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Administrative discussions

Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard#RfC closure review request at Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard/Archive 433#Closing (archived) RfC: Mondoweiss

(Initiated 13 days ago on 16 April 2024) - already the oldest thread on the page. starship.paint (RUN) 14:43, 26 April 2024 (UTC)

Requests for comment

Talk:Indo-Pakistani_war_of_1947–1948#RfC_on_what_result_is_to_be_entered_against_the_result_parameter_of_the_infobox

(Initiated 129 days ago on 22 December 2023) No new comments for over 45 days. Ratnahastin (talk) 07:24, 24 April 2024 (UTC)

Talk:Awdal#RFC - Habr Awal/Isaaq clan

(Initiated 126 days ago on 24 December 2023) ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 21:17, 24 January 2024 (UTC)

Talk: Interstate 90#RFC: Infobox junctions

(Initiated 59 days ago on 29 February 2024) Discussion is about to expire and will need closure. RoadFan294857 (talk) 15:37, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:Criteria for speedy deletion#RfC: enacting X3

(Initiated 52 days ago on 7 March 2024) SilverLocust 💬 22:51, 30 March 2024 (UTC)

I came here to add this discussion here. There have been no new comments for over a fortnight. Thryduulf (talk) 14:13, 25 April 2024 (UTC)

Question for other folks at CR: does my single comment in this discussion suggesting an edit to the RfC statement for clarity preclude me from closing this discussion as involved? voorts (talk/contributions) 01:26, 29 April 2024 (UTC)

Talk:2024 United States presidential election#RFC: What should the criteria of inclusion be for the infobox? (Question 1)

(Initiated 46 days ago on 14 March 2024) It's been about two weeks, since the RFC tag expired. GoodDay (talk) 14:07, 28 April 2024 (UTC)

RfC: Change INFOBOXUSE to recommend the use of infoboxes?

(Initiated 44 days ago on 15 March 2024) Ready to be closed. Charcoal feather (talk) 17:02, 27 April 2024 (UTC)

Talk:Russo-Ukrainian War#RFC on Listing of Belarus

(Initiated 44 days ago on 16 March 2024) Hello, this RFC was started on 16 March 2024 and as of now was active for more than a month (nearly 1,5 month to be exact). I think a month is enough for every interested user to express their opinion and to vote at RFC and the last vote at this RFC was made by user Mellk on 15 April 2024 (nearly two weeks ago and within a month since the start of this RFC). The question because of which this RFC was started previously resulted in quite strong disagreements between multiple users, but I think there already is a WP:CONS of 12 users who already voted at this RFC. Since the contentious topics procedure applies to page Russo-Ukrainian War, I think this RFC must be closed by uninvolved user/administrator to ensure a valid WP:CONS and to prevent further disputes/edit warring about this question in the future. -- Pofka (talk) 09:50, 27 April 2024 (UTC)

Will an experienced uninvolved editor please close this RFC. If there is a consensus that Belarus should be listed, but not as to how it should be listed, please close with the least strong choice, Robert McClenon (talk) 17:08, 27 April 2024 (UTC)

I think it should not be closed with the "least strong choice", but instead with a choice which received the most votes (the strongest choice). The most users chose C variant (in total 6 users: My very best wishes, Pofka, Gödel2200, ManyAreasExpert, Licks-rocks, CVDX), while the second strongest choice was A variant (in total 5 users). So I think the WP:CONS of this RFC question is C variant. -- Pofka (talk) 18:33, 27 April 2024 (UTC)

Talk:SpaceX Starship#RfC on IFT-3

(Initiated 39 days ago on 21 March 2024) This is a contentious issue with accusations of tendentious editing, so the RfC would benefit from a formal closure. Redraiderengineer (talk) 14:48, 14 April 2024 (UTC)

A note for the closing editor... an inexperienced editor attempted to close this discussion and didn't really address the arguments. There's been some edit warring over the close, but it should be resolved by an experienced, uninvolved editor. Nemov (talk) 19:28, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

Another note for the closing editor: beware the related discussion at Talk:SpaceX Starship#Do not classify IFT-1, 2 and 3 as success or failure. —Compassionate727 ^(T·C) 00:44, 20 April 2024 (UTC)

That discussion has only been going for two weeks and closing the RfC will not preclude editors from coming to a consensus on whether or not to remove the categorization entirely. voorts (talk/contributions) 01:28, 20 April 2024 (UTC)

RfC: Is the OCB RS?

(Initiated 34 days ago on 26 March 2024) This WP:RSN RfC was initiated on March 26, with the last !vote occurring on March 28. Ten editors participated in the discussion and, without prejudicing the close one way or the other, I believe a closer may discover a clear consensus emerged. It was bot-archived without closure on April 4 due to lack of recent activity. Chetsford (talk) 21:51, 4 April 2024 (UTC)

Talk:Libertarian Party (Australia)#Conservatism

(Initiated 30 days ago on 29 March 2024) RfC template expired. TarnishedPath^talk 01:22, 29 April 2024 (UTC)

Deletion discussions

XFD backlog

V	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	Total
CfD	0	0	0	18	18
TfD	0	0	0	0	0
MfD	0	0	0	1	1
FfD	0	0	0	1	1
RfD	0	0	0	43	43
AfD	0	0	0	0	0

Other types of closing requests

Talk:Killing of journalists in the Israel–Hamas war#Merge proposal (5 January 2024)

(Initiated 114 days ago on 5 January 2024) The discussion has been inactive for two weeks, with a preference against the merge proposal. CarmenEsparzaAmoux (talk) 19:39, 24 April 2024 (UTC)

Talk:Eat_Bulaga!#Merger_of_Eat_Bulaga!_and_E.A.T.

(Initiated 114 days ago on 6 January 2024) The discussion wasn't inactive for 7 days. It seems there's no clear consensus on merging those two articles into one. 107.185.128.255 (talk) 18:16, 3 February 2024 (UTC)

It's been over a month. So, it could be a good time to close that discussion. 107.185.128.255 (talk) 17:55, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

Talk:Saleh al-Arouri#Merge proposal

(Initiated 108 days ago on 11 January 2024) Discussion has stalled since March with no new comments. It appears that there is no clear consensus. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Aviationwikiflight (talk • contribs) 11:06, 25 April 2024 (UTC)

Talk:Frederik_IX_of_Denmark#Requested_move_15_January_2024

(Initiated 105 days ago on 15 January 2024) – Requested move open for 2 months, needs closure.98.228.137.44 (talk) 18:36, 30 March 2024 (UTC)

Now has been open for three months. 170.76.231.175 (talk) 15:17, 15 April 2024 (UTC)

Talk:Maersk Hangzhou#Second merge proposal

(Initiated 96 days ago on 24 January 2024) Merge discussion involving CTOPS that has been open for 2 weeks now. Needs closure. The Weather Event Writer (Talk Page) 04:46, 8 February 2024 (UTC)

@WeatherWriter: I would give it a few days as the discussion is now active with new comments. GoldenBootWizard276 (talk) 00:00, 3 March 2024 (UTC)

As nominator, I support a non consensus closure of this discussion so we can create an RFC to discuss how WP:ONEEVENT applies in this situation. GoldenBootWizard276 (talk) 21:56, 9 March 2024 (UTC)

Talk:1985_Pacific_hurricane_season#Proposed_merge_of_Hurricane_Ignacio_(1985)_into_1985_Pacific_hurricane_season

(Initiated 90 days ago on 30 January 2024) Listing multiple non-unanimous merge discussions from January that have run their course. Noah, AA^Talk 13:50, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

Talk:2003_Pacific_hurricane_season#Proposed_merge_of_Hurricane_Nora_(2003)_into_2003_Pacific_hurricane_season

(Initiated 90 days ago on 30 January 2024) Noah, AA^Talk 13:50, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

Talk:Pharnavaz_I_of_Iberia#Requested_move_6_February_2024

(Initiated 83 days ago on 6 February 2024) Requested move open for nearly 2 months. Natg 19 (talk) 17:46, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

Talk:12 February 2024 Rafah strikes#Merge proposal to Rafah offensive

(Initiated 76 days ago on 13 February 2024) The discussion has been inactive for over a month, with a clear preference against the merge proposal. CarmenEsparzaAmoux (talk) 19:35, 24 April 2024 (UTC)

Talk:2 World Trade Center#Split proposal 16 February 2024

(Initiated 72 days ago on 16 February 2024) Split discussion started over a month ago. TarnishedPath^talk 11:19, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

Talk:Genital_modification_and_mutilation#Requested_move_26_February_2024

(Initiated 63 days ago on 26 February 2024) – Requested move open several months, needs closure. Natg 19 (talk) 22:29, 18 April 2024 (UTC)

Talk:Rupert_Sheldrake#Talkpage_"This_article_has_been_mentioned_by_a_media_organization:"_BRD

(Initiated 12 days ago on 16 April 2024) - Discussion on a talkpage template, Last comment 6 days ago, 10 comments, 4 people in discussion. Not unanimous, but perhaps there is consensus-ish or strength of argument-ish closure possible. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 07:24, 23 April 2024 (UTC)

Pages recently put under extended-confirmed protection

Report

Pages recently put under extended confirmed protection (28 out of 7631 total) () WATCH Page Protected Expiry Type Summary Admin Cliff Cash 2024-04-29 15:24 2024-06-04 12:22 move Persistent sockpuppetry: extending Ohnoitsjamie Michael D. Aeschliman 2024-04-29 06:44 2024-05-13 06:44 edit,move Violations of the biographies of living persons policy Anachronist Wikipedia:Free encyclopedia 2024-04-29 03:24 indefinite edit,move Drop prot Pppery White Colombians 2024-04-29 03:17 2024-05-20 03:17 edit,move Persistent sockpuppetry: straight to WP:ECP due to involvement also of several confirmed accounts El C Government of Iran 2024-04-28 20:25 2025-04-28 20:25 edit,move Contentious topic restriction: WP:CT/IRP ToBeFree Everyone Knows That (Ulterior Motives) 2024-04-28 17:30 2024-04-30 15:20 edit Addition of unsourced or poorly sourced content: increase requested at WP:RFPP Favonian Draft:The Car Accident Lawyer Group 2024-04-28 08:07 indefinite create Repeatedly recreated Jimfbleak Battle of Ajmer 2024-04-28 06:42 2024-05-05 06:42 move Don't move an article being discussed at an AFD discussion Liz Khymani James 2024-04-27 21:35 2025-04-27 21:35 edit,move Contentious topics enforcement for WP:CT/A-I; requested at WP:RfPP Daniel Quinlan Minouche Shafik 2024-04-27 18:35 indefinite edit,move oops, accidentally full-protected Daniel Case User:Travism121212/Privacy law - Group D 2024-04-27 06:36 2024-05-04 06:36 move Stop moving this article around. Submit to WP:AFC for review Liz Travism121212/Privacy law 2024-04-26 22:17 2024-05-03 22:17 create Repeatedly recreated Liz Connecting Humanity 2024-04-26 19:45 indefinite edit,move Contentious topic restriction: WP:PIA, WP:ECR El C Mirna El Helbawi 2024-04-26 19:45 indefinite edit,move Contentious topic restriction: WP:PIA, WP:ECR El C User:Samory Loukakou/Erin Meyer 2024-04-26 18:29 indefinite create Repeatedly recreated; requested at WP:RfPP BusterD 24 Oras 2024-04-26 18:25 2024-06-26 18:25 move Persistent vandalism; requested at WP:RfPP BusterD Nasimi Aghayev 2024-04-26 17:17 indefinite edit Community sanctions enforcement: sorry, WP:GS/AA, that is (so many AAs!) El C Atrocity propaganda 2024-04-26 17:09 indefinite edit,move Community sanctions enforcement: WP:GS/RUSUKR, WP:PIA and others, I'm sure El C Timeline of the Russian invasion of Ukraine (1 April 2024 – present) 2024-04-26 16:49 indefinite edit,move and it continues... Robertsky Beit Hanoun 2024-04-26 14:48 indefinite edit,move Arbitration enforcement: WP:AELOG/2024#PIA Malinaccier Rangiya Municipal Board 2024-04-26 13:12 indefinite create Repeatedly recreated by sock of Rang HD Dennis Brown Siege of Chernihiv 2024-04-26 12:40 indefinite edit,move WP:GS/RUSUKR Filelakeshoe Bed Bath & Beyond (online retailer) 2024-04-26 03:31 indefinite move Repeated article moves despite recent RM discussion Liz Carlos Handy 2024-04-26 00:14 2025-04-26 00:14 edit,move Contentious topics enforcement for WP:CT/BLP; requested at WP:RfPP Daniel Quinlan Pro-Palestinian protests on university campuses in the United States 2024-04-25 22:17 indefinite edit,move Arbitration enforcement ScottishFinnishRadish Israa University (Palestine) 2024-04-25 17:35 indefinite edit,move Contentious topic restriction: per RFPP and ARBPIA Daniel Case Blu del Barrio 2024-04-25 17:14 indefinite edit,move Contentious topic restriction Daniel Case Gaza Strip mass graves 2024-04-25 17:03 indefinite edit,move Arbitration enforcement Red Phoenix

Changes to User pages guideline

This diff shows this month's changes to the guideline. These have been implemented with a minimum of discussion among a handful of editors. I commented that I thought an RfC was needed to make these changes, and I was shut down. I have been involved in these kinds of disputes as to whether changes to a policy or guideline are sufficiently substantive to require a larger discussion than a "normal" talk page discussion, and it's frustrating at best. Then, what sometimes happens in the future is we get stuck with changes that often administrators have to follow with the obvious question "when did that get changed"?

Many of the changes in the above diff are organizational and do not change the substance of the guideline, so I'll highlight the ones I believe are substantive:

• Very divisive or offensive material not related to encyclopedia editing -> Divisive material not related to encyclopedia editing
• Inappropriate or excessive personal information unrelated to Wikipedia. -> Inappropriate or excessive personal information unrelated to Wikipedia. The amount of leeway for userspace material is generally considered to be in proportion to the user's contributions to Wikipedia. A non-contributor may not post an autobiography.
• If you wish to delete your own page, tag the top of the page with {{db-u1}}, and an administrator will delete it for you. However, note that user talk pages are normally not deleted. -> If you wish to delete your own page, tag the top of the page with {{db-u1}}, and an administrator will delete it for you. However, note that your main user talk pages will not normally be deleted.

With that much moving material around to different places, I might have (1) put in something that didn't really change or (2) failed to put in something that did change.

I'm unwilling to try to push the RfC point on the guideline talk page. Nor am I willing to start a "negative" RfC myself as I'm not advocating any changes to the guideline. Often these kinds of changes are triggered by one or more editors being frustrated by a particular interpretation of the guideline and moving from micro to macro to try to "fix" the problem. Anyway, I've done as much as I feel able to do by bringing this here.--Bbb23 (talk) 14:07, 25 February 2019 (UTC)

• Shut down? You said something, I responded.

A minimum of discussion? A minimum of discussion would be zero discussion. There is more than zero discussion.

—SmokeyJoe (talk) 14:18, 25 February 2019 (UTC)

Oh come on. Spare us the vocabulary lesson. It's obvious they meant "little" discussion. ―Mandruss ☎ 15:27, 25 February 2019 (UTC)

• Actually, this should be brought here, and thanks to Bbb23 for doing so. And also, yes, changes such as these should have a RfC and been advertised at WP:CENT: they comprehensively affect every new page patroller, spam / vandal fighter and yes admin on the project. FWIW, I agree, at first glance, with some of the proposed changes—for example emphasising the disruption caused by PROMO/WEBHOSTing userpages (indeed, perosnally, I think it could go even further); on the other hand, redefing what is "Divisive material" in the absence of a major discussion could be seen as, well, rather divisive. ——SerialNumber54129 14:30, 25 February 2019 (UTC)
• I would generally be in favour of full-protecting every page that is classified as a policy - changes, even minor ones, should not be made to sitewide policies without discussion. In this instance what I see is mostly just moving things from one point to another, but things like changing "very divisive" to "divisive" are changes with inherently major consequences, the "amount of leeway" bit should not have been added without much wider discussion (it violates WP:ANYONECANEDIT as worded, for one thing), and creating a WP:FIGHTINGWORDS shortcut seems like it's inviting conflict. I endorse everything SN54129 said above. Ivanvector (^Talk/_Edits) 15:16, 25 February 2019 (UTC)

  I thought this was overkill until I saw the history. There are a lot of undiscussed changes there, and had they been discussed in a public place (where people that do not have every policy page on their watchlist would notice) I would have opposed. Natureium (talk) 15:42, 25 February 2019 (UTC)

  I generally agree, the current system is seriously flawed. Paradoxically, your suggestion to tighten the protocol would make it more difficult to correct problems resulting from 17 years under the looser protocol. Smarter folks than I would have to figure that out. ―Mandruss ☎ 15:48, 25 February 2019 (UTC)

• At the very least, these changes needed far greater publicity and transparency, and policy changes should not be made by small numbers of people who happen to hang out on talk pages of policy pages - such things should be more widely advertised. My thanks to Bbb23 for alerting us to this. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 15:21, 25 February 2019 (UTC)
• I don't necessarily disagree with the changes, but they need much wider discussion because they are indeed a significant change tot he existing guidance. Guy (Help!) 15:27, 25 February 2019 (UTC)
• The bit about The amount of leeway for userspace material is generally considered to be in proportion to the user's contributions to Wikipedia. A non-contributor may not post an autobiography., while possibly reflecting current usage, is rather a daring addition in the absence of centralized discussion. An RFC couldn't hurt. --Elmidae (talk · contribs) 15:30, 25 February 2019 (UTC)
• Echoing the above; it should have been RFC with publicity. GiantSnowman 15:59, 25 February 2019 (UTC)
• Piling on here: yes, although I agree with certain of the changes and disagree with others (and at least one appears to be seriously POV and pointy), they should not have been implemented without an RfC. I suggest that all the cited changes be revered to the LGV, and am RfC (or multuple RfCs), advertised on CENT, be started. Beyond My Ken (talk) 19:26, 25 February 2019 (UTC)
• I do agree give the importance of this guideline and the amount of change, it needs more discussion than it has received. This will hopefully also help deal with untagged redirects. For example, WP:SHITLIST currently redirects to polemic even though the most relevant part has been moved out of that table entirely. (I know this because I tried to refer to it but was confused when it didn't exist earlier today. Funnily enough, I also did refer to something which I find now does exist i.e. that people are likely to be more tolerant of stuff coming from established editors although I did add even if they shouldn't be. Nil Einne (talk) 22:32, 25 February 2019 (UTC)
• I was surprised to find that I am suddenly in violation because of these changes.

The guideline now says "User categories must be subcategories of Category:Wikipedians".

I and several other editors have

Category:Wikipedians with red-linked categories on their user talk page

on their user talk pages.

I also have added

Category:WikiProject Technology participants

and

Category:Members of the Ten Year Society of Wikipedia editors

and have have various templates add me to cats like

Category:User Assembly Language-4,

Category:WikiProject Cryptography participants

and

Category:Wikipedia semi-protected user and user talk pages

without me explicitly adding a cat for them.

None of these are subcategories of Category:Wikipedians, so all are technically violation of the guideline.

I also don't think the paragraph telling us to not include copyrighted files lacking a free content license should have been removed without discussion. --Guy Macon (talk) 02:22, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

Copyrighted files? Why should a guideline be paraphrasing the policy, Wikipedia:Non-free content criteria#Policy dot point #9? --SmokeyJoe (talk) 04:29, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

Excellent point Guy Macon. See Wikipedia_talk:User_pages#Remove_the_Usercat_reference. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 04:26, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

• I'm going to go against the grain here and just say no, an RfC should not be a first step for something like this. First, there are a bunch of different changes there. Some were very minor. Some were just organizational, without changing content. Some were a little bigger. None were major. A single RfC on all of them would just be a bureaucratic mess, and having a bunch of RfCs for each proposed change is, well, a bureaucratic mess in a different way. I don't agree that any edit to a policy is a major edit that needs an RfC. I would be curious to hear what great effect "Very divisive" being changed to "divisive" would have that can't be resolved on the talk page, for example (which is not to say that there's not a difference -- it's just not a huge change that demands refraining from standard levels of boldness in projectspace). There was discussion about some of them, and anyone else can jump in, contest, discuss, etc. Regarding the two additions that codify practice, I don't see where anyone has contested them. If instead of that SmokeyJoe changed the guideline in some way that was a leap from the way things are currently done, then sure, best to discuss beforehand, but not this stuff. Come on now. This is squarely in the domain of the sensibly bold (and barely bold). I'm not trying to endorse the changes here, btw -- just saying there's no reason for all of this hubbub. Make a change if it's not radical; if someone objects they can undo, and it goes to the talk page. If they're unsatisfied with the discussion, then think about posting to VP or, eventually, an RfC. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 02:47, 26 February 2019 (UTC)
• Holy hell, no, you can't just boldly alter policies and guidelines like that based on local discussions, and attempting to is egregious. You can't just add clauses to policy and claim they "reflect practice". You can't just "improve" the wording in a way that changes the meaning. Policies and guidelines are supposed to reflect the highest level of community consensus, thus trumping any lesser rulings. Beyond the most minor aesthetic or wording changes, policy alterations need to be as widely advertised to the community as possible. If hosting RfCs is too "bureaucratic" for your liking, then stay the hell away from editing policies! I can't believe this even needs to be discussed! ~Swarm~ {talk} 03:34, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

• ^File me under everything that Swarm said. Mr rnddude (talk) 13:56, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

• Oppose an RFC. There is nothing earth shattering and the section needed a good rewrite. If you don't like something propose a specific change on talk or fix it and see if it sticks. Legacypac (talk) 03:34, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

• The suggestion that users should apply "be bold" to editing policies and guidelines, and "see if it sticks" is unbelievable. Policies and guidelines are the highest form of community consensus. "Seeing if it sticks", on the other hand, is the weakest form of consensus. This may not seem "earth shattering", but if everyone started doing this, our fundamental system would completely break down. ~Swarm~ {talk} 03:41, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

• I broadly support those changes. In recent months, I have seen marked increase in the number accounts created purely to user the userpage as webshost, so some tightening up was long overdue.

I have some sympathy with the calls for an RFC, but that may be excessive. It seems to me that for policy/guidleine changes we need some process which essentially offers wide notification without necessarily requiring a discussion.

That is used in the UK and Scottish parliaments, where it is called the "negative procedure" (see Scottish statutory instrument#Negative_procedure and Statutory instrument (UK)#Negative_resolution_procedure). In both cases, the action proceeds unless a moation is passed to stop it.

On en.wp, we have some processes which are similar in that they proceed unless objected to, but have a lower thrshold of objection: one objection can stop a WP:CFDS within 48 hours, and one objection can stop halts a WP:PROD within 7 days. In each case, there is the option of a full discussion on a contested proposal. Both process are lightweight, but have in common some combination of of local tagging and central listing.

Something similar could be implemented for guidelines, giving us a step in between a local talkpage discussion and a central RFC. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 04:15, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

• Procedurally, if you can't agree, start an RFC. Being a "negative question" doesn't matter, the wording can be "Should we revert to the version of DATE". power~enwiki (π, ν) 04:24, 26 February 2019 (UTC)
• While folks sit here and dither about what to do, more changes are being made. I haven't been following them as I don't see the point. It's easy what should be done. All the changes in February should be reverted. Any substantive changes should be made by RfC. If there are multiple substantive changes that need to be made, then there needs to be multiple RfCs unless there is a way of handling them in one. As for supposed procedural, minor, and/or organizational changes, surely they can wait. There's no urgency to any of this. Somehow - I'm sure I don't know how - we have survived all this time without these changes, and we will continue to do so even if no changes are made. We don't need an RfC to remove the changes. We're here. We just need to do it. As for the future, I agree with Ivanvector that the policy on changing policies and guidelines needs to be tightened. This sort of thing happens more often than it should.--Bbb23 (talk) 13:24, 26 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Strongly agree that we need to tighten our policy on changing policies and guidelines. Doug Weller talk 13:32, 26 February 2019 (UTC)
    • +1 Lectonar (talk) 13:34, 26 February 2019 (UTC)
      • It would be my preference for any proposed changes to a policy page (it's occurred to me that WP:USERPAGE is not actually a policy, so consider this a general comment) to be proposed through an RfC and advertised on WP:CENT as a basic requirement. Policies are supposed to reflect widespread consensus and practice, so an updating process in which a tiny subset of interested users can make changes without wider review is inherently broken. For the current situation, splitting the changes from the last stable version to a subpage draft might be a good approach, such that the guideline remains in its most recently agreed-upon version while the changes are being proposed elsewhere. Ivanvector (^Talk/_Edits) 13:47, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

  And of course, in case nobody else has observed it yet (today is payroll so I'm not reading everything), the problem here is that the tiny subset of users have made a controversial change (the user categories thing) and I have no doubt some are already going around making changes to other editors' userpages that don't comply with their new directive. It's only a matter of time before someone pushes back and we have a new drama-fest at ANI. These changes should be undone. Ivanvector (^Talk/_Edits) 13:49, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

@Ivanvector: I'm passing the buck, obvs, but frankly, unless it's done by an admin as an admin action, I doubt it will last an—hour, perhaps. ——SerialNumber54129 13:56, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

I know, I just don't want to throw fuel on the fire unless there's a clear consensus here. Someone uninvolved should probably evaluate this thread. There's no rush. Ivanvector (^Talk/_Edits) 13:58, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

It's ironic that on 20 Fby, Legacypac made a change which—certainly at first glance—seems to reflect current AfC practice, which was then reverted with the edit summary Rv bold removal of content that comes out of many past discussions! A reversion to "last stable version" as suggested by Bbb23 qualifies under those grounds also. ——SerialNumber54129 13:40, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

• These changes are obviously challenged. The status quo ante should be restored, and a proper RfC should take place. Nihlus 14:01, 26 February 2019 (UTC)
•  Done Page has been restored to 21st February 2019. --QEDK (後 ☕ 桜) 19:01, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

• @Davey2010: I've reverted your close. First, I think an admin should close this discussion. Second, I don't think your wording matches the consensus so far. QEDK, unless there are instructions to the contrary from the closing admin, all of the changes in February should be reverted. You did not go back far enough. To prevent confusion and because of my unclose, I'm going to revert your revert.--Bbb23 (talk) 23:40, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

Hi Bbb23, No worries, As I said I had absolutely no objections to anyone reverting it,

Just my 2c but changes to guidelines and policies IMHO should be discussed on talkpages first but meh that's my 2c. –Davey2010^Talk 00:57, 27 February 2019 (UTC)

@Bbb23: It's the same revision as the one latest of January. I know what I did, there was no mistake, all the changes in February were reverted. --QEDK (後 ☕ 桜) 13:46, 27 February 2019 (UTC)

@QEDK: You're right; my apologies. I was confused by two things: (1) your edit summary ("Restore to 21 Feb 2019 in lieu of RfC") and (2) the fact that you restored it to a February version (not the one in your edit summary), but one that was effectively the January 22 version because of a prior revert.--Bbb23 (talk) 14:18, 27 February 2019 (UTC)

It's not an issue, nw. It was the 21 Feb revision, I picked it because it essentially showed the first edit was reverted (which was the start of changes in the month) and the rest restored. Again, I don't mind the revert, I don't really mind the edits in the first place, except the fact they were challenged. --QEDK (後 ☕ 桜) 13:59, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

WP:PGBOLD is policy. So, go start an RFC about changing that if you don't think bold edits to policies and guidelines should be made, or that changes can't be made because of some concern about how few people were involved.

On that note however, editors who make bold changes to PAG should expect to be reverted and per PGBOLD should generally keep to 0- or 1-RR. I don't think that bar was met here by the editors interested in making these changes. --Izno (talk) 04:13, 28 February 2019 (UTC)

• After a fairly clear consensus that the changes to the guideline should not have been made without an RfC, this thread has died. I now wish I hadn't undone Davey's closure and reverted QEDK's restoration to the January version of the guidelines.--Bbb23 (talk) 02:06, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
• Per above comments its clear that more (even *some* would be nice) discussion is needed before making major changes, I have taken it back to the last diff from Jan. If someone wants to make an RFC and actually advertise it, which should be a requirement for any major change to a wide-ranging policy anyway, go ahead. Only in death does duty end (talk) 02:21, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

Thousands of Portals

The purpose of this posting is to discuss portals, hundreds of portals. There is already discussion at Village pump (Proposals) (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)#Hiatus_on_mass_creation_of_Portals) to stop the creation of large numbers of portals by User:The Transhumanist, and the consensus is going strongly in favor of a hiatus, and there have been no new portals created since 22 February, but there has been no agreement to stop the creation of portals. The discussion at VPR appears to have slowed down, with a very clear consensus for some sort of hiatus, although it is not clear whether everyone agrees that the consensus is to stop the semi-automated creation of portals, or to stop the semi-automated creation of portals by TTH, or to stop all creation of portals by TTH (since there seems to be disagreement on what is semi-automated creation). Some editors have suggested that these portals are the equivalent of redirects by Neelix that warrant mass destruction. Anyway, proposals at VPR are just that, proposals. I am bringing the discussion here.

Perhaps I don’t understand, but User:The Transhumanist appears to be saying that we need to use portals as an experiment in navigation and in innovation. I am not sure that I understand whether, by experiment, they mean testing, a new initiative, or what, but I am not sure that I understand what is being innovated, or why it requires hundreds or thousands of portals. Robert McClenon (talk) 02:51, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

Note that the mass hiatus wasn't on me per se, but applicable in general. It applies to everyone. It's so that nobody mass creates portals for the time being. That includes me.    — The Transhumanist   05:53, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

An Example and Some Comments

One of the portals that has been proposed by User:Legacypac for deletion is Portal:English language. A look at it, with its error messages, is sadly informative. It was one of Wikipedia's earliest portals, preceding the involvement of the current portal team of TTH and a few other editors. However, the current portal team has made breaking changes to Portal:English language, apparently in order to attempt to improve the maintenance of portals. They apparently don't know how to keep our existing portals working, so what business do they have creating thousands of additional portals? We are told that the new portals are maintenance-free or nearly maintenance-free, but have the new portals been created at the cost of breaking existing portals? Robert McClenon (talk) 03:39, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

Also, TTH says, above, that there is a hiatus that applies to everyone so that nobody mass creates portals for the time being. What is meant by mass creation, as opposed to individual creation? Are they agreeing not to create any portals for the time being? How long a time? Will they defer the creation of any new portals until (and unless) there is a consensus arrived at the criteria for the creation and maintenance of new portals? Robert McClenon (talk) 03:39, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

Also, if any editor wishes to propose mass deletion of portals, similar to Neely redirects, that can be Proposal 3 (or 4). Robert McClenon (talk) 03:39, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

Further investigation found 2 of the 8 portals linked off the top of the Mainpage had similar Red Script Errors where content should be. User:Moxy has now reverted these to pre-automation status. A lot of effort goes into keeping content linked from the Mainpage error free, yet this little Portal Project group replaced featured article quality portals with automated junk. Legacypac (talk) 03:46, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

Proposal 1: Interim Topic-Ban on New Portals

I propose a topic-ban on the creation of portals by User:The Transhumanist for three months, to provide time for the development of new guidelines on portals, to provide time to dispose of some of the portals at MFD, and to provide time to consider whether it is necessary to mass-destroy portals. Robert McClenon (talk) 02:51, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

• Support as proposer. Robert McClenon (talk) 03:02, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support the true number of portal creations by this user appears to be around 3500 portals since July 2018 (claims this here [1]). There were less than 1700 portals prior. On their talk they said it takes them 3 mins. 3 minutes is not enough time to properly consider content or what should be included. After we get a few automated portals deleted at MFD and the VP discussion reaches some closure I feel strongly we need to delete all the automated portals as a really bad idea. The template that automates these is up for deletion at Wikipedia:Templates_for_discussion/Log/2019_February_28#Template:Basic_portal_start_page Further, even though TTH disputes semi-automated creation here he says he uses "semi-automated methods of construction" and is using a "alpha-version script in development that speeds the process further" [2] Legacypac (talk) 03:12, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
• Comment. I need to investigate this issue a little further, but I was quite concerned about this before I even saw the thread, because I discovered Portal:Ursula K. Le Guin a few months ago. I've written a considerable portion of the content about Le Guin on Wikipedia, and even I think it's too narrow a topic for a portal; and when I raised this on the talk page, Transhumanist didn't respond, though they've been active. Transhumanist has been around for a while, so if they're willing to voluntarily stop creating portals while guidelines are worked out, I don't see a need for a formal restriction. Vanamonde (Talk) 03:21, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
• Response from The Transhumanist – The proposer of the hiatus, User:UnitedStatesian, acknowledged that my efforts have been in good faith. Note also that no rules have been broken (to my knowledge) – I carefully went over the existing mass creation rule and portal scope rule before starting. I have been a participant in the hiatus of mass creation discussion, and have voluntarily ceased portal creation since Feb 21, so as not to aggravate the other participants of that discussion. (What purpose would that serve?) I wish the matter to be resolved as much as anyone else. Since scope is actively being discussed over at the portals guideline talk page, it makes little sense to create pages that might be removed shortly thereafter based on new creation criteria. I plan on participating in the discussions, perhaps continue working on (existing) portals, and I have no plans to defy the mass creation hiatus. Nor do I plan on pushing the envelope any further. The VPR community has expressed a consensus that mass creation be halted. Robert McClenon is seeking to go beyond community consensus specifically to stop me from creating any portals at all, which is not what the community decided. If editors in general are allowed to create portals, just not mass create them, as the response to UnitedStatesian's proposal has indicated, why should I be singled out here? A topic-ban would be unjustified given the circumstances, and would be punitive in nature. In such a case, I would like to know what I was being punished for. Sincerely,    — The Transhumanist   06:20, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support, given Transhumanist's utter refusal to listen to the input at the Proposals thread during the last days, or anywhere else for that matter. Would go further and support a full, indefinite topic ban or even site ban. Every time I've encountered The Transhumanist over the years, it was invariably over some pattern of mindless mechanistic mass creation of contentless pages, which he then kept pushing aggressively and single-mindedly into everybody's face. Fut.Perf. ☼ 07:18, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

And now we need to clean this mess up. It took me far too long to find and bundle thirty pages for deletion at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Districts of India Portals compared to the 3 minutes a piece he took to create them, but better to head this off before he starts into the other 690 odd Indian districts. Legacypac (talk) 07:33, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

• Quoted Comment on scale of this issue "Since July 1st (after WP:ENDPORTALS was over), over 4500 portals, excluding redirects, have been created (quarry:query/33793); the Transhumanist created more than 3500 (quarry:query/33795); of those, at least 561 were created with a summary along the lines of Started portal, in tab batch save, after batch was inspected: image slideshow minimum 2 pics, no empty sections. No visible formatting or Lua errors upon save, but there may be intermittent errors; report such bugs at WT:WPPORTD so that they can be fixed. Thank you. (quarry:query/33794). Just a note --DannyS712 (talk) 04:42, 27 February 2019 (UTC)" (end quote) |This off a base of just under 1800 Portals existing in July 2018. Legacypac (talk) 07:49, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support. Given the history with TTH—who has been pulling this same kind of "create an unwanted megaproject, force it through without discussion, and expect the rest of us to waste our time maintaining it" stunt for well over a decade (anyone remember The Award Center? Wikipedia:WikiProject Outlines? The Admin School?) and always tries the same "well, it wasn't explicitly banned so I assumed it was what you wanted" defense when called out on it, I'd strongly support a full and permanent topic ban and wouldn't be opposed to a site ban; anyone who's been here for as long as TTH and still can't see the issue with Portal:Yogurts, Portal:Rutland or Portal:A Flock of Seagulls is someone who's either being intentionally disruptive or is wilfully refusing to abide by Wikipedia's norms. ‑ Iridescent 08:26, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support temporary topic ban as a first step. We can look at a site ban if he ignores the topic ban. PhilKnight (talk) 08:32, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support A topic ban is necessary while the issue is discussed and mass deletion considered. Adding thousands of inadequate and unmaintainable pages is not helpful. Johnuniq (talk) 09:39, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support A generally-accepted principle of Wikipedia editing is that people who add content, and especially established editors, help to maintain it. Even assuming the best about Transhumanist here, I can't see how they can possibly do this with all these obscure portals. A ban on creating more of them has to be the first step. Nick-D (talk) 10:07, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
• Reluctantly Support We need time to curate and prune the low-quality portals, otherwise someone will panic and start deleting portals outright. 1:1 (topic to portal) parity is a nice goal, but it isn't readily achievable without the content to fill those portals.--Auric talk 11:33, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support: TTH's approach seems rather cavalier at the moment. A change, as they say, is as good as a test. ——SerialNumber54129 11:58, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose/Wait Let's see if he complies with the eventual results of the discussion at VPP. If he voluntarily agrees to stop, based on community input, then sanctions are not necessary. This seems like overkill right now. First, let the community guidelines pass, THEN let him violate those before we rush to ban. --Jayron32 12:13, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
• Massive Oppose - why the rush to ban? - the idea that giving a TBAN is the only appropriate means is bonkers - there are ongoing discussions. Currently you are trying to TBAN someone who hasn't broken policy. Let's get the agreements in, see if they stop and only then make any action Nosebagbear (talk) 12:18, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
• Comment: Isn't this all very similar to the mass creation of "Outline of" articles by The Transhumanist that met with the same kind of opposition (and tanked an RFA) 10 years ago? If so, then I'd say a topic ban might be in order.--Atlan (talk) 13:37, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

• Yes, it is. UnitedStatesian (talk) 03:26, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

• Support this or a complete topic ban from portals or if this continues simply a complete ban. His latest reply here shows such a complete WP:IDHT attitude, with utterly founded claims about the need to have thousands of portals to be able to find and fix issues (even though many of the now reported issues appear in portals from months ago already), and on the other hand that they have now trouble finding and fixing flaws: "With Legacypac and others actively nominating the new portals for deletion at MfD, our opportunities for improving them and discovering and fixing design flaws are diminishing quickly.", even though perhaps 2 or 3% of the new portals have been nominated, and more than enough similar problematic ones remain to work on (e.g. the inclusion of a DYK which links to red herring on the Portal:Forage fish...). Statements like "Legacypac's approach is to recommend deletion of the new type of portal due to design flaws such as this. " shows a thorough lack of understanding of why these MfDs are made and why so many people support them. The designs flaws are just a small part of the reason for deletion, the lack of interest in, maintenance of, and contents for many of these portals are much more important. Fram (talk) 14:11, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
  • The MfDs are potentially a prelude to an RfC, which may accelerate the process of deletion. With that in mind, the potential shrinkage is worrisome. I'm so tired, I forgot to mention it above.    — The Transhumanist   14:42, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

The MfDs, which impact a tiny portion of these creations but a decent sample of various types of topics, are very useful for finding out what the community finds acceptable or desirable. The MfDs are consensus building (something you forgot/ignored). Soon we will be able to craft acceptance and deletion criteria based on the MfD results. That's how notability and other guidelines get developed, precedent. Legacypac (talk) 15:23, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

• Unnecessary Yes, they need to stop, but they have already agreed to do so (see above: [I] have voluntarily ceased portal creation since Feb 21, so as not to aggravate the other participants of that discussion), and they are unlikely to kneecap themselves by continuing under the massive scrutiny now present. Let's be civil and spare them the block log entry. Current discussion should drive the portal thing towards some practical steps that will likely include the deletion of most of the offending portals, and some agreed-on guideline that prevents mass creation from occurring again. Let's focus on that. --Elmidae (talk · contribs) 14:44, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support – The unilateral creation of thousands of portals must stop. This has been driven largely by one editor, who has made the creation and preservation of portals his or her singular objective. We've seen since the portals RfC that this user will stop at nothing to continue the march of portals...regardless of community concerns, and regardless of Wikipedia policies and guidelines. Removing him or her from the portal topic area is the only way to prevent further disruption. RGloucester — ☎ 15:09, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support - as a first step. Beyond My Ken (talk) 18:42, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
• Unnecessary per Elmidae. Enterprisey (talk!) 19:31, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
• Unnecessary at this time as the editor has already agreed to stop and discussions are ongoing. Jonathunder (talk) 22:45, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support Although TTH seerms to be acting in good faith he just don't know when to stop, so the community has to do it for them. Miniapolis 23:50, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
• Reluctant support TT was one of the first users that was ever nice to me, many years ago, so I'd really rather not, but this is way out of line. Personally tripling the number of portals, a WP feature that almost nobody uses, and with apparenrly very little consideration to what subjects actualy merit a portal is grossly iresponsible. I get that they were upset at the proposed removal of portals, but this is a ridiculous overreaction that benefits nobody, and if they can't see that then a formal restriction is necessary. Beeblebrox (talk) 18:20, 2 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support per User:Fram, and I assume it would also cover conversions of "old-style" Portals to the problematic one-page versions, as well as adding portal links to any article in the mainspace, and all other Portal-related editing. WP:IDHT is spot on: in all of these Portal-related discussions, TTH has again shown what is to me a shocking failure of self-examination: no "Gee, this is another case where a broad swath of the community seems to have a major issue with my behavior, and thus should cause me to step back and assess whether there is 1) anything that, in retrospect, I should I have done differently, and 2) anything I can do now to a) try to mitigate the damage and/or b) regain the communitity's good favor." TTH's factual statement that "I have not created any new Portals since Feb. 21" is meaningless as a commitment to future behavior. UnitedStatesian (talk) 03:24, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
• Unnecessary As mentioned above, moving to preemptively TBAN an editor who has already agreed to stop while discussion is underway serves no purpose here. If they choose to ignore the community consensus, then we can discuss further preventative measures, but doing so now is premature. As an aside, most of those red errors that are being reported are simple fixes, so anyone who finds one can post a note on WT:WPPORT for one of our editors to fix, or simply add |broken=yes to the {{Portal maintenance status}} template at the top of the page. — AfroThundr ^{(u · t · c)} 06:11, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support. Portals have not been working for for 13 years. A pause of 3 months is more than reasonable. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 04:47, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
• Mass portal creation should be consider foul of Wikipedia:MEATBOT. Before continuing, I suggest seeking approval at an RfC, followed by the standard Bot approval process. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 04:59, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support This is a long-term problem with TTH. It used to be "Outline" pages, & maybe still is. He is always polite & cheery, but completely ignores all criticism and pushes on with his agenda, as his rather scary newsletters show. Johnbod (talk) 15:50, 7 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support. Sensible proposal. Agree with UnitedStatesian that this should also cover conversions of old-style portals. feminist (talk) 05:04, 8 March 2019 (UTC)

Proposal 2 - Indefinite ban on page creation

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

Helpful comments above lead me to these numerous Drafts by User:The Transhumanist (ranging from 1 to 12 years old) => Wikipedia:WikiProject_Outlines#Outline_starts:. This is an obsession with mass creation of content no one wants. He has been creating hundreds of useless pages for years and at least 3500 useless automated Portals in the last few months. He has used up his allotment of lifetime page creations on Wikipedia and has a maintenance job to do now on his creations. He should also be working on removal of these useless pages. Therefore I propose a TBAN on page creations in all namespaces, and a TBAN on moves of pages into Mainspace or Portalspace (to prevent the moving of presetup but now empty existing drafts into mainspace), with the following exceptions: Starting an XfD (so he can assist in cleaning yup his mess) and talkpages of other users (for vandal warning etc so he can maintain quality on his creations) and talkpages in general of any existing page. TBAN may be appealed to AN which would want to approve a specific plan for the types of pages he wants to create.

• Support as proposer Legacypac (talk) 10:44, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose in current form - a TBAN on page creations in all namespaces is too drastic, give how many other namespaces that cuts off. I can understand prohibition on mainspace, portalspace, wikipedia space, or even userspace. But TTH not being able to start talk pages? To upload files? To start community books? That's unnecessary. --DannyS712 (talk) 10:57, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

  I explicitly exempted talkpages of users but modified so all talkpages could be allowed. If he wants to create 500 books he should get permission. If there is a desire to create articles, he could ask for a relaxation, going through AfC for example, but with a preapproved plan. Legacypac (talk) 11:06, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

• Oppose This seems overbroad, locking down the English Wikipedia over one user. --Auric talk 11:20, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

  Umm, this user has a long history of mass page creations. When people object he says no one told him he could not do it. A restriction would not prevent him from creating pages, it would just require him to get the plan preapproved. I don't know what crazy idea he might try next, so block everything except what he gets the community to agree to first. Legacypac (talk) 11:26, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

  The problem isn’t page creation, it’s MASS page creation (usually using automated tools). Essentially, TTH routinely sacrifices quality for the sake of volume. It is the focus on volume that needs addressing. Blueboar (talk) 12:20, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

  Yes MASS creation. We don't know what he will MASS create next, so let him propose what he wants to create BEFORE he creates it. If his idea is reasonable, great, but if not we save a ton of work and drama. Legacypac (talk) 12:24, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

  So why does the original proposal not ban him from mass creation? --Izno (talk) 13:07, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

  Because 3500 pages [3] is not Mass Creation according to his post near the top of the VPP thread: "Please clarify what you mean by "mass creation"; the figure provided above is less than 10 new pages per day per editor, which has never been considered mass creation by any WP standard. Also, please clarify what you mean by "semi-automated", since all software programs, including Wikipedia's internal text editor, may be considered semi-automated. Thank you. — The Transhumanist 19:25, 26 February 2019 (UTC)"[4] Legacypac (talk) 13:16, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

• Oppose - the problem is limited to the Portal: namespace; there is no evidence provided that there is a problem in any other namespace (I disagree with the foregone conclusion presented about outlines). This is overreaching by a wide margin. Ivanvector (^Talk/_Edits) 13:33, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Proposal 3: Relax tagging and notification requirements for Grouped Portal MfDs

Creating group MfDs for portals is almost as hard as creating one of these portals. If you use twinkle it creates a bunch of redundent discussion pages and floods the creator's talkpage with templates. TheTranshuminist is insisting every page in a group nomination be tagged for deletion [5]. He is technically correct, but this generates a lot of extra work for no real benefit. Notifying the creator with the first nom in the group should be sufficient. It is not like there are tons of editors with a vested interest in an a given district of India portal. I expect there will be a few more group nominations so addressing this will speed this up. Legacypac (talk) 18:06, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

Well, there is no notification requirement that I'm aware of , so I think you can consider that relaxed. Tagging however, is usually considered a hard-and-fast requirement. It isn't exactly fair to discuss deleting a page while not giving any indication to users watching that page. Beeblebrox (talk) 18:13, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

But in this particular case, there is no realistic expectation that there are any page watchers to begin with, other than the single individual who created them all. Fut.Perf. ☼ 18:19, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

Perhaps any change to the requirements should wait until until it has been agreed which topics merit a portal. There is no urgent need to carry out a mass deletion before deciding what to keep. Certes (talk) 18:22, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

Grouped MfDs create precedent and help us create policy based on the result. For example if 20+ District of India portals are deleted at MfD a precident against creation of 690 more such portals has been established. Similarly an effort to create portals on all the counties in the US or regional districts in Canada would be easier to shut down.

Given how we found two recently automated now broken portals linked off the Mainpage, is the creator even watching them?

The Neelix situation creates precedent for this relaxation. We went even further there and dispensed with discussion. Legacypac (talk) 18:28, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for the clarification. Grouping portals which are clearly going to stand or fall together, such as districts of India, makes sense. Certes (talk) 18:38, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

Oppose. Tagging is a requirement, notification is not. And I just completed tagging on all of the Districts of India that are in the bundled nom. Assuming the current crop of MfD's close as delete, the solution is to propose a temporary speedy deletion criterion X3. UnitedStatesian (talk) 00:47, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

Those portals aren't representative, they're fringe cases. The set of new portals include a wide range of scope, for example, and many had additional work done on them.    — The Transhumanist   01:45, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

What do you mean by "fringe cases" and "representative"? They seem very representative to me. UnitedStatesian (talk) 03:58, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

Oppose – Any readers of a page that's up for deletion has a right to know that the page may go bye bye, and that's why the deletion policy requires notice. There's no need to create a separate MfD page for each page being nominated for deletion. Posting a notice on each page that leads directly to the same discussion is easy.    — The Transhumanist   01:45, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

• Oppose - As User:UnitedStatesian says, we need X3. Robert McClenon (talk) 04:11, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
• The is no need to relax anything. Mass tagging and mass notification is no great issue. If the consensus is that they should all be deleted, Feds them all through mfd in one list. Ask The Transhumanist to tag and notify. I trust that he will cooperate. Stop the panic. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 11:27, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

Concerning further proposals

The proper venue for proposals is Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals).    — The Transhumanist   01:49, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

AN is a perfectly good place for many kinds of proposal. With over 300,000 edits and many years here you should know better. Legacypac (talk) 03:51, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

AN is not the proper place for a proposal on regulating content (referring to portals loosely as content). The way forward does not require administrative action, TTH will respect consensus. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 12:18, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

Wrong venue In the nutshell at the top in read mode, and again in bold and red in the edit window, the words scream This noticeboard is for issues affecting administrators generally – announcements, notifications, information, and other matters of general administrator interest.. What we have here is a big idea involving the work of everyone. At most there should be a pointer diff here at AN. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 12:02, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

Proposal 4: Provide for CSD criterion X3

I am entering and numbering this proposal in order to get it into the record, but am requesting that action on it be deferred until the current round of MFDs are decided.

As per User:UnitedStatesian, Create Criteria for Speedy Deletion criterion X3, for portals created by User:The Transhumanist between April 2018 and March 2019. Tagging the portals for speedy deletion will provide the notice to users of the portals, if there are any users of the portals. I recommend that instructions to administrators include a request to wait 24 hours before deleting a portal. This is a compromise between the usual 1 to 4 hours for speedy deletion and 7 days for XFD. The availability of Twinkle for one-click tagging will make it easy to tag the pages, while notifying the users (if there are any). Robert McClenon (talk) 04:21, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

This proposal should be posted in a wider venue, such as WP:VPR or WP:MFD. Many of those portals have been in place for months, making WP:AN too narrow a venue for them. CSD notices wouldn't be placed until after the discussion is over, and therefore would not serve to notify the users of those portals of the discussion. A notice to the discussion of this proposal, since it is a deletion discussion, should be placed on each of the portals, to allow their readers to participate in the discussion. The current round of MfDs are not a random sampling of the portals that were created, and therefore are not necessarily representative of the set. The portals themselves vary in many ways, including scope, the amount of time they've been accessed by readers, quality, number of features, picture support, volume of content, amount of work that went into them, number of editors who worked on them, length, readership, etc.    — The Transhumanist   07:09, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

How would you suggest to get a representative sample? Legacypac (talk) 07:20, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

Thank you for asking. That would be difficult now, since there are already a bunch of portals nominated for MfD. If those were included, then the sample would already be skewed. I expect a truly random sample would reveal that some portals are worth keeping and others are not. A more important question would be "How would we find the portals worth keeping? Which is very similar to the question "what should the creation criteria for portals be?", the very thing they are discussing at the portal guidelines page right now. Many of these portals may qualify under the guideline that is finally arrived upon there. For example, they are discussing scope. There are portals of subjects that fall within Vital articles Level 2, 3, 4, and 5, and there are many portals of subjects of similar scope to the subjects at those levels. And many of the portals had extra work put into them, and who knows how many had contributions by other editors besides me. Another factor is, that the quality of the navigation templates the portals are powered by differs, and some of the portals are powered by other source types, such as lists. Some have hand-crafted lists, as there are multiple slideshow templates available, one of which accepts specific article names as parameters. Another way to do that is provide a manual list in the subtopics section and power the slideshow from that. Some of the portals are of a different design than the standard base template. Some are very well focused, contextually, while others are not. For example, some of the portals have multiple excerpt slideshows to provide additional context.    — The Transhumanist   07:46, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

• Support in principle. Looking at the existing MFD discussions, TTH seems determined to drag and wikilawyer as much as possible to try to derail the discussions, even for blatantly and indefensibly inappropriate microportals like those discussed at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portals for Portland, Oregon neighborhoods; it's not a good use of anyone's time to go through the same timesink 5000+ times. (The cynic in me says that a speedy criterion wouldn't work as while the creators wouldn't be able to decline the templates themselves, TTH and Dreamy Jazz would probably just follow the tagger around removing the speedy templates from each other's creations.) In practice, it would probably be more efficient to do what we did with Neelix and have a streamlined MFD nomination process, in which "created by TTH" is considered sufficient grounds for deletion at MFD and they default to delete unless someone can make a strong argument for keep. MFD is less gameable and also gives a space for people to defend them in those rare cases where they're actually worth keeping. (Every time I look, I find that the flood of inane and pointless TTH portals has spread further than I thought; shipping containers portal, anyone?) ‑ Iridescent 08:26, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

  Dreamy Jazz seems unlikely do that, having already decided during this debate to stop donating their time to Wikipedia. Certes (talk) 18:06, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

• Comment – Another option would be to move these to draft space. The templates and lua modules could be modified so that the portals render right in that namespace (I wish I would have thought of this before). Being in draft space would give time to fix their various problems (keeping in mind that micro-scope is not fixable), and identify the ones worth keeping. I would agree not to move any of them personally, and would propose/request such moves after the new creation criteria guidelines for portals are settled upon. I would also be willing to tag those that did not meet those guidelines with CSD (as creator), saving Legacypac the trouble of nominating them at MfD (he mentioned somewhere that he thought I should help clean up this "mess"). Another benefit of this strategy is that if any of them sit in draft space too long without further development, they automatically become subject to deletion per the draft space guidelines, and those that reach that age without any edits can be deleted en masse without time-consuming effort-wasting MfD discussions. This course of action would of course need the participation of some lua programmers to add the necessary functionality to the modules, which would be a good upgrade for those, to allow for portal drafts to be created in the future.    — The Transhumanist   09:15, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

P.S. @Iridescent and Legacypac: (pinging)    — The Transhumanist   09:28, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

• Absolutely not. The problem is that hundreds of portals on obscure topics makes an unmaintainable mess. Passing it to another namespace does not solve the problem which is that the portals are not helpful and are not maintainable. Automated creation of outlines/portals/anything must stop. Johnuniq (talk) 09:36, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
• No. I tried moving one broken portal to Draft as a test and it broke even more stuff. Not worth the effort to modify everything for draft space and then let the same little group of editors release them willy nilly back into portal space. Since this group ignored their own Wikipedia:Portal/Guidelines "portals should be about broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers." why should anyone trust them to follow stricter guidelines? Legacypac (talk) 09:57, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
• Definitely not. What possible benefit would there be to cluttering up another namespace with ≈5000 pages that will never serve any useful purpose? If you want to goof around with wikicode, nobody's stopping you installing your own copy of Mediawiki; we're not your personal test site. ‑ Iridescent 15:38, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
• As a general rule, Portal pages should not be draftified. In fact, we should not usually move anything not designed to be an article to draft space. Draft portals should be in portal space, just like draft books should be in book space and draft templates in template space (pages with subpages are a pain to move, and many namespaces have special features that suggest keeping drafts in the same space if possible). If a portal is not ready for viewing by the general public, tag it with a relevant maintenance template and make sure it is not linked to from mainspace or from other portal pages.
• In the case at hand, TT's mass created portals do not seem like they will all be soon made ready for wider consumption, so deleting them seems the better option. —Kusma (t·c) 20:15, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

• Support nuking from orbit: It's the only way to be sure. ——SerialNumber54129 09:32, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support enough with the wikilawyering and obstruction. This proposal is a little too narrow though - TTH created 3500+ automated portals but others in his little team created around 1000 more. I just grouped some by User:Dreamy Jazz into Wikipedia:Miscellany_for_deletion#US_County_Portals Legacypac (talk) 09:57, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support These useless broken portals have to go. CoolSkittle (talk) 14:54, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support, too many, too quickly, not enough thought went into their creation. Nuke these, revert other portals that were better before TTH "restarted" them. Automation should help with portal maintenance, not replace portal maintenance or move the maintenance burden to navboxes or other places. —Kusma (t·c) 14:57, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support, sensible and fair way to deal with these. Johnbod (talk) 16:53, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support: MFD could never handle the overwhelming amount of unnecessary and unsustainable portals, considering the magnitude of TTH's portal creation entering the thousands. –eggofreason^talk 20:12, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support nuking. Beyond My Ken (talk) 20:30, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
• Transcluded to Wikipedia talk:Criteria for speedy deletion. {{3x|p}}ery (talk) 20:31, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support mass creation of portals on these topics isn't appropriate without wider discussion, and the automated/semi-automated method used to create them doesn't produce high quality output. Portal:Sierra County, California, for example, is about a county with a population of 3,240, and consists of the lead of the main article, a few random contextless images grabbed from that article (mostly maps or logos) and portal boilerplate. Cleaning these up will require a temporary speedy deletion criterion, I don't think MfD could handle the load. Hut 8.5 22:25, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support as proposer. I had already suggested deferring, but am satisfied that it is going ahead to mass-delete. I will add that, after a consensus is reached on whether and how to use portals, any that were deleted and are needed are available at Requests for Undeletion. Robert McClenon (talk) 01:01, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
• This mass page creation went against WP:MEATBOT and at least the spirit of WP:MASSCREATION if not the letter. An appropriate remedy for automated script and semi-automated creation is speedy deletion. Did you know they were driving for 10,000 portals at a rapid pace? It's here [6] Legacypac (talk) 04:44, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose any and all notions of creating new CSD criteria at any drama board. Discussions here are too rushed, too emotive, too reactionary. Use WT:CSD. Consider using a WT:CSD subpage RfC. Do not attempt to mandate the detail of policy from a drama board. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 04:52, 4 March 2019 (UTC) Transclusion is not good enough. The discussion needs to be searchable from WT:CSD, and the specifics of any and all new criteria need to address the Criteria for a new CSD criterion. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 04:55, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

Many editors at the Village Pump discussion, the Tban discussion above, and at MfDs also supported this. We do not need to fragment this discussion further. Legacypac (talk) 05:12, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

Proposal 1 will make this Proposal 4 moot. This Proposal 4 is not a proper CSD implementation. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 05:41, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

@SmokeyJoe: Proposal 1 is about stopping TTH from creating new portals. Proposal 4 is about deleting those he created in the last couple of months. How is P1 going to make P4 moot? —Kusma (t·c) 10:19, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

List them all in an MfD, if they must all be deleted. A CSD that enables self appointed decision makes for which should go and which might be ok, is inferior to MfD. MfD can handle a list of pages. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 11:24, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

• Support. No care at all went into these portals, they are mindless creations with loads of errors and little actual benefit for our readers. I would also support the restoration of all pre-existing portals to the pre-transhumanist version, the new "single page" version may require less maintenance, but is way too often clearly inferior (see e.g. this, which is more like vandalism than actual improvement, and has been reversed since). Fram (talk) 10:31, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
• Comment. Anyone restoring old multi-subpage portals should bear in mind that they will require maintenance. If there is no-one willing to maintain them, they, too are likely to be MfDed. No old-style portal with a willing and active maintainer has been converted as far as I know, so I suggest that anyone restoring them should be willing to maintain them. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 16:47, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
  • No. Converting an unmaintained but well-designed portal into an unmaintained semi-automated worse portal is not the way forward. Any claims that the new portals are maintained or don't need maintaining is false, as the many problematic new portals demonstrate. Fram (talk) 17:00, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
  • Portal:Germany was converted (more than once) although it has maintainers. To make sure your portal isn't "improved", you need to put a specific template on the page, which isn't very obvious. There are old-style multi page portals that require only minimal maintenance, and where the conversion removed specific features. All those should be reverted, also to protect the subpages from overzealous deleters (the worst is deleting the /box-footer subpages; this breaks all old revisions by removing a necessary closing div). —Kusma (t·c) 17:21, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose A mass-deletion of the new generation portals. Listing them at MfD will be sufficient for any that do not meet the criteria laid out in the portal guidelines (which are still under discussion). It makes little sense to remove the whole batch because some of them are problematic. They would need to be properly triaged to ensure the good ones are not caught in the process. I would of course, help with said triage. We're not trying to create more work for the community, just preserve good content. — AfroThundr ^{(u · t · c)} 23:47, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
• Comment - You created more work for the community by creating thousands of portals, some of which do not work, and with no intention to maintain them. I see no evidence that this effort created good content that needs to be preserved. Robert McClenon (talk) 04:17, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

There is no new content in the automated portals, it's all poorly repackaged bits of existing content. Legacypac (talk) 04:40, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

All portals, old or new, good or bad, manual or automated, repackage existing content. That's their job. New content belongs in articles. Certes (talk) 11:20, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

• Weak oppose on principle. CSD is a necessary evil, and I don't think we should be hasty to add another criterion that skips our usual consensus process. I'm fine with nuking these portals and not opposed to deleting them, any diamonds in the rough will prove their worth by being created again, but I would prefer one big MfD with the rationale "created by The Transhumanist" which allows proper determination of consensus and gives those who want to spend their time triaging a chance to do so. Wugapodes [t^hɑk] [ˈkan.ˌʧɹɪbz] 08:03, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

Building multipage MfDs like Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portals for Portland, Oregon neighborhoods is time consuming and tedious. A temporary CSD is rhe way to go. Consensus against this mess of new portals has already been established at VP, AN and in the test MfDs. Legacypac (talk) 17:20, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

• Support due to the massive amount of time it would take to put the ~4500 portals through MfD. MfD has been swamped with portal deletion requests from some time ago, and I can't see all this stuff removed via MfD in the foreseeable future (as someone said earlier, there is still a lot of Outlines left over from one of TTH's previous projects, so who knows how long it would take for MfD to delete all of this). This CSD X3 would streamline the process, and it would probably only take a few days to a week. It would help, as also mentioned earlier, to extend the criterion to the other users involved in the mass creation of these portals. Rlin8 (☎·✎·📧) 03:31, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
  • MfD has never had an issue to nominations of list of pages. 4500 separate MfD nominations would be absurd, but a list would be OK. If each is new, and has a single author, notifications of the author will be trivial. A CSD proposal shortcuts a discussion of the merits of the new portals, and pre-supposes deletion to be necessary, contrary to deletion policy. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 04:01, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

TTH demands we place notification on every portal. We can skip notifying him, but building even 20 page MfD's is very time consuming. How do you propose to discuss 4500 or even 100 assorted portals at a time? These took 3 min to make - but far more than 3 min to list, tag, discuss and vote, then delete - when you add up all the time required from various editors and Admins. The test MfDs are sufficent and the very strong opposition to this automated portal project justifies this temporary CSD. Legacypac (talk) 04:16, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

"TTH demands we place notification on every portal"? Legacypac, I have missed that post by him. If he did that, it needs to be repudiated. If these are new pages, and he is the only author, it is sufficient to notify him once. If all 4500 are essentially variations on the same thing, as long as the full set is defined, and browsable, we can discuss them all together at MfD. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 05:34, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

User:SmokeyJoe during the Portland Oregon neighborhood MFD I specifically said I was not tagging all the related portals but he insisted I tag here [7] I could not get support in the section above to relax the MfD tagging because others wanted this CSD. During the Delete Portals RFC TTH went all out insisting every portal including the community portal be tagged for deletion - then he did it himself. That brought in all kinds of casual infrequent editors who were mostly against deleting the community portal. (Even though that was Pretty much pulled out of consideration for deletion before the tagging project). That massive tagging derailed the deletion RFC. By making cleanup as hard as possible TTH is making a lot of people want to nuke everything. Legacypac (talk) 06:11, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

Legacypac's analysis is erroneous and misleading. The WP:ENDPORTALS RFC was a deletion discussion, and posting a notice on each page up for deletion is required by deletion policy. Note that the Community Portal was only mentioned twice. A portal that was the basis for about 50 oppose votes was the Current Events portal. Neither the Community Portal nor the Current Events portal were exempted in the proposal at any time. If you didn't count those, that left the count at about 150 in support of eliminating portals to about 250 against.    — The Transhumanist   07:25, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

@SmokeyJoe: (edit conflict) See the top of this section for the referred to statement, which is not exactly as he quoted. A notice posted at the top of the portals slated by this proposal would be appropriate. Legacypac has been posting notice for his multi-page nominations using the {{mfd}} template, which auto-generates a link to an mfd page of the same title as the page the template is posted on. Rather than following the template's instructions for multiple pages, he's been creating an MfD page for each, and redirecting them to the combined mfd. Then a bot automatically notifies the creator of each page (me), swamping my user talk page with redundant notifications. Thus, Legacypac believes he'll have to create thousands of mfd redirect pages, and that I somehow want 3500+ notifications on my talk page.    — The Transhumanist   07:10, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

You want us to manually tag pages for deletion that you used an automated script to create? You flooded Wikipedia with useless pages in violation of WP:MEATBOT but you are worried about having to clean up your talkpage notices? Just create an archiving system for your talkpage like we did for User:Neelix's talkpage. If you don't want notices you could start tagging pages that fail your own guidelines with "delete by author request" instead of commenting on how we will do the cleanup. Legacypac (talk) 08:37, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

• Support whatever course of action that will result in every portal created in this manner being deleted with the minimal of time and effort required. TTH has set up his automated tool, created a massive mess, and left it unattended for others to sort out. It should take less time to clean up this mess than it did to make it, not more. Nuke the lot and if there is anything of value lost then TTH can manually request pages to be restored one at a time at DRV. Fish+Karate 11:19, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support per Fish and karate. RGloucester — ☎ 14:20, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
• Strong oppose as written. I could support something that explicitly excluded portals which are in use and/or are being developed, but the current proposal to indiscriminately delete everything, including active portals, unless the admin chooses to notify any editors and the ones notified happen to be online in a narrow time frame is significantly overly broad. Thryduulf (talk) 01:54, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

Thousands of Autogenerated "Quantum Portals" with no human curation?

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

Discovered Wikipedia:WikiProject Quantum portals which I'm not sure I fully understand but looks like another big disruption brewing. Sent to Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:WikiProject Quantum portals Legacypac (talk) 04:54, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

Please note that in the case of quantum portals there would be no actual pages stored in Wikipedia, There would be a link which would create a temporary page which would exist only while it was open, and would disappear when closed, like a search result. Since they would only exist when someone actively invoked them, their existence would depend on them being seen as useful to the reader at the time. Some processing time would be necessary, currently this appears to be limited by technical constraints, and is the same as would be used for rendering an uncached article or saving an edit, so it is hard to see where massive disruption would come from. No maintenance would be required, other than occasional improvements to the script.· · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 16:09, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

Legacypac (or anyone else confused by this), see Reasonator to get an idea of what they're talking about here. They don't serve exactly the same purpose—Reasonator assembles a pseudo-article in your browser on-the-fly based on data (which has no useful purpose on en-wiki, but it has an obvious potential use in more obscure languages, since it's less prone to errors than translation software)—but the principle is the same as that being discussed here.

I personally find the idea of a "quantum portal" beyond pointless, given that barely anyone uses even the real portals (something like Portal:Fish and Portal:Trains—both major topics with a high degree of world-wide interest and well over 100,000(!) incoming direct links—average around 20 and 80 views per day respectively), but I can see that the theory behind it might make sense, especially for smaller Wikipedias where the category structure isn't as well organized and "show me a list of all the articles we currently have about trains, and all the train-related topics which other Wikipedias consider important but where we don't currently have an article" might actually be useful.

However, English Wikipedia is certainly not the appropriate testing ground for TTH to be conducting his experiments, especially given that we still haven't finished cleaning out the detritus from the previous time TTH tried to pull this "it's too late for you to stop me as I've already done it" stunt, let alone the most recent attempt with the portals. ‑ Iridescent 11:06, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Any wikiarcheologists want something to do?

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

 Done  — Scott • talk 11:34, 8 March 2019 (UTC)

---

While digging around in some very dusty areas I found a few dozen deletion discussions from 2004 that are still sitting on Talk: subpages and need to be moved under WP:AFD as all the others were. I don't currently have time to do all of them, anyone pitching in would be very welcome.

Page list

Extracted from User:R3m0t/Reports/1_15#Delete discussions, these are remaining deletion discussions from the era around 2004 when we used to have them on a subpage of the article's talk page. They all need to be moved under Wikipedia:Articles for Deletion/ (without leaving a redirect, as in previous instances) and have an {{Old AfD}} placed onto the articles' talk pages. Some of them are also the first of several nominations for the same topic. In those cases, any extant Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Title should be moved to Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Title (2nd nomination) and so on as necessary and {{Old AfD list}} added to the later discussions. Talk:AT-PT/deletion Talk:Antiprocess/deletion Talk:Arighi_Bianchi/deletion Talk:Awakening/deletion Talk:Boynton_v._Virginia/deletion Talk:Carfree_movement/deletion Talk:Christian_demonology/deletion Talk:Curb_extension/deletion Talk:David_Pearce/deletion Talk:Europe,_the_Middle_East_and_Africa/deletion Talk:Extensive_farming/deletion Talk:Footjob/deletion Talk:Free_drinks/deletion Talk:French_alphabet/deletion Talk:Gadget/deletion Talk:Hawaiian_name/deletion Talk:Holocaust_(disambiguation)/deletion Talk:Homophobic_hate_speech/deletion Talk:Iontophoresis/deletion Talk:Library_of_Sir_Thomas_Browne/Delete Talk:Michael_H._Hart/deletion Talk:Nap/deletion Talk:Natural_hygiene/deletion Talk:Nick_Bostrom/deletion Talk:Paul_McKeever/deletion Talk:Peter_Atkins/deletion Talk:Philosophy_of_time/deletion Talk:PhpAdsNew/deletion Talk:Ratfiv_programming_language/deletion Talk:Squee/deletion Talk:Star_of_the_County_Down/deletion Talk:The_Scary_Sleepover/deletion Talk:Tom_Jackson/deletion Talk:Transporter_accident/deletion Talk:Transporter_beam/deletion Talk:UNaXcess/deletion

Cheers,  — Scott • talk 16:46, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

I think in some cases at least it's going to involve a number of page moves: the first on the list, AT-PT, was kept at the linked 2004 talk page VfD—but then subsequtly merged into a Star Wars page in 2007. So they'd be chronologically out of order? Also, I think it would need the pagemover right, as they page to be moved into would already exist? ——SerialNumber54129 16:52, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

Ah, in that particular instance I would rename the 2007 discussion to /AT-PT 2 and add an {{oldafdlist}} to it, before moving the other one. I'd check incoming links in those cases as well, and if there were would add a hatnote saying it had been renamed. You're certainly right that there will be several that require a bit more tidying, going on past experience....  — Scott • talk 17:16, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

Could an admin please delete Talk:Law school outlines/Delete? There's no afd debate or anything there, it's just some nonsensical rambling.💵Money💵emoji💵^💸 18:08, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

Why does this need to be done at all? It's been fine since 2004 and nobody has cared about it, from how it sounds. So just leave it alone. 173.228.123.166 (talk) 02:45, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for your contribution. Unfortunately you evidently have no idea what you're talking about, because literally hundreds of comparable discussions have been moved into the AfD space over the years by general consensus and these are leftovers. So, no.  — Scott • talk 13:55, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

I still can't figure out how to do what is asked and I'm also wondering what the point is. Legacypac (talk) 05:08, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

@Legacypac: you're experienced at moving pages, why don't you have that tool? Re: common sense. ——SerialNumber54129 14:02, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

Consistency and discoverability.  — Scott • talk 13:55, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

@Serial Number 54129: Thanks for helping! Just as a note, the established style for these is to not leave a redirect and replace the link on the talk page with {{Old AfD}}.  — Scott • talk 14:12, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Compromised admin account

I've blocked Bogdangiusca (talk⁺ · tag · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log · CA · CheckUser(log) · investigate · cuwiki) as an emergency measure following an AIV report. The recent contributions today indicate an account compromise. GAB^gab 17:12, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

• CheckUser also indicates a likely compromise. I’ve notified ArbCom and got a steward to lock. TonyBallioni (talk) 17:26, 2 March 2019 (UTC)
• ArbCom is aware of this, just as a heads up. ~ Rob₁₃^Talk 17:57, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

Derp. I just emailed the committee literally five seconds ago, should've checked here first. Beeblebrox (talk) 18:10, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

Level 1 desysop of Bogdangiusca

Under the Level 1 desysopping procedures, the administrator permissions of Bogdangiusca (talk · contribs · blocks · protections · deletions · page moves · rights · RfA) have been temporarily removed as a suspected compromised account.

Supporting: BU Rob13, KrakatoaKatie, GorillaWarfare

For the Arbitration Committee, Bradv🍁 18:21, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

Discuss this at: Wikipedia talk:Arbitration Committee/Noticeboard#Level 1 desysop of Bogdangiusca

Via Heraclea, Via Augusta, Via Herculea

Hi all,
It appears that we have two articles about the same Roman road in Hispania and WP:REDIRECT to a a Roman road in Italy - Via Herculea, not Via Heraulea. I don't know how to fix this up. Could someone with Teh Mad Skillz in Wikipedia:Merging help me out with this?
Pete AU aka --Shirt58 (talk) 10:48, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

Via Herculea seems to be, as you say, an it:WP article. Although we don't usually address content here, I've WP:BOLDly redirected Via Heraclea (an unreferenced stub) to Via Augusta (which mentions the alternate name). All the best, Miniapolis 23:24, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

Obscure

Please obscure this--NewDataB (talk) 19:51, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

NewDataB, done. —Kusma (t·c) 20:18, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

Request to lift the restriction for the unblock (2nd)

It has been over a year that I was unblocked, the relating unblock discussion please see Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Archive296#Standard Offer for User:B dash. The restrictions are as follow: #You must not edit at all except from this account. Note that this restriction goes further than your offer of stating any other accounts on your user page and following WP:SOCK#LEGIT strictly.

1. You must not make any GA nominations.
2. You may ask at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard for these conditions to be lifted, but not until one year has elapsed from the time of the block being removed. It is possible that further discussion may lead to a change in this restriction, but unless you are informed otherwise it remains so.

In the past year, I'm focus mainly on tropical cyclones-related articles, and doing some minor edits on certain topics. Moreover, I have written a few articles on tropical cyclones. Although they are not the best, this still showed my contribution to the encyclopedia. I have read through the guidelines of WP:GAN/I and WP:SOCK. I promise not to violate these guidelines anymore. In the future, I will still assuming good faith to others, especially to the new editors, and to communicate to the related userse when I'm facing a conflict. I hope the admins and other editors can consider this request. Best wishes to all. --B dash (talk) 02:09, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

Since last time I get not much comments, I'm pinging @Alex Shih, Dennis Brown, D4iNa4, TonyBallioni, JamesBWatson, and Ivanvector: as those who joined the SO unblock of me. --B dash (talk) 02:09, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

• Support Unless I'm missing something very obviously disruptive, I don't see any compelling reasons for the conditions to remain. Lourdes 02:28, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support since no one has raised objections and like Lourdes I can't see any likely problem. Although I strongly suggest B dash does not open any undeclared socks, even ones they feel are legitimate in the near future since the detection of such could easily be fairly controversial even in circumstances where a user who's never been under scrutiny would be fine. (Publicly declared socks would rarely be a problem for sock reasons. Privately declared socks would probably be okay, but I'd still suggest caution.) To be clear, I'm not proposing further formal sanction, simply the best way to try and avoid any problem. I leave it to B dash's best judgement when (both in time and circumstance) they can act as if they never had problems. Nil Einne (talk) 17:33, 5 March 2019 (UTC)
• Partial support. I do not see any reason for lifting condition #1, and would prefer to leave it in place. No concerns about condition #2, and condition #3 is moot. Risker (talk) 17:58, 5 March 2019 (UTC)
• Partial support per Risker. The condition #1 to use a single account should not be onerous. I have no concerns about lifting #2, the ban on filing GA nominations. User:B dash has been unblocked since February 2018 and they seem to be doing OK. EdJohnston (talk) 18:20, 5 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support per comments in the previous discussion. Like editors above I see no concerns over #2, and #3 is lapsed, to the extent that it was valid to begin with. Regarding alternative accounts, if you have some reason to use alternates then it's up to you not to use them inappropriately, and I echo Nil Einne's recommendation to disclose alternates if you do create them, whether connecting them publicly or disclosing privately to Arbcom. Ivanvector (^Talk/_Edits) 19:03, 5 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support though I also don't think making any new account is desirable for them. –Ammarpad (talk) 08:34, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
• Partial support per Risker. The one account rule was added by me in the original discussion and was required for me to support the Standard Offer request. If the editor can articulate a reason why multiple accounts are needed, I might reconsider. If they can't publicly say why, for safety or security reasons, then I would prefer they contact Arb privately, who can look at the situation, and then come back here and discreetly give their opinions as to whether this is a good idea or not, although they obviously wouldn't be making the final decision, consensus would. Dennis Brown - 2¢ 12:04, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

DRN Dispute Closure on Institute for Creation Research

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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I don't think that any action is needed, but I am posting this here to provide notice. I closed a dispute at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Dispute_resolution_noticeboard#Talk:Institute_for_Creation_Research . The filing editor states that the article on Institute for Creation Research is biased against ICR. I closed the dispute because the established editors, including three administrators, had stated that there is nothing to discuss in accordance with Wikipedia policies and guidelines because it is true that the article is biased against ICR, because the Wikimedia Foundation is biased against pseudo-science. DRN is not the forum to dispute that bias, and Wikipedia may not have a forum for disputing that bias. The First Amendment to the United States Constitution gives the Wikimedia Foundation the right to use its servers to present human knowledge as interpreted through a scientific viewpoint, and does not require the Wikimedia Foundation to offer alternative access to its servers. At the same time, the First Amendment to the United States Constitution gives the Institute for Creation Research the right to use its own servers to present an alternate viewpoint.

I don't think that any action is needed, but am using this noticeboard to provide notice of the action which I took, which I think is consistent with the views of the Wikimedia Foundation. Robert McClenon (talk) 03:54, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

As one of those unnamed admins, I obviously can only Oppose. Ian.thomson (talk) 04:05, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

The fundamental position of the WMF is a neutral point of view (not a majority point of view), and declaring that something is worthy of pro-bias or anti-bias is as non-neutral as you can get. One achieves a neutral point of view by representing perspectives fairly, so one must state that mainstream science strongly rejects ICR's position, but outright bias cannot be neutral. Nyttend (talk) 04:14, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

so one must state that mainstream science strongly rejects ICR's position -- that's essentially the "bias" in question. Ian.thomson (talk) 04:17, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

Actually, I think MrJosephWerzak and I essentially made the same points. Except I actually do have a problem with this hype term "pseudoscience" and he didn't seem to. The interesting thing is you are the one who keeps focusing on this term and thinking it is trying to be removed. If one reads the talk page, it is very apparent your one and sole aim is to prevent this term from being deleted or downplayed...even though no one asked for either of those.73.217.43.51 (talk) 04:56, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

I would have to agree with the above. That is not the bias in question...the bias in question is the tone and verbiage of the beginning article. The interesting thing, is what we essentially have here is the editors stating that "yes it is biased" and "no we do not care" because "wikipedia is biased against ICR" (despite hiding behind the proverbial pseudoscience rules and such). So in actuality, the ruling is fair because apparently Wikipedia cannot control its own bias. Perhaps I should have known all along.MrJosephWerzak (talk) 05:00, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

And yet 73.217 tried to remove any hint that the ICR advocates pseudoscience from the lede and MrJosephWerzak's suggestions would have had the effect of slowly downplaying the ICR's promotion of pseudoscience (regardless of their stated goals). Ian.thomson (talk) 06:37, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

Just noting that it's a fundamental misunderstanding of the First Amendment to say that it grants anyone any rights. It purports to recognize rights that already exist, and protect them against the actions of the U.S. Federal Government. - Nunh-huh 04:26, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

(And is incorporated against the states. --Izno (talk) 04:55, 4 March 2019 (UTC))

Well, it would seem that the overt bias of Wikipedia once again rears its ugly face. It is apparent Wikipedia has put in place so called rules and regulations which protect itself from having to simply say "we will choose which articles we infer negative bias upon and which ones we don't". Again, proving that the "editors" are merely the protectors of bias. Oh well, thus the downfall of what once was an ok internet wiki. MrJosephWerzak (talk) 04:46, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

• Wikipedia's only bias is towards empirically established fact. The article on ICR has exactly that bias - which of course only looks like bias if you reject empirical fact. Biblical creationism, as espoused by ICR, is indeed pseudoscience. This has been established as fact in the US courts. Their educational mission is objectively unconstitutional, again as established in the courts (though with the current SCOTUS interpreting the First Amendment as conferring the right to impose your religion on others, that may change). Any article that creationists would believe is neutral, would, almost by definition, not be, because their beliefs are objectively wrong. We are as "biased" against ICR as we are against a flat earth. Their problem is not with Wikipedia, it's with the real world. But I understand why they see it as they do: during the scientific revolution, experiment replaced authority as the arbiter of fact, but the religious right in America has regressed to the point where if experiment contradicts their interpretation of the Bible then experiment is necessarily wrong. ICR is one of these authorities. It's about objective truth versus religious Truth. Wikipedia has always been designed to reflect the former, and this has led to some of our longest-running content disputes (creationism, homeopathy, climate change). Guy (Help!) 06:14, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Change article name

Hi,

As Encyclopedia Iranica ( http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/ceram-or-corum-a-small-tribal-confederacy-il-inhabiting-the-dehestan-of-ceram-in-the-kuhgiluya-region-in-southw# ), The correct name for this city is ( Cheram ), you can see ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Persian ) And ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA/Latin ) to check this ( ČERĀM ).

Please change name of this article ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charam,_Iran ) to (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheram). Also please change name of this article ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charam_County ) to ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheram_County ).

Thanks.Cheshmebelgheis (talk) 10:28, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

This name ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheram ) was already taken wrong. That vilage name is (Cherm) not (Cheram).Cheshmebelgheis (talk) 10:32, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

• This is not the right place to ask these things. Admin do not determine the name of articles. Start a conversation on the talk page of the current article about it. We aren't very concerned with what another encyclopedia calls it, we are concerned with what reliable sources call it. This is our general policy on using secondary sources instead of tertiary sources when possible. Dennis Brown - 2¢ 14:44, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

@Cheshmebelgheis: - as Dennis Brown says, please use WP:RM process on the article talk page. GiantSnowman 14:54, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

cross-wiki vandal, tirritating stuff at lunch time

It is lunch time, so I'm going to drop this one in y'all's lap. CU is probably called for, but some of you know, no doubt, who this person is. Maybe User:Jon Kolbert would like to weigh in. I blocked one of these a few days ago but I can't find it right now. Thanks. Drmies (talk) 18:42, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

I have locked a few of these recently, although I must admit I am not yet familiar with this vandal to associate them with any possible LTA. Jon Kolbert (talk) 19:09, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

I had some of these on my talk page. I think this is a LTA who has some issues with CUs in the Russian Wikipedia (Q-Bit Array is one of them) and this, in some form, was going on for years. Just block on sight.--Ymblanter (talk) 11:12, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

Unblock request by User:Technophant

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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Technophant (talk · contribs) has requested a review of their block. The latest unblock discussion (that I could find) was here. The request by Technophant, as copy-pasted from their talk page, is below. Huon (talk) 20:20, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

I would like to make another unblock request. I have a block for sockpuppetry and topic ban in alternative medicine. I've made 3 unblock requests, detailed on my last archive page.

As per Standard Offer, I promise to never again edit as an IP again nor create or use an alternate account and follow all civility and conflict resolution guidelines. If I choose to contribute to controversial topics, I will respect consensus, and make proposed changes in talk pages. I haven't edited in a long time, almost 4 years, and I don't expect to go back to being a frequent contributor. The quality of most pages is very good and there's little that needs to be changed. What makes me want to have privileges again is seeing out-dated or incorrect pages and wanting to make suggestions. If I get back into trying substantial revisions I would focus on start and stub pages.

Asking for admin help to get this request in compliance and placed on the notice board.-Technophant (talk) 00:09, 11 February 2019 (UTC)

I will also try to answer some questions I expect will come up: "What has changed and what will you do differently?" More than 3.5 years have gone by and my body is more than half way through replacing all of my cells <jk>. A lot has changed. I spend less time on the computer. I've moved to from San Antonio (boring) to Austin (exciting). I'm learning how to play new musical instruments and almost finished with my demo. I've gone through many years of therapy and programs and a good deal calmer. "Are you appealing the topic ban or just the block?" Both. I had some ownership issues with the acupuncture page because I used to keep it updated with my earlier username. I was dismayed to find that it had been taken over by what seemed to be a cabal of users who had an agenda. I accept that acupuncture lacks scientific evidence of effectiveness, however, it's also being widely recommended as an effective alternative to opioid use. As with all articles, there needs to be a focus on accuracy, formatting standards and presentation without bias. "What are the top 3 topics you intend to edit?" Science and techology, music and musical instruments, and history of the United States. Technophant (talk) 17:39, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

• No objections, per standard offer and WP:ROPE (I'm previously and otherwise uninvolved in this). -- zzuuzz ^(talk) 18:35, 5 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support unblock per the genuine request. I neither support nor oppose lifting the topic ban: I would prefer to see some unrelated constructive editing before considering that. Ivanvector (^Talk/_Edits) 18:58, 5 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support unblock per the authentic request. The editors agrees to return to constructive editing. QuackGuru (talk) 20:14, 5 March 2019 (UTC)
• If memory serves the block was due in part to this user going a little crazy (probably exacerbated by real life events out of their control) and being unable to move past a threat/insult they found in the poorly-worded comment of another editor, despite the other editor apologizing. This unblock request I think deals with those issues. I think a focus on less controversial areas than acupuncture is a good idea anyway though, and diving right back into that dispute will probably not end well for them. So I support a second chance here, with the expectation that Techno will be on their best behavior from now on. ~Awilley (talk) 21:19, 5 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support unblock; however, suggest a Wait on the topic ban removal. Let's get a few months of problem-free editing under our belt first. --Floquenbeam (talk) 21:29, 5 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support unblock and also lifting of the topic ban, it's been a long time. And per their statement it's unlikely for them to resume to the past behavior after all this time. –Ammarpad (talk) 08:28, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support. I supported an unblock back in 2016. But then the request went so off the rails I withdrew my support. The block was for editing while logged out and ban evasion, but it only stuck for this many years because of behavioral issues that I hope won't be an issue anymore. As for the topic ban from alternative medicine, it might have been a long time ago, but he managed to get topic banned after only 4 days of editing there. I'm not opposed to lifting the ban but I hope Technophant will appreciate that he is on a short leash.--Atlan (talk) 11:09, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support unblock, but favour retaining the topic ban for a few months (assuming that those few months are problem-free, I would then happily support lifting the topic ban also). Yunshui ^雲_水 11:13, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support general unblock, + 3 month TBAN wait - certainly fine for a general unblock. I just feel there is not much to be gained by an immediate TBAN removal, and something to be gained by waiting, if only by removing temptation. Sometimes there's a "now wait 6 months for TBAN removal, then 6 months for IP editing etc etc" - given the 3.5 year wait, I think a 3 month tryout would be fine. Nosebagbear (talk) 17:18, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support unblock, the TBAN can wait for 6 months though, so he can get back into the flow of things before going back to that area. A Dolphin (squeek?) 16:09, 7 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support unblock, wait for 6 months on TBAN: The user seems is not troublesome, unblock is not a problem. However, let's wait for 6 months on the TBAN so that the user can know how to contribute properly. --B dash (talk) 16:15, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Administrators' newsletter – March 2019

News and updates for administrators from the past month (February 2019).

Administrator changes

Evad37

There'sNoTime

Alex Shih • Brian • Mushroom • Nakon • Oscarthecat • PeruvianLlama • Ragib • Reaper Eternal • Rossami • Tom

Interface administrator changes

Evad37 • Galobtter

Ritchie333

CheckUser changes

There'sNoTime

Keegan • Ks0stm

Oversight changes

There'sNoTime

Ks0stm • Sphilbrick

Guideline and policy news

• The RfC on administrator activity requirements failed to reach consensus for any proposal.
• Following discussions at the Bureaucrats' noticeboard and Wikipedia talk:Administrators, an earlier change to the restoration of adminship policy was reverted. If requested, bureaucrats will not restore administrator permissions removed due to inactivity if there have been five years without a logged administrator action; this "five year rule" does not apply to permissions removed voluntarily.

Technical news

• A new tool is available to help determine if a given IP is an open proxy/VPN/webhost/compromised host.

Arbitration

• The Arbitration Committee announced two new OTRS queues. Both are meant solely for cases involving private information; other cases will continue to be handled at the appropriate venues (e.g., WP:COIN or WP:SPI).
  • paid-en-wpwikipedia.org has been set up to receive private evidence related to abusive paid editing.
  • checkuser-en-wpwikipedia.org has been set up to receive private requests for CheckUser. For instance, requests for IP block exemption for anonymous proxy editing should now be sent to this address instead of the functionaries-en list.

Miscellaneous

• Following the 2019 Steward Elections, the following editors have been appointed as stewards: Base, Einsbor, Jon Kolbert, Schniggendiller, and Wim b.

---

• Discuss this newsletter
• Subscribe
• Archive

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:13, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

SPA?

@MaryKontana: appears to be a SPA, looking at editor's edit contributions. Not quite sure how to handle this. GoodDay (talk) 15:06, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

This is AttackTheMoonNow...working on it.
 — Berean Hunter (talk) 15:19, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/AttackTheMoonNow.
 — Berean Hunter (talk) 15:33, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

Proxy API Checker

Someone on Commons has cooked up a tool that checks whether a given IP is a proxy/VPN. I dunno how reliable it is, but folks here that work against vandals and spammers might be interested. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 07:56, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

Seems it's been mentioned in Admins' newsletter just little above #Administrators' newsletter – March 2019. –Ammarpad (talk) 08:11, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

"Brought to you by User:SQL and User:MusikAnimal" Don't think it is someone on commons :) Galobtter (pingó mió) 11:37, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

Galobtter, I mean technically we both have accounts on commons... SQL^{Query me!} 14:43, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

Been using it for a little while now. Its results should be taken with a grain of salt: it rarely returns both false positives and false negatives, but a very useful tool nonetheless. Ivanvector (^Talk/_Edits) 15:12, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

Exactly right. I wrote it last year because results from IPQS, and other providers alone can be unreliable. It only reports data from the providers, and makes no inferences of it's own at this time (except for a yes/no on google / amazon / azure nodes, and Hola VPN). Results from the tool can require some interpreting in many cases. That being said, I'm working on a version that uses Machine Learning which might.

I would like to ask everyone while we're here, Please, don't indiscriminately run every IP you come across. The resources that the tool uses are limited, and must be shared by everyone. I'd prefer not to be forced to implement blacklisting and/or rate limiting. SQL^{Query me!} 15:42, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

User Talk:World Udon Ｇroup

I can't create this page, wanted to warn them about their username.... --Thegooduser Life Begins With a Smile :) 🍁 00:56, 8 March 2019 (UTC)

 Note: the issue is caused by the title blacklist - "Ｇ" is a Fullwidth Latin letter, which are prohibited in titles by the line .*[\x{FF21}-\x{FF3A}\x{FF41}-\x{FF5A}].* <casesensitive | errmsg=titleblacklist-custom-fullwidth> # Fullwidth Latin letters in MediaWiki:Titleblacklist --DannyS712 (talk) 01:04, 8 March 2019 (UTC)

Thegooduser, I've created the page, you should be able to leave your message now. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 01:43, 8 March 2019 (UTC)

AntiCompositeNumber, Thank You! I've left my warning. --Thegooduser Life Begins With a Smile :) 🍁 01:44, 8 March 2019 (UTC)

BLP category disruption

Do any of you recognize this? Drmies (talk) 02:14, 8 March 2019 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Log/2019 March 8

I just posted at WP:VPT that at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Log/2019 March 8, {{Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Eric Walberg}} does not display any link to the AFD. --Jax 0677 (talk) 14:33, 8 March 2019 (UTC)

Fixed it, after several tries. Putting bare URLs in a template that is subst'd occasionally makes things go haywire. I pulled the links out, repopulated the template, then replaced the links. Courtesy ping E.M.Gregory. Ivanvector (^Talk/_Edits) 14:46, 8 March 2019 (UTC)