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 User talk:SMcCandlish/IP

Old stuff to resolve eventually

Cueless billiards

Unresolved
 – Can't get at the stuff at Ancestry; try using addl. cards.
Extended content

Categories are not my thing but do you think there are enough articles now or will be ever to make this necessary? Other than Finger billiards and possibly Carrom, what else is there?--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 11:12, 18 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Crud fits for sure. And if the variant in it is sourceable, I'm sure some military editor will fork it into a separate article eventually. I think at least some variants of bar billiards are played with hands and some bagatelle split-offs probably were, too (Shamos goes into loads of them, but I get them all mixed up, mostly because they have foreign names). And there's bocce billiards, article I've not written yet. Very fun game. Kept my sister and I busy for 3 hours once. Her husband (Air Force doctor) actually plays crud on a regular basis; maybe there's a connection. She beat me several times, so it must be from crud-playing. Hand pool might be its own article eventually. Anyway, I guess it depends upon your "categorization politics". Mine are pretty liberal - I like to put stuff into a logical category as long as there are multiple items for it (there'll be two as soon as you're done with f.b., since we have crud), and especially if there are multiple parent categories (that will be the case here), and especially especially if the split parallels the category structure of another related category branch (I can't think of a parallel here, so this criterion of mine is not a check mark in this case), and so on. A bunch of factors really. I kind of wallow in that stuff. Not sure why I dig the category space so much. Less psychodrama, I guess. >;-) In my entire time here, I can only think of maybe one categorization decision I've made that got nuked at CfD. And I'm a pretty aggressive categorizer, too; I totally overhauled Category:Pinball just for the heck of it and will probably do the same to Category:Darts soon.
PS: I'm not wedded to the "cueless billiards" name idea; it just seemed more concise than "cueless developments from cue sports" or whatever.— SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ Contribs. 11:44, 18 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I have no "categorization politics". It's not an area that I think about a lot or has ever interested me so it's good there are people like you. If there is to be a category on this, "cueless billiards" seems fine to me. By the way, just posted Yank Adams as an adjunct to the finger billiards article I started.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 11:57, 18 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Cool; I'd never even heard of him. This one looks like a good DYK; just the fact that there was Finger Billiards World Championship contention is funky enough, probably. You still citing that old version of Shamos? You really oughta get the 1999 version; it can be had from Amazon for cheap and has a bunch of updates. I actually put my old version in the recycle bin as not worth saving. Heh. PS: You seen Stein & Rubino 3rd ed.? I got one for the xmas before the one that just passed, from what was then a really good girlfriend. >;-) It's a-verra, verra nahce. Over 100 new pages, I think (mostly illustrations). — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ Contribs. 13:41, 18 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
If I happen to come across it in a used book store I might pick it up. There's nothing wrong with citing the older edition (as I've said to you before). I had not heard of Adams before yesterday either. Yank is apparently not his real name, though I'm not sure what it is yet. Not sure there will be enough on him to make a DYK (though don't count it out). Of course, since I didn't userspace it, I have 4½ days to see. Unfortunately, I don't have access to ancestry.com and have never found any free database nearly as useful for finding newspaper articles (and census, birth certificates, and reams of primary source material). I tried to sign up for a free trial again which worked once before, but they got smart and are logging those who signed up previously. I just looked; the new Stein and Rubino is about $280. I'll work from the 2nd edition:-)--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 14:16, 18 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Hmm... I haven't tried Ancestry in a while. They're probably logging IP addresses. That would definitely affect me, since mine doesn't change except once every few years. I guess that's what libraries and stuff are for. S&R: Should be available cheaper. Mine came with the Blue Book of Pool Cues too for under $200 total. Here it is for $160, plus I think the shipping was $25. Stein gives his e-mail address as that page. If you ask him he might give you the 2-book deal too, or direct you to where ever that is. Shamos: Not saying its an unreliable source (although the newer version actually corrected some entries), it's just cool because it has more stuff in it. :-) DYK: Hey, you could speedily delete your own article, sandbox it and come back. Heh. Seriously, I'll see if I can get into Ancestry again and look for stuff on him. I want to look for William Hoskins stuff anyway so I can finish that half of the Spinks/Hoskins story, which has sat in draft form for over a year. I get sidetracked... — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ Contribs. 14:29, 18 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
It's not IPs they're logging, it's your credit card. You have to give them one in order to get the trial so that they can automatically charge you if you miss the cancellation deadline. Regarding the Blue Book, of all these books, that's the one that get's stale, that is, if you use it for actual quotes, which I do all the time, both for answer to questions and for selling, buying, etc. Yeah I start procrastinating too. I did all that work on Mingaud and now I can't get myself to go back. I also did reams of research on Hurricane Tony Ellin (thugh I found so little; I really felt bad when he died; I met him a few times, seemed like a really great guy), Masako Katsura and others but still haven't moved on them.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 18:31, 18 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Ah, the credit card. I'll have to see if the PayPal plugin has been updated to work with the new Firefox. If so, that's our solution - it generates a new valid card number every time you use it (they always feed from your single PayPal account). — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ Contribs. 18:37, 18 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
PayPal Plugin ist kaput. Some banks now issue credit card accounts that make use of virtual card numbers, but mine's not one of them. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ Contribs. 19:49, 8 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for trying. It was worth a shot. I signed up for a newspaperarchive.com three month trial. As far as newspaper results go it seems quite good so far, and the search interface is many orders of magnitude better than ancestry's, but it has none of the genealogical records that ancestry provides. With ancestry I could probably find census info on Yank as well as death information (as well as for Masako Katsura, which I've been working on it for a few days; she could actually be alive, though she'd be 96).--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 04:52, 9 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Sad...

How well forgotten some very well known people are. The more I read about Yank Adams, the more I realize he was world famous. Yet, he's almost completely unknown today and barely mentioned even in modern billiard texts.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 13:47, 21 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Reading stuff from that era, it's also amazing how important billiards (in the three-ball sense) was back then, with sometimes multiple-page stories in newspapers about each turn in a long match, and so on. It's like snooker is today in the UK. PS: I saw that you found evidence of a billiards stage comedy there. I'd never heard of it! — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ Contribs. 15:17, 21 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Jackpot. Portrait, diagrams, sample shot descriptions and more (that will also lend itself to the finger billiards article).--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 01:34, 22 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Nice find! — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ Contribs. 06:07, 27 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Look at the main page

Unresolved
 – Katsura News added (with new TFA section) to WP:CUE; need to see if I can add anything useful to Mingaud article.
Extended content

Look at the main page --Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 03:37, 31 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Since you don't appear to have seen this near to the time I left it, it might be a little cryptic without explanation. Masako Katsura was today's featured article on January 31, 2011.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 20:26, 1 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Supah-dupah! That kicks. WP:CUE's (and your?) first TFA, yes?! And yeah I have been away a lot lately. Long story. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ Contribs. 01:22, 18 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Indeed, my first, though I have another in the works (not billiards related). I think François Mingaud could be a candidate in the near future. I really wanted to work it up to near FA level before posting it but another user created it recently, not realizing my draft existed, and once they did realize, copied some of my content without proper copyright attribution and posted to DYK. I have done a history merge though the newer, far less developed content is what's seen in the article now. I'm going to merge the old with the new soon. Glad to see your back.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 16:15, 20 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
My front and sides are visible too. ;-) Anyway, glad you beat me to Mingaud. I'd been thinking of doing that one myself, but it seemed a bit daunting. I may have some tidbits for it. Lemme know when your merged version goes up, and I'll see what I have that might not already be in there. Probably not earthshaking, just a few things I found in 1800s-1910s books. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ Contribs. 16:21, 23 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Some more notes on Crystalate

Unresolved
 – New sources/material worked into article, but unanswered questions remain.
Extended content

Some more notes: they bought Royal Worcester in 1983 and sold it the next year, keeping some of the electronics part.[3]; info about making records:[4]; the chair in 1989 was Lord Jenkin of Roding:[5]; "In 1880, crystalate balls made of nitrocellulose, camphor, and alcohol began to appear. In 1926, they were made obligatory by the Billiards Association and Control Council, the London-based governing body." Amazing Facts: The Indispensable Collection of True Life Facts and Feats. Richard B. Manchester - 1991wGtDHsgbtltnpBg&ct=result&id=v0m-h4YgKVYC&dq=%2BCrystalate; a website about crystalate and other materials used for billiard balls:No5 Balls.html. Fences&Windows 23:37, 12 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks! I'll have to have a look at this stuff in more detail. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ Contribs. 15:54, 16 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I've worked most of it in. Fences&Windows 16:01, 17 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Cool! From what I can tell, entirely different parties held the trademark in different markets. I can't find a link between Crystalate Mfg. Co. Ltd. (mostly records, though billiard balls early on) and the main billiard ball mfr. in the UK, who later came up with "Super Crystalate". I'm not sure the term was even used in the U.S. at all, despite the formulation having been originally patented there. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ Contribs. 21:04, 17 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

WP:SAL

Unresolved
 – Not done yet, last I looked.
Extended content

No one has actually objected to the idea that it's really pointless for WP:SAL to contain any style information at all, other than in summary form and citing MOS:LIST, which is where all of WP:SAL's style advice should go, and SAL page should move back to WP:Stand-alone lists with a content guideline tag. Everyone who's commented for 7 months or so has been in favor of it. I'd say we have consensus to start doing it. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ   Contrib. 13:13, 2 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I'll take a look at the page shortly. Thanks for the nudge. SilkTork ✔Tea time 23:19, 2 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Your free 1-year HighBeam Research account is ready

Unresolved
 – Needs to be renewed
Extended content

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Thanks for helping make Wikipedia better. Enjoy your research! Cheers, Ocaasi t | c 04:47, 3 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

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Unresolved
 – Needs to be renewed.
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Thanks for helping make Wikipedia better. Enjoy your research! Cheers, Ocaasi 17:22, 22 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Yay! — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ   Contrib. 10:50, 27 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Circa

Unresolved
 – Need to file the RfC.
Extended content

of Style/Abbreviations&diff=530110577&oldid=530110478 This edit explains how to write "ca.", which is still discouraged at [[MOS:#Abbreviations]], WP:YEAR, WP:SMOS#Abbreviations, and maybe MOS:DOB, and after you must have read my complaint and ordeal at WT:Manual of Style/Abbreviations#Circa. Either allow "ca." or don't allow "ca.", I don't care which, but do it consistently. Art LaPella (talk) 15:41, 28 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Sounds like a good WP:RFC. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ   Contrib. 17:52, 28 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
It's been hard to get opinions on circa in the past. Anyway, can I undo that edit, until when and if someone wants to edit the other guidelines to match? If we leave it there indefinitely, nobody will notice except me. Art LaPella (talk) 20:17, 28 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I don't care; this will have to be dealt with in an RfC anyway. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ   Contrib. 20:44, 28 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Done (now I don't need to wonder if the RfC will ever be acted on :) ) Art LaPella (talk) 21:08, 28 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

You post at Wikipedia talk:FAQ/Copyright

Unresolved
 – Need to fix William A. Spinks, etc., with proper balkline stats, now that we know how to interpret them.
Extended content

That page looks like a hinterland (you go back two users in the history and you're in August). Are you familiar with WP:MCQ? By the way, did you see my response on the balkline averages?--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 15:54, 6 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, I did a bunch of archiving yesterday. This page was HUGE. It'll get there again. I'd forgotten MCQ existed. Can you please add it to the DAB hatnote at top of and "See also" at bottom of WP:COPYRIGHT? Its conspicuous absence is precisely why I ened up at Wikipedia talk:FAQ/Copyright! Haven't seen your balkline response yet; will go look. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖ⊝כ⊙þ Contrib. 21:34, 6 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Hee Haw

Unresolved
 – Still need to propose some standards on animal breed article naming and disambiguation.
Extended content

Yeah, we did get along on Donkeys. And probably will get along on some other stuff again later. Best way to handle WP is to take it issue by issue and then let bygones be bygones. I'm finding some interesting debates over things like the line between a subspecies, a landrace and a breed. Just almost saw someone else's GA derailed over a "breed versus species" debate that was completely bogus, we just removed the word "adapt" and life would have been fine. I'd actually be interested in seeing actual scholarly articles that discuss these differences, particularly the landrace/breed issue in general, but in livestock in particular, and particularly as applied to truly feral/landrace populations (if, in livestock, there is such a thing, people inevitably will do a bit of culling, sorting and other interference these days). I'm willing to stick to my guns on the WPEQ naming issue, but AGF in all respects. Truce? Montanabw(talk) 22:40, 6 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Truce, certainly. I'm not here to pick fights, just improve the consistency for readers and editors. I don't think there will be any scholarly articles on differences between landrace and breed, because there's nothing really to write about. Landrace has clear definitions in zoology and botany, and breed not only doesn't qualify, it is only established as true in any given case by reliable sources. Basically, no one anywhere is claiming "This is the Foobabaz horse, and it is a new landrace!" That wouldn't make sense. What is happening is people naming and declaring new alleged breeds on an entirely self-interested, profit-motive basis, with no evidence anyone other than the proponent and a few other experimental breeders consider it a breed. WP is full of should-be-AfD'd articles of this sort, like the cat one I successfully prod'ed last week. Asking for a reliable source that something is a landrace rather than a breed is backwards; landrace status is the default, not a special condition. It's a bit like asking for a scholarly piece on whether pig Latin is a real language or not; no one's going to write a journal paper about that because "language" (and related terms like "dialect", "language family", "creole" in the linguistic sense, etc.) have clear definitions in linguistics, while pig Latin, an entirely artificial, arbitrary, intentionally-managed form of communication (like an entirely artificial, arbitrary, intentionally managed form of domesticated animal) does not qualify. :-) The "what is a breed" question, which is also not about horses any more than cats or cavies or ferrets, is going to be a separate issue to resolve from the naming issue. Looking over what we collaboratively did with donkeys – and the naming form that took, i.e. Poitou donkey not Poitou (donkey), I think I'm going to end up on your side of that one. It needs to be discussed more broadly in an RFC, because most projects use the parenthetical form, because this is what WT:AT is most readily interpretable as requiring. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖ⊝כ⊙þ Contrib. 00:12, 7 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I hate the drama of an RfC, particularly when we can just look at how much can be naturally disambiguated, but if you think it's an actual issue, I guess ping me when it goes up. As for landcraces, it may be true ("clear definitions") but you would be doing God's (or someone's) own good work if you were to improve landrace which has few references, fewer good ones, and is generally not a lot of help to those of us trying to sort out WTF a "landrace" is... (smiles). As for breed, that is were we disagree: At what point do we really have a "breed" as opposed to a "landrace?" Fixed traits, human-selected? At what degree, at which point? How many generations? I don't even know if there IS such a thing as a universal definition of what a "breed" is: seriously: [6] or breed or [7]. I think you and I agree that the Palomino horse can never be a "breed" because it is impossible for the color to breed true (per an earlier discussion) so we have one limit. But while I happen agree to a significant extent with your underlying premise that when Randy from Boise breeds two animals and says he has created a new breed and this is a problem, (I think it's a BIG problem in the worst cases) but if we want to get really fussy, I suppose that the aficionados of the Arabian horse who claim the breed is pure from the dawn of time are actually arguing it is a landrace, wouldn't you say? And what DO we do with the multi-generational stuff that's in limbo land? Montanabw(talk) 00:41, 7 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not really certain what the answers are to any of those questions, another reason (besides your "STOP!" demands :-) that I backed away rapidly from moving any more horse articles around. But it's something that is going to have to be looked into. I agree that the Landrace article here is poor. For one thing, it needs to split Natural breed out into its own article (a natural breed is a selectively-bred formal breed the purpose of which is to refine and "lock-in" the most definitive qualities of a local landrace). This in turn isn't actually the same thing as a traditional breed, though the concepts are related. Basically, three breeding concepts are squished into one article. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖ⊝כ⊙þ Contrib. 00:52, 7 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Side comment: I tend to support one good overview article over three poor content forks, just thinking aloud... Montanabw(talk) 23:01, 7 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Sure; the point is that the concepts have to be separately, clearly treated, because they are not synonymous at all. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖ⊝כ⊙þ Contrib. 02:07, 8 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Given that the article isn't well-sourced yet, I think that you might want to add something about that to landrace now, just to give whomever does article improvement on it later (maybe you, I think this is up your alley!) has the "ping" to do so. Montanabw(talk) 21:55, 8 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Aye, it's on my to-do list. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖ⊝כ⊙þ Contrib. 22:25, 8 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Although I have been an evolutionary biologist for decades, I only noticed the term "landrace" within the past year or two (in reference to corn), because I work with wildland plants. But I immediately knew what it was, from context. I'm much less certain about breeds, beyond that I am emphatic that they are human constructs. Montanabw and I have discussed my horse off-wiki, and from what I can tell, breeders are selecting for specific attributes (many people claim to have seen a horse "just like him"), but afaik there is no breed "Idaho stock horse". Artificially-selected lineages can exist without anyone calling them "breeds"; I'm not sure they would even be "natural breeds", and such things are common even within established breeds (Montanabw could probably explain to us the difference between Polish and Egyptian Arabians).
The good thing about breeds wrt Wikipedia is that we can use WP:RS and WP:NOTABLE to decide what to cover. Landraces are a different issue: if no one has ever called a specific, distinctive, isolated mustang herd a landrace, is it OR for Wikipedia to do so?--Curtis Clark (talk) 16:21, 7 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I have been reluctant to use landrace much out of a concern that the concept is a bit OR, as I hadn't heard of it before wikipedia either (but I'm more a historian than an evolutionary biologist, so what do I know?): Curtis, any idea where this did come from? It's a useful concept, but I am kind of wondering where the lines are between selective breeding and a "natural" breed -- of anything. And speaking of isolated Mustang herds, we have things like Kiger Mustang, which is kind of interesting. I think that at least some of SMc's passion comes from the nuttiness seen in a lot of the dog and cat breeders these days, am I right? I mean, Chiweenies? Montanabw(talk) 23:01, 7 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The first use of the word that I saw referred to different landraces of corn growing in different elevations and exposures in indigenous Maya areas of modern Mexico. I haven't tracked down the references for the use of the word, but the concept seems extremely useful. My sense is that landraces form as much through natural selective processes of cultivation or captivity as through human selection, so that if the "garbage wolf" hypothesis for dog domestication is true, garbage wolves would have been a landrace (or more likely several, in different areas). One could even push the definition and say that MRSA is a landrace. But I don't have enough knowledge of the reliable sources to know how all this would fit into Wikipedia.--Curtis Clark (talk) 01:01, 8 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Landraces form, primarily and quickly, through mostly natural selection, long after domestication. E.g. the St Johns water dog and Maine Coon cat are both North American landraces that postdate European arrival on the continent. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖ⊝כ⊙þ Contrib. 20:16, 9 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I see some potential for some great research on this and a real improvement to the articles in question. Montanabw(talk) 21:55, 8 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Yep. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖ⊝כ⊙þ Contrib. 20:16, 9 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Redundant sentence?

Unresolved
 – Work to integrate WP:NCFLORA and WP:NCFAUNA stuff into MOS:ORGANISMS not completed yet?
Extended content

The sentence at MOS:LIFE "General names for groups or types of organisms are not capitalized except where they contain a proper name (oak, Bryde's whales, rove beetle, Van cat)" is a bit odd, since the capitalization would (now) be exactly the same if they were the names of individual species. Can it simply be removed?

There is an issue, covered at Wikipedia:PLANTS#The use of botanical names as common names for plants, which may or may not be worth putting in the main MOS, namely cases where the same word is used as the scientific genus name and as the English name, when it should be de-capitalized. I think this is rare for animals, but more common for plants and fungi (although I have seen "tyrannosauruses" and similar uses of dinosaur names). Peter coxhead (talk) 09:17, 3 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

  1. I would leave it a alone for now; let people get used to the changes. I think it's reasonable to include the "general names" thing, because it's a catch-all that includes several different kinds of examples, that various largely different groups of people are apt to capitalize. Various know-nothings want to capitalize things like "the Cats", the "Great Apes", etc., because they think "it's a Bigger Group and I like to Capitalize Big Important Stuff". There are millions more people who just like to capitalize nouns and stuff. "Orange's, $1 a Pound". Next we have people who insist on capitalizing general "types" and landraces of domestic animals ("Mountain Dogs", "Van Cat") because they're used to formal breed names being capitalized (whether to do that with breeds here is an open question, but it should not be done with types/classes of domestics, nor with landraces. Maybe the examples can be sculpted better: "the roses", "herpesviruses", "great apes", "Bryde's whale", "mountain dogs", "Van cat", "passerine birds". I'm not sure that "rove beetle" and "oak" are good examples of anything. Anyway, it's more that the species no-capitalization is a special case of the more general rule, not that the general rule is a redundant or vague version of the former. If they're merged, it should keep the general examples, and maybe specifically spell out and illustrate that it also means species and subspecies, landraces and domestic "types", as well as larger and more general groupings.
  2. I had noticed that point and was going to add it, along with some other points from both NCFLORA and NCFAUNA, soon to MOS:ORGANISMS, which I feel is nearing "go live" completion. Does that issue come up often enough to make it a MOS mainpage point? I wouldn't really object to it, and it could be had by adding an "(even if it coincides with a capitalized Genus name)" parenthetical to the "general names" bit. The pattern is just common enough in animals to have been problematic if it were liable to be problematic, as it were. I.e., I don't see a history of squabbling about it at Lynx or its talk page, and remember looking into this earlier with some other mammal, about two weeks ago, and not seeing evidence of confusion or editwarring. The WP:BIRDS people were actually studiously avoiding that problem; I remember seeing a talk page discussion at the project that agreed that such usage shouldn't be capitalized ever. PS: With Lynx, I had to go back to 2006, in the thick of the "Mad Capitalization Epidemic" to find capitalization there[8], and it wasn't even consistent, just in the lead.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  11:11, 3 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  1. Well, certainly "rove beetle" and "oak" are poor examples here, so I would support changing to some of the others you suggested above.
  2. I think the main problem we found with plants was it being unclear as to whether inexperienced editors meant the scientific name or the English name. So you would see a sentence with e.g. "Canna" in the middle and not know whether this should be corrected to "Canna" or to "canna". The plural is clear; "cannas" is always lower-case non-italicized. The singular is potentially ambiguous. Whether it's worth putting this point in the main MOS I just don't know since I don't much edit animal articles and never breed articles, which is why I asked you. Peter coxhead (talk) 21:55, 3 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  1. Will take a look at that later, if someone else doesn't beat me to it.
  2. Beats me. Doesn't seem too frequent an issue, but lot of MOS stuff isn't. Definitely should be in MOS:ORGANISMS, regardless.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  00:46, 4 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Worked on both of those a bit at MOS. We'll see if it sticks.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  01:18, 5 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Note to self

Unresolved
Extended content

Finish patching up WP:WikiProject English language with the stuff from User:SMcCandlish/WikiProject English Language, and otherwise get the ball rolling.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  20:22, 17 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Re: Diacritics

Unresolved
 – An anti-diacritics pseudo-guideline is a problem and needs an RfC.
Extended content

Greetings. I was referring to conventions like "All North American hockey pages should have player names without diacritics.". Cédric HATES TPP. 23:26, 24 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Cedric tsan cantonais: Wow, thanks for drawing that to my attention. Don't know how that one slipped past the radar. That is actually a bogus WP:LOCALCONSENSUS "guideline" and needs to be fixed! My point still stands, though, that "any" covers both this any any new proposal someone might come up with. :-) Anyway, I'm not sure how to deal with the "screw the MoS, we're going to ban diacritics in hockey" crap, other than probably an RfC hosted at WP:VPPOL.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  23:30, 24 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]
For your information, I'm using "any and all" on the template so both our grounds can be covered. Cédric HATES TPP. 05:05, 25 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Fortunately, the universe did not implode.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  18:30, 26 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Excellent mini-tutorial

Unresolved
Extended content

Somehow, I forget quite how, I came across this - that is an excellent summary of the distinctions. I often get confused over those, and your examples were very clear. Is something like that in the general MoS/citation documentation? Oh, and while I am here, what is the best way to format a citation to a page of a document where the pages are not numbered? All the guidance I have found says not to invent your own numbering by counting the pages (which makes sense), but I am wondering if I can use the 'numbering' used by the digitised form of the book. I'll point you to an example of what I mean: the 'book' in question is catalogued here (note that is volume 2) and the digitised version is accessed through a viewer, with an example of a 'page' being here, which the viewer calls page 116, but there are no numbers on the actual book pages (to confuse things further, if you switch between single-page and double-page view, funny things happen to the URLs, and if you create and click on a single-page URL the viewer seems to relocate you one page back for some reason). Carcharoth (talk) 19:10, 12 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Carcharoth: Thanks. I need to copy that into an essay page. As far as I know, the concepts are not clearly covered in any of those places, nor clearly enough even at Help:CS1 (which is dense and overlong as it is). The e-book matters bear some researching. I'm very curious whether particular formats (Nook, etc.) paginate consistently between viewers. For Web-accessible ones, I would think that the page numbering that appears in the Web app is good enough if it's consistent (e.g., between a PC and a smart phone) when the reader clicks the URL in the citation. I suppose one could also use |at= to provide details if the "page" has to be explained in some way. I try to rely on better-than-page-number locations when possible, e.g. specific entries in dictionaries and other works with multiple entries per page (numbered sections in manuals, etc.), but for some e-books this isn't possible – some are just continuous texts. One could probably use something like |at=in the paragraph beginning "The supersegemental chalcolithic metastasis is ..." about 40% into the document, in a pinch. I guess we do need to figure this stuff out since such sources are increasingly common.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  20:29, 13 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Yes (about figuring out how to reference e-books), though I suspect existing (non-WP) citation styles have addressed this already (no need to re-invent the wheel). This is a slightly different case, though. It is a digitisation of an existing (physical) book that has no page numbers. If I had the book in front of me (actually, it was only published as a single copy, so it is not a 'publication' in that traditional sense of many copies being produced), the problem with page numbers would still exist. I wonder if the 'digital viewer' should be thought of as a 'via' thingy? In the same way that (technically) Google Books and archive.org digital copies of old books are just re-transmitting, and re-distributing the material (is wikisource also a 'via' sort of thing?). Carcharoth (talk) 23:13, 13 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@Carcharoth: Ah, I see. I guess I would treat it as a |via=, and same with WikiSource, which in this respect is essentially like Google Books or Project Gutenberg. I think your conundrum has come up various times with arXiv papers, that have not been paginated visibly except in later publication (behind a journal paywall and not examined). Back to the broader matter: Some want to treat WikiSource and even Gutenberg as republishers, but I think that's giving them undue editorial credit and splitting too fine a hair. Was thinking on the general unpaginated and mis-paginated e-sources matter while on the train, and came to the conclusion that for a short, unpaginated work with no subsections, one might give something like |at=in paragraph 23, and for a much longer one use the |at=in the paragraph beginning "..." trick. A straight up |pages=82–83 would work for an e-book with hard-coded meta-data pagination that is consistent between apps/platforms and no visual pagination. On the other hand, use the visual pagination in an e-book that has it, even if it doesn't match the e-book format's digital pagination, since the pagination in the visual content would match that of a paper copy; one might include a note that the pagination is that visible in the content if it conflicts with what the e-book reader says (this comes up a lot with PDFs, for one thing - I have many that include cover scans, and the PDF viewers treat that as p. 1, then other front matter as p. 2, etc., with the content's p. 1 being something like PDF p. 7).  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  08:07, 14 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]



Current threads

The Sustainability Initiative

The Sustainability Initiative

Hello SMcCandlish: An invitation for you to check out the Sustainability Initiative, which aims to reduce the environmental impact of the Wikimedia projects. If you're interested, please consider adding your name to the list of supporters, which serves to express and denote the community's support of the initiative. Thanks for your consideration! North America1000 09:40, 5 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Will take a look at it. I hope this will address the problem of WMF's server farm being powered by coal engines and child labor.  ;-)

DYK for William Hoskins (inventor)

On 12 February 2019, Did you know was updated with a fact from the article William Hoskins (inventor), which you recently created, substantially expanded, or brought to good article status. The fact was ... that William Hoskins, the co-inventor of modern billiard chalk, also invented the electric heating coil, used to create the first electric toasters? The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/William Hoskins (inventor). You are welcome to check how many page hits the article got while on the front page (here's how, William Hoskins (inventor)), and it may be added to the statistics page if the total is over 5,000. Finally, if you know of an interesting fact from another recently created article, then please feel free to suggest it on the Did you know talk page.

– Amakuru (talk) 00:02, 12 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
My first DYK in something like a decade. And I got someone else to actually do the DYK process-y stuff. I am now becoming a WikiMiddleManager, and expect my hair to recede and my shape to get flabby any moment now.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  20:07, 18 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I'm just glad I didn't make an absolute hash of it! Glad you can't get fired from wikipedia. Lee Vilenski (talk • contribs) 14:07, 19 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Nah, good stuff! I'm so happy you took that page "live" at all. I feared I would sit on it until I was 90. I'm not sure why I couldn't quite find the motivation to polish and post it. I think I was always hoping for more "earth-shaking" sources to show up about what an impact his work has had on the modern world (and the page doesn't do that justice yet, but we don't have the secondary sources for it, so far). PS: I saw you had a couple more pool-io DYKs in the pipes. I tried an "Alt. 2" on one of them (Mosconi cup guy) after someone proposed editing it into bland paste.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  16:36, 19 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
It's nice to see you back! My philosophy is that the article will always get more chance of being expanded in mainspace. The sourcing isn't fantastic, but I doubt something will just appear.
Yeah, I went quite crazy last month on pool articles, including a few dyks. Thanks for clearing up John. It's obviously very weird to have someone represent both sides in the Mosconi Cup, and he won it so many times as coach!
I did quite a bit of work on the Euro Tour, and discussed getting some images released with someone from the tour, but that appears to be a dead end, sadly; which is a little frustrating, as there are so few images for pool bios and tournaments.
Let me know if you have anything else you could do with being released. I did look at your draft of Ground Billiards, but I struggled a bit, and I've been working on getting some snooker articles up to GA. Lee Vilenski (talk • contribs) 20:29, 19 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

SMcCandlish,

Hey, in case you are interested, here is the updated task list I've been going by, in case you have any comments or suggestions:

To-do list:
  • Continue encouraging creation of new portals
  • Assist Dreamy Jazz in further developing the link placer bot to deorphanize new portals
  • Convert old portals to new design, except those on the "maintained" list
  • Encourage participants to post wishes for new features at WT:WPPORTD
  • Fix portals in the "In need of immediate attention" category
  • Report buggy portals in that cat, and at WT:WPPORTD
  • Work on general portal tool (script)
  • Refine search parameters in new portals (so that DYK and ITN items show up)
  • Place panoramas at the top of portals
  • Add Recognized content sections to portals (that have a corresponding WikiProject)
  • Brainstorm and develop new portal components
  • Clean up (speedy delete) obsolete portal subpages
  • Figure out a way to automate these features:
    • Anniversary/On-this-day section
    • Quotes section
    • Gathering and placement of panoramas
    • Biography section
    • Other topic sections
  • Revise/update the Portal support pages, including the Portals guideline
  • Develop a navigation footer builder script (navigation footers can be used to power portals)
  • Develop an outline builder script (outlines can also be used to power portals)
  • Keep portals notice section of the Community Bulletin Board up to date
  • Send out updates as news becomes available
  • Refine/expand the portal category system
  • Reduce portal load time (by making the lua modules more efficient)
  • Develop and test applications of existing portal components at User:The Transhumanist

Let me know if anything is missing.

Thank you.    — The Transhumanist   14:05, 28 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@The Transhumanist: That's a long list with a lot of competing priorities. I would think for the short term that "Assist Dreamy Jazz in further developing the link placer bot to deorphanize new portals" (if it's not already completed) is very high, since orphaned portals are a) individual targets for deletion, and b) collectively an incentive for portal skeptics to seek mass deletion or even to attack the new portal system in general.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  17:52, 14 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Dear SmcCandlish,
Dreamy Jazz Bot has been approved, is up and running, and is deorphanizing portals daily. It places 2 link types leading to portals: one on the corresponding root article page, and one on the corresponding category page. See its contributions – it has been busy. Based on that page, around 400 portals have been processed so far with incoming links.
Thank you for your concern.
By the way, I've spelled out the current strategy in the latest issue of the newsletter, including the next stage in the evolution of portals. Active discussions on that are taking place at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Quantum portals.
Enjoy,    — The Transhumanist   06:28, 15 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I've taken a closer look at the bot's ops. "Task 2" is the process that places links to portals. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Dreamy_Jazz_Bot/Task_2

Apparently, it is processing new portals daily, so newly created portals are getting deorphanized soon after they are created. This means we are not adding to the orphan problem by creating more portals. Dreamy Jazz has certainly gone beyond the call of duty by producing this amazing feature.

During its monthly passes the bot checks all portals for incoming links. And since only about 400 out of the 4700 single-page portals have been processed by the bot, it doesn't look like it has done a monthly pass yet.

I've posted a message to Dreamy Jazz's talk page, congratulating him on a job well done, and to ask about the monthly. It looks like the orphan portal problem will soon be behind us.    — The Transhumanist   20:53, 15 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]


Update: Concerning the disparity between the total single-page portals and the number the bot has added links for, Dreamy Jazz is working on it.    — The Transhumanist   23:34, 15 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Follow-up discussion on portal specificity, merging

@The Transhumanist and Dreamy Jazz: I'm glad this aspect of the process is well in-hand. I still think there will still be issues with unnecessary/redundant portals, e.g. some of the food ones. There was a thread about this back in October or November, I think, mostly focused on food portals, but just using them as an example. The issue in a nutshell is that we have no need of Portal:Bacon, Portal:Ham, etc., when a single Portal:Pork will do and will actually be more useful. I do note that we have a merged Portal:Pasta and not a bunch of Portal:Spaghetti, Portal:Rigatoni, etc., so this is improving. There are some obvious issues though, like Portal:Capsicum and Portal:Chili peppers which are the exact same topic (the portal should be at the more common name, even if the botany wikiproject has gotten its wish and convinced people to allow scientific names in plant article titles).

In some cases, topical overlap may be desirable; Portal:Fruits isn't entirely redundant with Portal:Apples, Portal:Grapes, etc., because such plants come in a bewildering array of cultivars, have different domestication histories, etc., etc.; there's enough "meat" to support a sub-topical portal. Similarly, Portal:Poultry and Portal:Chicken aren't a problem; they're different "classes" of portals, as it were. But separate portals for different cuts of meat from the same animal is probably an issue. (In anglophone countries alone, there are over 50 named cuts of pork, and if you count up all the kinds of processed pork – prosciutto, back bacon, soppressata, pepperoni, etc. – there are hundreds at least, a large subset of which would be covered at Portal:Sausages, which is discrete enough a topic to be a portal.)

We also need redirects that prevent the creation of more obviously redundant portals; Portal:Cucurbita isn't at a name many readers will use, but Portal:Squashes, Portal:Pumpkins, Portal:Zucchini should redirect there both so people find the portal and so they don't make redundant ones. (Yes, in theory, it might be possible to make non-redundant portals on the pumpkins and zukes, as major human-use plants with many cultivars, if someone wants to put in the manual work to make such portals "not suck"; but auto-generated ones are going to be redundant with the Cucurbita portal.) "Squash" is just a general classification, essentially synonymous with the genus Cucurbita (though Portal:Squash should probably be about the sport).
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  20:41, 17 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, there may be an issue of perspective here -- that is, from where the portals are being viewed. It seems like you may be viewing from the top down. Viewed from an article, the question becomes "Will this page benefit from having a link to a like-named portal?" If the answer is "yes", then we build the portal. So, from the bacon article, if the user wants elaboration, he clicks on the Portal:Bacon link, and that is what he gets: more coverage on bacon. Pork would be somewhat off-topic, and would include ham, which is not what he is currently reading about.
Bacon ice cream, anyone?    — The Transhumanist   21:07, 17 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Pork would not be off-topic if it includes bacon. I'm not trying to "lay down the law" here, I just have been doing categorization, merging, MFD, and other processes long enough to have what I think is a good sense of tolerable and intolerable levels of redundancy, over-precision, etc., and I've been paying attention to the rationales of people who have issues with the current "portals 2.0" rollout. It's not that I want to remake the new portal system in my own image (or I'd've been much more involved in developing it), I just want to prevent it being unmade (or a bunch of interminable drama seeking to unmake it) all because it's gone 5% too far in a particular direction. Another way to think of it: I'm not demanding an outcome but predicting one.
PS: I have actually had bacon ice cream, back in the days of that bacon-everything fad, around 2008 or so. I wouldn't recommend it. For weird ice cream, garlic was better, as was hot red-chile chocolate.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  21:33, 17 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I didn't write that it would be off-topic, but that it would be somewhat off-topic, that is, partially off-topic. In other words not a close match. After all, pork is not the subject, but the parent subject of bacon, and includes the entire animal from its nose to its tail. If you crave bacon, you probably aren't interested in pigs feet. So, if you go to the library to read about Germany, you probably won't be that happy if the librarian hands you a book on Europe, or Countries of the World. There's a whole section on the shelf specifically about Germany, and that's where a good librarian will direct you. When you want something specific, more general just won't do. From the viewpoint of focused study, more general isn't. We're talking navigation aids here. All of the navigation systems are analogous to each other. So, if you were studying bacon, you would go to Category:Bacon. It would be much harder to learn about bacon on the Category:Pork page. Here's an experiment for you. Let's say you want to read about penguins. Let me know which portal 1) you learn more about them on and 2) find material more easily about them: Portal:Birds or Portal:Penguins. Which one is someone looking for material on penguins more likely to want to read?    — The Transhumanist   23:53, 17 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
You mentioned you have been paying attention to the rationales of people who have issues with the current "portals 2.0" rollout. I'm very interested in all types of feedback. Could you provide links to those please?    — The Transhumanist   00:20, 18 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Upon rereading your post carefully, I've come to the conclusion that we are on the same wavelength. You stated, "In some cases, topical overlap may be desirable", which boils down to "on a case-by-case basis", which I totally agree with. If the subject has enough distinct coverage to warrant a portal, then build it. (And I'd still like to see the links to the 2.0 issues you mentioned above.)    — The Transhumanist   02:57, 18 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah; my earlier material is pretty clear that birds and penguins would be separate portals (but not every bird species is going to have a portal). And maybe bacon, due to the annoying bacon fad of the 2000s, is actually portal-worthy. But the 50+ other cuts of pork probably are not, nor are the 500-ish kinds of prepared/processed pork. It's going to end up being a lot like categorization and navboxes.

The community just organically develops and enforces criteria (very mergist criteria) for such things, especially if they generate pages to maintain. The criteria are very similar, except where they actually need to diverge, for differences between the purpose/functionality of different kinds of nav; some rationales for having (or eliminating) a category are different from those for a navbox, and the same will be true of portals. But the reasoning applied in arriving at and applying such criteria is remarkably consistent. This isn't accidental; regulars at CfD, MfD, RfD, and talk page discussions about navigation (of which portals are a form) take pains to be aware of all this stuff and to not produce conflicting guidelines and decisions. I'll reaffirm that I'm not trying to come off as a "topic-snob" portal deletionist. I'm just firmly predicting a wave of mergers and outlining some of the "meta-notability" and over-specificity reasons the merging will happen, based on what we already do and have been doing since the 2000s [since bacon "became a thing" – a coincidence or a conspiracy?]
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  20:03, 18 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

PS, re "I didn't write that it would be off-topic" – I wasn't trying to straw man you; rather, I meant (as you did) that relevance is relative; then, for my part, I was suggesting that pork is relevant enough for most pork-related topics, in the same way that Category:Pork doesn't have a gazillion subcats (notably, the only mostly-pork-specific food item that does have one is bacon, so maybe it really is an exception to the general rule). Category:Sausages has substantial overlap, but is a different kind of topic, and thus Portal:Sausages is also viable for the same reason.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  20:17, 18 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Notification

Hello SMcCandlish, I hope you are, and have been well. I mentioned you in this discussion but my alerts notification did not show that mention as having been sent? I am curious, since this marks the first time it has ever happened to me: have you set your preferences in some way that blocks others from sending you an alert that your name has been mentioned? If not, I'll pursue a technical answer, if so, a technical solution. Thank you.--John Cline (talk) 11:01, 16 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@John Cline: I've not done anything to block pings. Pings are rather "brittle". If there's a typo in the ping template, or you don't put the ping and a new sig in the same save it won't work. E.g., if you forgot to ping or didn't ping right the first time, you can't just go back and add the ping, you need to self-revert the original post, then re-add it with the [fixed] ping and a new sig. Or, if people have already replied, then add a new post-script with a ping template and sig.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  18:03, 17 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
PS: It also doesn't work to add the ping and a new sig to an existing post.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  18:38, 17 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you SMcCandlish, your reply is filled with good information (some of which I knew, and some I've learned thereby) and the post script seemed, most plausibly, to explain. It seems, however, that something else has occurred when considered in concert with the following, previously unmentioned, nuance: a second ping, within the same posting, was delivered as yours, inexplicably, should also have been? If you are befuddled by this, as I remain, I'll next seek that technical explanation of earlier mention. Thank you again.--John Cline (talk) 20:26, 17 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I'm at a loss to 'splain that one. I have long considered that the ping system isn't just a bit mis-featured, but actually has some outright bugs in it.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  20:30, 17 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Here's one that has me stumped

Here it is:

Vernal is to spring, as
Autumnal is to fall, as
________ is to summer, as
________ is to winter.

What goes in the blanks?

All I can come up with is "Summer" and "Winter", respectively. Are there corresponding adjectives besides these?    — The Transhumanist   03:04, 18 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Not common, but the Latinate names are estival (summer) and hibernal (winter). --Izno (talk) 03:27, 18 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
British-wise it's aestival, and you can be extra fancy-pants with æstival.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:45, 18 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Fame (no fortune)

Hello. Finally I got my chance to help get your essay up and running for the next issue of the Signpost. I edited it slightly so if you see something you don't like it, feel free to edit anything you want.

Best Regards, Barbara ✐✉ 14:12, 18 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@Barbara (WVS): Oh, ha ha, I'd almost forgotten about that one. I don't mind it being edited a bit, but there should be a link somewhere to the "canonical" version, e.g.: "This essay is available as a template that will use your username and other customization options.", or even just "The original version of this essay is at User:SMcCandlish/It.". PS: I'm seeing broken wikimarkup at both top and bottom of that Next_issue page.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:41, 18 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
That sounds like something I don't know how to do. I'll let you when I'm done and then could you do what want me to do? Best Regards, Barbara ✐✉ 21:30, 18 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Actually, I think the code gibberish I'm seeing toward the top of the piece is an intentionally commented-out Signpost template, and at the bottom it's a truncation of template-related material from my original (which I would just replace with an explicit cross-reference like I suggested; I can just go add one).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  21:53, 18 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I am going to snoop around all your subpages-for entertainment tonight. Best Regards, Barbara ✐✉ 21:39, 18 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@Barbara (WVS): Don't take everything seriously! There's some very goofy ancient stuff in there that I keep just to laugh at myself, like this silliness from 2007. Most of my actual essay material is catalogued at User:SMcCandlish/Essays. Some of it's been influential, like WP:SSF (which needs to be compressed to about 1/3 its present size), and some of it's been completely ignored, like WP:Consensus venue (though it probably isn't actually wrong). There's some pretty new stuff in there, like WP:Don't teach the controversy and WP:Reducing consensus to an algorithm. Of them all, I think the serious one that needs more attention than it gets is WP:Race and ethnicity, because the average person's (goes double for the average American's) pseudoscientific "understanding" in this area is intimately bound up with a lot of perpetual WP:BIAS, WP:POV, and WP:DRAMA issues.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  21:53, 18 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
After all the negative comments I have experienced late last year I will have to take your word on that. My 'job' is to find funny stuff we can all laugh at. I have been banned, scolded and threatened with a review from Arbcom. Quite the let down, needless to say. If you find something in your rounds that is funny, let me know. I would like to try creating an essay but the humour article is similar in function. Thanks for your honest and transparent comments. Best Regards, Barbara ✐✉ 22:42, 18 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
"Been there, done that". I ended up taking an entire-year wikibreak once, and have had several long but not that long ones since then. As for humor stuff, much of what I do in essay-subspace is in that vein, at least in part. There's a lot of other good material out there; I don't mean to blow my own horn. It's even a bit easier to find these days; I did a lot of work re-organizing and properly tagging in the Category:Wikipedia essays tree.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:53, 18 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Well, as I was somewhat expecting, the essay was twisted by various busybodies into "meaning" what it doesn't mean at all. I'll say here what I said at MfD: Feel free to delete the Signpost thing. It wasn't intended for that venue, but someone who edits it wanted to include it [see above]. I had my misgivings, predicting that various of the too-easily-offended would willfully misinterpret it, which is exactly what's happened. It wasn't transphobic in the faintest. A number of ranty editors utterly missed the point. It's about Wikipedia editors engaging in language-change activism trying to push non-mainstream stylistic strangeness, including a) fake pronouns like zie and hirm, b) unusual trademark stylizations, and c) excessive honorifics. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the off-site usage or the values of those who engage in it. It's about and only about encyclopedic usage. If you want to go change WP:MOS to say "It's okay to exactly mimic the appearance of logos, to write of Jesus and Mohammad with "Our Lord" and "Peace Be Upon Him" before and after (respectively) their names, to inject made-up pronoun shenanigans like ze and xir into our articles", well, good luck with that. Never going to happen.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  17:55, 28 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

In this sentence...

Nine days after far-right advocate Jeremy Joseph Christian allegedly stabbed three men on the Portland TriMet transit system, Gibson hosted a rally on April 2, 2017, which was met by thousands of counter-protesters.

the phrase "Gibson hosted a rally on April 2, 2017" is not in any way, shape, or form parenthetical. A parenthetical phrase is conceptually an aside, this is not, it's the absolute core of the sentence, You and Curly Turkey are dead wrong, but I'm tired of this shit, so...

Beyond My Ken (talk) 06:37, 19 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Beyond My Ken: You're misunderstanding: ", 2017," is structurally parenthetical in the same way that ", Jr.," is in "Sammy Davis, Jr., died in 1990". You're not getting the meaning of "parenthetical" here (it's about the orthographic layout and the function of the punctuation, not about the priority of the semantic content; different meanings of "parenthetical" or "parenthesizing" or "bracketing"), and you mistook the term for being applied to the entire "Gibson hosted a rally on April 2, 2017" clause, which isn't any kind of sensible interpretation.
Look, I don't have time for he-said-she-said semantics rehashing, nor for re-re-re-arguing the original issue with you. Just go read any general-English style guide from a major publisher, like Chicago Manual of Style or New Hart's Rules AKA Oxford Guide to Style AKA Oxford Style Manual. Direct quote (reformatted to suit this medium) from CMoS (16th ed., sect. 6.17, "Commas in pairs"), since I have that handy in digital form:
  • 'Whenever a comma is used to set off an element (such as “1928” or “Minnesota” in the first two examples below), a second comma is required if the phrase or sentence continues beyond the element being set off. This principle applies to many of the uses for commas described in this section [No, I'm not pasting in the entire section]. An exception is made for commas within the title of a work (third example): June 5, 1928, lives on in the memories of only a handful of us.; Sledding in Duluth, Minnesota, is facilitated by that city’s hills and frigid winters.; but Look Homeward, Angel was not the working title of the manuscript.'
That's just from the segment specifically about the "micro-issue" of commas an American-style dates and in multi-element geographical names (I'm almost willing to bet cash you wrongly try to delete those commas, too). The chapter goes into the entire class of these constructions in more detail (the "many of the uses for commas described in this section" that I didn't over-quote), including apposition phrases, titles appended after names, etc. WP really doesn't care that some news publishers have their own house styles that drop a lot of punctuation, including various commas (presumably where you got the idea from); WP is not written in news style as a matter of policy.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  08:56, 19 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
You might have noticed BMK is now blocked for editwarring at Joey Gibson (political activist)‎‎. That's not over this issue, which was not reported, but over a separate editwar with another editor at the same article, which was reported to WP:ANEW. Just so you don't end up thinking you're somehow "involved" in his block. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 12:20, 19 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Good, on several levels. Someone editwarring multiple ways all at once needs to have a "time out", heh. But more importantly, I don't like it when MoS stuff rises to "dramaboard" levels. I never go that route over MoS stuff myself unless the personage in question is being grossly disruptive over a long period of time. It perpetuates the false notion that MoS is some kind of hotbed of drama. (It hasn't been one in a long time, because the problem editors who were making it one way back when, mostly 2008–2014, have all left, either because they got tired of trolling, or because they got indeffed for other reasons.) MoS obviously is a continual source of debate, but it's generally sane and civil.

Anyway, this was part of why I posted something about WT:MOS not being a dramaboard, and people having to make a case at a venue like ANI. They would actually have to marshal a buttload of diffed evidence to prove an intractable problem, and no one's likely to do that over a minor incident of comma peccadillo-mongering, especially when CMoS citations and the like will probably just put the matter to bed. Besides, it's more productive to just disprove a claim than to have "the Man" muzzle the claimant. >;-) Even the two RM regulars I was kinda-sorta thinking should be T-banned from MoS stuff have notably chilled out over the last 6 months because their arguments just keep failing. It would have been nice to not have had to spend 2+ years deflating their constantly recycled (WP:IDHT) arguments, but in the end it's better to have the editors around since they're otherwise productive.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  12:58, 19 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Whoops—sorry, I made a mistake. BMK was indeed involved in another dispute at Joey Gibson (political activist)‎‎, but the block was for editwarring at Ben Shapiro. Hard to keep them all straight ...
If I wanted sanctions against BMK, I would've reported him to WP:ANEW. He uses IAR as justification with such frequency and forcefulness that I wanted to be sure whether it was legit. I would never consider taking it to ANI. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 21:43, 19 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

6:00 am inspiration

I think it might be a good idea for those who watch the various MOS pages and are active on their talkpages to stop answering general style questions and instead refer them to the language refdesk. My reasoning is that a lot of the negativity directed towards the MOS and its "regulars" comes from seeing the talkpage of a style guideline being used for answering style questions that are not covered by said guideline. This gives the answers the appearance of consensus-based legitimacy and any critisism of that is, I think, totally valid. The talkpages should be for improvement-based suggestions and clarification of existing guidance. No?

I'm sending this to several people so please respond on my talkpage. Thanks. Primergrey (talk) 14:35, 19 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Primergrey: In theory. But I think it'll be kind of like cold fusion. :-) There's so much to cover, I put it in an essay page, User:SMcCandlish/Why MoS talk pages have so much churn, since I find myself saying several of these things in more than one place over time. In short, I sympathize with the idea, but it's not likely to be practical, and the motivation for it's a little off, because critics of MoS's talk page being used for questionably-on-topic discussion are generally not the same people who are critics of MoS existing, of MoS saying what it says, or of MoS's frequent editors as individuals; the talk criticism is a severable one, and more often made by its regulars, not against them. The main problem with the "do it differently, or less" idea is that we generally can't tell why a question is being asked unless the asker is very explicit about it. It's easier and quicker to just answer and move on than to try to explore someone's rationale for asking. (Also, RDL may be doomed.)
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  16:28, 19 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I'm only talking about that which is not covered. The only appropriate context to discuss these is in a proposal for their inclusion. No? Primergrey (talk) 22:41, 19 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
It's a forgiveness vs. permission matter. People won't !vote for "include off-topic discussions here". They're just tolerant of it happening from time to time. Maybe we should be less so, and quicker to refer someone elsewhere.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:09, 20 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Please comment on Talk:Aurora, Illinois shooting

 Done

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:Aurora, Illinois shooting. Legobot (talk) 04:23, 21 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Trick shots (WalkinAlmanac)

Hey Thanks for contacting me back. The main information source for billiards is the WPA.ORG. The WPA (World Pool Association) is to pool like the NFL is to football. This source is the governing body of Professional billiards. Artistic Pool (trick shots) ,8 & 9 ball are each separate divisions. The WPA-APD is World Pool Association Artistic Pool Division, WPA-APD.ORG. There is other sources like A to Z etc..

I would like very much to work on a undated piece on billiards. However I need a few days to learn how to navigate the site. I will not try to publish or post any without you seeing it first. ~Cary WalkinAlmanac 05:23, 22 February 2019 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by WalkinAlmanac (talk • contribs)

That's a very good source, too, especially for basic stats. It's a primary source, and we prefer secondary sources for most things (WP:PSTS), but the best source for something like who won a tournament sanctioned by WPA, or what the WPA rules say, is apt to be WPA itself; it's a special kind of case where a primary source is of great value. (By contrast, WPA can't tell us how influential WPA is, or whether a fairness complaint someone made about them is valid, etc.; they have a vested bias in their answer. :-)

Lee Vilenski is apt to be more available to help for the time being. And, yeah, it can take a while to get up-to-speed on all of Wikipedia's ways. Lots of rules and norms, but given that it's the no. 5 most-used Website in the world, and no. 1 as a general information source, one can see why! PS, on formatting stuff here: If you try to indent a paragraph on a wiki talk page by introducing a bunch of leading space, it will actually produce weird results (monospaced font like a code block). Indenting the first line of paragraphs isn't a style we use anyway. Also, the way to sign your posts is with ~~~~, which auto-generates the date and links to your user and talk pages. If you want it to also include "~Cary", you can edit the signature string in Special:MyPage/Preferences.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  05:40, 22 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Just jumping on here WalkinAlmanac - I am more than willing to help you get to grips with editing wikipedia. I did do a little bit of work with the main Trick Shot article, as well as create Jimmy Caras yesterday. I'm actually off next week (I'll be in Sweden), but I can give tips or whatever after that. There's loads of nuance to editing on wikipedia; and it takes a long time (SMcCandlish knows a lot more than I do in regards to this, I've only been editing for 18 months or so), to get used to it. If you want, create WP:Draft articles so you can't get anything wrong. Best Wishes, Lee Vilenski (talk • contribs) 14:14, 22 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

A barnstar for you!

The Civility Barnstar
For being endlessly patient, civil, and understanding in an XfD you opened, and giving everyone thorough, policy-and-guideline–backed responses. Softlavender (talk) 04:10, 23 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]


Your responses, often multiple to individual editors, are an example for us all. Softlavender (talk) 04:10, 23 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I'm trying, but this is a real challenge. It's so politicized, and I frankly agree with the indignant side on the background merits (the author of the page has in fact been hounded). It just doesn't have anything to do with the MfD about that particular page; the problems with it are not confined in any way to that particular dispute between the editor and his hounders (whom ANI seems quite willing to block). Him getting himself blocked with a WP:OUTING incident doesn't help. [sigh]  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  06:06, 23 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Template:Cleanup-Html listed at Redirects for discussion

 Done

An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Template:Cleanup-Html. Since you had some involvement with the Template:Cleanup-Html redirect, you might want to participate in the redirect discussion if you wish to do so. -- Beland (talk) 19:24, 24 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Hello SMcCandlish. I noticed your !vote in this discussion and wanted to share an observation, regarding it, with you.

While I am certain that you acted with no ill intent, the levity used in closing your comment is ill informed and actually perpetuates one of the most common myths associated with Dyslexia that exists. The disorder has nothing to do with juxtaposing letters within words or any similar tendencies as they approach the ultimate myth of mirror writing. It is a cognitive disorder that affects one's ability to process language whereas a dyslexic might be seen writing it as dislexick, they would never be seen writing it as lysdexic.

I say this only because you are so well respected in this community that your word is accepted by observers in numbers untold as the unequivocal truth and this time you have not held yourself to the required standard of such high esteem. Thank you for understanding.--John Cline (talk) 07:26, 26 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I know; I am mildly dyslexic. (Ever noticed my typo rate?) I just like to joke about it, including playing on misunderstandings. (Though it's different for different people, and transpositions are actually common, though more often among adjoining letters and ones with a similar shape – is it coelocanth or ceolocanth?) Lysdexics of the world untie!  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  17:57, 26 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

emdashes at Singular they

 Done

Shouldn't something about "an em dash is conventional" be addressed in the MoS? I "fixed" these because I assumed they were MoS-incompliant, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who would gnome them away. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 23:43, 24 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Curly Turkey: Done, along with some block-quotation notes we've needed for a long time, though it may not "stick" without the usual bureaucracy and drama I mean discussion.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  03:59, 26 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Books & Bytes, Issue 32

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 32, January – February 2019

  • #1Lib1Ref
  • New and expanded partners
  • Wikimedia and Libraries User Group update
  • Global branches update
  • Bytes in brief

French version of Books & Bytes is now available on meta!

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 03:30, 26 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

February 2019

Information icon Welcome to Wikipedia. Although everyone is welcome to contribute constructively to the encyclopedia, articles should not be moved, as you did to Aurora, Illinois shooting, without good reason. They should have a name that is both accurate and intuitive. Wikipedia has some guidelines in place to help with this. Generally, a page should only be moved to a new title if the current name doesn't follow these guidelines. Also, if a page move is being discussed, consensus needs to be reached before anybody moves the page. Take a look at the welcome page to learn more about contributing to this encyclopedia. Thank you.
Information icon Hello. It appears your talk page is becoming quite lengthy and is in need of archiving. According to Wikipedia's user talk page guidelines; "Large talk pages become difficult to read, strain the limits of older browsers, and load slowly over slow internet connections. As a rule of thumb, archive closed discussions when a talk page exceeds 75 KB or has multiple resolved or stale discussions." - this talk page is 100.7 KB. See Help:Archiving a talk page for instructions on how to manually archive your talk page, or to arrange for automatic archiving using a bot. If you have any questions, place a {{help me}} notice on your talk page, or go to the help desk. Thank you. --Jax 0677 (talk) 20:58, 26 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah it's probably due for archiving. But what about WP:DTTR? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 22:08, 26 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Aurora, Illinois, shooting

Hello. Was your recent move a result of closing the RM discussion on the talk page? (I assume you know the RM was happening as you have commented on that talk page several times in recent days.) But you did not close the discussion and you did not cite the discussion in your move summary, which makes me wonder. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 22:07, 26 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

You did not reply to my question. Although the page move has now been reverted I would still like to know if you knew the RM discussion was ongoing when you decided to move the article? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 16:19, 28 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@MSGJ: I had no idea! I was just doing routine MOS/NC cleanup, and didn't think to see if an RM was actually open right that moment. I don't move pages in mid-RM on purpose, of course.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  17:57, 28 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

we thank you

February
The Hidden Valley, Negev
... with thanks from QAI

Thank you for article improvements in February! --Gerda Arendt (talk) 13:23, 28 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

ce

You sure about that? Also, while I'm here, "verh dispassionately". I suspect you meant very. ―Mandruss ☎ 13:41, 28 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Damn, I need coffee. Fixed.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  17:51, 28 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

MfD nomination of Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2019-02-28/Humour

Resolved

Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2019-02-28/Humour, a page which you created or substantially contributed to, has been nominated for deletion. Your opinions on the matter are welcome; you may participate in the discussion by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2019-02-28/Humour and please be sure to sign your comments with four tildes (~~~~). You are free to edit the content of Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2019-02-28/Humour during the discussion but should not remove the miscellany for deletion template from the top of the page; such a removal will not end the deletion discussion. Thank you. Fæ (talk) 15:05, 28 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

MfD nomination of User:SMcCandlish/It

Resolved
 – Commented over there. It should be kept, but I don't care much.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  17:49, 28 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

User:SMcCandlish/It, a page which you created or substantially contributed to, has been nominated for deletion. Your opinions on the matter are welcome; you may participate in the discussion by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/User:SMcCandlish/It and please be sure to sign your comments with four tildes (~~~~). You are free to edit the content of User:SMcCandlish/It during the discussion but should not remove the miscellany for deletion template from the top of the page; such a removal will not end the deletion discussion. Thank you. Jc86035 (talk) 15:55, 28 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Dude ...

that's the way dummies talk to each other, "You look like X" where X is selected from the collection of drivel that dummy A can confidently expect e shares with dummy B. Rarely is there ever a striking resemblance in fact, and usually it means A is trynna hit on B. 98.4.103.187 (talk) 16:14, 28 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

A "dude" impersonator, who bears a striking resemblance to the actual "dude" North America1000 16:22, 28 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I grew up in the '80s in the US Southwest. "Dude" was every other word out of our mouths.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  17:20, 28 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Pronouns

Please bear in mind that "I didn't intend it to be offensive" is not the same as "it wasn't offensive". DS (talk) 18:28, 28 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Nope. Everyone owns their own emotions, and is responsible for their own reading comprehension. If people willfully demand to misread something so they can feel offended and get their day's "outrage" taken care of before breakfast, that's not my problem.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  18:37, 28 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
You can't claim that people weren't hurt. You can only claim that you did not intend to do so. If you don't care about having hurt people, that's okay, but be open and honest about it. DS (talk) 22:11, 28 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@DragonflySixtyseven: I do care (and "offended" isn't "hurt" – let's not be hyperbolic). But it's a difficult issue to address. Attempts to deal with MOS:NEO problems in serious tones have a tendency to turn into WP:DRAMA. It's nearly impossible (as the current debate demonstrates) to keep this separate from general discussion (and ranting) about TG/NB matters. Sometimes there are truly massive and nasty amounts of rancorous debate, like the pile of RfCs running concurrently for something like 3 months at WP:VPPOL a few years ago. People cannot/will not stay focused on a question/issue, and wander all over the place into things like accusations of transphobia and of people trying to prevent referring to transwomen as "she" (who has ever advocated that on WP?), and into debates about "rewriting history" and using confusing constructions ("She fathered her first child in 1979", etc.), none of which relate to zie-style stuff at all. That VPPOL thread-pile directly spawned the failed proposal Wikipedia:Sexual harassment, and the failed proposal Wikipedia talk:Identity-based harassment, and the WP:TALKFORK RfC at Wikipedia talk:Harassment/Archive 5 (or maybe it was the other way around), plus another failed proposal (I forget the page name) that was just unbelievably bad, the author of which openly stated that harassment of women is necessarily worse that harassment of any other minority (I shit you not), and more ugliness on top of all of that, including editwarring at MOS:IDENTITY.

So, I tried humor for a change. That also turned into drama, but it was worth a try. I knew of course that some people would be offended. Some people will always be offended any time any approach of any kind is used to address something about which people have heated opinions. We can't stop discussing and stop trying different essay and proposal and RfC and whatever approaches just because some people will predictably get mad that it's not reflecting their viewpoint or sensibilities.

I'm bummed that people not in that "give me zie or else" micro-camp have also been offended. I should probably have declined the request to turn it into a Signpost piece. I should probably also have made it clearer in the original essay that the issue isn't "he" or "she" or "they" (accepted English usage) in agreement with expressed identity, nor is it mocking the concerns of TG/NB people; the issue is stuff that isn't recognizably English, and which most TG people don't use, and which RS do not use (in their own voices). I didn't develop it further enough to make it very clear that it's also about how closely neo-pronoun fandom mirrors attempts to over-stylize trademarks, to inject religious honorifics (and military ones, and others, like overuse of post-nominals and gentry titles in mid-sentence, etc.), to over-capitalize specialist terms, and various other "style warrior" problems Wikipedia suffers. It all comes down to "Wikipedia will write in my group's style, the One True Way, or we'll never stop fighting."

For the more average editor, would an explanatory intro have mattered? Probably not. Are they mostly reacting to claims that it's transphobic without bothering to check? Sure looks that way. I decline to be held responsible for people choosing not to distinguish between "hate speech against TG/NB people" and "raising an issue observed among some editors, which has something to do with TG/NB people". There's a form of guilt-by-association happening here. "This [attempt at] humor involved TG/NB people somehow, ergo it must necessarily be against them and against the entire left/progressive political wing, ergo you are a transphobe fascist." It's just fallacious. (And so very wide of the mark. And right-wingers can be Wikipedians, too, last I checked, though I am not one.) PS: WP:Never offend anyone, in any way, for any reason isn't a thing here (in or out of mainspace). We'd have to delete all kinds of stuff, starting with MOS:DOCTCAPS and Historicity of Jesus.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:24, 28 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

While I understand your point of view, the piece appears to have been reviewed and published with the conscious knowledge that it would be more offensive than most other humour pieces in the Signpost (the linked edit was after Headbomb's initial post to the newsroom talk page).
I also think that turning the MOS into a humour piece, particularly on this sort of sensitive and thorny topic, probably made it worse than if it had been based on something else. (Also, that it's mostly in the form of a proclamation, among other things. The MOS would, I guess, be allowed to be sort of blunt and unfeeling because of its purpose and its reliance on sources, and turning it into a proclamation completely changes the context. The explicit use of "come out" doesn't help.) Regardless of what the MOS or any other style guide should say, if someone told me in person that they preferred the use of certain pronouns, I wouldn't go looking for usage across reliable secondary sources to ascertain which pronouns to use when referring to them. Jc86035 (talk) 07:41, 1 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@Jc86035: I don't pay much attention to the Signpost and have no idea what its editorial policies and procedures are, nor any control over them. So, "appears to have been reviewed and published with the conscious knowledge that it would be more offensive than most other humour pieces in the Signpost" is something to take up at Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost. I will "take the hit" for allowing an editor of Signpost to use this piece, against my better judgement; I did have a feeling it would be misinterpreted or (more to the point) latched onto by "outrage addicts" as the source of their daily dose.

This is only incidentally related to MoS, and much more about WP:NPOV and WP:NOT, the actual policy authority from which all of MoS's material on tone and encyclopedic appropriateness is derived. If you're just telling me "You should have predicted this backlash for multiple reasons", I do concede on that. The fact that it's about X doesn't erect a magical wall against misinterpretation of it as being about Y, especially given a couple of wording flubs like "trans-" (should have used "post-") and "come out" (should have used something grandiose, given the fictional cult-leader context, like "self-actualized").

Regarding "if someone told me in person that they preferred the use of certain pronouns, I wouldn't go looking for usage across reliable secondary sources to ascertain which pronouns to use when referring to them" – that's fine for your interaction (including on our talk pages), and if such a declaration is self-declared in print then it's good enough for WP:ABOUTSELF purposes, but we do in fact have a duty otherwise, in the encyclopedia content, to do that RS research. See, e.g., Talk:Rose McGowan for an example of why. Random editors making identity claims about third parties are not facts we can report, they're just claims made by random editors. And none of that relates to whether WP should ever use xie in its own voice.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  03:31, 2 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I have spent a lot of time trying to reconcile a notable person's pronoun preferences with a reasonable interpretation of common English usage and the MOS in a specific article. This goes back years. Personally, I have no dog in this fight. I am a happily married white heterosexual male with a wonderful wife, two great sons, and a delightful little granddaughter. I am just a guy who believes in fairness and respect. Your "humor" piece offended me. It offended me deeply. What the hell were you thinking? It strikes me as utterly unfair and disrespectful. You are not mocking the powerful, which is productive when the mockery is actually amusing and edifying. Instead, you are mocking the weakest and most marginalized and most defenseless among us. That is called "punching down" and it is contemptible and vile behavior. Maybe you might want to kick a sleeping homeless person while you are at it. This is repellent. Cullen328 Let's discuss it 08:06, 1 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@Cullen328: This has all been addressed in exhausting detail, above, at Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2019-02-28/Humour, and at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2019-02-28/Humour, and at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/User:SMcCandlish/It, so I'm not going to go over it all again here. Your decision to willfully misinterpret this as an attack on non-binary people, no matter how many times it's made clear that it isn't one, is a WP:IDHT decision you are making for your own personal reasons. This is a confusion between wikt:inference and wikt:implication; it's a common error but it is an error. The only people being mocked in this are editors who refuse to abide by WP:NPOV, WP:NOT#ADVOCACY and the MoS elements derived from them, to mangle English with fake words, with trademark over-stylization, with aggrandizing epithets, and with other non-encyclopedic abuse of language. (Well, it also mocks self-righteous, exploitative cult leaders because they deserve it.) The fact that non-encyclopedic language is sometimes used in regard to genderqueer people is entirely incidental, and criticizing it is not an attack on the genderqueer. You can believe otherwise all you want, but belief on your part cannot change fact about what the essay actually says, or retroactively manufacture discriminatory intent on my part.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  03:35, 2 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Hey, I don't shout but let me try: WHAT THE HECK?!! I was offline for a couple of days and the whole encyclopedia dissolves into chaos. I am speechless, and if groveling in abject humility helps, then I will do it. I haven't read all the comments but I will. Best Regards, Barbara ✐✉ 16:18, 1 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Barbara (WVS): It is what it is. When drama addicts (like the blatantly and non-neutrally canvassed [9][10] horde who invaded Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2019-02-28/Humour) think they have found a syringe full of purest outrage they can get high on, they will not drop it, even if it's actually empty.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  03:35, 2 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I think we should have a new network TV show: The Outragists... I'm just saying. --Guy Macon (talk) 04:38, 2 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I think what is the most frustrating about this entire incident is the insistence that it is the responsibility of another person NOT to be offended as if the authors had no responsibility for their hurtful words. Granted, some people are more easily offended than others but you have multiple people, people who you likely otherwise respected, stating that this article was not okay. And you dismiss their objections as, just what? Being overly sensitive or touchy? Can the authors not accept any responsibility for the words you've written? Are any objections to the content of the article just chalked up to oversensitivity? That seems like cowardice, not to face the possibility that the words you wrote actually hurt other people. Why be an adult and take responsibility when you can blame other people for feeling hurt? Liz Read! Talk! 04:47, 2 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@Liz: This is a perennial major socio-political matter – across our entire trans-national Western culture – that has raged for over a century, and it will not be settled here and now. You'll find it in everything from hate-speech laws to examinations of the psychological effects of "everyone's a winner" messaging in our school systems. There are those convinced that everyone is responsible for their own reactions and perceptions (and that owning your own mind is part of being human and growing up and being a productive member of society, or else), and those who are convinced that everyone else is responsible for how they feel (and that they have a true right to be happy and that anyone who makes them uncomfortable is harming them and must be punished or muzzled – cf. what you said above: "the words you wrote actually hurt other people"), Plus, of course, there are many nuanced positions in the middle, where almost all of us actually live.

At any rate, I have not denied any responsibility for what I wrote. I've already revised my userspace copy to remove various "trigger terms". I've consistently (on all these pages, and at ANI) denied that Barbara_(WVS) had anything to do with the actual content – it's 100% me. I've conceded that inclusion in the Signpost was probably bad idea. And I've stated flat-out that I'm well aware that anything that addresses or even comes close to TG/NB people and pronouns is inevitably going to piss off some subset of people. But I cannot be held responsible for people willfully misreading it to mean what they want it to mean (including their utter bullshit claims like "This says you can't use singular they" or "This says you can't use she for a transwoman" or "This says nonbinary people are wrong for using something like zie in their own lives")just so they get to have their ranty-pants funtime on the Internet. I'm not the Internet whipping boy, and WP is not a flame forum for "the sport of debate". Awareness that some will take offense about any criticism of anything that touches in any way on TG/NB or LGBT+ matters does not somehow require me to remain silent. Nor does a majority of LGBT+ people holding one view require one of their number who disagrees to remain silent (though, in point of a fact, a majority of LGBT+ people are not supportive of using fake words like zie in formal writing; many are not even willing to do this conversationally and will simply speak around it).

You can't seriously hold the position that "Granted, some people are more easily offended than others" and simultaneously deny that people have plenty of (how much? that's up to interpretation) responsibility for the offense they choose to take over something that doesn't say anything like what they claim it says. That combination is just cognitively dissonant and oxymoronic.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  05:18, 2 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I read the Signpost humor piece & enjoyed it immensely. Best laugh I had, in quite a while :) GoodDay (talk) 04:58, 2 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@GoodDay: I have a suspicion that there is nearly a 1:1 correlation between people who do/don't find the humor in this (and do/don't get the point), and people who do/don't appreciate the stand-up work of call-out-the-bullshit comedians like George Carlin and Lewis Black. For some people, it is not possible for something to be funny if anyone could possibly be offended by it for any reason (even an unreasonable one).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  05:25, 2 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Ben Shapiro said it best - "Facts don't care about feelings". GoodDay (talk) 05:29, 2 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Please comment on Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard

 Done

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard. Legobot (talk) 04:23, 1 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Illegitimi non carborundum

I sympathize with your situation. Your words are being twisted around and you are being attacked for saying things you never said. Don't let it get you down. --Guy Macon (talk) 04:33, 2 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Guy Macon: Thanks, and it doesn't. I was a professional civil liberties activist for over a decade. My skin is very thick. I'm actually not offended that people took offense and are twisting it to mean what it doesn't say. Humans just have a tendency to do that with stuff gores any ox they consider sacred (or in this case walks into the same field where the ox is grazing). I will, however, to continue to correct their fabrications about me and about the intent and meaning of the piece. I do of course object to Fæ in particular canvassing and casting aspersions and hounding/harassing me across projects. Not enough to ANI the matter; given that the editor was indeffed and then long-term topic banned for similar antics, it's just a matter of time before they go after someone who actually does have the WP:DRAMA patience to take them back to ANI or AE or RFARB for a re-ban. Someone else will deal with it, I predict within the year.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:56, 2 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  • Not commenting on the wisdom of publishing, but I do commend you on the very high quality of the writing. Did you know La Leche League (an organization that organizes advocacy, educational, and training related to breastfeeding) is (or was) debating gender neutral material in their manuals to accomodate Transmen who give birth and choose to breastfeed? In this case "she" would be inappropriate as the breastfeeding transman is a "he". Far from common, I would guess, but grounds for a big debate.Icewhiz (talk) 11:20, 2 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    Probably more common than one would think, for the same reason that a lot of gay men have (non-adopted) children; lots of people feel the biological drive to breed very, very strongly, even if the mechanics of it don't jibe with their sexual preferences or gender identity.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  11:41, 2 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Nomination for deletion of Template:Dfn

Template:Dfn has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. -- Beland (talk) 08:10, 2 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

WP's edit-conflict resolver is barfing all over everyone today

Resolved
 – Both cases have been fixed.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  11:57, 4 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Revert

Soory! reverted you at An/I because the 'edit conflict thingy' removed several other comments, cygnis insignis 15:51, 2 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Do you want me to manually reinsert your comments? cygnis insignis 15:52, 2 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
And reclose? Might be better if you did that, there has been another response. I had an edit conflict/delete that did the same thing, the toolmaker was quick to fix it. cygnis insignis 16:03, 2 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@Cygnis insignis: No worries. I've had issues with the edit-conflict handler today, too. I think I'll just let it run; someone else who has not commented at all in this is a better person to close it even if the snowball is already huge.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  18:01, 2 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I am only aware of your edits removing others comments, I was just trying to repair that. I was waiting on a reply for two hours, and didn't know what you thought was going on. I'm taking you off my watchlist again. cygnis insignis 09:46, 3 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

EC heads up

Deadpool, shown here dressed as Elsa, always heals from his injuries. Leviv ich 20:38, 2 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

FYI Leviv ich 18:11, 2 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Levivich: Argh! Did you already repair that, or do I need to do it?  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  18:14, 2 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I didn't touch it, idk if you noticed but there's been a bit of pitchforks and torches about. To be safe I've been restricting my editing to fixing typos on my userpage. Leviv ich 18:26, 2 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I fixed them. As for the pitchforks, yes, they've mostly been in my own flesh for the last three days.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:11, 2 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks. I guess what the comedians say is true: comedy really is a brutal business. Stand up and make a joke and if not enough people laugh, they draw knives. Bet you wish you had a safe space now :-D Leviv ich 20:12, 2 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Well, with me being a transphobic anti-LGBT right-winger, I naturally have a well-defended militia bunker. It's chock full of Bibles and Pabst Blue Ribbon.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  20:29, 2 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Alt-right, alt-left

This topic is one of several alt-right talking points and ignorance of this is inexcusable, this is the means by which your nation is being destroyed from within. Some of your fans don't see the humour, if it is there, the laugh at the reaction of the people concerned about the real world consequences of freeze peach. Defending your creation with the defence it was 'published by someone else!' in the current climate is exceptionally average. cygnis insignis 09:46, 3 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Cygnis insignis: I've defended it, to the extent it needs or is worth defense, in several ways. That's not one of them. I'll correct people when they get the publication history incorrect, but it's not a defense of the content. They're separate matters that simply happen to be on the same page at the same time. I don't think the US is being destroyed from within; it's just going through one of its cycles. Things are much better today for LGBT+ people than they were when I was teenager, and they were much better then than they were in my parents' youth. I'm also not threatened by the presence of alt-right people on WP, as long as they play by the rules. We need them for balance, because the site is overwhelmingly dominated by the alt-left. I'm a progressive on social issues but a centrist on many others, so this perhaps matters to me more than average. Given WP:NPOV policy, it really should matter to everyone here, though. I have no control over what people choose to laugh at. I don't think the far-left overreaction to this piece (especially the "excuse any wrongdoing by someone we like" antics over at ANI) are a laughing matter. That's way, way more dangerous than some alt-right douchebags being, well, douchebags. They don't have any pull here, but il-liberal leftist WP:FACTION behavior to permit gross policy violations by one of their own number to WP:WIN on the censorious side of a content dispute is a serious problem which is apt to multiply.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  13:47, 3 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
The alt-left is an invention to premise those kind of statements, at least, that is what we tell people. Maybe go to The Atlantic and get some perspective, find the civilisation that is lurking between the channels in the US, or at least stop hanging in places where the grotesque idea that an alt-right is there to provide 'balance'. cygnis insignis 18:51, 3 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
You're entitled to whatever beliefs you like, but as a professional activist since 1993, I'm quite certain I know the political landscape quite well. You're also not in a position to tell me what I'm aware of and how well-read I am, nor how to make up my mind about what I see and read. :-) If you plan to try to suppress material more to the right than your views, things aren't going to go well for you here. The obvious exceptions – when political beliefs collide with science and we have a WP:FRINGE matter on our hands – apply on both sides of that political axis; being a climate-change-denial or anti-evolution activist isn't any different from being an anti-GMO or anti-vaccination activist when the science tells us both extremes are full of shit. There's actually more fringe stuff coming from the far-left than the far-right (bad science is only good for business when the good science would be used to restrain business instead of turn a profit; I'm sure you can work about the flip side of that).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  11:50, 4 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
SMcCandlish, oh, missed that. "If you plan to try to suppress material more to the right than your views, …" I'll note that is where we are up to, unless you are going to show where I have ever done anything remotely resembling that I'll assume you are just putting it out there for the 'freeze peach' readers :-| cygnis insignis 20:29, 7 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Poor wording on my part; I meant the hand-waving generic you (i.e., "If some editors plan to ... then they ..."), not the personal you in particular. You (particular) already have a clearly not-NOTHERE editing record (maybe we need WP:ACTUALLYHERE?).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  20:36, 7 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
It does read that way, I'm getting a lot of suggestions otherwise. apologies. My head is full of some rabbity thing with a proper common name, a nice old name that looks awful in print and sounds great when correctly pronounced (as lunch, back in the day). cygnis insignis 21:03, 7 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Nah, entirely my fault. That was written on a day in which I was arguing with a whole lot of people about pretty much the same thing, so I was thinking in en masse terms and not being careful with wording and context. (Kind of ironic, given that the dispute started in the first place by not being careful about those things!) PS: Your riddle has stumped me.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  21:22, 7 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@Cygnis insignis: PS – I've refactored this into a separate thread, since it doesn't relate to the edit-conflict resolution stuff above.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  11:57, 4 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@Cygnis insignis: I think you may like the essay User:JzG/Politics; it's a good summary of the media-and-society problems that appear to underly your position. Be assured that I'm well aware of this effect; I appreciate that JzG took the time to put up a page on it here, since we didn't already have one. I do not mean to imply that right-wing ideas from their own feedback loop should be accepted here. We literally cannot accept them, because far-right "echo chamber" sources are not reliable. Plenty of what I do on WP in mainspace is against such rather propagandistic nonsense. But there's a big difference between Trumpian ranto-blathering, and legitimate conservatism (of the sort going back generations and well-articulated by a lot of statespersons). They're not views I share for the most part, but they have a place here, and get short-shrift in many cases because of the further and further left-leaning pool of editors. I care about this because I care about WP:UNDUE policy, not because I have an agenda. I have an "un-genda", what I at least used to call radical centrism (before realizing that was a term already used by others), a realization that we live in the middle between extremes and our society is productive when it stays there, and starts to unravel the more extreme it gets in any direction. However, the center itself moving, in a sense, as the US, British, Greek, and many other populations shift rightward en masse. I probably need a new term for this, since "center" can imply the new center not the absolute one. And we do have the problem of plenty of FRINGE and other iffy ideas coming from the far left and being advocated as Truth™. They're popular but they also have to be rejected for the same reason: they're not based on reliable sources, but on ideological twaddle. The left has its own echo chambers, including entire publishing houses.
PS: A very salient statement from the author of that piece [11].  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  18:54, 7 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Hey mate. The essay is a reasonable primer with some nice phrases. I should AGF the alt-right and assume that don't have 'alt-left accounts' to make a point, or someone making an alt-right account then getting carried away. Which is reported to have happened, and pretty much how trolling became a 'political movement'. I will try to remember where I read a centrist view on the Empire destroying Tatooine, and how stormtrooper's warning shots were propagandised by the terrorists as bad marksmanship.
I haven't been following anything like people creating pseudo-troll accounts just so they can troll their real shit in pseudo-retaliation to their own straw man shilling; I don't hang out in the places where this would get tracked down. Sounds like a really sneaky form of DITF: try to wear the community down with the patent nonsense from one extreme to make one's own extremism sound more reasonable. I would hope that we've been fairly good at detecting this, as a community, or at least in nuking the trolls and their pseudo-trolls, since both voices of the same person would generally be obviously WP:NOTHERE, whether we can tell they're the same person or not. On the Star Wars references, that reminds me of Troops (film), still one of the funniest indy shorts ever made.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  20:32, 7 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Inquiry about issue on own talk page

Excuse, SMcCandlish, I am having a bit of an issue trying to solve an incident on my talk page, that you commented on earlier: User talk:PPEMES#Blocked. Would you mind having a look again and if possible comment on the process? Thanks. PPEMES (talk) 17:09, 2 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I said something over there, but it's pretty generalized, since I don't know se.wp's details.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:12, 2 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

On transgender

I've collapse-boxed this as likely of little interest to anyone else. The majority of it is ranting from a WP:MEATPUPPET (has had an account for 3 days, but edited literally nothing but my talk page and the related MfD, so clearly canvassed to come here from off-site and "vote"), plus a block of barely parseable invective from an interloper with a long history of nonsensical posting, described by others as "performance art" and probably trolling. If you're an actual WP editor, and are willing and able to make some sense, please feel free to start a new thread about your concerns.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:21, 5 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Wall o' text, round 1

I keep seeing you objecting to people interpreting what you didn't say. Well, here's what you did say in the actual essay - Wikipedia should ignore trans people who choose unconventional pronouns, they are "made-up" (in the talking bollocks sense, not the language evolution sense). You compared trans people who feel this way about their identification to stage performers adopting "wacky" stage names, and you implied they do it not out of a deep seated trauma, but out of some religious conviction or cult like mania. These are deeply offensive things to be saying about trans people and I'm afraid they are pretty obvious examples of transphobia.

You have since expanded on your thoughts, to argue you do not wish to insult all trans people, recognising they are not all of one mind, and so you are quite happy to accommodate those who are happy to fit in with what is the growing convention of they. You've said that you perceive the problem to be as much about language activists than the actual trans people in question, the ones with their wacky ideas and religious fervour which leads them to make up pronouns and give Wikipedia a real headache in how to respect their view.

It's questionable whether, if you edited the essay to reflect these nuances, it would make people change their minds and assume this is not transphonia, just a poorly argued position against the sort of views that are always seen as wacky and strange until society grows to accept them. It used to seem wacky that two dudes could get married, and it might be informative to know if you would have mocked those people if they came to Wikipedia twenty years ago to argue their relationship status be recognised in Wikipedia's own voice.

I get the point of the main part of the essay, why you might have thought it was hilariously satirical, but it rather assumes people who write Wikipedia are pretty stupid, and the readers even more so. Wikipedia is a dynamic resource, it is easily capable of reflecting changes in a subject's personal views even on short time scales, and it is easy to edit the text until things that need clarification or explanation have been. It has all the required articles to clarify for the genuinely confused, the current thinking on issues like gender and pronouns. Anyone with any skill in writing will certainly be well capable of avoiding the sort of scenarios you manufactured for comic effect.

So you disagree with this specific subset of trans people, and chose mockery over sober and respectful persuasion. That's fine. Being cruelly mocked is sadly a good day for many of them. I just hope that in twenty years you don't look back and wish you had found some other way to express your views on the Wikipedia platform. What you say on your own dime is frankly nobody's business but your own. But there's plenty of people out there who regret things they said about gay marriage twenty years ago. Some of them are remembered as homophobes who were undeservedly given a platform, others are simply remembered as having been wrong.
— Preceding unsigned comment added by MaryKontana (talk • contribs) 20:39, 2 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Except that's not what it says at all. WP shouldn't "ignore" trans/non-binary people with neo-pronouns (or ignore their neo-pronouns, rather), if reliable sources tell us what that preference is with sufficient frequency about that individual that we're certain it's worth mentioning as a sourced fact in the article about them. We simply shouldn't use those terms in Wikipedia's own voice. The nutshell summary is super-explicit about this before the real content of the page even starts. The reason to not do so is essentially the same as the reason to not append or prepend religious honorific stylings, spell Kesha as "Ke$ha" to mimic her marketing, render Sony as "SONY" to match their logo design, or do any similar things: It's a WP:NPOV and WP:NOT problem, and thus also against the WP:MOS provisions derived from those policies, e.g. MOS:TM, MOS:DOCTCAPS, MOS:BIO, etc. If it makes you apoplectic that TG people and singers and religion adherents and corporate marketing departments can all be mentioned together as external demand-makers to not cave into in the name of appeasing their "do it our way or else" demands, despite all of their rationales being very different, and all of them taken very, very seriously by those making the demands, there's really nothing I can do about that. Only you control your brain. I can't force you to see that having a blanket approach to all of these matters is sensible and will continue and isn't an evil.

Maybe "made-up" isn't the best way to put it; that's a bit of wording that could be tweaked. However, with every adjustment to it, there's a high likelihood that someone else will think of some reason to object to whatever it was changed to. There are about 1.5 billion English speakers; they cannot all be satisfied about anything, ever. Okay, I edited "made-up" out.

As for "specific subset of trans people", this page has nothing to do with what they choose as a preference in their private lives and among people they know. It's not about them. It's about extremist language-change activists – almost all of whom are privileged, white, cis, het, far-left busybodies acting in loco parentis trying to make Wikipedia write in such a manner.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  20:56, 2 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
PS: I've changed the heading of this section to something neutral. My talk page is not a place for angry ranters to keep making up bullshit accusations and insinuations, and one of them is already at WP:ANI for it.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  05:06, 3 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Self identity ≠ marketing, though. Leviv ich 20:55, 2 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Didn't say they were the same. Our response to demands to use constructions not generally recognized as English has to be the same (i.e. "not in Wikipedia's own voice") regardless of the source or motivation for the demand. It's quite possible that this simply cannot be addressed with humor in the way I attempted, even with endless revision, because a straw man built of false equivalence is likely to always be drawn, as above, by anyone unhappy that their way isn't going to be Wikipedia's way, or simply unhappy that anyone came within 10,000 miles of maybe sounding possibly critical of anything to do with a particular group (or even sub-sub-sub-group that may not really exist, e.g. non-binary individuals in the real world who actually do demand to be called It – someone claimed they're a real group, but can't prove it). At some point, the attempt to appease the manufactured outrage is exhausting. It was still worth attempting a humor approach, even if this one failed, because the discuss-it-seriously approach has been an endless nightmare of divisive anger for as long as I've been on Wikipedia. See related thread higher up this page for a summary.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  21:26, 2 March 2019 (UTC); revised 05:06, 3 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Something I didn't address about the OP's comments, on changing norms: Wikipedia does not blaze trails, it follows the lead. When dictionaries and style guides and other reliable sources consistently tell us that xie or hirm or any of hundreds of other candidates for new pronoun-hood have become "real words" – are terms used and understood in mainstream English and found in almost every contemporary dictionary – then reality itself will have changed, and WP will go along with it. It has not changed now, and WP's job isn't to help people try to change it. This simply is not at all like what you liken it to. As a linguistic matter, the inflectional morphology of a language – its really basic nuts and bolts like pronouns, grammatical-function-determining suffixes, the definite and indefinite article, etc. – cannot be altered by whim, force, or suasion. They naturally shift very slowly and not in predictable ways. This is not culturally relative but is true across all language. Nothing like that applies to (using your example) acceptance of homosexual couples, which does vary widely from culture to culture and always has, and which has been directly responsive in the recent West to just-change-it pressure within a very short time span, relatively speaking. They're very dissimilar processes.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  21:26, 2 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Wall o' text, round 2

It is like you traded all these ideas for a short list of "it"s. Can you explain for me please, what is "Wikipedias own voice"? ~ R.T.G 23:33, 2 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@RTG: It's the wording in which our content is written from an encyclopedic perspective, outside of quotations (including other literal strings like titles of works, and close paraphrases of claims attributed to someone else), and words-as-words usage. It's a phrase we use pretty frequently here. WP certainly should note (with reliable sources) that Sony styles its logo "SONY", that Genesis P-Orridge personally uses the neo-pronouns s/he, h/er, and h/erself, that Muslims traditionally add Peace Be Upon Him or an acronym for it after any mention of Muhammad, and that Kesha presented herself publicly as Ke$ha until mid-2012 (a stylization even the entertainment press did not take seriously; contrast Deadmau5, who is virtually never called "Deadmaus" by anyone in print – if sources are overwhelmingly consistent on a stylization that we would normally avoid, then we use it, as covered at MOS:TM). It's not okay for us to write "According to an article in SONY Entertainment Network news, Genesis P-Orridge says h/er favorite pop album is Ke$ha's 2010 Animal. P-Orridge hasn't produced music h/erself self since 2004, focusing on other art. H/er 2019 exhibition in London will focus on cross-cultural perception of Muhammad PBUH and Islam."

We wouldn't do that even if someone else did; WP doesn't follow other publishers' house styles, and they don't follow ours (not usually; various topical wikis actually do, but they are not reliable sources, being user-generated content). "We" in "we wouldn't do that" is the consensus of the broad editorial base, and the policies and guidelines and featured articles they've produced over the years. The problem is that individual editors on a "mission" of one sort of another quite frequently do all of these sorts of things and have to be reverted for turning WP's material into what amounts to a personal blog written in their own style from their own individual perspective (or that of some off-site entity like a religious body, a corporation, an individual celebrity and their fanbase, or a cluster of language-change activists). The most disruptive among them will continue to do it over and over again until blocked or topic-banned. It's not sufficient that someone feels really, really strongly about one of these things. Those in favor of doing them all do, about which ever one of these they want WP to use.

The language-reform people acting in loco parentis for TG/NB subjects often present the additional problem of well-meaning but confused false equivalence between a) accepting someone's gender declaration (intergender, non-gendered, transman, etc.), and b) accepting their preferred pronouns as something required to be used even when they invented them and are not part of the English language. (It's an error of confusing a term for what it refers to; in general semantics it's been generalized as mistaking the map for the territory, the menu for the meal.) It's perfectly acceptable in encyclopedic, news, scientific, and other writing to use a singular they for such cases and to simply write around pronouns as much as possible. The claim that failure to use someone's "h/erself" or "xem" is the same as mis-gendering a transwoman as "he" is patently false. But people unfamiliar with gender studies debates and lingo are ill-prepared to make that case (and often just unwilling to make it because of the ginned up hostility they will likely receive from the activism crowd), so we have way more xie and hirs sort of things in our articles than we should, sometimes for months or years at a time, and sometimes "slow-editwarred" back in after being removed (as has happened repeatedly at P-Orridge's article). PS: I've outdented this since it's better as a stand-alone subthread.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  05:06, 3 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

There was an editor came and went on Wikipedia before I ever looked closely at it but he became a minor celebrity or notoriety here. He would go around the site searching for "comprised of" and changed it to "comprising". Well everybody would revert him back and start war. But he was accurate and most who heard the story probably learned something.
Good humour brings divided communities back together but even good comedians can drive it wider apart. You/anyone might believe from the situation of a friendship circle they've got a particular social issue tied down but it has to be in good faith. If you mean well on people you've got to project that sentiment on them in your responses. Even if you stand by the work, you've got to accept the criticism of the work. Not must accept personal attacks, but social philosophies that work are like indestructible toys. Cliches stick not just because they roll off the tongue, but because they apply to further and further meanings. NPA is a cliche in a non-confrontable situation like Wikipedia discussions.
Wikipedia does follow other house style to a degree after a collaborative fashion. If the big houses take a uniform approach it is possible for Wikipedia to diverge but unlikely. A non-conformist name will be chosen by those who call it, and approved by those who it is called to, and no amount of unenlightened speculation will tell who will be the callers or what will stick, as far as I can see. ~ R.T.G 06:35, 3 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Thankfully, I don't think I see anything I have to disagree with in that.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  08:03, 3 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Blegh!

You've been puked on.

Don't take this too seriously. Someone just wants to let you know they did something silly.
~ R.T.G 13:35, 3 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Wall o' text, round 3

I'm sure you don't see it, but there is an astonishing level of arrogance and bullheadedness in your replies. The fact you have altered my quite deliberate choice of "On transphibia" as a heading to read 'On transgender", and without even having the courtesy of asking, much less noting what you have done, is very indicative of the problem.

I don't even recall the last time I was incandescent about anything, for example, but you decided to project that emotion onto me. It seems obvious why you would do that. Similarly your suggestion that mind control or the need to force me, is the only way you think you could convince me you are quite correct, and I am wrong. In your mind, your critics all either fit into one of two neat categories - crazy leftist activists, or crazy self-serving freaks.

No real recognition there that your critics are by and large, well adjusted and rational humans. People who really don't need patronising about style guides etc. It is you who seems to have the most difficulty mastering the English language, if we are really to assume none of any of these things are meant deliberately.

What you really need to do, if a sincere and persuasive argument is your goal, is stop deploying the most offensive aspects of your case, because they really don't show what you think they show. These people are not brands, they are not just making shit up in any of the senses you describe, not even in the language sense. For a start, Wikipedia literally doesn't allow things that have literally just been made up.

These so-called leftist extremist language activists are I am sure an entirely exaggerated part of all this, and they can look after themselves, but there are undoubtedly people who are upset for no other reason than obtaining a little dignity for themselves from the behemoth that is Wikipedia is their goal, and they could care less about changing the world, much less bending the Matrix all out of shape.

You want Wikipedia to represent reality, fine, the reality is trans people are different, but equal. Your language and your sense of humour suggests you have difficulty keeping this in mind enough to convince others it is your sincere belief. Your deeply held position is conservative, for sure, but is it really only about language and reality for you? Nothing at all to do with what you think of this subset if trans people? It is a brave man who stands alone, beating his chest and denying what the vast majority are telling him he looks like.

These pronouns are unusual and uncommon, but nobody with an open mind has any difficulty wrapping their head around what they mean. We already know enough about the brain to know that the precise spelling matters less than the word position, and these words are, of course, in the usual places a brain expects pronouns to be, and are deliberately crafted to look and feel like the traditional forms.

It was and still is the attempt to repurpose "they" that really confused people, because it was a kuldge, a real head-scratcher for the human brain used to what is "normal". Someone as concerned about a traditionalist and dare I say proper use of language as you, would presumably still be utterly horrified this even hapoens. But you are not. I suspect it is because it wasn't just "made up". Perhaps these trans people should find their own existing word to appropriate. Was that the subtext of your choice for "It?" I wonder? As in "It can bloody well use this and like it".

Wikipedia can quite easily cope with all this in its own voice, in the ways I explained, without all the tragic consequences that you predict. It is a small thing to do, in the name of decency. There is literally no sign you even understand the alternatives to your view, the compromises that can be made by well meaning and intelligent people, much less that you could be convinced they are not a precursor to the coming of the Apocalypse.

Shakespeare is said to have coined hundreds of brand new words, all by himself, just by literally making shit up and foisting them on a presumably baffled audience. I'd love to have known what you would have done, were you in the stalls. Storm out and write a mean little essay, putting that silly freak Shakespeare right back in his box. No doubt many did at the time, and thankfully he, and wider society, took no notice. Ancient Wikipedia would have been using these words in its own voice well before they reached a dictionary, and probably because many of them are rude and offensive.

It is a triviality to demonstrate Wikipedia is a very early adopter of new words in its own voice, well before style guides or dictionaries, so on that score, when stripping out all irrelevancies and the scaremongering, you really only have common usage left as an argument. And in context, when you sit down at look at how and why these pronouns appear and are used, and what Wikipedia is meant to stand for, it is a very thin argument indeed.

That is perhaps the most offensive aspect of all this, the thing that really does suggest where this all comes from, really, deep down, even if you yourself aren't ready to admit it. It is the realisation that no amount of reason, no amount of deconstruction of your argument, is ever going to change your mind. There will always be a reason the other person is a crazy language destroying fool who wants to sell our children to Sony to work in their collective farms, unless or until enough time has passed and the only argument you have, common usage, has shuffled your views into the sidings, to join all the other arguments whose proponents always insisted were not coming from the place we all kind of know they did, in retrospect.

I think it ironic that you set out to shape your own reality by getting Wikipedia to promote your views on this matter, but I think it came at a cost to you that I don't think you have even begun to appreciate yet. Or perhaps you do, given the observation I opened with. — Preceding unsigned comment added by MaryKontana (talk • contribs) 18:32, 3 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Sometimes the other person really is a crazy language destroying fool. Sometimes the other person is so crazy and language-destroying that they contact your employer and try to get you fired if you dare to disagree with the new language usage they are trying to shove down your throat. I'm just saying. --Guy Macon (talk) 19:19, 3 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

And sometimes people who, through no fault of their own, decide that rather than live a life where merely being mocked is a good day, decide to end it all. Contact your employer? Oh the mannity. How did you ever survive the trauma? Cast your mind back through history, think of all the pioneers of civil rights, and find me one that would give that sorry anecdote the time of day. — Preceding unsigned comment added by MaryKontana (talk • contribs) 00:41, 4 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Now I see what that was referring to, I think both of you need reminding that Wikipedia is not an "Open Venue" in the sense of allowing free speech. I don't know the details, but I agree that if the posts of "Tech Ambassador" and "Visitng Scholar" for Wikipedia carries the usual implication that you are representing the values and ideals of Wikipedia, then sure, people are gonna get fired for being this offensive, unless like Barbara they do the decent thing and resign. Anyone who didn't expect a call for writing something like this, is not living in the real world. — Preceding unsigned comment added by MaryKontana (talk • contribs) 01:04, 4 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Please sign your posts. The fact that you don't know to do so triggered me to check, and you've only been here for less than two days. This strongly suggests that you were canvassed to come here and stir up trouble from off-site.

I decline to respond to most of this, but will summarize a few points: our user talk page guidelines expressly permit refactoring of material. I can even simply delete what you post here on-sight if I want to. You do not "own" section headings; I've done nothing to the actual content of your post (and we usually would not, per the general talk-page guidelines), unless it contained something grossly inappropriate. Being stubborn and not reacting meekly to off-base verbal attacks is not a crime; your attempts to demonize me in this regard are a dismal failure. The fact that you're "incandescent" in anger over something that doesn't say what you think it does, is all about you, not me. See also "Wikipedia is not a forum". A transgendered person's dignity has nothing whatsoever to do with whether Wikipedia is forced to write shim or zie in our own articles, it has to do with mis-gendering, like referring to a transman as "she"; the singular they will suffice in encyclopedic writing for non-binary people and indeterminate references, and has become well-accepted English (has become again – it actually dates to the 1400s, and fell out of favor only because of the activism of Victorian prescriptive grammarians). If you refuse to or are unable to absorb the difference between what subjects prefer in their private lives and what WP must do, between a gender identity and descriptive words about that gender identity, then you should not be editing Wikipedia. You don't understand what neologisms are. When Shakespeare invented a bunch of words (around 400; the "over 1000" claims made by some have been debunked), at that time they were neologisms. In 2018 they are not, because we use them every day and they appear in all dictionaries. I decline to pore over any more of your off-base ranting.

I suspect that your underlying gist is that I should be contrite for having A) having written this at all in the form it has taken, and B) allowed its use in this state in Signpost. I've already conceded on B (many times, on many pages) and have conceded on A on this very page, though I oppose deletion of the user-space copy on procedural grounds and deletion (versus blanking) the Signpost copy because it would render all the community discussion about it meaningless. I also will not accept false accusations of being transphobic. No amount of brow-beating by you or anyone else is ever going to change that.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  07:32, 4 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

My gist is that you are wrong, but there are such fundamental problems with the way you treat people and argue you case, and how you respond to those who argue against it, that makes it all rather futile. There's not a person in the world other than you who would think I do not know what a neologism is, or believe any of the other ridiculous things you've felt forced to say about me, in the absence of anything better to say to counter my most important points. You're obstinate and strident, but worse than that, you take people for utter fools, people who manifestly aren't. You're losing the one thing you prize most dearly because of it. That it being a word you used at least once in every reply to me, probably quite unwittingly. I will not sign this post, because you did not sign your alteration of the meaning of the heading. It's as easy as that, any fool can spot these flaws of yours. The risk to your future ability to do the things you want to do, is how many take time out to their day to tell you this is now easy it is to see? — Preceding unsigned comment added by MaryKontana (talk • contribs) 20:55, 4 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I did sign my alteration of the heading, in a very specific statement about it, which I'll quote for you since you didn't bother to actually check: PS: I've changed the heading of this section to something neutral. My talk page is not a place for angry ranters to keep making up bullshit accusations and insinuations, and one of them is already at WP:ANI for it.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  05:06, 3 March 2019 (UTC) "You keep arguing around me and my buddies" isn't a "fundamental problem" in the arguments I present, it's called debate skill. Most of the arguments you and they present are patently fallacious and easy to deflate. You don't understand a thing about neologism and WP's relationship to it if you really think that WP, if it existed in the Elizabethan era but had the same policies, would have started running with Shakespeare's new words while they were fresh-minted. It's a fundamental misunderstanding of MOS:NEO (and the policies that underly it), and of neologism as something to do with a popularity contest of new terms' coiners. (If you wanted a proof of this, it would be easy to provide, using examples from both Stephen Colbert and Dan Savage, both of whom are popular, but one of whose neogisms have had their articles deleted because they do not have actual currency in our language; of Savages' does have an article about his campaigning about it and controversy surrounding that, because it used a politician's name as a sex term, but that's about controversy not about the word itself; contrast Truthiness.) You are not a mind-reader and have no idea what I "prize most dearly". You're sadly mistaken if you think it's your respect; I don't value it from people who care more about feelings than veracity, about spin-doctoring for public view than standing on principles.

You've done nothing to address a single point of substance, and just keep circling back to your hand-wringing projection of hurt feelings and blame. That's not an argument, it's argument to emotion, hand-waving, and proof by assertion. I don't take most people for fools; I take most people for poor at formulating reasoned arguments, and overly ruled in discourse by their emotions. I'm hardly alone in this, and we're shown over and over again that it's true. (The problem, of course, is that for most people reason and critical thinking is a non-mandatory university/college subject (i.e., for most people it's never something they have to learn), when it should be introduced as part of the core curriculum from 1st grade onward – along with the basics of cultural anthropology.) While unruly hominid hooting, chest-beating, and shit-throwing makes up the vast majority of our political discourse and the op-eds in the newspapers and the commentary on so-called "news" shows, in an encyclopedia project, it's just a cancer. It bends the project toward mob rule.

I'm unlikely to have any further interest in discussing this or anything else with you, here or elsewhere, until you have an editing history demonstrating that you're actually here to help build an encyclopedia instead of a troll whipped up to come here from off-site for activism purposes. We know you are one. We have some time-tested principles: WP:DUCK and WP:SPADE, and you fit the patterns, since you've done absolutely nothing but rant at me on my talk page and in a related deletion discussion, despite being here for several days now. It simply isn't possible for you to have landed at these pages, among millions of them, without having been drawn directly to them by off-site canvassing. You needn't remain a "single-purpose account" created through meat-puppetry for non-constructive agitprop. But either get to work on the actual project, or you know where to door is and can show yourself out. Continuing this with you is just getting circular, anyway. I collapse-boxed this, on a page at which discussion length isn't really a factor, simply because this thread isn't going to be of interest to anyone else and just a waste of their time to even skim it. PS, I have to return to your earlier, snide [and what was that you said about arrogance?] theme: If you're actually convinced that I'm unable to absorb what you call reason at this point yet will inevitably come around to your view with the passage of time, then you have no incentive to continue this, either.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:12, 5 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Nobody bothered to educate you

Just not a productive discussion.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  09:11, 3 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.

Not being aware of a law will not get you out of court in most modern states. Not being able to understand the law will get you off, but you won't be believed. That is, however, the court legal system.

This is a community. There are things we must do. It's been nearly a week. It is not good enough to let you break all the rules, but never explain them to you.

  • Most transgenders you ever saw are happy well adjusted people, beaming about the changes. Or sometimes you might see a kid who is allowed to live as the opposite kid, nothing but picture perfect Time spreads.
  • The reality is, apparently, trauma. Most transgenders wouldn't get approved unless they were suicidal. It's a really significant operation. The situation isn't like changing house or changing job. It's about people who have not been able to live with themselves. It is literally a joke about suicidal children.
  • I didn't really know that until the last couple of years, so I am not inclined to insist that McCandlish was purposely malicious. However, making a joke about transgender=suicide IS NEVER going to fly until freedom crosses back over.
  • With the rise in transgender popularity, recognising the suicide joke will soon change from a possibly innocent remark, to absolutely pathetic dark humour remark.
  • The real options for gender neutrality in speech and text drawn from existing traditions, is neutral honorifics. Colleague. Comrade. Citizen. Friend. Etc.
  • It doesn't matter how you feel. Not all freedoms add up to the same dream. There are two kinds of freedom in this world. The one you cherish is based on restriction. Humans are the most clever animal on the planet. We are also the most stupid. You already knew that. Have a nice day.

~ R.T.G 04:39, 3 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Regarding your heading, see meta:Don't be a jerk. I'll try not to take it too personally, but seriously: Someone who says transgender issues are a matter of "popularity" and confesses that they had no idea until a couple of years ago that TG people are often traumatized is in no position to "educate" anyone about anything even close to this topic. Do you remember our discussion about the Dunning–Kruger effect? This is a textbook example of it. To go over this all in detail:
Your first three paragraphs don't have a clear point. I think you're trying to indicate that you wish there were some rules or different rules you could use against me, because your desire is to punish for a perceived wrong. I never said you're a self-appointed anything. Taking your bullet points in order:
  • You are not a mind-reader; don't presume to tell me what I have seen and who I know.
  • If you have to say "apparently" then you're just offering an opinion. Your "I didn't really know that ..." confirms this. You're lecturing me about something you say only just kinda figured out for yourself recently. In point of fact, I've known about this in considerable detail since the 1980s, and I'm quite certain about it that, yes, most TG people have a considerable amount of trauma. However, most of them are not on the verge of suicide or leading miserable lives, and its extremely tiresome to see people suggest or imply this. I'll repeat that you're misusing the word literally.
  • I made no joke that's actually about transgender, but about people who do inappropriate things to encyclopedic wording (sometimes in furtherance of TG, for corporate marketing purposes, out of fandom, out of religious conviction, etc.). And I said nothing at all about suicide. Even what the Signpost did with my piece didn't do that. It did link to something that had the word "suicide" in it, in a different context. I had no editorial control over that, wasn't asked about it, and would not have approved. No one noticed but you. Good eye, then, but it has no actual impact on the larger debate.
  • "With the rise in transgender popularity": I hope you realize that this strongly suggests that your interest in this topic is some kind of pop-culture fixation for you, a form of fandom, not something connected to your own identity or real socio-political concerns. If that implication isn't correct, you should seriously re-think your approach to how you write about this topic (especially if you're going to lecture other people on how they do). I suspect that English isn't your native language, so this might be understandable, but you should probably stay out of extremely nuanced topics except in your own native language or you're apt to be misread. Hell, I'm proof you can be seriously misinterpreted even in your native language!
  • I don't disagree with your observations on collegial terminology as a conversational matter, but it's not how an encyclopedia is written (we'll never write "Our friend and colleague Genesis P-Orridge is a British artist and musician who ...").
  • "It doesn't matter how you feel". I matters how I feel precisely as much as it matters how you feel or anyone else feels. That "mattering-ness" level varies by context. It matters a great deal on talk pages (something you clearly need to absorb better), but it matters not a whit in encyclopedic writing, or we could not have WP:NPOV policy and could not actually write an encyclopedia, only an emotive editorial blog. I have not said anything anywhere in this debate about "freedom" (other than to correct someone's legally wrong claims that Signpost has or should have completed editorial freedom under US free speech and free press laws; it does not because it's a house organ, and the US First Amendment does not apply except against governmental censorship anyway).
Lest this sound all negative, I will close with strong agreement that "Humans are the most clever animal on the planet. We are also the most stupid." As an anthropologist by original training, I make points like this all the time. And "Not all freedoms add up to the same dream." is a very evocative statement, verging on plaque-worthy.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  05:52, 3 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Look McCandlish, I can't teach you good faith. I didn't say you are uneducated. I didn't tell you what you think or feel. You don't know anything about me to make out like I don't know enough gay people to talk to you or something. Attack, attack, attack. Here is your thoughts:- That what you had in mind when you wrote the joke is what it is, not what it should be. Forget about it then. ~ R.T.G 06:54, 3 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, you did: "Nobody bothered to educate you". Yes, you did: "Most transgenders you ever saw ...". Yes, I do, because you said it yourself: "The reality is, apparently ..." and "I didn't really know that until the last couple of years ...". And you've said much worse, including "With the rise in transgender popularity ...", and now confusing transgender and non-binary people with "gay people". Gender identity and sexual preference are separate topics. They get covered in the LGBT+ umbrella because the social stigmas against all of them drive them together to a certain extent, all being based on mainstream, conformity-seeking, narrow socio-religious mores. Criticizing the very strange things you are saying here is not an attack (see WP:NPA#What is considered to be a personal attack?). I don't follow your last point; yes, it is true that what I had in mind when I wrote the piece is what I had mind, not what someone else (or even I) retroactively wish I had mind – none of us have a time machine. I'll repeat that I don't think someone who has this much difficulty communicating clearly in English should get involved in this topic area except on their own native-language Wikipedia. I may have failed badly to communicate in it myself, but in a way that's a matter of interpretation. You're failing a way that is not open to interpretation at all, but just wrong. "Gay people" cannot be equated with "transgender". Transgender isn't a "popularity" matter, like following a TV show or considering it fashionable to grow a beard; it's how people are. As I said at ANI, I was willing to respond to this stuff for one round with you, and it's already gone to two, in two threads. Let's just stop, please.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  07:59, 3 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Transgender isn't a popularity matter. Your joke is though. cya ~ R.T.G 08:43, 3 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Keep monitoring the user, until their username is more clear. — Preceding unsigned comment added by RTG (talk • contribs) 13:21, 3 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Uh, okay.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  13:34, 3 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Pretty sure RTG is some sort of performance artist or troll. Recommend denying recognition. --Guy Macon (talk) 16:50, 3 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
A performance artist? How very dare you! ~ R.T.G 01:51, 4 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I made a similar DENY suggestion at the RfArb, and also left a {{Ds/alert}}; if RTG keeps making up weird-ass accusations that couldn't possibly be proved (e.g. trying to deny anyone the ability to speak their mind, being supportive of TG people suiciding, etc., etc.), then they can be swiftly blocked.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:36, 4 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Self-domestication

 Done

Hello Mac, I just became aware of this unexpected article on Self-domestication (12.5kb) of some mammals, which is in danger of WP:CONTENTFORK from the Domestication of animals (70kb). As a domestication aficionado, you might like to keep an eye on it from time to time. William Harris • (talk) • 09:51, 3 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@William Harris: Right-o. It is probably a separate enough topic for a page, but Domestication should have WP:SUMMARY treatment of it.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  13:35, 3 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I cleaned up the lead, and removed an off-topic section (about forced domestication in laboratories, which is the opposite of the topic).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  14:21, 3 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Many thanks for your opinion. I had earlier made some edits to it concerning wolves/dog, and will keep an eye on it from time to time. William Harris • (talk) • 20:49, 3 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Arbitration

 Done
 – I've commented over there.

You are involved in a recently filed request for arbitration. Please review the request at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case#Conduct dispute involving gendered pronouns and, if you wish to do so, enter your statement and any other material you wish to submit to the Arbitration Committee. As threaded discussion is not permitted on most arbitration pages, please ensure that you make all comments in your own section only. Additionally, the guide to arbitration and the Arbitration Committee's procedures may be of use.

Thanks, Leugen9001 at 15:07, 22 September 2024 UTC [refresh] (Talk) (he/him) 20:09, 3 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Apology

I apologize for taking this to arbitration. I was not aware of all the facts and I am an inexperienced editor. I am now aware that conduct disputes are being resolved privately. Leugen9001 (Talk) (he/him) 20:29, 3 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Leugen9001: Nothing to apologize for; WP:RFARB is a process we can all use (though it's very, very rule-bound and bureaucratic). I think the reasons given at the ANI sub-thread about why not to go that route were valid, but that hardly compels you to agree they were valid. :-)  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:32, 4 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I've actually rescinded my objection to the case going forward, anyway.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  17:20, 4 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

MOS question

I'm asking since I know you're into MOS (and I'm very much not, am a MOS newbie). I know Wikipedia:Article size exists for articles. And I found MOS:PARA for paragraphs. Is there an similar guideline for sections and sub-sections? I'm discussing sub-headers for a section that currently consists of 22 paragraphs (2,789 words, 18,513 characters) in one block, and I was wondering if there are MOS/policy/guidelines here beyond mere common sense. Icewhiz (talk) 07:53, 4 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Icewhiz: It's not very specific. MOS:LAYOUT is the overall page, though most of it's about particular sections ("See also", etc.) Length and detail level are just generally left to editorial discretion. One thing I would avoid is completely arbitrary breaks; we use those in excessively long talk threads, but it's not encyclopedic in the content. An over-long section needs to be sub-divided into meaningful sections (chronological, geographical, etc.). Sometimes a single section isn't really about one thing and can be split into one or more sections, rather than subsections. Or sometimes a combo of both approaches is needed.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:48, 4 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks! Might be worth spelling out just so that a discussion on non-arbitrary breaks (I agree are bad - in the content in question (a large bunch of reviews) there are a number of reasonable ways to sort the content - positive/negative, language or the (similar) region, or chronological) can be started based on length - I guess I'm stuck arguing common sense - it might prevail, :-), or we might have a RfC after discussion. Icewhiz (talk) 10:57, 4 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
There's a general principle that, by this late a date, if MoS doesn't already have something then it probably shouldn't have it (i.e., its absence hasn't been felt much or at all, the 'pedia has worked fine without it, and MoS is too long already). Exceptions are increasingly rare, but a short bit on over-long sections and what to do with them might be worthwhile. Probably something to propose at WT:MOSLAYOUT.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  12:00, 4 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

My next essay?

I am considering writing an essay entitled "þ" as there is no vowel involved at all, much less any gender. It is an English letter, and used to be in type fonts. þ's combination with other letters allowed the equivalent of "the", "thee", "thou", "that" and a few other words. Absolutely no one could conceivably take umbrage or Umbridge at its use. Though, I fear, as far as humor goes, it might be a "þ" in someone's side. (AFAIK, no MfD applies to comments on an UT page?) Collect (talk) 13:58, 4 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Collect: Most importantly, someone would say they know someone somewhere who uses þ as their non-binary pronoun, ergo this blind coincidence makes you a transphobe.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  14:20, 4 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
More likely, current Wikactivism encourages eventual scriptophobia. "Blind coincidence" as a term makes one a visiophile? Odds are against ArbCom following the actual root of the current problem, unfortunately. Collect (talk) 15:15, 4 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Oculocentric? Vis-ableist? Cis-visioned? A few days before the current shitstorm, I got called out for using lame, as being "disability-phobic", never mind that no one's used lame to mean 'has trouble walking' for about two generations (and we have WP:LAME). And there's that misuse of -phobic and -phobia, which refer to 'pathological fear of', not 'insensitivity to/about'. Around the same time (somewhere on this talk page), I also got lectured at for making light of dyslexia; I am dyslexic (though not that much, and it's much better now than it was 30-odd years ago; mostly affects me when I'm tired – the letters start to swim and fuse, their order slips, my typo rate shoots up, since it affects the output as well as the input). The lecturer tried to tell me that dyslexia has nothing to do with letter transposition, when this is actually one of the more common symptoms, and one that I get. What'll it be next, I wonder? I'll be thinking someone in shorts on the bus has hot legs, and get a Gmail ding with an e-mail from another mind-reading Wikipedian: "Hey, that's objectifying!" I would say this slide into il-liberal censoriousness is depressing, but of course that's a belittlement of and attack on people with emotional health struggles.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  16:13, 4 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Your unfeeling use of a weaponized rotary phone icon in your signature is an obvious commentary on the elders, who had to grow up finger-twirling a plastic contraption in order to communicate with their fellow man common-ancestor speaking-mammals. Tis true, you have no shame, or at least shame which can be pointed to and reverse-shamed. Randy Kryn (talk) 16:32, 4 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Keep up the good fight. We finally got rid of the "Save changes" button because "Save" is an obvious dog whistle aimed at evangelical Christians. Now we just need to get rid of "Show preview" on the grounds that "Show" is an obvious dog whistle aimed at AKC show dogs. --Guy Macon (talk) 16:54, 4 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Unfortunately, preview is a trigger, suggestive of male gaze and entitlement to more.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  17:18, 4 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
(edit conflict) Many years ago (pre-Johnson and Webster), spelling was "mutable" to say the least. It is the modern idea that we should teach kids to read letter-by-letter which really is the "dyslexia" problem - speed readers can understand "misspelled words" readily - per test results. Dyslexics tend to be smart. It is the mode of teaching them to read which is poor. Once one reads line-by-line, reading speed increases dramatically. We also teach kids to read music note-by-note yet musicians read music line by line or even more. We teach kids to dance step by step but dancers learn long sequences. The human brain is a heck of a lot more powerful in learning complex patterns than any "normal school" pedant could ever realize. Sorry for the sidetrack. Collect (talk) 18:51, 4 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Nah, that's spot-on. I've experienced this first-hand, having great difficulty with a specific turn in some swing-dancing instruction. In the second day of failure at it, the instructor distracted me by having me talk about the upcoming dance event and who I was taking to it, as we went through that part of the sequence, and the turn fell right into place because my body and less conscious mental processes knew exactly how it should go. Same with various skating stuff in my youth; I couldn't master a kick-flip after hours and hours, and wrecked my shins trying, but it quite literally came to me in a dream that night, a feeling how it should go, of the necessary (physics-wise, the completely inevitable) flow of the move, and the next day I got it in 5 minutes. Anyway, my actual reading speed is actually quite ponderous (about equal to my typing rate, which is much higher than average but still slow compared to much of anyone's reading speed). A side-effect is that it makes me a good MoS-compliance editor, since I'm poring over every word; I just have to hang that up for the day when the letters start swimming around.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:13, 4 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Previously unreleased video of SMcCandlish skating --Guy Macon (talk) 00:35, 5 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Schweeet. I was talking about the board kind, though [12] (and it was to a soundtrack mostly published by SST Records, though I will out myself as actually a secret fan of "Funkytown").  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:47, 5 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
It girl. Clara was the cats pajamas. Randy Kryn (talk) 01:22, 6 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, I'm a fan. One of my favorite books ever, at least in the visual arts realm, is Jazz Age Beauties: The Lost Collection of Ziegfeld Photographer Alfred Cheney Johnston. I'm just irritated that it's so small, instead of a coffee-table book.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:02, 7 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

John T. Koch

Is it my imagination, or were you complaining a while back that he had no article (with the implication it would have been vulnerable at AFD)? In fact he's been officially notable since 2010. Though if it wasn't him, do you remember who it was? Johnbod (talk) 02:11, 5 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I'm misremembering. I think I may have wondered why his Celtic-from-the-west hypothesis didn't have an article (well, it's not just his – if even the preeminent Barry Cunliffe propounds it, it has wings). I've worked a little on Koch's page, but I had a browser crash and, despite plugins for saving form input, I lost hours of work on it. Haven't had the heart to pick it back up again yet; have to wash the blood off my keyboard first [13]. If there was a bio about which I'd said something to this effect, I'm not sure. I say that sort of thing pretty frequently. There are so many subjects (especially academics and other non-"celebrities") that are just right on the edge of notable.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:40, 5 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
As I said at the time, wherever it was, it's rarely a notability issue, but a nobody-has-bothered-to write-it issue. I expect I referred to the several '000 Fellows of the Royal Society (inherently notable of course) with no article, many still alive and kicking. Johnbod (talk) 15:05, 5 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Details-wise, I'm drawing a blank.  :-(  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  16:12, 5 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Oh well. On the non-bio issue, we have Atlantic Bronze Age & I think Koch's views are reasonably well-represented at Celts, the language articles and so on. Johnbod (talk) 18:16, 5 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Glad to hear that.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:46, 6 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Use of circa with non-dates

Is the use of Circa in a non-date function something that's done here? I know that circa means "approximately", but I've only ever seen it used with dates. The California High-Speed Rail article, where the subject of the article isn't built yet, apparently uses circa when mentioning the lengths of track in the infobox. But is that a correct use? It seems weird to me, but the template page doesn't specify any non-use situations. I'm asking you because your name was the only one I recognized as a recent poster in the Circa talk page. Thanks for any input you can offer.  Spintendo  16:36, 5 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

IMHO, "circa" is a well-known term, and it is not restricted to dates. Dates are, however, the most common place for "circa" to be used. "Rush Hour on I-95 runs circa 24 hours" seems clear enough. It is simply not a "common usage". When dealing with measurements, use of "about" is simpler, and thus generally preferred. Collect (talk) 19:16, 5 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Much appreciated!  Spintendo  00:05, 6 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@Spintendo: I concur with Collect. I've encountered it used with distances and some other things, but it comes across as an old-fashioned usage, and seems to have lost currency, while the usage with time/date remains very common.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  18:56, 7 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

FYI

[14] --Guy Macon (talk) 18:13, 5 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

If Arbcom doesn't do something about this sort of behavior, we really should file an ANI report concerning his WP:NOTHERE behavior on multiple pages (not just at arbcom). --Guy Macon (talk) 18:16, 5 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
This sort of thing can also be taken to AE, since it's disruptive and pertaining to the subject area about which he recently received a {{Ds/alert}}. The broader (years-long) pattern of off-topic blathering and ranting, plus frequent incivility and personal attacks, however, is a bigger, ANI matter.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  11:02, 6 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

DYK

Hi Stanton, hope you are well. Just a quick message to apologise if you were worried about me nominating the ground billiards article for DYK. I wasn't sure if you were ok with that. I've done quite a few pool dyks recently, but realised I didn't ask about this one before nominating. Hope that's ok. Best Wishes, Lee Vilenski (talk • contribs) 21:47, 7 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

No, no, have it! I'm so happy to see this stuff actually get into the 'pedia proper. I kept sitting on it for too long, lingering over the unresolved bits you wisely just commented out.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  21:49, 7 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
No problem. It's a notable topic; so it's more likely someone will find all those missing bits of information. I don't have a great deal of knowledge on the subject, so thanks for giving it a once over. Best Wishes, Lee Vilenski (talk • contribs) 07:18, 8 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Good one. I have an interest, as you may remember. This sentence jarred, despite having just read who he was, "probably most commonly made of wood. Cotton, writing" However, it is late, the rabbit is the article I'm wrestling with today, Nabarlek. cygnis insignis 22:12, 7 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, I never would have guess that. As for that sentence, I'll try tweaking it. Some kind of joke about cottontails is probably in there, but I can't seem to ferret it out.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:02, 7 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Done.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:05, 7 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Brought back by the crusaders, as so many things apparently were, but the point the author makes about being maintained by the clergy rings true. It is easy to imagine how that allowed refinement of rules and equipment, regional competitions, and so on. I would probably have joined the clergy to get access to the billiards. cygnis insignis 07:10, 8 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Stein & Rubino make a really good case for it, and it can be backed up well with parallel histories of other games that became sports. A large number of them were developed in monasteries, during a period when much of Europe tried to forbid any organized game-playing of any kind to the common people (as the Devil directing idle hands away from work toward pursuits that too often turned violent in and of themselves and led to gambling and other vices). We got tennis and various related games via the church, as well as several forms of bowls and bowling (both obviously related to ground billiards – start whacking the ball into the air, or abandon the stick and use your hands), and they helped preserved in Europe various gentler Eastern games like chess and backgammon. Suppression of peasant games was hardly successful all the time, of course, especially with regard to big events like bull-runs and early forms of football (more like inter-village brawls) – sometimes troops were sent to suppress the events. And lots of dice and card games also survived (having easy-to-conceal implements of play). The rationale for the suppression was secular profiteering off the serfs and maintenance of power over them. Within the cloister walls, the church had different concerns, like keeping young monks from getting bored enough to seek out prostitutes, etc. The games developed within their walls – often with complex rulesets and requiring considerable skill – were eventually picked up in royals' courts (there was a lot of permeability between the two spheres, with higher clergy almost always being from the nobility, as with military officers, who also helped preserve and refine some games), and they spread out of court to the gentry then trickled down to commoner people, but mostly only as feudalism wound down. It was very gradual, tracking the progress of the Renaissance from around the 14th century until the real florescence of sport in the 18th. One interesting thing I ran across a while back was that the Spanish language simply did not have a word for 'sport' at all until well into this era, and had to backform deporte as an intentional neologism, along the same lines as the more natural disport in English (later shortened to sport) and desport in Old to Middle French (both from a Latin root meaning 'to behave', i.e. in that context 'to follow gentlemanly rules'). By the time of renewed wide-scale public game-playing by the people, the French had lost this meaning of what became déport, and borrowed sport directly from English. It's weird to imagine entire cultures with organized game-play so suppressed they didn't have the words for it. (They did have words for simple games, like juego in Spanish and jeu in French; like English joke, they're both from from Latin iocus, 'play, jest, pastime'.)  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  08:14, 8 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
(talk page watcher) I call bullshit on entire cultures with organized game-play so suppressed they didn't have the words for it, at least with regards to Europe in this period. Because of sport's utility in getting young men fit for service should they be called on to join the militia, if anything the authorities in this period had an obsession with sport unparalleled in modern times, from the jousting tournaments of the nobility, to buhurt mass brawls, to weird-ass sports like goose pulling and fox tossing (and the even weirder stuff that grew up in the Spanish Empire like pato), to compulsory participation in archery contests for yeoman farmers, and that's before we get on to the entire competitive hunting-shooting-fishing subculture. The sports played may have changed from that day to this, but the concept of organized sport has been a part of all major European cultures right back to the start of recorded history; it's only the specific notion of professional team sports that's a 19th-century development ‑ Iridescent 22:08, 8 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Military-oriented competition (mostly target oriented, or directly martial, like boxing/wrestling) were a big deal, but largely controlled by the military (i.e., the nobility); if the lord of your land wanted an archery competition, then he got one, and might authorize various other things at a festival (a controlled gathering with guards aplenty), but he'd not take too kindly to 100 of you having a near riot on his land for your own amusement and without supervision. The common people weren't able to participate in things like jousts, just watch them. Organized games without a practical and regulated aim like fight-training were banned (for the common folk) in various places by various rulers for considerable periods, including in England, along with gambling-oriented activities like card games. The latter were seen as vices, and the former as threats to order and the gentry. The army was sometimes sent out to stop things like bull runs. Didn't stop people, entirely, of course, and this kind of oppression wasn't universal; it came and went, and affected some areas barely at all. A lot of animal-oriented stuff seems to have been exempted (bear-baiting, etc.), but not when it got too many people together in one place for landholder comfort. England was trying to suppress bull runs well into the 19th c. (for the "lawlessness" reasons, not out of animal welfare concerns. Even in English, "sport" and "sporting" and such often referred to hunting-related activities until pretty recently; the lines blurred, and "let's kill some animals" was often in the mix.) So few forms of football survived probably as a result of the suppression; we know that villages had quite violent matches between each other without permission (there are some eyewitness accounts) but little is known of the rules, to the extent any existed and lasted more than a generation. Things like Rugby come down to us because of later institutions (of the upper class). Same with cricket and many other sports; they weren't pastimes of the common folk, though folk forms of stick-ball in general were clearly being played in numerous variations whether it was approved of or not. The suppression for long stretches does see to have had a language effect, since French lost its general word for it, and Spanish didn't develop one, and even the words for "game" in these languages doubled as a word for "joke" and other forms of amusement.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:52, 8 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Without most of my relevant books available (in boxes due to moving), the earliest game-ban stuff I'm finding in a trivial amount of searching around is Henry III of England banning boules among the military, so they would practice archery and such instead of gambling over ball games. So, even the military dispensation for competitive activity had limits; if it wasn't practical, it was out, at least inasmuch as something like that would be enforceable. PS: Bowling-type games (which would have included ground billiards probably) were legally banned for all commoners in France (to whatever actual effect) starting with Charles IV and Charles V in the 14th c., and the ban wasn't lifted until the 17th c., which is quite a long time. The games were still played but largely by the gentry, including the clergy (we know they were since detailed account of them survived, and the games, including jeu de mail, spread around from court to court and eventually became popular in England, as bowls and pall-mall).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:55, 8 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

RFAR declined

A request for arbitration in which you were involved has been declined. For the Arbitration Committee, Miniapolis 18:19, 8 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Kinda figured. :-) There were already 10 votes several days ago (5 no, 3 yes, 2 abstain, which is all 10 active Arbs).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  18:29, 8 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Deletion review for Template:Puke

 Commented at the DRV. An editor has asked for a deletion review of Template:Puke. Because you closed the deletion discussion for this page, speedily deleted it, or otherwise were interested in the page, you might want to participate in the deletion review. Zackmann (Talk to me/What I been doing) 21:15, 8 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  • I just reviewed that AfD and thought I'd summarize it to save other editors time:
Q: "Why should we keep the template?"
A: "Because it is puking on McCandlish."
Closer: "QED."
Leviv ich 21:32, 8 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I think it should be deleted because it's an insensitive mockery of people with eating disorders. Keeping this template is a trigger and is harming people. Someone might suicide over it, and even if they don't, it sends a terrible signal to the entire world, which is always watching every petty dispute on Wikipedia, that the project is hostile to people who are nutritionally different and gastrically challenged.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:07, 8 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I object to your insensitive use of the phrase "sends a terrible signal" I had a terrible experience with a railway signal (I won't get into the painful details, but it also involved a platypus and an ornithopter), and any mention of "terrible signals" triggers me. --Guy Macon (talk) 22:23, 8 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Isn't all this "trigger" talk an insensitive trivialization of the victims and survivors of gun violence?  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:53, 8 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
You are right! How could I be so thoughtless? I think that the paqge I linked the "T" word to above says it all. --Guy Macon (talk) 23:16, 8 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Apologies in advance to any thoughtless-Americans who might be offended by the above. --Guy Macon (talk) 23:16, 8 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Getting back to the deletion review, I just !voted and at the same time asked the question "Would it be possible within the rules for deletion reviews to do what Kusma suggested late in the TfD, which is to delete and then re-purpose it as 🤮? --Guy Macon (talk) 02:31, 9 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Could be done after-the-fact regardless; WP:CSD has a line-item for re-creating previously deleted material, but it doesn't apply to re-using now-vacant page titles for something else.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  09:42, 9 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Please comment on WP:Reliable sources/Noticeboard

 Done

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard. Legobot (talk) 04:23, 9 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Combining parameters in Template:Db-t2

Almost exactly three years ago, you added a parameter (reason) to {{db-t2}}, basically treating it as a parenthetical to the unnamed 1. Was there a reason for that as opposed to just using combining them? I've merged them in the sandbox, what do you think about doing it that way? ~ Amory (u • t • c) 16:46, 10 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

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