so in your own followup post; but do not edit others' posts. Comet Tuttle (talk) 19:30, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

Remember -- if you attempt to "clarify" a question by adding a link, you run the very real risk of confusing the heck out of later readers, who will wonder, "if he knew enough about the topic to link to our article about it, then why is he asking about it?" (This possibility doesn't apply so much to the possibility of link-clarifying an abbreviation like "wtf", but it's yet another reason why, in general, adding links is just as problematical as other forms of comment-editing.) —Steve Summit (talk) 22:48, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

Cuddlyable3's 'editable' posts - redux

Despite the overwhelming consensus reached above against Cuddlyable3 implementing unsigned, 'editable' posts on the Reference Desk (see #EDITABLE responses, above), he's gone ahead and started doing it anyway. This is his first use of the new technique, which incorporates no signature and instead links to User:Cuddlyable3/EDITABLE. I have replaced this with the {unsigned} template to identify the author: [18]. I have also asked Cuddlyable3 not to implement his new process against consensus: [19].

As Nimur noted in the last discussion, Cuddlyable3 has been around long enough to be aware of WP:POINT. While I hope that a block won't be necessary to dissuade Cuddlyable3 from further fruitless pursuit of his personal projects here, I am not heartened by his previous track record in this area. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 13:54, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

If he wants to make his own edits "editable", I don't see the problem as such. Long as he doesn't try to impose that concept on anyone else. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 14:02, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

WP:TPO 1st bullet. Any questions? Cuddlyable3 (talk) 14:21, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

That bullet does not specify the construct you've invented, and the prior discussion (initiated by you) of "EDITABLE" was not supportive of your proposal. We need to sign our RD posts - that is clear by convention and the application of WP:Talk to the RD. If one wishes to prepend a well-formed sig with "editable" or somesuch non-disruptive word, that is the editor's prerogative. -- Scray (talk) 14:51, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

I also have little problem with this, as the EDITABLE clearly links to Cuddlyable's sub page, effectively a signature. Yes, it's a bit pointy, but as long there is no expectation on others, I'm not going to shout too loudly. Having said that, Cuddlyable, would you consider also including your signature, so that it becomes "EDITABLE post by Cuddlyable3"? I'd be much happier with that solution Worm^TT 14:33, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Yes that was condidered in arriving at Point 5 of the proposal. I think there is a danger of misunderstanding such a compound signature, and an EDITABLE post is not meant to be marked as owned by anyone. Cuddlyable3 (talk) 15:07, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

The "owned by anyone" was the point of debate. The consensus of the previous discussion was that the Reference Desk posts are owned by the person who posts them. The cannot be "owned by anyone". Therefore, to conform to consensus, you should take ownership of your posts, but you may allow them to be edited by others. -- kainaw™ 15:10, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Comments left using the above method do not include a normal signature or timestamp. I was lectured at length about how disruptive not signing ones posts with a normal signature is, even when the post is fully attributed to the editor 82.43.92.41 (talk) 14:36, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Yes there is the lack of timestamp. It becomes timestamps if edits occur. The time information is not lost because one has recourse to the page history like in mainspace articles. Cuddlyable3 (talk) 15:16, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

It was explained to you before that page history is not an acceptable alternative to signatures on a talk page. APL (talk) 15:23, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

This is clear WP:POINT behavior. He asked about doing something, there was overwhelming consensus against it, then he went and did it anyway.

This was turned down for a number of good reasons. It's confusing, ugly, and achieves nothing.

It's one more thing that new users have to learn about before comprehending what's going on here. As the reference desk is one of the very few talk pages intended for non-editors and other newbies it is about the worst possible talk page on WP to test-market potentially confusing new policies.

I propose that these be edited back to Cuddlyable's standard signature, or a sinebot-style generic signature. APL (talk) 15:23, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

There are two issues here, both I believe are pretty clearly covered in existing guidelines and policies. One is the need to sign your posts in an acceptable manner. If this is not done by the editor making the post, any other editor is free to indicate the provenance, for example by adding the {{unsigned}} template. That is standard procedure and not to be undone. Second, there is the general need to respect consensus, which we all have an obligation to do. Consensus in the thread above concerning "editable" responses is not hard to read - overwhelmingly against the notion. There was a late suggestion to allow CA3 to tag their own edits in such fashion, but that was not fully addressed, and certainly there was no agreement that CA3 should sign with a manifesto link. For my purposes: RD edits should always be signed as discussed in guidelines and any attempts to remove added sigs is blockable; and if editors wish to remove the "editable" tag as not having gained consensus I would support them on that too. This is not rocket science here, we all have to recognize that we can't just do exactly whatever little thing we want here regardless of whether large numbers of other editors say it's a bad idea. Franamax (talk) 15:40, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

You might not argue that way when we are all dead. I intend everything I post to Wikipedia to be my incremental contribution to building the Public domain i.e. "owned by no one", of knowledge, not personal agrandisement (though I correctly attribute any re-use of another's IPR).. Cuddlyable3 (talk) 15:56, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

That is fine, Cuddlyable. If you refuse to abide by talk-page conventions, restrict your contributions to article space, and do not contribute to the talk-pages, or the reference desk. Nimur (talk) 16:06, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

(e/c w/Nimur)

That's nice. Unless your intent is to participate in the reference desk in a non-disruptive way, as defined by policy and consensus, then you are not welcome here. APL (talk) 16:07, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

You appear to be heavily confused about the difference between the Reference Desk and the Article Space of Wikipedia. If you want to incrementally increase knowledge, edit in the Article Space. If you want to give information that you own, edit on the Reference Desk. -- kainaw™ 16:10, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

The Wikipedia reference desk works like a library reference desk. Users leave questions on the reference desk and Wikipedia volunteers work to help you find the information you need. Any questions? Cuddlyable3 (talk) 16:19, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Sure, I have a question: why are behaving so boorishly? If this is your attitude, stay the hell off the ref desk. Friday (talk) 16:34, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

I have yet to visit a library reference desk where one librarian answered a question and another librarian tries to rewind time and alter what the first librarian said. In my experience, one gives an answer and another gives an answer - just like this reference desk. -- kainaw™ 16:41, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

You are talking about chatter with librarians, I hope you find a library where there are librarians that are more interested in helping you.than in having you know their names. But if the library gives you a printed reply intended to be archived, you will reasonably assume it was not written alone by the junior janitor who couldn't handle the question properly without help.Cuddlyable3 (talk) 18:08, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

My email is archived. I could email a reference desk and get a response that they understand may (and likely will) be archived. However, the answer will most likely have a person's name on it and the date it was sent. I hope that you don't feel the need to continue wasting time by comparing this reference desk to library reference desks in an attempt to argue that you are right and everyone else is wrong. -- kainaw™ 18:17, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

You send that email because you want information and for you it is a good/bad library depending on whether the information is good/bad (delete as applicable!).It's nice if an employee signs the reply, that's all. Be aware that I didn't write "The Wikipedia reference desk works like a library reference desk". That sentence is fixed over the entrance to the Ref. Desks. Cuddlyable3 (talk) 19:35, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

On some side notes and not to distract from yet another consensus forming above which does not agree with your own view, thanks CA3, I'm perfectly capable of comtemplating my own mortality and I have very little interest in your own, though I do wish you a long and happy life. You seem rather confused though - nothing you have ever contributed here is in the public domain, you need to click on one of those many blue-links in the editing interface. You explicitly own all your creative contributions here, you have only licensed them under GFDL and latterly CC-BY. If you seek to contribute material that is absolutely free-free-free, you need to put a specific disclaimer on your user page. Franamax (talk) 16:45, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Don't give out legal advice about IPR because someone might think that coming from you means it's all reliable. Disclaimers on user pages can't do what you say. You couldn't know that THIS is in public domain and I contributed it. Cuddlyable3 (talk) 17:31, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Listen Cuddlyable, if I ask a question, come back to see one detailed response, and then come back the next day to see that there's still only one response then I'll assume that no one else has contributed to my answer.

By hiding your corrections in the original post, you've made it LESS LIKELY that the corrections will be heeded.

Surely you can understand how a question/answer that a user will check repeatedly over a small period of time needs to be handled differently than an article intended to be a timeless resource? APL (talk) 16:51, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

(And that assumes that the second answer is more correct than the first one. IF the 'correction' is an error, the correct version now no longer exists, but editors will remember that the question was answered correctly and not realize that it now requires correction, even though it didn't previously!) APL (talk) 16:58, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

This is all a pity in a way. At least a year ago, right around the point where I took the pledge to refer to sources (and found myself with much less to say), a thought struck me: wouldn't it be cool if we could have a special box for each Q where we would get all wiki on the answer? We would all work together to make a mini-article for the response, with sources and all, even correct spelling and grammar. I discarded the notion mostly because I don't think querents here will have the patience to wait 5 days for the "right" version to be assembled and somehow approve-stamped, and because - you know, everyone has their own preferred version, it could get nasty. But I still think it would be really cool if there was a fast way to put up an article-worthy response. Just dreaming, and this go-round taints my own Utopian notion. Oh well... Franamax (talk) 17:39, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

If a questions is about a noteworthy topic, there is no reason that a question couldn't spawn an article. However, most questions here are not noteworthy. Most don't want to put in much more effort than "No, you're theory that every scientist who ever existed is wrong is not valid." -- kainaw™ 17:56, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

I apologise to Kainaw for my off-topic comment to Kainaw's post as I did not appreciate that a grammatical error lies in the quotation that presumably does not represent how Kainaw writes. The interpolation [sic] can be used to distance oneself from what one quotes. I deleted my comment. Cuddlyable3 (talk) 19:52, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

@Franamax your thought had merit. The problems you perceived are real too. They start around "We would all work together to...'. I think that anticipation was the fatal flaw of Marxism (and there are some political savants among us who can explain that better in terms of herding cats.). Wikipedia's growth, of which the Ref. Desk archive is a part, thrives in the kind of constructive anarchy that Abbie Hoffman foresaw when he wrote: "THE KEY TO ORGANIZING AN ALTERNATIVE SOCIETY IS TO ORGANIZE PEOPLE AROUND WHAT THEY CAN DO AND MORE IMPORTANTLY WHAT THEY WANT TO DO." Please excuse tha capitals because it is sourced that way in his book.. That means Wikipedia and its Ref. Desk advance by not excluding people. That is the problem with your thought of a boxed mini-article per question. That Wikipedia could succeed still seems counter-intuitive so here's a thought. If you put a person in a dark room for hours with no prospect of getting out, you lose a friend. If you give someone a movie ticket, you gain a friend. But if you really want to see what people power can achieve, give some Amish friends a field for a weekend. Cuddlyable3 (talk) 19:12, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

My idea was actually that all the other responses that happen anyway would go on anyway, but there would be this special box where we could all get together to craft the "ideal" response, and yeah, it would be something worthy of consideration for inclusion in an existing article. I'll not lie, I was really looking at clouds that day, it's not really an achievable notion given the contraints on our editing environment here. But still, there's a definition of "wistful"... Franamax (talk) 19:53, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

It's not just cloudy wistfulness because Ref. Desk interactions do nourish mainspace article building. We should not be complacent about articles as long as questioners say "I read the article on xxx but I still don't understand yyy". Exposure to real-world questions leads to revelations such as "We should have an article about that!" and "Our article about xxxx is only a stub" and I think many editors when researching a question like to fix errors and omissions that they spot. The nourishment effect is real but hard to quantify. I know only one case where I collected information from several external sources to answer a question. Someone suggested the material would be good for a Wikipedia article that I didn't know existed, so now it is there.Cuddlyable3 (talk) 20:59, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Franamax's impulse was the same impulse that inspired the creation of Wikipedia:Reference desk/Computing/Viruses. Every week, seemingly, someone asks for computer help on the Computing desk involving the removal of a virus, and it's a fairly detailed topic with several approaches; the above page was meant to be comprehensive, so that when we answer these questions we don't leave out something important. Comet Tuttle (talk) 19:33, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

Cuddlyable, you are aware that there's a difference between 'incremental contributions' and 'excremental contributions', aren't you? Maybe you've got these ideas confused. -- Jack of Oz [your turn] 18:37, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Own off-topic comment removed by poster. Cuddlyable3 (talk) 19:52, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Cuddlyable, have you considered taking this to larger fora? I would personally suggest village pump ideas. The overwhelming consensus here is that the desks should be treated as talk pages and follow talk page standards on signatures. At a larger forum you could see if the community agrees with your suggestion for talk page comments being incrementally updated. Assuming you think the larger fora are a bad idea, why do you believe it appropriate on the reference desks? Worm^TT 08:45, 20 February 2011 (UTC)

Consensus proposal #1

I think the community consensus is clear. Cuddlyable3, your contributions to the reference desk, and especially to the reference desk talk page, are not improving the quality or content of Wikipedia. Because Cuddlyable3 is unwilling to abide by community consensus, he should stop contributing to the reference desk. Because Cuddlyable3 constantly derails discussions, he should stop participating in discussions on the Reference Desk Talk Page. If Cuddlyable3 does not wish to voluntarily comply, I am sure an administrator can intervene. Nimur (talk) 18:59, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

• support this conclusion. Cuddlyable3's contributions to RD and Talk:RD have frequently been highly disruptive and tendentious, and pointy. -- Scray (talk) 21:21, 18 February 2011 (UTC)
• Keep. I oppose voting CA3 off the island just because some people sometimes feel his contributions to the RD can sometimes be problematic and/or less-valuable-than-average-for-RD-regulars. I would counsel you again, though, Cuddlyable3, to make a real effort to avoid antagonizing those of the regulars here that you seem to be antagonizing so often. If you persist in doing so, I can no longer in good faith support the continuation of your unrestricted participation here. (And btw here, have a random koan :). WikiDao ☯ 01:56, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

Keep I believe that it' unnecessary to jump just too quickly, bt as WikiDao has already noted, he does atagonise rather esily. I suggest you please for your own good read some major Wiki guidelines. Maybe I should to! General Rommel (talk) 09:31, 20 February 2011 (UTC)

Consensus proposal #2

There's no policy against trying to indicate that one's reference desk posts are amenable to editing, but the talk page signature guidelines (including the requirements for dates and links) must not be ignored.

• Agree —Steve Summit (talk) 00:13, 20 February 2011 (UTC)
• I agree, though doesn't it seem unnecessary to establish consensus for an existing guideline or policy? -- Scray (talk) 02:39, 20 February 2011 (UTC)
• Agree He can tell us he will let us edit it all he wants, but the policies tell us we can't edit other people's posts, so we would be the ones breaking it, not him. Aaronite (talk) 03:16, 20 February 2011 (UTC)

  I don't know about that, WP:TPO does imply that if he gives permission, other people can edit his posts. Worm^TT 08:37, 20 February 2011 (UTC)

• I agree with this proposal, though It should not be necessary as both policy and consensus agree with it. Worm^TT 08:37, 20 February 2011 (UTC)

WP:TPO 1st bullet is explicit enough. It is even reiterated in "The basic rule..." at WP:TPO. The rule neither prescribes nor proscribes wording by which a poster can permit editing. But he must be able to do so. Cuddlyable3 (talk) 15:10, 20 February 2011 (UTC)

Remember that even with the permission of the original poster, editing someone's posts is only acceptable when some very strict rules are followed, the first being "Never edit or move someone's comment to change its meaning[...]" (emphasis in original). This basically ruins the idea of having editable posts and following the TPO at the same time: if someone gives a more or less wrong answer in his editable reply, you are not allowed to correct that post by editing it, as that would change its meaning. Considering that this rule comes just two lines above the "if you have their permission" bullet, I'm amazed that this isn't clear yet. Fram (talk) 14:28, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

Just supposing that sentences at WP:TPO are ordered by priority, the text The basic rule – with some specific exceptions outlined below – is... has priority. Point 1 of the proposal says it is for editors who can tolerate that [their post] be reviewed by others. Others need not apply. This offers the same flexibility as in mainspace articles. It's amazing that open editing gives good results there too. Cuddlyable3 (talk) 16:12, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

Cuddlyable3, have you considered sub-pages for popular topics, like the Wikipedia:Reference desk/Computing/Viruses page I just linked above? The intent was to present a polished answer to a frequently asked question, so we didn't leave anything out every time someone asks this particular FAQ. It seems to me a similar approach could be valuable on any topic. Comet Tuttle (talk) 19:36, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

It has already been suggested that he work on articles, but he apparently refused. -- kainaw™ 22:27, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

Comet Tuttle makes a good suggestion. The example page can be regarded as the germ of a reference compendium that has been reviewed by a plurality of editors, which vouches for its reliability as a reference. Such locally generated material can include tutorial and how-to materials that are not available in a Wikipedia main article. (Although Wikibooks are seldom referenced on the ref. desks they could be a depository for these materials.) Such polished FAQ answers arise when editors tolerate a significant amount of collaborative work rather than insisting that their solo performances be immortalized. The result of the latter is evident in the ref. desks archive that has for years been a dump of mostly-good-but-also-tainted replies to random answers. The taint is by errors that are indisputable. A responder who is aware of, yet neglects to correct, blatant error(s) in their post, and is supported in that stance by administrators (in at least one citable case they are the same person) lets down the rest of us. A small step towards improving the archive can be to organize it more like a physical library using the Dewey Decimal Classification. That classification is widely adopted and understood. Its classes are not incompatible with the subject desks that we have now (there will always be a residue of Miscellaneous posts that defy classification). The classification of previously answered questions by Dewey numbers could proceed gradually and uncontroversially. Cuddlyable3 (talk) 10:22, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

While we're refreshing our memories about what WP:TPO says, let's also contemplate its very first sentence:

It is not necessary to bring talk pages to publishing standards, so there is no need to correct typing/spelling errors, grammar, etc.

—Steve Summit (talk) 22:36, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

Also, the "basic rule" does not support your proposal, Cuddlyable. "that you should not edit or delete the comments of other editors without their permission." That you shouldn't do it without their permission, doesn't mean that you can edit it anyway you like with their permission either. The next line makes it clear that even with that permission, you may only do a limited number of things, and that those should never change the meaning of the changed post. I don't see what is ambiguous or unclear here. Fram (talk) 07:46, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

The public and permanent nature of ref. desk responses is not directly comparable with transient Talk page communications that have different contexts and may be deleted at the whim of an anonymous recipient. It's no wonder that ambiguity arises from treating a ref. desk page like an individual editor's Talk page when it is really a public service. The ref. desks give a widely seen view of the Wikipedia project that has been reported by external sources, sometimes critically. A comment on a talk page does not have to be publishable i.e. brought to publishing standards, but the archived responses from the ref. desks are in a real sense published by Wikipedia, which at the top of every ref. desk page directs everyone to Search them. If there were no concern for responsible publication then why would we refuse medical and legal questions?

I don't see Fram volunteering at the ref. desks so I present a hypothetical question (that I know Fram could answer) to illustrate "meaning": Q: Who were painters to the Spanish court?. Editor #1 responds: Velázquez and Zurbarán. Editor #2 (it could be Fram!) responds: There is also Goya. The questioner is best served by these accumulated facts: A: Goya, Velázquez and Zurbarán were Spanish court painters. In this example, no factual meaning has been changed, nor could it be because both editors have reliable sources. However subjective meanings such as "I like Goya's daring imagination better than Zurbarán's stuffy religious paintings" are commentaries that are not fundamental to answering the question, and disputation such as "That's ignoring Zurbarán's gift for painting drapery" has meaning that is more appropriate to a debate than a purposeful ref. desk. Cuddlyable3 (talk) 12:51, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

Comparing the ref desk to user talk pages is a false dichotomy. The ref desk pages are comparable to article talk pages. The TPO rules apply to article talk pages as well. Subjective meanings like your "I like X better" example have no place at article talk pages either. Fram (talk) 13:04, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

Comparing the ref. desk pages to article talk pages is misleading. Article talk pages are not seen by average readers and they are dedicated to improving a separate product (a Wikipedia article) the best we can, because it is for public use. Ref. desk pages are the opposite: they are presented to the public, they have no separate product, and they are supposed to be worth archiving for public access indefinitely. Here's a rhetorical question: Imagine that a catastrophic global electric storm wipes out a big part of Wikipedia. Case #1; It erases all the subject articles leaving their talk pages intact. Case #2: It erases all the article talk pages leaving the subject articles intact. In which of these disaster scenarios will humans recover the knowledge to rebuild civilisation? Cuddlyable3 (talk) 22:10, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

The basis of this argument is that getting a complete answer in two responses is simply too complex for most humans to comprehend, so we must forcefully join two responses into one response or the entire purpose of the reference desk will fail miserably. Is that correct? -- kainaw™ 13:22, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

Kainaw, as usual, has hit the nail on the head. Cuddlyable3 also overlooks the issue of Editor #3, who adds A: Goya, Velázquez, Zurbarán, and Gonçalves were Spanish court painters, not realizing that Nuno Gonçalves painted for the Portuguese court. Does Editor #4, who sees the error, start an edit war? (So much for a stable, 'final' answer.) Will Editors #1 and #2 notice that their correct answer has been mangled in the first place? Unlike an article, the responses at the Ref Desk have a very short lifetime 'above the fold'—anything that's wrong after a day or two is almost certainly going to remain that way forever in the archives. How do we know the last person to post is the most correct? Should editor #4 instead write a comment in reply that refutes the error, and if so, how is this better than the usual threaded discussion where it is at least apparent who added what material when, and where threaded discussion of comments won't be rendered nonsensical by further modification of the posts to which they respond?

Cuddlyable3's model would work if we accepted questions to research and discuss 'behind the scenes', and presented our best single, final, immutable consensus answer a week later. It doesn't work if anyone can come along and replace the existing answer – in whole or in part – with their own at any time, when there's no way of knowing when or if the original poster has returned to read what has been written, and no conspicuous clues as to who has changed what, when. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 14:12, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

I haven't posted to this discussion yet due to an acute case of fuck, do we have to go over this again, but I agree completely with the posts by kainaw and ToaT immediately above. Matt Deres (talk) 19:06, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

It is not correct to suppose that the Spanish painters example is about a complete answer. I said the accumulated facts. There is no obvious limit to Spanish court painters but finding more than the well-known ones takes research. We cannot and therefore should not assume that the attitude of Editor #1 is either one of (i) I found just 2 names of painters, end of story; or (ii) let's see how many Spanish painters were court painters. Here are two for our list. With attitude (i) the editor will probably sign their response in the conventional way and may never look at the question again. I never proposed taking that freedom away, so talk of "forcefull" methods is unfounded. The innovation is an option for the editor with attitude (ii) to post a freely editable response. That will allow Editor #2 to insert his additional fact, which in this case is the painter Goya, into the shared response in a holistic manner. That is in contrast to responses that are fragmented over a chain of discussion posts with varying indents and signatures. In the example, that can mean arranging the painters' names' in alphabetical order. That adjustment is only allowable if Editor #1 permits it, and demonstrates that editing to build information is not done just by joining responses sequentially. Shall we extend the example to consider Editor #3 who is wrong? Nothing prevents #3 from adding their information and it can only ever be corrected by a subsequent editor who spots the error. But it is significant that #3 will choose either to post their own conventional signed response or to edit the EDITABLE^link section. The "link" part gives advice on how, why, and what not to edit. It contains this guideline: If you think material is misleading or otherwise should be deleted, post a note about it at Wikipedia talk:Reference desk.. That is what Editor #4 should do. Two good reasons are to take away from the ref. desk a possibly long discussion in which someone may be shown to have been wrong, and to make the differing views conspicuous. However a dualistic proposition that [#3 = true/false, #4 = false/true] cannot be resolved until someone provides a reference that resolves the issue. The goal is a good consensus answer worthy of archiving. I doubt that a "final immutable" answer exists to most questions. Cuddlyable3 (talk) 22:16, 22 February 2011 (UTC).

Be all of that as it may, I think the overwhelming consensus here is that yes, Reference Desk pages are like talk pages, and follow those rules. Any proposal to promote post hoc modification of entries -- whether to correct grammer, evolve towards a single consensus answer, or whatever -- stands not a snowball's chance of being accepted here. —Steve Summit (talk) 00:00, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Cuddlyable3, if the idea is to try to arrive by archival-time at good "composite" responses that are sort of article-like in quality, tone, style, etc — I don't think there's any reason why you shouldn't be permitted to add a "summary answer" right before a question and its responses get archived. You could put it in at the end, in a table or box maybe, or even in its own subsection. Perhaps it will catch on, and others will start to help you out with that.

But I do not support at this time your "editable" proposal as you have described it and argued for it above. WikiDao ☯ 02:12, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Editing pages just before material is archived in order to add one's own version of a "summary" could also be seen as an attempt to rewrite history to one's own preference, and could spawn an entirely new set of discussions on talk pages of project-space pages as to which particular version of the summary is correct. If anyone were to try doing it, I'd suggest they discuss it widely and get other active participants, perhaps a [WikiProject:RefDesk Index Curators] approach, which would be a noble effort. However I think the actual benefit to the wider world would be almost nil, since it presupposes that outsiders would actually ever search the RD archives before asking their own subtly different question. Me, I think the counter on that is very close to zero, whereas I know the counter for actual articles that need to be improved is more than hrair. Franamax (talk) 04:14, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

What is hrair? This reliable source says rabbits have a single word, "hrair", for all numbers greater than four. Cuddlyable3 (talk) 11:32, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Yes, that's the right source. Rabbits, so the story goes, can only count to four or five, so any number greater than that is basically "many" or "a whole bunch" or "thousands" or "countless" -- this last being the sense in which Franamax clearly meant it. —Steve Summit (talk) 11:59, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Similarly with the trolls of discworld which count "one", "two", "three", "many"... but in a twist it turned out that they were actually counting in a base 4 system, so 5 would be "many-one" and so on up to 15 ("many-many-many-three"), which is followed by 16... "lots". Worm^TT 12:07, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Yep, that's about it. I fully endorse Matt Deres' comment above, but I would remind Cuddlyable3 that we already have an area on Wikipedia that encourages free, unsigned revision and rewriting of other editors' work, supported by discussion of contested material on associated discussion pages. We call it 'article space'. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 04:43, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Yes, to take Cuddlyable3's own example, if you want to give the questioner a polished list of artists of the spanish court, it really is less effort to start an article List of artists of the Spanish court than it is to fiddle around with someone elses post with all its attendant problems. Or if you are one of these people who come out in a rash when writing in actual articles, start a category instead. SpinningSpark 07:43, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Very true. Indeed, there's an argument (mentioned in this essay) that our primary purpose here is actually not answering questions, but rather, that in response to any question, what we should theoretically do is write or improve an article, then point the OP there. —Steve Summit (talk) 12:09, 23 February 2011 (UTC), tweaked 13:33, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

(ec)The first duty of a ref. desk is to refer a questioner to a Wikipedia article that answers the question if such an article exists. New articles must overcome a WP:N threshold, are the subject of prolonged work and can disappear as fast as you can say AfD. None of this applies to ref. desk reponses. @WikiDao, classifying responses by Dewey numbers will be less controversial than writing summaries, it does not depend on catching composite responses before archiving, and the result will be a collection of questions in fine-grained subject categories. That is useful in itself for searches and might later inspire making summaries of frequent questions that overlap. @SpinningSpark see Court painter. Cuddlyable3 (talk) 12:17, 23 February 2011 (UTC).

I had this thought this morning as I woke up... There is no rule and I see no objection to placing an answer summary after a question. For example, I recently asked a question on the math desk. The answer I got was a link to a previous question. It had about 30 responses. Which was "the" answer? I had to poke through them to get the answer. Cuddlyable wants to change that so I would only have to look at one answer, not 30. But, there is no reason that he cannot do that without this editable answer thing. He could simply place an answer directly below the question that says: "A summary of all the answers below is..." As long as it is a correct summary, I don't see how that could be a problem. -- kainaw™ 13:09, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

I'd modify that slightly—there's no reason why Cuddlyable3's (or anyone's) summary should enjoy a privileged position in the thread. Putting one individual's summary ahead of all the other responses is apt to mislead the reader on a number of fronts. First, it implies that the 'summarizer' holds a position of special responsibility (and, implicitly, expertise or competence); their opinions or conclusions should somehow be weighed more heavily or read ahead of the remarks which follow. Second is the related issue that it generates a second mid-thread location for bickering if other editors should feel that the summary is inaccurate, misleading, incomplete, or otherwise flawed; as well, a summary inserted late and near the top of the thread is less likely to be noticed by other responders (who expect new content to appear at the bottom of the thread) and errors inadvertently introduced in the summary are less likely to be caught. Finally, the casual reader is unlikely to engage in detailed scrutiny of the timestamps in a discussion. If a question should happen to receive late responses – after someone writes a summary statement – the original poster (and other subsequent readers) may not realize that additional material has been added to the thread. In summary, it would be far better for anyone who wants to write a summary to do so to place their comments at the end of the existing thread, just as they have always been allowed to do. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 13:45, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

I have removed an attempt to extend this debate into the user-facing side of the ref-desk. Please keep policy debates on talk pages. APL (talk) 15:01, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

not going to do anything myself about this, but...

we've had a string of IPs on the humanities desk (possibly someone socking over multiple IPs) asking really vapid and pointless questions like Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Humanities#peace_and_harmony. It might be best if everyone stopped answering them for a while. --Ludwigs2 14:58, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

To me, that particular question seems scary rather than vapid - I can just imagine the next question to be: "So, is it illegal to put locks on the doors and windows of my peace-and-harmony house and do you think the figure skaters would mind if I installed cameras in the house or should I keep that a secret? Also, just how much would a house with a big, sound-proof basement cost in Alamedo, what do you guys think?". What's the other questions you spotted? TomorrowTime (talk) 20:34, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

I too think this falls under the category "experimental" reference desk querent. Some of the questions are legitimate, some are pointless, and some combine the pointless or trivial with the creepy or uncomfortable. I'll follow Ludwig's advice. ---Sluzzelin talk 21:43, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

"Stop answering" is an imaginary solution. There is no such thing as a question on the reference desk that does not get answered. Even if you plaster the question with warnings like "Do not even consider answering this question or we'll come to your house and kill your dog!", you will get people who consider that a challenge to come up with an answer. -- kainaw™ 22:26, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

Actually, we do have question that remain unanswered, but sadly they rarely come from under the bridge. They are usually highly specific but perfectly reasonable questions. Of course you're right that the appeal to resist won't ever be followed (or even noticed) by all. Yet it can be helpful to point out one's behavioral observations here. I often miss patterns until someone points them out. Doesn't mean we have to think about sanctions, but it means I get to respond to questions with informed and due emphasis. ---Sluzzelin talk 22:36, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

I have responded a couple of time to the specific question mentioned. Doesn't strike me as being deliberately problematic (with that question anyway). Could be a more "unintentional" problem, which would merit a different approach. I don't know, though, I guess we'll have to see. WikiDao ☯ 14:11, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

I find such answers illuminating and entertaining. Admittedly that might not be the exact aim of the reference desk.

With this particular question, I also consider the possibility that it's a slightly odd person, rather than a troll. Someone who doesn't understand that their question/idea is nonsensical. Maybe they've asked something similar of someone in real life and got the response "what the hell are you on about?", so they thought they'd ask Wikipedia instead. This would make it a good faith question, if not an entirely meaningful one. --Demiurge1000 (talk) 17:17, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

Guys, you've basically just said that you prefer to assume that the author is stupid or disturbed rather than assuming that he's a fully functioning troll. Wrestling over whether the person is good-but-incompetant or normal-but-evil is pointless - the question itself is vapid, regardless of the mindset of the person presenting it, and cannot do anything except stimulate a bunch of speculative cross-chater between respondents.

Yes, there will always be some fool who responds to even the stupidest questions on the desk. that does not mean that the rest of us should not show some restraint. --Ludwigs2 17:27, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Miscellaneous Desk problem?

Any reason why the Miscellaneous Desk (only) is currently lacking its [edit] function? 87.81.230.195 (talk) 20:08, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

I don't know, but I saw it too. Nothing in the page logs either to indicate why. I purged the cache and it seems to be cleared now. 82.43.92.41 (talk) 20:13, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Refdesks and iOS

Can I make a little request: the boxes at the top of reference desk pages don't work very well on a small-screen browser such as iOS' Safari on an iPod or iPhone; they still try to float and consequently render very badly. Similar boxes atop the WP:HELP pages and WP:VPx pages have been changed to render nicely in such an environment. Could someone figure out what those pages do that the refdesk boxes don't, and apply the same fix here. Thanks. 91.125.171.235 (talk) 00:27, 27 February 2011 (UTC)

Question removed from Humanities desk

diff. Edit summary explains the reason. If someone wishes to reinstate the question, I won't edit war over it. ---Sluzzelin talk 23:51, 27 February 2011 (UTC)

Obvious trolling. Good removal. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 23:55, 27 February 2011 (UTC)

Question collapsed

I collapsed a question here [20]. It was an attempt to draw traffic to what will be a webcomic, and to get users to complete a very simple poll there. Violates our "don't ask for opinions" rule IMO, took a topic off-wiki and was effectively spam. I'm happy to be overruled if I called it wrong. Karenjc 21:24, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

I agree with the collapse and would have been fine with a removal. Matt Deres (talk) 03:47, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

I didn't notice the link, or I would have removed it myself. APL (talk) 04:23, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

I personally like those links. I quickly write a script to spoof IPs and flood the survey with tons of random answers, making any attempt to use the data collected absolutely useless. -- kainaw™ 14:12, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Maliciously disrupting someones site for apparently no other reason than you getting a chuckle out of it is trolling. 97.81.52.123 (talk) 15:37, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Weird. He spent lot of energy above getting so frustrated with trolls previously, but here he's advocated being one when it suits him. Aaronite (talk) 04:37, 27 February 2011 (UTC)

Kainaw has the right idea. :) ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 19:22, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

"Trolling" has a specific definition, it's not just "Being mean on the Internet." I can't imagine how intentionally ruining poll data would count as "Trolling" in any context. APL (talk) 23:11, 27 February 2011 (UTC)

What other reason would someone have for intentionally ruining poll data except trolling? It's not as though he's rigging the poll for a purpose, to make one option come out on top or something, he's just randomly disrupting it to annoy the person who set the poll up. 82.43.92.41 (talk) 00:04, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

It's not exactly trolling, it's more like humorous sabotage. Fittingly, the spammer's question was, "What would you like to see in a webcomic?" The future of mankind is in the balance. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 00:09, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

What's the difference between trolling and "humorous sabotage"? 82.43.92.41 (talk) 00:12, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

They're ... completely different things. Trolling is the act of posting intentionally stupid, insulting, or inflamitory posts in an attempt to cause forum drama. Go to a forum about guns and post about how you think guns should be outlawed, not because you want to convince them of anything, not even because you believe that, simply to see if you can start a flame war. That's trolling. APL (talk) 05:43, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

I don't see the difference really; posting intentionally stupid posts on a forum and posting intentionally stupid responses to online polls both have the effect of being annoying and disruptive. They're both something done deliberately to upset someone else. 82.43.92.41 (talk) 11:20, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

The guy's looking for ideas for a webcomic. He's free to reject any ideas that he doesn't think are good. He's also free to use any supposedly "stupid" responses as inspirations. If the guy is so short of ideas that he has to take a survey and be totally dependent on its results, maybe he should pursue another line of work. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 11:50, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

The reason why the poll was set up is irrelevant. Or are you saying that if the purpose of something doesn't seem worthy to you, it's fine to ruin it for fun? 82.43.92.41 (talk) 11:55, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

For fun? The person asked my opinion. I gave him my opinion - about a million times - which is that I don't like people who ask my opinion. It wasn't "for fun". -- kainaw™ 13:18, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

It's a safe bet the guy won't be spamming wikipedia any more. :) ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 13:24, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

The intent of causing a flamewar is the essence of "trolling", in much the same way that theft is the essence of a bank robbery. Undoubtedly there are other mean things you could do that are morally "just as bad" as trolling, or similar in some ways, but they have different words to describe them. That is how language works.

Or ... are you trolling me? I can't tell. APL (talk) 16:47, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

I'm just astonished that a supposedly civil and respectable wikipedia editor is boasting about willfully disrupting other sites, and that nobody here seems to think there's anything wrong with it. Especially since these are the same people who are active with identifying and cleaning up disruptive things on the desks. What people do off-wiki is their own business, but this is being treated by the above editors as some kind of acceptable practice for reference desk volunteers to spam other sites who post their links here. Allowing it to go unchallenged sets a precedent for people to disrupt any non-wikipedia site linked in an OPs question and boast about doing so, should they feel so inclined. Perhaps you should set up Wikipedia:Revenge Spam to organize and target sites you feel deserve to be counterspammed with proxies in the name of the reference desk. 82.43.92.41 (talk) 14:40, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

I agree with you. Aaronite (talk) 16:32, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

I'm supposedly civil and respectable? I vent a lot of frustration here and you'd be hard-pressed to find a single editor who thinks I exhibit much tact or intelligence. The only positive adjective you might use is honest. There's not enough room here for the negative ones. -- kainaw™ 17:19, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

Hey! Thanks for the idea! :) ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 14:42, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

I'm guessing you're one of those folks who think that we should be polite to telemarketers when they call during supper. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 14:43, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

I agree with 82. here. Telemarketers make a business of bothering people. This person made an honest mistake. APL (talk) 16:47, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

Hopefully he learned from it. This very experience could be a good subject for his proposed webcomic. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:54, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

He probably didn't. If you saw the poll, you'd see that he didn't put any effort into it, just as he isn't putting any effort into coming up with his own ideas for his supposed web comic. Makes me think of Scott Adams. He said in an interview that he gets thousands of ideas for Dilbert every week, but he refuses to read them because no respectable author would simply regurgitate ideas from fans. -- kainaw™ 17:16, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

Well, he put some effort into it. I like the category "something awesome". As opposed to "something that sucks", perhaps? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 17:26, 28 February 2011(UTC)

Can I just point out that the OP responded politely to my speedy squishing of his question, didn't protest, and apologised for breaking the rules? I wished him luck, he said thanks, end of story. It was a civil enough exchange, and should have ended there, if WP:AGF means anything. If other regulars really have been off inputting loads of junk into his site to teach him some kind of lesson, then as the person who actually responded to him here, I think that sucks. He probably thinks we're a bunch of jerks. Nice. Karenjc 22:22, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

Beyond just wishing him luck, did you refer him to the Wikipedia atrticle about Webcomic? Cuddlyable3 (talk) 08:49, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

Nope. Since he was intending to start one, had got as far as finding a host and setting up a content poll, and had found his way to the reference desk (presumably by typing "reference desk" into a search box), I doubt he's unaware of the article or unable to find it himself. He didn't want to know about what webcomics are, he wanted us to give our opinion about what we'd like to see in one, on the desk or via his poll. Neither option is what we're here for, so I collapsed it. I wished him luck because his response to my collapse rationale was civilised and polite, suggested a misunderstanding rather than plain spamming, and deserved acknowledgement. If you feel he needs to be asked "Have you read our article Webcomic?", by all means do so. Karenjc 11:16, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

84.61.155.241 troll?

84.61.155.241 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log)

I see that a user is reverting that IP based on its being a ref desk troll.[21] I'm not well-acquainted with that one. Any opinions on the matter? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 15:42, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

He generally asks rather difficult questions, usually related to phonotactics of a variety of languages, which are valid on surface. However, when one sees the pattern, it is obvious that he's asking just to make people search for an answer, which is practically always a piece of trivia, without a valid use. Apart from Language, he also strikes other RDs, though I don't follow those and I don't know the details. IPs always geolocate to Essen, Germany. I'll try to dig out a list of diffs... No such user (talk) 15:57, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

1. [22] on Vietnamese
2. [23] on Proto-Slavic
3. [24] a barely useful answer
4. [25] on Polish
5. [26] ambiguity of "Mitsubishi car"
6. [27] on Turkish
7. [28] similar style on RD/S

There is probably more, that's what I could dig out shortly. No such user (talk) 16:07, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

Is that from the subnet that kept asking things like, "Why is there no [X] combination of letters in the [XXXXX] language?" ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:04, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

Yes, that one. No such user (talk) 16:07, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

I've blocked him for 72 hours. —Angr (talk) 16:14, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

Yes I've noticed and looked in to this user before partially because of their behaviour on RD/L and partially because of past? problems in the encylopaedia proper. In concurance with 'No such user' it's long been my belief that while their questions may seem genuine albeit obscure or simple difficult to answer (e.g. asking for long lists); given their history on the RD/L (as well as behaviour in general) it seems they're just asking to waste people's time. See also Wikipedia talk:Reference desk/Archive 79#Cross-wiki vandal also very active on our reference desk pages and User:A. B./Sandbox20. Nil Einne (talk) 17:07, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

More Spam

User:Tomjohnson357, and several of his IP aliases, are posting nonsense to the Science Reference Desk. I have warned the user and removed two of his questions. If this continues, I will request an administrator to block the user. Nimur (talk) 03:34, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

I agree with you. A quick look at Tom's contributions shows most of them are questions to the Reference Desks, and a significant proportion are what you describe as nonsense. See contributions. It is not only the Science desk that has seen some of Tom's questions deleted. Here is deletion of one from the Humanities desk: diff. Tom has been helped and coached and warned numerous times on his Talk page, but there is no outcome other than Tom blanking his page!

Considering Tom's ability to use alternative identities, blocking him is unlikely to put an end to it. Also, erasing an inappropriate question inevitably brews up a storm or at least attracts a lot of debate on this Talk page - very gratifying indeed to any genuine troll. A more effective strategy might be for regular respondents to the Reference Desks to boycott nonsensical questions, so the question doesn't attract any answers, or doesn't attract comprehensive answers from any of the regular respondents. Some clever User might develop a banner that says something like This question is considered inappropriate for the Reference Desk. Users are asked to refrain from posting answers. That is the only appropriate response to questions like this one. Dolphin (t) 06:31, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

No, erasing nonsense from known trolls doesn't normally evoke any sort of Talk Page response, really. It's been done many times before. 90.195.179.114 (talk) 10:23, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

Have a look at #Removed question. Dolphin (t) 10:47, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

Yes, but that's a recent thing. Most of the time, removal and a talkpage note is as far as it goes. Vimescarrot (talk) 14:06, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

That recent #Removed question was a different thing, actually. WikiDao ☯ 15:10, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

I wonder if User:Tomjohnson357 could perhaps be a "reinwikication" of User:Kj650, who finally got blocked last December right after I and others removed this question from the Sci desk? WikiDao ☯ 15:06, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

He is, and a whole string of other identities (most didn't get blocked just they changed username when they were starting to wear out their welcome). I think we've discussed this before and some here are already aware of this (Dolphin at least) although I understand it's difficult to keep track of all the different problem identities that show up. Personally despite some more questionable posts from them I've never been convinced they're really a 'troll' per se at least going by strict definitions (there was only one really post I noticed that really raised my eyebrows but I later realised an alternative explaination) but that their questions and style was simply a genuine reflection of themselves. It doesn't really matter of course, I'm fine with blocking them. In terms of whether it will achieve anything, I don't know we've never actually tried enforcing a block, so far from what I've seen they're fairly easy to recognise so if we did want to try to start blocking them whenever a new ones shows up, perhaps they'll eventually get the message. Or may be they'll start to change their style suggesting to me I'm wrong and they are actually a troll). P.S. I mostly gave up reading anything they ask a long time ago so it may be they've grown worse then I realise. Nil Einne (talk) 17:44, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

User:Tomjohnson357 and User:Tommy35750 have been blocked indefinitely because they are sockpuppets of banned User:Kj650. See WP:Sockpuppet investigations/Kj650/Archive. Dolphin (t) 04:01, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Yup, thought so. "Tagged-and-bagged." ;) But I doubt we've seen the last of this one. As Nil points out, he's been persisting at the RD through several accounts for a long time now. Not sure what his deal is, difficult to engage with in dialogue, too. We may in this case just need to hope they get bored trolling the RD and move on elsewhere eventually. WikiDao ☯ 14:37, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

I have a feeling they're back already but too early to ask for a SPI I think. Nil Einne (talk) 14:45, 27 February 2011 (UTC)

Agree with you, Nil Einne. Looks like they might be back. Brammers (talk/c) 22:51, 27 February 2011 (UTC)

Yeah, I'd say Wdk789 should be included in any CU-request on this one next time there's any sort of problem. WikiDao ☯ 01:40, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

Two more: Joshuad95 (spotted by Dolphin51[29] and pretty clearly a problem already) and Lufc88. We're just about ready for another SPI round-up, perhaps? WikiDao ☯ 22:32, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

And Tom12350 and True path finder? Dolphin (t) 02:56, 2 March 2011 (UTC) Disregard True path finder. Dolphin (t) 11:49, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

I'm not sure if Joshuad95 is actually them although they're looking close to earning a block anyway. I'm not that sure Lufc88 is them either, it doesn't quite look like them, amongst other things I don't think I've ever seen [30] from them. Tom12350 is one of the many old identities, I don't think I've ever seen them reuse them after they were abandoned so not sure if there's much point tracking all these down. But yeah Wdk789 was who I had in mind and it's even more clear to me now it's them. Nil Einne (talk) 19:10, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

Using machine translators

(This mainly applies to the language desk). I think it can be helpful to point out that Google Translate and other automatons exist, and linking people there is fine too, of course. I also don't think there is any problem if we volunteers use machine translators for researching questions (on pages written in languages we don't understand well for example). I do this frequently, though I try to use the gained information in order to find a reference in English or some other language I understand well.

What I do not think is helpful to our querents, is when we post a machine translator's result as an answer to a request for translation. People come here expecting some human understanding of both source and target language. I even think it's better if these questions remain completely untranslated at the desk, rather than copying the machine's version. As I said, pointing out or linking to machine translators can be helpful; they really can be useful tools. They don't live up to our standards at the language desk, however. Just my thought. ---Sluzzelin talk 03:52, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

Do you have any examples where one editor gives a machine translation and another gives culturally-correct human translation, and it is not obvious which came from a machine? If a machine tranlation is the only translation that one has to offer, why is it not better to give it than give nothing? Cuddlyable3 (talk) 08:39, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

Because people come here seeking correct answers to their questions, not some machine-spewed drivel that bears no relation to the source text. If we can't give an accurate translation, we have no business giving any at all. I support Sluzzelin. --Viennese Waltz 08:42, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

Cuddlyable, we have no way of knowing whether the querent sees the obviousness or not. This is a far more restricted version of the Turing test. Even if the copied text is presented as Google Translate's answer, we still cannot know whether the OP is aware of the pitfalls of machine translation. A regular language desk editor whom I greatly respect once stated that they often use machine translators as a very raw first draft which they then correct according to their knowledge and understanding. I have zero problems with that. But a verbatim copy of a machine translation can only be acceptable when the respondent knows both languages and has checked the translation for errors. Moreover, we have no way of knowing how long an OP will hang around to see whether anyone has added any corrections to the first response. ---Sluzzelin talk 09:13, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

And as a practical answer to what we can do when no speakers of Fooian happen to be present at the desk: We can post a request for reference-desk-input at Wikipedia:Project:Foo. I have done this for a number of languages in the past, usually with good results. ---Sluzzelin talk 09:31, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

I dislike seeing a machine translation when the OP has specifically asked for help from a speaker, as I have seen before now. Most of us are capable of sticking a foreign language sentence into Google Translate and trying to make the output comprehensible in our mother tongue, so an OP who seeks help here is probably relying on us for a greater level of expertise in the source and/or target language than a machine can offer. Provided it's abundantly clear that it's a machine translation we're not misleading them, but IMO offering the results of such a translation is not quite the same as offering the results of some knowledge and some Google-fu, which is what we mostly do. Karenjc 14:07, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

I have found Google Translate to be reasonably useful, at last for foreign languages that I have some knowledge of. Unless the OP specifically says, "I already tried Google Translate", I don't see any problem in posting a Google Translate result, along with a comment that this is a Google Translate result. If I were the OP and had never heard of Google Translate, I would rather see an attempt than to see no response at all. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 14:36, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

I do not see a problem with using Google Translate with the caveat that it is clearly labeled as such. Googlemeister (talk) 20:51, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

I suspect that those who are aware of a machine translation's problems are already aware of Google Translate, and those who didn't think of trying to use a machine translator themselves may not know about how it can give you a sentence in perfectly understandable and correct English, but signifying something completely different from the source's meaning. I don't want to turn this into a hard rule, but think about it. By the way, this example of using Google Translate was very helpful, because the respondent verified the translation elsewhere. ---Sluzzelin talk 21:10, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

I could make the same argument about Google itself, and about Wikipedia. If an OP has tried something but didn't tell us he tried it, we can't make any assumptions. And if I use Google translate against a Spanish sentence, for example, I can reasonably verify it from my semi-passable knowledge of Spanish. I myself wouldn't try it against Russian or Arabic, though someone who has some knowledge of those languages might feel more confident. And your example is good, in that it gives Google Translate's interpretation and has an implicit disclaimer. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 21:55, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

Heh, I wanted my example to be good because Tagishsimon had checked Google's translation in referenced sources before posting (it was a notable quote, which allowed for this kind of verification; more often than not we don't have that possibility, unfortunately). As I tried to express, I don't have a problem with your using machines for translating Spanish to English, precisely because you are capable of checking it for errors, ambiguity, and so forth. Recently someone, not you, used Google Translate for an old German text, and it was rather botched. Yes, the errors eventually got corrected, and another editor finally gave a complete and correct translation in coherent English which read really well. Still, I didn't think posting that translation was helpful. ---Sluzzelin talk 22:58, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

Clearly we shouldn't do an automated translation, post it with no actual knowledge behind it, and say "See ya!" ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 23:46, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

Here's a simple, perhaps too simple, view on it, similar to what Sluzzelin is saying: if you are capable of actually determining the accuracy of the Google Translate result, then by all means, post it. If you aren't, don't post anything, because posting no answer is better than posting a wrong answer. --Mr.98 (talk) 16:15, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

Yes. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:24, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

I agree, and would point out that because of the subtlety of language, this basically means that we'll never use Google Translate, because if you know enough of the language to actually determine the accuracy of the Google Translation, you know enough to just translate it yourself and not use Google Translate. Comet Tuttle (talk) 18:13, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

I know a fair amount of Spanish, not enough to consider myself "fluent", but enough to get a sense of whether a Google-translate result has the ring of truth or not. You can go right ahead and never use Google Translate, but I will continue to do so, when I deem it appropriate. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 18:40, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

I agree with Bugs, amazingly. I am not fluent in Russian, but I have taken enough of it to be able to use Google Translate and Multitran.ru to work my way through things into very reliable English. It's a much easier thing to check the errors of mechanical translation than it is to translate from scratch. --Mr.98 (talk) 20:30, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

The more commonly used the language, the better Google Translate is. And it's being updated on an almost moment-by-moment basis. HalfShadow 18:42, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

Case in point: Several months ago, someone asked for a translation of a paragraph of Catalan. Since no actual Catalan speakers were forthcoming, I plugged it into Google Translate, edited the translation against the Catalan original on the basis of my knowledge of French and Spanish (I don't actually know Catalan), and gave the answer. Without Google Translate, I never would have attempted the translation, and the questioner might have gotten no answer at all (IIRC, no one else attempted to answer the request but me). But Google Translate got me something I could work with and massage into a decent translation. Of course, this wouldn't work with a language completely unlike any other language I know: if it had been Finnish or Hungarian, I wouldn't have dared. But Catalan is just familiar-looking enough to me that I can proofread an English translation against a Catalan original, even though I can't translate Catalan without machine assistance. (Full disclosure: I'm pretty sure I'm the "regular language desk editor" Sluzzelin mentioned above at 09:13, 1 March 2011 (UTC).) —Angr (talk) 18:45, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

(Yep). A linguist who understands several Romance languages can certainly check a Catalan-English translation and give a good answer. Depending on the exact words, I myself might have also checked in Catalan dictionaries to see options Google might have missed. Anyway, I trust most people here are capable of judging their own linguistic competence. But apparently not everyone has been judging the machines's competence accurately. I tested Goggle's translations for the recent wrinkly-grandmother question in the few languages I can handle. Each translation had a grammatical error, and some used the wrong word in the given context (of a single sentence). If you don't understand the target language, you might be giving the querent an incorrect, useless (and even potentially embarassing) result. Mr. 98, thanks for putting all my blabla in a succinct nutshell. ---Sluzzelin talk 19:03, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

76.178.113.225

76.178.113.225 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log)

FYI... Following the lead of Angr, I have taken the liberty of boxing up a couple of his little rants-disguised-as-questions, and I've told him to stop it. If he keeps it up, I'll ask for a block. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:18, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

Actually, I don't agree with Angr's boxing up of the "should everyone in the UK leave so the native people can have their land back" question. We should only box up or remove questions that are disruptive to the Reference Desk. I don't at all mind answering patiently and with a straight face questions that have a strong touch of xenophobia or ignorance. The querent might learn something, you see. I don't think it was a very serious question, but the answers might give the querent something to think about; and the question was not nonsense. Comet Tuttle (talk) 18:10, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

Well, I did find that question disruptive to the reference desk. He wasn't actually trying to get information; he was trying to prove a point about Native Americans (against whom he clearly has some sort of grudge) by asking a leading, reductio-ad-absurdum question about Great Britain. At the very top of the RefDesk page, it says "The reference desk does not answer requests for opinions", and his question, "Should everyone in the United Kingdom leave their country so the original inhabitants who were ran off or killed have their homeland back?", is a request for opinions. —Angr (talk) 18:24, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

He asked a series of related questions, all of them ultimately focusing on his agenda to stir up debate about Native Americans, against whom he is obviously prejudiced. Strictly trolling. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 18:38, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

I don't know. You guys are very low on AGF with this guy. I'll concede that his last question was trying to prove a point and wasn't really an honest question; but why box up his earlier question? It looks to me like you just didn't like his question, attitude, and tone. Comet Tuttle (talk) 19:21, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

It was pure soapboxing, so we put him in one. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 19:23, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

I have found after many years of trying to get some sense into the brains of similar people in my own country that it it is a pointless exercise. Even blatant logic in a place like this will never change the minds of bigots. Waste of time. Waste of electrons. Take him off the page. HiLo48 (talk) 21:53, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

75.181.40.63

Non question was first removed [31] by Titoxd at 08:11. 7 min later, 75 decided to post the exact same non question (without caplock this time, congrat) which I removed [32]. I already posted a message on his talkpage but perhaps an admin could impose further warning/action? Royor (talk) 08:38, 6 March 2011 (UTC)

If they post again, blocking may be in order. However for now they seem to have stopped so there's no need for anything further Nil Einne (talk) 10:38, 6 March 2011 (UTC)

Removal of question/answer from RD/S

I removed This question and answer. The question was borderline, but in my opinion the answer clearly crossed into attempt at diagnosis. I will notify both editors. -- Scray (talk) 15:45, 6 March 2011 (UTC)

Thanks, The answer helped -- Thomas888b (Say Hi) 15:53, 6 March 2011 (UTC)

...or maybe it mislead you. The RD/S is no place to ask for medical advice. Please see the guideline, linked below. -- Scray (talk) 15:57, 6 March 2011 (UTC)

(edit conflict)Having notified them, I'll explain by saying that the OP was clearly asking about themselves, specifically about medical conditions that might account for a symptom (an observation about their own body). The answer suggested a specific medical condition they might have. Sorry if this level of commentary seems excessive, but I know these removals can be contentious. I considered suggesting (here or on RD/S) how this question might have been refactored, but a link to our guidelines should suffice for these experienced editors. -- Scray (talk) 15:55, 6 March 2011 (UTC)

Good removal. --- Medical geneticist (talk) 16:25, 6 March 2011 (UTC)

Good removal, in the absence of sufficient information. By that I mean that the guy says he has the ability to do thus-and-so. What's unclear is whether he's always had that, or if it's a recent phenomenon. It could make a difference. But better safe than sorry. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 06:13, 8 March 2011 (UTC)

Add link to Computing/Viruses

We should add this link to the Reference Desk, since a few every month will ask that question.http://en.wiki.x.io/wiki/Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Computing/Viruses However, I have no idea, if we decide to put a link to it, where to put it. Suggestions? General Rommel (talk) 07:48, 8 March 2011 (UTC)

I think putting the link into the header is unnecessary, as the number of questions isn't too much that it's overwhelming the computer desk. And most people rarely read through all the guidelines before asking their questions anyway, so there will probably still be just as many questions on virus removal as before. Just posting the link as a response to questions when they come up seems to me like the best option 82.43.92.41 (talk) 11:38, 8 March 2011 (UTC)

I also feel that the current state of the virus removal instructions (as of March 2011) is a bit over-the-top and unhelpful. The phrase "nuking the system from orbit" might be humorous and sarcastic, but to the novice computer user who is already struggling to understand what's wrong with their computer, this is unhelpful and confusing. We need clear, concise, referenced instructions. We should briefly explain what an operating system is, and how it works, and how malware can compromise it; and present an informational explanation of the benefits and downsides of a complete re-installation of the machine. Photos of atomic blasts, while potentially humorous, are not helpful to novice users who need computer help. The computer reference desk is not the place to promulgate jargon file-esque in-jokes. Nimur (talk) 16:44, 8 March 2011 (UTC)

As the original author of the Viruses page and as the inserter of the nuclear explosion picture, I now agree with Nimur, and I agree with the several editors who in the past have complained that the page's default advice (reformat) is overkill for most people — unfortunately those editors haven't expanded the "remove it in place" section. All are welcome to come and improve the Viruses page. As to the original poster in this thread, I don't think anyone will read yet another link at the top of the page. The original idea of the Viruses page wasn't to start a library of FAQs but to cover the topic thoroughly so we didn't have to type all that stuff every time someone asked about viruses; and to make sure we didn't miss anything each time we gave advice on the topic. Comet Tuttle (talk) 18:41, 8 March 2011 (UTC)

Torrent index link removed

Here, I removed a torrent index link that Cuddlyable3 provided to a querent. We do not assist copyright violations here on the Reference Desk. Comet Tuttle (talk) 23:47, 7 March 2011 (UTC)

I would tend to agree with the removal, although I wonder about the practicality of saying "we do not assist copyright violations". In the past I've given querents the names of torrent sites where copyright material can be found, but have not linked directly to them. That approach has not gained consensus – fair enough – but some might argue that even saying "you can download it on torrent sites" is assisting a copyright violation. I wouldn't go that far myself, though. --Viennese Waltz 09:04, 8 March 2011 (UTC)

In the past I have done the same, as long as it's a big name site. Sometimes it seems like ignoring the elephant in the room not to. ("Where can I get X?" "You can't, X has been discontinued, however some pirate sites like The Pirate Bay may still distribute it illegally.")

However this removal was appropriate because direct links to copyvio files is against policy and it's long been consensus that a direct link to a .torrent is, at least philosophically, the same and should also be removed. ( "Where can I get X?" "The easiest is to download this torrent file right here. Link.") APL (talk) 15:20, 8 March 2011 (UTC)

I agree with APL, and note that there are a few "grey areas" regarding this subject. In this specific instance, the removal of the link seems justified. Nimur (talk) 17:09, 8 March 2011 (UTC)

I also agree with the removal. Matt Deres (talk) 14:29, 9 March 2011 (UTC)

Comet Tuttle did you intend to leave the post by Viennese Waltz dangling and incomprehensible? Cuddlyable3 (talk) 21:37, 9 March 2011 (UTC)

What? --Viennese Waltz 21:59, 9 March 2011 (UTC)

I believe Cuddlyable3 is seeking to re-hash earlier, very-much-closed debate about the pros- and cons- of editing others' comments. Cuddlyable3, WP:POINT, and all that. Nimur (talk) 22:02, 9 March 2011 (UTC)

If he has a problem understanding my post – which would itself be strange, since it is very clear – he should talk to me about it, not CT. --Viennese Waltz 22:06, 9 March 2011 (UTC)

(I shall write this slowly to help those who are slow readers.) First I posted a link. Then Viennese Waltz posted "Is that link kosher? Then [33] deleted the link. That leaves the question by Viennese Waltz dangling. What Nimur chooses to believe is uninteresting. What is the OP supposed to see? Cuddlyable3 (talk) 09:26, 10 March 2011 (UTC)

No. I guess inserting the text "[link redacted]" in the middle of your comment would be the next-best editing choice; but I don't see any evidence of confusion in the thread. I say "next-best" because it's defacing someone else's post, which has its own, other problems. Comet Tuttle (talk) 00:43, 10 March 2011 (UTC)

@Comet Tuttle, you have already defaced my post, with collateral damage outlined above. I suggest that you go back and deface it better. Cuddlyable3 (talk) 09:40, 10 March 2011 (UTC)

I removed a link that violates what we do here on the Reference Desk, consensus is that this was the right thing, and I still think it was the right thing. Also, you need to look up what "deface" means. Now what exactly is your new complaint? Comet Tuttle (talk) 17:57, 10 March 2011 (UTC)

Wrong. Consensus is that we do not break into threads with an unmarked deletion. What you call "second best" way is the only way. Any redaction of another's post must be done leaving a trace. Wilful negligence of that is vandalism. Cuddlyable3 (talk) 21:01, 10 March 2011 (UTC)

I disagree, with the quite reasonable point that each word of your redacted post was left intact; what was removed was a hyperlink; and the way you happened to have phrased your post, the removal of the link luckily had a 0% impact upon the meaning of your post. I don't think any defacement of your post to explain what was done was necessary or even beneficial. Anyway, it's disingenuous to claim I'm wrong; we have two consensuses here that you are trying to say conflict: the consensus to remove certain hyperlinks, vs. the consensus to not modify the posts of others. Congratulations, you have made your POINT. In this case, I'll venture that the simple removal of the hyperlink without comment was the right approach; but I'd say that sometimes inserting "[link redacted]" or the like would be the right approach. Comet Tuttle (talk) 21:13, 10 March 2011 (UTC)

Wrong again. Your act of redacting my post rendered the post that follows it incomprehensible to any reader, such as the OP, who comes along later and can't read your mind. I see the strawman rhetoric that you launch about two consensuses neither of which is relevant to your failure to redact in a responsible way. You have had ample opportunity to review what you did in my post and now "venture" (the word means GAMBLE) that you did right. You have no administrative privilege that exculpates your obdurate act of vandalism on that thread. Cuddlyable3 (talk) 22:44, 10 March 2011 (UTC)

OK, let me ask an ignorant question, that being my specialty: As I recall, the original question had to do with how many words some particular book had. Was the OP using that as a pretext to getting info on how to use this legally-questionable downloading method? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 04:55, 10 March 2011 (UTC)

Torrent file loading is a method used for legal purposes. Wikipedia has articles Torrent file and BitTorrent (protocol). See this list of many legal users including Hollywood studios and the UK government. Cuddlyable3 (talk) 09:37, 10 March 2011 (UTC)

While the protocol itself is not illegal, using it to acquire copyright-protected materials without appropriate licenses or permissions likely is. Compared to – for example – purchasing and downloading the ebook version from a bookseller or publisher's website, torrenting a DRM-stripped copy certainly qualifies as a "legally-questionable downloading method". TenOfAllTrades(talk) 15:17, 10 March 2011 (UTC)

Copyright infringement is (a form of) theft with criminal liability. That applies regardless of the means of disseminating the work under copyright. In this respect it matters not whether the work is carried by torrent, FTP, carrier pigeon or smoke signal. The torrent method is just an effective way for multiple users to collaborate in exchanging data. Whether the collaboration is an illegal conspiracy depends on the purpose of their collaboration. There is no evidence of any impropriety in the OP's question that asked the word count of a novel. Providing extracted information about a book for the purpose of literary criticism, commentary, or other fair use is legal. A book's word count is no more sacrosanct than its page count. The page count of A Town Like Alice is given in the article. Its word count is another number that is extractable in a collaboration such as visiting a public library whose officials will have no objection to anyone counting the words. Using the Internet for the same purpose is legitimate when there is no intent of theft. (For complete transparency one can delete the downloaded file immediately after the automated count that I suggested, which gives no time for actually reading the text). Cuddlyable3 (talk) 22:10, 10 March 2011 (UTC)

Cuddlyable3, please review Wikipedia:Wikilawyering and Wikipedia:Legal disclaimer. Nimur (talk) 22:16, 10 March 2011 (UTC)

I did review them. WP:WL is an essay about application of Wikipedia policies. WP:IANAL does not hinder anyone from observing common innocent acts. Cuddlyable3 (talk) 22:58, 10 March 2011 (UTC)

Cuddlyable3, what the heck are you talking about? You didn't provide "Extracted information", you provided a link to a torrent of the entire book! Did you forget what you posted? Did you hope we forgot so you could keep the debate rolling?

Anyway, Providing a link to a torrent is against policy, so I don't understand why you're arguing with us about it. You want policy changed? Take it up at the village pump. By pointless debating here you just establish yourself as either an idiot or an intentionally disruptive troll, and I'm reasonably certain you're not an idiot.

Slightly Sarcastic Answer : You realize that libraries lend eBooks now, right? It isn't 2001 anymore. You don't need to pirate a book to get a digital copy. APL (talk) 07:04, 11 March 2011 (UTC)

As I mentioned above, I believe Cuddlyable3 is trying (and has succeeded) in baiting a pointless debate. This behavior does not help us make a better encyclopedia. Cuddlyable3, please stop your disruptive behavior. Nimur (talk) 00:47, 12 March 2011 (UTC)

The correct answer to the OP is 120 579 words. Cuddlyable3 (talk) 12:34, 11 March 2011 (UTC)

Missing question

The question worded as far as I recall 'Online polls in UK offline until?' has disapeared without any trace or comment. As it highlighted a shortcoming of the current political party in power, deleting it may have been done for political reasons. Who or what deleted it? Thanks 92.28.254.54 (talk) 14:35, 10 March 2011 (UTC)

It appears User:Scsbot deleted half the question when archiving the page in this edit. The other half is now under the section Egalitarianism - who invented the idea? being transcluced onto the current desk from Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Archives/Humanities/2011_March_7 82.43.92.41 (talk) 14:49, 10 March 2011 (UTC)

(ec) Or there could be a non-conspiracy explanation, which is much more likely. I doubt very much that the Queen is monitoring the Reference Desk so she can censor any mean things people might say about her. (Though as a point of advice, in the future please try to remember that we're here to try to help readers find answers to factual questions; the Desk isn't the right place for you to vent your feelings about the monarchy.)

It appears that the problematic edit was this one. The editor was Scsbot, which is an automated tool (a 'bot') that performs basic maintenance and archiving tasks on the Reference Desks. For some reason, it took a random chunk out of the middle of the page when it was adding a new date header. I've notified the bot's maintainer and asked him to have a look at things; I've also asked him to comment in this discussion.

I'm right in the middle of something at the moment, so could someone try to put the excised section back in? It looks like a good chunk of the preceding question was lost, too. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 15:01, 10 March 2011 (UTC)

Missing text restored. [34] —Steve Summit (talk) 17:13, 10 March 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for catching this. I'm in the middle of things, too, so I can't diagnose this fully just now. It looks like the bot timed out waiting for a response from the wikipedia server (and I think I remember bad server lag a couple of days ago). What's odd is that a timeout resulted in corrupted text like that. —Steve Summit (talk) 17:02, 10 March 2011 (UTC)

Book of Answers

Editors of Wikipedia Reference Desk may be interested in this book.

• The Book of Answers: The New York Public Library Telephone Reference Service's Most Unusual and Entertaining Questions | The New York Public Library
• Amazon.com: Book of Answers: The New York Public Library Telephone Reference Service's Most Unusual and Enter (9780671761929): Barbara Berliner: Books

Someone may wish to start a Wikipedia article about it. (See New York Public Library#ASK NYPL.)
—Wavelength (talk) 06:24, 12 March 2011 (UTC)

Removed nonsense non-question

Here. And I'm ashamed to say that I actually was able to decipher it, but it still has no place on the RD. --LarryMac | Talk 13:54, 11 March 2011 (UTC)

I have no problem with the deletion but I am curious as to what they were trying to get across. So, if you don't mind, what the hell was that?! Dismas|^(talk) 14:48, 11 March 2011 (UTC)

A google image search of "machete" + "drinking" will reveall all. (Possible BLP concerns stop me from spelling it out). ---Sluzzelin talk 15:03, 11 March 2011 (UTC)

Ah, thanks. I've barely paid any attention to any of that crazyness, so it's no wonder I was unaware. Dismas|^(talk) 15:06, 11 March 2011 (UTC)

Clearly you don't have tiger's blood, Dismas. Which is probably a good thing.  :-) --LarryMac | Talk 15:56, 11 March 2011 (UTC)

For anyone still clueless as what the OP in that non-question was getting at, Charlie Sheen ("cs") was waving a machete in public recently. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 03:15, 13 March 2011 (UTC)

I definitely agree with removing both the question and the first attempt at answer, but I do also feel that the first responder's "See a doctor who can diagnose you" is very good advice for anyone who's caught up in the current Hollywood "scandal" of the week. —Angr (talk) 15:43, 13 March 2011 (UTC)

And was drinking Tiger Blood^tm. I don't usually pay too much attention to that world, but what Charlie Sheen has been doing lately seems relatively interesting and noteworthy. And well-documented in RSs, too, so it would not necessarily have been a BLP violation to respond to it at all (the way questions about celebs can often be). It made no sense to me at first either, but at this point I think it was keep-able. WikiDao ☯ 16:14, 13 March 2011 (UTC)

The OP's core question is, "Why is he doing this?" I think that would call for a medical diagnosis from a distance, which is something we don't do. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:27, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

Well, there's nothing wrong with saying eg. he seems to think he's "punk'd us all"[35] in response to that question -- as long as a source is cited for it. It's only a BLP violation (see specifically WP:WELLKNOWN) if it is not "notable, relevant, and well-documented". What Charlie is doing, or rather what Charlie and others think he's doing, is "notable, relevant, and well-documented" so can be answered here if a reliable source is provided to support that answer.

I agree though that no one here ought to be offering their own personal opinion in response to this or any other RD question. WikiDao ☯ 02:52, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

I'm safe, since I haven't the vaguest idea why he's doing this stuff. The OP asked why, and all we really have to go on is whatever Sheen has said about it. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 03:46, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

Well, I know the RD isn't an "article," but still WP:PSTS does say:

"Wikipedia articles should be based on reliable, published secondary sources and, to a lesser extent, on tertiary sources. Secondary or tertiary sources are needed to establish the topic's notability and to avoid novel interpretations of primary sources, though primary sources are permitted if used carefully. All interpretive claims, analyses, or synthetic claims about primary sources must be referenced to a secondary source, rather than original analysis of the primary-source material by Wikipedia editors.

So strictly speaking we really ought to try to only be going on what secondary sources have said about it... WikiDao ☯ 04:17, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

What "secondary source" can possibly know what's going on in Sheen's head? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 04:32, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

Well, I'm not sure that's really the question. But anyway the point is that "Wikipedia articles should be based on reliable, published secondary sources and, to a lesser extent, on tertiary sources." That's the way an online encyclopedia -- the Ref Desk notwithstanding! -- ought to work. One ought, as an online encyclopedia, take what Charlie Sheen says about what Charlie Sheen is doing with a grain of salt. And certainly no one at Wikipedia ought to be interpreting anything that Charlie Sheen says about what Charlie Sheen is doing. That is for reliable secondary, and to a lesser extent tertiary, sources to do. WikiDao ☯ 07:27, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

The question specifically was, "He's drinking booze and pointing a machete. What gives?" I guess it depends on how you interpret, "What gives?" I interpret it to mean, "What is going on in his head?" And you're not likely to find a valid secondary or tertiary or quaternary or any other kind of external source that's going to know. Only he and his therapist might know, and his therapist is bound by confidentiality, so that pretty much leaves Charlie's word as the only useful source for "What gives?" ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 21:08, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

Yeah, I read it as being answerable in about as much detail and in a similar way as the highly-referenced information presented in eg. the Warner Bros. dismissal and Personal life sections of his article. WikiDao ☯ 21:45, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

There's no shortage of information about what he's done. The "why" is the tricky part. Saying he's "gone nuts" probably covers it, but it doesn't really help. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 21:47, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

removal from RD/S

I removed a couple of posts that, IMHO, were nothing more than ad hominem attacks. I will notify the editors involved straightaway. -- Scray (talk) 03:13, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

Editors have been notified ([36] and [37]). If that's the end of it, that's fine with me. -- Scray (talk) 03:19, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

This ad hominem snubb to the OP[38]"(P.S. Printing in full caps is regarded as a style best suited for the uneducated and uncouth. Then again, perhaps you better keep on using it.)" should also be deleted. WP:BITE. Cuddlyable3 (talk) 11:54, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

Definitely. Actually, the entire section should be deleted, as it's not a question, just a SOAPBOX STATEMENT of some kind. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 12:07, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

Removed and noted, Myles325a notifed. OP is a newcomer, responses to newcomers should assume good faith. WikiDao ☯ 12:42, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

E-Mails, Law, and Medicine... Oh My!

I really have never understood why the RD does not offer Medical and Legal advice, unless it adheres to Kainaw's Criterion. Hear me out.....

If a stranger is willing to post their very personal information (e.g. this question), then what is the big deal with someone who may post an answer about US tax law with which the are familiar? I really don't care either way, and I don't think the RD regulars should either (see, it's an archaic law).

On the same note, why not leave e-mail addresses in the post? If an answerer is willing to open their e-mail program and type an answer and send it, then so be it! Likewise, if the questioner is not sensible enough to either return to the RD for the answer or to know that spammers patrol the RD, the SO BE IT!

If the answer to all this is liability, then I refuse that answer. That being because if someone who received bad medical advice on the RD and really decided to take Wikimedia Corp. to court, there are precedents which prevent a successful lawsuit.

Just a thought...

Schyler! (one language) 00:44, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

Your musings are profoundly short-sighted. An article in the NYT entitled "Boy dies after following medical advice on W" would do far more damage to the organization than any lawsuit, successful or not. That is but one example. The Masked Booby (talk) 01:19, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

But it would also call greater attention to the need for users of WP not to believe everything they read on WP, whether at the RD or in an article. Because that's one of the downsides of making it an encyclopedia that anyone can edit, and while more experienced readers probably understand that by now, it's probably not something that's entirely clear to new or less experienced readers. A society that understands better how Wikipedia works is a society that's safer, healthier, and better informed! ;)

That said, I think things as they are are better than any change to how things are I've so far heard proposed on this page. The policy as it is is there to deal with problems; if it's not a problem, schyler, then it's not a problem. WikiDao ☯ 01:40, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

Getting somebody killed through incorrect diagnosis is not really the way to teach a lesson about the unreliability of the internet. It would be like Otter in Animal House telling Flounder, "Hey! You f*ed up! You trusted us!" ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 11:00, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

Well, it's one way to teach the general public that lesson. I don't think anyone here thinks it's the best way to do that.

If such an article appeared in the NYT, though, that would not cause Wikipedia to collapse. It would lead to greater understanding about how to use, and how not to use, Wikipedia, though. Meanwhile, Wikipedia contributors like ourselves ought to continue going about building a better online encyclopedia as usual, which includes the vigilant removal of unacceptable content.

Schyler, posts like the one you started this thread with are not likely to achieve much change in policy at Wikipedia. I recommend that for now you just try to focus on understanding why that is. And in the meantime there is eg. Facebook, which has fewer restrictions on content afaik; you might consider discussing the legal and medical issues you want to discuss there instead. WikiDao ☯ 12:18, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

In that case, I'm pretty sure Jimbo would mysteriously reacquire all his powers and rights, oversight the entire history of the desks, and institute strict policy rules about anything vaguely medical or based around users' lives. Consider the Siegenthaler case: a basic function of Wikipedia was lost for the majority of contributors, and a major new policy was introduced to severely limit what people could include that might possibly lead to anything like this case. 86.164.66.59 (talk) 00:43, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

(edit conflict) OK, disregard liability; what about the moral responsibility of respondents, whether or not they give a damn about it? What if someone acted on your half-baked medical advice and died or acted on your legal advice and found himself in the hoosegow for tax evasion or some other crime? Encouraging people to rely on (probably quite ignorant) strangers on the Internet for advice that may seriously screw up their lives is hardly the sort of behavior that we want to be engaging in here. You may not "care either way" but fortunately the reference-desk guidelines and consensus are against you. Deor (talk) 01:21, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

With regards to email addresses; we remove them because we'll never respond by email, because it prevents other people from seeing the answers. Vimescarrot (talk) 10:10, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

It is not possible to give a valid medical diagnosis without having a personal visit conducted by a physician. And likewise with legal advice. The best, and ONLY, advice we can give is, "See a professional." ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 10:58, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

The opinions that Schyler expresses are clear but the reasoning mystifies me. Calling US tax law "archaic" doesn't invalidate it; linking that characterisation to Progressivism seems to make a political point that might as well be promoting Anarchy; and since Schyler studies with Jehovah's Witnesses, Schyler might seek their advice on the relevance of Mathew 22:21/Mark 12:17 /Luke 20:22-25 to taxation. The claim that precedents exist that prevent a type of lawsuit succeeding is Legal Advice about unspecified cases by an unqualified person. TMB has made the point that a lawsuit can be damaging whether ultimately successful or not.Cuddlyable3 (talk) 12:46, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

Use of references

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

Resolved

 – see thread below. This is the same people, picking on each other in the same way. It isn't generating any positive discussion, and is part of the same basic pattern of two sides sniping without generating any positive way forward. As an uninvolved administrator, I am closing this down and hoping this can all end. --Jayron32 16:20, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

---

Unfortunately, after months of more constructive behavior, Baseball Bugs is back to posting numerous bad jokes and other irrelevant comments, such that, as a poster to RD/H recently stated, every time he does post, it seems to decrease our signal/noise ratio. I don't relish the idea of reading all his recent posts, but here are five recent examples: [39], [40], [41], [42], and [43].

Naturally, none of these contain references, which is bad for a Reference Desk. Bugs, again, this is not a chat board. Please don't post your non-referenced opinions. Because of the previous identical problems we have had with this editor, I propose a topic ban if he persists. Comet Tuttle (talk) 18:31, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

Curiously, of the 5 items you cited, they were all responses to items that didn't have references either. So should I assume you will also hassle those editors about their unreferenced comments as well? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 18:44, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

Also, I see a grand total of 4 edits for you today, of which only one is of any value (and it wasn't the one at 18:31). So spare me your lectures, and mind your own business. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 18:47, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

We'd love to have you answer questions...that's perhaps the primary purpose of the whole ref-desks...if you have actual citable answers to give. The problem is that you're doing "other things" and "not that". DMacks (talk) 18:49, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

I assume you will also lecture the other editors who engage in non-referenced speculation - including CT for 2 of the 4 edits he made today whose "references" were "If memory serves." ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 18:52, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

(e/c)I must admit I like the humorous tone, as long as it is kept within certain limits and is not breaking into forum territory. A limit that I find Baseball Bugs manages to mostly stay within overall. I did find this one to be a bit too much, especially considering the current plight of Japan. --Saddhiyama (talk) 18:51, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

That was in response to a paragraph that appeared to be putting down America for having bombed Japan heavily during the War. In such cases, it's good to remind the complainant that the Japanese brought that destruction upon themselves. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 18:54, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

I did not read that paragraph as in any way putting down America on account of the bombings, as Acroterion never mentions support or comments on the reasons for them. It can as well be interpreted as being in support of the bombings. S/he only listed the numbers to inform about the scope of the destruction, which was entirely on topic of the OPs question about the amount of ancient architecture remaining in Japan. I see that my worries about your comment being interpreted as off-topic nationalism was unfortunately correct. --Saddhiyama (talk) 19:09, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

I might have taken it as simply factual (Germany had to do the same thing, for the same reason), except for "Happily, Kyoto was considered off-limits to bombing..." implying that he was unhappy the other cities got bombed. And I'm merely pointing out that the destruction visited upon Japan was of their own making. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 19:21, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

No, that was of the Allies' making, Bugs. I understand what you're saying, and your justification for saying it, but I agree with Saddhiyama. Please try to listen to some of the feedback you are getting here; it doesn't have to become a big issue, but I agree you ought to maybe just ease up a bit with the off-the-cuff comments (which can certainly sometimes be well-executed and funny) for awhile... WikiDao ☯ 19:29, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

No, the Allies' entry into the Pacific Theater and the consequent destruction of Japan was a result of Japan having attacked us at Pearl Harbor. They brought the disaster upon themselves. And if someone is going to make editorial comments that take an unfairly anti-American stance, I'll be damned if I'll let those comments stand unchallenged. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 19:34, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

I understand what you are saying. Please try to understand what I'm saying. All I'm saying is maybe just ease up a little here for a while. WikiDao ☯ 19:45, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

If the other editor strikes his anti-American editorial comments, then I'll strike my response to it. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 19:47, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

I don't comment here often (ever?), but I must admit I was pretty disappointed when I read that remark about Japan. I enjoy or ignore jokey responses (from any of the respondents at the ref desks), but I don't think that's the kind of impression we want to give readers and questioners about these pages.--Kateshortforbob _talk 20:42, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

Yes, like you, I was disappointed in that other editors comments about Japan. But that's how things go sometimes. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 21:26, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

Bugs, it might have been an anti-war addition, but that doesn't make it anti-American. It was a "World" war (unlike the "World" series ;) and lots of peoples did lots of terrible stuff, bad enough it even got a number. It just happens that one reason for the paucity of older buildings in Japan is carpet bombing, done in this case by Americans - and one city wasn't bombed. I won't get into why the US-Japan war originated long before your simplistic analysis of "Pearl Harbour". I think you're reading way too much into this. No-one had pointed out yet the rather obvious fact that Japan gets many earthquakes, which winnows out many older buildings, but that doesn't mean it's all the fault of the USA. Franamax (talk) 00:33, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Including winnowing out nuclear power plants, it seems. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 00:36, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Incidentally, just like baseball, basketball, the zipper, lacrosse, the G-suit, football, hockey, and ultra long-range artillery, nuclear meltdowns were developed first right here in Canada. Franamax (talk) 02:08, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

I read it as a rather shallow "happily, because traditional Japanese architecture is pretty". I generally agree with your "brought it on themselves" concept; the responsibility for harm caused by conflicts lies with whoever is morally in the wrong (which is usually mostly one party and not so much the other). This is an old divisive question, though, similar to the division between hawks and doves, and it's beside the point of whether you're behaving yourself or not. (Yeah, you probably are really. Maybe a small reminder not to produce another baffling flood of opaque puns like that phase you went through last year.) 213.122.14.131 (talk) 00:05, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

I'm concerned about the POV of this complaint. Who decides what a "bad" joke is? Are reference desks a no humour zone? My impression is that a lot of what's posted on the reference desks is non-referenced, but still very useful. Is this a personal vendetta? HiLo48 (talk) 18:55, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

He does have a point, it's just that he makes it with a sledgehammer. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 19:01, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

I agree with Comet Tuttle – this editor is becoming an increasing problem. If he doesn't curb his tendencies, I propose a temporary block. --Viennese Waltz 19:07, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

(edit conflict) I agree, Bugs. Maybe just ease up a little for a while. We all need to/ought to at times. WikiDao ☯ 19:09, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

Recently I've been checking the ref desks about once a week and seeing if anything remained unanswered. In future I'll try and un-watch the page after answering something. Out of sight, out of mind. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 19:23, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

I agree that joke posting is detrimental to desks. It's irrelevant whether the jokes are "good" or "bad"; they are not serious answers, and they are not helpful. Lack of jokes and other nonsense is what distinguishes the Reference Desk from yahoo answers and other such sites. 82.43.92.41 (talk) 19:33, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

Then you should generalize the complaint to all the attempts at humor, rather than singling out one registered user. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 19:35, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

I did. Do you see any registered users mentioned in my post? 82.43.92.41 (talk) 19:40, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

Good point. Perhaps you should change the section header, to reinforce that point? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 19:41, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

You're free to change it yourself if you want. 82.43.92.41 (talk) 19:43, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

Am I also free to box it up, as being nothing more than a gratuitous pot-shot by a user who has failed to live up to his own rules today? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 19:45, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

You are free to edit how you want, I don't control what you do nor do you have to ask my permission before you edit. 82.43.92.41 (talk) 19:48, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

No, and throwing up shocked hands at the unfairness of it all is pretty rich, considering that this identical complaint has been raised on this discussion page about your behavior more than once. Comet Tuttle (talk) 19:49, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

So what's with this "if memory serves" stuff? Is your brain now registered as an official Reliable Source? Or do you apply different rules to yourself than to others? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 19:55, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

That's right, Bugs: Never admit error or fold; always double-down with indignation and an attempt to change the subject. Although you are being disingenuous by asking the above, I will respond. I pointed one user to The Book of Lists, though I can't remember whether it's 1, 2, or 3 of the books that have the list he was looking for. That's a reference, though obviously not a great one, because I can't remember which of the three books it was. In any case, my post helped the querent find what he or she was looking for, if he or she walks the last mile and locates the books. Your posts I complained about above are not trying to help the querent. All of them are offtopic jokes. None of this is news to you; you have been warned about this before. This is not the place to display your B.A. in witty repartee with a minor in raconteurship. Comet Tuttle (talk) 21:10, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

I said you had a point, but you might have missed that. Well, let's see... someone asked if it was a vendetta. Well, you attack my comments, but not the comments that I respond to, which are equally off-topic. You single me out for reasons known only to yourself, while displaying a sharp, keen lack of perspective. So it does appear to be a "vendetta" of sorts. In future, if you have any questions, come to my talk page and we'll have a nice chat. Don't bring your vendetta here again. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 21:25, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

I was the one who suggested vendetta. I certainly don't see consistency in this thread. Either all humour is bad (with which I don't agree) or we have to be flexible. Humour has massive cultural biases, and what offends some will not offend others. So long as it's clear that offence is not intended, we should all learn to deal with it. As for referencing responses, again I'll say the bulk of posts on the Reference Desks are unreferenced, but still useful. As for Bugs, I suspect I could have a massive ideological fight with him on some issues, but we both know that's inappropriate, and I respect his diplomacy and tact when posting here. I still wonder what the real issue is? HiLo48 (talk) 21:53, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

I doubt we'd have a fight, though we might have a lively discussion. :) I think his grudge goes back a number of years, to a time when I proved, through geometric logic, that his mother did, in fact, wear Army shoes. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:13, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

Humor is fine on the desks if it is moderate, within reason, and does not cause disruption. I submit that when a user's attempts at humor semi-regularly spawn lengthy debates on this talk page (33 comments totalling 10k of text in less than 4 hours, and this is far from the first time this has happened), then it is, ipso facto, causing disruption and has therefore crossed the line into being inappropriate. —Steve Summit (talk) 23:05, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

I guess it would have killed Tuttle to talk to me about it. Then we could have avoided this megillah. He probably didn't want to lower himself to addressing me directly. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 23:07, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

To be fair, you only have to sneeze to cause a lengthy debate on this talk page. 213.122.14.131 (talk) 23:51, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

They probably couldn't find anything to yell at Cuddly about this week, so they had to find another scapegoat. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 00:25, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

I'll agree it's unfortunate this wasn't discussed with you first on your talk page Bugs. OTOH you react pretty defensively no matter where it's raised. You've acknowledged the point, I'll agree with the OP that you've made lots of perceptive and informative comments for quite a while now (while still using the occasional ironic humour). You're just being asked to keep it in mind going forward. Franamax (talk) 00:44, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Being "asked" coupled with threat of banishment. Oh, jolly, peachy keen. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 00:46, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

My mistake, it was a topic ban proposal - but look how much traction that got. You're a reasonable enough guy, from what I've seen you do eventually take critism onboard. Did I already agree that there were better ways to communicate the concern? Still, the concerns arise from your style of contributing here, not anyone else's. Everyone else does a pretty good job of restraining their sense of humour, irony and sarcasm to keep balance with their positive additions. You can do that too. Franamax (talk) 01:11, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

What, everyone? During 2010, Baseball Bugs contributed on average nearly a reference a day to the Miscellaneous desk. That rate ranks him among the top 10 editors together with Comet Tuttle so there is no shortage of referenced answers from either editor. However it was unwise not to use SMALL FONT that could have kept under the radar the comments that Comet Tuttle cited. Cuddlyable3 (talk) 09:44, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Good point.

I'm not perfect. I'll try to do better. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 09:49, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Yeah we've been around this when you first published that bizarre piece of "research". Just counting the number of times an editor puts an internal or external link in a post tells you nothing at all about the quality of their responses. They could – and, in the case of this editor, frequently are – be linking to anything at all, whether relevant to the question or not. --Viennese Waltz 10:04, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Unlike me, you are in fact perfect. :) ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 10:40, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

3.1 references per day, by my count, and top 20, not top 10. Quite a big difference in our counts there. 213.122.24.55 (talk) 11:16, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

How does one go about calculating those counts? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 11:35, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

I downloaded the desks for the year (there is a page for this) and ran scripts on them - see the archives for January. (Excuse brief answer - going afk for the rest of the day now.) 213.122.24.55 (talk) 11:44, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Holy moly, that's a lot of tedious work. Well, whatever trips yer trigger. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 12:51, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Somehow, I knew, I just knew that that count was going to come back to bite the Reference Desk in the ass one day. Vimescarrot (talk) 15:23, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

The problem is not with the input data, that always has to be refined, resorted and recounted, usually in a series of steps. The problem is not even in the putative results posited here. The problem is the same one our teachers used to mark us down for: show your work~ Don't just announce a numeric result, write down what you do each step of the way, convince yourself that you can do it all again for a different time period if asked. Then publish the method with the results. How simple can that concept be? Franamax (talk) 01:19, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Verifying a result obtained by specially written script (software code), as is the case here, is not simple. The purpose is not served by publishing the software for someone else to run. Inspecting someone else's software for error(s) is difficult and uncertain. In my experience the only way to get a solid verification is to publish only the basic pseudocode or algorithmic description of what one has implemented. Then another programmer must inspect it, write code in their own way for their own platform, and see whether they get the same result. That is why I shall not publish my code. Cuddlyable3 (talk) 10:40, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

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