Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2020 December 21

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December 21

Confused by claims of wikilawyering

Hi! This is my first time posting here so apologies if this isn't the right place :) I have been accused of wikilawyering on ANI and the accuser says that I should be sanctioned for it, but I'm confused about what exactly it is, why it warrants such a severe response and how it should affect editing. At first the user didn't explain how my actions were wikilawyering, but has since given one example. Sorry it's a bit complex but essentially there were 3 vs 1 editors in a disagreement on a talk page and those 3 editors explicitly said that they'll completely ignore the 1 editor's view, which they then preceded to do. Those 3 then claimed that consensus was reached, because 3 vs 1 is a majority. I replying saying that WP:CON states that "A consensus decision takes into account all of the proper concerns raised" and "The quality of an argument is more important than whether it represents a minority or a majority view." This reply was characterized as wikilawyering because I was repeatedly quoting the policy to go against the spirit of the policy, which the editor claimed was about following the plurality. Firstly, is that true - was I going against the spirit of the policy? If so, how can one find a balance between ensuring you're backing your claims up with policies and ensuring you're not quoting policies in order to go against the spirit of them? Thanks so much in advance! Bgkc4444 (talk) 01:10, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

Bgkc4444, it's Wikilawyering when you disingenously use rules and policies which you misinterpret, as noted here:

link.--Quisqualis (talk) 01:31, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

@Quisqualis: Thank you very much for your response. I do not understand how my comment could be called wikilawyering then, as it was neither disingenuous nor misinterpreting the policies, as I was directly quoting the policy of consensus in order to defend the very spirit of what consensus is. I feel like being faced with such accusations can discourage editors from quoting policies to back up their claims. Bgkc4444 (talk) 01:45, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

It is hard to give an objective answer based on analyzing that ANI thread. It is not only hard on the eyes, but hard on the frontal lobes and the emotions. It looks like the term "wikilawyering" is easy to throw around simply on the basis of the poster not having gone into much detail in support of the charge, and I would not worry too much about what was said on that thread. Wikilawyering tends to give me a certain vibe that a person thinks they are clever, and above the rules due to their cleverness. You did none of that. I hope you can put that episode behind you. I never realized that pop music disagreements could be so warlike.--Quisqualis (talk) 03:47, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

Thank you very much - that's definitely helpful. And I didn't realize either, and wish I never had to find out! Bgkc4444 (talk) 09:57, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

EXTREME BIAS IN DESCRIPTION OF THIS PLATFORM DOESN'T ADHERE TO WIKIPEIDA CONCEPT OF NEUTRALITY

  THIS IS NOT A NEURTAL OR UNBIASED DESCRIPTION OF THIS PLATFORM. IT SHOW A LEFTIST BIAS AND NEEDS TO BE NEUTRALIZED TO ADHERE TO WIKIPEIDA PROMISE OF NEUTRALITY.

Parler (/pɑːrlər/, PAR-ler) is an American microblogging and social networking service launched in August 2018. Parler has a significant user base of Donald Trump supporters, conservatives, conspiracy theorists, and right-wing extremists.[5][6][7][8] Posts on the service often contain far-right content,[13] antisemitism,[20] and conspiracy theories like QAnon.[24] Journalists have described Parler as an alternative to Twitter, and the service is popular among people who have been banned from mainstream social networks or oppose their moderation policies.[5][8][25]

Parler markets itself as a "free speech" and unbiased alternative to mainstream social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. However, journalists and users have criticized the service for content policies that are more restrictive than the company portrays and sometimes more restrictive than those of its competitors.[26][27][28][29] Some left-wing users have been banned from Parler for challenging the prevailing viewpoints on the site, criticizing Parler, or creating parody accounts.[30][31][32][discuss] — Preceding unsigned comment added by 116.250.167.19 (talk) 01:36, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

If you have specific issues with this article (ie. X and Y should be Z and A) please bring it up on the article talk page. HickoryOughtShirt?4 (talk) 01:44, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

IP editor, Wikipedia articles are based on what we call reliable sources. Take a look at the sourcing for the article's statements. See if the sources seem honest. If you find bias or outright lies in the sources the article is based on, you should bring it up on the talk page of the article.

Also, it is possible that the the sources for the article don't include Fox News, Breitbart or OneAmerica, for instance. You are free to add content from reliable conservative sources to the article. Of those 3, above, only Fox, and not all of its coverage, is considered reliable. Only if Wikipedia refuses neutral, factual content from those sources can you call it biased.

It may turn out to be the case that you disagree with Wikipedia's definition of a reliable source. In that case, read the blue-linked article and the pages it links to on the same subject to find out if you agree with it. You may discuss any questions regarding what Wikipedia calls reliable sources on Wikipedia talk:Reliable sources. --Quisqualis (talk) 02:52, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

IP editor, you may have understood Wikipedia's stance on neutrality: Wikipedia has to work with sources considered reliable, represent them fairly and proportionately, and without as much editor bias. —Tenryuu 🐲 ( 💬 • 📝 ) (🎁 Wishlist! 🎁) 04:56, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

{{Sent pause}}

Normally I would asked this question to the creator of the template. But since he/she didn't crontibute for more than 4 years, it doesn't seem to be a good option. Hence I ask here.

Can some explain the name of the template to me? {{Sent off}} is clear, but what is {{Sent pause}} supposed to be? A mandatory pee break? It's used to indicate a blue card (compare to yellow or red card) in sport. In handball a red card indicates a player is send off. In addition the player can get a blue card which means there will be a written report as well (there's no written report in case of a red card only). A blue card can be given only in combination with a red card. But I don't see the relation between the purpose of the blue card and the name of the template.

See end of section 16.8 of the IHF game rukes --Sb008 (talk) 03:31, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

It's used in soccer to indicate a temporary sending-off; whereas a red card means "get off the field and don't come back", a blue card means "get off for five minutes". It's an experiment to see if sin bins will work in association football; unless you're writing about one of the few leagues where the experiment is being carried out (mainly US indoor tournaments) you'll never have occasion to use it. ‑ Iridescent 10:09, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

See also Penalty card#Blue card. Several sports use it for a temporary sending-of. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:17, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

Noor Allatar

can you kindly help me to move my article to the main page because it is still in the draft — Preceding unsigned comment added by Aliraqiiq (talk • contribs) 04:14, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

@Aliraqliq: If you feel the draft is ready for mainspace you can place the code {{subst:submit}} at the top of the markup. This will submit the draft for review. (Please remember to sign your posts on talk pages by typing four keyboard tildes like this: ~~~~. Or, you can use the [ reply ] button, which automatically signs posts.) Thank you. Eagleash (talk) 04:31, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

Just looking at Draft:Noor Allatar, I would say that he doesn't satisfy WP:JOURNALIST. Clarityfiend (talk) 05:26, 22 December 2020 (UTC)

Yoko Ono

Height: 5 feet 2 inches (same as Elisabeth Shue) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:84:4600:5450:B158:D797:286:D0BF (talk) 04:32, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

Do you have a question about using or editing Wikipedia. Eagleash (talk) 04:44, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

Hello IP editor. There is no need to mention people's height, unless it is important to their notability. So, we give weights and heights for athletes, for example. In the spirit of full disclosure, I saw Yoko Ono perform with her husband John Lennon, on December 10, 1971, at the John Sinclair Freedom Rally in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Cullen³²⁸ Let's discuss it 04:54, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

Primary source content being cited from a secondary source

I'm currently doing a copy edit of the article Fratelli tutti, and while I was checking the sources, I noticed that many of the cited references are taking quotes from the primary source that are quoted verbatim in the article. Should these be sourced to the primary source instead? —Tenryuu 🐲 ( 💬 • 📝 ) (🎁 Wishlist! 🎁) 05:26, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

In this case almost certainly not; the article says the original was in Spanish, so in this case the citation is correctly to which translation is being quoted. ‑ Iridescent 10:21, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

@Iridescent: Thanks for the response. I'm asking this because the sources appear to be quoting the document's translation from the official Vatican site word for word (source reliability and officialness mentioned in this RSN discussion); that is, secondary sources are quoting from the translation performed by the primary itself. If this is the case, should the quotations remain cited to the secondary sources or re-attributed to the primary source? The article is very quote-heavy, so it potentially poses a problem for establishing notability if the latter is done. —Tenryuu 🐲 ( 💬 • 📝 ) (🎁 Wishlist! 🎁) 15:08, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

TonyBallioni, you know about Vatican stuff, do you have an opinion on this? I know that in the past, Vatican translators have on occasion completely dropped the ball when it comes to Papal announcements (a notorious example is «de nouvelles connaissances conduisent à reconnaître dans la théorie de l'évolution plus qu'une hypothèse»—"fresh knowledge has led to the recognition that evolution is more than just a hypothesis"—being mistranslated by the Vatican as "new knowledge has led to the recognition of more than one hypothesis in the theory of evolution", meaning that for a time the RCC literally had diametrically opposing doctrines in French and English), but I have no idea if this is another of those situations where it's better to cite a neutral third party than the original source. ‑ Iridescent 15:57, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

Iridescent, the authoritative text will be the Latin one, even if written originally in Spanish; the opposing doctrines issue you raise being the historical reason Latin is retained (i.e. it’s a dead language where the meanings of words don’t change over time or by geography.)

If you’re going to go with a translation, I would cite directly to the English translation on the Holy See website. For a variety of reasons this usually is one that is closest to what is meant even if the original author didn’t speak a word of English. This is because 1) the people in charge of the Vatican’s Latin department have traditionally been Americans so there’s a decent chance the actual draft went [Manuscript language]->English->Latin with a review by the original authors of the Latin text and 2) the Vatican is well aware that English is the trade language of the world so tends to care that the English text of major documents is correct since no one is going to be translating to Somali from Latin. This isn’t always the case, but for late-90s to present documents, the official English translation on the Holy See’s website is usually a pretty safe bet.

All that to say: if you’re doing quotes go with the Holy See’s translation. Tenryuu for the notability question: it’s a papal encyclical. There is no question that it is notable. For context we have an article for every encyclical since John XXIII and one for most of the encyclicals of his 20th century predecessors. It’s a document that expounds official teaching of the largest religious sect on the planet and are issued ordinarily only every few years. There will be significant coverage of these (here’s the New York Times piece on it.) The difficulty in English is that because of historical reasons involving Henry VIII, most on the English-speaking world isn’t Catholic, so newspapers often won’t refer to it by name or type of document in the title so to be reader friendly. It’s just described as “Vatican teaching”, “papal statement” or the like. They also have a bad habit of translating the title from Latin to English, which is pretty rare even among English-speaking Catholics. If you had access to Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, etc. sources, it’d be much easier to demonstrate because those language groups historically have a higher percentage of Catholics than English. The English sources most definitely will exist as well, you just have to know how the Anglophone press describes a letter written in Spanish and then translated into Latin by a celibate Argentine in Italy. TonyBallioni (talk) 16:46, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

Also, I just checked and they don’t appear to have published the Latin text yet (that can take time.) I’m even more inclined to say go with the official English because of this as that’s likely to serve as the basis of the authoritative text when it is published. TonyBallioni (talk) 17:04, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

@TonyBallioni: Thanks for the descriptive guidance. I'll pass that along to a regular editor on the article to consider. —Tenryuu 🐲 ( 💬 • 📝 ) (🎁 Wishlist! 🎁) 22:19, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

@TonyBallioni: the Latin text is not the authoritative one, the authoritative one is the version which will be published in the Acta Apostolicae Sedis, whatever the language is; some official versions of documents are in Italian (e.g. Non abbiamo bisogno), in French (e.g. Une espérance nouvelle pour le Liban), in English, etc. and most are in Latin. Veverve (talk) 00:52, 22 December 2020 (UTC)

Yes. Agreed. I was simplifying, but there can be non-Latin authoritative texts (Mit Brennender Sorge probably being the most famous.) Typically, however, Latin or authoritative. The language politics of the Vatican are complex, and they do have some rather poor English translations, but there’s been a push in the last few decades to beef up the English translations on the assumption that a lot of other translations will be based on it rather than the authoritative text. That’s why there was much more attention paid to the English translation of the Roman Missal a decade or so ago. My point in the long rant above was that while there are some terrible English translations from the Vatican, there’s been a push since the 1990s to get English texts “right” for major documents, so the official English version of an encyclical should be safe to cite. TonyBallioni (talk) 02:25, 22 December 2020 (UTC)

Cite the primary source for each language that you quote, with appropriate attributions. It's a judgement call which translations to quote. Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 17:31, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

BET episode

Why doesn't BET air episode of New York Undercover? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 205.147.237.77 (talk) 16:03, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

This is the help desk for how to use Wikipedia. You will need to ask elsewhere, perhaps to BET itself or you can try WP:RDE RudolfRed (talk) 17:47, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

Updating company page

Hello -

I was just reviewing our company page on your site and noticed that it is pretty outdated. I also understand the desire that individuals do not update their own company pages.

Given that I was wondering what is the best path to have our company page reflect who we ar today vs when we started 20 years ago?

Thank you in advance for your help and insight

Thank you for being aware of your conflict of interest. You can post your suggested changes on the article's talk page along with {{edit request}}. RudolfRed (talk) 18:06, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

And they'll have more chance of being implemented if you cite a source wholly unconnected with your company for the information. Wikipedia is not interested in what the subject of an article says or wants to say about themselves, or what their associates say about them. Wikipedia is only interested in what people who have no connection with the subject, and who have not been prompted or fed information on behalf of the subject, have chosen to publish about the subject in reliable sources.. --ColinFine (talk) 18:15, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

Problems editing articles

Hello, for a couple of months I have noticed that I find it difficult to copy and paste paragraphs or sentences that I formulate to improve an article or create one. Before editing an article or creating one, I first create a sketch in Microsoft Word and then transfer it to the article in question by copying and pasting with the mouse. But when I do the latter, it sticks or takes a long time to do. At first, I suspected it was a Google Chrome problem and therefore started using Opera. At first everything was perfect but the last two days I have also had the same problem with this browser. This leads me to think that it may be something else. Does anyone know why this happens and how to fix it? Thank you. --Muwatallis II (talk) 18:35, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

@Muwatallis II:This appears to be a generic computer problem, not a Wikipedia problem, the folks over at the Wikipedia:Reference desk/Computing may be able to help you. -Arch dude (talk) 18:47, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

@Muwatallis II: And I recommend in general you use the notepad text editor instead of word.

My Smart TV Samsung UE40 7000 (2015 model) stopped connecting with Wikipedia (thru internet)

Good Evening, I used to be able to read Wikipedia thru the Samsung browser (Tizen), but it is now impossible - I get a message "not connecting" on the browser. It is the most recent version of the latter, that is not the problem. Thanks for any help. Best regards (Mr) Michel Bernard, London UK — Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.194.175.140 (talk) 19:29, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

No idea, I'm afriad, Michel. You might try asking at WP:VPT. --ColinFine (talk) 21:56, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

Redirects and whether or not to redirect the talk page

When a page is redirected, is it normal practice to also redirect the talk page or to not redirect the talk page. In my specific case, I am wondering about Wikipedia:Help Desk which is a redirect that I never noticed redirects to Wikipedia:Help desk. However, Wikipedia talk:Help Desk does not redirect to Wikipedia talk:Help desk. Before I boldly redirect the talk page, I would like to know what the normal practice is in general, not just for this specific case. 2nd question, why does WP:Help desk and Wikipedia:Help desk not generate a wikilink, but I can type "WP:Help desk" into the address bar and it gets to the help desk? RudolfRed (talk) 20:32, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

@RudolfRed: If the talk page of a redirect doesn't already exist then it's not common to create it. [[Wikipedia:Help desk]] is a selflink on this page (until it's archived) so it displays as bold instead of linking. WP is a namespace alias for Wikipedia so it behaves like Wikipedia. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:04, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

@PrimeHunter: Thanks for the reply! I did not know self links did not generate a Wikilink. RudolfRed (talk) 21:26, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

@RudolfRed: there is an exception though, if the link contains a section fragment (#something), the link will render. Example: Wikipedia:Help desk#Redirects and whether or not to redirect the talk page Victor Schmidt (talk) 06:46, 22 December 2020 (UTC)