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Comment at WP:CESSPOOL
Completely unrelated tangent to the discussion where this came from, but...
I don't think that rant even falls in the top 100 ANI bangers. ... It shouldn't have to be among the top 100 ANI bangers for us to call it out.
I don't think we would ever be able to include it in Wikipedia-space or even userspace due to the WP:ENEMIESLIST connotation, but I'd sure love to see a list of the "top 100 ANI bangers" someday. There were some editors (most of them gone now) back in the old days whose rants were legendary. ⛵ WaltClipper-(talk)13:57, 22 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Hi! I would like to ask you to remove your comment calling me a noob at the Trannarchist ANI thread. I might be new here but I am aware of WP:CIVIL. cheers! --Licks-rocks (talk) 20:37, 22 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Hi! Ok, done. I would like to ask you to read MOS:LABEL so that you understand that being a mountaineer is not an MOS:LABEL. When people make these kinds of arguments at ANI, it can waste time and derail discussions. Levivich (talk) 20:51, 22 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I didn't say I'd ignore your suggestions, just that I'd think twice. So keep your to-do list handy - not that I don't have a pretty comprehensive list of my own should I ever decide to exit Wikipedia in a blaze of glory. Banks Irk (talk) 01:19, 26 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Your comment Also, please mind systemic bias when you're evaluating articles about women and people of color, especially Americans, especially historical. Their notability will not be as obvious as white American men is plainly evident: you feel my editing takes a sexist and racist bent. A peculiar assessment, especially when I addressed the need to work against systemic bias earlier in the discussion. If you had an alternative implication, you are welcome to give it. Also, again, mergeto is valid rationale. ~ Pbritti (talk) 18:46, 27 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
No, I don't think your editing takes a sexist or racist bent. Nor do I believe that people, when they don't mind systemic bias, or don't mind it enough, are being sexist or racist. Systemic bias is systemic, we all contribute to it, it doesn't mean we're racist or sexist. "Mergeto" is a valid rationale, but it's not the rationale you chose when declining the drafts you declined. Levivich (talk) 18:48, 27 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
You felt the need to say this, despite my ready acknowledgement of systemic bias in my OP and elsewhere in the thread. If you felt the need to reiterate it, why?
Ok, so we agree that the fact that an article is a merge candidate does not mean it should be declined at AFC! is wrong. Also, you're right–I didn't chose mergeto in my two declines because there were other rationales. I was discussing another article entirely–one that fully embodies the mergeto rationale. ~ Pbritti (talk) 19:04, 27 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Because despite saying we should mind systemic bias, you're not doing it.
I'm not wrong. Just because an article is a merge candidate does not mean it should be declined for that reason. Read what WP:AFCR says about when to decline as mergeto. Anyway, since that's not the reason you chose, I'm not sure why we're talking about it.
I just took a spin through your declines from today:
Draft:Kishor Helmar Sridhar is a notable, award-winning author. I don't know why you declined for notability and for lack of inline citations. You wrote, "please remember provide inline citations for every claim in a biography of a living person," but that's not what WP:MINREF or WP:BLP says; inline cites are only needed for contentious BLP claims, not for "every claim" in a BLP. (Meanwhile, AFCR says explicitly not to do this.)
Draft:Code of Everand - not supported by RS? What? And not notable? Double what? [1][2][3][4]. OK, not all of those were in the article, but there's enough in the article, and a quick Google Scholar search [5], how many video games have 67 hits in GScholar?
Draft:Zirid campaign in Illyria - not supported by RS? There's three academic sources there. Yes, two are over 100 years old. Not a reason to decline. Actually, I'd have declined this as mergeto.
After looking at these three, I now believe more than I did before that you are being too strict in your declines, and not helpful enough in your decline rationales. Levivich (talk) 19:18, 27 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
That's a lot of evidence of...nothing? Declining a draft that didn't cite claim he was a college graduate (accreditation is a contentious claim) and was primarily based his own website? Declined a draft that lacked sourcing to demonstrate its notability (something another editor immediately declined it for after me)? Declined a draft with sources variously primary, old, and limited? And not a thing to support your claim of systemic bias. ~ Pbritti (talk) 19:36, 27 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
ANI discussion
Hi Levivich, I realize the irony that lasted only half an hour lol, but I added that clarification due to advice from Licks-rocks that I was throwing fuel on the fire by asking for more evidence so I tried to narrow the scope of my comment so the conversation didn't blow up again. If you did raise previously raise concerns about specific GENSEX edits/articles that didn't overlap with BLP/BLPGROUP, please by all means prove me a fool there and link/quote them. Otherwise, please post a clarification that you hadn't raised them and your issues had thus far been with my conduct on BLP/BLPGROUP - GENSEX intersections. Either way, you can have the final word there, I just want this to be over with. TheTranarchist ⚧ Ⓐ (talk) 22:15, 27 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I tried hard to align the indentation of Your cherrypicking is obvious ... with the quote preceding it but failed. Maybe, you or one of your t/p watchers can come to aid? TrangaBellam (talk) 17:31, 2 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Actually I have no idea how to fix the bullet-indent-{{talkquote}}-next-paragraph bug; I've come across this before as well. For anyone else reading this who cares, if you start a comment with *: (or similar), and then you use {{tq2}}, and you want to put another comment after the tq2, *: leaves the trailing bullet (doesn't continue the list markup in HTML, it's rendered as a new list), and :: won't line it up right (because colons and bullets have different indents), and paragraph breaks don't work after the tq2 for whatever reason, and a <br> after the tq2 (or nothing after the tq2) will make the next line appear as if it's in {{code}}. I have found no solutions to this. Levivich (talk) 17:50, 2 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I would if I could but unfortunately I can't get past the paywall today. :-( Yesterday I followed a link on Twitter to the article and no paywall. Today, it's all paywalled and I can't figure out how to get around it... none of my usual methods (privacy mode, reader mode, proxy, come in from an outside link from Twitter) work. Levivich (talk) 17:09, 3 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I'm hoping Der Spiegel puts out an English translation in a few days (Haaretz did the same thing; their initial article was in Hebrew), and that it's not paywalled, because the article was quite interesting to read. And not only because it's a German article about Holocaust distortion written by a guy named Fuhrer.
IPN responded to the Der Spiegel article on Twitter today (assuming the Twitter account is real), denying that they are behind editing Wikipedia articles about the Holocaust [6], specifically denying that they're behind the KL Warschau hoax [7], and calling out one of the authors [8].
Yeah, I think that's now a GNG-notable topic, based on the journal article, Haaretz 2019 and 2023, YNet, JTA, and Der Spiegel. Levivich (talk) 17:49, 3 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I was wondering if you had any advice for trying to deal with Category:All unreferenced BLPs? I noticed that the category existed quite awhile ago by going through the rabbit hole that is Wikipedia:Backlog. Despite the category name, most of these wouldn't actually fit WP:BLPPROD because many of them have an external link (like Steve Colter, which I found by using "random" in the category). I asked someone else for advice once and they suggested organizing through page views because the ones that are viewed more often are more likely to be notable... but the more I think about it, I'm not sure that's the best way to go about it. Do you have any advice for trying to work through this? Maybe I could try to organize a backlog drive or something? Clovermoss🍀(talk)18:16, 5 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I'd be cautious about that category. Checking a few from the beginning of the list: Pablo Acosta (footballer), Russ Adam, J. B. Adams, and Graham Addley are all referenced. Sometimes the references aren't formatted properly (they're ELs or general refs, not inline), and sometimes the references are poor (or non-RS), but they do have at least one reference somewhere on the page; they're not really unreferenced BLPs. I have no idea how many false positives like this are among the 1,815. I also wonder why, if you add up the numbers at Category:Monthly clean-up category (Unreferenced BLPs) counter, it comes nowhere close to 1,815 (or so it seems, haven't actually tried to do the math). I also wonder if 1,815 is a lot for this maintenance category -- it seems that way to me, but then I don't really have a clear memory of how many it had in the past. I'm curious if a lot of these tags are recent.
Anyway, I feel like {{BLP unreferenced}} should only be added for articles that don't have any sources, not for articles that have sources poorly formatted or have general references but lack inline citations; that's for {{BLP no footnotes}}. So I wonder if I'm right about that, and if so, there's probably a technological way (script) to figure out which BLPs have any kind of external link, and then change those from {{BLP unreferenced}} to {{BLP no footnotes}} automagically (if there is consensus to do that). If that's done, then you'll have a smaller set of truly unsourced BLPs, for which a backlog drive could be organized. But I would see about cutting down the list with a script first, if that's possible/would have consensus. Levivich (talk) 18:31, 5 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Writing a WP:QUERY to generate a list, then going through it with WP:AWB, might be a good approach. If you're just fixing articles that have the wrong template, that might not need a fresh consensus discussion. If you're looking for articles to BLPPROD, keep in mind that there's some undocumented nuances and it depends on the admin. I once had a BLPPROD declined because it had an authority control template, which the admin considered to be an external link. A good next step might be to think about what kind of list you want to generate (is in category X and has 0 external links, etc.) and then request a WP:QUERY for it. Hope this helps. –Novem Linguae (talk) 18:56, 5 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Seems to me that {{Prod blp}} is no refs/genrefs, no external links, {{BLP unreferenced}} is no refs/genrefs, yes external links, {{BLP sources}} is yes refs/genrefs. Doesn't seem like a great system. There is probably room for improvement, although not sure if it's worth the effort. I tried to make a small change to BLPPROD one time and was reverted. –Novem Linguae (talk) 19:35, 5 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I think you might be right that that's the current system, and I agree it's not a great system, because I don't see a difference between genrefs and ELs other than what we call the section heading, which seems not a good reason for having two categories. Of the four examples I posted above, Pablo Acosta (footballer) and Russ Adam have genrefs, J. B. Adams and Graham Addley have ELs but those ELs are actually genrefs; all four are in {{BLP unreferenced}} and in my view, none are "unreferenced". They should all be in {{BLP sources}}. Levivich (talk) 19:39, 5 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Even if there is a difference between BLP unreferenced and BLP source it seems most people don't understand the difference - I would support merging them. I note that there are also around 100 articles in BLP unreferenced that include citation templates. BilledMammal (talk) 02:35, 6 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Talk page watcher here. I find it highly unlikely that there are any BLPs at all who were born in 1815. Are we talking about vampires here? I only read the header. BD2412T03:21, 6 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
This joke actually worked because the link was blue on the app (where I saw it for the first time, so that's something to add to the list of things to tell the WMF). Anyways, merging the templates seems fine to me. My concern was more about the category's broader ramifications in general. It's somewhat bizzare to me that WP:BLPROD seems to have stricter standards than WP:PROD. You'd think that with how important the WP:BLP policy is, a random external link that may or may not even be reliable wouldn't be enough. Clovermoss🍀(talk)08:35, 6 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I was rereading policy pages to make sure I got that last part right, but I think I did. This is a quote from the introduction to WP:BLPPROD: "To be eligible for a BLPPROD tag, the entry must be a biography of a living person and contain no sources in any form (as references, external links, etc., reliable or otherwise) supporting any statements made about the person in the biography." So, therotically, you could have an unreliable source that supports a statement and that's good enough for a BLP (at least in the "not to be prodded" sense). Clovermoss🍀(talk)08:48, 6 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I may be explaining something you already know, but BLPs can also be prodded normally. You can also BLPPROD and then PROD again if the first doesn't stick. The advantage to BLPPROD is that it can't be deprodded unless a reliable source that supports something is added. I think this means we're continuing to have extra protection for BLPs. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 14:37, 6 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@Firefangledfeathers Well I missed that (on my third reread, I see the note explaining this). Thank you for letting me know. I feel a bit embarrassed now but at least that somewhat makes sense. However, that part I read about "reliable or otherwise" still doesn't fill me with confidence. So I'm still somewhat confused. Is there something else I'm missing? Clovermoss🍀(talk)18:01, 6 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I think they wanted BLPPROD deletion to happen when it's a slam dunk. Poorly sourced BLPs can still be deleted via regular PROD or AfD, and NPPers will frequently draftify such articles if they're newly created. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 18:04, 6 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
"Do not cite the deep magic to me, Witch. I was there when it was written.There's a good reason for that, I'm one of the people who built BLPPROD. For some background, see WP:BLPRFC1 and especially my close of WP:BLPRFC2. Long story short, the community was split on whether the tens of thousands of completely unreferenced BLPs (I want to say there were around 80k?) were not a problem and should be left alone, or if they were a huge problem and should be nuked on sight. One day Kevin and a few other admins went rouge and started mass deleting them to force the community's hand. Dramaboards, blocks issued, desysoppings requested, Arbcom got involved and gave them amnesty, it was a whole mess. The compromise was that we could create a "sticky prod" process that couldn't be removed without a source being added, but it had to be strict like that to avoid being too subjective.
Personally I'd be fine with a proposal loosening it up to apply to BLPs that had only unreliable sources (or even switching the completely unsourced one to CSD) if there's an appetite for it. I came down strongly on the side of nuking them all, and when the implementation process started dragging instead of meeting the timelines I kicked off a second round of mass deletions to force the issue again. If you're interested in an alternative proposal that had decent support at the time and included reliability, there was one at Wikipedia:Deletion of unreferenced BLPs. The WordsmithTalk to me19:39, 7 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I too immediately thought of the final days of what us Americans call the "War of 1812". But to the more serious point, it would be probanly useful but not a panacea to identify the totally unreferenced BLPs as opposed to the poorly referenced BLPs. On the other hand some totally unreferenced BLPs might be easy to reference properly with a brief BEFORE style Google search, and many poorly referenced BLPs may remain poorly referenced until deletion or the extinction of humanity because the references are garbage and the person is simply not notable. Cullen328 (talk) 09:05, 6 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I've created two lists that might be helpful; this list contains BLP's that do not contain an external link, do not contain a citation template, and do not contain a reflink template. Most of them will be unreferenced BLP's, but there will be some exceptions like J. M. Marcus Humphrey and Geoff Cooke (rugby union).
This list contains BLP's that do not contain an external link, do not contain a citation template, but do contain a reflink template. Most of them have references, but many are not.
I've tagged a couple from each with the appropriate prods, but there is a probably a better way to address this problem than overloading the prod list. If a list with clickable links would be convenient, let me know and I'll make one. BilledMammal (talk) 13:13, 6 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
One option would be to go through both of those lists with a tool like AWB, adding BLP prod's to the ones that have no sources (or using a different deletion process, to avoid the overloading issue), and adding cite templates and reflink sections to the ones that do. After that, we can run the queries every month and easily identify most newly created BLP's that lack sources. BilledMammal (talk) 13:37, 6 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Well the way I see it, if I BLPPROD 500, and you BLPPROD 500, and Clover BLPPRODs 500, by the end of the week, we'll all be TBANed, so we should probably try something else. I bet there are some categories of these that have easy sources... like athletes and stats databases, which we might be able to batch process, reducing the amount that needs manual review. Like a py script that checks names/other strings against soccerway or something like that to find potential sources. In theory it could add the sources as an external link but that might be dangerous. Although it might be a useful thing to develop. Like, any automated methods of processing these could also be used to monitor and guard against new unsourced BLP creations. Wouldn't it be nice if a bot notified you that a new unsourced BLP creation was made and also told you it seems to be a soccer player bio and here's a link to the soccerway page about someone with the same name/team/position. An unreferenced BLP detector that suggests sources. Levivich (talk) 20:45, 6 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
(edit conflict) Do we really want to deprive the WP:CESSPIT of the drama that thread would cause?
I think the process has to be us manually process the results to remove the false positives. Once we have those, I can split it by category; sports and similar where we know of database sources we can add ourselves, and for the rest we dump lists in the appropriate wiki-projects. Any that remain unsourced a month after we dump them in the WikiProjects we tag with BLPPROD. BilledMammal (talk) 20:52, 6 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I'll produce a list in a more convenient format than the search results for us to go through. It might not be for a few weeks though, as I'm about to be away from my computer for a while and will only edit intermittently, if at all, through my phone. BilledMammal (talk) 21:03, 6 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
By the way, I missed some of the earlier threaded discussion here. I wasn't thinking of doing any sort of mass PROD campaign... I'd rather keep my nice clean slate from participation in drama, thank you very much. I was thinking something like more managable chunks (like looking at potential sourcing for one or two articles a day) and hopefully with several people working through the backlog something good could come out of that. Clovermoss🍀(talk)12:43, 7 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
That sounds plausible, although I have no experience with writing Wikibots - at a minimum, an unreferenced article detector would be very useful. BilledMammal (talk) 20:54, 6 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
To write the code. It makes writing code (at least in py, haven't tried anything else) very easy. You give instructions in natural language, and it writes the code. You get an error, copy/paste the error, it walks you through debugging. It's amazing for this purpose, at least for simple things like web scrapers, APIs, list manipulation, graphing, etc. Levivich (talk) 21:16, 6 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I doubt that I could find a better search string but I'll try to manually look through some of these results later today. I'll keep you updated if anything's interesting. :) Clovermoss🍀(talk)12:36, 7 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, definitely aging myself by mentioning it. The project page does have a number of category breakdowns already in place that could be useful if anyone is interested in tackling the backlog that way.-- Ponyobons mots20:46, 6 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I don't really understand how WP:UBM allows edits like Special:Diff/1143182781, Special:Diff/1143229804, Special:Diff/1143249028, but I don't know much about userboxes. Those are pretty! Levivich (talk) 18:19, 6 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Special:Diff/1143182781 was a merger of duplicate userboxes, via a WP:BLAR. Leaving a redirect at the merged userbox ensures the merged userbox will match the userbox it was merged into.
Special:Diff/1143229804 was a duplicate userbox that, instead of merging, I turned into a unique userbox. Therefore, I moved it to my own userspace.
Special:Diff/1143249028 was a migration to User:UBX, as part of the series on locomotive types.
Special:Diff/1143182781 doesn't look like the merger of duplicates to me, because Special:Permalink/885215626 has different colors and a different picture than Template:User Railfan, plus it's in another editor's userspace.
Special:Diff/1143229804 also doesn't look like the merger of duplicates. Special:Permalink/1135785127 has different colors and picture than User:UBX/Steam locomotives, and again it was in another editor's userspace, and you moved it to your userspace (User:Tbf69/userboxes/LNER Class A4 4468 Mallard), and then redirected the other editor's userbox to the UBX page Special:Diff/1143255562. It looks like you stole somebody else's userbox and then covered up your tracks :-D
Special:Diff/1143249028 was after you edited somebody else's userbox, then you moved that page to the UBX page.
I created the gallery Wikipedia:Userboxes/Railways earlier so I wanted to clean it up a bit. But generally I don't think that changing other people's userbox is necessary. Although there's no rules on mergers/cleanups. - Tbf69🛈🗩20:13, 6 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
What I don't understand is: just because you made new ones, why are you taking other people's old ones? There can only be one steam locomotive userbox on Wikipedia? Seems a little extreme to me. Levivich (talk) 21:13, 6 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
BTW did you get my joke about "covered up your tracks"? Cuz it's a rail userbox? :-) Anyway, I see you have an inquiry about this on your talk page to attend to, I won't take up any more of your time. Thanks, Levivich (talk) 21:25, 6 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]